Last week Think Progress
highlighted a portion of
this self serving interview.
The SecDef Def-ed himself for the audience of 32%ers who tune into
Bill Cunningham's radio show-
"Of course the implication that there was something wrong with the war plan is amusing almost because of the fact that the war plan's fashioned by the combatant commanders and it's reviewed in great detail by the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then it's recommended to me and the President......But I guess everyone's got their right to say what they think."
Gee. Thanks. Here's what I think: Alone -all by itself- the FACT that you visited an invading force into the city of Baghdad with commanders who did not know where journalists were CERTAIN to be located should have done you in. That should have been one of the very first congressional investigations. Alone, it is evidence of sheer, deadly, how-does-he-dress-himself incompetence.
http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr.nyud.net:8090/photo/42006/m41083.jpgToday's
LATOn the morning of April 8, 2003, nearly 100 reporters and cameramen were in their second day of covering the firefight from balconies at the Palestine, on the east bank of the Tigris. They felt reasonably safe, assuming American soldiers on the west bank knew the hotel was the main base of operations for the foreign news media in Baghdad.
The soldiers, locked in battle and cut off from news reports for the previous three weeks, had never heard of the Palestine Hotel....
The balcony was about a mile away — too far, Gibson said, for the soldiers to see the "Palestine Hotel" lettering on the building through the smoke of the battle. The brigade commander, Col. David Perkins, had been trying to identify the Palestine that morning — both before and after it was hit. His men had requested an airstrike against an east bank building, about a mile from the Palestine, from which gunmen had been firing on the tanks. An embedded American TV reporter warned Perkins that the Palestine was on the east bank.
Two journalists dead.
If only there had been
resources for some sort of equipment that could
identify locations a mile away.
Capt. Phillip Wolford, the Assassin commander who gave Gibson permission to fire, was awarded a Silver Star and promoted to major. He is in Kuwait training U.S. soldiers bound for Iraq. The Palestine incident "stays in the back of my mind … still there, lingering," he said.
...
Perkins, who also earned a Silver Star and now trains multinational forces in Germany, said he often cited the Palestine incident to emphasize the consequences of decisions commanders make in the heat of combat.
"You give orders to people and your actions result in a lot of people dying. We are responsible for people getting killed," Perkins said.
Ok. Those guys have to live with what they did, and that's a burden to be sure. I certainly don't believe it was intentional. But when a hundred journalists are fired on in a hotel recognized by millions of their audience around the world, something is very, very wrong. At the top. Isn't that just about enough evidence of incompetence, negligence, and lack of planning for one guy to lose his job? How could the broader media have just accepted this? Isn't that enough?
Maybe I should consider myself blessed to have lived through a time when. I believe, this would have risen to the level of an international incident over which heads would have rolled.
Those days are gone. And it's not "almost amusing" at all.