“A ruthless little bastard,” was President Richard Nixon’s verdict on Donald Rumsfeld as recorded by the Watergate tapes – and everything in his career, supremely successful until the Iraq war, confirmed that Nixon had read him correctly.

Rumsfeld relished such tributes to his toughness, but he was above all else a skilful bureaucratic warrior in Washington and never the warlord he pretended to be. As defence secretary between 2001 and 2006, he gloried in his role as America’s military chief avenging 9/11, but his arrogance and inability to adjust to the realities of the Afghan and Iraq wars produced frustration or failure on the battlefield.

Manoeuvre though Rumsfeld did to avoid responsibility for the Iraq war, he became the living symbol of America’s plunge into the quagmire. Typically, he responded to this by banning his staff at the Pentagon from using the word “quagmire” along with “resistance” and “insurgents”.

Rumsfeld started his career as a Republican Congressman from Illinois and moved on to serve four Republican presidents. He headed the Office for Economic Opportunity under Nixon, became defence secretary and ambassador to Nato in the Ford administration. As President Ronald Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, he travelled to Baghdad to shake hands with Saddam Hussein and assure him of US support in the eight-year war that the Iraqi dictator had launched against Iran. His camaraderie with Saddam reflected American strategy at the time, but it also showed Rumsfeld’s liking for people with power and his dismissiveness towards those without it.

One question that many people ask with regards to the events of September 11 was why the U.S. Air Force went missing in action for over 90 minutes as four lumbering commercial jets traveled around American airspace at will. Now with the death of Donald Rumsfeld, 88, the world may never know.

Prior to the attacks of 9/11, a mosquito couldn’t penetrate U.S. airspace over Washington, D.C. without being intercepted or swatted down. So what went wrong that fateful Tuesday morning? For an answer to that question it is necessary to look at the actions and non-actions of then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, second in military command only behind President George W. Bush, who was out of the loop at the time, visiting a class of elementary school students down in Florida.

Rumsfeld, as Pentagon chief, was in charge of the National Military Command Center [NMCC], which was responsible for coordinating with the Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] in the event of a hijacking. But when Rumsfeld’s presence was needed more than ever before in his career, he went missing in action. So what exactly was Donald Rumsfeld doing on the morning of September 11?

According to the 9/11 Commission Report, around 9 a.m., just after American Airlines Flight 11 had slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, “Secretary Rumsfeld was having breakfast at the Pentagon with a group of members of Congress. He then returned to his office for his daily intelligence briefing. The Secretary was informed of the second strike in New York [9:03 am] during the briefing; he resumed the briefing while awaiting more information.”

Various individuals pleaded with the Defense Secretary to cancel his morning appointments after news that a second plane had slammed into the World Trade Center. Yet Rumsfeld rejected their desperate appeals. The first person to meet with Rumsfeld after it was clear America was under attack was CIA agent, Denny Watson, who was responsible for giving Defense Secretary his intelligence briefing each morning. At 9:03 a.m., Watson was in the anteroom of Rumsfeld’s office where she witnessed the second plane hit the South Tower live on television. Moments later, she is called into the office and, clearly aware there are more pressing matters at hand, doesn’t bother to remove the President’s Daily Brief [PDB] from her briefcase. “Sir, you just need to cancel this,” she tells Rumsfeld upon entering the office, as cited in David Priess’s book, ‘The President’s Book of Secrets’. “You’ve got more important things to do.” Rumsfeld, however, insists on going ahead with the meeting. “No, no, we’re going to do this,” he tells her.

An incredulous Watson has a seat as the Secretary of Defense flips through the PDB.

Watson was not the only person who tried to impress upon Rumsfeld the urgency of the moment. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Victoria Clarke, wrote in her 2006 book Lipstick on a Pig that she went directly to Rumsfeld’s office after the second plane hit. “A couple of us had gone into… Secretary Rumsfeld’s office, to alert him to that, tell him that the crisis management process was starting up. He wanted to make a few phone calls.” Rumsfeld reportedly told Clarke to report to the Executive Support Center (ESC) and wait for him. Clarke would wait a long time. Yet that was not the only emergency meeting Rumsfeld failed to attend on the morning of September 11.

