The Efficient Manager, Rumsfeld
2005-10-20
In answer to an acquaintance's comment:
"Rumsfeld was a superb efficient manager and reorganizer, like no one else in the position before him, of a Department of Defense that was so in need of reorganization."
Remember that Mussolini amazingly for the first time made Italy's trains really run on time; and Adolph Hitler made very efficient the mass deportation by train of thousands of people -- the same technique that Stalin had first used but was more sloppy in the carrying out. (Stalin's slave labor camps were profitable, but not as efficient as Hitler's use of the Zyclon B gas. Creative idea. Amazing efficiency.)
I am saying only that these unprincipled bureaucrats in power have no moral compass in their efficient souls -- do they have souls?
Rumsfeld's invention of "shock and awe" bombardment in an illegal, criminal massive invasion of a essentially defenseless population -- will go down as one of the major atrocities of modern history.
Rumsfeld has also maneuvered getting the power over awarding military contracts for the war in Iraq into his own hands -- (it used to be the State Department and other agencies that had jurisdiction.) It is now his Department of Defense that is quite literally raiding the American Treasury in the name of "providing services to the troops." And when 9 billion dollars go missing in Iraq, Secretary Rumsfeld, with the help of a few powerful and unscrupulous senators, has seen to it that there is little oversight and no accountability.
But the worst cut -- it's difficult to judge what is the worst -- is what Rumsfeld has turned our country into -- he and the Cheney-Gonzalez-Bush team in the administration -- a strange unrecognizable country where torture is now systematically practiced in military prison camps on a routine basis -- in the face of the hypocritical denials by him and by Bush -- "just a bunch of bad apples" was the way Rumsfeld put it. One soldier (82nd Airborne sergeant, reported in Newsweek) said, "In a way it was sport," referring to the breaking of a prisoner's leg with a baseball bat.
So this is Rumsfeld's world -- he has no concept that what he has put in place here is a violation of basic human rights and international law. No, that's wrong, he DOES have a concept of the enormity he has created, but cares nothing about it. He and his criminal cronies believe they have the power to give themselves impunity. (Just a few more Supreme Court justices will do it and they can be home free, they figure.)
Perhaps a long rant, but I just wanted to show some of the sources of anger over this bloody and evil war, and the administration's miscreant policies undertaken for venal reasons.