Name

Score

rumsFLD99

-666

Rumsfeld and Saddam Shake on It

Washington, D.C., 25 February 2003

The National Security Archive at George Washington University today published on the Web a series of declassified U.S. documents detailing the U.S. embrace of Saddam Hussein in the early 1980's, including the renewal of diplomatic relations that had been suspended since 1967. The documents show that during this period of renewed U.S. support for Saddam, he had invaded his neighbor (Iran), had long-range nuclear aspirations that would "probably" include "an eventual nuclear weapon capability," harbored known terrorists in Baghdad, abused the human rights of his citizens, and possessed and used chemical weapons on Iranians and his own people. The U.S. response was to renew ties, to provide intelligence and aid to ensure Iraq would not be defeated by Iran, and to send a high-level presidential envoy named Donald Rumsfeld to shake hands with Saddam (20 December 1983).

rumsFLD99

-66

The two faces of Rumsfeld

2000: Director of a company which wins $200m contract to sell nuclear reactors to North Korea

2002: Declares North Korea a terrorist state, part of the axis of evil and a target for regime change

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea - a country he now regards as part of the "axis of evil" and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration.

AbuGr666

-66.6

Abu Ghraib

Prison abuses, otherwise known as torture. Is Rumsfeld responsible? Yup. Should he resign? Yup. Is this an even lower score than we thought possible when we created this website 3 years ago? Yup.

Has he taken responsibility for anything? Nope. Does he want to continue Abu Ghraibing through the Middle East, fomenting backlash so he can continue to Invade? Yup.

Nucular666

-66

Pre-emptive strike in US nuclear plan

September 12, 2005- THE Pentagon is preparing guidelines on the use of nuclear weapons that foresee possible pre-emptive strikes against terrorist groups or nations planning attacks on the US.

The draft document, the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations, updates procedures for using nuclear weapons that were last changed in 1995. The plan is undergoing final review by the Pentagon's staff and by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and it could be finished within several weeks, according to a Pentagon official.

Much of the document restates longstanding procedures for launching a nuclear strike, including declarations that such a decision requires explicit presidential approval.

A Pentagon official confirmed that a copy of the document posted on the national security website, globalsecurity.org, was authentic.

The Bush Administration said in 2002 that a pre-emption strategy was necessary to deal with emerging threats from terrorist groups seeking unconventional weapons and from the proliferation of nuclear capability in numerous countries.

Although the unclassified document reasserts the longstanding American position that it will not make definitive statements about when nuclear weapons will be used, it describes several scenarios for using them, including circumstances under which pre-emptive use might be necessary.

The scenarios for a possible attack include one in which an enemy is using "or intending to use" unconventional weapons against the US, its allies or civilian populations. Another scenario for a possible pre-emptive strike is in the event of an "imminent attack from adversary biological weapons that only effects from nuclear weapons can safely destroy".

The draft document also envisions the use of atomic weapons for "attacks on adversary installations".

A copy of the draft document dated March 15 was posted on a Pentagon website for several months but was removed over the northern summer, according to the Pentagon official, who said he could not explain why it was taken down.

The draft says that to deter a potential adversary from using unconventional weapons, the US must make it "believe the United States has both the ability and will to pre-empt or retaliate promptly with responses that are credible and effective". It also says that American policy makers have "repeatedly rejected calls for adoption of a 'no first use' policy for nuclear weapons since this policy could undermine deterrence".

Californian Democrat representative Ellen Tauscher, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said members "certainly don't want the Administration to move forward with a (nuclear) pre-emption policy" without hearings.

A spokesman for Republican senator John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said yesterday that the panel had not yet received a copy of the draft.

AMerkaF_Yeah

-6

Clint Black, as Salon.com notes, is the voice behind the jingoistic "I Raq and Roll," a song that connects Saddam Hussein to Sept. 11, tucked in between couplets of jingoistic chest-beating.

