10/3/07: Donald Rumsfeld, the war criminal who presided over the invasion and occupation of Iraq until his resignation last year, was recently given a one-year appointment as Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Stanford University’s Hoover Institute on a task force on terrorism and ideology. Stanford University faculty and students have not been quiet about Rumsfeld coming to their campus.
Professor Pamela Lee immediately started an online petition from faculty members opposing Rumsfeld’s appointment, which now has 3,500 signatures, including from 300 faculty members in diverse disciplines. The petition reads:
We view the appointment as fundamentally incompatible with the ethical values of truthfulness, tolerance, disinterested inquiry, respect for national and international laws, and care for the opinions, property and lives of others to which Stanford is inalienably committed.
CNN News quoted Dr. Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology, describing why so many at Stanford opposed Rumsfeld’s appointment:
Many of us believe that Donald Rumsfeld, in his role as secretary of defense, has behaved in ways that are dishonorable, disgraceful and always disingenuous. Rumsfeld authorized a list of interrogation methods that violated the Geneva Convention and the Convention against Torture used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay … and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison.
One student, Sam Dubal, who created a Facebook group called “Rumsfeld — You Are Not Welcome at Stanford!”, hit the nail on the head when he told CNN News, “He’s a war criminal.”
This resistance to Rumsfeld’s appointment at Stanford is exactly what needs to happen at every college campus when current or former Bush administration officials show up to speak, or worse yet are given appointments.
When Bush attempted to visit the Hoover Institute in April, 2006, he couldn’t make his way there because students came out to protest in the largest protest on campus in recent years (click here to read report).