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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The information blackout extends to other aspects of the Abu Ghraib issue. Defense Department officials turned over to Congress Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's report on prisoner abuse in Iraq only after it had been posted all over the Internet. Days later they passed along the 6,000 pages of annexes backing up the report, but, according to one Capitol Hill staffer who has seen the annexes, the new material is incomplete. Some sections have cover pages, the staffer said, but nothing else. Notably, the enclosures to the statements of Col. Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which was at Abu Ghraib, are among the crucial missing items.
Sen. Mark Dayton, a Minnesota Democrat who sits on the Armed Services Committee, recalled how until last month, members would receive regular briefings, all with the same message: Iraq was 95 percent pacified and the situation was improving. "Right now with the prison abuses, we're getting something along the same lines," Dayton said, that is: "This is one prison, a few incidents, caused by a few bad apples who weren't following all the procedures, regulations and instructions that have been handed down from above. No one else knew about it, they should be punished, end of story. The Red Cross indicates, having visited 14 prisons, that it was far more widespread."
He added: The Pentagon has "been minimally responsive to Congress -- and only under duress and out of absolute necessity -- from the very beginning, although I question the accuracy of enough of the information that we have received that I'm not sure whether [this] information is better than no information."
Dayton is not alone in that view. "We have been treated as at best an inconvenience that they can avoid and deal with as they choose, and at worst we have been treated as though we are asking questions that are unpatriotic or causing problems for them," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a California Democrat who sits on the House Armed Services Committee.
One Republican Senate staffer, speaking on condition of anonymity, sarcastically echoed one of Secretary Rumsfeld's famous maxims when asked about how forthcoming the Pentagon has been with information. "We don't know what we don't know," the staffer said, adding, "The truth is that no one up here really knows what our overall strategy is, either politically or militarily, there. We find out in the newspapers."
