Colin Powell Got Snookered at CIA

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Ray McGovern
May 19, 2009 - CommonDreams.org

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Think back six years. How often did we hear then-Secretary of State Colin Powell tout his intense four-day vigil at CIA headquarters preparing the speech he would give to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003? Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, who was asked by Powell to herd cats in putting that speech together, recently threw light on why it turned out to be such an acute embarrassment.

Surrogates of Vice President Dick Cheney were insisting on giving prominence to highly dubious reports of operational ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but on this particular issue (unlike the phantom WMD) CIA and State department intelligence analysts had stood firm in the face of heavy pressure. Indeed, the CIA ombudsman saw fit to tell Congress that never in his 32 years as a CIA analyst had he witnessed a more aggressive "hammering" on analysts to change their minds and give credence to reporting that was trash.

How was it, then, that Secretary Powell ended up citing a "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network" to depict a relationship that did not exist? Fair labeling: Reading what follows may not make you quite as ill as reading the Department of Justice torture memos, but it may well sicken-and anger-you just the same.

According to Col. Wilkerson, just days before trying to sell the invasion of Iraq to the United Nations, his boss Colin Powell had decided not to regurgitate the dubious allegations about Saddam Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda. Just in the nick of time, however, top CIA officials produced a "bombshell" report alleging such ties. The information was more than a year old and apparently extricated via torture, but Powell took the bait.

Wilkerson says the key moment occurred on Feb. 1, 2003, as the two men labored at the CIA over Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council four days later.

"Powell and I had a one-on-one - no one else even in the room - about his angst over what was a rather dull recounting of several old stories about Al Qa'ida-Baghdad ties [in the draft speech]," Wilkerson said. "I agreed with him that what we had was bull___t, and Powell decided to eliminate all mention of terrorist contacts between AQ and Baghdad.

"Within an hour, [CIA Director George] Tenet and [CIA Deputy Director John] McLaughlin dropped a bombshell on the table in the director's conference room: a high-level AQ detainee had just revealed under interrogation substantive contacts between AQ and Baghdad, including Iraqis training AQ operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons."

Although Tenet and McLaughlin wouldn't give Powell the identity of the al-Qaeda source, Wilkerson said he now understands that it was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had been captured 15 months earlier; who later claimed he gave the CIA false information in the face of actual and threatened torture; and who now seems to be quite dead.

Presumably not realizing that the "new" intelligence was tainted, "Powell changed his mind and this information was included in his UNSC presentation, along with more general information from a previous draft about Baghdad's terrorist tendencies," Wilkerson said.

Wilkerson's account provides insight into how the need to justify war gave impetus to the use of torture for extracting information, and how the Bush administration's reliance on harsh interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects helped grease the skids to war. Both.

Sealing the Deal

Powell, whose credibility essentially sealed the deal for war as far as millions of Americans were concerned, let himself be manipulated by senior CIA officials who kept him in the dark about crucial details, including the fact that the Defense Intelligence Agency had thrown serious doubt on al-Libi's credibility. Wilkerson told me:

"As you can see, nowhere were we told that the high-level AQ operative had a name, or that he had been interrogated [in Egypt] with no US personnel present or much earlier rather than just recently (the clear implication of Tenet's breathtaking delivery).

"And not a single dissent was mentioned (later we learned of the DIA dissent) ... All of this was hidden from us - the specific identity, we were informed, due to the desire to protect sources and methods as well as a cooperative foreign intelligence service....

"As for me in particular, I learned the identity of al-Libi only in 2004 and of the DIA dissent about the same time, of al-Libi's recanting slightly later, and of the entire affair's probably being a Tenet-McLaughlin fabrication - to at least a certain extent - only after I began to put some things together and to receive reinforcement of the 'fabrication' theme from other examples."

Among those other examples, Wilkerson said, was the case of the Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball, who supplied false intelligence about mobile labs for making biological and chemical weapons, and various Iraqi walk-ins who spun bogus stories about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

Though some of those sources appear to have concocted their tales after being recruited by the pro-invasion exiles of the Iraqi National Congress, al-Libi told his stories-he later claimed-to avoid or stop torture. This is a central point in the current debate about why torture was used and whether it saved American lives.

Torture Can Produce

For those of you distracted by the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) spotlight on "what-did-Pelosi-know-about-torture-and-when-did-she- know-it," please turn off the TV long enough to ponder the case of the recently departed al-Libi. According to a Libyan newspaper, al-Libi has died in a Libyan prison, a purported suicide.

The al-Libi case might help you understand why, even though information from torture is notoriously unreliable, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the me-too officials running U.S. intelligence ordered it anyway.

In short, if it is untruthful information you are after, torture can work just fine! As the distinguished Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham put it during a Senate hearing on May 13-with a hat-tip to the Inquisition-"One of the reasons these techniques have been used for about 500 years is that they work."

All you really need to know is what you want the victims to "confess" to and then torture them, or render them abroad to "friendly" intelligence services toward the same end.

Poster Child for Torture

Al-Libi, born in 1963 in Libya, ran an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2000. He was detained in Pakistan on Nov. 11, 2001, and then sent to a U.S. detention facility in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was deemed a prize catch, since it was thought that he might know of, or at least be induced to "confess" to, Iraqi training of al-Qaeda.

The CIA successfully fought off the FBI for first rights to interrogate al-Libi. FBI's Dan Coleman, who "lost" al-Libi to the CIA (at whose orders, I wonder?), said, "Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links" between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Maj. Paul Burney, a psychiatrist sent there in summer 2002, says, "A large part of that time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, and we were not successful," according to Burney's recent testimony to the Senate. Burney added:

"The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link...there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

CIA interrogators elicited some "cooperation" from al-Libi through a combination of rough treatment and threats that he would be turned over to Egyptian intelligence with even greater experience in the torture business.

By June 2002, al-Libi had told the CIA that Iraq had "provided" unspecified chemical and biological weapons training for two al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that soon found its way into other U.S. intelligence reports. Al-Libi's claim was well received even though the DIA was highly suspicious.

Serious Misgivings

"He lacks specific details" about the supposed training, DIA observed. "It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest."

Despite his cooperation, al-Libi was still shipped to Egypt where he underwent more abuse, according to a declassified CIA cable from 2004; the year al-Libi recanted his earlier statements. The cable reported that al-Libi said Egyptian interrogators wanted information about al-Qaeda's connections with Iraq, a subject "about which [al-Libi] said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story." (This, despite the limited "success" CIA interrogators claimed to have had on this issue.)

According to the CIA cable, al-Libi said his interrogators did not like his responses and "placed him in a small box" for about 17 hours. After he was let out of the box, al-Libi was given a last chance to "tell the truth."

When his answers still did not satisfy, al-Libi says he "was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and fell on his back" and then was "punched for 15 minutes."

And, sure enough, as Sen. Lindsay Graham has noted, this stuff really works! For it was then that al-Libi expanded on his tales about collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iraq, adding that three al-Qaeda operatives had gone to Iraq "to learn about nuclear weapons." Al-Libi added that the treatment he received improved after he told that to his interrogators.

In any case, al-Libi's stories apparently were music to the ears of Colin Powell, who was under pressure to establish in his U.N. speech some evidence of a "sinister nexus" between Iraq and al-Qaeda-the "axis-of-evil" kind of epithet he ended up using to try to justify invading Iraq.

Al-Libi recanted his claims in January 2004. This prompted the CIA, a month later, to recall all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the 9/11 Commission. But he was really a big help before he recanted!

Just What the Doctor Ordered

George Bush relied on al-Libi's false confession for his crucial speech in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, just a few days before Congress voted on the Iraq War resolution. Bush declared, "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases."

Colin Powell relied on it for his own speech to the U.N. on Feb. 5, 2003: "I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al-Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story."

Bear in mind that before the attack on Iraq on March 19, 2003, polls showed that some 70 percent Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had operational ties with al-Qaeda and thus was partly responsible for the attacks of 9/11. Worse still, about half of the American people had been led to believe that Saddam was actually involved in 9/11.

For a while, al-Libi was practically the poster boy for the success of the Cheney/Bush torture regime; that is, at least until it was learned that he recanted, explaining that he only told his interrogators what he thought would stop the torture.

In his disingenuous memoir, At the Center of the Storm, George Tenet sought to defend the CIA's acceptance of the original claims made by al-Libi in the run-up to the Iraq war. Tenet even suggested that al-Libi may have been right the first time-that it may have been his subsequent recantation that was not genuine.

