Rumsfeld is toast
From Seeing the Forest, comes this excellent analysis
“Apparently Rumsfeld has been chosen as the fall guy for Iraq, as this piece by Martin Sieff, “UPI Senior News Analyst” shows:
“Even worse for Rumsfeld and his coterie of neo-conservative true believers who have run the Pentagon for the past 3½ years, three major institutions in the Washington power structure have decided that after almost a full presidential term of being treated with contempt and abuse by them, it’s payback time.
Those three institutions are: The United States Army, the Central Intelligence Agency and the old, relatively moderate but highly experienced Republican leadership in the United States Senate.”
You can add a fourth basically-conservative institution to the anti-Rumsfeld list: the UPI, which is owned by Rev. Moon. As I understand, UPI is mostly a simple news-dissemination organization, and doesn’t normally do opinion like this. (Sieff is defnitely right-wing — he was originally from the Washington Times and has written for the National Review.)
It looks to me as if the neocons will be thrown overboard to try to save the Bush Presidency. It seems unlikely to me that anyone will abandon Bush himself, though Kerry has really done nothing to make it impossible for Sens. Hagel and Lugar (or other rational conservatives) to support him.”
It’s beginning to feel a lot like Watergate, where Nixon was forced to sacrifice knights, rooks and even the queen, in a losing attempt to protect the king.
From Slate
If today’s investigative shockers—Seymour Hersh’s latest article in The New Yorker and a three-part piece in Newsweek—are true, it’s hard to avoid concluding that responsibility for the Abu Ghraib atrocities goes straight to the top, both in the Pentagon and the White House, and that varying degrees of blame can be ascribed to officials up and down the chain of command.
Both stories are worth reading in full. The gist is that last year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put in place a secret operation that, in Hersh’s words, “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.”