This summer on Saturday, June 5, under drizzle and low gray clouds, people from across the region gathered in Washington D.C. for a national march on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s house. Between one and two thousand people showed for a rally and speeches from noon to 2 p.m. at Lafayette Park , and then marched through residential urban neighborhoods to arrive at Rumsfeld’s house across from the French embassy, and charge Rumsfeld with murder and war crimes.

With the electoral campaign-season focusing voters’ attention on the more beguiling faces of the Bush administration, Rumsfeld is a reminder of Bush’s pro-military, pre-emptive strike policy that dominates today. To highlight this fact, people came from all over the East Coast, including from New Jersey, Maryland, New York, Virginia, and Ohio; while brother and sister rallies also were held simultaneously in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

D.C. keynote speakers included Michael Berg, whose son Nicholas was beheaded by Islamic radicals in a claimed response to the Abu Ghraib prison-torture scandal. Michael Berg blamed the Bush administration for instigating this second Iraq war and for causing what he named a “hate train” to gather speed and run over his son.

Berg cited the late Dr. Martin Luther King as one of America’s greatest inspirational leaders, and called for massive civil disobedience against this administration’s war drive and erosion of civil liberties at home and abroad.

Berg noted how he has received an outpouring of letters, emails, and other sympathetic expressions from various Americans in wake of his son’s death, and that “the people of America and the world have told me that they have a dream of peace, a vision of all nations living together in harmony and in love.”

In addition to Michael Berg, a relative of U.S. soldier Camillo Mejia spoke at Lafayette Park against the war. Camillo Mejia has been sentence to a year in jail by the U.S. military for refusing to re-deploy to Iraq for what he now calls an illegal war .

Since the outbreak of photos of U.S. troops torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, there have been at least four marches on Rumsfeld’s house, says Jim of the D.C. Anti-War Network (DAWN). DAWN organized two of them.

In a world where cause-and-effect is often obfuscated, it can be powerful to bring protests to actual engines of today's news. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is one of the leaders of the Iraq invasion, an invasion that continues to deploy ever-revolving self-justifications as a real-time form of surgical historical revisionism. In addition, Rumsfeld’s long association dating back to the Ford Administration with Vice-President Dick Cheney--the man whose aides helped cultivate pre-war Iraqi ‘intelligence'-- places Rumsfeld at the epicenter of the Iraq invasion and all its abuses. No wonder activists in D.C. have spontaneously marched against him.

In fact, on the eve of the Iraq war during the time when the Bush Administration gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to abdicate, the activist group Code Pink led a march on Donald Rumsfeld’s house, bringing models of coffins to his doorstep. On that day, roughly 500 people vociferously marched up Connecticut Avenue without a permit and exerted their rights to freedom of assembly and speech against police pressure. During the latest march to Rumsfeld’s house on June 5, 2004, Rumsfeld himself was in Bangladesh trying to drum up Bangladeshi troops for the Iraq occupation. There too he was met by protesters.

While Rumsfeld may be the face of callous militarism for many in the world today, this militarism is grounded in very concrete plans by the Bush administration to expand military funding and U.S. military might if re-elected. President Bush’s proposed Defense Department budget for fiscal year 2005 contains a prediction that Defense spending will rise every year through 2009 to hit $467 billion. That’s $66 billion more than $401 billion approved by Congress for fiscal 2004.

To put all this in perspective, President Clinton’s last military budget passed for fiscal 2001 placed Defense Department spending at $291 billion, according to current White House numbers.

Meanwhile, the federal government already is running the largest annual deficits in U.S. history. President Bush’s defense increases, projected over an eight-year term, are on a trajectory to surpass Ronald Reagan’s Cold War build-up.

The All People’s Congress of Baltimore, Maryland, brought 20 people to the rally. Steven Cici, an organizer with All People’s, says the march was both symbolic and concrete, as well as an organizing tool to get more people informed and involved.

Rumsfeld has become the perfect symbol of all that is wrong with this war and the neo-conservative wing ensconced in the Pentagon, says Cici. “Concretely, he is the highest authority in the military and should be fired--at the minimum--with the ultimate goal of bringing the troops home now.”