The acting-Deputy Director of the National Military Command Center, Captain Charles Leidig, who was substituting for Brigadier General Montague Winfield on this very morning, called an emergency ‘significant event’ conference (SIEC). According to the Commission Report, the meeting “began at 9:29, with a brief recap: two aircraft had struck the World Trade Center…” Now if that summary failed to get Rumsfeld out of his office then clearly nothing would.

At 9:37 a.m., eight minutes after Captain Leidig had called the emergency response meeting, the Pentagon was rocked by what numerous witnesses said felt like a bomb detonating inside of the complex. The Commission Report briefly describes what action Rumsfeld took next: “After the Pentagon was struck, Secretary Rumsfeld went to the parking lot to assist with rescue efforts.” Now just try and rationalize that decision.

Rumsfeld, the highest ranking commander of the U.S. military aside from the President of the United States, has taken it upon himself to inspect the crash site and assist with the search and rescue efforts. A quaint, touching story that the media happily devoured, and the Commission Report completely ignored, but an altogether implausible one. That is not to deny the claim, however, that Rumsfeld was on the front lawn of the Pentagon assisting with the rescue efforts. Indeed, there are photographs showing the Defense Secretary, with a security detail at his side, doing exactly that.

Paul Wolfowitz, in an interview with Vanity Fair, spoke glowingly about how his boss responded to the emergency: “He went charging out and down to the site where the plane had hit, which is what I would have done if I’d had my wits about me, which may or may not have been a smart thing to do, but it was. Instead, the next thing we heard was that there’d been a bomb and the building had to be evacuated. Everyone started streaming out of the building in a quite orderly way.”

So Wolfowitz is somehow of the opinion that Rumsfeld abandoning his command post and dashing outside to the Pentagon blast site, where more attacks could have been forthcoming, was the best course of action. The media papering over Rumsfeld’s disastrous actions did not stop there.

In the New York Times, journalist Andrew Cockburn provided a breathless account of Rumsfeld, the military man of impetuous action, as he inexplicably traversed about two miles around the Pentagon – each side of the Pentagon complex is around the length of three football fields – to inspect the damage site and help the wounded instead of leading the nation at its most critical hour. Brace yourself because this is classic.

“There were the flames, and bits of metal all around,” Cockburn writes, quoting Officer Aubrey Davis of the Pentagon police, who served as Rumsfeld’s personal bodyguard during this mindless morning jog. “The secretary picked up one of the pieces of metal. I was telling him he shouldn’t be interfering with a crime scene when he looked at some inscription on it and said, ‘American Airlines.’ Then someone shouted, ‘Help, over here,’ and we ran over and helped push an injured person on a gurney over to the road.”

Cockburn proceeds to pin media laurels on Rumsfeld’s chest when what the Pentagon chief really deserved was a military tribunal: “[T]hose few minutes made Rumsfeld famous, changed him from a half-forgotten twentieth-century political figure to America’s twenty-first-century warlord. On a day when the president was intermittently visible, only Rumsfeld, along with New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, gave the country an image of decisive, courageous leadership… Over time, the legend grew. One of the staffers in the office later assured me that Rumsfeld torn his shirt into strips to make bandages for the wounded …”

Keep in mind, Rumsfeld was paid to serve as chief of the military, not as a nurse.

Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon building by 10 o’clock and despite desperate pleas from staff members, he continued to avoid the command center as if it were a leper colony. Instead, he went back to his office where he had a phone conversation with President Bush, though, as Cockburn reported, “neither man could recall what they discussed.”

Rumsfeld did not make it to the command center until 10:30 a.m., which, by that time, was too late to do anything of consequence, except to have a phone conversation with Dick Cheney, who was holed up in the basement of the White House.

