Republican competence has been a myth for far too long. Josh Marshall did a fine job debunking it a couple of years ago, but new examples that undermine the myth, particularly as it relates to the Bush White House, just keep coming.
For example, a competent presidential administration would probably be able to find thousands of missing pages of a critically important military report that Congress wants to see. This administration, however, can’t.
The Pentagon has also not turned over to the Senate the full report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who conducted the Army’s biggest investigation so far into abuses at Abu Ghraib. The Pentagon has still not accounted for the 2,000 pages missing from his 6,000-page file when it was given to the Senate Armed Services Committee more than a month ago; the missing pages include draft documents on interrogation techniques for Iraq. The committee’s chairman, Senator John Warner, said last week that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had assured him that he was working on the problem. Mr. Warner’s faith seems deeply misplaced.
And a competent presidential administration would probably have created a plan to deal with hundreds of detainees who’ve been held without access to the judicial system. But not this administration.
Now, after being handed the losses, the administration has been left to scramble to develop a strategy for granting hearings to detainees without having to cope with an unwieldy series of lawsuits throughout the nation.
“They didn’t really have a specific plan for what to do, case by case, if we lost,” a senior Department of Defense official said on condition of anonymity. “The Justice Department didn’t have a plan. State didn’t have a plan. This wasn’t a unilateral mistake on Department of Defense’s part. It’s astounding to me that these cases have been pending for so long and nobody came up with a contingency plan.”
And, as long as we’re on the subject, a competent presidential administration would probably have a Justice Department with accessible computer databases. But these guys…
The Bush administration is offering a novel reason for denying a request seeking the Justice Department’s database on foreign lobbyists: Copying the information would bring down the computer system.
“Implementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating,” wrote Thomas J. McIntyre, chief in the Justice Department’s office for information requests.
Advocates for open government said the government’s assertion that it could not copy data from its computers was unprecedented but representative of generally negative responses to Freedom of Information Act requests.
“This was a new one on us. We weren’t aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them,” Bob Williams of the Center for Public Integrity said Tuesday. The watchdog group in Washington made the request in January. He said the group expects to appeal the Justice Department’s decision.
Of course, a competent administration would also be able to effectively manage and plan for an occupation of Iraq, while passing a federal budget with a Congress of the same political party, but as I noted earlier today, that’s not happening either.
I liked it better when the grown-ups were in charge of the government.
Only 125 days until Election Day…