The brief on Donald Rumsfeld

Bush loyalists have got it in for Rumsfeld–and they’ve now let him have hit with both barrels, through journalist Robert Draper. The tale is harrowing, although it shouldn’t come as a surprise, since it concerns the man who hugged Saddam Hussein for Reagan/Bush; tore into Iraq without a plan, and then shrugged off the lethal chaos after the invasion (”Stuff happens”); said that, in the Bush/Cheney’s “war on terror,” US military strategy was modeled on the German blitzkrieg; and
on and on.

And while this story shouldn’t come as a surprise, neither should it serve to take the heat off Bush and Cheney, since they’re the ones who put this monster where he was–and stubbornly refused to dump him for as long as possible, even though the military largely hated him like poison.

Here, then, is Draper’s article, prefaced by a DailyKos blog highlighting Draper’s revelation about Rumsfeld and Katrina, which bit the MSM has overlooked.

MCM

Rumsfeld kept rescue choppers from Katrina – Turf War
by SteinL
Sun May 17, 2009 at 05:32:57 AM PDT

The GQ article about SecDef Rumsfeld is now up. Frank Rich referenced it in today’s column. There you’ll find the cover pages of the top secret notes Rumsfeld sent to the WH – with biblical quotations above battlefield images.

But you’ll also find this:

* – a final story of Rumsfeld’s intransigence begins on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans-and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington-a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, “We’re not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?”

* “No, sir,” said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida’s Hurlburt Field Air Force base-roughly 200 miles from New Orleans-which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. “I’m just here because you’re here,” the pilot added. “My whole unit’s sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we’re not being used.”

Read more.

Originally posted: The brief on Donald Rumsfeld

Syndicated from: markcrispinmiller.com