[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 8984]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




        CALLING FOR THE RESIGNATION OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney 
has told the Nation that people ought to get off Secretary Rumsfeld's 
case and let him do his job. President Bush has called him ``really 
good'' and ``superb'' in the last week alone.
  There are many reasons why Mr. Rumsfeld should resign from his 
position as Secretary of Defense. It is not just because he engaged in 
a cover-up in keeping the atrocities at the Abu Ghraib Prison from the 
Congress of the United States when he had full knowledge about it, but 
it is also his incompetency to appreciate and understand the political 
firestorm that would be set off across the Islamic and Arab world by 
the humiliation that was taking place, or even the suffering and the 
humiliation that Americans would feel when they saw these out-of-
control soldiers engaging in that conduct.
  But it is also because he is reigning over the most incompetent and 
mismanaged occupation of the country of Iraq, because his arrogance 
would not allow him to pay attention to those prestigious institutions 
and people who had actual experience in peacekeeping and restoring 
democracy to countries, who had done it without taking casualties of 
American soldiers. They pushed ahead with an inadequate number of 
resources in terms of soldiers and equipment; they pushed ahead with 
inadequate resources in terms of paying for this, and for the force 
protection, his number one responsibility, the force protection of our 
soldiers.
  Because of his actions and because of his rush to war, as the 
Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff study tells us in Lessons Learned, they 
failed to provide for the protection of these soldiers. More recently, 
that failure has been translated by the Pentagon to say because of 
improper equipment for the personal protection of soldiers, because of 
the improper kind of mix of equipment in terms of non-armored Humvees, 
one out of four of the casualties was unnecessary, had we been properly 
prepared with the proper equipment, the training, for our soldiers. One 
out of four of the casualties was unnecessary, according to the 
Pentagon, another reason why Secretary Rumsfeld should resign.

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