Donald Rumsfeld, testifying under oath, to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee two weeks ago:
So it seems to me that the ICRC report was helpful, and that the military command, as I understand it, undertook a series of corrections. Now, with respect to when were we knowledgeable of this, the situation was this: Specialist Darby told the CID that he had information about abuses in the prison. I believe it was on the 13th or 14th of January. By the 15th or 16th, an investigation had been initiated. And the Central Command public affairs people went out and told the world — they told everyone in the world that there were allegations of abuse and they were being investigated.
The Wall Street Journal, today:
Senior U.S. military officials in Iraq, including two advisers to the top commander there, reviewed a strongly worded Red Cross report detailing the abuse of prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison last November — but the Army did not launch an investigation into the abuses until two months later.
The senior legal adviser to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, helped draft a formal response to the Red Cross’s November report, according to one senior Army official. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who oversaw the military police guards at the prison, signed that response and sent it back to the Red Cross. Gen. Karpinski said that she also discussed the report with Gen. Sanchez’s top deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, in a late November meeting.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Gen. Karpinski said officials at first generally disbelieved the Red Cross report. One military intelligence officer at the meeting in late November drew laughs, she said, when he joked, “I’ve told the Commander to stop giving the Victoria’s Secret catalogues to detainees” — a reference to the Red Cross’s complaint that some prisoners were being forced to wear women’s underwear on their heads.
The late November events show that top military commanders were alerted to the abuses by the Red Cross earlier than they so far have publicly acknowledged. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified before the Senate recently that officials at the Pentagon learned of the abuses after a soldier alerted them in mid-January.
Two questions. One, why did it take two months to launch an investigation? And two, doesn’t this mean Rumsfeld lied under oath to Congress?