Update: In my nominations for the TomDispatch Political Comedy Awards of 2005, I suggested that the Bush administration, rejected by several top choices in its search for a director of national intelligence and evidently desperate, had “hit on what was clearly a brilliant scheme: Just look for someone who had a post already so nightmarish, hopeless, and targeted for failure that DNI would look like a dream. With that job description in hand, of course, who better fit the bill than the viceroy in … er, ambassador to Baghdad, John Negroponte. Though Negroponte declared DNI ‘the most challenging assignment I have undertaken in more than 40 years of government service,’ it’s hard to believe it wasn’t a matter of anything-that-gets-me-home.”
Without a single reporter on “staff,” I was, of course, relying on situational logic and perhaps a dark sense of humor. But these days, reality can whip logic, imagination, and a sense of humor any time, any place. That very Friday, as it happens, Douglas Jehl and Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times were reporting ("Bush Picks Longtime Diplomat for New Top Intelligence Job") that “Mr. Negroponte was also known to be eager to leave Baghdad. … ‘He made clear to everyone every time he came back that “I’ve got to get out of there,”‘said a senior administration official who asked not to be named because he did not want to publicly question Mr. Negroponte’s enthusiasm for his service in Iraq.”
Now there’s a vote of confidence in our Iraq policy from a man who was truly on the spot. The other day I mentioned a report from Patrick Cockburn of the British Independent indicating that all the major roads into Baghdad were under at least partial control of the insurgents. As it happens, today’s New York Times helps explain Negroponte’s quick decision. Things are far worse than I imagined. Journalist James Glantz in a front-page piece reports: “Insurgent attacks to disrupt Baghdad’s supplies of crude oil, gasoline, heating oil, water and electricity have reached a degree of coordination and sophistication not seen before, Iraqi and American officials say. … A new analysis by some of those officials shows that the choice of targets and the timing of sabotage attacks has evolved over the past several months, shifting from economic targets to become what amounts to a siege of the capital,” or as Glantz writes later, “a siege on the great circulatory systems of a nation.”
In the meantime, the near complete destruction of Fallujah in November – still largely a city of rubble amid the faltering “reconstruction” of the country – seems to have done nothing to slow down the insurgency or bring it under control. So the Marines who helped level Fallujah are now launching a new campaign, code-named “River Blitz,” around the even larger, insurgent-controlled city of Ramadi. They are setting up cordons, instituting curfews, busting down doors, and arresting suspected insurgents or their supporters. Which reminds me, in the spirit of correction, that one thing the new campaign will surely do is continue to fill American detention centers in Iraq. In the dispatch mentioned above, I indicated that these jails, including the infamous Abu Ghraib, were already refilling with 8,000 or so Iraqi prisoners. Well, revise that. Close to ten thousand is more like it, according to Bradley Graham of the Washington Post, who offers these bottom-line American figures:
“About 3,180 prisoners are now at the Abu Ghraib facility, which has remained the U.S. military’s primary interrogation center. Camp Bucca, which has a maximum capacity of 6,000 detainees, is up to about 5,150. Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, houses about 100 ‘high-value’ detainees. Another 1,300 or so suspected insurgents are being held for initial screenings at military brigade and division levels, according to military figures.”
Now, let’s just give these numbers a little thought. Iraq has a population of approximately 25 million people, 20 percent of whom, roughly speaking, are Kurds who are not likely to be in American “interrogation centers” in Iraq right now. So that leaves us with about 20 million other Iraqis, which means that one out of every 2,000 non-Kurdish Iraqis is being held under less than pleasant conditions by American forces. Figure that each of those prisoners has nine close family members and friends likely to be angry about his imprisonment (certainly an underestimate). That brings us to one of every 200 Iraqis detained or closely involved with a detainee. If you do the figures just for Sunnis (undoubtedly the major part of the incarcerated population but only 20 percent of Iraq’s population), the situation looks far, far worse. I offer this as one very partial explanation for what’s fueling the ongoing (and not about to go anywhere else or simply be defeated) insurrection. Talk about winning hearts and minds!
Now, do these figures another way. The various factions of the insurgency are usually described by American officials as having in total perhaps 10,000-20,000 members – and nearly 10,000 Iraqis are imprisoned for activities assumedly related to the insurgency. You do the math and try to explain it. Either we have close to the whole insurgency in jail, or we’re holding an awful lot of innocent people, or the insurgency is far bigger than anyone cares to imagine. Oh, and by the way, just out of curiosity, what do you make of the recent Time magazine report that some of the American victors are now in back-channel discussions, if not negotiations, of some sort with at least some part of the insurgency? Curious, no?
Me, I’d want to get out of town too, as I suspect would an awful lot of Iraqis.
