Rumsfeld must go. I'm hardly the first politician to say this ... it's practically mainstream Democratic position now. There are any number of reasons why he must resign (or be fired); we can't even pretend there's any accountability for the disaster in Iraq if he stays on. But I was listening to NPR earlier this week, and I heard
a story I think perfectly captures the man, his lack of respect for the troops, and his slippery bureaucratic nature.
It was an interview with Joseph Darby, the courageous soldier who turned in the Abu Ghraib photos. He blew the whistle on what was happening there, and he was promised anonymity by the military. But the military didn't keep to that promise.
Donald Rumsfeld outed Joe Darby in open testimony to Congress in April, "thanking" him for his actions. And because of that testimony, Joe Darby's family was stalked, they had to move away from their home, and he feared for his life.
NPR makes you pay for its transcripts, so I can't link to a transcript of that interview. But here's another radio story (
The World Today in Australia):
The whistle-blower has told of how he slept with a loaded pistol once the graphic images became public, as Charles Graner and the other soldiers implicated tried to discover the identity of the leaker.
In the end Joe Darby's cover was blown by none other than Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and it happened in the worst possible circumstances.
Specialist Darby was eating lunch in an army mess hall with 400 other soldiers in may 2004, when Mr Rumsfeld appeared on an overhead TV and dropped his name.
From that point onwards Joe Darby's life was never to be the same.
How was it not the same? Here's Alternet:
The family of Sgt. Joseph Darby, the whistleblower who exposed the abuses in Abu Ghraib, is in protective custody because of death threats. His wife Bernadette Darby told Reuters that Darby's actions made many people in her town in western Maryland: "People were mean, saying he was a walking dead man, he was walking around with a bull's eye on his head. It was scary."
Donald Rumsfeld would claim, all wide-eyed innocence I'm sure, that he was just "thanking" Joseph Darby. In fact, some articles even claim that there was a low-level leak of his name in another forum. "Geez," Rumsfeld would probably say, "I was just thanking a soldier for bringing this abuse to our attention. Did he receive death threats after that? Yes. Are we doing everything we can to protect him? Absolutely."
This is bunk. I'm not going to say Rumsfeld orchestrated the earlier leak to give him plausible deniability for his leak (I have no evidence for that), but it's clear that previous leak (which some papers don't even mention) had no effect. Then Don Rumsfeld decided to tell the world the identity of Joseph Darby in the most public of ways possible. I firmly believe this was a deliberate act of intimidation. Joe Darby wasn't going to get away scot-free for what he did, of that Don Rumsfeld made sure. But Rumsfeld's too canny a bureaucratic operator to out him in too obvious a way. So he "thanked" him, unctuous gratitude oozing as he destroyed Darby's life.
This is "respect for the troops," Bush Administration style. As we've seen so often, the troops are fine as a back-drop for a photo-op, they're great rhetorical props for a policy gone bad, but when it comes to actual, living soldiers, they are denied body armor, they are put in an un-winnable situation in Iraq, and, in the case of Joe Darby, their lives are destroyed for a courageous act of whistle-blowing.
It fits so perfectly with the entire enterprise of the Bush Administration, especially its foreign policy. Shoot the messenger. Make sure the person taking the fall is as low on the totem pole as possible. And never, ever deal with the root problems for failure or hold people accountable. The only sin is disloyalty, telling the outside world things that shouldn't be said, embarrassing the administration with unauthorized leaks or statements (authorized leaks are A-OK, though).
So we have a foreign policy that has made us less safe, but the chief architects of that policy, folks like Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Condi Rice, and Dick Cheney, remain or are promoted. We have $9 billion dollars (at least) missing in Iraq amongst rampant corruption, but there are no investigations, no one held accountable. We have a runaway disaster in the Middle East, but we "stay the course" and try to tighten up the rhetorical ship with more attacks on Democrats. Dick Cheney rumbles on about "al Qaeda types," while our foreign policy rumbles on to disarray and disaster.
Joseph Darby is an American hero, a man who followed his conscience to do the right thing, a man who even today, after all that has happened, says he would have done the same thing all over again. He deserves better from Donald Rumsfeld, and we all deserve better from our government.
{I'm Bob Johnson, and I'm running for Congress against GOP foot-soldier John McHugh in New York's 23rd district. }