Intended to boost support for America's troops in Iraq (and transparently enough, the Bush administration's unpopular policies), the planned festivities should instead boost America's anger against a blatant attempt to manipulate our opinions through our emotions. In order to reinforce the false, but aggravatingly popular belief that Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War are somehow linked to that morning in September, the Bush administration is exploiting both the tragedy of thousands of innocent deaths here at home, and our country's capacity to empathize with our fallen comrades abroad.

Because Bush and company have repeatedly failed to justify our massive intervention in the Middle East, and refused to acknowledge our current problems in that region and lack of preparation going in, we must be subjected to this vicious propaganda.

Some relatives of Sept. 11 victims have already sounded off on this travesty, relaying their outrage on behalf of the memories of their departed loved ones. Iraq War veterans have expressed their anger to the press upon hearing of the Pentagon's ill-conceived Sept. 11 birthday party.

For the good of the country, anything but Rumsfeld and the Pentagon's Orwell-in-a-cowboy-hat Sept. 11 tailgate party.

(Excerpt of an Opinion piece by Joshua Huck in the Daily Texan 8/11/05)

PRPGNDA_PSYOPS

-6.6

Torie Clarke, who "formerly" worked as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs wrote a book called "Lipstick on a Pig". She is doing a book tour and going on NPR, the Daily Show, etc. Clarke embedded reporters with military units in Iraq. She is embedded with Rumsfeld too, and I bet she is being paid by the Defense Department to do public relations. The War on Information is happening here in the US, and this Clarke is out to counter Richard Clarke and those who question the war and the ridiculous power that Rumsfeld and the militarists now have.

Psy Ops- Defense Department Mind Control (you are getting sleepy, very sleepy, trust Rumsfeld, he is your friend- what? oops, I fell for it again, darn it!)

At the beginning of December, word broke that the U.S. military had been paying Iraqi newspapers to publish pro-American stories. U.S. command, arguing that it was necessary to counter propaganda spread by insurgents, confirmed that "articles have been accepted and published as a function of buying advertising and opinion/editorial space, as is customary in Iraq."

At the recent meeting of the Council on Foreign RelationsDefense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld discussed his plan to control the minds and information of the world.

The US government is creating “Proactive news.” In other words, propaganda such as the bogus stories that were printed in Iraqi newspapers by Pentagon contractors.

(We) “sought non-traditional means to provide accurate information to the Iraqi people in the face of an aggressive campaign of disinformation….This has been deemed inappropriate—for examples the allegations of ‘buying news’” .

Rumsfeld boasts of the vast changes in “communications planning” taking place at the Pentagon. A “public affairs” strategy is at the heart of the new paradigm, replete with “rapid response” teams.

“US Central Command has launched an online communications effort that includes electronic news updates and a links campaign that has resulted in several hundred blogs receiving and publishing CENTCOM content.”

The military plans to develop the “institutional capability” to respond to critical news coverage within the same news cycle and to develop a comprehensive scheme for infiltrating the internet. The Pentagon’s strategy for taking over the internet and controlling the free flow of information has already been chronicled in a recently declassified report, “The Information Operations Roadmap”; is a window into the minds of those who see free speech as dangerous as an “enemy weapons-system”.

The Pentagon is aiming for “full spectrum dominance” of the Internet. Their objective is to manipulate public perceptions, quash competing points of view, and perpetuate a narrative of American generosity and good-will. Rumsfeld’s comments are intended to awaken his constituents to the massive information war that is being waged to transform the Internet.

The Associated Press reported recently that the US government conducted a massive simulated attack on the Internet called “Cyber-Storm”. The wargame was designed, among other things, to “respond to misinformation campaigns and activist calls by internet bloggers, online diarists whose ‘Web logs” include political rantings and musings about current events”.

Before Bush took office, “political rantings and musings about current events” were protected under the 1st amendment. No more.

