From Bad to Worst

September 15, 2004

Just as Michael Moore sought to confront the president of General Motors in his documentary film “Roger and Me,” so I have sought to meet Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. My roots, like Rumsfeld’s, are in Chicago. I also have moved to Taos. But our lives manifest entirely different values. He is the warrior personified. I am a civil rights lawyer who has represented movements opposed to his policies, while fighting for the disenfranchised. I’ve tried visiting Rummy frequently, but he’s never been around, so I thought I’d write him a series of letters. This is really the final one.

Dear Rummy,
You have fallen from favor since the time of Vice President Dick Cheney’s visit last summer. The headline on AOL recently was: “Is Rumsfeld Hurting Bush?” A similar cover story in Newsweek was entitled “Should Rumsfeld Go?” (The answer therein being “yes.”) On Aug. 25, 2004, the New York Times headlined “A Trail of Major Failures Leads to Rumsfeld’s Office.”

The Dogs?
The New York Times piece referred to the findings of the Schlesinger report, which held you responsible for not anticipating the insurgency in Iraq and for not having clear directives for interrogating prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons.

Your president, Mr. George W. Bush, wrote in February 2002 that fighters in Afghanistan were not entitled as a matter of law to the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions. In December 2002, your memo to interrogators at Guantánamo authorized “the use of dogs to induce stress and the removal of clothing as counter-resistance techniques.” Following the conclusion of an Army General dispatched from Guantánamo in September 2003 that detentions at Abu Ghraib prison “do not yet set conditions for successful interrogations,” Lt. General Richardo Sanchez, the senior U.S. military commander in Iraq, sent a secret cable to Central Command outlining more aggressive interrogation methods he planned to use immediately. These included “exploit Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations.”

We have all seen the results in the photos from Abu Ghraib of naked prisoners being demeaned and others being attacked by dogs. The Schlesinger report concluded that abusing detainees with dogs started almost immediately after dog teams were brought to Abu Ghraib from Afghanistan in November 2003. Yet, in April 2004, months after the abuses had been extensively written up by a general in Iraq, you claimed to be surprised by their disclosure, claiming lamely that the memo had not yet made its way up the chain of command to you. Even after the Schlesinger report, you told the New York Times in an interview that there had been no finding of abuse during interrogations, in direct contradiction of the Schlesinger and other reports, a misstatement from which you quickly had to back off when confronted with the reports.

Your Buddy Chalabi
At the Republican National Convention we heard many laudatory references to the attack and war on Iraq, which your bosses attempt to sell as a war against terror or to liberate Iraq. But where were you to get the credit? You, the embodiment of the Iraq war itself, were nowhere to be seen or heard from. I think it’s because you and your neocon buddies in the Pentagon are the real war: the one that was conjured up and advocated before 9/11, the one that we were told was justified by the WMDs, the exact location of which you swore you knew. The war that you and your surrogate and proxy, Ahmad Chalabi, assured us would be welcomed by the Iraqis with open arms, and would not need a large post-invasion force to create stability.

You are the guy who did not plan beyond getting U.S. tanks into Baghdad and who grossly underestimated the resistance of the Iraqi people after the war. You are the guy who decided Chalabi intelligence was superior to the CIA’s, and created a defense agency in the Pentagon to advocate his
misinformation. You provided uniforms and arms for Chalabi and flew him to Iraq. You expected him to seize power—as a puppet of you and your neocon friends, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle (more about him below)—and immediately recognize and support Israel.

And what has Chalabi done for you? Played you for a chump. First, he told Iran the U.S. had cracked its security code for encrypted messages, thereby undoing thousands of hours of work by intelligence agencies. Second, he hit Iraq running, quickly setting up an operation to counterfeit and sell at a profit outlawed money from Saddam’s reign. And, finally, word came out recently about a further scandal that could land you in Taos, if not before a grand jury, even sooner than we expected.

Who’s Being Investigated?
In your zealous efforts to rebuild the Middle East as friendly to U.S. and Israeli dominance, you have recruited and employed in the Pentagon a number of ideologues with close ties to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Perle, the original head of the Defense Policy Board—an advisory committee to your Defense Department—was a speechwriter for former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is to the right of Sharon. Douglas Feith, another neocon with impeccable hawk credentials, is Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. It has been widely reported and confirmed by the FBI that there is an investigation into whether Feith’s employee, Lawrence Franklin, passed a draft presidential directive on Iran to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a lobbying group with close ties to Sharon’s Likud Party.

On Sept. 3, the Washington Post reported that the two-year-old FBI investigation went further, examining whether Pentagon officials with a particular interest in assisting Israel and Chalabi passed on to both Chalabi and AIPAC highly classified information, not only on Iran, but also on U.S. intentions in Iraq and the Arab-Israeli peace process. If this investigation results in arrests and indictments, your dismissal, and perhaps a subpoena or even indictment will follow. You are the hands-on guy who knows what’s happening on his watch. One day soon, you will be a civilian again.

Coming Clean?
I protested with all my heart and soul against Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam war, but my anger subsided the day he announced “I will not seek nor will I accept another term as President.” Upon your departure as defense chief my anger and energy to expose and discredit you will diminish as well, but you should be held accountable for your war crimes. I agree with former intelligence analyst Ray McGovern that you should not be accepted back in Taos until you publicly acknowledge and accept your civil and criminal responsibility for misleading the American people into waging aggressive war against Iraq. You and your cohorts, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Perle, schemed to accomplish the war long before Sept. 11, 2001.

It took former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara 30 years to partially come clean about his mistakes in “The Fog of War.” You and I don’t have that long.