Rummy Watch: In the meantime, if all is not well in Baghdad, perhaps something’s also off in Washington. Nick Turse reports on a disturbing pattern he’s noticed in our Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He seems, in manner, a changed character since those glory days back in 2003 when he was riding a wave of triumph and charming much of the country in his role as the Secretary of Comedy and Wise-Ass Comments at press conference after press conference. Remember, for instance, this response to the wholesale looting of Baghdad? “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that’s what’s going to happen here.” To which he added, on the issue of looting, “Stuff Happens.” Now check out the new Donald Rumsfeld in what may be the beginning of a periodic Rummy Watch at TomDispatch. Tom
Rummy Dropped From the Loop?
What didn’t he see and when didn’t he see it?
by Nick Turse
I first noticed the pattern last year with the Abu Ghraib torture scandal exploding. By now it’s beyond a trend. Closer to an established fact. Plain for all to see – and it suggests a significant breakdown of some unknown sort at the Department of Defense.
On April 28, 2004, with Sy Hersh about to scoop them, the journalists at CBS ran a story about crimes committed by American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison on its 60 Minutes II program. It included the now infamous torture photographs as well as information on the military’s own “scathing report” on the subject, which would later become known (by its author’s name) as the Taguba Report.
About a week later, I began to notice the trend. During a briefing with reporters on May 4, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked if he had himself read the Taguba Report. He hemmed and hawed about seeing a summary of it before finally answering “no.” Another question followed:
“REPORTER: [G]iven the ramifications of not only what is in this report, the findings specifically, but the pictures, the photographs that you knew, as of a couple of weeks ago, were going to be broadcast, why did you not feel [it] incumbent upon you at that time to ask for the findings, to take a look at the pictures beforehand, so you could perhaps be prepared to deal with some of the world reaction?
“SEC. RUMSFELD: I think I did inquire about the pictures and was told that we didn’t have copies.
“RUMSFELD (to staff): Is that correct?
“STAFF: We didn’t have them here, that’s for sure.
“SEC. RUMSFELD: Yeah, I didn’t have them.”
Could it be, I wondered, that I had the hardware on my desk to burn photo CDs and make copies of reports, but the Pentagon didn’t?
On May 5, Rumsfeld did an interview with Matt Lauer of NBC’s Today Show and was again asked about not reading the report or seeing the photographs until they aired on television. Rumsfeld sputtered “just a minute” before he confessed that “when I’m asked a question as to whether I’ve read the entire report, I answer honestly that I have not. It is a mountain of paper and investigative material.”
So I wondered, could the problem be the amount of reading involved? Or could the SECDEF be suffering from adult Attention Deficit Disorder?
On May 7, Rumsfeld testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee at a hearing on the treatment of Iraqi prisoners. There, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham asked him about the video files of torture at Abu Ghraib.
“GRAHAM: Mr. Secretary, have you seen the video?
“RUMSFELD: I have not. The disk that I saw that had photos on it did not have the videos on it. I checked with General Smith and he indicates he does have a disk with the videos on it. I don’t know if that means there’s two disks with all these photographs or if the photographs are the same and one just doesn’t have the video.”
Later, Democratic Senator Bill Nelson asked:
“BILL NELSON: Mr. Secretary, when did you first see the photos?
“RUMSFELD: Last night about 7:30.
“BILL NELSON: Mr. Secretary…
“RUMSFELD: I should say, I had seen the ones in the press. I had seen the ones that are doctored slightly to suit people’s tastes. We’ve been trying to get one of the discs for days and days and days. And I’m told by General Smith that there were only a couple of these, that they were in the criminal investigation process. And we finally, Dick Myers and I, finally saw them last night.”
By then I was truly curious: Was it a budgetary problem – the lack of CD burners, or floppy disks, or available computers at the Pentagon? Or was no one technically capable of making copies for Rumsfeld? Or was there some kind of institutional/personal issue at stake? Were Rumsfeld’s underlings, for unknown reasons, engaging in a game of diskette keep-away “for days and days and days” (and right before his big Senate grilling too)?
Since then, I’ve paid closer attention to Rumsfeld’s problems and continued to speculate. Just take a look at a few of the numerous incidents thus far in 2005…
On Jan. 8, 2005, Newsweek broke a story about a high-level debate within the Pentagon on implementing the “Salvador Option” – that is, the use of “death-squads” like those the U.S. funded in El Salvador during the 1980s – in Iraq. On Jan. 11, at a press conference, Rumsfeld finally weighed in:
“The – on the subject of Iraq, I also have been reading and hearing about this so-called Salvatore – Salvador option, I think it’s called. And I looked all through Newsweek, which apparently was the place it supposedly had appeared. I couldn’t find it.”
