Moet Rumsfeld aftreden?

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Op dinsdag 11 mei 2004 17:30 schreef schatje het volgende:

En waar maak jij uit op dat de Amerikaanse overheid er nu wel het fijne ervan wilt weten, dat het hen ernst is??

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Op dinsdag 11 mei 2004 17:56 schreef RM-rf het volgende:

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ik geloof ook zeker niet in de oprechtheid van het Pentagon, maar die kunnen nu ook weinig doen (althans ze zouden zelf een grondig onderzoek kunnen starten, maar daar hebben ze weinig zin in, een parlementair onderzoek door het congress is ook enigszins ongeloofwaardig, nu met de lopende 911-commission).

punt is wel dat de aanvallers, de criticasters ook zelf moeten oppassen het niet tezeer persoonlijk te spelen, ik vrees dat ze dan over twee maanden makkelijk met lege handen komen te staan als Bush straks makkelijk Rumsfeld laat vallen en laat aftreden, dan kan hij zeggen: "kijk ik doe nu wat diegenen van me vragen", zonder verder iets te doen aan de bevelsstruktuur in Irak: het resultaat zal dan in de (amerikaanse) publieke opinie weinig afdoen aan de positie van de regering Bush.

Na de verkiezingen kan Rumsfeld dan toch makkelijk terugkeren in een adviseursfunctie, of hij duikt het bedrijfsleven in (Halliburton zal genoeg posities vrij hebben voor zo'n man)

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Op dinsdag 11 mei 2004 14:52 schreef thabit het volgende:
In wezen is het zo dat Bush en Rumsfeld hetzelfde doen als datgene waar Milosevic voor naar Den Haag is gehaald. Laten we dat nu ook maar met deze twee heren doen.

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Op woensdag 12 mei 2004 00:25 schreef Sidekick het volgende:

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Er waren al incindenten bekend 6 maanden geleden. Er zijn ook al enkele militairen geschorst destijds. Dat is op zich goed.

Alleen is het ernstig onderschat. Het waren iets meer dan een handvol. Een schorsinkje en het dossier is dicht. Nu eindelijk de wereld kan zien wat er allemaal gebeurd is, dan pas komen de excuses. Die onderschatting kan je zeker op het conto schrijven van Rumsfeld.

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Op dinsdag 11 mei 2004 20:09 schreef Sater het volgende:

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Alle dieren zijn gelijk; sommigen méér dan andere dieren. [Orwell]

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See Rummy spin. Spin, Rummy, spin
Descriptions of prisoner abuse in January weren't vivid enough to spur action, says Rumsfeld

To hear Don Rumsfeld tell it, even though the Bush administration had been told back in January about the abuse and torture going on at Abu Ghraib -- and that there were photos documenting it -- the idea that this might be a very bad thing didn't really hit home until recently because no one in the White House had actually laid eyes on the photos.
"It is the photographs that give one the vivid realization of what actually took place," Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. "Words don't do it."

Really?

So being notified by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that U.S. soldiers were torturing and humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners in the very place that had once been Saddam Hussein's favorite Little Shop of Horrors wasn't vivid enough to get the alarm bells ringing on Pennsylvania Avenue?
Neither, apparently, were the non-visual warnings about the mistreatment of prisoners delivered by the Red Cross, Colin Powell and Paul Bremer. Why not? Is the country being run by a bunch of preschoolers who can't process all those big words and will only sit still for a colorful picture book?

See Rummy spin. Spin, Rummy, spin.

Even the release of Gen. Taguba's damning 53-page report detailing the "systematic and illegal abuse of detainees" wasn't enough to pique Rumsfeld's concern. "The problem at that stage," he testified, "was one-dimensional. It wasn't three-dimensional. It wasn't video. It wasn't color."
I challenge anyone to read the Taguba report and say that the nightmares it depicts aren't chillingly three-dimensional. Even without pop-up illustrations.

According to Taguba, U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib were guilty of: "Positioning a naked detainee on a box... with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes and penis to simulate electric torture"; "Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees"; "Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair"; "Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick."
Close your eyes. Now picture what you just read. Still need to see photos before you hit the roof? I didn't think so.

