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Donald Rumsfeld is finally dead, at 88 years of age, which is a bit on the nose.
Here are some quotes about him from books I've read:
Noam Chomsky - 'Global Discontents', interviewed by David Barsamian
In the foreword to the second edition of Voices from the Plain of Jars, historian Al McCoy writes that approximately twenty thousand civilians have been killed or maimed by unexploded cluster bombs since the bombing ended—and those numbers continue to rise. That’s correct. I’ve written about it, too. These are tiny little bomblets, as people call them. Children pick them up, thinking they’re toys, and are blown up. They also explode and maim farmers who hit them with a hoe. They’re all over the place. A British demining team has been working to remove the bomblets, but the area is saturated with them. It’s a massive undertaking. And very limited resources have been devoted to the effort by the United States, which is responsible for the situation, of course.
McCoy suggests that Laos was a test case for future U.S. wars, particularly the extensive use of airpower. Fred also talked about that. We have other test cases, as well, which are pretty remarkable. Researchers at the Seton Hall law school, who published a detailed study of the Guantánamo torture system, point out something quite interesting. There was a part of the Cheney-Rumsfeld torture system in Guantánamo that the military called “the battle lab.” It was essentially a laboratory of torture. The lab was supervised by medics, and its purpose was to determine the most effective techniques of torture. Let’s figure out how much torture—psychological, physical, medical—can be applied.
In fact, if you take a look at the Senate report on the torture system, it asks one question: Did torture work? And it claims torture didn’t work, so therefore it was bad. The commentary has been pretty much the same: torture didn’t work, so we shouldn’t do it. When they say torture didn’t work, it means it didn’t stop terrorist acts. But was that the purpose of it? Probably not. The initial purpose of the Cheney-Rumsfeld torture system seems to have been to try to extract some kind of claim—true or false, it doesn’t matter—that would justify the war in Iraq. They were trying to find some kind of evidence that there were connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. When they didn’t find it, they called for more torture. Finally, because people under torture will say anything, they claimed they got some evidence. Apparently, that was the primary goal. And it was achieved.
Jon Stewart - 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth'
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] We begin tonight with the story dominating the world’s headlines. The situation in Iraq, which we had been calling “Mess O’Potamia,” but as of this week has officially grown into a “Giant Mess O’Potamia.” The stories and photographs of Iraqi prisoners being beaten with broom handles, threatened with pistols, and doused in acid poured from broken chemical lights are very difficult for all of us to wrap our heads around. Clearly, this is a time for our leadership, starting with our defense secretary, to speak clearly and honestly to the American people about these egregious instances of torture.
Donald Rumsfeld: [in press conference clip] “I think that—I’m not a lawyer. My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse. Which I believe, technically, is different from torture. And therefore I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.”
Jon Stewart: You know, I’m also not a lawyer. So I don’t know technically if you’re human. But as a fake newsperson, I can tell you, what we’ve been reading about in the papers, the pictures we’ve been seeing—it’s fucking torture. However you choose to characterize what took place—torture, abuse, or, to use deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s term, “freedom tickling”—the real tragedy is the damage it has done to our standing in the Middle East. So just how is this playing with Muhammad Q. Public?
Iraqi Citizen: [in video clip] “I’m going to answer this question with another question: How would the Americans feel if this happened to them by Iraqis in America?”
Jon Stewart: We would bomb you. It’s kind of our first response. Clearly the best first step toward soothing Arab anger would be for the president to appear on Arab TV. Which he did yesterday, giving two separate interviews, one of them with Alhurra, the U.S. government–sponsored satellite network.
President George W. Bush: [in video clip] “What took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know. The America I know is a compassionate country. That believes in freedom. The America I know cares about every individual.”
Jon Stewart: In fact, I would really love for you to meet that America someday. The one that you’ve seen, the bombing one—yeah, he’s kind of a prick. But the other America—very sweet!
Laurence Ralph - 'The Torture Letters'
The Senate Armed Services Committee has now said that Rumsfeld also bears major responsibility for the abuses committed by US troops at another black site, Abu Ghraib, the camp where the US Army imprisoned Iraqis from 2003 to 2006, during the same time Slahi was imprisoned. That camp became infamous for photographs that US military police took while torturing Iraqi prisoners. Rumsfeld’s “enhanced” methods resulted in a host of human rights violations, including physical and sexual abuse, rape, and sodomy. In Slahi’s case, these techniques consisted of being beaten, being subjected to deafening noise, being subjected to extreme temperatures, being deprived of food and liquids, having his sleep disrupted, having his medical care withheld, being confined in a coffin-sized box, and being repeatedly slapped. There is more. But I’ll get to those details later. For now, I should mention that US Supreme Court decisions, including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), eventually ruled that the Geneva Conventions do, in fact, apply. But by the time that decision was handed down, it was too late to prevent Slahi’s torture, which had occurred three years before the decision.
