Chapter Six

Chapter Six

Documents, books, letters, marginalia – Rumsfeld had been virtually besieged by an army of words, hundreds of thousands upon millions of them, during his lamentable time upon the slave’s tomb of Mount Misery. That afternoon, his paperwork labyrinth was crenellated still further with the delivery of a document he had requested days ago from those ambiguity-minders deep within the Pentagon; recently de-classified, Donald H. Rumsfeld wanted to read this particular document in full, as he was certain that it would eventually become more widely known, and raise some very troubling issues regarding his time as secretary of defense. When it had been written, several years before, he could have hardly cared less about the thing’s contents – cross, caustic, vitriol-laden, inflectively-sober or otherwise, it didn’t matter a damn to him, he was a busy man secure in his job, Good Old Rummy with two wars to fight, virile and magically immune to misfortune’s ever-spreading pox, stoically defiant. Now, suddenly curious as only the hubris-shorn can be, he found this particular White Paper offensively legitimate. Anybody could read the damn thing now, thanks to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits; to defend against the avalanche of charges within, he would at least have to acknowledge that they existed.

He’d packed already and was getting as far away from Maryland as he could. On the limo drive to the airport, the old man relaxed again to music, this time Beethoven, a late Rasumovsky like the score to civilization itself, and examined what purported to be the definitive psychological/historical analysis of the conduct of one Corporal Charles Graner, Jr., the Army MP held chiefly responsible for the torture exhibits arranged at the great military fortress of Abu Ghraib in the Fall of 2003.

It was one more ghost he would have to deal with for the remainder of his days, a haunting as assured and repugnant as the wickedest visitation from the damned; for Don Rumsfeld was recognizing that perhaps even if Frederick Douglass had not stood in his living room the other night and engaged upon a three-hour philosophical harangue, there were other memories of the world, other visitations, other claustrophobic encounters with the permanent and enduring spirit of History.

He would never be able to escape all that was his work. Old Man Misery would forever be known for these things, his name forever blackened for infamous crimes. But if it shook him, either to conscience or trepidation, he did not let it show.

Rumsfeld relaxed into the seat and began reading the document.

* * *

The first thirty pages droned on through a cataloguing of crimes of inspired depravity. Rumsfeld knew them well, having seen the same photos that the entire world did when the carnal circus of American Empire had been betrayed by a suddenly vigilant media, pruriently displaying the images of sexual torture, the chastisement dripping with lascivious intent. Don breezed through the pages and paused only for boarding of the corporate Lear jet that awaited him, shook a few hands and settled into his private cabin. Alone, he watched Washington fade away beneath him as the jet made altitude, re-read a few passages that hinted at an author with an axe to grind, and then moved on to the sections where he knew minefields of accusation awaited.

It took the anonymous author of the document some time to get to the crux of his arguments, and specifically to a point where Rumsfeld felt himself involuntarily rising in his chair, seeing for the first time how he was being accused of abetting the torturers of Abu Ghraib:

We do not know what orders were given regarding “softening up” the insurgents by the military intelligence apparatus and the CIA; it will take years to procure that information, if indeed it will be allowed to enter the public domain at all, and it is likely that myriad Freedom of Information Act lawsuits will be required to gain these documents. In the meantime, the questions raised by this troubling confluence of illegal and abusive activities engaged upon by US troops in both Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison will be left for the reader to ponder for significance.

