Notice how there is no accountability in the Bush White House, that almost none of them admit they were wrong or apologize? Its because they are treating the government as if it were a big corporation, and companies never apologize or admit they are wrong about anything, and lie to their customers all the time.

-----Original Message----- From: Peter Schurman, MoveOn.org [mailto:moveon-help@list.moveon.org] Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 2:17 PM To: craig cline Subject: Fire Rumsfeld

Dear MoveOn member,

It's time for President Bush to fire Donald Rumsfeld from his post as America's Secretary of Defense. The signs are now everywhere.

As Thomas Friedman put it, in a column titled "Restoring Our Honor":

"This administration needs to undertake a total overhaul of its Iraq policy; otherwise, it is courting a total disaster for us all. That overhaul needs to begin with President Bush firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- today, not tomorrow or next month, today." [1]

Please call President Bush now, and urge him to fire Rumsfeld. White House comment line 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1112 Bush has already taken the unusual step of publicly disclosing a reprimand of Rumsfeld. But he's got to go further, and dismiss him. Please also call your Senators and Representative:

Senator Dianne Feinstein Washington, DC: 202-224-3841

Senator Barbara Boxer Washington, DC: 202-224-3553

Congressman Tom Lantos Washington, DC: 202-225-3531

Let them know it's time for Rumsfeld to go.

Here are some highlights from the latest reports, illustrating why:

Presidential advisor Karl Rove "believes that it will take a generation for the United States to live this scandal down in the Arab world." [2]

The Washington Post reports that "U.S. officials said Rumsfeld and the Pentagon resisted appeals in recent months from the State Department and the Coalition Provisional Authority to deal with problems relating to detainees." [3] The Post also links the culture that fostered torture to Rumsfeld, in a searing editorial excerpted below.

Amazingly, Rumsfeld still doesn't seem to see that the despicable acts at Abu Ghraib prison amounted to torture. According to Salon.com:

"My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday. "I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going to address the torture word." [4]

Rumsfeld's simply got to go.

Please make your calls today. Please let us know you've called, at:

http://www.moveon.org/callrumsfeld.html?id(01-3820739-oD6uylDtSThtbnUwPE9Q TA

Thank you.

Sincerely,

- Carrie, Joan, Noah, Peter, and Wes The MoveOn.org team Thursday, May 6th, 2004

P.S.: Here are key excerpts from the Post editorial:

Mr. Rumsfeld's Responsibility

THE HORRIFIC abuses by American interrogators and guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and at other facilities maintained by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan can be traced, in part, to policy decisions and public statements of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Beginning more than two years ago, Mr. Rumsfeld decided to overturn decades of previous practice by the U.S. military in its handling of detainees in foreign countries. His Pentagon ruled that the United States would no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions; that Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners would not be observed; and that many detainees would be held incommunicado and without any independent mechanism of review. Abuses will take place in any prison system. But Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered -- and in which, until recently, no one has been held accountable.

The lawlessness began in January 2002 when Mr. Rumsfeld publicly declared that hundreds of people detained by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan "do not have any rights" under the Geneva Conventions. That was not the case: At a minimum, all those arrested in the war zone were entitled under the conventions to a formal hearing to determine whether they were prisoners of war or unlawful combatants. No such hearings were held, but then Mr. Rumsfeld made clear that U.S. observance of the convention was now optional. Prisoners, he said, would be treated "for the most part" in "a manner that is reasonably consistent" with the conventions -- which, the secretary breezily suggested, was outdated.

. .

The Taguba report and others by human rights groups reveal that the detention system Mr. Rumsfeld oversees has become so grossly distorted that military police have abused or tortured prisoners under the direction of civilian contractors and intelligence officers outside the military chain of command -- not in "exceptional" cases, as Mr. Rumsfeld said Tuesday, but systematically. Army guards have held "ghost" prisoners detained by the CIA and even hidden these prisoners from the International Red Cross. Meanwhile, Mr. Rumsfeld's contempt for the Geneva Conventions has trickled down: The Taguba report says that guards at Abu Ghraib had not been instructed on them and that no copies were posted in the facility.

The abuses that have done so much harm to the U.S. mission in Iraq might have been prevented had Mr. Rumsfeld been responsive to earlier reports of violations. Instead, he publicly dismissed or minimized such accounts. He and his staff ignored detailed reports by respected human rights groups about criminal activity at U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, and they refused to provide access to facilities or respond to most questions. In December 2002, two Afghan detainees died in events that were ruled homicides by medical officials; only when the New York Times obtained the story did the Pentagon confirm that an investigation was underway, and no results have yet been announced. Not until other media obtained the photos from Abu Ghraib did Mr. Rumsfeld fully acknowledge what had happened, and not until Tuesday did his department disclose that 25 prisoners have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. Accountability for those deaths has been virtually nonexistent: One soldier was punished with a dishonorable discharge.

On Monday Mr. Rumsfeld's spokesman said that the secretary had not read Mr. Taguba's report, which was completed in early March. Yesterday Mr. Rumsfeld told a television interviewer that he still hadn't finished reading it, and he repeated his view that the Geneva Conventions "did not precisely apply" but were only "basic rules" for handling prisoners. His message remains the same: that the United States need not be bound by international law and that the crimes Mr. Taguba reported are not, for him, a priority. That attitude has undermined the American military's observance of basic human rights and damaged this country's ability to prevail in the war on terrorism.

