Rumsfeld ‘kept up fear of terror attacks’
Donald Rumsfeld, the former United States defence secretary, tried to maintain an atmosphere of fear in America as part of the Iraq war propaganda campaign, a series of leaked memos has shown.
One memo, written in April 2006, contained a list of instructions to Pentagon staff including “Keep elevating the threat” and “Talk about Somalia, the Philippines etc. Make the American people realise they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists”.
Another said “link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern of the American people, and if we fail in Iraq, it will advantage Iran”. He also urged staff to produce “bumper sticker statements” to rally the public around the war.
The memos, written between 2002 until shortly after his resignation in 2006, were leaked by undisclosed sources to the Washington Post. Rumsfeld was unpopular with many for his tough management style.
The newspaper reported that his emails were so numerous they were called “snowflakes”. He would send between 20 and 60 a day, often instructing his team to refute negative news stories in the media.
One note will please Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. It said: “We are getting run out of Central Asia by the Russians. They are doing a considerably better job at bullying those countries than the US is doing to counter their bullying.”
Rumsfeld also managed belatedly to embarrass Bush administration’s attempts to win hearts and minds in the Arab world. In one memo he said: “Too often Muslims are against physical labour” because oil wealth had detached them from “the reality of work”.
A White House spokesman yesterday repudiated the comment. “It’s not in line with the president’s views,” said spokesman Dana Perino.
Keith Urbahn, an aide to Mr Rumsfeld, told the Washington Post that the published memos were “selective” and “gross mischaracterisations” carefully picked from some 20,000 while he was defence secretary. There was no comment from Mr Rumsfeld.
‘Link Iraq to Iran,’ Rumsfeld argued before proof
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Memos_reveal_Rumsfelds_concern_with_marketing_1101.html
Ten months before the US aired formal proof of Iranian involvement in funding Iraqi insurgents, then-Secretary of Defense warned in secret Pentagon memos that Iran should be the “concern of the American people” and he issued explicit instructions to the military.
“[L]ink Iraq to Iran,” Rumsfeld wrote in one of thousands of “snowflakes” — short memos distributed throughout the Pentagon during his tenure.
The Washington Post obtained a handful of the memos and published excerpts from them Thursday. A newly disclosed memo, written in April 2006 as Rumsfeld faced retired generals’ calls for his resignation, tied Iran and Iraq together and claimed failure in the latter “will advantage Iran.”
The memo came as Rumsfeld was going to great lengths in public to avoid explicitly tying Iran’s government to Iraqi insurgents — although that was precisely the impression he left.
In March 2006, Rumsfeld and Army Gen. Peter Pace were asked about recent claims about Iranian-made weapons found in Iraq. Did the military have any “proof” Iran’s government was fueling the insurgency?
“I do not,” Pace acknowledged. Rumsfeld gave a more open-ended response.
“Unless you physically see it coming in …, you can’t know it,” he said. “All you know is that you find equipment — weapons, explosives, whatever — in a country that came from the neighboring country.”
The following month, when he was privately circulating the Iran-Iraq link, Rumsfeld publicly downplayed suggestions that the US was planning a military or nuclear strike against Iran.
“You know, someone comes up with an idea, runs it in a magazine or a paper; other papers pick it up and reprint it; editorialists then say, oh, Henny Penny, the sky is falling, and isn’t — opine on this and opine on that. And to the extent anyone starts responding to the kinds of things that have been circulated, it’s endless,” he said, insisting that America was on a “diplomatic track” in dealing with Iran.
It would be more than a year until Vice President Dick Cheney took to the deck of an aircraft carrier floating in the Persian Gulf in an apparent effort to antagonize Iran. And it was February of this year by the time American intelligence agencies were reported to have reached a “broad agreement” that Iran was supplying weapons to Insurgents.
The New York Times reported the assessment in February of this year, based largely on anonymous administration and intelligence sources. It acknowledged that specious administration claims four years ago could create difficulty in paving the way to war with Iran.
