Bush's pathetic attempt to explain the horrors

Arab world scorns Bush's TV 'apology'
Pressure mounts in US over Iraq torture scandal

Brian Whitaker, Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad

Thursday May 6, 2004

In an unprecedented damage-limitation exercise, President George Bush told Arab TV viewers last night the treatment of prisoners by some members of the US military in Iraq had been "abhorrent" and would be thoroughly investigated.

The people of Iraq "must understand that what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know," he said in an interview with al-Hurra, an Arabic-language channel funded by the US government.

Though Mr Bush stopped short of a direct apology for the abuse at Abu Ghraib jail, where prisoners were stripped naked and sexually humiliated, he continued: "In a democracy everything is not perfect _ mistakes are made."

The perpetrators would be investigated and brought to justice, he said. "We will do to ourselves what we expect of others." He contrasted this approach with the attitude of the ousted Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein. "His trained torturers were never brought to justice _ there were never investigations about mistreatment," Mr Bush said.

It was the first time Mr Bush had made direct mention of the abuse since photographs of gloating US guards and humiliated Iraqi prisoners surfaced a week ago.

Later, the White House spokesman Scott McClellan used the word "sorry" half a dozen times. "The president is sorry for what occurred and the pain it has caused," he said.

The president's media offensive followed critical reaction around the world to the photographs of prisoners being abused by US soldiers.

In the Middle East the degradation was widely portrayed as symbolic of American intentions towards the region.

The gravity of the threat posed to the White House, and Mr Bush's re-election prospects, was further underlined yesterday by the moderate Republican senator John McCain, who told ABC television he could not rule out the prospect that the scandal could force the resignation of the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Officials said last night that Mr Rumsfeld, along with the joint chiefs of staff chairman, General Richard Myers, would testify to a senate committee tomorrow on the torture claims.

Senator Saxby Chambliss, a member of the Senate armed services committee, told CNN: "I want to know when [Rumsfeld] knew about this. He will be grilled pretty good."

Mr Bush also faces rising anger in Congress at his administration's failure to come forward about the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.

He admitted he first learned of the torture claims in early January.

Last night the pressure on Mr Bush intensified with a request to Congress for another $25bn (about £14bn) for US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. A request for more money was not expected until after the election. Meanwhile, new details have emerged of the scale of abuse by US troops. Pentagon officials are investigating 35 possible instances of abuse by US personnel, and the Los Angeles Times reported that 25 Iraqi and Afghan prisoners had died in US custody in the last 17 months.

However, the focus of Mr Bush's efforts yesterday was public opinion in the Arab world. Edmund Ghareeb, a Middle East expert at American University, said: "The symbolism of it is devastating. Some of these abuses have taken place at Abu Ghraib prison where some of the worst abuses of the Saddam Hussein regime took place."

The president's Arabic TV offensive came two days after the state department compiled a devastating survey of media coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

"This Greater Middle East that Washington promises is not a recipe for democracy, openness, freedom and respect for human rights; rather, it's a new formula to guarantee US control _ and a way to keep all Arab regimes humiliated and subjugated," a commentator in the Palestinian daily al-Ayyam wrote.

The Arab League's ambassador in London, Ali Muhsen Hamid, said he doubted that Mr Bush's remarks would win over Arab viewers. "They will not be persuaded, because they don't trust the Americans," he said.

The first Arabic station to air an interview with Mr Bush was al-Hurra ("The Free"), which is usually regarded in the region as a US propaganda vehicle, though the president later spoke to al-Arabiyya, a satellite channel with more substantial audiences. He did not speak to al-Jazeera, the most widely-watched Arabic channel. The Bush administration has persistently accused it of inaccurate and inflammatory coverage of Iraq.

Few Iraqis appeared convinced of Mr Bush's sincerity. At the Amir hairdressing salon in Karrada, a busy shopping district in central Baghdad, there was stony silence among the waiting customers as the interview was broadcast.

