Rummy At A Bus Stop: “But I didn’t order those things.”

[kpete]

emptywheel –

I hope you find this interesting. Your analyses are very important to my understanding of the world, so I wanted to share it on your blog.

This is way off the topic of the day, but is maybe pertinent to one of the overarching topics of this site, war criminals. It’s certainly vanity that leads me to post this, but also a kind of trepidation that makes me want to make at least a semi-public statement about a very disturbing public encounter I just had.

Donald Rumsfeld was standing at my bus stop this morning as I waited to take my boy to school. I’m still shaky. I confronted him and couldn’t control my anger. I had seen him once before walk by (his arm was in a sling then and he looked positively wizened, but this time he was hale and nattily dressed) but had been too flabbergasted to react. I wanted to be ready with something to say the next time, and had prepared myself, but couldn’t stay on script past “You think you can show your face in public among decent people?”. I became more vociferous and enraged the longer it went: mass murderer, traitor, torturer, rapist of children….In fact, from my first words, when I saw Rumsfeld don an impenetrable smirk I consciously took the tack of yelling and loudly indicating his presence to everyone else; I wanted to enlist their help. Dismayingly my gentle fellow citizens didn’t intervene in any way, or were even outright hostile to me, although some people who witnessed the exchange from the bus comforted me afterwards, approvingly. Thankfully my kid was not overly disturbed, and seemed even cheerful after I explained that Rumsfeld is a wicked man who started a war, like Sauron or Saruman, but that he was not a danger to us. I’m frankly not positive about the latter assertion.

Anyway, he did respond at a couple of points. One insidious tactic was to comment on my kid — I don’t remember his exact words, but it was something to the effect that he would be messed up by having such a crazy father, which bait I took and responded, “He has to learn the difference between good and evil.” The other was a surprising statement, the inverse of the “I vuz only taking orders”, uttered in a tone of bemused incredulity you’d recognize from his press conferences: “But I didn’t order those things.” I took that lie as an admission.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/02/26/burris-the-sequel/#comments

[Tangerine LaBamba]

1. I hope this is a fantasy.......

I hope an adult didn't do this in front of his kid.

[BuyingThyme]

2. ...

Well done, brendanx. You testified. Every time a citizen just does that, just speaks to principle, however churned up it makes us feel, we get some of our democracy back.

Remember that annotation of Rumsfeld’s to the DoD memo outlining approved methods of interrogation? Why just four hours? I stand eight to ten hours a day?

Ask him whether he grasps now what enforced “standing” means when you’re either suspended from above or your chest is forced forward because your arms are locked behind you over the metal bar against your back, as in one infamous photograph from Abu Ghraib. A doctor friend of mine says that “stress positions” like that mean slow suffocation, just as waterboarding is slow drowning (”simulated” only if you’re using simulated water). The other word the doctor suggested was crucifixion.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/02/26/burris-the-sequel/#comments

[Stinky The Clown]

3. "Donald Rumsfeld was standing at my bus stop this morning"

As if ......

[Aviation Pro]

5. It could have been in Aspen....

...where even billionaires take the bus rather than try to park their high end SUVs and Mercedes Benzes in the tow away zone that is the whole town.

[Demeter]

4. this is why I don't own a firearm

the temptation would be too great.

[HamdenRice]

6. "Szell? Szell? Oh my God! It's Szell! The Wiese Angel !!!"

A Rumsfeld sighting at this point is like the scene in "Marathon Man" when the Holocaust survivor in the diamond district spots the Nazi monster, Szell, played by Laurence Olivier.