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The Pentagon said Monday it no longer includes a Bible quote on the cover page of daily intelligence briefings it sends to the White House as was practice during the Bush administration. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he did not know how long the Worldwide Intelligence Update cover sheets quoted from the Bible. Air Force Maj. Gen. Glen Shaffer, who was responsible for including them, retired in August 2003, according to his biography. For a period in 2003, at least, the daily reports prepared for President George W. Bush carried quotes from the books of Psalms and Ephesians and the...

The fight over national security increasingly threatens to drag the United States into a political civil war that could also fracture Barack Obama's political base. It is turning the President's own Democratic allies into potential enemies, while undermining his domestic priorities in health care and energy reform. Yesterday, New York Times columnist Frank Rich pointed all eyes to the website of Gentleman's Quarterly, which has posted a series of cover sheets to ultra-top-secret intelligence updates that former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to prepare daily for former president George W. Bush. It turns out that the cover sheets routinely showed...

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld routinely used militaristic passages from the Bible on the cover pages of White House intelligence documents, according to new revelations by GQ magazine. It said Rumsfeld displayed the passages over photographs of US forces in Iraq to curry favor with then president George W. Bush, despite concerns about the incendiary impact on the Islamic world if they were ever made public. One republished on the GQ website came from March 31, 2003, showing a US tank roaring through the desert about 10 days after the United States invaded Iraq to topple the regime of Saddam...

A series of cover sheets for intelligence reports written for Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials during the early days of the war in Iraq in 2003 were adorned with biblical quotations, and appeared Sunday, six years later, on the Web site of GQ magazine. The daily briefings were called the “Worldwide Intelligence Update,” one of several intelligence reports compiled overnight and presented in a folder for Mr. Rumsfeld and other officials as they came to work. In the selection of the cover sheets that GQ placed on its Web site, photographs of soldiers praying...

These days, political memoirs come in three genres. First, the "everyone around me was an idiot or a crook, but I was a really smart good guy." Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's What Happened perfected the genre, assuring him the place in history previously occupied by Baron Munchausen. The second borrows a line from the great Toby Keith, converting "I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then" from lyric to prose. Former CIA director George Tenet's At the Center of the Storm will, for many a year, be foremost in that category. The last is...

Presidential campaigns are so much about posturing that it's easy to miss what's really going on. Take national security policy. John McCain and Barack Obama want you to think they represent diametrically opposed approaches to national security, when in fact they have quite similar views. And one of the things they have in common is that neither of them wants you to realize they see future security challenges pretty much the same way Donald Rumsfeld did. To prove that point, let's take a little stroll down memory lane. Nine years ago this month, presidential candidate George W. Bush gave the...

May 10, 2008, 8:30 a.m. Warring HistoryRethinking the Iraq critics. By Michael Barone In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we’ve learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists only could guess at what was going on behind the scenes. Today we’re only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes in...

During his tenure as President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld often likened the administration's foreign policy decisions to those of the Truman administration during the first years of the Cold War. As President George W. Bush makes his way to Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states with a stated agenda of advancing the goal of Palestinian statehood, it is worth examining president Truman's achievements and comparing them with those of President Bush. ...The Defense Department's decision last week to sack Stephen Coughlin, the only expert on Islamic law in the Pentagon's joint staff,...

Today the people of Venezuela face a constitutional referendum, which, if passed, could obliterate the few remaining vestiges of Venezuelan democracy. The world is saying little and doing less as President Hugo Chávez dismantles Venezuela's constitution, silences its independent media and confiscates private property. --snip--With diplomatic, economic and communications institutions designed for a different era, the free world has too few tools to help prevent Venezuela's once vibrant democracy from receding into dictatorship. But such a tragedy is not preordained. In fact, we face a moment when swift decisions by the United States and like-thinking nations could dramatically help, supporting...

Editor’s Note: Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld received the 2007 Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award in honor of Sir Winston S. Churchill on November 17, 2007, and delivered the following remarks (as released by the secretary, exclusively to National Review Online). This past year has certainly provided ample entertainment for those interested in politics. The activities of Congress and the unexpected blessing of an extra year of presidential campaigning fill our newspapers, televisions, and blogs. The problem is that this entertainment tends to focus on the petty and the personal, and seems to avoid a serious discussion of the emerging...