Certain commentators have found disturbing parallels between the specific actions of the MP’s at Abu Ghraib and the graduates of a US Army program created by behavioral scientists called SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape). The SERE program reportedly utilizes a series of the “homeostatic derangement” mechanisms visible in the infamous “Darby photographs” leaked to the press in the early days of the atrocity scandal. Why this is significant is that if there can be shown to be a confluence or congruity between the grisly abuses supposedly concocted by that “one bad apple” (Corporal Graner) and the actual techniques taught by the Army at SERE warfare schools, a far more disturbing case can be made that – by direct implication – the “somehow” in the question of where Graner and the other defendants got their knowledge on the utilization of these specific tortures will come a long way towards being answered. The resulting answer will certainly not absolve Corporal Graner of his crimes, but may allow a certain “mitigating factor” to be considered: namely, that Graner was chosen for this assignment expressly due to his violent background, a years-long résumé that includes charges of prisoner abuse during his time as a guard at a Pennsylvania correctional facility, two separate restraining orders issued against him due to violent assaults upon his estranged wife, and even disciplinary action taken by the Fayette County (PA) jail due to a sadistically-conceived “practical joke” wherein Graner dumped a phial of chemical Mace into the coffee of a fellow guard. All of this information is publicly available, and therefore it is possible Graner was chosen for his role of “prisoner breaker” further up the command chain, by bureaucrats who knew he was, at root, a common sociopath, prone to sadistic outrages and, in short, a thug. Corporal Graner could have been chosen specifically due to his violent demeanor to run guard duty on the unsupervised overnight shifts within the prison’s “Hard Site” – and therefore to enact the program of abuse the mind warriors of the Pentagon had concocted. The mitigation arises when considering that the Pentagon is, at root, to blame by virtue of their compiling this dark-sided information in the first place – the SERE course information and the somewhat-related CIA “intensive interrogation techniques” KUBARK manual. It is not inconceivable that the Army – in some remote corner of its budget, locked away in a room full of Strangelove-ian Psy-Ops mandarins – engineered the very abuse of the detainees that has so appalled the civilized world. The result of such a conclusion is one of terrible realization: That the crimes at that point rise to the level of state sponsored terrorism. Such irony would be devastating to the image and mission of the United States in these troubled, morally ambiguous times.

There is also the question of even greater crimes that have not been exposed yet, and this due to the brilliant investigative work of Seymour Hersh of the New York Times. Hersh maintains that an entire class of photos which have only been seen by a (shaken) congressional delegation deal with unconscionable atrocities that simply make pale the sexual shenanigans and abuse associated with the MP’s of the 372^nd (Corporal Graner’s unit). Hersh claims that women and young boys were also part of the human booty taken in the punitive raids by army units in “active” insurgent sectors, and that the fate of some of these people is so grim as to be beyond description. To be blunt, however: credible reports exist of young boys being sodomized to death by prisoners forced to molest at gunpoint, of women being gang raped until they pleaded with their captors to kill them, and of adult male detainees being simply murdered for sport after their usefulness as props in this stomach-churning saturnalia had been exhausted. Could this possibly be? It is wrong, of course, to merely engage in the syllogism of extrapolating authority for these charges from the certainty that other, equally disquieting allegations have already been proven true. One must ask oneself a vital question, however: if all of these links in the logical chain continue to hold – and it increasingly appears at least possible that the abuses of Abu Ghraib were directed from a devious, secretive Pentagon program – then it becomes instead more incredible that other, more vile tortures did not occur rather than that they may have or did. The onus at this point resides strictly upon the back of the Army; it is up to the generals to exonerate themselves, and not continue to simply blame this all on one sad sack MP from Uniontown, Pennsylvania named Charles Graner, Jr.

Satisfied that his worst fears for the document were being realized – the author had gone so far as to lump the United States in with North Korea and Syria as sponsors of terrorism, for Christ’s sakes – Rumsfeld arrived at a later section which developed the idea, and posited a theory on why such a catastrophe as Abu Ghraib was possible in the first place:

These preparatory comments are necessary to understand how the military prison at Abu Ghraib turned into the chaotic torture chamber the world knows it as today. Rumsfeld’s initial plan of campaign was to involve a mere 75,000 soldiers to overrun an entire nation – the reductio ad absurdum of his “transformation warfare” theorizing. This was, of course, a plan born of a mindset thinking only of military exigencies which would have been applicable to conventional conflicts like World War Two or even the First Gulf War; unfortunately, they took no consideration of the inevitability of Saddam loyalists “taking to the hills” and continuing a brutal struggle that took no care for actual victory, but rather sought vindication through merely harassing the enemy until his plans were rendered impossible to fulfill. In short: “Shock and Awe” segued to a “Mill on the Tigris”, and the military authorities of the Pentagon amazingly did not consider that the enemy didn’t have to “win” anything to force us to lose.

On a self-flagellating roll and anxious to see how far the indictment could go, Rumsfeld poured himself a fresh drink from the wet bar and considered the author’s opinion that the counter-insurgency operation was handled so disastrously that the very apprehending of suspects actually made the situation worse:

Similarly, the Army in Iraq seemed concerned with arresting and detaining as many people as possible – whether or not they were of actual value to our intelligence resources or a threat to our security – in an attempt at giving the American public solid evidence of a pro-active campaign against the insurgents. The parallel to the infamous Vietnam War “body counts” should be obvious; such public-relations calculus representing the intellectual nadir of an operation which can only count the numbers of heads on sticks to justify its continuance. During this time of “democratization quotas” Abu Ghraib went from approximately 1,000 prisoners at the start of the war to over 10,000 during the worst of the fighting in late October, 2003. That most of these prisoners weren’t Fedayeen at all but merely common criminals was not reported until much later; by then, it was too late. Corporal Graner’s unit was virtually alone and seriously undermanned; there simply hadn’t been adequate resources allocated to do anything other than make sure the detainees were fed. But, unfortunately, their fighting spirit had hardly been extinguished.