As the authors of the Commission Report noted, “Secretary Rumsfeld told us he was just gaining situational awareness when he spoke with the Vice President at 10:39. His primary concern was ensuring that the pilots had a clear understanding of their rules of engagement.” Well, that concern arose about two hours too late. Rumsfeld’s presence at this point was no longer even symbolic. The emergency, for all intent and purposes, was already over. Now it was up to the media to twist this unforgivable dereliction of duty into some sort of act of heroism. And it was only too happy to comply.

Fellow U.S. war criminals have eulogized the former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld upon news of his death. “A faithful steward of our armed forces,” former U.S. President George W Bush declared. “A period that brought unprecedented challenges to our country and to our military also brought out the best qualities in Secretary Rumsfeld.” Tell that to the tortured, executed and displaced Iraqis tortured upon Rumsfeld’s orders, in line with the “War on Terror” agenda post September 11.

Foreign intervention in the Middle East was high on the U.S. agenda, and a premise was needed for invasion – an invented one would suffice. Cue the alleged evidence of Iraq hoarding weapons of mass destruction to justify an invasion for regime change. The weapons of mass destruction were never discovered, but the claim served its purpose to render Iraq a failed state.

Rumsfeld legacy is mostly tied to his role in the “enhanced interrogation techniques” – the U.S. euphemism for torture – against Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Although by no means the only place where detainees were tortured – Guantanamo and Bagram are two other detention centres linked to widespread torture and human rights violations – the media focus on Abu Ghraib’s torture provided an insight into the U.S. government’s penchant for torture, all in the name of democracy.

In December 2002, Rumsfeld had approved a set of interrogation techniques to gain intelligence related to the “Global War on Terrorism”. The indicated torture methods were subject to caveats which, of course, were not included to observe but rather to generate impunity for the perpetrators and the officials authorizing the human rights violations. Of waterboarding, a document dated November 27, 2002 states, “The use of a wet towel to induce the misperception of suffocation would also be permissible if not done with the specific intent to cause prolonged mental harm, and absent medical advice that it would.”

In 2004, it became public knowledge that Rumsfeld himself had approved the use of torture against detainees. As global outrage ensued, former President Bush sought to isolate the perpetrators from the decision-makers, thus ensuring impunity for the political war mongers. So involved was Rumsfeld in authorizing torture against detainees, that the former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski who ran Abu Ghraib until early 2004, recalled a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld and detailed in the margins, “Make sure this is accomplished.”

Hypocritically, the U.S. applied torture practices during interrogation sessions which it condemned other nations for. The waiver of the Geneva Conventions was instructed as an exception, allegedly to reduce the risk of a terror threat. The underlying reason was to guarantee impunity for U.S. officials involved in approving torture techniques.

Havin authorized torture, Rumsfeld could not feign ignorance. However, even as warnings increased and evidenced surfaced publicly, Rumsfeld refused to halt the torture program. The photos from Abu Ghraib, as well as leading mainstream media articles highlighting the U.S. role in torture failed to serve as a deterrent. On the contrary, Rumsfeld authorized further aggression against detainees in January 2003. A further endorsement of impunity came from Bush, who refused Rumsfeld’s resignation twice.

Notably, Rumsfeld refused the torture label in 2004. “What has been charged so far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture. I’m not going to address the “torture” word,” he had stated. Yet Article 1 of the UN Convention Against Torture is clear, despite Rumsfeld’s futile play on semantics. How does the U.S. describe using a nude prisoner at Abu Ghraib for target practice, for example?

Accolades may continue to pour in for Rumsfeld, but history will continue to judge the ravages of U.S. imperialist violence.

When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld boasted, as he did frequently, of his unrelenting focus on the war on terror, his audience would have been startled, maybe even shocked, to discover the activities that Rumsfeld found it necessary to supervise in minute detail. Close command and control of far away events from the Pentagon were not limited to the targeting of bombs and missiles. Thanks to breakthroughs in communications, the interrogation and torture of prisoners could be monitored on a real time basis also.

