I used to really enjoy Donald Rumsfeld’s press conferences because he could be relied on not to parrot any boring talking points. Now that he’s promoting his new book, he’s making the rounds and still stymieing reporters with his bluntness and refusal to accept the assumptions behind many of their questions.

John Hawkins at RWN interviewed him and he’s as direct as ever:

Rumsfeld on the rules of engagement: I remember being one time with a commander out, way out in the fringes near the border in Iraq, and he was giving me a report. He told me that his people had been attacked from the Syrian border and then he very proudly said that he responded proportionately. I remember going back and talking the General Casey in Baghdad and saying George, here’s a man who thinks that he’s doing the right thing by responding proportionately. Now what’s that mean? That if you are on the Iraq side of the border and there are some people on the other side of the border firing at you with mortars, rockets, automatic weapons, RPGs, you name it – and he thinks his job is to respond proportionately? That means eventually, some of our people are going to get killed. The people shooting are already in a defensive position. So if you respond proportionately, they fire three things, you fire three things back. Does that make any sense? It makes no sense to me. You ought to kill them.

I love that – it’s so obvious, and yet it’s just the sort of statement to make liberal heads explode, especially because we’re all so conditioned to think that a “proportionate response” is appropriate. It’s a ludicrous concept – Winston Churchill would laugh out loud at the idea. Proportionate responses are what you do when you want to prolong a war; Israel is proof enough of that. If you want to end a war, you surrender. When you want to win a war, you don’t respond proportionately. You respond by killing the enemy and breaking his will to fight. Rumsfeld’s directness and common sense are a breath of fresh air. Read the rest of the interview here; I may have exaggerated a bit when with the post title “hilarity ensues” but it’s still an enjoyable interview.

Her trainer described her as

“She is not very intelligent or practical and is lacking in shrewdness and cunning,” he wrote on Jan. 26, 1944. “She has a bad memory, is inaccurate, and scatterbrained.” He went on to describe her as a “very feminine and immature” person who was too inexperienced for deployment.

Maybe there was a shortage of women spies in WWII, or maybe she impressed someone else a bit more, because she was sent out in spite of the bad review.  And then Eileen Nearne collected data, transmitted it without detection, and helped coordinate munitions and resistance forces in France until she was captured and tortured by the Gestapo.  She was 23 years old.

She revealed no information, and was sent to Ravensbruck detention camp in Germany – from which she escaped with two others. Then she met up with the liberating American troops – who detained her with the Nazis until an English officer turned up and confirmed her story.

After all that… she lived quietly according to the secrecy agreement she had signed, telling no one of her amazing exploits. Only after her death was her story revealed. (Video here.)

On Monday, President Obama signed S. 1067, the “Taliban Disarmament and Afghanistan/Pakistan Recovery Act.” In his Signing Statement, the President said: “The legislation crystallizes the commitment of the United States to help bring an end to the brutality and destruction that have been a hallmark of the Taliban across several countries for two decades, and to pursue a future of greater security and hope for the people of the middle east.”

President Obama added,

The Taliban preys on civilians – killing, raping, and mutilating the people of the middle east; stealing and brutalizing their children; and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Its leadership, indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, has no agenda and no purpose other than its own survival. It fills its ranks of fighters with the young boys and girls it abducts. By any measure, its actions are an affront to human dignity.

Okay, I totally made that up. It was really the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament Act that he signed. The Taliban, he’s looking to cut a deal with.

Crossposted.

I do my fair share of bashing government employees and the government in general. Generalizations are easy when you’re trying to score a political point. But they’re not all porn-surfing SEC staffers. Some sit in offices stateside and quietly save lives:

Best known for: Leading an Army team that developed and fielded state-of-the-art medical evacuation equipment to Iraq and Afghanistan, allowing medics to more safely and efficiently transport injured patients from the battlefield to hospitals. This has significantly increased the survival rate of those wounded by makeshift roadside bombs known as improvised explosive devices.

This means a lot to me, especially because my son in law in currently serving in Iraq as a gunner, escorting convoys targeted by IEDs.