What a colossal failure of imagination on the part of our leaders.

But even as ludicrous as the "No photos, no fury" justification is, let's accept the premise that detailed descriptions of chemical light buggery and electrodes attached to genitals aren't enough -- that Rummy and company have made such a habit of twisting and spinning and manipulating words, mere language has lost its power to move them.

Fine.

But since photographic proof is now the prerequisite for moral outrage, why didn't Rumsfeld demand to see the photos as soon as he was told about them back in January? If you were in his shoes, wouldn't you have ordered them to be on your desk within the hour? Of course you would have. But not the man Dick Cheney just called "the best secretary of defense the Unites States has ever had."

When asked by a reporter why he never got around to actually viewing the incendiary photos until the night before he was called on the Senate carpet, Rummy insisted the problem wasn't his lack of interest; it was the lack of a good photo developer. Call it the Fotomat defense.
"I think I did inquire about the pictures," he said, "and was told that we didn't have copies."
No copies? The biggest U.S. military scandal since My Lai and the secretary of defense can't get any extra prints sent his way?

Memo to Rummy: We now live in the era of digital photos and instant uploads. "The dog ate my negative" just ain't gonna fly.

Rumsfeld claims he was "blindsided" by the revelation of what he called the "radioactive" torture photos. But the timeline proves otherwise: He wasn't blindsided, merely blind to the devastating impact the pictures would have once they became public. That's where this failure of imagination turned into a profound failure of leadership.

The White House has said that the war on terror is as much a war of ideas as a war of weapons. If that were more than rhetoric, someone there would have seen the writing on the prison wall and gotten out in front of this crisis instead of allowing the Taguba report to languish unread by the top brass and the photos to be made public by the press and not the president. Indeed, they treated it not as a political land mine that could flatten America's moral high ground but as a PR problem that would disappear if they kept the photos from public view.

Always a master of understatement, Rummy termed the Abu Ghraib scandal "unhelpful in a fundamental way." The time has come for him and his cohorts to admit that the situation in Iraq has become untenable in a fundamental way. We can't put the torture genie back in the bottle. And we can no longer pretend that we have any chance of ushering democracy into Iraq so long as democracy has an American face.

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'Rumsfeld keurde verhoren Irak goed'
De Amerikaanse minister van Defensie Rumsfeld heeft in het diepste geheim ondervragingsmethoden goedgekeurd die geleid hebben tot de misstanden in de Iraakse Abu Ghraib-gevangenis.



New Yorker
Dat meldt het weekblad The New Yorker. Volgens The New Yorker gaf Rumsfeld het leger ruime bevoegdheden.'Grijp wie je moet grijpen, doe wat je wilt', zou er boven de instructies hebben gestaan.

Militaire politie
Op nieuwe foto's is militaire politie te zien die aanwijzingen geeft bij de mishandeling van Iraakse gevangenen. Daaruit zou blijken dat mishandelingen geen incident waren, maar beleid.

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The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

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America is Asking… About Secretary Rumsfeld's Role and Abu Ghraib

In light of revelations about the Abu Ghraib prison, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has come under intense scrutiny. While the secretary has taken full responsibility for the scandal, newspapers around the country believe that an apology is not enough – only his resignation will help restore our nation's credibility. Here is a sample of that commentary:

Milwaukee, Wis. – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
May 8, 2004

"…Officials must be held accountable for their failures just as they are entitled to praise for their successes.

"…Rumsfeld publicly took responsibility for these acts. But these rhetorical gestures, welcome and belated as they are, are insufficient simply because - at least at this point - they are only rhetorical.

"If words are to have any meaning, and if the damage from this scandal is to be contained and reversed, they need to be accompanied by deeds.

"What, exactly, does it take for a top official in this administration to lose his job? America's brave soldiers deserve better than this. They deserve the best."

Wilmington, Del. - The News Journal
No link available
May 9, 2004

"Rumsfeld and Myers didn't fare well at all before Senate panel.

"The answers of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who conceded he had failed to prepare both the president and the Congress of the gravity of the situation, put him on extremely thin ice. They will almost certainly accelerate calls for his resignation.