“Administration officials said they recognized that intelligence failures related to prewar American claims about Iraq’s weapons arsenal could make critics skeptical about the American claims,” reported Michael Gordon, the Times scribe whose by-lined accompanied Judith Miller’s on several key discredited pre-Iraq reports.
New memos reveal Rumsfeld’s PR efforts, from arguments with columnists to attempts to re-brand the ‘War on Terror’
The memos also show that Rumsfeld, who left the Pentagon’s top job the day after last year’s Democratic sweep of Congress, kept a tight reign on the military’s image. He issued a flurry of memos instructing his staff to respond to critical news reports and suggesting “bumper sticker statements” to rally public support. He also mulled re-branding President Bush’s signature foreign policy adventure, the “Global War on Terror.”
“Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said. The memos are not classified but are marked ‘for official use only,'” reports the Washington Post which obtained a sampling of the memos Wednesday.
The memos reveal Rumsfeld was concerned about how Americans viewed the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he suggested strategies to improve public opinion.
“Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists,” Rumsfeld wrote in April of 2006 after retired generals began calling for his resignation. He suggested that people would “rally” to sacrifice. “They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory.”
Rumsfeld suggested that the when the Pentagon responded to war criticism aides should “push people back, rather than just defending” Iraq policy, and he acknowledged privately that no “terminal event” would signal an end to the fight against terrorism. Eighteen months ago, Rumsfeld also urged military aides to begin connecting the war in Iraq to threats from Iran — a strategy that has since become de rigueur within the Bush administration.
“Iran is the concern of the American people, and if we fail in Iraq, it will advantage Iran,” he wrote in April 2006.
Rumsfeld also displayed concern with how the “war on terror” was being sold to the American people, and he suggested redefining the campaign as a “worldwide insurgency,” according to the Post, and he even proposed focus grouping the proposed name change.
“[T]est what the results could be,” if the war on terror were renamed, he advised aides.
A Pentagon spokesman accused the Post of using “selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations” from “some 20,000” memos Rumsfeld penned as defense secretary.
Indeed, Rumsfeld’s snowflake production was prolific, and his instructions covered nearly every aspect of the Pentagon and were distributed to employees at all levels of the bureaucracy, sometimes rankling aides.
“Rumsfeld was into everyone’s business. No one was immune,” Bob Woodward recounted last year in State of Denial, which examined the Bush war policy. “Many in the Pentagon looked at the snowflakes as an annoyance. Others found them intrusive and at times petty. For some there was no way to keep up.”
According to memos obtained by the newspaper, Rumsfeld displayed an increasing concern with battling a pessimistic media that focused on missteps and setbacks in the Iraq war. A handful of snowflakes asked aides to respond to columns in the New York Post and Philadelphia Inquirer that were critical of the war. Rumsfeld even asked for clarification of his own assessments of the war.
“Please have someone find precisely when I said ‘dead-ender’ and what the context was,” he ordered one aide in September 2006.
Two months later, Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon reached its own dead end.
Memos Prove Rumsfeld Directed Psychological Terror Campaign
Hyping climate of fear, threat of violence to achieve political objectives is the very definition of terrorism
New Pentagon memos released by the Washington Post prove that ex-U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld directed a psychological campaign of terror in order to achieve political objectives, making Rumsfeld himself a terrorist according to the very definition of the term.
“Donald Rumsfeld, the former United States defence secretary, tried to maintain an atmosphere of fear in America as part of the Iraq war propaganda campaign, a series of leaked memos has shown,” reports the London Telegraph.
In an April 2006 memo, Rumsfeld encouraged Pentagon officials to “Keep elevating the threat” and “Talk about Somalia, the Philippines etc. Make the American people realise they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists”.
Rumsfeld also urged his staff to concoct “bumper sticker statements” (mindless clichés) in an attempt to garner continued support for the occupation of Iraq.