"He clearly lied," Tenet wrote. "We just don't know when. Did he lie when he first said that Al Qaeda members received training in Iraq or did he lie when he said they did not? In my mind, either case might still be true."

I am not making this up. That incisive analysis appears on page 353 of Tenet's book.

Tenet, of course, is hardly a disinterested observer. If there was a CIA plan to extract a false confession, it's likely he was a key participant. After all, he devoted 2002-03 to the mission of manufacturing a "slam-dunk" WMD-case for invading Iraq, in order to please his bosses. He had both the motive and the opportunity to commit this crime and, later, huge incentive to cover it up.

Al-Libi "Commits Suicide"

If al-Libi is now dead - strangely our embassy in Tripoli has been unable to find out for sure - this means the world will never hear his own account of the torture he experienced and the story he made up and then recanted. And we have already been asked to believe he "committed suicide" even though al-Libi apparently was a devout Muslim, and Islam prohibits suicide.

Hafed al-Ghwell, a Libyan-American and a prominent critic of the Gaddafi regime, explained to Newsweek, "This idea of committing suicide in your prison cell is an old story in Libya." He added that, throughout Gaddafi's 40-year rule, there have been several instances in which political prisoners were reported to have committed suicide, but that "then the families get the bodies back and discover the prisoners had been shot in the back or tortured to death."

Am I suggesting...?

Anatomy of a Crime

Commenting on what he called the "Cheney interrogation techniques," Col. Wilkerson, writing for The Washington Note on May 13, made the following points:

"...as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002 - well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion - its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but on discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq to al-Qaeda.

"So furious was this effort on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their detainee 'was compliant' (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet.

"As far as al-Libi is concerned, his harsh interrogation ceased after, under waterboarding in Egypt, he 'revealed' such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop."

Cheney Family Honor

Stung by Wilkerson's criticism of her father, Liz Cheney, who worked in the State Department during the Bush/Cheney administration, lashed out publicly at Wilkerson on Sunday, charging he has made "a cottage industry out of fantasies" about the former Vice President. All that Ms. Cheney could manage in support of her contention was to point out that al-Libi was not among the three al-Qaeda detainees the CIA has said it waterboarded.

After his article in The Washington Note, I asked Col. Wilkerson for a retrospective look at how it could have been that the torture-derived information from al-Libi was not recognized for what it was and thus kept out of Secretary Powell's speech at the UN.

Since al-Libi had been captured over a year before the speech and had been put at the tender mercies of the Egyptian intelligence service, should he and Powell not have suspected that al-Libi had been tortured?

Wilkerson responded by e-mail with the comments cited above regarding Tenet and McLaughlin interrupting Powell's evaluation of the Iraqi WMD intelligence with their new -just trust us-"bombshell."

I asked Col. Wilkerson: "Were there no others from the State Department with you at CIA headquarters on Feb. 1, 2003. Was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), State's very professional, incorruptible intelligence unit, not represented? He answered:

"When I gathered 'my team' - some were selected for me, such as Will Toby from Bob Joseph's NSC staff and John Hanna from the VP's office - in my office at State to give them an initial briefing and marching orders, I asked Carl [Ford, then head of INR] to attend. I wanted Carl - or even more so, one of his deputies whom I knew well and trusted completely, Tom Fingar - to be on 'my team'.

"Carl stayed after the meeting and I asked him straightforwardly to come with me or to send someone from INR. Carl said that he did not need to come or to send anyone because he had the Secretary's ear (he was right on that) and could weigh in at any time he wanted to.

"Moreover, he told me, the Secretary knew very well where INR stood, as did I myself (he was right on that too).

"As I look back, I believe one of my gravest errors was in not insisting that INR send someone with me.

"Fascinating and completely puzzling at first was the total absence of a Department of Defense representative on my team; however, after 3-4 days and nights I figured out ... DoD was covering its own butt, to an extent, by having no direct fingerprints on the affair - and being directly wired into Cheney's office, Rumsfeld's folks knew they were protected by Toby and Hanna.

"When we all arrived at CIA, we were given the NIC [National Intelligence Council] spaces and staff. [But] I could not even get on a computer!! Protests to Tenet and McLaughlin got me perfunctory CIA-blah blah about security clearances, etc. - and me with 7 days and nights to prepare a monumentally important presentation! ...

"[It took] 24 hours before George or John acknowledged I could be on a computer.... From there on, it was a madhouse.

"But at the end of the day, had I had an INR rep, had I had better support, had I been more concerned with WHAT I was assembling rather than HOW on earth I would assemble it and present it on time, I'm not sure at all it would have made any difference in the march to war."

Not the Only Criminal Activity

So there you have it folks, the anatomy of a crime - one of several such already on the record, with some of the same dramatis personae.

Mention of Carl Ford and Tenet and McLaughlin remind me of another episode that has gone down in the annals of intelligence as almost equally contemptible. This one had to do with their furious attempt to prove there were mobile biological weapons labs of the kind Curveball had described.

Remember, Tenet and McLaughlin had been warned about Curveball long before they let then-Secretary of State Powell shame himself, and the rest of us, by peddling Curveball's wares at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003. But the amateur attempts at deception did not stop there. After the war began, CIA intrepid analysts, still "leaning forward," misrepresented a tractor-trailer found in Iraq outfitted with industrial equipment as one of the mobile bio-labs.

On May 28, 2003, CIA analysts cooked up a fraudulent six-page report claiming that the trailer discovered earlier in May was proof they had been right about Iraq's "bio-weapons labs."

They then performed what in Army parlance is called a "midnight requisition," finding the only Defense Intelligence Agency analyst sympathetic to their position and getting him to provide DIA "coordination," (which was almost immediately withdrawn by DIA).

On May 29, President George W. Bush, visiting Poland, proudly announced on Polish TV, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." (For a contemporaneous debunking of the CIA-DIA report, see "America's Matrix," http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/060103a.html)

When the State Department's Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts realized that this was not some kind of Polish joke, they "went ballistic," according to Carl Ford, who immediately warned Powell there was a very large problem. Tenet, in turn, must have learned of this quickly, for he called Ford on the carpet, literally, the following day. No shrinking violet, Ford held his ground. He told Tenet and McLaughlin, "That report is one of the worst intelligence assessments I've ever read."

What seems clear is that Tenet and McLaughlin learned nothing from their decision just four months earlier to play fast and loose with intelligence-regardless of the risk of heavy embarrassment to the Secretary of State or, in this case, the President.

"They Should Have Been Shot"

This episode-and several like it-are described in Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, who say that Ford is still angry over the fraudulent paper. Ford told the authors:

"It was clear that they [Tenet and McLaughlin] had been personally involved in the preparation of the [bio-weapons labs] report. As it turned out, that analysis was unprofessional and even unethical. People did funny thing with the evidence...It wasn't just that it was wrong. They lied...they should have been shot." (Page 229)

Small wonder Ford has remained angry-like Wilkerson. It was all just too much. Ford knew he had made a huge mistake in early Feb. 2003, by assuming that Colin Powell would face down the blandishments of Tenet, McLaughlin, and the White House members of Wilkerson's team.

The way these things normally work, it was not unreasonable for Ford to assume further that he would have the opportunity, in extremis, to trade on his credibility with, and entrée to, Secretary Powell to thwart the CIA seniors, if they peddled their meretricious wares at CIA headquarters.

In the end, Powell went along; Col. Wilkerson was left to twist slowly in the wind, so to speak. Bush, Cheney, and their courtiers prevailed and our country embarked on what the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal termed the "supreme international crime"-a war of aggression.

Sad. Very sad. Criminal, I would say.

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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President's Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

Sinking incomes

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May 19, 2009 - Richard Daughty

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If you are one of the people who write to me and question my consistent advice to buy gold, silver and oil and who must think that oil will remain low forever, think again: Bloomberg.com reports that "China's passenger-vehicle sales rose 37% last month, the most in three years, as government subsidies spurred demand for minivans and small cars."

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, as I was thinking, "Only a bunch of commie morons would pass out free money so that people could buy cars!"

Well, it turns out that the Chinese can't hold a candle to us
American idiots, as Congress has not only legislated a commie-think US$8,000 tax credit (also known as "actual cash back at tax time!") to "first-time home buyers" but also a tax credit as a rebate for a portion of the price of a new, more fuel-efficient car!

In this regard, Jim B sent a collection of witticisms by Ronald Reagan, one of which goes "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." This is the subsidize part!

