Killing for Christ, War Was a "Crusade"

Update: A quick read of CommonDreams presents well the problem Obama faces if he continues down the Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld road. See Changing Obama's Mindset (Howard Zinn), The Media’s Collective Yawn Over Torture for War (Joy-Ann Reid), These Killings Will Only Strengthen the Taliban (Patrick Cockburn), The NYT Sums up Obama's Civil Liberties Record in One Paragraph (Glenn Greenwald). As our Cheney once advised: Stick to principle.

Frank Rich in his Obama Can't Turn the Page on Bush column points to a must-read by Robert Draper in GQ Magazine on Donald Rumsfeld.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

This is the same Rumsfeld who spoke of the "humanity' with which we invaded Iraq, and along with Cheney ordered that people be tortured to speak of the non-existent Saddam-Al Qaeda connection.

Writes Draper:

Onward Christian Soldiers!
These never-before-seen documents from the Rumsfeld Pentagon mixed religion and war.

In the days surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, cover sheets—like the ones in this exclusive GQ.com slideshow—began adorning the top-secret intelligence briefings produced by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. The sheets juxtaposed war images with inspirational Bible quotes and were delivered by Rumsfeld himself to the White House, where they were read by the man who, just after September 11, referred to America's war on terror [sic] as a 'crusade.'

Let's hope each revelation leads to Obama reversing the wars and crimes against humanity that Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld committed with impunity.

Watching the GQ.com slideshow, a reader laughs, scoffs, and sadly ruminates on the degree to which these depraved lies are going to continue under Obama's administration.