• home • about • twitter • archives • subscribe • email •

This Donald Rumsfeld character sounds like one messed-up dude…

In the case of Abu Ghraib, there is again a trail of evidence showing it was Rumsfeld who personally decreed and monitored stress positions, individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. One US army officer, Janis Karpinski, has described finding in Abu Ghraib a piece of paper stuck on a pole outside a little office used by the interrogators. It was a memorandum signed by defence secretary Rumsfeld, authorising techniques such as use of dogs, stress positions, starvation. On the paper, in Rumsfeld’s handwriting, was the terse instruction, “Make sure this happens!!”

Alexander Cockburn thinks there might now be a good chance that Rumsfeld along with Bush, Cheney and the rest ‘will be the target of public war crime hearings and even criminal prosecutions, here in the United States’. We’ll see.

If I was Rumsfeld’s lawyer I’d push for a ‘diminished responsibility’ defence (or whatever the American equivalent is). They’d have a good chance with it, I’d say. It looks very much as if an extremely disturbed person ran the Pentagon during those years.