In China, the incentives were a success, as total vehicle sales in China, including buses and trucks, "rose 25% to 1.15 million."

Well, I don't really know about China, but if people in America are going to afford cars, they are going to need government assistance, too, as the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that "Personal income decreased $34.4 billion" in March.

And it is not just oil that is going to go up because of supplying more and more gasoline to more and more cars, but gold and silver will, too, shoot up in the horrific inflation as a result of the eye-popping increases in the money supply as part of the unbelievable stupidity known as Quantitative Easing.

And as for my demand that you buy silver, well, Ted Butler, writing at GoldSeek.com, surprises us with "a statistic that is stunning and troublesome at the same time. In 1959, there were about 5 billion ounces of silver physically held on US soil. This includes the 3.4 billion government holdings plus privately held silver, including hundreds of millions of ounces of silver objects that would be subsequently melted in the early 1980s."

In comparison, "In 1959, there were about 9 billion ounces of silver bullion-equivalent in the world (half of that in the US, both public and private). With a world population of 3 billion, there was a per-capita amount of 3 ounces for each of the world's citizens. Today, 50 years later, there is a per capita amount of silver of 0.15 of an ounce remaining (1 billion ounces divided by a 6.8 billion population)."

In short, "The per-capita amount of silver bullion equivalent in the world has declined by 95% over the past 50 years." Wow!

Contrast that with today, when he figures that there are only about "300 million ounces held on US soil, including all the 118 million ounces in COMEX-approved warehouses and privately held silver."

And as for gold, which historically has always risen with inflation in prices, Andrew Mickey of Q1 Publishing has done some research and finds that "The last few times US government spending reached these levels (as a percentage of GDP), the consequences, which were always the same, followed close behind."

And what happened, you wonder? Well, "In 1861, the Union printed more money, borrowed everything it could, and spent it all to fight back the 'rebels.' Inflation between 1861 and 1865 ended up at 117% for the period. That's 16.7% on an annualized basis.

"In 1917, president Woodrow Wilson aggressively emptied the government coffers in World War I. Prices increased 126% between 1917 and 1918. That's 50.3% annual rate.

"In the 1940s we went through it again. The US involvement in World War II forced another surge in government spending. This time the prices rose 108% between 1941 and 1945. That works out to a 15.7% annual rate of inflation.

"Then in the 1960s, during the quest for the Great Society' amidst the Vietnam War, the US government stepped up spending in a big way. The end result was the 'lost decade' of the 70s and stagflation which followed."

I sum it all up to the Austrian school of economics being Exactly Freaking Correct that inflation in the money supply is Bad, Bad News, as anybody at Mises.org can tell you.

But Mr Mickey thinks he can roughly estimate the inflation we are going to suffer, and says "all the forces are pointing towards a huge wave of inflation coming - an annual rate of 10% to 20% given the historical ranges. And right now, while the inflation/deflation debate rages on, it's giving us a chance to protect ourselves from the coming inflationary wave inexpensively and maybe actually profit as well."

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Richard Daughty is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the editor of The Mogambo Guru economic newsletter - an avocational exercise to heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it.

Mule Diddlers of the World - Unite!

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Jaime O'Neill
May 16, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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There's a guy running to become Governor of Georgia who says he'd sacrifice his livin' breathin' son to help end abortion. There was a time when the irony in that gubernatorial candidate's position might be a mite obvious, but given how dadgum dumb we've gotten as a nation after eight years with the village idiot as our leader, chances are lots of people in Georgia and throughout the land might miss the collision of thought that occurs when people are almost eager to whack an existing kid in order to spare one not yet born.

That guy seeking the gubernatorial office down in Georgia is a true believer named Neal Horsley, a would-be poster boy for some future public service ad trying to convince the public of the need for more mental health treatment facilities in the deep south.

Horsley can be found among that brand of Bible beaters who get real bloody minded when the subject of a woman's right to choose comes up, and he's more than willing to do a homicidal number on people who don't agree with him. On his website, he publishes the names of abortion doctors and the addresses of abortion clinics, along with appeals to his fellow zealots to stop further terminations of pregnancies by any means necessary.

Horsley got his start as a nut job back in his red dirt days as a boy in Georgia, where he admits gaining his first carnal knowledge with mules. "When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule," Horsley said in an interview on Fox News."

In yet another of those closeted ironies, Mr. Horsley's is running for office on the idea that gay marriage is an offense against God.

Some unspecified time after his youthful mule-boy love affairs, Mr. Horsley got religion and, it is assumed, found other more species-appropriate objects of his desire.

We've had some fairly odd governors get elected in this country as part of the ongoing attempt by the voters to discredit the very notion of democracy. There was that wrestler feller up in Minnesota, and a couple of actors in Californ-I-A. And then there's Sarah Palin up in Alaska, and the slick and handsome dimbulb down in Texas who wants to secede from the union so he can become president of his own damn country.

Which is what this guy Horsley, the mule fornicator, wants to do because he figures that his best hope for living in a peckerwood heaven on earth is to secede from a nation ruled by laws like Roe v. Wade, and form a righteous nation where men can lord it over women the way Horsley, God, and the Taliban intended.

Stranger things have happened in Georgia. Older readers might remember Lester Maddox, the guy who became governor of that state after his appetite-whetting stint as a restaurateur who became nationally famous for handing out ax handles to white patrons of his establishment who were encouraged to employ such farm implements in the interest of Negro-free dining environments.

If you were this guy Horsley's kid, you might be getting a tad nervous about now, fretting over how far dear ol' dad might be willing to take this crusade for Christ and the unborn.

And you'd be none too reassured by what your Pop said in a recent interview, quoting the Bible in favor of the kind of family values that place one's family pretty far down the chute, survival-wise. When a reporter repeated the question about Horsley's willingness to sacrifice his son, the would-be Gov replied by citing scripture: "Unless you love me more than you love your father, your son, your wife, your daughter, you're not fit to be my disciple," Horsley said. "That's why there's a real rift of estrangement in my family,"

It appears Horsley's family is a tad peck-ish when it comes to his ideas about showing devotion to Christ with their blood, but the mule-ish balking of his kin hasn't inclined Mr. Horsley to lighten up on the idea of sacrificing any or all of them to a greater good.

"I contend this is really about people's ability to believe in God. When it comes to that place, when you're talking about God's plan to protect Himself, then the lives of people become, really, almost irrelevant... in the degree that they result in Him being glorified."

It remains unclear if Horsley's son will be supporting his dad's run for office. Calls to "Dobbins Horsley" were greeted by a recorded message that said, simply, "hee haw."

Obama Must Cow Netanyahu, Not the Other Way Around

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Far rightwing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is meeting Monday with President Barack Obama in Washington.

Juan Cole
May 18, 2009 - Informed Comment

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It is the most fateful encounter of two world leaders since Kennedy met Khrushchev. And Obama absolutely must not allow himself to be cowed or misunderstood as timid by Netanyahu, who is a notorious bully and warmonger. (Bill Clinton complained that Netanyahu when last prime minister thought that he was the superpower). If Obama can cow Netanyahu, his Middle East policy may have a chance. If Netanyahu comes away thinking he can thumb his nose at Washington, the whole Middle East could be in flames by the end of Obama's first term.

The two come to the encounter with starkly different agendas for the Middle East. Obama wants better relations with Iran (which he needs for a clean withdrawal from Iraq and for success in Afghanistan). And Obama wants to be the president who finally established a Palestinian state, implemented a two-state solution, and resolved the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict, which has generated so many wars and so much terrorism and instability. (As I have said before, the key problem in all this is Palestinian statelessness.)

Netanyahu on the other hand wants to attack Iran and attempt to destroy its nuclear enrichment research facilities. And he absolutely does not under any circumstances want a Palestinian state or to be forced to withdraw Israeli squatters from the Palestinian territories that they have been colonizing since 1967 (unlike most of Israel proper, the UN never awarded that territory to Israel, nor has it been recognized implicitly by international treaties, as Egypt's Camp David accords implicitly recognized 1949 Israeli borders.)

Obama, concerned that Israeli sabre-rattling might itself lead to hostilities, sent CIA head Leon Panetta to Israel recently to demand that the Netanyahu government tone down its belligerent rhetoric. Netanyahu maintains that Iran has vowed to destroy Israel, which is not correct. The Iranian government is hostile to Israel and wishes that the Zionist enterprise would collapse the way the Soviet Union or the shah's government did. But it has said that it would accept a two-state solution if that was what the Palestinians wanted. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to 'wipe Israel off the face of the map,' since there is not even such an idiom in Persian. He was talking about an ideological collapse of a Zionist regime and its occupation of Jerusalem, Islam's third holiest city. Iran has not launched an aggressive war possibly since Karim Khan Zand took Basra in the 1780s.

