A Few Facts Rumsfeld Omitted

from His Resignation Letter

By Hank Edson

Two days ago, the Washington Post reported that a copy of Donald Rumsfeld’s November 7, 2006 resignation letter came to light as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Associated Press. Rumsfeld’s letter was four-paragraphs long and contained 148 words. Like the recent resignation statement of Karl Rove, Rumsfeld’s letter spoke of the honor he felt in being allowed to serve his country and of the historical significance of this presidency.

Like Rove, Rumsfeld omitted to reflect on the long catalogue of ways he had defiled the honor that had been bestowed upon him. Like Rove, Rumsfeld avoided acknowledging that the historical significance of the Bush presidency was shameful to the extreme.

Neither men said anything about their responsibility for the most disastrous administration of our government in the history of the United States. And yet both men were resigning because their disgraceful performance of their different offices was no longer tolerable to the nation. Well, here are a few facts Rumsfeld should have mentioned in his letter.

An Old Hand at War Profiteering

Rumsfeld did not mention that in the 1980s he worked for Bechtel Corporation in negotiating an Iraq pipeline project. Nor did he mention that during that same time period he also served as the Reagan administration’s special envoy to the Middle East. [i] As special envoy, Rumsfeld actually met with Saddam Hussein twice in his capacity as the Reagan administration’s point man in its efforts to restore diplomatic relations with Iraq. It was during one of those visits on December 20, 1983 that the Rumsfeld was famously photographed shaking hands with Saddam Hussein.

During Saddam Hussein’s trial following his capture, a substantial part of the prosecution related to a massacre that occurred in the town of Dujail a mere seventeen months before the photo of Rumsfeld and Hussein shaking hands was taken. At trial, Hussein was charged with ordering the torture and murder of 143 men and adolescent boys following an assassination attempt in July of 1982. [ii] The New York Times’ coverage of Hussein’s trial reported, “The first witness, Ahmad Hassan Muhammad, 38, riveted the courtroom with the scenes of torture he witnessed after his arrest in 1982, including a meat grinder with human hair and blood under it.” [iii]

With Rumsfeld’s help, however, by March of 1984, the United States was sending Saddam agricultural-commodity credits worth $840 million. According to a July 17, 1984 New York Times article, between 1982 and 1984, the U.S. sent Saddam approximately $2 billion in similar commodity credits. By the end of 1984, Washington had restored full diplomatic relations with Iraq and had sold Saddam 45 “civilian-use” Bell 214ST helicopters. [iv]

When Saddam used those helicopters to kill Kurdish civilians with poison gas, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed comprehensive sanctions that prohibited the sale to Iraq of most U.S. technology. Officials within the Reagan Administration intervened, however, and the bill was killed. Ben Bagdikian writes in The New Media Monopoly, “In the 1980s and afterward, the United States underwrote 24 American corporations so they could sell to Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction which he used against Iran…Hussein used U.S.-supplied poison gas while the United States looked the other way.” [v] U.S. support for Hussein would continue for six more years during much of his most murderous oppression. Rumsfeld never mentioned his key role in this disgraceful history of murderous war profiteering under the guise of U.S. Foreign Policy.

To his credit, twenty years later, Rumsfeld did not initially support the plan being pushed from the first days of the Bush administration to invade Iraq. It was not that he was against war profiteering, however; it was just that he wanted to go about it in a different way. In a 2002 article published in Foreign Affairs, titled, “Transforming the Military,” Rumsfeld advocated “a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists.” In the long run, the industrial arms complex stood to profit more from a privatized military than from a supposedly short term war in Iraq.

An Expert at Fear and War Mongering

On September 11th, 2001, however, Rumsfeld’s position on Iraq quickly swung into alignment with the rest of the neo-conservatives inside the administration. On that same day, Rumsfeld instructed an aid to gather “best info fast; judge whether good enough hit S.H. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related, and not.” [vi] A few days later, Rumsfeld “raised the possibility that weapons of mass destruction could be used against the United States” as “an energizer for the American people.” [vii]

In just nine days, the White House had transformed national grief over the loss of three thousand innocent lives on September 11th into a proposal to stage a false threat of non-existent nuclear weapons in another country that just happened to be laden with huge oil reserves. The specter of WMD’s, Rumsfeld suggested, would “energize” the people into committing hundreds of thousands of American lives to an unprovoked invasion on that country.

