WP: Capitol Hill Sees the Flip Side of a Powerful Warrior

[kskiska]

Saturday, May 8, 2004; Page A01

Congress saw a new face of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday.

Summoned to Capitol Hill for a bipartisan trip to the woodshed over the Iraq prison abuse crisis, the man who has spoken so often of transforming the world's largest military testified that he has been trying for "days and days and days" to simply get a CD copy of the Abu Ghraib photographs and video -- but has not been able to find one.

"The disc that I saw that had photos on it did not have the videos on it," Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. All the pictures, both stills and video, have been in the hands of military investigators since January, he told Congress. But the secretary has had trouble getting hold of them.

Rumsfeld testified that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, finally saw the stills Thursday night, more than a week after CBS broadcast the first images of U.S. soldiers humiliating and threatening naked Iraqi prisoners.

This image of a powerless secretary unable to summon up a cheap piece of plastic in the face of a "catastrophe," as Rumsfeld described the prison scandal, was a long way from the boldly assured Rumsfeld of a year ago. Back then, during the U.S. military's lightning drive on Baghdad, the civilian architect of two wars in two years described a computerized force in which data leapt from soldier to satellite to smart bomb, in which unimaginable firepower was just a few keystrokes away.

Rumsfeld was a sort of Achilles for the Information Age, and his bold assurance won him a place among People magazine's sexiest humans. President Bush nicknamed him "Rumstud."

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9495-2004May7.html

[markses]

1. How the mighty have fallen

Collector of bad and doubtful debts....

[saigon68]

2. A LITTLE DOSE OF WAR CRIMES GETS YA EVERY TIME

Rumsfeld did not describe the photos, but U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4855930 /

SCREWED IN THE RECTUM WHILE MILTARY GUARDS STOOD AND WATCHED. CHILDREN SCREAMING AS THEY WERE SODOMIZED.

[wellstone_democrat]

3. bullshit Rumsfeld knew long ago and saw it all

I don't believe that for one minute. I also believe that soon we will know that he's been aware of every minute of what is out there. Every minute. This is too big and too politically dangerous not to have full DOD and WH knowledge up and down the line.

bullshit


on edit: fix subject line

[lectrobyte]

4. Haven't see the CD? I guess until he see it, then...

his plausible deniability is maintained. Where have I seen this before? So, I guess where we are on this deja-vu timeline is somewhere around 1973. So that means Bush won't resign until another year and a half.

[teryang]

5. They should call him and Fieth back

...to explain Fieths views on the Geneva conventions as support for terrorism and the use of contractors to kill people with impunity.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x49395

[daleo]

6. This is a revealing quote, the key phrase

"I wish I knew how you reach down into a criminal investigation when . . . it turns out to be something that is radioactive, something that has strategic impact in the world," Rumsfeld said, with unfamiliar helplessness. "We don't have those procedures. They've never been designed. We're functioning in a -- with peacetime constraints,with legal requirements, in a wartime situation, in the Information Age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had -- they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."

Rummy isn't upset about what happened, just at the fact the pictures have gotten out, and there are still "legal requirements" and "peacetime constraints" that prevent him and the administration from preventing it.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

7. What happened to us being "at war" The people we are holding

for no good reason were told by the Supreme Court last week that we were a nation at war.

So, we are at war, but Rummy is not?

So is * a wartime president?

[jdj]

8. This is why I am not jumping on the lynch the six

bandwagon.

Because it was an enlisted person, or several who brought this story to the light of day.

Meanwhile all the higher-ups stood by and did nothing, and were it up to them the world would never have known. And now that they are caught they are whining about geneva conventions and how constrained they are and were.

They make me sick with all their apologies and protestations of disgust,etc. They are not sorry this happened, they are only sorry they got caught.