Netanyahu's plan to attack Iran's nuclear facilities would fail, and would only cause Iran actually to seek nukes, which it is not presently doing according to US intelligence. I like Israelis, but they are understandably traumatized by all the things that have happened to them since the 1930s and have developed an unhealthy hysteria and tendency to shoot first and ask questions later. They were convinced that a US overthrow of Saddam Hussein would change the Middle East in their favor. It has not (Hizbullah in Lebanon has new friends in Baghdad, as does Tehran). Obama must impress on them that the answer to every problem is not a bombing raid. The good thing about having Rahm Emmanuel in the White House is that he will be able to phrase the instruction colorfully enough for it to be understood unambiguously.

An Israeli attack on Iran might well reactivate the Mahdi Army and Badr Corps as anti-American Shiite militias in Iraq- all hell could break loose in that country, leaving Obama's hopes for a withdrawal in tatters. And Iran has many clients in Afghanistan that could be mobilized against NATO-- in fact it could join an effort to keep military materiel from even getting to Afghanistan, leaving NATO forces vulnerable to being cut off and killed.

Netanyahu's talk of improving the economic lives of Palestinians instead of giving them a state is also nonsense. Statelessness prevents economic security and progress. And people aren't just motivated by material things. Palestinians want a concrete manifestation of their national identity, just as everyone else does.

Only a viable Palestinian state resolves this huge decades-long mess in the short to medium term. I think it may be too late but am willing to see what Obama has in mind.

.....

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been published. He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.

The Disease of Permanent War

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Chris Hedges
May 18, 2009 - TruthDig.com

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The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism.

This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.

It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls-the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads - personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.

"War," Randolf Bourne commented acidly, "is the health of the state."

In "Pentagon Capitalism" Seymour Mellman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, trash economies. They are able to upend priorities. They redirect government expenditures towards their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule and our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We sink money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies to fight global warming. Universities are flooded with defense-related cash and grants, and struggle to find money for environmental studies. This is the disease of permanent war.

Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $le1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.

Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality. The corporations behind the doctrine of permanent war-who have corrupted Leon Trotsky's doctrine of permanent revolution-must keep us afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear means that we will be willing to give up our rights and liberties for security. Fear keeps us penned in like domesticated animals.

Mellman, who coined the term permanent war economy to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current, and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. It comes with guaranteed profits. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which receives some $3 billion in assistance and is required to buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of the money. The taxpayers fund the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign governments. It is a bizarre circular system. It defies the concept of a free-market economy. These weapons systems are soon in need of being updated or replaced. They are hauled, years later, into junk yards where they rust. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

Those who profit from permanent war are not restricted by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. They operate, rather, outside of competitive markets. They erase the line between the state and the corporation. They leech away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful products and produce sustainable jobs. Mellman used the example of the New York City Transit Authority and its allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no American companies responded. Melman argued that the industrial base in America was no longer centered on items that maintain, improve, or are used to build the nation's infrastructure. New York City eventually contracted with companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway cars. Mellman estimated that such a contract could have generated, directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in
the United States. In another instance, of 100 products offered in the 2003 L.L. Bean catalogue, Mellman found that ninety-two were imported and only eight were made in the United States.

The late Senator J. William Fulbright described the reach of the military-industrial establishment in his 1970 book "The Pentagon Propaganda Machine." Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced and shaped public opinion through multimillion dollar public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, close ties with Hollywood producers, and use of the commercial media. The majority of the military analysts on television are former military officials, many employed as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an employee of Defense Solutions, Inc., a consulting firm. He profited, the article noted, from the sale of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he championed over the airwaves.

Our permanent war economy has not been challenged by Obama and the Democratic Party. They support its destructive fury because it funds them. They validate its evil assumptions because to take them on is political suicide. They repeat the narrative of fear because it keeps us dormant. They do this because they have become weaker than the corporate forces that profit from permanent war.

The hollowness of our liberal classes, such as the Democrats, empowers the moral nihilists. A state of permanent war means the inevitable death of liberalism. Dick Cheney may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war it does not matter. They get what they want. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Notes from the Underground to illustrate what happens to cultures when a liberal class, like ours, becomes sterile, defeated dreamers. The main character in Notes from the Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to its logical extreme. He becomes the enlightenment ideal. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He prizes realism over sanity, even in the face of self-destruction. These acts of accommodation doom the Underground Man, as it doomed imperial Russia and as it will doom us.

"I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect," the Underground Man wrote. "And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."

We have been drawn into the world of permanent war by these fools. We allow fools to destroy the continuity of life, to tear apart all systems, economic, social, environmental and political, that sustain us. Dostoevsky was not dismayed by evil. He was dismayed by a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront the fools. These fools are leading us over the precipice. What will rise up from the ruins will not be something new, but the face of the monster that has, until then, remained hidden behind the facade.

.....

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July

That Didn’t Take Long: Insurance Industry Breaks Promise to President Obama

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Jason Rosenbaum
May 16, 2009 - The Seminal

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Why we can't trust the insurance industry with health care reform.

Just four days after standing next to President Obama and declaring their commitment to control health care costs to the tune of $2 trillion over 10 years, the insurance industry, drug and medical device makers, and hospital groups are backing off their promise:

Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending.

Mr. Obama invited health industry leaders to the White House on Monday to trumpet their cost-control commitments. But three days later, confusion swirled in Washington as the companies' trade associations raced to tamp down angst among members around the country.

Health care leaders who attended the meeting have a different interpretation. They say they agreed to slow health spending in a more gradual way and did not pledge specific year-by-year cuts.

"There's been a lot of misunderstanding that has caused a lot of consternation among our members," said Richard J. Umbdenstock, the president of the American Hospital Association. "I've spent the better part of the last three days trying to deal with it."

First, these groups are showing their true, dishonest colors. AHIP, the main insurance industry lobby group, sent out this press release from their fake grassroots campaign after the announcement:

By reducing the rate of growth in health care spending by 1.5% each year, the nation can achieve a savings of $2 trillion over the next decade. This effort will have a direct effect on the budgets of individuals and families and will also go a long way in ensuring that every American have access to affordable, high-quality health care. Stay tuned for more information on this important initiative in the weeks and months ahead.

Sounds like they made a commitment, right? Well, that commitment is now pretty soft (emphasis on the softness added):

He and other health care executives said they had agreed to squeeze health spending so the annual rate of growth would eventually be 1.5 percentage points lower.

One of the lobbyists, Karen M. Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, said the savings would "ramp up" gradually as the growth of health spending slowed.

David H. Nexon, senior executive vice president of the Advanced Medical Technology Association, a trade group for makers of medical devices, said "there was no specific understanding" of when the lower growth rate would be achieved.

"It's a target over a 10-year period," Mr. Nexon said.

So we've gone from commitments to eventualities, targets, and non-specific understandings.

This just proves what the American people have known all along: You can't trust the insurance industry with health care reform.

Why have these commitments gone soft? It's about profits. Every dollar of health care "waste" in the system, every dollar that goes somewhere other than to your health, that's a dollar more in the pockets of a rich hospital administrator or insurance industry CEO. For health care costs to come down, somebody's profits have to come down as well.

Now, in a good reform plan, every player in the system would be squeezed a little bit to help alleviate the crushing cost on the patient. Doctors, hospitals, and other providers would charge a bit less for care and be paid based on quality, not quantity. Drug and medical device makers would be forced to sell their products at a discount in volume. And the insurance industry would trim overhead and profits to keep costs in line. Then, employers and government would pitch in to cover all individuals. It would be a system of shared responsibility.

Clearly, the insurance industry, hospitals, and drug makers aren't interested in shared responsibility. They don't want to be squeezed a bit. The want to protect their profits so much that they show their two-faced nature: Standing next to the President of the United States, promising responsibility, and then backpeddling as fast as they can four days later.

That's why we need to make them do it. Voluntary agreements are not enough. We need regulation and we need real cost control, and that means a public health insurance option that will force these awful companies to earn their keep through stiff competition, something they've avoided for far too long.

