After the cascade of inflamed adjectives came tumbling in to express our revulsion with photos from Abu Ghraib -- “disgusting,” “abhorrent”, “brutal,” “sickening”, “inhumane,” “un-American” -- the debate about the causes and consequences of the Iraqi prison abuse is moving into decidedly more complicated territory for the administration.
For a White House that hates having to explain itself, these are going to be tough days. And if Congress continues to assert itself, demanding answers and a little respect, the whole thing could get messy. We could end up with a full-blown congressional investigation.
The strong, simple language that the president likes so much is suddenly giving way to the kind of ambiguous and measured explanations that the White House often derided as Clintonian.
Detainees in the Iraqi War, for example, were treated “consistent with but not pursuant to” the Geneva Conventions, said Donald Rumsfeld. One Pentagon official told Congress this week that Abu Ghraib was under the “operational control” of Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, but agreed that it was under the “tactical command” of Colonel Thomas Pappas, a military-intelligence commander.
Who's going to clear up all of this mess?
I'm guessing that congressional hearings may be the only vehicle properly calibrated for that kind of careful parsing of the language. And that is likely where we're headed. But, for now, things are being handled a little differently on opposite ends of the Capitol.
In the House, the impulse to protect the administration and the president runs a little deeper than in the Senate. And so House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, a Republican from California, held a hearing on the abuses last week but made clear his belief that they were getting more attention than was warranted. Calls for Rumsfeld's resignation were out of line, he said.
“We need to judge the [Defense] Department's leadership on its performance in …war, not on its public-relations skills or the frequency with which a few egos on Capitol Hill get bruised,” Hunter said. “Today, some people with 20-20 hindsight asked why the secretary didn't drop everything to personally investigate the abuses when they were first reported in January. That's bad, and irresponsible, advice.”
The ranking Democrat on the committee, Ike Skelton of Missouri, shares with Hunter a deep commitment to the men and women in uniform, and they generally get on well. But Skelton was part of the early chorus calling for congressional hearings on Abu Ghraib. “These appalling revelations have done incalculable damage to our nation's reputation and to our military,” he said last week. “And one hearing, however important as it is, will not suffice. … We must hold an independent congressional investigation into these abuses and into the command atmosphere that permitted them to occur.”
He's going to have a tough time persuading the GOP leadership to follow that path.
Meanwhile, an altogether different dynamic is developing in the Senate. Some sense of high purpose is driving John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to pursue Abu Ghraib with a doggedness that should alarm the White House. “Our central task … is to get all of the facts in this difficult situation -- no matter where they lead, no matter how embarrassing they may be -- so that we can assess our response and, in the end, make sure that such dereliction of duty, as is in this case, never, never happens again in the proud history of our country,” Warner said.
Asked if he thought Rumsfeld should resign, Warner responded that it's the defense secretary's decision to make.
Warner's committee has already held two hearings in five days, and there will be more. And the tough questions are not just coming from Democrats and John McCain. As we quiver at the idea that there are pictures worse that the ones we've seen, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, an Air Force reservist who once served as the chief prosecutor of the Air Force, keeps reminding everyone that there are allegations of rape and murder being investigated.
When there's one hearing after another, it's hard to see this thing fading away anytime soon.
When he was chairman of the House Republican caucus and in charge of the House GOP message machine, former Representative J.C. Watts used to say, “If you're explaining, you're losing.”
Well, there is a lot of explaining going on, and probably a lot more to come.
On Tuesday, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone continued the Pentagon's valiant efforts. Asked by Senator Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat, about who knew what and when, and about his own role in communicating the bad news about Abu Ghraib to Rumsfeld, Cambone said: “Let me draw gradations here. There are instances of people having been mistreated in their apprehension, transportation, and interrogation. A level of poor performance and behavior on the part of our people was understood, but it was understood at a fairly low level of abuse and incidents -- rate of incidents. The scale of this was unknown to any of us, and had we known its scale, [its] scope, the earlier we would have known, the sooner we would have been able to come to you, to the president, and to others to talk about it.”
Gradations, scale, scope. What else could this mean but a long, hot summer in congressional-hearing rooms?
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the online edition of The American Prospect.