The fact that so many of these detainees were, in fact, mere private citizens with no links at all to any inchoate insurgency leads to a further rank irony worthy of historical comparison: namely, that these innocent men may have gone into Abu Ghraib with no lasting negative opinion of America, but certainly came out with a decidedly different orientation. Like the British and their disastrous experience locking up suspected IRA militants at the infamous H-block in Long Kesh during the early 1970’s, America may be learning that wholesale-sweeps of purported terrorists may in fact take an innocent man and expose him to actual terrorists, thereby creating a new enemy where before was at worst a disheartened citizen. That Abu Ghraib is, in fact, the real cradle of this ongoing insurgency is an irony so deeply demoralizing as to invite despair at the actions of men who could so obdurately foul up seemingly every level of the occupation, down to the last prison cell holding the last common thief.

The causal chain then took a disturbing turn closer towards the top, pointing to the possibility that the Army’s emphasis on Graner alone was a knowing fraud, and that, by implication, the Department of Defense and Pentagon would have known precisely these facts:

When learning of the Army’s desperate attempts to place the blame squarely on this “one bad apple” and distance its higher officers completely from the scandal, however, it is hard not to feel sympathy for Graner’s plight and recognize a terrible injustice in placing this one man “outside of history” as though he were, truly, “an army of one” and writing him off as a psychotic who with Svengali-esque skill violated all orders and corrupted an entire unit. This, most assuredly, he is not. The charge is so absurd as to be laughable. But, as Arnold Zweig wrote in his classic novel The Case of Sergeant Grischa, “The divisional court martial works like a machine: when once a man is caught in it, he only comes out as a corpse.”

Don knew he was in for a treat as the literary allusions started to fly. He also knew that the anonymous author was getting to his real and final point, namely that no matter what the photographs showed Graner and his pals doing in Abu Ghraib, somebody else thousands of miles away was ultimately responsible, and Don had no illusions about whom that person had in mind when he wrote the following:

Corporal Graner is facing serious jail time and the knowledge he will be held in full public obloquy for his crimes and specifically reviled for their shocking and debilitating nature. But he perhaps is facing something even worse: Corporal Charles Graner, Jr. is the living embodiment of all the failures of the United States Army to control its troops and effectively maintain a chain of command in a conquered nation. In this era of instant battlefield communication, cellular phones and real-time satellite intelligence, it is remarkable indeed that so many just above this humble corporal claim to know nothing of what he was doing, or where he got these curious ideas regarding jail-house discipline in the first place. Theirs, after all, might be the most remarkable and incredible defense of any. And, realistically, it is simply implausible.

The reason for this collective (and selective) ignorance compounded by bureaucratic amnesia may be very simple indeed. For this ludicrous defense to succeed, and for so many who wish to give it credence, what is exposed primarily are their cherished hopes rather than any intellectual acumen or honesty: the need to protect the organization, i.e., the Army or the Defense Department or the Bush administration, is paramount. And these are people who will need monumental amounts of protection from the facts once those uncomfortable gadflies make their presence known to history. As Michael Herr writes in Dispatches, his brilliant reportage from the ground up in Vietnam, “When all the projections of intent and strategy twist and turn back on you, tracking team blood, ‘sorry’ just won’t cover it. There’s nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in a war.” (Herr, p. 49)

And, at last, the diligent author came to his own conclusion regarding the events at Abu Ghraib, and found a host of culprits who allowed such abuse to occur. But Don was only really concerned about one of these supposed culprits, and he skipped down to the section where his own name appeared most noticeably:

There is no “ultimate culpability” in the grisly torture chamber that was, and perhaps remains, Abu Ghraib prison. Through a farrago of noise and interpretation, many officials have sought to distance themselves from the disaster, some more effectively than others, but perhaps none as curiously successful as the man who planned this war in the first place, US Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. His acumen in the face of criticism and condemnation is remarkable, though perhaps not laudable; Rumsfeld has survived a spate of damning questions regarding his knowledge of the events in the prison, but never has he bothered to truly answer any of them. His silence in the moral cauldron of basic human decency and adherence to international law during time of war is remarkable; to some, it is also gravely disquieting.