[The full editorial is at:] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5840-2004May5.html

Footnotes:

[1] Friedman's complete column is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/opinion/06FRIE.html?th

[2] Rumsfeld Chastised by President for His Handling of Iraq Scandal http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/politics/06CABI.html?hp

[3] Bush Privately Chides Rumsfeld Officials Say Pentagon Resisted Repeated Calls for Prison Changes http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5733-2004May5.html

[4] "Abuse"? How about torture http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2004/05/06/torture/index_np.html _______________

This is a message from MoveOn.org. To unsubscribe from this list, please visit our subscription management page at: http://moveon.org/s?i(01-3820739-oD6uylDtSThtbnUwPE9QTA
5:50:42 PM    

How Much Does Information Technology Matter?. In 2003, the Harvard Business Review published an article titled "IT Doesn't Matter." The debate still rages. By Hal R. Varian. [New York Times: Technology]
4:36:18 PM    

I watched the film "The Four Feathers" last night, about the British incursion into the Sudan in the late 19th century, and you could sub the Americans for the British and nthe Iraqis for the Sudanese and you wouldn'tm miss a beat - we're just another sanctimonious would-be imperialist on a crusade to bring our way of life and values to cultures that have no interest in them - or certainly not in having us impose them on them.

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From liberator to oppressor
MANY ARABS VIEW THE U.S. DIFFERENTLY NOW; DONALD RUMSFELD SHOULD RESIGN
By Daniel Sneider

The Bush administration is desperately trying to contain the scandal over American guards who abused Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. But it is already too late for damage control.

The nauseating image of an American woman guard, posing with a cigarette dangling from her mouth while pointing at the genitals of a naked and hooded prisoner, is already burned forever into the minds of millions of Iraqis and fellow Arabs. No matter what happens now in Iraq, we've lost the war for Arab hearts and minds.

Certainly what the American guards did pales in comparison to the torture, brutality and murder practiced by the Saddam Hussein regime in that same prison. We can take some comfort in our willingness to investigate ourselves.

But images from Abu Ghraib prison have blurred the crucial moral difference between the United States and the horrific regime it overthrew. For many Arabs, the United States has quickly descended from liberator of Iraq, beyond occupier, to an oppressor -- arrogant and disdainful of those it rules.

Just listen to Abdel Basset Turki, who resigned as human rights minister in the government set up by Ambassador Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority.

``In November, I talked to Mr. Bremer about human rights violations in general and in jails in particular,'' he said. Turki told Bremer about meetings with former detainees and the harsh treatment they had received. ``He listened but there was no answer . . . He didn't take care about the information I gave him.''

The investigation into how far up the chain of command the responsibility for these acts goes has only begun. But it is not too soon to demand that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resign for what has happened on his watch.

The perpetrators of these abuses ``have done more damage to the United States than most traitors have done by revealing state secrets,'' says the Hoover Institution's Larry Diamond, who just returned from Baghdad where he was a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority on the political transition.

Diamond is among a growing number of experts who support the war, yet are now deeply pessimistic. For them, the Abu Ghraib affair is only the latest in a series of setbacks.

In the last few weeks, the coalition authority was forced to back off from bellicose threats to destroy Sunni fighters in Al-Fallujah and radical Shiite militias in An-Najaf for fear it would trigger a broader insurgency. Instead it is relying on tribal leaders, moderate Shiite clerics and former Baathist military officers to create order.

While the correction in American policy was inevitable, it was also fateful and consequential.

``It may not be apparent in the U.S. as it is in the Arab world, but several weeks of travel in the region indicate that the course of the fighting in Fallujah and Najaf is being perceived in much of Iraq and the Arab world as a serious U.S. defeat,'' Anthony Cordesman, a widely respected specialist on the Iraq conflict, wrote this week.

The Bush administration had already reversed its course by embracing United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi's plan to form a new interim government after June 30 and oversee elections by Jan. 31 of next year. Cordesman worries however that the combination of the loss of American legitimacy and the appearance of weakness will embolden radicals who are eager to seize power.

``At this point, the U.S. lacks good options other than to turn as much of the political, aid and security effort over to moderate Iraqis as soon as possible,'' he wrote, ``and pray that the U.N. can create some kind of climate for political legitimacy.''

The administration still plans to use the military, now bolstered by an additional 20,000 troops, to keep control over Iraq. But that belief, too, will crash up against Iraqi reality, suggests Graham Fuller, a longtime former CIA analyst of the region.

``I can't see any Iraqi leader signing on to an American contingent there without destroying his own credibility as a nationalist,'' Fuller told me.

``The only thing they can hope for is to get out without too much humiliation,'' he said. ``It will be a victory for the radicals.''

Listening to the rosy talk that still bubbles out of the White House, I wonder whether a much-needed dose of reality will ever reach those who send our men and women to war.

DANIEL SNEIDER is foreign affairs columnist for the Mercury News. His column appears on Sunday and Thursday. You can contact him at dsneider@mercurynews.com

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© 2004 Mercury News and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.mercurynews.com

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