Marine Captain Duncan D. Hunter, who's running in next year's GOP primary to replace his father Duncan L. Hunter in Congress, has picked up some heavyweight financial support from none other than Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary forced from office after years of dismal news out of Iraq. Now working as a "business consultant" in Saint Michaels, Maryland, according to a campaign-disclosure filing, Rumsfeld gave the maximum $2300 contribution on September 30 to the younger Hunter, who is conducting a remote campaign from Afghanistan, where he is serving his third Middle East tour of duty. The elder Hunter was...

The private plane about to deliver Rummy and Mrs. Rummy to their getaway in Taos, New Mexico, is idling on the tarmac at Dulles when the Secretary arrives. He enters smiling, beaming, swaggering, a compact little 75-year-old package of waning testosterone, dressed in real-man-headed-to-his-ranch khaki, two dachshunds (names: Reggie and Chester) yapping at his loafers, classy, no-nonsense wife of fifty-two years Velcroed to his side. In other words, the perfect tableau of a Bush-administration official—except, of course, that he no longer is and has chosen this outing to talk at length for the first time since he was rudely banished...

Rumsfeld Calls Afghanistan 'Big Success' By RICHARD PYLE NEW YORK (AP) — In an interview billed as his first since leaving the top Pentagon post, Donald Rumsfeld calls Afghanistan "a big success," but says U.S. efforts in Iraq are hampered by the failure of Iraq's government to establish a foundation for democracy. "In Afghanistan, 28 million people are free. They have their own president, they have their own parliament. Improved a lot on the streets," Rumsfeld says in the October issue of GQ magazine. While "that's been a big success," he said, the Baghdad regime "has not been able to...

Much of what you know about Donald Rumsfeld is wrong. I know, because I worked intimately with him for four years, from the summer of 2001 until I left the Pentagon in August 2005. Through countless meetings and private conversations, I came to learn his traits, frame of mind and principles ? characteristics wholly at odds with the standard public depiction of Rumsfeld, particularly now that he has stepped down after a long, turbulent tenure as defense secretary, a casualty of our toxic political climate. I want to set the record straight: Don Rumsfeld is not an ideologue. He did...

WASHINGTON --Under that famously self-confident exterior is a president who weeps - a lot. President Bush told the author of a new book on his presidency that "I try not to wear my worries on my sleeve" or show anything less than steadfastness in public, especially in a time of war. "I fully understand that the enemy watches me, the Iraqis are watching me, the troops watch me, and the people watch me," he said. Yet, he said, "I do tears." "I've got God's shoulder to cry on. And I cry a lot. I do a lot of crying in...

Rumsfeld Is Setting Up a Foundation AP WASHINGTON (AP) - Now that he's out of government, former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is setting up a foundation to attract others to public service. ''His whole focus is getting this foundation organized,'' said Lawrence Di Rita, once Rumsfeld's spokesman at the Pentagon and still authorized to speak for him. ''He's deep into that.'' While Rumsfeld did stints as an investment banker and pharmaceutical executive, the 75-year-old Republican spent most of his life in public service, including two separate tours as defense secretary, four terms representing Illinois in the House of Representatives...

TAOS— This small mountain town is known for leaving its celebrities alone. That's why Julia Roberts can shop for yarn at La Lana Wools and Anthony Hopkins (aka Hannibal Lecter) can thumb through the pages at Brodsky Bookshop undisturbed. But Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense? That's a different story. While living in Taos, Rumsfeld has suffered a number of public indignities, from being burned in effigy to being refused a hot chocolate by a bartender. But last week's description of a verbal fracas aimed at Rumsfeld by writer Jeff Conant, posted on an Internet political newsletter at www.counterpunch.org, may...

The commander in chief and the U.S. armed forces joined to bid farewell yesterday to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with a precision-timed 60 minutes of laudatory speeches, honor guard spit and polish and patriotic music... The record of Don Rumsfeld's tenure is clear," Mr. Bush said. "There has been more profound change at the Department of Defense over the past six years than at any time since the department's creation in the late 1940s. And these changes were not easy." It was the president who ended Mr. Rumsfeld's six-year tenure prematurely over the bogged-down war in Iraq. Mr. Bush,...

I would like to say I am sorry for the recent remarks I have made concerning President Bush. I was immature and have not responded well to the recent election. I was especially upset when Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld resigned the day after the election. I still think it could have been handled better. However, when I watched his Townhall meeting last Friday with the Pentagon troops, I came to some conclusions. Rummy did not appear or sound bitter. I realized this man has been around the Washington scene for so long, he knows how the game is played. There...

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