Retired Generals finally calling for Rumsfeld resignation

I'm re- bookmarking because I am a bit behind in my reading.

But I did discuss this particular question of the "General's rebellion" with "my dear" who is a General at the Pentagon....

I'd like to hear his opinion

I bet there are just thousands of retired generals. Four or five-thousand, at least

New Army documents reveal US knew of and approved torture before Abu Ghraib scandal

RAW STORY
Published: Tuesday May 2, 2006

BREAKING HARD -- FROM AN ACLU RELEASE TO RAW STORY.

#
New Army documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union today reveal that Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez ordered interrogators to "go to the outer limits" to get information from detainees. The documents also show that senior government officials were aware of abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.



"When our leaders allow and even encourage abuse at the 'outer limits', America suffers," said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director. "A nation that works to bring freedom and liberty to other parts of the world shouldn't stomach brutality and inhumanity within its ranks. This abuse of power was engineered and accepted at the highest levels of our government."

Among the documents released today by the ACLU is a May 19, 2004 Defense Intelligence Agency document implicating Sanchez in potentially abusive interrogation techniques. In the document, an officer in charge of a team of interrogators stated that there was a 35-page order spelling out the rules of engagement that interrogators were supposed to follow, and that they were encouraged to "go to the outer limits to get information from the detainees by people who wanted the information." When asked to whom the officer was referring, the officer answered "LTG Sanchez." The officer stated that the expectation coming from "Headquarters" was to break the detainees.

The ACLU also released an Information Paper entitled "Allegations of Detainee Abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan" dated April 2, 2004, two weeks before the world saw the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib prison. The paper outlined the status of 62 investigations of detainee abuse and detainee deaths. Cases include assaults, punching, kicking and beatings, mock executions, sexual assault of a female detainee, threatening to kill an Iraqi child to "send a message to other Iraqis," stripping detainees, beating them and shocking them with a blasting device, throwing rocks at handcuffed Iraqi children, choking detainees with knots of their scarves and interrogations at gunpoint.

The ACLU said the document makes clear that while President Bush and other officials assured the world that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was the work of "a few bad apples," the government knew that abuse was happening in numerous facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 62 cases being investigated at the time, at least 26 involved detainee deaths. Some of the cases had already gone through a court-martial proceeding. The abuses went beyond Abu Ghraib, and touched Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and other detention centers in Mosul, Samarra, Baghdad, Tikrit, as well as Orgun-E in Afghanistan.

"These documents are further proof that the abuse of detainees was widespread and systemic, and not aberrational," said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project. "We know that senior officials endorsed this abuse, but these officials have yet to be held accountable."
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/New_Army_documents_reveal_US_knew_0502.html

blueflame, it usually takes decades or, in some cases, years before the public gets to know the truth. I hope to live long enough to see the present administration exposed.
.
I know that these politicians are rotten to the core but it would be great to see it written down for all to read. Imagine the true followers of Bush and company who still admire that man.

BBB
It's been known for a long time that General Sanchez took his orders from Rumsfeld to torture. I hope Sanchez gets the same court martials his scape goat underlings got.

BBB

GENEVA (Reuters) - Torture and inhumane treatment are "widespread" in U.S.-run detention centers in
Afghanistan,
Iraq, Cuba and elsewhere despite Washington's denials, Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060503/ts_nm/rights_amnesty_dc


It bothers me that we're so sanctimonious about human rights...I guess the excuse is...that there's a war going on...

The 'General' Uproar: Military Protest and the Press
The 'General' Uproar: Military Protest and the Press
By Greg Mitchell
April 27, 2006

Robert Jay Lifton, the famed author and psychiatrist, coined the term "retirement syndrome" to describe top officials or military leaders who speak out against bad policies only after stepping down. In this interview, he discusses the current Iraq protest by former U.S. generals, why it's important, and how the media can make sense of it.

Since an impressive group of retired generals started calling for Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, and offering other critiques of our actions in Iraq, the press hasn't known quite what to do with them. On the one hand, this group of six or eight dissidents (or whatever the number is today) represents a tiny percentage of ex-officers. On the other hand, these were former top guys, many of whom played a role in the Iraq debacle.

Other conflicts are teasing the media: Did the generals show disloyalty by speaking out? Or, on the contrary, why did they take so long to do it? In any case: What does it all mean and what is the likely long-term impact?

When questions such as the final one surface, an expert I often turn to for advice is my former collaborator, the famed psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton.

While he is best known for classic studies on earth-shattering events (the Holocaust and Hiroshima), he also has a strong military connection, as a veteran who served in the Far East during the Korean war and as a counselor of Vietnam veterans. Several of his books have featured in-depth interviews with generals and admirals who have confronted military or nuclear policies with which they were once intimately involved.