In the most telling e mail, the former defense secretary ordered the Pentagon to “link Iraq to Iran,” heralding the birth of the now saturated propaganda talking point that Iran is fueling the violence in Iraq and helping to kill U.S. troops, despite the fact that British officials patrolling the Iran-Iraq border admit that there is “No concrete proof that Iran is supplying Iraq.”
Rumsfeld’s obsession with micro-managing every aspect of the propaganda offensive upon the American people led to him disseminating anything up to 60 “snowflakes” or memos every single day, much to the chagrin of Pentagon employees.
His insistence that an artificial climate of fear be maintained in America about the threat of new terror attacks in order to sell the unpopular war in Iraq are the smoking gun for criminal charges to be initiated.
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By several of the very definitions of terrorism, Rumsfeld has provably engaged in terrorism, by hyping the threat of terror to achieve a political objective.
Definitions of terrorism
– A psychological strategy of war for gaining political ends by deliberately creating a well-founded climate of fear among the civilian population.
– The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence against people or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies.
– The systematic use of terror, the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear for bringing about political change.
– The use of – or threatened use of – criminal violence against civilians or civilian infrastructure to achieve political ends through fear and intimidation, rather than direct confrontation.
– The calculated use of violence (or threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear.
Under any of the definitions of terrorism listed above, Rumsfeld has demonstrably engaged in terror by artificially hyping the fear of new attacks as part of a strategy to achieve a political objective.
A Window On The “Snowflakes”
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2007/11/01/couricandco/entry3441874.shtml
A published report has opened a window on the world as Donald Rumsfeld saw it during his tenure as Defense Secretary. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld’s memos were known as snowflakes. There was a blizzard of messages from his office. The Washington Post obtained some of the wartime defense secretary’s 20,000 memos including one that drew sharp responses today from the White House and a leading Arab American group.
According to the Post, Rumsfeld contended that Muslims avoid “physical labor.” He expressed the belief that oil wealth removed Muslims “from the reality of work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world.” His memo said, “Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed.” Rumsfeld also warned, “An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism.”
White House press secretary Dana Perino said Rumsfeld’s observations were “not in line with the president’s views.” She said she could understand why Arab Americans would be offended by the comments attributed to Rumsfeld.
The report brought a terse reaction from the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Spokesman Kareem Shora told CBS News Radio, “It seems very clear from the quotes that Mr. Rumsfeld had a very stereotypical, negative pessimistic view of Muslims. He’s labeling 2.2 billion people in the world as lazy and against physical labor. It’s going to be very harmful to our efforts in the Middle East and to winning the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.” The White House Press Secretary said the White House is already aware “that we have a lot of work to do to win hearts and minds across the Arab world and the Muslim world.”
The Post said the Rumsfeld memos were marked “for official use only.” They were not classified. The paper quoted a Rumsfeld spokesman who complained that the story was “based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos.”
From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld . . .
In Sometimes-Brusque ‘Snowflakes,’ He Shared Worldview, Shaped Policy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/31/AR2007103103095.html?hpid=topnews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 1, 2007; Page A01
In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid “physical labor” and wrote of the need to “keep elevating the threat,” “link Iraq to Iran” and develop “bumper sticker statements” to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.
The memos, often referred to as “snowflakes,” shed light on Rumsfeld’s brusque management style and on his efforts to address key challenges during his tenure as Pentagon chief. Spanning from 2002 to shortly after his resignation following the 2006 congressional elections, a sampling of his trademark missives obtained yesterday reveals a defense secretary disdainful of media criticism and driven to reshape public opinion of the Iraq war.
Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said. The memos are not classified but are marked “for official use only.”
In a 2004 memo on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, Rumsfeld concluded that the challenges there are “not unusual.” Pessimistic news reports — “our publics risk falling prey to the argument that all is lost” — simply result from the wrong standards being applied, he wrote in one of the memos obtained by The Washington Post.
Under siege in April 2006, when a series of retired generals denounced him and called for his resignation in newspaper op-ed pieces, Rumsfeld produced a memo after a conference call with military analysts. “Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists,” he wrote.
