The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #68378   Message #1152379
Posted By: steve in ottawa
01-Apr-04 - 07:12 PM
Thread Name: BS: A mutiny against Rumsfeld's terrorism
Subject: RE: BS: A mutiny against Rumsfeld's terrorism
Dares? That implies we'll suffer (from the all-controlling superhuman mastermind fiends) if we dare reveal the truth.

Rumsfeld also interfered like crazy in the recent Gulf War deployment. Some people say the war was much more difficult because of his interference. He is a very smart, very self-important individual, who thinks he's vastly smarter and ought to be much more important than he is. I'm sure he'd like to be in charge of everything, let alone deciding whether or not to shoot down civilian planes. I haven't bothered to look at the order, but if it's real, a simple explanation is that Rumsfeld believed in the system; he thought the system would give him enough time to make the decisions himself. One puts decisions into the hands of the people in the field because the system doesn't always work (witness the German guy who landed a small plane in Red Square during the cold war). See what happened during the early war when Rumsfeld was informed of the POW pictures during a TV show? He started saying utterly stupid things. They're breaking the Geneva Convention! They're breaking the Geneva Convention! Sure, American media can show Iraqi bodies and POWs because they're privately run and therefore can't be construed as a combatant's deliberate humiliation of the enemy... Give me a break. Why was Rumsfeld so stupid? Because he gets stupid when he sees things slipping beyond his control. I'm wandering. In fairness, he was probably really tired.   

The amazing thing was that so much of the American media immediately parroted his hypocrisy. However, eventually they did show most of the pictures. Even they recognized that it was a matter of taste and decency, not law, that ought to have prevented the pictures being shown.

Nuff of this topic for me.