More on Abu Ghraib

Read "The General’s Report: How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties" by Seymore Hersh in The New Yorker, June 21, 2007.

The article paints the government as a murky place in which

• people give deliberately unclear statements and orders in order to maintain the ability to deny involvement in doggy decisions,
  
• people obfuscate and lie to cover up what they have done, and
  
• those few who seek out and tell the truth are punished for doing so.

That is not a good environment for decision making in my book!

With regard to what the Secretary Rumsfeld knew about the abuses at Abu Ghraib and when he new it, Hersh says:

Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld’s office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint. On January 13, 2004, a military policeman named Joseph Darby gave the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D.) a CD full of images of abuse. Two days later, General Craddock and Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, the director of the Joint Staff of the J.C.S., were e-mailed a summary of the abuses depicted on the CD. It said that approximately ten soldiers were shown, involved in acts that included:

Having male detainees pose nude while female guards pointed at their genitals; having female detainees exposing themselves to the guards; having detainees perform indecent acts with each other; and guards physically assaulting detainees by beating and dragging them with choker chains.

I note specifically about the President:

Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career.

But this quote from the book by L. Paul Bremer III where he is talking about January 16, 2004:

I made my way across the alley from the West Wing to the third floor of the Executive Office Building, where Vice President Cheney provided me an office. Dan Senor greeted me with the news that he'd just learned that a "terrible story" was about to break in Baghdad......

That afternoon in an Oval Office meeting on Iraq, the issue of the MP's alleged mistreatment of detainees came up.

The president leaned forward in his chair, his face solemn.

General Pete Pace gave a brief description of the story, stating that we did not have all the details.

Bush shook his head in anger. "I hope they find every last guilty person," he said, looking at the group. "We've got to punish them as soon as possible. I want them out of Iraq and in jail, ASAP." Again, he shook his head. "I want everybody to take a very hard press line on this."

Does anyone believe that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed Abu Ghraib with the President in the White House at a time that Secretary Rumsfeld did not know about the problem or did not know that it was serious?