People will “rally” to sacrifice, he noted after the meeting. “They are looking for leadership. Sacrifice = Victory.”
The meeting also led Rumsfeld to write that he needed a team to help him “go out and push people back, rather than simply defending” Iraq policy and strategy. “I am always on the defense. They say I do it well, but you can’t win on the defense,” he wrote. “We can’t just keep taking hits.”
The only man to hold the top Pentagon job twice — as both the youngest and the oldest defense secretary — Rumsfeld suggested that the public should know that there will be no “terminal event” in the fight against terrorism like the signing ceremony on the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered to end World War II. “It is going to be a long war,” he wrote. “Iraq is only one battleground.”
Based on the discussion with military analysts, Rumsfeld tied Iran and Iraq. “Iran is the concern of the American people, and if we fail in Iraq, it will advantage Iran,” he wrote in his April 2006 memo.
Rumsfeld declined to comment, but an aide said the points in that memo were Rumsfeld’s distillation of the analysts’ comments, though he added that the secretary is known for using the term “bumper stickers.”
“You are running a story based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos — carefully picked from the some 20,000 written while Rumsfeld served as Secretary,” Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn wrote in an e-mail. “After almost all meetings, he dictated his recollections of what was said for his own records.”
In one of his longer ruminations, in May 2004, Rumsfeld considered whether to redefine the terrorism fight as a “worldwide insurgency.” The goal of the enemy, he wrote, is to “end the state system, using terrorism, to drive the non-radicals from the world.” He then advised aides “to test what the results could be” if the war on terrorism were renamed.
Neither Europe nor the United Nations understands the threat or the bigger picture, Rumsfeld complained in the same memo. He also lamented that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims “from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed,” he wrote. “An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism.”
If radicals “get a hold of” oil-rich Saudi Arabia, he added, the United States will have “an enormous national security problem.”
The memos delve into issues beyond Iraq and terrorism. In a memo to national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley in July 2006, Rumsfeld warned that the United States is “getting run out of Central Asia” by the Russians, who are doing a “considerably better job at bullying” than Washington is doing to “counter their bullying.”
As public discontent and congressional questioning grew in 2006, his final year at the Pentagon, a series of snowflakes revealed a man determined to counter the chorus of media criticism in one- or two-line zingers to staff members about specific articles.
“I think you ought to get a letter off about Ralph Peters’ op-ed in the New York Post. It is terrible,” he writes on Feb. 6, 2006. In a Feb. 2 New York Post column, Peters decried “chronic troop shortages in Iraq” while the Pentagon buys “high-tech toys that have no missions.”
On March 10, he commanded J. Dorrance Smith, the assistant defense secretary for public affairs, to craft a “better presentation to respond to this business that the Department of Defense has no plan. This is just utter nonsense. We need to knock it down hard.” A Washington Post-ABC News poll that month found that 65 percent of Americans thought that Bush had no plan for victory.
On March 20, Rumsfeld ordered a point-by-point analysis of the seven “mistakes” columnist Trudy Rubin wrote about in the Philadelphia Inquirer and a response to her essay — which he wanted to see before it was sent out. Rubin wrote that the war had “gone sour.”
“Please have someone find precisely when I said ‘dead-enders’ and what the context was,” he ordered Smith in September 2006.
A November 2006 editorial in the New York Times that said the Army was ruined “is disgraceful,” Rumsfeld wrote to Smith. The editorial said that “one welcome dividend” of Rumsfeld’s departure was that the United States would “now have a chance to rebuild the Army he spent most of his tenure running down.”
Rumsfeld later reprimanded his staff, writing, “I read the letter we sent in rebuttal. I thought it rather weak and not signed at the level it should have been.” He then instructed staffers to prepare an article about the Army. “We need to get that story out,” he wrote on Nov. 28, 2006, a Tuesday. He ordered a draft by Friday.
Ignorance Is Futile! 