They're liars. They're cheats. They're greedy. They're untrustworthy. They cannot be trusted to come up with a health care reform plan that works for you and me. We must make them do it.

US Stirs a Hornet's Nest in Pakistan

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Eric Margolis
May 17, 2009 - Winnipeg Sun

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PARIS - Pakistan finally bowed to Washington's angry demands last week by unleashing its military against rebellious Pashtun tribesmen of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) -- collectively mislabelled "Taliban" in the West.

The Obama administration had threatened to stop $2 billion US annual cash payments to bankrupt Pakistan's political and military leadership and block $6.5 billion future aid, unless Islamabad sent its soldiers into Pakistan's turbulent NWFP along the Afghan frontier.

The result was a bloodbath: Some 1,000 "terrorists" killed (read: mostly civilians) and 1.2 million people -- most of Swat's population -- made refugees.

Pakistan's U.S.-rented armed forces have scored a brilliant victory against their own people. Too bad they don't do as well in wars against India. Blasting civilians, however, is much safer and more profitable.

Unable to pacify Afghanistan's Pashtun tribes (a.k.a. Taliban), a deeply frustrated Washington has begun tearing Pakistan apart in an effort to end Pashtun resistance in both nations. CIA drone aircraft have so far killed over 700 Pakistani Pashtun. Only 6% were militants, according to Pakistan's media, the rest civilians.

Pashtun, also improperly called Pathan, are the world's largest tribal people. Fifteen million live in Afghanistan, forming half its population. Twenty-six million live right across the border in Pakistan. Britain's imperialists divided Pashtun by an artificial border, the Durand Line (today's Afghan-Pakistan border). Pashtun reject it.

Many Pashtun tribes agreed to join Pakistan in 1947, provided much of their homeland be autonomous and free of government troops. Pashtun Swat only joined Pakistan in 1969.

As Pakistan's Pashtun increasingly aided Pashtun resistance in Afghanistan, U.S. drones began attacking them. Washington forced Islamabad to violate its own constitution by sending troops into Pashtun lands. The result was the current explosion of Pashtun anger.

I have been to war with the Pashtun and have seen their legendary courage, strong sense of honour and determination. They are also hugely quarrelsome, feuding and prickly.

One quickly learns never to threaten a Pashtun or give him ultimatums. These are the mountain warriors who defied the U.S. by refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden because he was a hero of the anti-Soviet war and their guest. The ancient code of "Pashtunwali" still guides them: Do not attack Pashtun, do not cheat them, do not cause them dishonour. To Pashtun, revenge is sacred.

HAM-HANDED

Now, Washington's ham-handed policies and last week's Swat atrocity threaten to ignite Pakistan's second worst nightmare after invasion by India: That its 26 million Pashtun will secede and join Afghanistan's Pashtun to form an independent Pashtun state, Pashtunistan.

This would rend Pakistan asunder, probably provoke its restive Baluchi tribes to secede and tempt mighty India to intervene militarily, risking nuclear war with beleaguered Pakistan.

The Pashtun of NWFP have no intention or capability of moving into Pakistan's other provinces, Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan. They just want to be left alone. Alarms of a "Taliban takeover of Pakistan" are pure propaganda.

Lowland Pakistanis repeatedly have rejected militant Islamic parties. Many have little love for Pashtun, whom they regard as mountain wild men best avoided.

Nor are Pakistan's well-guarded nukes a danger -- at least not yet. Alarms about Pakistan's nukes come from the same fabricators with hidden agendas who brought us Saddam Hussein's bogus weapons.

THE REAL DANGER

The real danger is in the U.S. acting like an enraged mastodon, trampling Pakistan under foot, and forcing Islamabad's military to make war on its own people. Pakistan could end up like U.S.-occupied Iraq, split into three parts and helpless.

If this continues, at some point patriotic Pakistani soldiers may rebel and shoot the corrupt generals and politicians on Washington's payroll.

Equally ominous, a poor people's uprising spreading across Pakistan -- also mislabelled "Taliban" -- threatens a radical national rebellion reminiscent of India's Naxalite rebels.

As in Iraq, profound ignorance and gung ho military arrogance drive U.S. Afghan policy. Obama's people have no understanding what they are getting into in "AfPak." I can tell them: An unholy mess we will long regret.

.....

Eric Margolis is a columnist for The Toronto Sun. A veteran of many conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was featured in a special appearance on Britain's Sky News TV as "the man who got it right" in his predictions about the dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in Iraq. His latest book is American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim.

Obama Can't Turn The Page On Bush

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Frank Rich
May 16, 2009 - The New York Times

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To paraphrase Al Pacino in "Godfather III," just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can't. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration's high ambitions.

That's why the president's flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool's errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven't started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here's a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.

There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld's corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of "Dead Certain," the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld's monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America's most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper's biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go." (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What's up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary's actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world's apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout "would be as bad as Abu Ghraib."

The GQ article isn't the only revelation of previously unknown Bush Defense Department misbehavior to emerge this month. Just two weeks ago, the Obama Pentagon revealed that a major cover-up of corruption had taken place at the Bush Pentagon on Jan. 14 of this year — just six days before Bush left office. This strange incident — reported in The Times but largely ignored by Washington correspondents preparing for their annual dinner — deserves far more attention and follow-up.

What happened on Jan. 14 was the release of a report from the Pentagon's internal watchdog, the inspector general. It had been ordered up in response to a scandal uncovered last year by David Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times. Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while posing as objective "military analysts." Many of these propagandists worked for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in Pentagon procurement. Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special briefings unavailable to the legitimate press. Yet the public was never told of these conflicts of interest when these "analysts" appeared on the evening news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call "the real situation on the ground in Iraq."

When Barstow's story broke, more than 45 members of Congress demanded an inquiry. The Pentagon's inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14 report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon. Indeed, when Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last month, Rumsfeld's current spokesman cited the inspector general's "exoneration" to attack the Times articles as fiction.

But the Pentagon took another look at this exoneration, and announced on May 5 that the inspector general's report, not The Times's reporting, was fiction. The report, it turns out, was riddled with factual errors and included little actual investigation of Barstow's charges. The inspector general's office had barely glanced at the 8,000 pages of e-mail that Barstow had used as evidence, and interviewed only seven of the 70 disputed analysts. In other words, the report was a whitewash. The Obama Pentagon officially rescinded it — an almost unprecedented step — and even removed it from its Web site.

Network news operations ignored the unmasking of this last-minute Bush Pentagon cover-up, as they had the original Barstow articles — surely not because they had been patsies for the Bush P.R. machine. But the story is actually far larger than this one particular incident. If the Pentagon inspector general's office could whitewash this scandal, what else did it whitewash?

In 2005, to take just one example, the same office released a report on how Boeing colluded with low-level Pentagon bad apples on an inflated (and ultimately canceled) $30 billion air-tanker deal. At the time, even John Warner, then the go-to Republican senator on military affairs, didn't buy the heavily redacted report's claim that Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were ignorant of what Warner called "the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history." The Pentagon inspector general who presided over that exoneration soon fled to become an executive at the parent company of another Pentagon contractor, Blackwater.

But the new administration doesn't want to revisit this history any more than it wants to dwell on torture. Once the inspector general's report on the military analysts was rescinded, the Obama Pentagon declared the matter closed. The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. "Sometimes I think just keep walking," she said on ABC's "This Week" as the torture memos surfaced. "Some of life has to be mysterious." Imagine if she'd been at Nuremberg!

The administration can't "just keep walking" because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president's "left-wing base" want accountability, but that's not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month's Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into "confirming" a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.

And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture "worked," and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the "bad apples" made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.

It will soon be every man for himself. "Did President Bush know everything you knew?" Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on "Face the Nation" last Sunday. The former vice president's uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — "I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew..." — suggests that the Bush White House's once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.

I'm not a fan of Washington's blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney's watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.

AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED

.....

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they're saying? It isn't pretty.

Robert Draper
GQ Magazine

.....

On the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing's cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days' war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: "Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To
deliver their soul from death."

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: "Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand." On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: "It is God's will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.

See these and more Bush-administration intelligence cover sheets:

http://men.style.com/gq/features/topsecret

These cover sheets were the brainchild of Major General Glen Shaffer, a director for intelligence serving both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. In the days before the Iraq war, Shaffer's staff had created humorous covers in an attempt to alleviate the stress of preparing for battle. Then, as the body counting began, Shaffer, a Christian, deemed the biblical passages more suitable. Several others in the Pentagon disagreed. At least one Muslim analyst in the building had been greatly offended; others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout—as one Pentagon staffer would later say—"would be as bad as Abu Ghraib."