"The fact that neither he nor Secretary Rumsfeld hadn't actually viewed the original photographs until Wednesday night seems to be a glaring example of chiefs not being curious enough to prevent catastrophic revelations. The fact that it took a whistle-blower to force the graphic details into the public domain indicates that the military was protecting its own interests.

"When was he going to tell us?

"The nation's credibility is at stake. Punishing those directly involved in the abuse is critical, but it will also be essential that those who are responsible for military integrity and protecting national security also be brought to task, if they do not choose to do so themselves. It is a matter of national honor."

Chattanooga, Tenn. - Chattanooga Times Free Press
No link available
May 12, 2004

"Mr. Rumsfeld should resign, the sooner the better. The Bush administration cannot begin to contain the damage from the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal until Mr. Rumsfeld resigns.

"The Abu Ghraib scandal and chain-of-command failures that led to it, to be sure, are not the only reason Mr. Rumsfeld should resign. To hold the present scandal as the sole reason would be to miss seeing the forest for a single tree. His mismanagement of the war in Iraq should compel Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation…

"As a result, the United States has lost its moral authority to justify its invasion of Iraq and its treatment of Iraqi and Afghan prisoners. It is no defense to say that the way Afghans or Iraqis have treated their people, or their prisoners, has been worse. This nation justified both wars under the banner of liberating Iraqis and Afghans to enjoy higher standards -- our democratic standards of justice."

Dayton, Ohio - The Dayton Daily News
May 9, 2004

"Mr. Rumsfeld's departure would be the most dramatic, tangible, believable demonstration of real concern.

"Mr. Rumsfeld is a good and capable man, dedicated to his country. But he has to know in his heart that he failed in a crucial part of his job. His very dedication to his country should lead him to see that the best service he can perform now is to step down.

"It is not Monday morning quarterbacking to say that a secretary of defense needs to make sure that the American troops who run a prison camp in an occupied country know that they are required not to abuse prisoners. That is basic.

"So what happened at the prison was, besides a moral outrage, a momentous political blunder."

Phoenix, Ariz. - The Arizona Republic
May 8, 2004

"As Sen. Lindsey Graham correctly observed during the tense Senate grilling of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday, it would be a shame if the only people who pay a price for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are a few "privates and sergeants.

"His point, of course, is that the abuse scandal is so explosive, higher-level heads must roll if the United States is to recover any fraction of its credibility following this grotesque scandal.

"Given the sweeping, disheartening impact of the photos of abuse, it would indeed be a shame if one of those held to account should not be Rumsfeld himself.

"Other symbolic gestures like tearing down Abu Ghraib, as Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain proposed Friday, may prove useful as well. But the continuing fallout from these events is so profound, nothing short of the resignation of the nation's top officer directing the military will serve.

"The Bush administration needs to make a statement that it recognizes how serious this scandal is and that our Iraq policies demand a new perspective. The strongest statement it could make, then, is for Donald Rumsfeld to step down."

St. Louis, Mo.– St. Louis Post Dispatch
May 6, 2004

"It's the accumulation of all these miscalculations, misconceptions and missteps - and an arrogant inability to admit his mistakes - that require him to step down. If the Defense Department were a corporation, its CEO would be long gone.

"Whether or not Iraq is like Vietnam, Mr. Rumsfeld's failings are reminiscent of Robert McNamara's.

"Regarding Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld has been more interested in proving his theories of military transformation than in listening to pragmatic advice of experienced military experts.

"This isn't a plan; this is chaos."

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Henry Kissinger once said that Mr Rumsfeld was the most ruthless man he knew.

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Report: Rumsfeld policy allowed Abu Ghraib abuse
Pentagon dismisses Hersh article as 'outlandish, conspiratorial'

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The Abu Ghraib prison scandal was not the result of a few misguided soldiers, but of a decision last year by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to expand a clandestine operation against al Qaeda to the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, according to a report in The New Yorker.

Rumsfeld's goal was to bring the success of the secret terrorism program to Iraq in an effort to "generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency," the magazine reports.
The rules governing the secret operation were "Grab whom you must. Do what you want," according to a former intelligence official whom Seymour M. Hersh quotes anonymously in "The Gray Zone." The Pentagon sharply rejected the author's conclusions.

