Feb. 18 | Donald Rumsfeld's Big Quote (revised with follow-up below) http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/04/september11/main520830.shtml ONE of the ways I keep up with the news is that there are some talented people in the Planet Waves network who sweep the news pages, do Google searches and set up keyword alerts (a number of these update automatically at http://planetwaves.info/ ). This morning, the CBS link I posted earlier today appeared in my inbox as a result of one of these efforts. I did not realize until five minutes ago that it was a story from September 2002, six months before the attack on Iraq began. The article is about notes that surfaced a year after Sept. 11 on the response of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Mind you, not long ago his title would have been Secretary of War, but the title was edited after WWII to seem friendlier. The CBS News article states, "With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted 'best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.' – meaning Saddam Hussein – 'at same time. Not only UBL' – the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden. "Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld. "'Go massive', the notes quote him as saying. 'Sweep it all up. Things related and not'." How much interpretation does this require? I think a little. Whenever handling a document, check and remember the date. This is six months before invasion and bombing Iraq. We have a clear statement of intent and foreknowledge. By "sweep it all up" he means start the bombing, on a "massive" scale, as he says. By "things related and not" he means it does not matter whether a country is really implicated; bomb them too. And it was clear at that time, and has been clear many times since, that Iraq was not involved in Sept. 11. But this is the Big Lie of the Bush administration (or one of them; the other is who really did pull off Sept. 11). When a country gets bombed, a lot of civilians get killed. That is, people like you and me and your cousins. The justification for this, in military terms, is  called collateral damage -- that is, in order to strike seemingly legitimate enemy military targets, you have to do a little killing of uninvolved people on the side. Even if one accepts that rationale, now it's gone, because when you "retaliate" against a country whether "related or not" you're just committing murder for its own sake. Never mind more than 2,000 American service members who have been killed and tens of thousands injured. When do the war crimes trials begin? Tomorrow if I'm feeling up to it, I would like offer some insight from my travels in Germany in 1998 about how it is that people became professional government killers for its own sake -- the SS men of the Nazi government; and how it is that so many ordinary people went along with it. Here is the second batch of reader responses to my query below: http://planetwavesweekly.com/dadatemp/20060218x.html And here is the first set: http://planetwavesweekly.com/dadatemp/20060218.html FOLLOW UP TO RUMSFELD QUOTE... Eric, The last link in my email of this morning (which was how I got the cbs link in the first place) http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/02/17/204749.php Eric: a blogger who'd done a Freedom of Information thing and got the notes in question and they confirm that Rumsfeld said this. Excerpt from Blog: On July 23, 2005, I submitted an electronic Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense seeking DoD staffer Steven Cambone's notes from meetings with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. Cambone's notes were cited heavily in the 9/11 Commission Report's reconstruction of the day's events. On February 10, 2006, I received a response from the DoD which includes partially-redacted copies of Cambone's notes. The released notes document Donald Rumsfeld's 2:40 PM instructions to General Myers to find the "[b]est info fast . . . judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time - not only UBL [Usama Bin Laden]" (as discussed on p. 334-335 of the 9/11 Commission Report and in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack). In addition, the documents confirm the contents of CBS News' Sept. 4, 2002 report "Plans For Iraq Attack Began on 9/11," which quoted Rumsfeld's notes as stating: "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not." These lines were not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report or Woodward's Plan of Attack, and to my knowledge, have not been independently confirmed by any other source. After the Rathergate fiasco, I wondered if CBS had been fooled into publishing a story that, from a publicity perspective, seemed too good to be true (see Blogcritics.org post CBS Report on Rumsfeld's 9/11 Notes Under Scrutiny). These documents prove that CBS was right on this one. end of excerpt. M