The first prisoner to experience such attention from Rumsfeld’s office, or the first that we know about, was an American citizen, John Walker Lindh, a young man from California whose fascination with Islam had led him to enlist in the Taliban. Shortly thereafter, he and several hundred others surrendered to the Northern Alliance warlord Abdu Rashid Dostum in return for a promise of safe passage. Dostum broke the deal, herding the prisoners into a ruined fortress near Mazar-e-Sharif. Lindh managed to survive, though wounded, and eventually fell into the hands of the CIA and Special Forces, who proceeded to interrogate him.

According to documents later unearthed by Richard Serrano of the Los Angeles Times, a Special Forces intelligence officer was informed by a Navy Admiral monitoring events in Mazar-e-Sharif that “the Secretary of Defense’s Counsel (lawyer William Haynes) has authorized him to ‘take the gloves off’ and ask whatever he wanted.” In the course of the questioning Lindh, who had a bullet in his leg, was stripped naked, blindfolded, handcuffed, and bound to a stretcher with duct tape. In a practice that would become more familiar at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq 18 months later, smiling soldiers posed for pictures next to the naked prisoner. A navy medic later testified that he had been told by the lead military interrogator that “sleep deprivation, cold and hunger might be employed” during Lindh’s interrogations. Meanwhile, his responses to the questioning, which ultimately went on for days, were relayed back to Washington, according to the documents disclosed to Serrano, every hour, hour after hour. Someone very important clearly wanted to know all the details.

Lindh was ultimately tried and sentenced in a U.S. court, but Rumsfeld was in no mood to extend any kind of legal protection to other captives. As the first load of prisoners arrived at the new military prison camp at Guantanamo, Cuba, on January 11, 2002, he declared them “unlawful combatants” who “do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.” In fact, the Geneva Conventions provide explicit protection to anyone taken prisoner in an international armed conflict, even when they are not entitled to actual prisoner of war status, but no one at that time was in a mood to contradict the all-powerful secretary of defense.

A year after Haynes, his chief counsel, had passed the message that interrogators should “take the gloves off” when questioning the hapless John Walker Lindh and report the results on an hourly basis, Rumsfeld was personally deciding on whether interrogators could use “stress positions” (an old CIA technique) like making prisoners stand for up to four hours, or exploit “individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to induce stress,” or strip them naked, or question them for 28 hours at a stretch, without sleep, or use “a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation”. These and other methods, euphemistically dubbed “counter-resistance techniques” in Pentagon documents that always avoided the word “torture,” were outlined in an “action memo” submitted on November 27, 2002, for Rumsfeld’s approval by Haynes. The lawyer noted that Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard General Richard Myers (respectively deputy defense secretary, under-secretary for policy and chairman of the joint chiefs) had already agreed that Rumsfeld should approve all but the most severe options, such as the wet towel, without restriction. A week later, Rumsfeld scrawled his signature in the “approved” box but added, “However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”

The answer, of course, was that he could always sit down if he felt like it, and in any case, according to a sworn statement by Air Force Lt. General Randall Schmidt, appointed in 2005 to investigate charges by FBI officials that there had been widespread abuse at Guantanamo, Rumsfeld’s signature was merely for the record; he had given verbal approval for the techniques two weeks before. In any event, sitting down at will was not an option available to Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi inmate in Guantanamo who soon began to feel the effects of Rumsfeld’s authorization in the most direct way. Qahtani, alleged to have been recruited for the 9/11 hijackings only to fail to gain entry into the U.S., had been under intense questioning for months.

There is no more chilling evidence of just how closely connected Secretary Rumsfeld was to the culture of torture so defiantly adopted by the Bush administration than Schmidt’s 55-page statement, which at times takes on an informal, almost emotional tone. Schmidt is adamant that Rumsfeld intended the techniques “for Mister Kahtani (sic) number one.” And so Qahtani’s jailers now began forcing him to stand for long periods, isolating him, stripping him, telling him to bark like a dog, and more. “There were no limits put on this and no boundaries”, Schmidt reported. After a few days, the sessions had to be temporarily suspended when Qahtani’s heartbeat slowed to 35 beats a minute. “Somewhere”, General Schmidt observes, “there had to be a throttle on this”, and the “throttle” controlling the interrogation was ultimately Rumsfeld, who was “personally involved”, the general stresses, “in the interrogation of one person.” Bypassing the normal chain of command, the secretary called the prison chief directly on a weekly basis for reports on progress with Qahtani.

