All Americans with a scintilla of intellectual integrity (yeah, I'm addressing Republicans who voted for BushenCheney in 2004 when you should have known better) should read Frank Rich's NYT column today, Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush, in its entirety. Today, I just want to key on two or three paragraphs:Robert Draper .... author of Dead Certain .... 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.
Today, GQ publishes seven covers of Rumsfeld's Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Updates. Readers are recommended to follow the link to GQ's Slide Show. Otherwise, these screen-shots need clicking for expansion:
Frank Rich Continues:
What’s up with that? ... 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.The real point being, Bush the - fundamentalist sap that he was - was being played by Rumsfeld. Rich concludes:
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.Rich is right. Obama must be made to understand that in order to move on, he must dig up and air out these cadavers from their unmarked graves.
OMG Vigil. Thank you for posting the links to today's article by Frank Rich, and to GQ. The more details of the Busheney reign that are revealed, the more sickened I feel.
ReplyDeleteI know Obama is doing his very best to tackle the overwhelming number of disasters he inherited from the Repubs, but he MUST support, if not initiate, the appointment of a Special INDEPENDENT Prosecutor to examine ALL the evidence, and interview ALL those involved in the past eight years in which our Constitution has been shredded by the power hungry Busheney cabal. If our beloved nation is to be restored to health, we have to know the full extent of the crimes committed by the evildoers selected by those five "Activist" Supremes in 2000.
Job One, for we who love our Country, is to email and telephone our Congresspersons and the White House and DEMAND that Obama come to his senses.
It's instructive to note that Robert Draper's book, Dead Certain, was a White House-approved version of the Administration's policy at the time it was published.
ReplyDeleteThis is a truly creepy story about how a shrewd Secretary of Defense manipulated the simple-minded President with bible quotations.
ReplyDeleteIf the US is serious about restoring her image of a democratic role model she will have to go the extra mile - and Cheney and Rumsfeld wouldn't look that bad in orange anyway, would they?
Thanks for featuring my favorite member of the Bush crime family. I never would have guessed he was so well versed, Biblically speaking! Thanks to GQ, he's finally beginning to add up.
ReplyDelete"WAS"? Don't you mean is? A Christian Democratic Crusade?
ReplyDeleteWe are thinking alike again Vigil!!!
ReplyDeleteI understand the president's desire to avoid truth commissions or appointments of a special prosecutor. I'm sure the republicans actually want such a development because it would complete derail Obama's domestic agenda.
ReplyDeleteBut if we keep getting information like this stuff its almost a certainty that some sort on formal investigation will eventually be formed.
Rumsfeld is an absolutely despicable and diabolically controlling person. Those of his ilk deserve to be splitting rocks, not being members of the Cabinet or our government in general. It is hard to tell who is more evil: Cheney? Rumsfeld? Rumsfeld? Cheney? Hmmmm...
ReplyDeleteUntil 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.Amen!
ReplyDeleteYes, isn't it time President Obama convened a committee of independent counsel to impeach Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Rove of high crimes and misdemeanors...
I know. It won't happen. But it's nice to have a second to visit the best bloggers in cyberspace.
Jack, who are you? Great comment. I can't answer your question, though.
Stella, I'm just an average guy in the Minneapolis area who is progressive-minded and has seen through the conservative Republican load of smokescreens and lies for many years. I finally started blogging a year ago at the recommendation of several friends. I've had my fill of corporatist conservative oppression and criminality, and I will continue speaking out until this country once again follows a more egalitarian path, as it did in the 1960s and 1970s.
ReplyDelete