Get Your Blog Up

“This administration is populated by people who’ve spent their careers bashing government. They’re not just small-government conservatives—they’re Grover Norquist, strangle-it-in-the-bathtub conservatives. It’s a cognitive disconnect for them to be able to do something well in an arena that they have so derided and reviled all these years.”

Senator Hillary Clinton

Saturday, August 28, 2004

Is there a movie version?

Our Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld apparently doesn't read reports on things in his control:
In his first comments on the two major investigative reports issued this week at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld incorrectly described one of the reports' central findings about the U.S. military's treatment of Iraqi prisoners by saying there was no evidence that prisoners had been abused during interrogations.

The reports, one by a panel Rumsfeld had appointed and one by three Army generals, made clear that some abuses occurred during interrogations, that others were intended to "soften up" prisoners who were to be questioned, and that many intelligence personnel involved in the interrogations were implicated in the abuses. The reports were issued Tuesday and Wednesday.

But on Thursday, in an interview with a radio station in Phoenix, Rumsfeld, who was traveling outside Washington this week, said, "I have not seen anything thus far that says that the people abused were abused in the process of interrogating them or for interrogation purposes." Rumsfeld repeated the assertion a few hours later at a news conference there, adding that "all of the press, all of the television thus far that tried to link the abuse that took place to interrogation techniques in Iraq has not yet been demonstrated."

After an aide slipped him a note during the news conference, however, Rumsfeld corrected himself, noting that the inquiry by three Army generals had, in fact, found "two or three" cases of abuse during interrogations or the interrogation process.

In fact, the Army inquiry found that 13 of 44 instances of abuse involved interrogations or the interrogation process, an Army spokeswoman said. The report itself explicitly describes the extent to which each abuse involved interrogations.

You would think something so important, something that implicates Rummy himself would have caught his eye, or at least garnered a cheat sheet from an aide. I mean before he "misspoke" a few times. I guess that's why I wasn't chosen for SOD.