Rumsfeld went on to complain that he couldn’t find a copy of the story anywhere and could only read articles about the story. Members of the press corps promised to get him a copy and informed him that it was available in the online edition of the magazine. In his defense, Rumsfeld claimed that he only buys the hard copy of Newsweek.
I wondered how much time he had spent futilely paging through back issues of Newsweek. Had none of his staff thought to look online? Or could it be that they were thumbing their noses at their aging boss as he stared at an unplugged computer? Or was there simply not a single person on hand in the Pentagon who could master a Google search?
Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who commanded troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, made headlines when, on Feb. 1, he publicly stated, “It’s fun to shoot some people.” Rumsfeld apparently missed all the morning newspaper accounts and TV reports on this; for, on the afternoon of Feb. 3, he told a reporter, “I have not read his words. I don’t know what he said precisely…”
On Feb. 10, Axis of Evil Enemy Number One, North Korea, declared for the first time that it definitively possessed nuclear weapons. You’d think an announcement of that sort from a nation with which the United States is still technically at war would warrant some attention from the Secretary of Defense. (I mean, just look at the response Saddam’s phantom WMD warranted way back in 2002-03). But Rumsfeld, it seems, didn’t even bother to read an account of the announcement, although he was apparently briefed on the fact that such stories had been written. When asked about North Korean nukes, the Secretary of Defense said, “I know I’m told that today in the press they indicated they do [have nuclear weapons].”
On Feb. 16, when fielding questions from the press following a House Armed Services Committee Hearing, Rumsfeld was asked about an intelligence report concerning al-Qaeda and replied, “I have not seen the paper that you’re referring to with respect to the memorandum. It hasn’t come to me yet… [To General Meyers:] You haven’t seen it either, have you?”
Not surprisingly, Meyers hadn’t.
The next day dawned on a near repeat of this incident. At another session with the press, this time following a Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing, Rumsfeld was asked about a presidentially ordered joint CIA/Department of Defense study of paramilitary activities.
“Rumsfeld: [To Myers]: Have you seen it? I have not seen the study.
“Myers: I have not seen the results of the study. I think that’s coming over here shortly to us in the department.”
Responses like these have come fast and furiously from Rumsfeld since the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke. Obviously, a pattern has developed, involving what looks like a systemic breakdown in information reaching the secretary of defense. The question is why? Why do reporters consistently know more than he does? Hell, why had I read the stories (and probably the military’s own reports) before Rumsfeld?
I assume he’s busy, but given his lack of reading, what exactly is he busy doing? Is he having personal problems? Recent reports indicate that lately Rumsfeld has been increasingly belligerent and cranky; most recently packing up his briefcase and spouting off about his lunch while being questioned by the House Armed Services Committee (where he also replied incoherently to a question about an aide’s comments pertaining to the expansion of military retirement benefits with, “I have not … seen the statement that you’ve quoted in the context that it might have been included”).
Other theories exist. Has he developed his boss’s aversion to reading? Or has he somehow, despite all the new intelligence powers he’s been garnering for the DoD, been squeezed out of the national security information loop? Is he being kept in the dark even about front-page national security news? Could Pentagon subordinates be rebelling against him for unknown reasons by refusing his requests for information, thus making him look uninformed and inept? Or could this be a more general problem of incompetence at the Department of Defense? Okay, maybe you can’t expect a 72-year-old secretary of defense to be up-to-date on the latest technology, but can no one at the Pentagon figure out how to photocopy a report? Burn a photo CD? Copy a disk? Find an article online? Or figure out how to e-mail a file?
Last year the DoD paid out almost $300 million to Battelle Memorial Institute – whose scientists “played a crucial role in developing the office copier machine [Xerox]” and which holds “more than 250 patents related to the dry-copying process.” It paid almost $643 million to PC-maker Dell, and nearly $2.4 billion to Computer Sciences Corporation – “a leading global information technology (IT) services company … [whose] mission is to provide customers … with solutions crafted to meet their specific challenges and enable them to profit from the advanced use of technology.”
You’d think with this kind of spending the people at the DOD could manage to get copies of crucial materials to their chief. But they either can’t or won’t. They’ve left Rumsfeld twisting in the wind, forced to admit on a daily basis that he can’t get the information he asks for or wants to see in a timely fashion. The implications for national security are obvious. It’s time for an inquiry. We need to know what Rumsfeld didn’t see, when he didn’t see it, and why he is so incredibly uninformed.
Nick Turse is a doctoral candidate at the Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He writes for the Village Voice and regularly for TomDispatch on the military-corporate complex and the homeland security state.
