Thanks to arrogant, inept and weak leadership by George Bush we have this. Of course Bush is going to do like he always does and pass the buck instead of standing up like a man and taking responsibility. Remember when he was running for office and saying he was going to RESTORE responsibility to the White House. Well, here's an example of what he's providing to our military.


May 11, 2004
General Blames Command and Training Lapses for Prison Abuse
By KIRK SEMPLE

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, the Army general who wrote the report detailing abuses of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers, told a Senate panel today that rampant failures of leadership, training and discipline led to the violations at Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.

He said leadership failures could be traced as high as the brigade commander: Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which oversaw the prison during the time the abuses were committed.

"Failure in leadership from the brigade commander on down, lack of discipline, no training whatsoever, and no supervision" were at the root of the problems, General Taguba said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee as part of the continuing congressional inquiry into the scandal.

General Karpinski has said that she knew nothing about the abuse until weeks after it occurred and that the prison cellblock where the mistreatment occurred was under the tight control of Army military intelligence officers who may have encouraged it. She has said that she was excluded from areas of the prison where some of the abuses occurred, a claim that General Taguba said was "hard for me to believe."

But General Taguba said that he did not conduct his investigation any higher in the chain of command than General Karpinski, leaving open the possibility that responsibility for the failure in leadership went higher than General Karpinski.

General Taguba was one of the leadoff witnesses in a day of hearings before the committee and was accompanied by two other Pentagon officials, including Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, and Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of Centcom.

The hearings come a day after President Bush robustly defended Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld in comments seemingly intended to dispel speculation that he would seek Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation.

In a "town hall" meeting at the Pentagon, which was originally scheduled for Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to update Pentagon workers about Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld first addressed the prison scandal.

"It is a body blow when we find that we have, as we have just within the last — what — week or seven days, a few who have betrayed our values by their conduct," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "Pete Pace can tell you the look on the faces of the people who have viewed the photographs and the videos from what took place there, they were stunned — absolutely stunned that any Americans wearing a uniform could do what they did. We are heartsick at what they did, for the people they did it to. We are heartsick for the really well-earned reputation as a force for good in the world that all of us, military, civilians and those Americans who support us will pay."

Before the Senate panel, General Taguba testified that in his investigation, he never found any evidence that the abusive techniques were part of military policy.

"I think it was a matter of soldiers with their interaction with military intelligence personnel who they perceived or thought to be competent authority," the general said. Some guards have said they had been asked by intelligence officers to rough up the prisoners to help along the interrogations. General Taguba said the guards "were probably influenced by others but not necessarily directed by others."

As in last Friday's questioning of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, most of the Senators on the committee roundly condemned the prisoner abuse. But one committee member, Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma, lashed out at the outrage itself.

"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," he said. While saying a few "misguided" and "maybe even perverted" perpetrators of abuse needed to be punished, he suggested that much of the criticism was exaggerated and misplaced.

"These prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents," he said. "Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."

He went on: "I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons, looking for human rights violations while our troops, our heros, are fighting and dying."

In an exchange with Senator Carl Levin, Democrat from Michigan, Mr. Cambone said that he believed there were different guidelines for the interrogation of prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq.

He also said that it had been decided from the beginning that the rules of the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners would be followed in Iraq.

Senator Levin responded: "And yet Secretary Rumsfeld repeatedly has made a distinction between whether or not those Geneva Convention rules must be applied to the people — prisoners — will be treated `pursuant to those rules or consistent to those rules,' and he said, and this was a few days ago, that the Geneva Convention did not apply `precisely.' "

He added: "You this morning said again that the Geneva Convention applies to our activities in Iraq. But not precisely?"

Mr. Cambone, pressed by Senator Levin, said the convention guidelines applied in Iraq.

"Precisely?" Senator Levin asked again.

"Precisely," Mr. Cambone said. "They do not apply in the precise way the Secretary was talking about, in Guantánamo and the unlawful combatants there — "

The senator, saying "Let me cut you off," said Mr. Rumsfeld's remarks in a May 5 interview applied to Iraq, not Guantánamo.

Asked if he was saying that Mr. Rumsfeld misspoke, Mr. Cambone said he could not speak for the secretary.

On Monday, in appearing alongside Mr. Rumsfeld and other cabinet and military officials, Mr. Bush sought to convey a sense of unity in the administration as it tries to manage a controversy that has sparked outrage both home and abroad, and has undermined the White House's effort to spread democracy to Iraq.

Also on Monday, the Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan resolution condemning the prisoner abuse and calling for a full investigation and accounting of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.

In General Taguba's report, which was completed in March and publicly revealed about two weeks ago, he cited the "systematic and illegal abuses of detainees," and said that between October and December 2003, "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees."

The White House, the Pentagon and Congress have been grappling with whether and how to release more pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused by American soldiers.

Some of the president's political and communications advisers are advocating the quick release of images to avoid a slow trickle of the images to the news media over a period of weeks or months.

Officials say they are weighing issues including the effect of any release on pending criminal inquiries and the privacy of people shown in the images, some of which, government officials said, show American soldiers having sex with one another.

Separately, the Pentagon and Congressional leaders continued to negotiate ways to allow lawmakers to view the images in the absence of a public release.

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, a Virginia Republican, asked the Pentagon to hold off on delivering the classified material until legal questions are answered on how it could affect criminal investigations, privacy protections and other issues, his spokesman said.

General Taguba, who was born in 1950 in Manila, is deputy commanding general of the Third Army and of the Coalition Forces Land Component Command in Kuwait, a post he took up last July.

The Pentagon announced Friday that he would soon take a new post in Washington as a deputy assistant secretary for reserve affairs, a move that in Army culture is not seen as a major promotion.

General Taguba was appointed on Jan. 31 to conduct what was then described as "an informal investigation" in detention and internment operations by the 800th Military Police Brigade, focusing in particular on "allegations of maltreatment" at Abu Ghraib prison.

General Taguba's team spent about a month gathering evidence and completing its report, and presented its confidential findings on March 3, the report says.

Under the scope set by his superiors, the inquiry was limited to the conduct of a military police brigade. But General Taguba used it to deliver a much broader indictment.

Among the findings laid out in the report was what General Taguba described as his strong suspicion that military intelligence officers and private contractors "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses."

Carla Baranauckas and Terence Neilan contributed reporting for this article.




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