It is clear that the orders issued to General Miller regarding the detainees in Guantanamo Bay, during his time as commanding officer at that detention facility, came not from the Army general staff, since there were three separate entities entrusted with gaining “actionable intelligence” from those pathetic prisoners. The three entities – the CIA, Army intelligence, and a civilian contractor known as CACI – operated seemingly independent of each other, and this arrangement was continued when General Miller was sent to Iraq to “advise” the local commander, General Sanchez, on how to better utilize his capabilities and break the resistance of the supposed-terrorists held at Abu Ghraib.

The question then becomes: who, precisely, is the most logical choice in the entire command-and-control apparatus of the United States military for having issued orders that, under any reasonable interpretation of the word, rise to the level of torture. Who had the most to gain by leaving the Army, and the Army alone, to explain for any possible indication that the United States had gone beyond “extraordinary rendition” and “intensive interrogation techniques” into the realm of dictators and despots, that of officially-sanctioned sadism masquerading as “intelligence gathering”?

One need only return to the days before the Iraq invasion to see where all of this “turf warfare” seems to have begun. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was so intent on getting the “proper” intelligence regarding the nuclear capabilities of Saddam Hussein that he established, in effect, his own private intelligence service, the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), within the Pentagon, operating under a “defense intellectual” and committed PNAC signatory named Douglas Feith. Rumsfeld feuded with the CIA and other, more established intelligence agencies, disregarded their views, buried their data and interpretations of evidence, and in short did everything he could to make sure that the policy he chose to pursue, e.g., an invasion and occupation of Iraq, would be the only one that could be considered by the president, according to the “evidence”. That this “evidence” was almost completely fabricated and willfully misrepresented is now increasingly clear; what is also clear is that this “intelligence war” between Rumsfeld’s DIA and every other US agency was ugly, protracted, and left lasting scars.

Rumsfeld has never trusted the military to run its own operations. His disregard and contempt for professional soldiers is legendary within the Beltway. That he would treat something so vitally important – intelligence gathering from detainees in GITMO and Abu Ghraib – as a subject the Army could be trusted to handle on its own is not credible. Rather, the facts point to Rumsfeld using established channels within the Army to direct that certain types of procedures be used, and older, more “quaint” adherence to things like the Geneva Conventions be effectively disregarded.

The entire legal rationale for the detainee system was a coöperative effort of the very highest Bush Administration officials, including, but not limited to, the vice president, his personal lawyer David Addington, legal counselor John Yoo, the Justice Department’s Jay S. Bybee, White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, and the secretary himself, Donald H. Rumsfeld. But Rumsfeld seems to have a special culpability, as once the lawyers had hashed out the necessary semantic details for shredding the Geneva Conventions, one man above all the others would be given the special task of utilizing this newly found despotic freedom. Thus liberated, he would then be expected to produce results commensurate with the low-level of veracity demanded by a president who went to war over the flimsiest patina of evidence seen in this country since the jingo’s grab for Empire at the expense of Spain in 1898. Armed with such esoteric and unregulated authority, Rumsfeld began collecting information for his own personal perusal, deftly removing the uniformed military from the chain of command regarding sensitive battlefield intelligence, and, with curious irony, making inevitable the kind of abuse which occurred amongst the detainees within Abu Ghraib. Stripped of restraint, emboldened by duty, and sanctioned by the Pentagon, soldiers in complete physical command of fellow human beings began to de-humanize, humiliate, torture and kill their charges. Considering all of the foregoing evidence presented as to the origins of some of these exotic “intelligence gathering” techniques, it becomes increasingly clear that the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America, Donald H. Rumsfeld, would have been aware of these techniques, the tenuous rationale of the administration for suspending something as fundamental as the Geneva Conventions, the results of the practical application of torture in a theater of operations dealing with grueling counter-insurgency combat, and finally the usefulness and worth of information gleaned from individuals who would have been saying anything – literally – to satisfy their interrogators and keep themselves alive. There is precedent, after all, for using such techniques to gain information one vitally wishes to be true; after all, it must have taken quite the skillful interrogator to persuade Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and thousands of other “saboteurs” to admit to being spies and wreckers for various foreign conspiracies designed to destroy the infant Soviet Union. The brutal irony is, that for all the human rights abuses and war crimes Donald Rumsfeld may have countenanced during his tenure as secretary of defense, far from aiding America in her quest to defeat international terrorism and render the Mid-East fit for Democracy, he may have ultimately sabotaged the very idea of proper intelligence gathering, making this country more likely to suffer a catastrophic repeat of Nine-Eleven while at the same time destroying all of the respect and regard this nation has long been held in by the oppressed of the world seeking to emulate our bold experiment in individual liberty and freedom. It is difficult to more strenuously denounce the catastrophic legacy Donald Rumsfeld has left to posterity in his role as secretary of defense; quite plainly, he is perhaps the most disastrous Cabinet official to ever serve a sitting president, a man whose singular contempt for the Rule of Law has left this nation open to the depredation of its existing enemies and burdened us still further with new foes only too willing to see his crimes as being worthy of fanatical resistance and punishment. Rumsfeld’s vision of a “democratic” Mid-East may end, paradoxically, as the greatest recruiting tool radical Islam has ever had placed at its disposal for a final reckoning with the “Great Satan”.