"Assertions apparently being made in the latest New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib and the abuse of Iraqi detainees are outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture," Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita said. Seven U.S. Army Reserve military police have been charged with abusing inmates at the prison near Baghdad. Three of the soldiers face arraignments Thursday for general courts-martial, used for felony-level offenses. A fourth soldier faces a special court-martial -- the military equivalent of a civilian misdemeanor court -- Wednesday.

Photos of that abuse -- some showing men in humiliating sexual positions -- enraged people around the globe after CBS's 60 Minutes II broadcast the snapshots. Hersh's article attempts to explain the history of the policy that led to the abuse. Hersh, who has won a Pulitzer and dozens of awards for investigative reporting, concludes that the "roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists," but in the August 2003 decision by Rumsfeld. His article has been posted online at the New Yorker's Web site and will be published in the May 24 issue of the magazine, on newsstands Monday.

The U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan confirmed Saturday that a second investigation has been initiated into allegations of detainee abuse at the hands of U.S. jailers. On Wednesday, the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan announced that the military was investigating the alleged mistreatment of an Afghan police colonel while in the custody of coalition forces.

The officer says he was stripped naked, photographed, kicked and subjected to sexual taunting while being held by coalition forces in August, according to an embassy statement. On Friday, the Pentagon announced that the U.S. military will not use certain prisoner interrogation procedures in Iraq and Afghanistan, including sleep and sensory deprivation, as a result of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Earlier in the week, top officials acknowledged that some of the techniques being reviewed could violate the Geneva Conventions, which were adopted internationally as a way to protect prisoners of war from abuse. It remains unclear whether the ban applies to accused Taliban and al Qaeda detainees held by the U.S. military in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Hersh's article notes that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller was summoned to Baghdad from Guantanamo to evaluate the prison system.

An internal Army report on the prisoner abuse charges written in February by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba quotes Miller as saying "detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation."
Recent Senate hearings, Hersh writes, indicate that Miller supported using the methods used in Guantanamo, including sleep deprivation, and exposure to extremes of cold and heat.

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Op zondag 16 mei 2004 12:40 schreef Sater het volgende:
Uit Parool 15 - 05 - '04: Washington: "De Verenigde Staten, Groot - Brittanië en Japan trekken hun troepen terug uit Irak, als de nieuwe Iraakse regering dat wil", aldus hun ministers van buitenlandse zaken.

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Op zondag 16 mei 2004 12:51 schreef Verbal het volgende:

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Wat mij betreft een moot point omdat ze waarschijnlijk een regering met een flinke vinger in de pap voor stroman Ahmed Chalabi zullen installeren.

V.

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Op zondag 16 mei 2004 15:27 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Ja, hij moet aftreden. Het is het enige damage control wat de US regering nog kan doen.

Elk doel van de invasie is tenslotte faliekant mislukt:

- De olie is duurder
- Geen massavernietigingswapens gevonden
- Irak bleek geen dreiging voor de VS
- Geen nauwe banden met terroristen.
- Democratie invoeren loopt ook niet lekker (bij echt vrije verkiezingen winnen de ayatollahs)
- Geen progressie geforceerd in Israel - Palestijnen conflict
- Geen domino effect waar te nemen
- De wereld is niet veiliger

en tot overmaat van ramp bleken er nog steeds mensen te worden opgepakt na de val van Saddam en zonder proces of iets te worden opgesloten en nog te worden gemarteld. Ook daar is weinig verbetering merkbaar.

Tja,

dan mag er wel een verantwoordelijke worden onmtslagen.

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Op zondag 16 mei 2004 14:08 schreef Keizer11 het volgende:
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact

Dit feit zal vandaag de talkshows gaan beheersen, maar ik ben bang dat ze toch allemaal blijven zitten.
Ik vind dat 'wij', als Nederland zijnde eigenlijk nog erger zijn, wij steunen ditb gajes door dik en dun.

Wir wusten es, aber haben nichts getan