Did Bible quotes adorn Pentagon briefings during the Iraq war?

By DAVID E. SANGER, New York Times

Last update: May 17, 2009 - 9:36 PM

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WASHINGTON - A series of cover sheets for intelligence reports written for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and senior Pentagon officials during the early days of the Iraq war in 2003 were adorned with biblical quotations and appeared Sunday, six years later, on the website of GQ magazine.

The daily briefings were called the "Worldwide Intelligence Update," one of several intelligence reports compiled overnight and presented to Rumsfeld and other officials.

In one cover sheet posted on GQ's website, a photograph of a tank at sunset was overlaid with a quotation from Ephesians: "Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand."

The accompanying GQ article, written by Robert Draper, the author of a recent book about President George W. Bush, suggested that Rumsfeld often hand-delivered the briefings to the White House. But several former officials said Sunday that they doubted that Bush regularly saw the briefings, which were considered less sensitive than the intelligence assessments prepared for the president every morning.

Lawrence Di Rita, the former Pentagon spokesman under Rumsfeld, said that he had no recollection of the biblical briefs but doubted that the famously acerbic Rumsfeld would have tolerated them, much less shared them with Bush.

"The suggestion that Rumsfeld would have used these reports to somehow curry favor over at the White House is pretty laughable," Di Rita said. "He bristled anytime people put quotes or something extraneous on the reports he wanted to read."

Rumsfeld's reputation was as a strong ideologue, but not as someone motivated by religious convictions.

The GQ article said the cover sheets were thought up by a general on the Joint Staff.

The article said some Pentagon officials were concerned that, if the cover sheets were ever leaked, they could be interpreted as a suggestion that the war was religiously driven, a battle against Islam. But those officials were not named in the article, and a number of former Pentagon officials interviewed Sunday said they had no memory of seeing the quotations.

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