Dhurgan Khalid, 21, an art student, said: "I don't believe what Bush has promised. I don't believe the people that did this will go to jail. I don't even believe they will face justice."

[Gentle Giant]

War means never having to say you're sorry.

Bush fails to apologise
as he tries to quell outrage

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
06 May 2004

In a desperate bid to contain the damage caused by reports of Iraqi prisoner abuse, President George Bush acknowledged to an outraged Arab world yesterday that what had happened was "abhorrent" and "reflected badly on my country".

But though he promised a full investigation and to punish those responsible, he stopped short of a clear apology.

In hastily arranged and unprecedented separate interviews with two Arab-language television channels in the White House Maproom, Mr Bush insisted that the images of the soldiers mistreating prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison did not represent America. The US, he promised, would "clean up its act". But it was far from clear last night whether Mr Bush's words had even begun to mollify the fury in Iraq and the Arab world, which is fast concluding that there is little practical difference between Saddam Hussein's jailers and those of the US military.

Nor did they relieve the pressure on Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary and a prime architect of last year's invasion. In the first interview, with the US government funded al-Hurriyah network, the President explicitly backed Mr Rumsfeld. "Of course I've got confidence in the Secretary of Defence," he said.

But Mr Rumsfeld was squarely in the sights of Congress, where top Democrats and Republicans alike are furious they were not kept abreast of arguably the military's biggest scandal in decades. In a sudden change of schedule, the Senate Armed Services Committee "invited" Mr Rumsfeld to give public testimony today. Calling the abuse "appalling and totally unacceptable", John Warner, the Virginia Republican who chairs the panel, noted ominously that Mr Rumsfeld and the other top civilian officials at the Pentagon had "ultimate responsibility for the actions of the men and women in uniform".

That view is shared across the political spectrum in the Senate, long resentful of highhanded treatment from Mr Rumsfeld. If the trail of responsibility led to the Defence Secretary's office, then he should resign, said Joe Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But in a series of TV and radio interviews, Mr Rumsfeld too has stopped short of apologising, insisting that the abuse was an isolated incident, whose culprits were being punished. At one point he refused even to concede that the humiliations and abuse visited on the prisoners amounted to torture. "I'm not a lawyer," he said.

For all the anger, and a widespread feeling that a head should roll, the odds remained that the Defence Secretary would keep his job. It was unlikely in the extreme, Congressional staffers said, that Mr Bush would shake up his national security team less than six months before the election, at a moment when the entire military operation in Iraq was hanging in the balance.

In the interviews, one shown unedited in English with an Arab-language summary afterwards, and the other with a simultaneous Arabic voice-over, Mr Bush tried to project himself as firm and re-assuring.

"In a democracy everything is not perfect," he declared, "Mistakes are made." But in a democracy also, mistakes were dealt with: "There will be investigations, people will be brought to justice."

But he did not offer a personal apology, and told the al-Arabiya network that, whatever had happened, US forces would remain in Iraq until their mission was done. "We want to help Iraq. We made a commitment," he said. "The United States will keep that commitment, because we believe in freedom and we believe the people of Iraq want to be free."

Speaking on the same channel earlier yesterday, the national security adviser Condoleezza Rice did apologise. "We are deeply sorry for what has happened to these people, and what the families must be feeling. It's just not right," she said.

Meanwhile, Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, has sent the clearest signal yet that, weary and frustrated, he does not intend to be around for a second term if the President is re-elected in November. But in classic Powell style, he did not deliver the message in person. Instead, confidants, notably his deputy Richard Armitage and his chief-of-staff Larry Wilkerson, have made his feelings plain in an lengthy article in the magazine GQ, clearly with the Secretary of State's blessing.

* More shocking pictures of Iraqi prisoners apparently being humiliated and abused by US soldiers were published today by The Washington Post. One image appears to show a soldier holding a leash tied around the neck of a naked man lying on the floor of an Iraqi prison.