A year after Donald Rumsfeld “raised the possibility that weapons of mass destruction could be used against the United States” as “an energizer for the American people,” [viii] the administration cited links to al-Qaeda and Iraq’s purported possession of WMD’s, including, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, as the basis for invading Iraq. On September 11, 2002, Rumsfeld warned on Face the Nation: “imagine a September 11th with weapons of mass destruction,” and predicting it would kill “tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children.” On September 27, 2002, Rumsfeld would claim “that American intelligence had ‘bulletproof evidence of links between al-Qaeda and the government of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.” [ix] Rumsfeld also stated, “We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical- and biological-agent training.” [x]

At the time Rumsfeld made this claim, however, the “evidence” of chemical- and biological weapons had recently been rejected by the Defense Intelligence Agency in its February 2002 report, DITSUM No. 044-02, which concluded that the confession of an al-Qaeda prisoner claiming “that Iraq trained al-Qaeda to use biological and chemical weapons” was unreliable because “it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was intentionally misleading debriefers” by claiming that Iraq had provided support for al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons. [xi] In breaking the story, Douglas Jehl of The New York Times, reported that the DIA was critical of Mr. Libi’s evidence because it “lacked specific details about the Iraqis involved, the illicit weapons used and the location where the training was to have taken place.” [xii] The DIA analysis also stated that “Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements….Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.” [xiii]

In fact, as Jehl would report a month later, the prisoner only asserted these claims after he was secretly transferred to Egypt by the United States in early 2002. [xiv] After the U.S. had already invaded Iraq, the prisoner later retracted his assertions regarding Iraqi participation in the training of al Qaeda members, explaining that he had made up this information “to escape harsh treatment”—a vivid demonstration of why extraordinary rendition and torture are simply unjustifiable. [xv]

Thus, (1) after conducting a massive sweep of “things related, and not” that might possibly connect Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and (2) after suggesting in White House meetings that WMDs might “energize” public support for invasion of Iraq, (3) Rumsfeld went on to tell the American people on nationwide television that indeed the White House had “bulletproof” evidence of Iraqi support for al Qaeda’s terrorist activities, and (4) he did so without disclosing that this evidence had been obtained from foreign intelligence agencies under coercion, or (5) that it lacked specific detail, or (6) that it had been deemed unreliable by the Defense Intelligence agency. Consistent with his tendency to withhold such pertinent information, Rumsfeld also neglected to cite any of these facts in his resignation letter.

A Direct Instigator of Torture

Rumsfeld’s responsibility for American use of torture is another subject not addressed in Rumsfeld’s letter of resignation. Journalist Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that anonymous military and intelligence sources indicated that Rumsfeld approved the use of interrogation tactics implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. [xvi] Specifically, a secret Pentagon interrogation unit dedicated to collecting intelligence about al-Qaeda was assigned responsibility for interrogating prisoners in Iraq. Hersh wrote, “According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, [the program] ‘encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.’” [xvii]

The highest ranking officer in the military punished for the Abu Ghraib scandal was Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the first female to ever command soldiers in a war zone. Karpinski later explained to the national press how her soldiers had been “borrowed” by Two Star Major General Geoffrey Miller who told her he had been transferred to Abu-Ghraib to Gitmo-ize it under the direction of Rumsfeld’s undersecretary Douglas Feith. Karpinski warned him that her M.P.s were not trained for conducting interrogation, but Miller insisted that she give him Cell Block 1A for “enhanced” interrogation. [xviii]

Meanwhile, General Sanchez, who was responsible for the entire Iraqi command ordered General Karpinski to Camp Victory near the Iranian border. Karpinski said, “He wanted me away from the situation. He wanted me away from the possibility of finding out about what was going on in interrogations. So he incrementally moved me farther away, took Abu Ghraib away from me, then moved me out of Baghdad completely.”

After reports of abuse leaked out of Abu Ghraib, Karpinski learned for the first time what Miller was doing with her soldiers. Upon return to the prison, one of the things she found was a handwritten instruction from Donald Rumsfeld himself. Karpinski explained to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!:

I did not receive that email or phone call or a message [about the reports of abuse] from General Sanchez himself, who would ultimately attempt to hold me fully responsible for this, but from the C.I.D. Commander. And I was alarmed at just that short email. I was not in Baghdad at the time. I was at another location very close to the Iranian border, so we made arrangements to leave at the crack of dawn to drive down to Abu Ghraib to see what we could find out about this ongoing investigation and went through the battalion over to Cell Block 1A. The people who would normally be working on any shift were not working. The sergeant that I spoke to said that their records had been seized by the investigators, and they started a new log to account for prisoners, make sure that their meals were on time, those kinds of things, and he pointed out a memo that was posted on a column just outside of their small administrative office. And the memorandum was signed by the Secretary of Defense…by Donald Rumsfeld. And said—it discussed interrogation techniques that were authorized. It was one page. It talked about stress positions, noise and light discipline, the use of music, disrupting sleep patterns, those kinds of techniques. But there was a handwritten note out to the side. And this was a copy. It was a photocopy of the original, I would imagine. But it was unusual that an interrogation memorandum would be posted inside of a detention cell block, because interrogations were not conducted in the cell block. [xix]

The handwritten note, in the same script as Rumsfeld’s signature, said: “Make sure this happens.” Essentially, Rumsfeld gave an order to Karpinski’s untrained M.P.s to apply “enhanced techniques” that were, at best, only to be applied by the trained “Intelligence Brigade” under a separate command not Karpinski’s. The order, however, was never routed through General Karpinski.

