The Pentagon Papers That Donald Rumsfeld Doesn’t Want You to See

[Newsjock]

Source: Gawker

When Donald Rumsfeld released his memoir Known and Unknown, he made a big deal out of putting thousands of documents from his archives online in a sop to transparency and accuracy. But he didn't put them all online. And we've found some of the papers that Rumsfeld would have preferred to toss down the memory hole.

The Rumsfeld Papers web site, which launched earlier this month as a complement to the memoir, is a collection of Rumsfeld's memos, speeches, and other documents going back to his days as an undergraduate at Princeton in the 1950s. The idea, according to a researcher he hired for the project, "to get more information in people's hands" because "he really thinks the free flow of information is critical to a vibrant democracy." Rumsfeld himself compared the digital archive to a sort of legit version of Wikileaks.

More power to him! Except Rumsfeld, of course, only posted the information that he wanted to flow freely. The other stuff—like his callous attempts to keep John Walker Lindh from getting speedy trial, his effort to whitewash the Pentagon's detainee policy, and the friendly op-eds he tried to plant in newspapers—he left out. Luckily, we were able to get a hold of some of the papers from his days as defense secretary that Rumsfeld reviewed and deliberately withheld from the archive.

Rumsfeld used the Freedom of Information to gather some, but not all, of his papers in researching the book. So we filed a FOIA request with the Pentagon asking for everything Rumsfeld asked for, and everything he received. Last week, we got a partial response, including roughly 100 pages of memos he wrote in 2002 and 2003 that the Pentagon handed over to him. We checked against the Rumsfeld Papers, and almost none of them were there. None of the missing memos are particularly damning, but they do show Rumsfeld's cavalier attitude to the legality and reality of the war he was busily conjuring prior to 2003.

Read more: http://gawker.com/#!5766225/the-pentagon-papers-that-donald-rumsfeld-doesnt-want-you-to-see

[upi402]

1. BushCo bought 10K acres Paraguaya to run from Gawker!

They were so stupid. They actually worried that a Democratic president would charge them. pfft


Bush's 98840ac ranch is protected by a semi-secret U.S. military base. It's American troops have been exempted from war crimes by Paraguay.

[patrice]

2. AND - sitting on one of the biggest fresh water aquifers in the whole region, I have heard. nt