Word: rumsfeldism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Last week Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld swatted down reports that the U.S. plans to ship Zubaydah to a nation, such as Egypt or Jordan, that unlike the U.S. has no qualms about extracting information through torture. But a well-placed American military official tells TIME that at least initially the U.S. had looked for an ally to conduct an interrogation. "Someone is going to squeeze him," says the official. "We've been out of that business for so long that it's best handled by others." No matter who pressures Zubaydah to talk, the squeezing would most likely consist...
...word," as Rumsfeld prefers it to be called, has been percolating through legal and military circles for some months. Is the brutalization of one life justified if it could save thousands? According to a CNN/USA Today poll last fall, 45% of Americans surveyed supported torture to prevent attacks. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has endorsed the issuance of "torture warrants" in the rarest of instances. While ethicists remain squeamish at the prospect of torturing low-level al-Qaeda recruits who probably aren't privy to life-sparing information, the stakes may be different in Zubaydah's case. Anthony D'Amato...
...meetings that produced the speech were even more extraordinary. For several days, the most powerful people in the Administration had served as speechwriters. Bush, Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet had all called or crowded into the Situation Room and worked on the speech line by line--a measure of how troubled and critical this moment really was. The team added a great deal of moral embroidery and made sure that the speech demanded something from everyone. In the Rose Garden, Bush reached out to Yasser Arafat...
...central obstacle to engagement in the region has been Bush's senior foreign-policy advisers, led by Cheney and Rumsfeld. They are staunchly pro-Israel and have shown little regard for the peace process in the past. Concentrated at the Pentagon but salted all around the White House, the hard-liners have regular access to Bush. They take a dim view of the land-for-peace swap on which every peace proposal has been based for more than a decade. Every time the Administration's moderates, led by Powell, pushed Bush for a serious peace initiative in 2001, Cheney...
...Qaeda to plant and nurture. But as the ground war cooled, the hard-liners got busy again. They turned their attention to Iraq, and the back-room tug-of-war began all over again. In January, while Powell was out of the country on a diplomatic mission, Cheney and Rumsfeld teamed up to persuade Bush to cut all ties with Arafat...