It was bad enough when the Pentagon decided to hide statistics on per-months attacks in Iraq. The government had been publishing the data in publicly-available reports, right up until the numbers became a political embarrassment. Then, all of a sudden, the data was “classified.”
This is just as troubling.
The Defense Department has resisted auditors’ efforts to obtain data on the military readiness of U.S.-trained Iraqi troops, according to a senior government official.
Comptroller General David M. Walker told audience members at a Government Executive breakfast Wednesday that Defense has not complied with repeated Government Accountability Office requests for evaluations of Iraqi troop preparedness, known as transitional readiness assessments. The Pentagon develops those evaluations for Iraqi and U.S. forces, Walker said, and has a statutory obligation to release them to GAO.
“We’ve received high-level briefings that are helpful, but not adequate,” Walker said. He said he has yet to see the requested information, but Defense Deputy Secretary Gordon England has agreed in principle to turn it over.
This is hardly trivia. The whole “they stand up, we’ll stand down” mantra is premised on the notion that U.S.-trained Iraqi troops are prepared, or will be, to provide some semblance of security in Iraq.
And yet, Bush’s Pentagon prefers to sit on these numbers, probably because of political concerns. Put it this way: if the data on the military readiness of the Iraqi troops were impressive, do you suppose the administration would be just as hesitant to shield the numbers from public view?
Walker said he expected to find some embarrassing information that would account for the battle over obtaining them. “You just can’t go by how many people you trained,” he said. “Of the people that you’ve trained, how many are left? To what extent do they have loyalty to the unified government of Iraq? To what extent are they properly equipped? To what extent do they have appropriate support?”
Hmm, sounds like the kind of questions that would be pertinent right now, as Americans and their lawmakers are weighing the benefits of a “new way forward,” don’t you think?
And, of course, it’s also worth noting that this fits in nicely with the administration’s m.o. Using one of my posts from December as a starting point, TPM Muckraker has been building a list of all the instances in which the Bush administration has hidden public information that officials found inconvenient. The list is depressingly long at this point — and we keep finding new additions.
Once again, the administration would rather hide bad news than deal with it.