If you’re counting how many generals have become fodder for the Bush administration,
today you need to add another one. But Seymour Hersh talks about a lot more
in his New Yorker piece. For me, it’s what I’ve been writing about for a very
long time. What Donald Rumsfeld did for Mr. Bush is abjectly criminal, but it’s also what the president wanted. They both needed useful partners to get it done. So when
Major General Antonio Taguba reported on Abu Ghraib that was the end for him. However,
it didn’t end what Bush and Rumsfeld had planned.
Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report
appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As
for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the
Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t
see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been
made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime
after January 13th . . . I don’t remember precisely when, but sometime
in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was
proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact
that the President didn’t know, and you didn’t know, and I didn’t
know.“And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press,
and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s
testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if
he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge
was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs
and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously
difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld
is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way
he’s suffering from C.R.S.—Can’t Remember Shit. He’s
trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.”
It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House
appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here
to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba
said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of
the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve
dragged a lot of officers with them.” … ..The
General’s Report
How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of
its casualties
The real problem was never solved. Bush and Rummy continued to do what they
wanted in secret and well beyond Abu Ghraib. It’s why men like Myers, then General Peter Pace were chosen. Ambitious, career military men at the peak of their careers looking for the ultimate perk, with too much to lose to buck their bosses. Men like General Taguba weren’t required, even if what he reported was only the
half of it.
I was told by the former senior intelligence official and a government consultant
that after the existence of secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe was revealed,
in the Washington Post, in late 2005, the Administration responded with a
new detainee center in Mauritania. After a new government friendly to the
U.S. took power, in a bloodless coup d’état in August, 2005,
they said, it was much easier for the intelligence community to mask secret
flights there.“The dirt and secrets are in the back channel,” the former senior
intelligence officer noted. “All this open business—sitting in
staff meetings, etc., etc.—is the Potemkin Village stuff. And the good
guys—like Taguba—are gone.”In some cases, the secret operations remained unaccountable. In an April,
2005, memorandum, a C.I.D. officer—his name was redacted—complained
to C.I.D. headquarters, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, about the impossibility
of investigating military members of a Special Access Program suspected of
prisoner abuse:[C.I.D.] has been unable to thoroughly investigate . . . due to the suspects
and witnesses involvement in Special Access Programs (SAP) and/or the security
classification of the unit they were assigned to during the offense under
investigation. Attempts by Special Agents . . . to be “read on”
to these programs has [sic] been unsuccessful.The C.I.D. officer wrote that “fake names were used” by members
of the task force; he also told investigators that the unit had a “major
computer malfunction which resulted in them losing 70 per cent of their
files; therefore, they can’t find the cases we need to review.”
Seymour Hersh’s piece is important for another reason. It will give you an
idea of what we’re up against on Iraq. Bush has no intention of doing anything
he doesn’t want to do. It’s his presidency, so it’s his country
until January ’09. The rest is just a minor inconvenience. However, one thing is for sure. Bush intends to do everything he can to keep from getting blamed for it. He evidently still believes history will report a different take, so his only hope is to stay in Iraq until the bitter end. And a bitter end it will be.
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