Don Rumsfeld – the man who destroyed Liberty. The thought was finally too much for the old man, and he gritted his teeth and cast a series of violent aspersions underneath his breath, crumpled the lower half of the obscene polemic, and winced in discomfort as the wound to his jaw exploded in newly found pain. True or not, he was not going to let some literary lunkhead slander him like this and get away with it. The moment the plane touched down, Rumsfeld was getting on the blower and calling up some friends in the tobacco industry who knew all about bad press, and have them recommend to him an ace PR guy. Don hadn’t spent the last six years defending America to end up being compared to Andrei Vyshinsky.

His name had appeared a handful of times in the document, several tenuous, inference-laden mentions of his possible culpability is creating the conditions which had made for the gravest American military scandal in two generations. Several times only, but clearly the author’s intention had been to place him as squarely in the dock as the “sad sack MP” Charles Graner, Jr. Don knew things were bad, and he knew things were going to get progressively worse in the remaining years of his life. This one report had made almost no use of classified material, had been written by a Historian with a psychology background and with obviously no intent of reaching a wider audience, and yet it was still enough to make the anger Rumsfeld had been feeling in recent days recede to virtual nothingness by comparison. He saw now how the game was going to be played, and how brutally his enemies would seek to affix his name to every terror even remotely associated with the Iraq war. The only thing that allowed him rest, as he re-arranged himself into the plushly-stuffed chair in the middle of the government jet, preparing for landing, was that no matter how noxious the charges and how debilitating the verbiage, they would never be able to touch him.

His enemies were lining up to pillory and chastise; his head would be demanded and many lawyers of international repute would emerge with many fine-sounding theorems of guilt, culpability and requisite punishment. In the legal journals and in the newspapers, justice for a war criminal would be demanded, adumbrated to the finest tooth-combs of analysis, all sorts of theoretical punishments awaited the old man as surely as had been hinted at by the high-minded analyst whose paper Rumsfeld had just read. But on the spot men become men again and mountains mountains. And Don was more mountain than man to the little pricks who would be trying to take him down. It simply wasn’t going to happen.

The plane began its descent to the tarmac, banking a hard left and causing Don to spill a minute amount of the drink he held, the ice melting and forming condensation on the outside of the glass, slippery in his palm. Don noticed that, even after reading so much disparaging commentary on his role in the Iraq atrocities, his dead-calm rigidity remained true, both his hands were steady and sure, nothing could shake this old man’s imperturbable demeanor. Sang-froid; literally, from the French, the term meant “cold blooded”. It was a phrase that held many possible inflections, from reptilian to homicidal. Don thought about the possible irony for a second and decided he was just a tough old bastard and that was nothing to be ashamed of. He thought again about how, no matter what he had just read, he would never have to sweat a meaningful prosecution, grinned like only the de facto justified can in recognition of their detractor’s impotence, and lay back with a Scotch and water in his hand and this slight consolation in his heart. Let the Left and the peaceniks and all the others file war crimes charges until they were blue in the face with fatigue, and let them see if he would ever care. People had been demanding Henry Kissinger’s head on a pike for the last thirty years, and they would never get it. And although it sometimes cut into his travel plans, old Henry the Terrible had managed just fine and remained the single wealthiest person Don had ever known whom had made government his primary occupation. Don felt it couldn’t be all bad to be a Class-A war criminal, not if you never had to face the Tribunal or the Hague or the dock or the gallows. All his enemies would ever be able to do would be to pile words atop his carcass, volumes of scorn and vitriol and the occasional well-reasoned analysis. Regardless, Don had weathered a torrent of words in his life – he had been beset by angry speeches and loaded denunciations all weekend, of course – and he had managed to survive them all. One more untoward condemnation didn’t matter more than all of the others; he was a free man, would never answer for any of his supposed “crimes”, and was more than willing to face a future wherein he was barred by indictment from entering, say, France.

