Rumsfeld Crawls Out of His Hole to Lie Again

Donald Rumsfeld's approach to bad news is simply to assert it doesn't exist and hope no one catches on. We saw that in the Iraq War with his "broken pots" remark, and we see it again with Abu Ghraib:

The (investigative) reports ... made clear that some abuses occurred during interrogations, that others were intended to soften up prisoners who were to be questioned, and that many intelligence personnel involved in the interrogations were implicated in the abuses. ...

But on Thursday, in an interview with a radio station in Phoenix, Mr. Rumsfeld ... said, "I have not seen anything thus far that says that the people abused were abused in the process of interrogating them or for interrogation purposes." ...

Mr. Rumsfeld repeated the assertion a few hours later at a news conference in Phoenix, adding that "all of the press, all of the television thus far that tried to link the abuse that took place to interrogation techniques in Iraq has not yet been demonstrated." After an aide slipped him a note during the news conference, however, Mr. Rumsfeld corrected himself, noting that an inquiry by three Army generals had, in fact, found "two or three" cases of abuse during interrogations or the interrogations process. In fact, however, the Army inquiry found that 13 of 44 instances of abuse involved interrogations or the interrogation process, an Army spokeswoman said. The report itself explicitly describes the extent to which each abuse involved interrogations.

Mr. Rumsfeld also misstated an important finding of an independent panel he appointed and is led by James R. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary, saying in the interview with KTAR radio, "The interesting thing about the Schlesinger panel is their conclusion that, in fact, the abuses seem not to have anything to do with interrogation at all."

But the first paragraph of the Schlesinger panel report says, "We do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere."

Mr. Rumsfeld insisted that while the abuses "were a terrible thing to have happened," the military has responded quickly and thoroughly to the allegations. So far, four major reports into aspects of the misconduct have been released. Four more are pending. "We keep learning more all the time," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It's a bit of a discovery process."

The Education of Donald Rumsfeld. May we live so long.....