Years before, a G.D. Searle executive had remarked on Rumsfeld’s practice of “diving down in the weeds” to check on details, but this was a whole new departure. At one point in Schmidt’s description of his interview with the secretary during his investigation, it appears that Rumsfeld was bemused by the practical consequences of his edicts: “Did [I] say ‘put a bra and panties on this guy’s head and make him dance with another man?’” Schmidt quotes him as remarking defensively. To which Schmidt, in his statement, answers that Rumsfeld had indeed authorized such specific actions by his broad overall approval.

Sometime in mid-August 2003, Rumsfeld took action to deal with the question of “insurgency” in Iraq once and for all. During an intelligence briefing in his office he reportedly expressed outrage at the quality of intelligence he was receiving from Iraq, which he loudly and angrily referred to as “shit”, banging the table with his fist “so hard we thought he might break it”,according to one report. His principal complaint was that the reports were failing to confirm what he knew to be true ­ that hostile acts against U.S. forces in Iraq were entirely the work of FSLs [“Former Saddam Loyalists”] and dead-enders. Scathingly, he compared the quality of the Iraqi material with the excellent intelligence that was now, in his view, being extracted from the prisoners at Guantanamo, or “Gitmo,” as the military termed it, under the able supervision of prison commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller. Rumsfeld concluded his diatribe with a forthright instruction to Stephen Cambone [under-secretary of defense for intel]ligence] that Miller be ordered immediately to the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where the unfortunate PUCs [Persons Under Confinement] were ending up, and “Gitmoise it.” Cambone in turn dispatched the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, a fervent Christian fundamentalist given to deriding the Muslims’ Allah as “an idol,” to Cuba to brief Miller on his mission.

Boykin must have given Miller careful instruction, for he arrived in Iraq fully prepared, bringing with him experts such as the female interrogator who favored the technique of sexually taunting prisoners, as well as useful tips on the use of dogs as a means of intimidating interviewees. First on his list of appointments was Lt. Ricardo Sanchez, who had succeeded McKiernan as the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq. It must have been an instructive conversation, since within 36 hours Sanchez issued instructions on detainee interrogation that mirrored those authorized by Rumsfeld for use at Guantanamo in December the previous year that gave cover to techniques including hooding, nudity, stress positions, “fear of dogs,” and “mild” physical contact with prisoners. There were some innovations in Sanchez’ instructions however, such as sleep and dietary manipulation. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the overall commander of the U.S. military prison system in Iraq at that time, later insisted that she did not know what was being done to the prisoners at Abu Gharib, though she did recall Miller remarking that “at Guantanamo Bay we learned that the prisoners have to earn every single thing that they have” and “if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog, then you’ve lost control of them”.

The techniques were apparently fully absorbed by the Abu Ghraib interrogators and attendant military police, as became apparent when photographs snapped by the MPs finally began to surface, initially on CBS News’ 60 Minutes in late April 2004. When Rumsfeld first learned that there were pictures extant of naked, humiliated and terrified prisoners being abused by cheerful soldiers, he said, according to an aide who was present, “I didn’t know you were allowed to bring cameras into a prison.”

It is not clear when Rumsfeld first saw the actual photographs. He himself testified under oath to Congress that he saw them first in expurgated form when they were published in the press, and only got to look at the originals nine days later after his office had been “trying to get one of the disks for days and days”.

The army’s criminal investigation division began a probe on January16, 2004, after Joseph Darby, a soldier not involved in the abuse, slipped the investigators a CD carrying some of the photos. As the CID investigation set to work, Karpinski, according to her later testimony, asked a sergeant at the prison, “What’s this about photographs?” The sergeant replied, “Ma’am, we’ve heard something about photographs, but I have no idea. Nobody has any details, and Ma’am, if anybody knows, nobody is talking.” When she asked to see the logbooks kept by the military intelligence personnel, she was told that the CID had cleared up everything. However, when she went to look for herself, she found they had missed something, a piece of paper stuck on a pole outside a little office used by the interrogators. “It was a memorandum signed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, authorizing a short list, maybe 6 or 8 techniques: use of dogs; stress positions; loud music; deprivation of food; keeping the lights on, those kinds of things,” Karpinski said. Over to the side of the paper was a line of handwriting, which to her appeared to be in the same hand and with the same ink as the signature. The line read: “Make sure this happens!!”

