WE KNOW NOTHINK – NOTHINK!

May 5, 2004 - The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told The Associated Press today that Mr. Bush first became aware of the accusations of abuse some time after the Pentagon began looking into them, but that he did not see the photographs of sexual humiliation until they were made public and did not learn of the classified Pentagon report about the episode until news organizations reported its existence. New York Times May 4, 2004.

The public learned of the Army’s investigation into the abuse of prisoners on January 16th when Central Command announced it. Apparently the President missed that announcement. He did not learn of an investigation when the rest of us did but, to be fair, the announcement suggested that the incidents under investigation were minor incidents in which four soldiers, two men and two women, were being charged with having pushed Iraqi prisoners around. The announcement was carefully worded to avoid setting off alarm bells. According to the White House the President did not know about even the accusations until “some time after” the investigations began.

Remember, the investigation began with the CD containing the images you have seen and many more you haven’t seen and the six soldiers charged are only the people whose faces are seen in the pictures. General Karpinski, who apparently has seen more of the photos than we have, says she counted seventeen pairs of boots in the pictures. Six have been charged and a seventh, the star of the show whose line, “He’s getting hard” was featured in Chip Fredrick’s Article 32 hearing, has been confined to base at Fort Bragg. Seven unnamed officers have been had reprimands of record placed in their files and two relieved of their commands. But the President did not know. The Secretary of Defense did not know. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs did not know – but he did ask CBS to hold the story he did not yet know about.

There seem to be a whole series of things that this President and his advisors did not know about. They did not know that Al Qaeda threaten to attack inside the United States. They did not know that aircraft could be used as missiles. They did not know that the yellow cake take was a fraud; the mobile biological weapons systems produced hydrogen to fill weather balloons and that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now, two months after General Taguba sent in his report on February 26th they still did not learn anything about it until CBS broke the story they had held at General Myers’ request.

The script for the Bush Administration and its wars seem t have been written by the same writers who gave us Hogan’s Heroes. You may have seen the reruns on cable TV. The comedy was set in a WWII German POW camp. The scripts were repetitive tales in which the clever Americans and a token Brit put one over on the German camp commandant. Colonel Hogan and his fellow prisoners may have been heroes with their elaborate schemes for frustrating their captors but Sgt. Shultz, who knew nothing, became a role model for authorities faced with inconvenient facts. What he “did not know” he couldn’t report to the hapless Col. Klink. That benign bumbler was always successful in avoiding responsibility but you could hardly accuse him of leadership.