Long ago, he coined the term "retirement syndrome" to describe officials who dare to speak out only after they have left government or retired from the military. His current book is "Crimes of War," a collection of views on the Iraq conflict that he co-edited with Richard Falk and Irene Grendzier.

I interviewed Lifton via telephone earlier this week, following the appearance of a New York Times article last weekend on the chances that active-duty officers might follow the generals in raising a protest today.

What's your take on why the generals finally spoke out?

The media is right to pay special attention to those who offer criticism who have been on the inside, and especially military people. I experienced that in working with Vietnam veterans who were especially powerful on the foot-soldier level.

It's indeed an expression of what I called the retirement syndrome or retirement wisdom. What it means is that these generals lived through certain military policies, adopted them, because that was their world, then had doubts, but suppressed those doubts. The syndrome depends on previously suppressed doubts emerging on retirement.

It happens because when they retire they are no longer responsible for those military policies and actions and can psychologically permit those doubts to surface. When that happens and they speak critically, they have enormous credibility with the press and public because they have lived these dubious policies. They frequently speak with extraordinary eloquence because they have knowledge from the inside about these events.

What's the significance going forward?

The generals really become important, for one thing, as psychological models for younger officers. From what we read in the Times last weekend about the reverberations of those generals critical of Rumsfeld, younger officers are talking to each other and sharing in those doubts.

What we sense is at stake is their sense of military honor. I can remember talking to antinuclear admirals and generals in the 1980s and they told me that they began to oppose nuclear weapons because they threatened all military honor. Why? There is a very important quality of military idealism that is necessary in a democracy. As I've heard them define it, it includes a commitment to defending their country--and doing so with a minimal loss of lives. With nuclear weapons, and certain other actions, it's almost impossible to do that.

I also interviewed one of the men who refused to fire at My Lai during the massacre there, who talked about military idealism as the source of his restraint.

The classical example of military idealism is Eisenhower -- the mother of all retirement syndromes. As many know, in 1961, after presiding over a very large nuclear and conventional buildup as president, he left office giving a strong and prescient warning about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He understood viscerally what those dangers were, as a military man and president who lived in the atmosphere of the "national security state."

The retirement syndrome can emerge gradually and with conflicts. We can see this with Robert McNamara, who struggled painfully over his part in the Vietnam war. With retirement he even raised questions about being a war criminal. He is still a tortured man.

The tragedy in these situations is you can have very good people who realize their humanity and wisdom only on retirement, or after leaving a project -- such as Robert Oppenheimer after directing the building of the first atomic bomb.

What difficulties did the current generals face?

They retain very important friendships with peers on active service. So they still have one foot in that community and one foot out of it in the political and media or cultural community. We can see from that report in the Times that there are profound struggles to speak out. And those who have doubts about Rumsfeld or the war refuse to speak out in deference to their military obligation.

This is all a struggle of the military to retain its integrity. The military was corrupted by the Vietnam war, which was created by civilians. Of course, the generals there went along and endorsed policies of "free fire zones" and "body counts" that created what I call atrocity-producing situations. The military lost its bearings in that enterprise, then began a strong movement to regain its integrity.

I think these generals now are speaking out not only against wrong policies and a bad leader but speaking out for the integrity of an institution that they love and are still a part of. The military can be squeezed between integrity in its function of warmaking and pressures exerted upon them by their civilian masters.

Younger officers, of course, are exposed to the protests, in the press.

These younger officers, still on active duty, are talking about nothing less than the future of the military. Press reports say that a large number of them will not stay in the military. They are reflecting a tendency already obvious to military leaders, with very few staying in and moving up and becoming quality officers.

I have had the experience of speaking at War Colleges. It was uncomfortable for all of us, but there were always younger military officers who were interested in a strong critique of military behavior because they needed that critique for a sense of their own integrity.

So we have generals speaking out for integrity and the younger officers having questioned already what is going on in the military, now legitimized by the generals. One can even see the beginnings of a crusade for reform.

It's retirement syndrome but also what I've called "survivor meaning." They have survived their experience in the Iraq war, many of them, and the meaning they give to that survival is a kind of wrongheaded policy responsible for too many American dead and Iraqi dead too. So it's also "survivor mission" and "survivor wisdom."

What happens next?

A lot of useful criticism, and leaks, will continue to come from the military and conservative forces and people who have known these policies from the inside. The media is right to focus on those who have struggled on the inside and have visceral knowledge of those policies -- and the harm they do.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Greg Mitchell ([email protected]) is editor of E&P. He has co-authored two books with Lifton: "Hiroshima in America" and a study of capital punishment in the U.S., "Who Owns Death?"