But the Pentagon's top officials were apparently unconcerned about the effect such a disclosure might have on the conduct of the war or on Bush's public standing. When colleagues complained to Shaffer that including a religious message with an intelligence briefing seemed inappropriate, Shaffer politely informed them that the practice would continue, because "my seniors"—JCS chairman Richard Myers, Rumsfeld, and the commander in chief himself—appreciated the cover pages.

But one government official was disturbed enough by these biblically seasoned sheets to hold on to copies, which I obtained recently while debriefing the past eight years with those who lived them inside the West Wing and the Pentagon. Over the past several months, the battle to define the Bush years has begun taking shape: As President Obama has rolled back his predecessor's foreign and economic policies, Dick Cheney, Ari Fleischer, and former speechwriters Michael Gerson and Marc Thiessen have all taken to the airwaves or op-ed pages to cast the Bush years in a softer light. My conversations with more than a dozen Bush loyalists, including several former cabinet-level officials and senior military commanders, have revealed another element of this legacy-building moment: intense feelings of ill will toward Donald Rumsfeld. Though few of these individuals would speak for the record (knowing that their former boss, George W. Bush, would not approve of
it), they believe that Rumsfeld's actions epitomized the very traits—arrogance, stubbornness, obliviousness, ineptitude—that critics say drove the Bush presidency off the rails.

Many of these complaints are long-standing. Over the past three years, several of Bush's former advisers have described their boss's worst mistake as keeping Rumsfeld around as long as he did. "Don did not like to play well with other people," one cabinet official told me—stating a grievance that nearly everyone in the White House seemed to share, except for Bush himself. "There was exasperation," recalls a senior aide. "'How much more are we going to have to endure? Why are we keeping this guy?'" Rumsfeld has also received ongoing criticism that his Bush-mandated efforts to modernize America's Cold War–era military contributed to the early stumbles in Iraq. But in speaking with the former Bush officials, it becomes evident that Rumsfeld impaired administration performance on a host of matters extending well beyond Iraq to impact America's relations with other nations, the safety of our troops, and the response to Hurricane
Katrina.

The Scripture-adorned cover sheets illustrate one specific complaint I heard again and again: that Rumsfeld's tactics—such as playing a religious angle with the president—often ran counter to sound decision-making and could, occasionally, compromise the administration's best interests. In the case of the sheets, publicly flaunting his own religious views was not at all the SecDef's style—"Rumsfeld was old-fashioned that way," Shaffer acknowledged when I contacted him about the briefings—but it was decidedly Bush's style, and Rumsfeld likely saw the Scriptures as a way of making a personal connection with a president who frequently quoted the Bible. No matter that, if leaked, the images would reinforce impressions that the administration was embarking on a religious war and could escalate tensions with the Muslim world. The sheets were not Rumsfeld's direct invention—and he could thus distance himself from them, should that prove
necessary.

Still, the sheer cunning of pairing unsentimental intelligence with religious righteousness bore the signature of one man: Donald Rumsfeld. And as historians slog through the smoke and mirrors of his tenure, they may find that Rumsfeld's most enduring legacy will be the damage he did to Bush's.

...

"What Rumsfeld was most effective in doing," says a former senior White House official, "was not so much undermining a decision that had yet to be made as finding every way possible to delay the implementation of a decision that had been made and that he didn't like." At meetings, he'd throw up every obstacle he could. "Rumsfeld would say, 'Golly, we haven't had time to read all of these documents! I mean, this is radical change!' " the official adds. "And then, if you suggested that maybe he should've read all the documents when everyone first got them a week ago, he'd say: 'Well! I've been all over the world since then! What have you been doing?' "

The Department of Justice got a taste of such stalling tactics two months after September 11, when the president issued an order authorizing the establishment of military commissions to try suspected terrorists. Rumsfeld resisted this imposition of authority on his DoD turf. "We tried to get these military commissions up and running," recalls one former DoJ official. "There'd be a lot of 'Well, he's working on it.' In my own view, that's cost the administration a lot. Hearings for detainees would've been viewed one way back in 2002. But by 2006"—the year commissions were at last enacted—"it's not so appealing."

Similarly, Rumsfeld delayed the implementation of a 2004 presidential order granting our Australian and British allies access to the Pentagon's classified Internet system known as SIPRNet. "He always had what sounded like a good reason," says one of Bush's top advisers. "But I had a lot of back channels and found out that it was being held up." It finally took Australian prime minister John Howard forcibly complaining to Bush about the matter in the fall of 2006 for SIPRNet to become accessible.

"In many ways," says one of Bush's national-security advisers, "Rumsfeld was more interested in being perceived to be in charge than actually being in charge." When I repeated this quote to an administration official privy to Rumsfeld's war efforts, this person's eyes lit up. "One of the most fateful, knock-down-drag-outs was over postwar reconstruction," says this official. "It was the question of who'd take charge, State or DoD. Rumsfeld made a presentation about chain of command. 'If State takes over here, are you saying Tommy Franks is going to report to a State official? Mr. President, that's not in the Constitution!' "

"I'm not saying State could have done any better," this official says of the bungled reconstruction efforts. "But he owned it."

That is, until he disowned it. In May 2003, six weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Bush decreed that newly appointed envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer would be reporting directly to the secretary of defense. But within seven months, according to Bremer's book My Year in Iraq, Rumsfeld had completely washed his hands of the faltering reconstruction efforts.

At times, this my-way-or-no-way approach could even come at the expense of his soldiers. Shortly before the Iraq invasion, King Abdullah II of Jordan decreed that warplanes could not overfly his country if they had previously flown over Israel. The king's demand meant that U.S. fighters would need to make a multiple-hour detour before proceeding to their targets. Rumsfeld had himself been a fighter pilot and presumably recognized the absurdity of the detour, and so one NSC aide approached him during a meeting in the Situation Room as the matter was being discussed.

"Excuse me, Mr. Secretary," said the aide. "I want you to know that Dr. Rice is prepared to call the king to get that restriction removed so that our kids don't have to fly the extra two and a half or three hours."

Rumsfeld looked up from his coffee. "When I need your help," he said, "I'll ask."

The secretary did not ask for the help, and so his soldiers went the extra distance, unnecessarily. This seemingly instinctive stubbornness adds to the growing consensus that Rumsfeld's obduracy—on increasing troop levels, on recognizing the insurgency—was a primary cause of mishap in Iraq. But Rumsfeld and his defenders have already begun to counter this story line, most notably with an op-ed by Rumsfeld himself in The New York Times published last November—in which he argued, remarkably, that he had been "incorrectly portrayed as an opponent of the surge in Iraq." ("I was amused by that," says one top White House official, sounding unamused. "The Casey war plan was very much his." A former senior commander qualifies this view by pointing out that General George Casey did in fact increase troop levels in 2004 and 2006—but then adds, "Whenever we asked for increases, there was a certain amount of tension with Rumsfeld: Why
couldn't we do with less?")

The assignment of blame for what went wrong in Iraq will continue to be a matter of vigorous debate. But what's been less discussed is Rumsfeld's effect on the relationship between Bush and Vladimir Putin. Bush began his presidency determined to forge a new, post–Cold War relationship with Putin, and a year after their June 2001 "sense of his soul" meeting, the two leaders released a statement pledging dialogue on matters ranging from bilateral investment to missile-defense systems. But Rumsfeld, who had also served as Gerald Ford's secretary of defense during the Cold War, wasn't on board. According to an administration official closely involved in U.S.-Russia policy, "From the get-go, it was clear that the Pentagon had no interest in anything that was in that document. Rumsfeld wanted to do the minimum and move on."

Rumsfeld's office cut against Bush's pledge of cooperation and transparency with Russia on "a whole host of things," says this official: the proposed Russian-American Observation Satellite, the Joint Data Exchange Center, plutonium disposition. By 2005 the Bush-Putin partnership had soured for a variety of reasons, including Russia's growing economic swagger and America's Iraq-induced decline in global prestige. But, the official observes, Rumsfeld "did not help the relationship; that's clear." Russia came to believe that the U.S. wasn't interested in cooperating, and Rumsfeld's actions "devalued what the president had originally said. It made the Russians believe he lacked credibility."

"No one," says another former official, "threw sand in the gears like Rumsfeld."

...

