- Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, told George
Bush in February about torture at Abu Ghraib prison. From the limited detail
Rumsfeld recalled of that meeting, it can be deduced that Bush gave no
orders, insisted on no responsibility, did not ask to see the already commissioned
Taguba report. If there are exculpatory facts, Rumsfeld has failed to mention
them.
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- For decades, Rumsfeld has had a reputation as a great
white shark of the bureaucratic seas: sleek, fast-moving and voracious.
As counsellor to Richard Nixon during the impeachment crisis, his deputy
was the young Dick Cheney, and together they helped to right the ship of
state under Gerald Ford.
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- Here they were given a misleading gloss as moderates;
competence at handling power was confused with pragmatism. Cheney became
the most hardline of congressmen, and Rumsfeld informed acquaintances that
he was always more conservative than they imagined. One lesson they seem
to have learned from the Nixon debacle was ruthlessness. His collapse confirmed
in them a belief in the imperial presidency based on executive secrecy.
One gets the impression that, unlike Nixon, they would have burned the
White House tapes.
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- Under Bush, the team of Cheney and Rumsfeld spread across
the top rungs of government, drawing staff from the neoconservative cabal
and infusing their rightwing temperaments with ideological imperatives.
The unvarnished will to power took on a veneer of ideas and idealism. Iraq
was not a case of vengeance or power, but the cause of democracy and human
rights.
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- The fate of the neoconservative project depends on Rumsfeld's
job. If he were to go, so would his deputy, the neoconservative Robespierre,
Paul Wolfowitz. Also threatened would be the cadres who stovepiped the
disinformation that neoconservative darling Ahmed Chalabi used to manipulate
public opinion before the war. In his Senate testimony last week, Rumsfeld
explained that the government asking the press not to report Abu Ghraib
"is not against our principles. It is not suppression of the news."
War is peace.
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- Six National Guard soldiers from a West Virginia unit
who treated Abu Ghraib as a playpen of pornographic torture have been designated
as scapegoats. Will the show trials of these working-class antiheroes put
an end to any inquiries about the chain of command? In an extraordinary
editorial, the Army Times, which had not previously ventured into such
controversy, declared that "the folks in the Pentagon are talking
about the wrong morons ... This was not just a failure of leadership at
the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top.
Accountabilty here is essential - even if that means relieving leaders
from duty in a time of war."
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- William Odom, a retired general and former member of
the National Security Council who is now at the Hudson Institute, a conservative
thinktank, reflects a wide swath of opinion in the upper ranks of the military.
"It was never in our interest to go into Iraq," he told me. It
is a "diversion" from the war on terrorism; the rationale for
the Iraq war (finding WMD) is "phoney"; the US army is overstretched
and being driven "into the ground"; and the prospect of building
a democracy is "zero". In Iraqi politics, he says, "legitimacy
is going to be tied to expelling us. Wisdom in military affairs dictates
withdrawal in this situation. We can't afford to fail, that's mindless.
The issue is how we stop failing more. I am arguing a strategic decision."
-
- One high-level military strategist told me that Rumsfeld
is "detested", and that "if there's a sentiment in the army
it is: Support Our Troops, Impeach Rumsfeld".
-
- The Council on Foreign Relations has been showing old
movies with renewed relevance to its members. The Battle of Algiers, depicting
the nature and costs of a struggle with terrorism, is the latest feature.
The seething in the military against Bush and Rumsfeld might prompt a showing
of Seven Days in May, about a coup staged by a rightwing general against
a weak liberal president, an artefact of the conservative hatred directed
at President Kennedy in the early 60s.
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- In 1992, General Colin Powell, chairman of the joint
chiefs, awarded the prize for his strategy essay competition at the National
Defence University to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dunlap for The Origins
of the American Military Coup of 2012. His cautionary tale imagined an
incapable civilian government creating a vacuum that drew a competent military
into a coup disastrous for democracy. The military, of course, is bound
to uphold the constitution. But Dunlap wrote: "The catastrophe that
occurred on our watch took place because we failed to speak out against
policies we knew were wrong. It's too late for me to do any more. But it's
not for you."
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- The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 is
today circulating among top US military strategists.
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- - Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President
Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of Salon.com
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1215562,00.html
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