UNBELIEVABLE--AND SCARY--RUMSFELDIAN MOMENTS--A few "Rumsfeldian moments" below, but the best indication that captain Ahab has lost touch with reality is the last interview...Click here
Exerpts from "State of Denial":
"I told Rumsfeld that I understood the number of attacks was going up.
“That’s probably true,” he said. “It is also probably true that our data’s better, and we’re categorizing more things as attacks. A random round can be an attack and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you’ve got a whole fruit bowl of different things—a banana and an apple and an orange.”
I was speechless. Even with the loosest and most careless use of language and analogy, I did not understand how the secretary of defense would compare insurgent attacks to a “fruit bowl,” a metaphor that stripped them of all urgency and emotion. The official categories in the classified reports that Rumsfeld regularly received were the lethal IEDs, standoff attacks with mortars, and close-engagements such as ambushes—as far from bananas, apples and oranges as possible..."
Another "PURE RUMSFELDIAN MOMENT"
...Here was one of the central questions in any war. Was the other side “gaining strength and increasing capacity?” General Casey the Joint Chiefs’ intelligence staff, and the CIA had all categorically said the insurgency was gaining. Certainly Rumsfeld knew that. I had also quoted from the assessment on a list of 29 sample questions I had submitted in advance, and I know he had spent at least one hour the day before preparing for the interview.
“When was this?” Rumsfeld asked.
Six weeks ago, I answered. The question on the table was whether he agreed or not that the insurgency in the Iraq War was gaining. I was ready for a pure Rumsfeldian moment, and I was not disappointed.
“Gosh, I don’t know,” the secretary of defense replied. “I don’t want to comment on it. I read so many of those intelligence reports”—I had never said it was an intelligence report—“and they are all over the lot. In a given day you can see one from one agency, and one from another agency, and then I’ll ask Casey or Abizaid what they think about it, or Pete Pace, ‘Is that your view?’ And try and triangulate and see what people think. But it changes from month to month. I’m not going to go back and say I agree or don’t agree with something like that.”
He was right that there might be some changes month to month, but, as he knew, the overall assessment and trend was visibly, measurably and dramatically worse...
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Sounds like Rumy might need to be waterboarded to extract a confession. Another symptom of acute integrity deficite disorder and the politics of terror: the willingness to TORTURE. Click on the links below to see what "our" representatives in Washington just legalized in your name...
David Corn and the Killing Fields of Cambodia/America
ABC piece on CIA Torture:
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Powell's Kool-Aid moment with Jesus George:
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