It is just one of 1,000 digital pictures obtained which it claims were taken during last summer and winter. The newspaper says the pictures were passed around military police who served at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and some of them are similar in content to those shown in the US media which shocked the world last week.

[patricia]

Odd that the head honcho, Mr Bush would claim ignorance of these apparently wide-spread abuses on Iraqis and it seems Afghans as well.
It seems as though those who were carrying out the scutwork in the War On Terror didn't think that Bush was in charge.
The underlings, from Rumsfeld on down, just went ahead and made decisions, without ever feeling that Mr Bush should be kept in the loop. When your underlings don't think that you are in charge.............you are not in charge.
I think that because Mr Bush had everybody else apologize, in one way or another, he didn't think he had to. After all, he's delegated everything else in his term as President. Why would this be any different??
What a putz!!

[bluenoter]

Forgive me if this AP item has already been brought up elsewhere, but it looks as if they might be trying to let Rummy take the fall.

[Paul B]

Rumsfeld should take the fall, as Thomas Friedman so eloquently puts it in today's Times:

"What happened in Abu Ghraib prison was, at best, a fundamental breakdown in the chain of command under Mr. Rumsfeld's authority, or, at worst, part of a deliberate policy somewhere in the military-intelligence command of sexually humilitating prisoners to soften them up for interrogation, a policy that ran amok.

"Either way, the secretary of defense is ultimately responsible, and if we are going to rebuild our credibility as instruments of humanitarian values, the rule of law and democratization, in Iraq or elsewhere, Mr. Bush must hold his own defense secretary accountable. Words matter, but deeds matter more."

I wonder what the warmongers around here think...Crawjo, Dolan? Should Rummy be canned? Or should the whole thing just be brushed under the rug so Bush can continue to "build democracy" in Iraq?

Bye-ya.

[bluenoter]

Originally Posted by Paul B

Rumsfeld should take the fall

I'd like to see the whole administration, including the smirking-chimp-in-chief, take the fall.

[Al in NYC]

if we are going to rebuild our credibility as instruments of humanitarian values, the rule of law and democratization, in Iraq or elsewhere

What credibility? From where? One can't "rebuild" what has never been built in the first place. Friedman is certainly right about Rumsfeld, but he is such a goof.

[clinthopson]

And what is just as apalling is that 40%+ still think he's doing a good job.

Fucking idiots!

[patricia]

Originally Posted by bluenoter

I'd like to see the whole administration, including the smirking-chimp-in-chief, take the fall.

I think that the whole kit and kaboodle of these clowns should fall on their collective swords. They have no honour and they have no reason to be proud of the way that they have first of all, gotten the world into this mess and then, lost control over the military.

Shameful. The whole bunch of them, right up to Mr Bush, should resign.
Hold the election now, if that's what it takes. In other systems, there's such a thing as a non-confidence vote. Is impeachment the U.S. equivelant??
The Republicans were determined to oust Clinton, over a private sexual matter. Surely the security and reputation of the U.S. is more important than a smarmy sexual matter, which should never have become public.
Conduct both in and out of Iraq is a mess. The ones to blame are the ones at the top. It's not enough to court-marshal a few soldiers at the bottom.
The climate encouraging abuse was clearly there, through a lack of leadership. By leadership I don't mean the soldiers' immediate superior, but that this goes all the way to the attitude at the top.

We've heard Mr Bush and Mr Rumsfeld, time and time again, say that the Geneva Convention does not apply to these captives. What did they think would happen when no rules applied??

RESIGN, for the good of the country's reputation and it's safety, against the anger that has been further exaserpated, worldwide, by this fiasco.

[Monte Smith]

The horrors, the horrors.

peep

[RBS]

Originally Posted by clinthopson

And what is just as apalling is that 40%+ still think he's doing a good job.

Fucking idiots!

Yeah, true. But it's much better than the 60-70% of recent history!