The War Department is planning to insert itself into every area of the Internet from blogs to chat rooms, from leftist web sites to editorial commentary. Their rapid response team will be on hair-trigger alert to dispute any tidbit of information that challenges the official storyline. We can expect to encounter, as the BBC notes, “psychological operations (that) try to manipulate the thoughts and the beliefs of the enemy (as well as) computer network specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.” [Editor's note: Bad Rummy! Low score! Go to your room! No more internet for you if you can't play with others. Sorry, back to the story.]

The enemy, of course, is anyone who refuses to accept their servile role in the new world order or who disrupts the smooth-operation of the Bush police-state.The resolve to foreclose on free speech has never been greater.

Rumsfeld's strategy is to police the Internet, uproot the troublemakers and activists who provide the truth, and “catapult the propaganda” (Bush) from every bullhorn and web site across the virtual-universe.

In February 2006, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said that Rumsfeld had been wrong, and that the military was actually still in the Baghdad newspaper business. "I don't have knowledge as to whether it's been stopped," Rumsfeld confessed at a press briefing yesterday. "I do have knowledge it was put under review. I was correctly informed, and I just misstated the facts." The stories were placed through the Lincoln Group, a Washington-based defense contractor; on Friday, Mark Mazzetti of the Los Angeles Times reported that "one person familiar with Lincoln Group's operations...said the program in Iraq was still active as of a week ago."

The Lincoln Group, with offices in Washington and in Baghdad's Green Zone, was once known as Iraqex. It is the publisher of the non-satirical Iraq Business Journal. The company had been granted a contract worth up to $100,000,000 for "media approach planning" efforts related to the Iraq war. When "the press" first "got it," MSNBC described the Lincoln Group's role as "to help produce favorable articles, translate the articles into Arabic, get them placed in Iraqi newspapers and not reveal the Pentagon's role." The Chicago Tribune chimed in with the revelation that the Lincoln Group's Iraq team "included three Republican operatives who helped run the Bush campaign in Illinois and had no apparent experience in Iraq."

In November, the Los Angeles Times reported that dozens of news articles, written by the U.S. military, had been placed in Iraqi publications throughout 2005. "The Lincoln Group's Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors," according to the Times, "sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets."

"Military officials familiar with the effort in Iraq said much of it was being directed by the 'Information Operations Task Force' in Baghdad, part of the multinational corps headquarters commanded by Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines.

"...As part of a psychological operations campaign that has intensified over the last year, the task force also had purchased an Iraqi newspaper and taken control of a radio station, and was using them to channel pro-American messages to the Iraqi public. Neither is identified as a military mouthpiece."

Some of the Iraqi people will probably be fooled by this official campaign of deception, just as some of the American people have been fooled by the equivalent campaign of deception sponsored by the Bush regime in our own media. But this kind of thing can only work for so long. Americans are slowly waking up to the reality that we are engaged in an unjust and unwinnable war, but all we know is what we read in the paper. Iraqis have the evidence all around them. It must make the propaganda sound that much sillier.

DEJAVU_Ford

-6

Back in the day when I was young, I'm not a kid anymore, but sometimes I sit and wish I was a kid again.

Just Like the Good Ol' Days- Back in the Summer of '76

Documents from the Ford administration reflect a remarkably similar dispute between the White House and Congress a generation before President Bush acknowledged that he authorized wiretaps without warrants on some Americans in terrorism investigations.

George H.W. Bush, then director of the CIA, wanted to ensure "no unnecessary diminution of collection of important foreign intelligence" occurred under the proposal to require judges to approve terror wiretaps, according to a March 1976 memorandum he wrote to the Justice Department.

In another document, Jack Marsh, a White House adviser, outlined options for Ford over the wiretap legislation. Marsh alerted Ford to objections by then-CIA Director Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and White House national security adviser Brent Scowcroft.

Some experts weren't surprised the cast of characters in this national debate remained largely unchanged over 30 years.

When Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, Congress decisively resolved this debate. (Rumsfeld and Cheney haven't yet come to terms with this.)

At the 1975 meeting participants worried about "will we get hit with violating the First Amendment to the Constitution?"
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