The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne devoted much of his excellent column today to chastising Rumsfeld, but he bucked the trend by noting that the buck doesn’t stop at the Pentagon.
[D]umping Rumsfeld and Myers is not enough. Ultimately the buck stops with President Bush. No, I don’t think for an instant that Bush knew anything about this. That’s the problem. Reports of prisoner abuse have been around since the war in Afghanistan and the opening of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The president needs to explain why he wasn’t more curious about what was happening, and whether his management style delegates so much authority that the White House could be caught so unprepared for this catastrophe. Are we dealing here with a culture of unaccountability?
It’s an important point; kudos to Dionne for making it.
Rumsfeld is being raked over the coals, as well he should be. Both chambers of Congress are going to hold contentious hearings with Rumsfeld today, and if he’s not careful, he’ll lose his job. In fact, even if he is careful, Rumsfeld’s hold on his job is tenuous, at best.
But there’s no reason Rumsfeld’s boss should be entirely off-the-hook here. Yes, Rumsfeld helped create a “lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered — and in which, until recently, no one has been held accountable.”
But, as lawless as the regime has been, Rumsfeld wasn’t capable of simply running his own government. He still had to answer to the president, who should have been asking a few questions. With that in mind, forgive the cliché, but I’d like to ask what the commander-in-chief knew and when he knew it?
Bush is holding Rumsfeld out as a scapegoat for not telling him more in advance. Rumsfeld apparently wanted to try and keep as much of this scandal as secret as he could, but when it came to the president, Rumsfeld didn’t answer questions that Bush didn’t ask.
We learned this week, for example, that the “abuse of Iraqi prisoners sparked so much concern that President Bush was told about an investigation during the winter holidays.” According to the White House, Bush responded to the briefing by…pretty much ignoring it. It reminds me of the flap over Bush ignoring terrorist threats before 9/11. Bush was briefed about the abuse, but since no one told him to do anything…
Likewise, the Taguba report was completed in February. Bush not only didn’t read it; he apparently didn’t know it existed.
Bush’s defense is that he was in the dark about this. Scott McClellan said Bush “only become aware of the photographs and the Pentagon’s main internal report about the incidents from news reports last week.”
But is that much of a defense? What kind of White House is Bush running, exactly?
Rumsfeld and Myers, among others, knew about the abuse well in advance. Bush was told, in some way, about the abuse months ago. Either Rumsfeld and Myers intentionally hid the most serious information from the president, which doesn’t say much for Bush’s leadership abilities, or they kept Bush up-to-date, which means Bush is lying.
Bush is now insisting that he shouldn’t have learned about the scandal from the news. On this, we completely agree. The president may not be the brightest star in the sky, but the public expects him to have some grasp of what’s going on in the world, especially on developments that may set back U.S. diplomacy for the foreseeable future.
Ultimately, ignorance is a poor justification for a dysfunctional presidential administration. Bush wanted a White House that thrived on secrecy and a lack of accountability. He got it; these are the consequences.