[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: A Trail of ' Major Failures' Leads to Defense Secretary' s Office

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A Trail of 'Major Failures' Leads to Defense Secretary's Office

August 25, 2004
 By DOUGLAS JEHL 



 

WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 - For Donald H. Rumsfeld to resign over
the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib would be a mistake, the
four-member panel headed by James M. Schlesinger asserted
Tuesday. But in tracing responsibility for what went wrong
at Abu Ghraib, it drew a line that extended to the defense
secretary's office. 

The panel cited what it called major failures on the part
of Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides in not anticipating and
responding swiftly to the post-invasion insurgency in Iraq.
On the eve of the Republican convention, that verdict could
not have been welcome at the White House, where postwar
problems in Iraq represent perhaps President Bush's
greatest political liability. 

The report rarely mentions Mr. Rumsfeld by name, referring
most often instead to the "office of the secretary of
defense.'' But as a sharp criticism of postwar planning for
Iraq, it represents the most explicit official indictment
to date of an operation that was very much the province of
Mr. Rumsfeld and his top deputies. 

"Any defense establishment should adapt quickly to new
conditions as they arise, and in this case, we were slow,
at least in the judgment of the members of this panel, to
adapt accordingly after the insurgency started in the
summer of 2003,'' Mr. Schlesinger, a former defense
secretary himself, said in presenting the panel's findings
at the Pentagon on Tuesday. 

Beginning in late 2002, the panel said, Mr. Rumsfeld and
his staff set the stage for an environment in which abuses
later became widespread. They did this first by sowing
confusion about what kinds of interrogation techniques
would be permitted, then by failing to plan for the
intensity of the post-invasion insurgency, and finally by
delaying for months in dispatching reinforcements to help
the American guards at Abu Ghraib contend with the swelling
number of prisoners. 

The panel sidestepped the broader, even more contentious,
question of whether Mr. Rumsfeld had sent enough troops to
Iraq. It focused instead on what it described as short
staffing among the military police, who were outnumbered by
prisoners by a ratio of 75 to 1 at Abu Ghraib, and at the
headquarters of Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, whose
495-member staff numbered only about one-third of the
authorized total. 

In the four months since the abuses at Abu Ghraib first
came to light, some of Mr. Rumsfeld's critics have demanded
his resignation, as a gesture of the accountability that
the defense secretary himself has promised. But while the
panel chronicled failures all the way up the civilian as
well as the military command, all four members said that
Mr. Rumsfeld's errors were less severe than those made by
uniformed officers, and that he should not be forced from
office for what they described as primarily failures of
omission. 

"If the head of a department had to resign every time
someone below him did something wrong, it'd be a very empty
cabinet table,'' said Harold Brown, defense secretary under
President Jimmy Carter and a panel member. Indeed, members
of the panel went out of their way to praise Mr. Rumsfeld
for having tried to avert abuses by directing his staff
beginning in late 2002 to draw up rules for interrogation
at the American detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.


But they said confusion about those rules, which were
rewritten several times as part of a fierce Pentagon
debate, ultimately added to problems in Afghanistan and
Iraq as the procedures were put into force there, without
adequate supervision, by military intelligence units that
were moved from Cuba to the Middle East. 

Mr. Rumsfeld, who was briefed on the findings by video
conference on Tuesday morning, responded later in the day
only with a brief statement, saying that the panel had
provided "important information and recommendations.'' 

"We have said from the beginning that we would see that
these incidents were fully investigated, make findings,
make the appropriate corrections, and make them public,''
Mr. Rumsfeld said. 

As described by Tillie K. Fowler, another member of the
group and a former Republican congresswoman from Florida,
the panel's mission was to find out "how this happened and
who let it happen,'' a reference to the abuses that came to
public attention in April with the publication of what have
now become infamous photographs. 

The abuses depicted in those photographs themselves were
primarily the work of a small group of wayward soldiers,
including the seven members of a military police unit who
have already been charged with the crime, the panel members
said Tuesday. But the panel took issue with the idea,
voiced publicly by senior officials including Mr. Bush,
that the full array of misconduct at the prison was limited
to no more than "a few'' soldiers. 

"We found a string of failures that go well beyond an
isolated cellblock in Iraq,'' Ms. Fowler said at the
Pentagon. 

"We found fundamental failures throughout all levels of
command, from the soldiers on the ground to the Central
Command and to the Pentagon," she said. "These failures of
leadership helped to set the conditions which allowed for
the abusive practice to take place.'' 

In addressing the role played by Mr. Rumsfeld in
particular, the panel's report emphasized the defense
secretary's decisions beginning on Dec. 2, 2002, to
authorize for use at Guantánamo Bay 16 additional
interrogation procedures more aggressive than the 17
methods long approved as part of standard military
practice. The next month, in response to criticisms from
the Navy, Mr. Rumsfeld rescinded a majority of the approved
measures, and directed that the remaining aggressive
techniques could be used only with his approval. 

But it was not until April 16, 2003, the report said, that
a final list of approved techniques for use at Guantánamo
was issued. It said that those changes "were an element
contributing to uncertainties in the field as to which
techniques were authorized,'' and that ultimately "the
augmented techniques for Guantánamo migrated to Afghanistan
and Iraq where they were neither limited nor safeguarded.''


"Had the secretary of defense had a wider range of legal
opinions and a more robust debate regarding detainee
policies and operations, his policy of April 16, 2003,
might well have been developed and issued in early December
2002,'' the report said. "This would have avoided the
policy changes which characterized the Dec. 2, 2002, to
April 16, 2003, period.'' 

In terms of postwar planning, members of the panel faulted
the Pentagon for assuming that the problems encountered in
Iraq after a full-scale American invasion in 2003 would be
limited to the refugee issues that followed the limited
incursion of the Persian Gulf war of 1991. 

By last summer, as it became clear "that there was a major
insurgency growing in Iraq,'' the report said, senior
leaders within the uniformed military and the Pentagon
"should have moved to meet the need for additional military
police forces'' to help guard prisoners at Abu Ghraib in
particular, whose population had begun to overwhelm the
members of the 800th Military Police Brigade, who
ultimately became the primary agents in the acts of abuse. 

Here in particular, the panel made clear its view that by
October or November at least, the void should have been
filled by Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides. 

Using an acronym that refers to the Office of the Secretary
of Defense, the report said, "It is the judgment of this
panel that in the future, considering the sensitivity of
this kind of mission, the OSD should assure itself that
serious limitations in detention/interrogation missions do
not occur.'' 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/politics/25assess.html?ex=1094468933&ei=1&en=27dc8e66e0bb5f10


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