Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Some of the top brass will testify today.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senators are pulling in top U.S. generals from Iraq to tell what they know about the prisoner abuse scandal over strong criticism from a Republican committee chairman in the House.
The Senate Armed Services Committee is "basically driving the story" of prisoner abuse and "jerking out these battlefield commanders" while their troops are in a shooting war, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said.
"The Senate has become mesmerized by cameras" and "they have given now probably more publicity to what six people did in the Abu Ghraib prison at 2:30 in the morning than the invasion of Normandy," said Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
Testimony today
The Senate panel hears testimony today from Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command; Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, commander on the ground in Iraq; and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, deputy commander of prison operations there.
The Senate hearing, its third on the abuse scandal, follows testimony by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on Tuesday in which he said the Pentagon made a number of misjudgments about Iraq, and that the future is uncertain.
Sen. John Warner, the Virginia Republican who chairs the Senate panel, released a letter in which he said the generals could appear by video teleconference.
Warner said the Pentagon told him that the generals would be in Washington for conferences.
Aggressive questioners
Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Susan Collins of Maine have been among the most aggressive questioners of witnesses in hearings that followed publication in the past three weeks of photographs that appear to document abuse at the prison near Baghdad.
Hunter's objection is only the latest from congressional Republicans about the handling of the prisoner abuse scandal.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has said, "The people who are against the war are using this to their political ends." Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., has said he is outraged by "the press and the politicians and the political agendas that are being served by this."
About the war itself, Wolfowitz said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that the Pentagon failed to anticipate that:
USaddam Hussein would still be financing attacks on Americans until he was captured.
UOne of Saddam's principal deputies, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, would still be bankrolling operations even now.
USaddam loyalists would have hundreds of millions of dollars in bank accounts in neighboring countries to support operations against the U.S.-led occupation force and its Iraqi sympathizers.
UThe old intelligence service would keep fighting.
Wolfowitz said U.S. officials were wrong to impose so severe a policy of de-Baathification, the decision, recently modified, that purged members of Saddam's Baath party from the government.
The problem
The move threw out of work thousands of teachers, military men and others, many of whom had been required to join the party for employment, and was blamed by some for not only boosting joblessness but for also helping to fuel the insurgency.
Wolfowitz said it's impossible to say how long a large American military force will have to stay in Iraq after political power is handed to Iraqis on June 30.
Wolfowitz also said that the next year to 18 months will be critical in Iraq because it will take that long to stand up fully trained and equipped Iraqi security forces and to elect a representative government.
Occupation forces have signed up some 200,000 Iraqis for police, army and other security jobs. Training has been slow, however, insurgent violence is on the rise and Wolfowitz said Iraqis remain far from capable of securing the country without the 160,000-member U.S.-led occupation forces.