is dead

So say an article in todays Sydney Morning Herald. It is worth a read ...

Cheers Doug M

[link|http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/09/1084041267581.html|http://www.smh.com.a...084041267581.html]
EXTRACT 1 >>>
Rumsfeld is more peeved than sorry
May 10, 2004

Snapping at the insolence of questioning the land of the free is more his style, writes Maureen Dowd.

Golly, you knew Rummy wasn't going to pretend to stay contrite for long. Not with lawmakers bugging him about the Pearl Harbour of PR, as the Republican Tom Cole called it. The flinty 71-year-old kept it together as John McCain pounced and Hillary Clinton prodded.

But soon he was once more giving snippy one-word answers to his inquisitors, foisting them on his brass menagerie or biting their heads off himself. By Friday evening, when the delegate from Guam, Madeleine Bordallo, pressed him on whether "quality of life" was an issue in the Abu Ghraib torture cases, you could see Donald-Duck steam coming out of his ears.

"Whether they have a PX or a good restaurant is not the issue," he said with a veiled sneer.

Rummy was having a dickens of a time figuring out how a control-freak administration could operate in this new-fangled age when GIs have digital cameras.

In the information age, he complained to senators, "People are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."
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EXTRACT 2 >>>
Even if the Defence Secretary survives, the Rummy Doctrine - using underwhelming force to achieve overwhelming goals - is discredited. Jack Murtha, a Democratic hawk and Vietnam vet, says "the direction's got to be changed or it's unwinnable," and Lieutenant-General William Odom, retired, told newsman Ted Koppel that Iraq was headed toward becoming an al-Qaeda haven and Iranian ally.
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