Howard Zinn - 'Artists in Times of War'
Remember Timothy McVeigh, when he was asked about the Oklahoma City bombing? Timothy McVeigh said of the children who died: “Collateral damage.” He’d learned this during the first Gulf War, when this phrase was used by the United States to describe Iraqi civilians dying under U.S. bombs. And so this is Rumsfeld: collateral damage, an accident, unintentional. Or: “They’re deliberately putting civilians in military targets.”
That always gets to me. A village is destroyed. You mean they populated this village with ordinary people so that then it would become a propaganda weapon against the United States—they created a Hollywood set? No, there’s something wrong with that. History is important here. When you’re dealing with an event like this, what’s happening in Afghanistan or Iraq, if you don’t have any history about American wars or American foreign policy, it’s as if you were born yesterday. Then whatever people tell you, you have no way of checking up on it.
Andrew Feinstein - 'The Shadow World'
When Rumsfeld accepted George W. Bush’s nomination as Defense Secretary he was so weighed down with holdings in defence-related companies that he tied government lawyers and their ethics rules in knots trying to hang on to everything he could. He sat on the board of the aircraft manufacturer Gulfstream and was paid $190,000 a year as a board member of ABB, the Swiss engineering giant that was revealed to have sold nuclear technology to North Korea. He sold off directly owned stock in Lockheed Martin, Boeing and other defence companies and put up to $50m of stocks in a blind trust. But he was still part or complete owner of private investment firms that were devoted to defence and biotech stocks. He continued to hold these interests six months into the job. The frequency with which he had to excuse himself from meetings for this reason in his first year in office was described as embarrassing.
Both men could easily have divested themselves of their holdings but then they would have missed the boom years they created. What would they have made of FDR’s injunction against war profiteers: I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the US as a result of this disaster [the Second World War].’ In the Bush administration the war profiteers weren’t just clamouring to get access to government, they were the government.
Rumsfeld – of whom Nixon famously said: ‘He’s a ruthless little bastard, you can be sure of that’ [...]
Oliver North, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, ‘Scooter’ Libby, George W. Bush and the myriad corporate grandees of the defence contractors are revered by the resurgent right wing in the country. Lockheed Martin, with the gargantuan F-35 project among many multibillion-dollar contracts, remains the pre-eminent beneficiary of the MICC. In February 2011, years after it had bribed its way to the original cancelled deal, Boeing was duly awarded the contract to build a new fleet of tanker refuellers, which will be worth between $35bn and $100bn. Achieved with massive support from Congress and the rest of the MICC, this is damning proof of the lawlessness of the American arms trade. A few months previously, in October 2010, President Obama announced that the US would sell Saudi Arabia weapons worth $60bn over 15–20 years.
It is officially the largest single arms deal ever signed by the US with a foreign country...
Scott Horton - 'Fool's Errand'
At the start of the Afghan war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was so singularly focused on using the September 11th attacks as a pretense for launching a war in Iraq that there was one positive side to his strategy: after allowing bin Laden to escape, he wanted to get out. Just as wiser heads had advised the Soviet war cabinet not to invade Afghanistan in 1979, he had argued that trying to nation-build in a war-torn tribal society would be impossible and they should pull the military out almost immediately. It turns out that Rumsfeld was right about at least this one “known known,” not that he stood by it for long. Tens of thousands of soldiers would arrive soon enough — just not soon enough to catch bin Laden or his partner Ayman al Zawahiri. They would instead be used for just the kind of nation-building project the defense secretary had been trying to avoid, shoring up the new government’s allies and attacking its enemies in a state of permanent war.
[...]
Retired U.S. Army General Wesley Clark, the former commander of NATO forces in Europe, later told the story of going to the Pentagon shortly after the September 11th attacks and seeing a memo that had been drawn up by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s staff. The memo included a list of seven countries to be the subject of U.S. regime-change policies in the new War on Terrorism: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. None of the governments of these countries supported al Qaeda or threatened the United States.
Matt Kennard - 'Irregular Army'
With the tragic events of the next day and the ensuing two-front ground war in the Middle East, Rumsfeld was gifted the perfect opportunity to enact his program with minimal opposition. The results were clear eight years into the War on Terror when the DOD (Department of Defense) had 95,461 private contractors working for them in Iraq compared to 95,900 US military personnel.
[...]
It wasn’t just that the military was ignoring the use of alcohol and drugs—in many cases it was promoting it. The streamlined, flexible, and understaffed US military that was Rumsfeld’s dream meant that extra energy and service time had to be squeezed out of existing troops. To do this some were plied with cocktails of narcotics and stimulants. “The capability to resist the mental and physiological effects of sleep deprivation will fundamentally change current military concepts of ‘operational tempo’ and contemporary orders of battle for the military services,” states a document from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. “In short, the capability to operate effectively, without sleep, is no less than a twenty-first-century revolution in military affairs that results in operational dominance across the whole range of potential U.S. military employments.” To achieve this operational dominance, amphetamines of all kinds were provided to the US air force—in street parlance, speed.
