U.S. accused of Kidnappings in Iraq
From Salon News
Excerpt: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has until 5 p.m. Friday to hand over a raft of documents to Congress that might shed new light on detainee abuse in Iraq. The documents could substantiate little-known allegations that U.S. forces have tried to break terror suspects by kidnapping and mistreating their family members.

It now appears that kidnapping, scarcely covered by the media, and absent in the major military investigations of detainee abuse, may have been systematically employed by U.S. troops. Salon has obtained Army documents that show several cases where U.S. forces abducted terror suspects’ families. After he was thrown in prison, Cpl. Charles Graner, the alleged ringleader at Abu Ghraib, told investigators the military routinely kidnapped family members to force suspects to turn themselves in.

A House subcommittee led by Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays took the unusual step last month of issuing Rumsfeld a subpoena for the documents after months of stonewalling by the Pentagon. Shays had requested the documents in a March 7 letter. "There was no response" to the letter, a frustrated Shays told Salon. "We are not going to back off this."

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Labels: iraq, prisoner, rumsfeld

Rumsfeld Stands to Make Fortune from Bird Flu
From CNN Money
Excerpt: The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it's proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that's now the most-sought after drug in the world.
Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.
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Labels: bird flu, health, rumsfeld, science

The Two Faces of Rumsfeld
2000: director of a company which wins $200m contract to sell nuclear reactors to North Korea
2002: declares North Korea a terrorist state, part of the axis of evil and a target for regime change
Guardian (UK)

Labels: contractors, rumsfeld

Rumsfeld and Cheney in 1975 Cover-up
Scientist's death Haunts Family
From the San Jose Mercury-News
Excerpt: The death in 1953 of a government scientist, Frank Olson, in a fall from a New York hotel window, is one of the most notorious cases in CIA history. Only in 1975 did Olson's family learn that the CIA had slipped LSD into his drink, days before his death. President Ford apologized for an experiment gone awry, and promised that the government would reveal everything about the case. But newly obtained documents show that the Ford administration continued to conceal information about Olson -- particularly his role in some of the CIA's most controversial research of the Cold War, on anthrax and other biological weapons.
The documents show that two of the key officials involved in the decision to withhold that information were White House aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, today the nation's vice president and secretary of defense. ``These documents show the lengths to which the government was trying to cover up the truth,'' said the scientist's son, Eric Olson, who gave them to the Mercury News. ``For 22 years there was a coverup. And then, under the guise of revealing everything, there was a new coverup.''...

Labels: rumsfeld

Rumsfeld sold up to $91 million in shares comply with ethics
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Excerpts: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sold up to $91 million in stock and partnership shares last year to comply with government ethics rules, according to his financial disclosure statement released Tuesday. Rumsfeld complained in a letter to the Office of Government Ethics that the disclosure form is "excessively complex and confusing" and cost him more than $60,000 in accountants' fees to compile.
Rumsfeld, who also was defense secretary under President Gerald Ford, spent more than 20 years as an executive at several large corporations before returning to government service. Among his largest holdings were stakes in the computer graphics chip maker Nvidia, where he was a business adviser, and Gilead Sciences, a drug company where he was chairman of the board until coming to head the Pentagon.

Labels: rumsfeld