Links referenced within this article

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Cut and Run? You Bet.
Cut and Run? You Bet.
Foreign Policy May/June 2006 Issue
By Lt. Gen. William E. Odom (Ret.), senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and professor at Yale University. He was director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988.

Why America must get out of Iraq now.

Withdraw immediately or stay the present course? That is the key question about the war in Iraq today. American public opinion is now decidedly against the war. From liberal New England, where citizens pass town-hall resolutions calling for withdrawal, to the conservative South and West, where more than half of "red state" citizens oppose the war, Americans want out. That sentiment is understandable.

The prewar dream of a liberal Iraqi democracy friendly to the United States is no longer credible. No Iraqi leader with enough power and legitimacy to control the country will be pro-American. Still, U.S. President George W. Bush says the United States must stay the course. Why? Let's consider his administration's most popular arguments for not leaving Iraq.

If we leave, there will be a civil war. In reality, a civil war in Iraq began just weeks after U.S. forces toppled Saddam. Any close observer could see that then; today, only the blind deny it. Even President Bush, who is normally impervious to uncomfortable facts, recently admitted that Iraq has peered into the abyss of civil war. He ought to look a little closer. Iraqis are fighting Iraqis. Insurgents have killed far more Iraqis than Americans. That's civil war.

Withdrawal will encourage the terrorists. True, but that is the price we are doomed to pay. Our continued occupation of Iraq also encourages the killers-precisely because our invasion made Iraq safe for them. Our occupation also left the surviving Baathists with one choice: Surrender, or ally with al Qaeda. They chose the latter. Staying the course will not change this fact. Pulling out will most likely result in Sunni groups' turning against al Qaeda and its sympathizers, driving them out of Iraq entirely.

Before U.S. forces stand down, Iraqi security forces must stand up. The problem in Iraq is not military competency; it is political consolidation. Iraq has a large officer corps with plenty of combat experience from the Iran-Iraq war. Moktada al-Sadr's Shiite militia fights well today without U.S. advisors, as do Kurdish pesh merga units. The problem is loyalty. To whom can officers and troops afford to give their loyalty? The political camps in Iraq are still shifting. So every Iraqi soldier and officer today risks choosing the wrong side. As a result, most choose to retain as much latitude as possible to switch allegiances. All the U.S. military trainers in the world cannot remove that reality. But political consolidation will. It should by now be clear that political power can only be established via Iraqi guns and civil war, not through elections or U.S. colonialism by ventriloquism.

Setting a withdrawal deadline will damage the morale of U.S. troops. Hiding behind the argument of troop morale shows no willingness to accept the responsibilities of command. The truth is, most wars would stop early if soldiers had the choice of whether or not to continue. This is certainly true in Iraq, where a withdrawal is likely to raise morale among U.S. forces. A recent Zogby poll suggests that most U.S. troops would welcome an early withdrawal deadline. But the strategic question of how to extract the United States from the Iraq disaster is not a matter to be decided by soldiers. Carl von Clausewitz spoke of two kinds of courage: first, bravery in the face of mortal danger; second, the willingness to accept personal responsibility for command decisions. The former is expected of the troops. The latter must be demanded of high-level commanders, including the president.

Withdrawal would undermine U.S. credibility in the world. Were the United States a middling power, this case might hold some water. But for the world's only superpower, it's patently phony. A rapid reversal of our present course in Iraq would improve U.S. credibility around the world. The same argument was made against withdrawal from Vietnam. It was proved wrong then and it would be proved wrong today. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the world's opinion of the United States has plummeted, with the largest short-term drop in American history. The United States now garners as much international esteem as Russia. Withdrawing and admitting our mistake would reverse this trend. Very few countries have that kind of corrective capacity. I served as a military attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during Richard Nixon's Watergate crisis. When Nixon resigned, several Soviet officials who had previously expressed disdain for the United States told me they were astonished. One diplomat said, "Only your country is powerful enough to do this. It would destroy my country."

Two facts, however painful, must be recognized, or we will remain perilously confused in Iraq. First, invading Iraq was not in the interests of the United States. It was in the interests of Iran and al Qaeda. For Iran, it avenged a grudge against Saddam for his invasion of the country in 1980. For al Qaeda, it made it easier to kill Americans. Second, the war has paralyzed the United States in the world diplomatically and strategically. Although relations with Europe show signs of marginal improvement, the trans-Atlantic alliance still may not survive the war. Only with a rapid withdrawal from Iraq will Washington regain diplomatic and military mobility. Tied down like Gulliver in the sands of Mesopotamia, we simply cannot attract the diplomatic and military cooperation necessary to win the real battle against terror. Getting out of Iraq is the precondition for any improvement.

