Rumsfeld needs to go. NOW. Bush needs to show him the door. NOW.
(But that may require pictures showing a President firing someone.)
By Brad Friedman on 5/5/2004, 10:27pm PT  

Reuters reports that Bush has "privately expressed annoyance to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld" over the issue.

"Privately expressed annoyance"?!! And the Understatement of the Year Award goes to...

Bush knew about these reports since at least Mid-January when the military released a statement which was reported briefly in the media --- BUT WITHOUT PICTURES.

"The president was not satisfied with the way he was informed with regard to the pictures, and he let Secretary Rumsfeld know about it too," a senior administration official said. "He believes it's better to make it known privately instead of pointing fingers."

So it was the pictures that disturbs the "President". Not the fact of what actually happened there? Perhaps if our "President" actually read news sources instead of relying on his pals to keep him informed, he would have seen this report from CNN on January 21st of this year, which speaks of:


"...new details from the Army's criminal investigation into reports of abuse of Iraqi detainees, including the location of the suspected crimes and evidence that is being sought."

...

U.S. soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners, a Pentagon official told CNN on Tuesday.

Or this story from The Nation on March 11, which speaks of the Arab Journalist who was arrested and taken to Abu Ghraib:

...he was taken to the military base at Baghdad International Airport, held in a bathroom for two days, then flown hooded and bound to Tikrit. After two more days in another bathroom, he was loaded onto a five-truck convoy of de-tainees and shipped south to Abu Ghraib.

...

he was greeted by US soldiers who sang "Happy Birthday" to him through his tight plastic hood, stripped him naked and addressed him only as "Al Jazeera," "boy" or "bitch." He was forced to stand hooded, bound and naked for eleven hours in the bitter autumn night air; when he fell, soldiers kicked his legs to get him up again. In the morning, Hassan says, he was made to wear a dirty red jumpsuit that was covered with someone else's fresh vomit...

But it's best "not to point fingers" and to "express annoyance privately"?

The point here is not there were a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib. If you bother to read the Taguba Report or pay attention to what's actually being said by the people involved the point is that there are not enough resources, not enough personnel, no planning whatsoever at all for what's going on, and no training whatsoever to execute that non-plan!

It goes all the way up the food chain, folks. If you see this as just "an isolated few incidents" or a "few bad apples" you're kidding yourselves. The way the Bushies still seem to be. There is blame and systematic failure enough to go all the way up the food chain. Unless Bush learns how to take accountability for anything --- that means some of his buddies are gonna have to GO --- then this thing is only gonna get much much darker from here.

We all wondered if he learned his lesson after missing the FBI's impossible to decipher memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." on August 6th of 2001. I guess we can stop wondering.

If it don't come with pictures, in color, he ain't gonna get it.

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