Rumsfeld, Feith, and Miller “Gitmo-ized” Abu-Ghraib and when they got caught, they blamed the first and only female war zone commander, who they had kept completely out of the loop. Karpinski confirmed that the M.P.s understood the memorandum to come from Rumsfeld, himself. Karpinski further explained that Rumsfeld had also ordered her to hold some prisoners without giving them a prisoner number or putting them in the database, which is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and that on several occasions prisoners had fallen into this category of “ghost detainees.” According to the ACLU, there is documentary evidence that at least 21 detainees were murdered while in detention as a result of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, but of course we can’t know how many undocumented prisoners may have been murdered as well. [xx]

Although Karpinski took responsibility for violating the Geneva Conventions in allowing ghost prisoners to be kept undocumented in the prison database, she says she also protested to the prison legal advisor, Colonel Warren, when one such prisoner, prisoner “Triple X,” was ordered by Rumsfeld to be held in secrecy: “It’s a violation. You have to put people on the database. And how much longer are we going to be held responsible for him? You take control of him. If you want to violate a Geneva Convention, that’s up to you, but I don’t want to keep him in one of our camps this way.” Karpinski asserts that responsibility for the torturing that occurred at Abu Ghraib ought “to start at the very top, and the original memorandum directing interrogation…” which Bush signed and that the M.P.s who were court marshaled were “unfairly and unjustly held accountable for all of this, as if they designed these techniques, as if Linddie England deployed with a dog collar and a dog leash.” [xxi]

When the torture scandal broke in the Press, Rumsfeld appointed a four person commission to investigate. All four members of the commission were members of the Defense Policy Board which reported to Rumsfeld and two of them were past Secretaries of Defense. Thus, there was little likelihood such a commission would find any wrongdoing on the part of Rumsfeld himself. They didn’t. Predictably, the commission exonerated the three senior most senior officers responsible for prisoner interrogation: Rumsfeld, Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, and Major General George Fay. Instead, the commission concluded that ‘freelancing’ guards on the night watch were responsible for the torture, not any effort orchestrated from higher up to collect more information from prisoners. [xxii]

The Author of Privatized Death and Mayhem

Many have criticized Rumsfeld for the absence of planning that went into the post-invasion occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. For example, Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran analyst in the CIA has been sharply critical of the lack of planning. Pillar was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia region during the run up to the invasion of Iraq. In this position, Pillar says he would have been involved in any significant U.S. intelligence assessments of conditions likely to prevail in Iraq following an invasion, but that “there were never any requests by the administration. We, on our own initiative, offered exactly such assessment,” which made numerous ominous predictions that were ignored. [xxiii] Although there was a horrific lack of planning for achieving peace and the safety of Iraqi citizens, this does not mean that Rumsfeld’s defense department did no planning. The “Rumsfeld Doctrine,” which gave the U.S. military an entrepreneurial makeover, did succeed in making, not just warfare, but war reconstruction, a goldmine for the industrial-arms complex.

Frida Berrigan writes in an article in Foreign Policy in Focus that “War, instability, and high oil prices have created a perfect storm of profit for the world’s weapons manufacturers. This year, military analysts predict the biggest arms bonanza since 1993…which is saying something because in the aftermath of the first Gulf War the global industry reaped the benefits of a $42 billion arms race.” [xxiv] In 2006 alone, the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency processed $21 billion in arms sales offers. Meanwhile, by the end of 2006 there was nearly one private contractor in Iraq for every active-duty American soldier. [xxv] In that year alone, military contracts with private contractors equaled approximately $400 billion, nearly double the annual amount before Bush entered office. [xxvi] Donald Rumsfeld’s old company, Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco was given a $2.8 billion contract to rebuild water, electricity and sewage systems. Author Antonia Juhasz explains that “[a]fter the Gulf War, the Iraqis rebuilt these systems in three months’ time. It’s been three years, and…those services are still below pre-war levels.” [xxvii] Rumsfeld neglected to take credit for this booming business in his resignation letter as well.

