One of the reasons I started blogging was because I signed up for email transcripts of press conferences by the State Department and Military a year before the Iraq war, and I was stunned by the distortions of the media.
So while I’m not taking any position on whether Rumsfeld is right or wrong in this case, I think that its worth reading what he actually said, instead of having it spoon fed to you by the media. So here is a transcript as emailed to me by the DOD.
Q: Inaudible – (re: Abu Ghraib, Schlessinger and Fay Report)
SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, as I testified before Congress, if you’re the secretary of defense and something happens in your area of responsibility and you simply have to accept that responsibility. And on the other hand, we’ve got a big department, you know, 3, 3 ½ million people in the military and the civilian total. What is that, three times the size of Phoenix. And at any given moment, there’s something happening somewhere in the world in that population. We have about 3,000 courts martial a year and we have something like 17,000 criminal investigations a year that are going on. We have 70 DoD corrections facilities, some 13 of them overseas. And the Department of the Army is the executive agent for detainees and enemy prisoners of war. At any given time, we have something like 12,000 people involved in managing the prison populations of one type or another.
Needless to say, if you’re Washington, D.C., you can’t know what’s going on in the midnight shift and it’s one of those many prisons around the world. Now what happened shouldn’t have happened. I was interested in the various reports that came out this week Kern Report and the Schlessinger Panel Report. At least as far as I’m aware, it is now at least as of this moment, because we keep learning more all the time, it’s a bit of a discovery process and that’s why we’ve initiated so many investigations to look at the scenes to make sure that we’re covering everything that needs to be covered and then reporting this to the public and reporting this to the Congress. But I have seen nothing yet that suggests that there was any abuse that was related to interrogations. So all of the press and all of the television, thus far, that tries to link the abuse that took place to interrogation techniques in Iraq has not yet been demonstrated – quite the contrary. In so far as I’m aware, no one of the individuals that were abused — and there were people abused and we should not have been — none of those individuals who were abused in the process of being interrogated. Indeed, most of the people subject to the abuse, as I said discovered, thus far, were individuals who were not security detainees at all; they were criminals, the overwhelming majority. So all of this discussion and debate, it seems, on this subject has, in some sense, been demonstrated to not have been well placed. The Iraq situation was always subject to the Geneva Convention. The president announced that, I announced it. That was communicated. Any abuse that took place was inconsistent with that and therefore, violated the rules and procedures that the Army had established for management of the prison population. Yes.
Q: Mr. Secretary, Major General Barbara Fast reported to Fort Huachuca but has been accused of failings on her watch at Abu Gharib. Can you comment on this?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Well, let me answer that this way. I am told that as Secretary of Defense, some of the issues could eventually reach me. It’s not clear that that’s the case. Most of them will be handled under the Uniform Code of Military Justice in the Department of Army. But I am told that I am not allowed to talk about any individuals, or even any categories of activities without running the risk of being accused of having asserted command influence. That is to say if you nod yes or not or smile or something else, it could end up harming a person. And it also could end leading to the acquittal or the release of a person who doesn’t deserve to be released and therefore, anyone in that chain is advised to not comment. I was told that years ago as an example of what can happen, a senior commander was asked about an individual person to another person – not even publicly – and his comment was “That person’s trouble” and that person got off because of command influence. So it is an understandable situation that the people up that chain are supposed to be and, in fact, do behave in a way that keeps them free of that accusation.
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