Rumsfeld WikiLeaks Himself to Rehab Image

This is either a last ditch effort to save a little bit of face or a publicity stunt to boost Rumsfeld's new book.

A memoir isn’t enough to rehabilitate the careers of today’s disgraced public officials. Any case you make for yourself is damaged by the fact that you’re the one making it. A shrewder tactic is to go full-on Assange, releasing formerly secret documents that you can say prove you were right all along. And so here’s Donald Rumsfeld, doing his best WikiLeaks impression to accompany his new book.

After Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, there are few rhetorical tactics Rumsfeld can employ to satisfy his hordes of critics. So he’s accompanying his memoir, Known and Unknown, with tons of primary source material: hundreds of raw documents detailing his thought process at the Pentagon, all searchable on his new website. This way, he’s not engaging with a debate he’s unlikely to win; he’s burying it under an avalanche of paper.

I guess a new say could be Rumsfeld is "pulling an Assange". I think this hit the nail on the head. If he dumps his documents and runs, then he doesn't have to answer the difficult questions. Although I never really cared for Rumsfeld, I never once mistook him for a stupid man.

To put it uncharitably: when you’ve got a rep for being less-than-honest and unwilling to debate, you might as well let the documents speak for themselves.

I think less than honest could possibly be one of the greatest understatements of the year. And could we possibly trust any of these documents?

Rumsfeld’s documents show him worrying about military interrogations. “I don’t feel I have good data on the people we have been capturing and interrogating in either country,” he told his intel chief, Steve Cambone, on Sept. 12, 2003. “I don’t feel I am getting information from the interrogations that should be enabling us as to the answer to the questions I’ve posed.” Probing. But perhaps Rumsfeld might have considered that before changing the rules for military interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, which “migrated” to Iraq, to allow more brutal treatment.

Double speak anyone? IMO he may have done better if would have just retired and laid low. Thou doth protest too much.

Rumsfeld isn’t the first to take this documentation-based approach. His policy chief, Douglas Feith, under fire for sexing up intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s relationship with al-Qaeda, accompanied his 2008 War and Decision with a searchable online supplement of his own documents from the Pentagon.

It appears almost as if he is trying to save himself. It makes me wonder what may be coming down the line, that is making him throw others under the bus and distancehimself from the war and the previous administration.

Source www.wired.com...

Also a link to The Rumsfeld Papers... www.rumsfeld.com...

I used search and came up empty. As usual mods please remove if this is already posted. Thanks.

I watched a news clip at RT ...pretty much sums up your post .rt.com...
"Known and Unknown" – the new book by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is being called tedious and self-serving, and an attempt to blame others for his failures.
In about 800 pages, instead of taking responsibility or addressing allegations Rumsfeld opted to take an unapologetic tone, blaming everyone else while praising his own actions.
Michael M. O'Brien, the author of "America’s Failure in Iraq" said he was surprised Rumsfeld admitted any of them made mistakes, although he shifted the blame elsewhere.
Rumsfeld's book is about vindication following terrible mistakes in Iraq, including the invasion itself

Rummy is not alone in his quest to clear himself ...Former US President George W. Bush is set to rewrite the history of his presidency, which was a “disaster for America,” US radio host and author Thom Hartmann told RT.
The University of Virginia has announced it will put together an oral history of Bush's presidency. It will work together with the George Bush Foundation and is planning around 100 interviews with leading members of his administration.

“Rather than a presidential library, like most presidents have, which basically just chronicle the presidency, George Bush is going to be spending several hundred million dollars to hire so-called scholars to rewrite his legacy and to re-invent the history of his administration,” said radio host and author Thom Hartmann.
The reality is, he went on, that “the biggest legacy of his administration right now is what we saw last week in Fort Hood, Texas,” where a Muslim American officer murdered more than a dozen fellow soldiers.
Hartmann believes Bush should have dealt with “Osama bin Laden and his small radical Islamic mafia” in a different way. Had he “asked for international cooperation from police agencies, labeled them criminals, arrested them, had them tried and put them in jail, the 9/11 victims would have closure and Muslims around the world would not only not hate America and be afraid of it –as so many of them do right now – but we would probably see a renaissance in Islam.”
“Bush was the worst president of America, and if not the total worst, the second worst behind John Adams. His presidency was a disaster – it was a disaster for working people, it was a disaster for the military… for our international relations… for us economically,” Hartmann said.rt.com...

reply to post by the2ofusr1


Thanks for that link.

I would bet any one of my limbs that if the war had been an extreme success, he would have been screaming from the rooftops that he was the one that made it so. The book would have been renamed "How I Was The Savior Of An Entire Nation Of People". Selective memory is a gift I suppose...

reply to post by the2ofusr1


I think I remember near the end of GWB's term someone stating that this would happen. Interestng that they opted for an audio interview based approach.