Further indications of Rumsfeld’s close interest in ongoing events at Abu Ghraib emerged in subsequent court proceedings. In May 2006, Sergeant Santos Cardona, an army dog handler was court-martialed at Fort Meade, Maryland. In stipulated (i.e., accepted by defense and prosecution) testimony, Maj. Michael Thompson, who had been assigned to the 325th Military Intelligence Battalion in the relevant period and reported to Col. Tom Pappas, the battalion commander, stated that he was frequently told by Pappas’ executive assistant that “Mr. Donald Rumsfeld and Mr. Paul Wolfowitz” had called and were “waiting for reports”. The defense also read aloud stipulated testimony from Steve Pescatore, a civilian interrogator employed by CACI, a corporation heavily contracted to assist in interrogations, who recalled being told by military intelligence personnel that Secretary Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz received “nightly briefings”.

Needless to say, the numerous investigations of itself by the military high command concluded that no officer or official above the rank of colonel bore any responsibility for Abu Ghraib. Col. Pappas was granted immunity in return for his testimony against a dog handler. One of the investigations, conducted by former Defense Secretary Schlesinger (who had become a friend of Rumsfeld since the distant days of the Ford administration) concluded that the whole affair had been simply “animal house on the night shift”, the acts of the untrained national guard military police unit from Cumberland Mary, and assigned to Abu Ghraib.

This strategy of deflecting responsibility downwards appears to have been crafted in the three desperate weeks that followed the first call for comment on the photographs from 60 Minutes’ producer Mary Mapes. While Gen. Myers bought time with appeals to the broadcasters’ patriotism, Rumsfeld’s public affairs specialists went into crisis mode under the urgent direction of Larry DiRita, who had taken on Torie Clarke’s responsibilities as Pentagon public affairs chief following her departure in April 2003 . To help in developing tactics to deal with the storm they knew would break once 60 Minutes went ahead, DiRita’s staff summoned an “echo chamber” of public relations professionals, “all Republicans of course”, as one official assured me, from big firms such as Hill and Knowlton to advise them. Naturally, the well-oiled system for delivering the official line through the medium of TV military analysts was brought into play. Retired Army Gen. David Grange, one of the stars of this system, got the tone exactly right on CNN. Responding to a question from Lou Dobbs that though there were six soldiers facing charges, “their superiors had to know what was going on here.” Grange responded quickly: “Or they didn’t know at all because they lacked the supervision of those soldiers or (were not) inspecting part of their command.” In other words, the higher command’s fault lay not in encouraging the torture at Abu Ghraib, but simply in failing to notice what the guards were up to. “These soldiers,” continued Grange indignantly, “these few soldiers let down the rest of the force in Iraq and the United States, to include veterans like myself. It is unexcusable.”

Meanwhile, Rumsfeld accepted full responsibility without taking any blame, a standard response for high officials implicated in scandal. He said had had no idea what was going on in his Iraqi prisons until Specialist Darby, whom he commended, alerted investigators, though he also claimed that a vague press release on the investigation issued in Baghdad at that time had in fact “broken the story” and alerted “the whole world.” He said he had written not one but two letters of resignation to President Bush, which were rejected. Gen. Myers testified under oath that he never informed Rumsfeld that he was trying to persuade CBS to suppress their report. When a leaked internal report by Gen. Antonio Taguba detailing how “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees” at Abu Ghraib had been published in the press and even on Fox TV a few days after the original CBS broadcast, Feith sent an urgent memo round the Pentagon warning officials not to read it , or even discuss it with family members.