One of rumsfeld's other favorite tactics was obfuscation. "He was always bringing questions," recalls a senior White House adviser of Rumsfeld. "Never answers." The SecDef most famously revealed this obsession with mystery in a February 2002 news conference while speculating on Iraq's links to terrorist groups. There were, he explained, "known knowns" and then "known unknowns—that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know." But, he added, there were also "unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know." The paradox of Rumsfeld's tenure is that in seeking to know all he could know, he also sought to control all he could control—and control inevitably came at the expense of accurate knowledge.

"Rumsfeld believed that all of the power from the military needed to migrate up to his level," recalls one former senior commander who got along well with the SecDef. "But you can't run an organization like the Department of Defense with everything going through the eye of the needle. It just doesn't work. And it wasn't just his inability to build a team below him. It was also his inability to play as a team player above him."

This unwillingness to cooperate was not a trifling matter. When the Department of Homeland Security was formed in 2002, Rumsfeld smelled a turf war. "He was very uncooperative in a petty way, and he would send some lower-level person to the secretarial meetings," recalls one former top West Wing adviser. At least he sent somebody. When Condoleezza Rice appointed Robert Blackwill to the Iraq Stabilization Group in 2003 to oversee that country's rickety reconstruction efforts, Rumsfeld saw the new group as an encroachment and therefore elected to dispatch no DoD personnel to its meetings. Here was the Rumsfeld paradox in action— his need for control trumping his desire for information—and his own subordinates could see the cost. "The truth is," recalls a former aide, "having people in the National Security Council is how you influence the NSC. So he would weaken himself by not having his eyes and ears there."

Another such trespasser on Rumsfeld's turf was the deputy national-security adviser for combating terrorism—an office that Rumsfeld once decreed does not exist. Its third occupant was a woman, Fran Townsend, and Rumsfeld's contempt for her was well-known throughout the building. "You think I'm going to talk to this broad?" he would complain.

After repeatedly being snubbed, Town-send approached Rumsfeld at a principals' meeting, the NSC gatherings of senior officials. "Mr. Secretary, if I've in some way offended you, I apologize," she said. "I'm just trying to do my job."

Whereupon Rumsfeld laughed loudly, put his arm around her shoulder, and boomed, "Ab-so-lute-ly not! Why, nothing could be further from the truth!"

Two years later, however, Townsend had received a promotion—to assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism—yet was still unable to command Rumsfeld's respect. In the midst of Hurricane Rita, Townsend learned that Texas governor Rick Perry had signaled his willingness to cede control of the National Guard to the federal government. She called Rumsfeld's aide and was told, "The secretary and Mrs. Rumsfeld are at an event."

Townsend knew that. The event was an ambassadors' ball; she was supposed to be there but was instead dealing with the crisis. "Put me in to his detail," she ordered.

A minute later, Townsend was on the phone with Rumsfeld's security agent, who then spoke to the SecDef. "The secretary will talk to you after the event," she was told.

Later in the evening, her phone rang. It was Chief of Staff Andy Card. "Rumsfeld just called," said Card. "What is it you need?"

Livid, Townsend said, "I want to know if the president knows what a fucking asshole Don Rumsfeld is."

Sighing, the chief of staff replied, "It isn't you, Fran. He treats Condi the same way. Me, too. He's always telling me I'm the worst chief of staff ever."

As objects of Rumsfeld's scorn, Card and Townsend took a backseat to Senator Ted Kennedy. During the final months of the Bush presidency, a White House program had been quietly under way to award numerous Presidential Medals of Freedom. Nomination forms were distributed, and several in the White House—apparently including Condi Rice and Chief of Staff Josh Bolten—suggested Kennedy, without whose support Bush's single most important domestic-policy achievement, the No Child Left Behind education initiative, would never have been realized. Administration sources say Bush was warm to the idea of awarding a medal to the cancer-stricken senator. Doing so would have come across as a bighearted, postpartisan gesture in the unpopular president's final days. But ultimately he chose not to, siding with the more conservative members of the White House who had been receiving encouragement from the vice president's longtime friend Donald Rumsfeld. The
former SecDef had even made a point of bringing up the subject at a Beltway social gathering late last year.

"They can't give Kennedy a medal!" he'd declared. "Not after he murdered that woman!"—referring to the Mary Jo Kopechne incident on Chappaquiddick Island nearly forty years earlier.

...

A final story of Rumsfeld's intransigence begins on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, "We're not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?"

"No, sir," said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida's Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. "I'm just here because you're here," the pilot added. "My whole unit's sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we're not being used."

The search-and-rescue helicopters were not being used because Donald Rumsfeld had not yet approved their deployment—even though, as Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, the cigar-chomping commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, would later tell me, "that Wednesday, we needed to evacuate people. The few helicopters we had in there were busy, and we were trying to deploy more."

And three years later, when I asked a top White House official how he would characterize Rumsfeld's assistance in the response to Hurricane Katrina, I found out why. "It was commonly known in the West Wing that there was a battle with Rumsfeld regarding this," said the official. "I can't imagine another defense secretary throwing up the kinds of obstacles he did."

Though various military bases had been mobilized into a state of alert well before the advance team's tour, Rumsfeld's aversion to using active-duty troops was evident: "There's no doubt in my mind," says one of Bush's close advisers today, "that Rumsfeld didn't like the concept."

The next day, three days after landfall, word of disorder in New Orleans had reached a fever pitch. According to sources familiar with the conversation, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff called Rumsfeld that morning and said, "You're going to need several thousand troops."

"Well, I disagree," said the SecDef. "And I'm going to tell the president we don't need any more than the National Guard."

The problem was that the Guard deployment (which would eventually reach 15,000 troops) had not arrived—at least not in sufficient numbers, and not where it needed to be. And though much of the chaos was being overstated by the media, the very suggestion of a state of anarchy was enough to dissuade other relief workers from entering the city. Having only recently come to grips with the roiling disaster, Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, "Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what's on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I'm watching? What the hell are you doing?"

Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would create "unity of command" issues. Visibly impatient, Bush turned away from Rumsfeld and began to direct his inquiries at Lieutenant General Honoré on the video screen. "From then on, it was a Bush-Honoré dialogue," remembers another participant. "The president cut Rumsfeld to pieces. I just wish it had happened earlier in the week."

But still the troops hadn't arrived. And by Saturday morning, says Honoré, "we had dispersed all of these people across Louisiana. So we needed more troops to go to distribution centers, feed people, and maintain traffic." That morning Bush convened yet another meeting in the Situation Room. Chertoff was emphatic. "Mr. President," he said, "if we're not going to begin to get these troops, we're not going to be able to get the job done."

Rumsfeld could see the writing on the wall and had come prepared with a deployment plan in hand. Still, he did not volunteer it. Only when Bush ordered, "Don, do it," did he acquiesce and send in the troops—a full five days after landfall.

Today, when I presented this account to Rumsfeld's then homeland-affairs assistant, Paul McHale, he denied that Rumsfeld's actions resulted in any delay: "This was by far the largest, fastest deployment of forces probably for any purposes in the history of the United States." McHale argues that Rumsfeld's caution was due to his conviction that Bush could not send in the military as de facto law-enforcement officers under the Insurrection Act. But as one of the top lawyers involved in such scenarios for Katrina would say, "That in my mind was just a stall tactic so as not to get the active-duty military engaged. All you needed to do was use them for logistics."

Ultimately, Rumsfeld's obfuscations about National Guard rotations, unity-of-command challenges, and the Insurrection Act did not serve his commander in chief, says one senior official intimately involved with the whole saga: "There's a difference between saying to the president of the United States, 'I understand, and let me solve it,' and making the president figure out the right question to ask."

"What it's about," says this official, "is recognizing that in an emergency, the appearance of control has real operational significance. If people are panicked, everything becomes harder. If we had put those troops in on Thursday, the narrative of Katrina would be a very different one."

...

At any burial, some praise is appropriate. Donald Rumsfeld demanded much of others, but also of himself. Even the commanders who loathed him appreciated how he stood up for them in wartime, especially during the pitfalls at Fallujah and Abu Ghraib. He did not whine. He did not capriciously fire—and, if anything, was too slow to fire those he found wanting. Quietly yet frequently, he visited the hospital beds of those he had sent into battle. And though his former colleagues have been quick to point out his miscues, one man—the man who dubbed himself "the Decider" when describing his refusal to let Rumsfeld go—clearly saw something in him.

What, then, was it that caused Bush to keep Rumsfeld around for so long?