For years, placed deep within this or that sinecure, lost within the Nixon administration brambles and fog, stuck at the Great Society-era-holdover Economic Opportunity Council or later trundled off to Brussels and NATO headquarters by a vindictive George H.W. Bush, Don had used his isolation from the policy mandarins to network and form alliances that would serve him in the decades to come. He knew what it meant to be isolated, how it felt to be adrift, and Don knew it was an eminently survivable situation. He remembered reading a biography about Stalin once, wherein was described the broad-chested Ossete’s similar aptitude for intriguing in the policy backwaters; Stalin stuck in the nationalities commissariat proposing stillborn constitutions for Kyrghiz pony herders, Stalin under reams of sham reports plotting the collectivization of the Ukrainian granary, Stalin the “grey blur” lost and ignored in the ferocious Bolshevik bureaucracy, all the while making nice with Politburo cronies whom he would one day render stooges. And, still later, corpses. To Don, such a reward for his reading was the pleasantest joke on a long winter’s night; there was old Uncle Joe, banished to some bureaucratic netherworld, patient as a Tartar sheepherder and forever claiming vendetta on enemy blood. And Don wondered how many Nixon toadies had made the same mistake about him that Trotsky had, fatally, about The Man of Steel; how many of their number, Ehrlichman, Halderman, John Dean, Mitchell, every sonofabitch in Washington who wore a Trilateral Commission pin and wouldn’t let him play, how many of them had viewed Don as merely a “grey blur” walking through their midst, never knowing that no matter where you sent him – EOC, NATO headquarters, Tel Aviv or goddammit even Baghdad – Old Rummy was making friends and influencing people, people whom he would need and could use later in his life when the time for a trump came nigh and he aimed to be the last cardplayer holding the deck. Had someone else ever compared his boiler-room politicking to Stalin, Don would have slapped the taste out of their mouth; discovered deep within his old reading, alone, this strange similarity to a dictator long dead and of a completely different ideological stripe, the notion of getting his revenge against all of those Trotskys who had doubted him so much, was exhilarating. Flush, within a crucible of resentment, he found liberation in pure acrimonious reflection upon jobs well done and pure, spiteful survival. Don remembered how many times an infuriated and floridly gesticulating Dick Nixon had been presented with some new perfidy hatched by supposed political allies, and simply raged, to all within the room and with tape recorders running in the basement, “Fuck those cocksuckers, fuck ‘em all!” What hadn’t that brilliant man known the elemental truth about? Don thought it might be worth being damned to Hell for all eternity by an irate God just to have the pleasure of spending time with old Dick Nixon again, off in Hades with Satan and no doubt handling his foreign policy across the River Styx with Heaven. The thought made him chuckle, and Don threw the troublesome White Paper to the floor, fit only for the cleaning woman to throw in the goddamn trash.

After a breathtakingly mundane three-and-a-half hour flight, marred only by two or three mild incursions with storm fronts or turbulence, the turbo-jet carrying the ex-secretary touched down safely and quietly to the earth, a lulled and quiescent Rumsfeld recovering his sense of equilibrium after hurtling through the sky at six-hundred miles an hour. The cabin was quiet, only a vague ringing in Don’s ears from the engines, the space devoid of judgment, merely calming, assuredly isolating: They’ll never touch me, thought Don Rumsfeld, I’ll die breathing free air and they can all go straight to Hell.

And without punishment, what good, after all, were even the most ironclad indictments of a man’s character and crimes? He was right, of course; without the gallows, words are never more than empty catalogues of even the most infamous crimes. Without punishment, a man dies vindicated, if only by the callow inability of a civilization to make him answerable for what he has done.

And America had shown no appetite to make her guilty, now or ever before, no matter the enormity of their crimes, ever face real justice.

Words, for now at least, and perhaps forever, would have to do.

Words were the only justice men like Rumsfeld could ever know.

Words were still vitally, excruciatingly, irreplaceably important.