Amidst the spirited discussion here and elsewhere about Wikileaks, you might have missed the fact that Donald Rumsfeld set up a web site (rumsfeld.com) with hundreds of “declassified or previously unreleased documents” to accompany his new book. (Rumsfeld compared his “archive” to a sort of legitimate version of Wikileaks.) Rumsfeld didn’t have to go through that pesky FOIA process to get or release those documents either. (See: Rumsfeld’s Snowflake, “Subject:Porpoises” and Rumsfeld Memoir Highlights VIP Access to Government Files).
Now, here is more news:
John Cook at Gawker has posted a collection of documents that Donald Rumsfeld neglected to include in his archival Rumsfeld Papers website that accompanied the publication of his recent memoir. Cook and company obtained the documents by sending a FOIA request to the Defense Department for all the records that Rumsfeld had requested and previously obtained from DOD via FOIA. The result was many documents that did not make their way into Rumsfeld’s online collection. The documents (available in their entirety here) portray Rumsfeld “curious to know what the rush is” in bringing enemy combatant and U.S. Citizen John Walker Lindh to a speedy trial, interested in rationalizing why administration policies toward detainees was “perfectly legal, proper, and historically correct,” and emphasizing that administration officials continued “referring to our ‘plan’.”
—FRINFORMSUM: 2/24/2011, Unredacted, by Seth Maddox.
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