Jon Stewart - 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth'
President Bush had urged the nation to fight terrorism by… going shopping. Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, tried to explain away the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction—which had been the supposed justification for the war—with an abstruse pronouncement about “known unknowns.” A series of jingoistic, made-for-TV slogans—“Operation Iraqi Freedom,” “Operation Enduring Freedom,” “Operation Anaconda”—were trotted out to market an increasingly dubious military adventure. Refracting the lies and absurdities through comedy, The Daily Show’s tone mixed more indignation into the wisecracks.
Joby Warrick - 'Black Flags'
“Stan’s going to tell you what we are doing to get Zarqawi,” Rumsfeld told Bush. McChrystal, now a major general, ran through a slide presentation as Bush asked occasional questions, according to the officer’s written account of the meeting. When he finished, Bush studied the general for a long moment. “Are you going to get him?” the president asked. McChrystal summoned up all the conviction he could muster. “We will, Mr. President,” he said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.” Later in the meeting, Bush turned to McChrystal again. “Do you want to kill him or capture him?” Bush asked. “I’d like to capture him, Mr. President.” “Why don’t we just kill ’im?” Bush asked, to nervous laughter around the room. “Well, Mr. President, to be honest, I want to talk to him. He knows things we want to know.” Bush appeared satisfied. He smiled. “Good point,” he said.
Andrew Cockburn - 'Kill Chain'
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, irked by the prominent role played by CIA paramilitary teams in the initial overthrow of the Taliban, was eager to enhance the U.S. military role in covert operations. “Have you killed anyone yet?” he would query General Charles Holland, chief of Special Operations Command, whenever they met. In December 2001, a Joint Special Operations Task Force, code-named Task Force 11 for the occasion, with personnel drawn from elite units of all three services, arrived in Afghanistan with the specific mission of killing or capturing al-Qaeda and Taliban “HVTs” (high-value targets).
Brad Evans, Natasha Lennard - 'Violence: Humans in Dark Times'
On the other hand I miss movies. I think there is a certain form to it that is beautiful, elegiac. I think if you can tell a story in two hours, it’s much better to do so than in eight to ten hours like a TV series. There is a purity to movies that will disappear. I hope we never lose them, but it doesn’t look good right now. In fact, so many movies from 1930s through the 1980s and the 1990s are lost to our culture because they’re not available from the cloud. Only people with libraries have evidence that there’s a tremendous culture, a tremendous amount of work done in those fifty years. Netflix, for example, would rather make an original series (and make more money) than to store old films. This is as bad, in its way, as the sack of Baghdad under Donald Rumsfeld. “Shit happens,” he said. That’s the American way. So, in the meantime, it seems these kinds of pro-American, pro-System movies like Zero Dark Thirty, Black Hawk Down, and American Sniper will get made. It’s the guys who attack the system who have a hard time getting the resources to make their films; it seems they’ll be marginalized and even erased if the empire wins out.
Naomi Klein - 'No is not Enough'
In 2002, George W. Bush threw a ninetieth-birthday party at the White House for the man who was the intellectual architect of that war on the public sphere, the radical free-market economist Milton Friedman. At the celebration, then US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld declared, “Milton is the embodiment of the truth that ideas have consequences.” He was right—and Donald Trump is a direct consequence of those ideas.
Noam Chomsky - 'The Precipice'
The Carter administration strongly supported the Shah until the last moment. High US officials - [Henry] Kissinger, [Dick] Cheney, [Donald] Rumsfeld - called on US universities (mainly my own, MIT, over strong student protest but faculty acquiescence) to aid the Shah's nuclear programs, even after he made clear that he was seeking nuclear weapons.
When the popular uprising overthrew the Shah, the Carter administration was apparently split on whether to endorse the advice of de facto Israeli Ambassador Uri Lubrani, who counseled that "Tehran can be taken over by a very relatively small force, determined, ruthless, cruel. I mean the men who would lead that force will have to be emotionally geared to the possibility that they'd have to kill ten thousand people." It didn't work, and soon Ayatollah Khomeini took over on an enormous wave of popular enthusiasm, establishing the brutal clerical autocracy that still reigns, crushing popular protests. Shortly after, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with strong US backing, unaffected by his resort to chemical weapons that caused huge numbers of Iranian casualties. His monstrous chemical warfare attacks against Iraqi Kurds were denied by Reagan, who sought to blame Iran and blocked congressional condemnation.
Finally, the US pretty much took over, sending naval forces to ensure Saddam's control of the Gulf. After the US-guided missile cruiser Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in a clearly marked commercial corridor, killing 290 passengers and returning to port to great acclaim and awards for exceptional service, Khomeini capitulated, recognizing that Iran could not fight the US. President Bush then invited Iraqi nuclear scientists to Washington for advanced training in nuclear weapons production, a very serious threat against Iran.
Noam Chomsky - 'ReTargeting Iran'
It’s ironic that when Iran was a loyal client state under the shah in the 1970s, the shah and other high Iranian officials made it very clear that they were working to develop nuclear weapons. At that time, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney were pressuring American universities, primarily Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to bring Iranian nuclear engineers to the U.S. for training, though, of course, they knew they were developing nuclear weapons.