As a person of very mixed faith I read the following article with sort of a sick feeling in my stomach. Apparently, Rumsfeld (remember him?) used to send daily updates to President Bush that were plastered with quotes from the bible:

One showed US troops trudging through the desert under a passage from Isaiah: “Their arrows are sharp, all their bows are strung; their horses’ hoofs seem like flint, their chariot wheels are like a whirlwind.”

Another showed Saddam delivering a speech to camera with these words from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.”

Draper noted that unlike Bush, Rumsfeld did not wear his faith on his sleeve. And he said the use of the biblical passages was the brainchild of a director for intelligence working under the Pentagon chief.

“Still, the sheer cunning of pairing unsentimental intelligence with religious righteousness bore the signature of one man: Donald Rumsfeld,” Draper’s report said.

“At least one Muslim analyst in the (Pentagon) building had been greatly offended,” it said.

“Others privately worried that if these covers were leaked during a war conducted in an Islamic nation, the fallout — as one Pentagon staffer would later say — ‘would be as bad as Abu Ghraib’.”

Now, really–I don’t think that Rumsfeld technically did anything wrong, at least not compared to the other shit he did (advocating torture, starting wars with little rhyme or reason, etc). But on a purely emotional level, I find this news to be reprehensible. It demonstrates to me on the most base level that the wars the U.S. are in right now were not based on what is best for U.S. citizens–but rather instead were based on and justified on the religious beliefs of a few powerful white men that remain completely disconnected from the people they claim to represent.

Does that sound like anybody else to you?
It does to me.

You can see the images of the folders here at GQ