Internal Republican bickering over strategy and oversight is amusing because it’s largely inconsequential. Watching GOP leaders attack one another publicly over how to address military abuse policies, however, is more troubling than entertaining.
On Monday, the Senate Armed Forces Committee announced relative bi-partisan support for doing the right thing: the Committee would thoroughly investigate the systematic prisoner abuse scandal(s), no matter where it led.
The Armed Services Committee, led by 77-year-old Senate veteran John W. Warner of Virginia, has served noticed that it would not pull back, as the House Armed Services Committee has done. Instead, Warner plans extended hearings to call on the carpet such high-profile officials as Army Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority.
More disturbing still for the White House, Democrats and Republicans on the Senate committee say they will shift the focus from the misdeeds of a handful of guards at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. What they want to dig into instead is how senior Pentagon officials loosened the rules protecting prisoners during interrogation.
It was, to be sure, an encouraging development that told the public this is one scandal that wouldn’t be swept under the rug. Committee members from both parties expressed a sincere commitment to get to the bottom of this.
Which is exactly why Republican leaders of the House Armed Services Committee, who prefer to see this matter ignored altogether, are so upset. In an unusually harsh public spat, the New York Times described GOP leaders as engaged in a “feud.”
With top Iraq battlefield commanders scheduled to testify about the prison abuse scandal before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, a major rift has developed among Republicans as to whether Congress is taking the inquiry into the issue too far.
The House GOP isn’t holding back.
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee lashed out at his Senate counterpart yesterday for summoning senior U.S. commanders from the field to testify at hearings into the prisoner-abuse scandal, saying the move threatens to disrupt military operations in Iraq.
“I think the Senate has become mesmerized by cameras, and I think that’s sad,” said Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.).
To his credit, Warner isn’t backing down yet. But the attacks on Warner by Hunter and Tom DeLay really make me wonder exactly what House GOP leaders would have Congress do given the circumstances.
This isn’t just a shocking scandal about the misguided recklessness of seven soldiers. There’s ample evidence that the Bush administration intentionally crafted a policy that encouraged torture and then went to great lengths to cover it up. Slate’s Fred Kaplan noted that recent reports “spell out an elaborate, all-inclusive chain of command in this scandal” — a chain of command that includes Bush, Rumsfeld, and most of the top leaders of the Defense Department, all of whom knew about the abuse and created policies that led to torture.
The House GOP leadership considers this reality and has decided that they should just keep quiet and wait for this to blow over. As the Post noted, “House Republican leaders have argued for doing as little as possible in response to the scandal.”
There’s no excuse for such negligence.