What Rumsfeld did not mention in all his public protestations of regret over Abu Ghraib was that in the same month of May 2004 he had on his desk a report prepared by the Navy inspector general’s office detailing the interrogation methods, refined in their cruelty, being practiced on Jose Padilla and other inmates in the South Carolina naval brig. Padilla, a Puerto Rican former gang member, found himself incarcerated on the direct authority of the secretary of defense, one of three prisoners accused of terrorism held in the jail and subjected to a carefully designed regime of isolation and sensory deprivation. Padilla, according to his attorneys, would ultimately spend 1,307 days in a nine-by-seven-foot cell, often chained to the ground by his wrists and torso and kept awake at night by guards using bright lights and loud noises. In repeated legal arguments, administration lawyers maintained that Rumsfeld was entitled to hold anyone deemed ‘an enemy combatant’ in his rapidly excpanding prison system.

counterpunch.org

Career neocon and warmongering monster Donald Rumsfeld is dead at the age of 88, the news media has reported. Rumsfeld was kind of the Fauci of the early 2000’s, a relatively faceless bureaucrat who circumstance selected to serve in a glamorous role as a symbol of the zeitgeist of his time. Rumsfeld became the rock star of George W. Bush’s 2003 Iraq war.

He warmed to the camera, after spending many years in relative obscurity in the revolving-door world between highly-paid positions in the “private sector” and battery-recharges back in senior government positions.

To keep your value to the weapons manufacturers you must constantly re-steep yourself into the world of the bureaucracy and also the world of the Congressional-military-industrial complex. You have to dip your beak into the endless river of military appropriations and the (deep state) people who grease the skids of billions of dollars to the war industry.

Otherwise you do not know what buttons to push to deliver billion dollar contracts in exchange for million dollar salaries.

In this endeavor, Rumsfeld was not the worst offender, it must be said. He was, unlike our current Defense Secretary, never on the board of missile-maker and death-dealer Raytheon. In fact his credentials in the war industry were paltry compared to the new breed of “public servant” in Pentagon leadership.

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld took on the job of selling the monstrous and unnecessary invasion of Iraq as “the good war” and he made sure he was the face of the marketing campaign.

The one thing the US mainstream media agrees on is the promotion of the US global military empire, and thus Rumsfeld’s follies in front of the camera were for the most part presented to Red and Blue America as wholesome evening entertainment.

Known unknowns and unknown knowns and etc. It was all gobblygook but Rumsfeld delivered it with a smile and bravado and it sure beat having to watch video clips of innocent children slaughtered by America’s “shock and awe” bombing orgy against a country that did not threaten us and could not have threatened us if it wanted to do so.

Yes, much more enjoyable to watch the Rumsfeld follies than to watch Iraqi children burning to death and fatally radiated under the terrorism of US bombs.

So, many antiwar allies are tonight dancing on the perhaps sulfuric-smelling grave of Donald Rumsfeld, but I will not be joining them.

Rumsfeld was all-powerful for a brief time, when the machine had selected him for the role. He was the face of the “good war” against the “demon of the day,” Saddam Hussein. And there is no doubt that he relished his emergence from the bowels of the war apparatus to the poetry of the Pentagon daily briefing.

But in the end, Rumsfeld was just another tool of the bigger beast. In that way his death is pathetic. Just another traveling salesman of a product that had already been bought and sold many times over: Death.

God have mercy on Donald Rumsfeld’s soul. Let’s pray he converted to actual Christianity and thus saved himself from eternal horror. To hope for less is to descend to the level of the neocon demons themselves.

At the end of the day, yes Rumsfeld helped sell a war that killed a million people and did not in any measurable way make us more safe. But he’s a mere piker in our current far more murky world of deep state murderers like Austin, Nuland, Powers, Blinken, and so many others who will never appear before the camera because they are too busy manning the killing machine.

Rumsfeld was a monster 20 years ago. Today compared to his competition for neocon monster murderer he is a mere footnote in the book of US foreign policy murder history.

Rest in Peace Donald Rumsfeld. May God have mercy on your soul (and on all of our equally sinful souls). Amen.

ronpaulinstitute.org