The relationship between the two men was formal, reflecting generational differences. The president never called Rumsfeld "Rummy" to his face, says a close adviser: "He'd always do a dramatic 'Mr. Donald Rumsfeld! Mr. Secretary!' You have to understand, in any cabinet but no doubt in ours, Condi, Powell, and Rumsfeld were larger-than-life personalities who dwarfed any other cabinet member. And Rumsfeld used that to great effect."

Bush also enjoyed Rumsfeld's cussedness, his alpha-dog behavior toward the media. That same behavior toward his colleagues did not seem to bother the president. To Bush, rivalry was healthy, and the full extent of Rumsfeld's conduct was not known to him for the simple reason, say aides, that they did not wish to trouble the leader of the Free World every time Rumsfeld jerked them around.

But when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in the spring of 2004, Bush was upset that the Pentagon had not shared the damning photos with him before 60 Minutes II aired them. He called Rumsfeld on the Oval Office carpet, an incident that the White House leaked to The Washington Post to convey the president's dissatisfaction to the public. Rumsfeld read the story the next morning, May 6, and promptly drafted a letter of resignation. Bush received the letter with bemusement. Ol' Rummy had called his bluff. The president took no further action.

Nonetheless, as conditions in Iraq worsened throughout 2005 and early 2006, removing Rumsfeld was a "rolling -conversation" with Bush and top aides. One adviser recalls bringing up the matter twice. Each time, says this adviser, Bush shrugged and said, "Who've we got to replace him?" The adviser wondered why the president never initiated a search process.

By the spring of 2006, Bush at last seemed receptive to relieving Rumsfeld. But in April, when a half-dozen retired generals voiced their beliefs that the SecDef should be fired, Bush dug in his heels. That same month, Bush invited several of his top advisers to a meeting at the White House, where a show of hands went in favor of removing Rumsfeld before the '06 midterm elections. "There were plenty of substantive reasons given for why he should be fired," recalls a participant, "and not one substantive reason for why he should stay. People said that it would look bad to fire him after the retired generals said he should be fired, but no one offered any defense of Rumsfeld at all."

Rumsfeld kept his job for six more months while midterm-threatened Republicans clamored for his head. Politicizing the issue by replacing Rumsfeld during the electoral cycle was precisely what the president refused to do, say aides. These same aides were deluged with calls from angry Republicans when Bush announced the day after the election that Bob Gates would be replacing Rumsfeld. "A lot of people on the Hill were pissed," admits one such adviser.

"I think most Republicans believe that if Rumsfeld had been dismissed before the election, we would've hung on to the Senate," says South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham. "I think they're probably right."

...

"I know him enough to know that he was both surprised and hugely disappointed," says one military commander who saw the SecDef shortly after Bush's November 8 announcement of his departure. But at his hour-long farewell ceremony at the Pentagon on December 15, Rumsfeld maintained his unflappable affect. Though the event was freighted with solemnity, replete with salutes and detonating cannons, he joked merrily with both the vice president and Bush—"almost to an inappropriate degree for the setting," says one colleague, who later asked Rumsfeld about his ebullience.

Referring to Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld said, "I wanted them to have fun."
But at the end of the ceremony, the president could be seen climbing into his sedan, wearing an expression that one could interpret any number of ways: guilt, disappointment, self-loathing, a general sadness. Not "fun," however.

From beginning to end, the Rumsfeld experience was never that.

.....

GQ correspondent Robert Draper is the author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush.

Rumsfeld's Renegade Unit Blamed for Afghan Deaths

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Special Forces group implicated in three incidents that claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians / MarSOC was set up by former defence secretary despite opposition from within the Marine Corps

Jerome Starkey in Kabul
May 16, 2009 - The Independent/UK

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A single American Special Forces group was behind at least three of Afghanistan's worst civilian casualty incidents, The Independent has learnt, raising fundamental questions about their ongoing role in the conflict.

Troops from the US Marines Corps' Special Operations Command, or MarSOC, were responsible for calling in air strikes in Bala Boluk, in Farah, last week - believed to have killed more than 140 men, women and children - as well as two other incidents in 2007 and 2008. News of MarSOC's involvement in the three incidents comes just days after a Special Forces expert, Lieutenant-General Stanley McChrystal, was named to take over as the top commander of US and Nato troops in Afghanistan. His surprise appointment has prompted speculation that commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle to beat the Taliban.

MarSOC was created three years ago on the express orders of Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary at the time, despite opposition from within the Marine Corps and the wider Special Forces community. An article in the Marine Corps Times described the MarSOC troops as "cowboys" who brought shame on the corps.

The first controversial incident involving the unit happened just three weeks into its first deployment to Afghanistan on 4 March 2007. Speeding away from a suicide bomb attack close to the Pakistan border, around 120 men from Fox Company opened fire on civilians near Jalalabad, in Nangahar province. The Marines said they were shot at after the explosion; eyewitnesses said the Americans fired indiscriminately at pedestrians and civilian cars, killing at least 19 people.

The US Army commander in Nangahar at the time, Colonel John Nicholson, said he was "deeply ashamed" and described the incident as "a stain on our honour". The Marines' tour was cut short after a second incident on 9 March in which they allegedly rolled a car and fired on traffic again, and they were flown out of Afghanistan a few weeks later.

The top Special Operations officer at US Central Command, Army Major General Frank Kearney, refuted MarSOC's claims that they had been shot at. "We found no brass that we can confirm that small-arms fire came at them," he said, referring to ammunition casings. "We have testimony from Marines that is in conflict with unanimous testimony from civilians."

At the military hearings on the incident, which were held back in the US, soldiers said the MarSOC troops, who called themselves Taskforce Violence, were gung-ho and hungry to prove themselves in battle. The inquiry also heard testimony suggesting there were tensions between the Marine unit and its US Army counterparts in Nangahar province.

Col Nicholson told the court the unit would routinely stray into areas under his control without telling him, ignoring usual military courtesies. "There had been potentially 25 operations in my area of operations that I, as a commander, was not aware of," he said. Asked about the moment he was told of the March shootout, he added: "My initial reaction was, 'What are they doing out there?' " The three-week military inquiry ultimately spared the Marine unit from criminal charges.

There are around 2,500 troops in MarSOC. Around half are frontline troops, the rest are support and maintenance. Originally the unit was used to plug gaps in the Special Forces world and it has operated in more than 16 countries since being set up by Mr Rumsfeld in 2006. However, in a recent interview, its commanding officer, Major General Mastin Robeson, revealed he has been ordered to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Today MarSOC answers to the Combined Forces Special Operations Component Command, based in Kabul. That in turn answers to US Forces Afghanistan, which is led by the top US commander, David McKiernan, who is soon to be replaced by General McChrystal.

In August last year, a 20-man MarSOC unit, fighting alongside Afghan commandos, directed fire from unmanned drones, attack helicopters and a cannon-armed Spectre gunship into compounds in Azizabad, in Herat province, leaving more than 90 people dead - many of them children.

And just last week, MarSOC troops called in the Bala Baluk air strikes to rescue an Afghan police patrol that had been ambushed in countryside in Farah province. US officials said two F18 fighter jets and a B1 bomber had swooped because men on the ground were overwhelmed. But villagers said the most devastating bombs were dropped on compounds some distance from the fighting, long after the battle was over, and when Taliban forces were retreating. Afghan officials said up to 147 people were killed, including more than 90 women and children.

US officials dispute the number of people killed in each of the MarSOC incidents, which sparked angry public demonstrations and condemnation from Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan, Colonel Greg Julian, denied reports that commanders have lost confidence in the Marine unit. "MarSOC was involved in these incidents, but it's not all the same guys. They get the lessons passed on from all of the rotations and experiences. Yet, they are human," he said. "They have the same rules of engagement that everyone has."

The so-called "tactical directive" was introduced last September in the wake of the international uproar that followed the Azizabad deaths. It requires troops to exercise "proportionality, restraint, and utmost discrimination" when calling in air strikes. Claims that bombs were dropped in last week's incident in Farah long after the fighting finished suggest those directives may not have been followed by MarSOC.

Meanwhile, Afghan MPs have called for new laws to regulate the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan, and limit use of air strikes, house searches and Special Forces operations. Sayed Hussein Alemi Balkhi, one of the chief proponents of the planned legislation, said: "Special Forces, all forces, should be regulated by the law. If they won't accept that we have to ask bigger questions about what they are doing here."