Esteemed Member of the White House Cabal

Perhaps Rumsfeld’s real resignation letter should have been written by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. In 2005, Wilkerson described Cheney and Rumsfeld as the core of an “Oval Office Cabal.” Wilkerson, an eyewitness to the planning of the war, said in a speech that Rumsfeld and Cheney had hijacking the formal decision making process required by the 1947 National Security Act. This act created the National Security Council, in Wilkerson’s words, “to make sure the nation’s vital national security decisions were thoroughly vetted.” [xxviii]

Speaking of the abuse of power by Rumsfeld and Cheney, Wilkerson said, “…the case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, and perturbations in the national-security (policy-making) process.” [xxix] Wilkerson explained:

You’ve got this collegiality there between the secretary of defense and the vice president. And then you’ve got a president who is not versed in international relations—and not too much interested in them either. And so it’s not too difficult to make decisions in this, what I call the Oval Office Cabal, and decisions often that are the opposite of what you thought were made in the formal process. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with those decisions and carried them out, it was presented in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out. If you’re not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran. [xxx]

This should be the last word on Donald Rumsfeld. He should have written, “Dear Mr. President: Because I have dishonored my nation by recklessly courting disaster of global proportions and disregarded my fundamental responsibility to the democratic political process, I must resign my office. I suggest you do the same for the same reasons.” Earlier this month, the organization Just Foreign Policy reported that the number of people killed in Iraq as a result of the U.S. invasion had surpassed 1 million individuals. Donald Rumsfeld omitted to hold himself accountable for these deaths as well.

Copyright © Hank Edson 2007         Subscribe to MP³'s RSS Feed!

[i] http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/rumsfeld/rumsfeld_body.html.

[ii] Norman Solomon, “Rumsfeld’s Handshake Deal with Saddam,” CommonDreams.org, December 8, 2005, http://www.commondreasm.org/cgi-bin/pring.cgi?file=/views05/1208-34.htm.

[iii] Robert Worth, “Hussein Is Fiery Again in Unruly Court Session,” The New York Times, December 5, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/international/middleeast/05cnd-saddam.html?ex=1291438800&en=d5594f2058cd0b22&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[iv] Norman Solomon, “Rumsfeld’s Handshake Deal with Saddam,” CommonDreams.org, December 8, 2005, http://www.commondreasm.org/cgi-bin/pring.cgi?file=/views05/1208-34.htm.

[v] Ibid., citing Ben Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly, (Boston: Beacon Press 2004).

[vi] James Bamford, A Pretext for War, (New York: Doubleday 204), p. 275; Walter C. Uhler, “’Fixed’ Intelligence from Feith’s ‘Gestapo Office,’ the CIA and the Bush Adminsitration’s Impeachable Lies about Iraq’s Prewar Links to al Qaeda,” http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/Gestapo.html.

[vii] Bob Woodward, Bush at War, (New York: Simon & Schuster 2003) p. 106.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Eric Schmitt, “Rumsfeld Says U.S. Has Bulletproof Evidence of Iraq’s Links to Al Qaeda,” The New York Times, September 23, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/28/international/middleeast/28QAED.html

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Douglas Jehl, “Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts,” The New York Times, November 6, 2005, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1106-01.htm.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] Douglas Jehl, “Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited Is Tied to Coercion Claim,” The New York Times, December 9, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/politics/09intel.html.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] Ibid.

[xvi] Seymour M. Hersh, “The Gray Zone,” The New Yorker, May 24, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/24/040524fa_fact.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Amy Goodman, “Col. Janis Karpinski, the Former Head of Abu Ghraib, Admits She Broke the Geneva Conventions But Says the Blame ‘Goes All the Way to the Top,” Democracy Now!, October 26, 2005, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/10-/26/1423248.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] Ibid.

[xxi] Ibid.

[xxii] Chris Shumway, “Rumsfeld’s Torture Panel Clears Rumsfeld,” The New Standard, August 26, 2004, http://www.antiwar.com/orig/shumway.php?articleid=3450.

[xxiii] Elizabeth Sullivan, “Ex-Analyst Tells a Tale of Twisted Iraq Intelligence,” The Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 6, 2007, http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/06/1012/print/.

[xxiv] Frida Berrigan, “The United States Rides Weapons Bonanza Wave,” Foreign Policy in Focus, November 18, 2006, http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1118.22.htm.

[xxv] Jeremy Scahill, “Bush’s Shadow Army,” The Nation, March 16, 2007, http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0316-28.htm.

[xxvi] Jesse Jackson, “War Privatization is Public Scandal,” The Chicago sun-Times, February 6, 2007, http://www.commondreams.org/views/07/0206-28.htm.

[xxvii] Amy Goodman, “Antonia Juhasz on the Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time,” Democracy Now!, April 25, 2006, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/25/1343214.

[xxviii] Lawrence B. Wilkerson, “The White House cabal,” The Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2005, http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news5/latimes7v’.htm.

[xxix] Jim Lobe, “Powell Aide Blasts Rice, Cheney-Rumsfeld ‘Cabal’,” published by Inter Press Service on October 20, 2005.

[xxx] Ibid.