An Inspirational Story

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was an inspirational man, a man who rallied and encouraged a brain-damaged war President through an illegal, ill-advised war with a country innocent of any wrongdoing against American interests by spicing up Bush's war briefings with Biblical scripture. Yes, Rummy was a man who inspired countless numbers of people but from where did Rummy get his inspiration?

The KGB. Because, according to ABC News (tip o' the tinfoil hat to A Tiny Revolution by way of Crooks and Liars), Rumsfeld in 2005 visited Vilnius, Lithuania where the CIA just happened to build a torture palace in place of a riding academy.

Rummy said after his visit,

I also had the chance to spend an enjoyable and educational Sunday morning walking through your historic, old town district and visiting the KGB museum. The museum was a stark reminder of the importance of preserving our liberty at all costs...

Dog whistle for, "We can learn a lot from the most brutal secret police organization in world history and put a bright, clean face on torture by doing so in the interests of American freedom."

No doubt, this is very much what Rummy's desk looked like at the Pentagon, except Pravda would've been replaced with the National Review.

How inspiring to the rest of us when an inspirational man such as Rummy gets inspired by the most brutal thugs in all of Eastern Europe, that he could consider such a tour as not only educational but "enjoyable."

In 2006 in his A Question of Torture, CIA critic Alfred McCoy drew a direct connection between the CIA's methods of torture and that used by the KGB, the secret police of a regime that was hypocritically reviled by the very same type of Republicans who would embrace their torture methods (McCoy has been such a gadfly to the CIA that they'd even tried to suppress publication of one of his expose books.).

So McCoy's persuasive proof that we'd derived inspiration from the KGB (as well as the Koreans and Red Chinese) in our methods of torture is not news (or underreported news) but I've never actually seen proof that any high ranking government official has openly embraced such methods as "enjoyable" and "educational." No doubt his old buddy Cheney, had he been there, would've spooged in his pants.