In fact, getting out now may be our only chance to set things right in Iraq. For starters, if we withdraw, European politicians would be more likely to cooperate with us in a strategy for stabilizing the greater Middle East. Following a withdrawal, all the countries bordering Iraq would likely respond favorably to an offer to help stabilize the situation. The most important of these would be Iran. It dislikes al Qaeda as much as we do. It wants regional stability as much as we do. It wants to produce more oil and gas and sell it. If its leaders really want nuclear weapons, we cannot stop them. But we can engage them.

None of these prospects is possible unless we stop moving deeper into the "big sandy" of Iraq. America must withdraw now.

Rumsfeld Calls Powell a Liar! by Steve Young

05.03.2006
Rumsfeld Calls Powell a Liar! Tells Hannity Former Sec'y of Defense Story Never Happened The Way Powell Says It Did

(Lords of Loud, 5/3) So the left demeans the lack of tough interrogation by Fox New pundits when the White House makes their friendly-confines visits to Fox News and the right wing radio Lords of Loud.

Well, my liberal friends, it's time to rearrange the deck chairs on the hate-Hannity Titanic.

Yesterday, the Secretary of Defense, who was celebrating the three year anniversary of the "mission" that is in the midst of being "accomplished" and took the risque step of facing devastating interrogation by Sean Hannity on his radio show.


At one time (yesterday and everyday before that), a sentence that includes Hannity and "devastating interrogation" of the right would have been facetious. Not anymore.

It happened in the midst of asking (not actually asking as much as making a statement that Rumsfeld could agree with) about how gutsy it was that he and Condileeza Rice made a visit to Iraq to observe the fabulosa progress of our incursion into Iraq, especially the selection of a new prime minister that Hannity assured us, no one in the mainstream media had talked about. This was much the business as usual of comfort-zone questioning. Then came the blockbuster and Hannity instantly became a card-carrying member of the demeaning this president and his team while troops are in harm's way liberal mainstream media.

Hannity asked Rummy about Colin Powell saying that in the big old White House pre-Iraq invasion, are we planning for enough troops meeting.

Flash back to Powell's interview last week with Britain's ITV television: "I made the case to Gen. Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld before the president that I was not sure we had enough troops," Powell said. "The case was made, it was listened to, it was considered. ... A judgment was made by those responsible that the troop strength was adequate."
He comes da blockbuster. Rumsfeld told Hannity that no one in that meeting disagreed with the "troop strength was adequate" judgement. i.e. Colin must be lying.

Way to go, Sean! If that doesn't prove that you no lap dog for the White House, nothing will.

I waited for Sean to go for the jugular.

"Well, Mr. Secretary. Are you calling the former Secretary of State under President Bush, during the invasion, a liar?! Or is it you that's doing the lying? Don't wait for the translation, Secretary Rumsfeld. I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over."

Sean didn't, but y'gotta give him a break. Becoming a real reporter where truth is more important than partisanship is kind of new. It takes some time to hone the craft. Still, it's a start.

Wonder why the liberal mainstream media didn't pick up the Rumsfeld rip of Powell? Is it any wonder why we have to listen to Sean? It's so we can hear what we won't hear anywhere else. I always guffawed at that one. Not anymore. Not anymore.

Can't wait to listen to Sean today to hear him drag the truth out of Michelle Malkin.

Rumsfeld Called Out On Lies About WMD

The problem with the folks at "thinkprogress.com" is they don't think.

Except for one commenter who said,



Same old, same old. Heard it all before from these loonies or similar. "9/11 was an inside job, blah, blah, blah." Pathetic.

link

So, that's Ray McGovern's resume.

Your resume and background knowledge, SierraSong, would compare?

What is pathetic is that Rumsfeld lied. To trick a country into going to war by lying is not a good strategy.

The source of both the question and the article don't matter, the point is that Rumsfeld was asked about his statement regarding WMD, he denied making the statement and the CIA agent who asked the question had a copy of Rumsfeld statement right there to prove him a liar.

As for the above, quote from the CIA agent, it all sounds about right to me.

Are you equally impressed with the resume of the former head of CIA Counterespionage, Aldridge Ames? Look where it got him

Oh yes! Let's play "smear the messenger"! That should be fun....


SierraSong, why does it matter so much to you who asked the question? Whom would you rather prefer having asked the question? Do you think it was an illegitimate question? Do you think Rumsfeld's answer was satisfying?

He's gotta think on that one.....

SierraSong wrote:

As to what might impress us, we'll note that you've managed to pull off the very difficult feat of providing a response even more logically irrelevant than your earlier post.

The good news is, of course, that the lies aren't working any longer. Tonite, all the news shows did a fine job of covering McGovern's questions to Rumsfeld and then cross-checking Rumsfeld's replies with what McGovern claimed Rumsfeld had said previously. McGovern had it right, word for word. Facts, of course, have a liberal bias.

Turning, turning, turning...

link