THE US: The US Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday dismissed criticisms of the Bush administration by the former treasury secretary, Mr Paul O'Neill, as having no validity.
He said his own experience of the inner workings of the White House was as different as "night and day".
Mr Rumsfeld's comments coincided with the publication yesterday of The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind, a tell-all book in which Mr O'Neill describes his role as chief economic adviser to a President who acted "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people" at cabinet meetings.
In extracts released at the weekend the former treasury secretary claimed that President George Bush had discussed invading Iraq as soon as he took office and that in his two years on the National Security Council he saw no evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
In the book Mr O'Neill also reveals that the publicity he received from a trip to Africa with Bono irritated President Bush and may have contributed to his dismissal in December 2002.
Mr O'Neill visited several African countries with the Irish rock star that year, after he said he "dared" Bono to take him there to see the need for debt relief at first hand, and he later spoke out on the need for clean water and medicines to fight AIDS.
After he returned to Washington Mr Bush greeted him coldly at an Oval Office staff meeting.
"Hey, there, Big O," Mr Bush said to him. "You know something? You're getting quite a reputation as a truth-teller. You got yourself a real cult following, don't ya?"
The President was not smiling and everyone knew not to laugh, recalled Mr O'Neill, who took it as a bad sign about his relationship with the President, who had begun ignoring his economic advice.
Within six months the treasury secretary had been fired for refusing to support Mr Bush's second round of tax cuts.
Mr O'Neill yesterday sought to dampen down some of the furore his remarks have caused, saying he should not have used the "blind man" quotation as it overshadowed the substance of the book.
Mr Rumsfeld, who has been a friend of Mr O'Neill's for 40 years, disclosed at a press conference yesterday that he had called him when he heard "it was not going to be a good book" but denied asking him not to proceed with it.
"What I've been reading about the book is so different from my experience about the administration - night and day," he said. "I don't see any validity to his criticisms at all."
The Defence Secretary denied there was a predisposition to go to war against Iraq in the early days of the administration, noting that regime change had been the official policy of the US since 1998.
Mr O'Neill denied yesterday that he had used classified documents, a claim which the Treasury Department is investigating.
"The truth is, I didn't take any documents at all," he told NBC News. All the material he provided was vetted by the White House counsel.
The Democratic Party chairman, Mr Terry McAuliffe, noted yesterday that it took only two hours for the White House to begin an investigation of Mr O'Neill but 79 days to start investigating the White House leak that exposed the wife of a critic of the administration as a covert CIA agent, a crime in US law.
The book also claims that Mr Bush took a conscious decision to tilt American policy "back towards Israel" after he took office.
After the Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, warned him that the consequences could be dire for the Palestinians, Mr Bush shrugged and said: "Maybe that's the best way to get things back in balance.
"Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things."
On another occasion when Mr O'Neill expressed concerns to Vice-President Dick Cheney that the Bush tax cuts were dangerously expanding the deficit, Mr Cheney stunned him by replying: "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," and then adding: "We won the mid-terms \. This is our due."