WE THOUGHT WE HAD THEM ALL

May 8, 2004 - Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of forces in the region, testifying Friday before Congress, said he was still unclear how that happened. "It was a surprise that it got out," General Smith said. Military officials were aware of two disks with photographs on them that were part of continuing investigations, one in Iraq and another in Washington, he said. "That was the limit of the pictures, and we thought we had them all," General Smith said. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08IMAG.html

General Smith inadvertently let the cat slip out of the bag during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on Friday. The Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon thought that they had the story contained. They knew that the photos existed. They thought that they had possession of them. They had stamped General Taguba’s candid and revealing report as secret. Only the six military policemen who were clearly identified in the photographs were being prosecuted. Quietly, and with out public announcements, the officers of the local command at Abu Ghraib had been reprimanded and transferred out. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who had brought the “stress and duress” techniques to Iraq last August and December, was given the command.

Even when the Pentagon discovered that they did not have them all, that some of the photos had found their way to a CBS News producer the still thought that the story could be contained. The Pentagon dispatched the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to contact Dan Rather and with an appeal to the welfare of the troops on the ground in Iraq General Myers convinced CBS to sit on the story. Believing that the story was spiked Rumsfeld and his staff thought they had the matter under wraps and that the Abu Ghraib manifestation of the “stress and duress” policy had been handled. And it probably would have been had not someone within the military leaked the Taguba Report to Seymour Hersh, the journalist who had broken another atrocity story three decades ago. When the may New Yorker went to press with the Hersh story CBS took the story off the spike and ran with it. Secretary Rumsfeld inadvertently revealed that the Pentagon operation was intended to contain the story when he blurted out to the Senators that the “real question” was how the top secret report and the pictures were leaked.

Now American officials are falling all over themselves to “apologize” to everybody in sight for what they describe as a “few bad apples” did in pursuit of breaking down detainees so that they could be, in General Miller’s words, “rapidly exploited”. Many years ago a friend of mind was busted in a “youthful indiscretion”. When the arrest hit the local paper she went to apologize to her mother. “Are you sorry you did it or are you sorry that you got caught?” was her mother’s perceptive response.

And that is where the Bush Administration is today. They are really sorry that they got caught - and surprised as well because they really thought that they had them all.