August 25, 2004
The panel cited what it called major failures on the part of Mr.
Rumsfeld and his aides in not anticipating and responding swiftly to the
post-invasion insurgency in Iraq. On the eve of the Republican convention, that
verdict could not have been welcome at the White House, where postwar problems
in Iraq represent perhaps President
Bush's greatest political liability. The report rarely mentions Mr.
Rumsfeld by name, referring most often instead to the "office of the secretary
of defense.'' But as a sharp criticism of postwar planning for Iraq, it
represents the most explicit official indictment to date of an operation that
was very much the province of Mr. Rumsfeld and his top deputies. "Any
defense establishment should adapt quickly to new conditions as they arise, and
in this case, we were slow, at least in the judgment of the members of this
panel, to adapt accordingly after the insurgency started in the summer of
2003,'' Mr. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary himself, said in presenting
the panel's findings at the Pentagon on Tuesday. Beginning in late 2002,
the panel said, Mr. Rumsfeld and his staff set the stage for an environment in
which abuses later became widespread. They did this first by sowing confusion
about what kinds of interrogation techniques would be permitted, then by failing
to plan for the intensity of the post-invasion insurgency, and finally by
delaying for months in dispatching reinforcements to help the American guards at
Abu Ghraib contend with the swelling number of prisoners. The panel
sidestepped the broader, even more contentious, question of whether Mr.
Rumsfeld had sent enough troops to Iraq. It focused instead on what it
described as short staffing among the military police, who were outnumbered by
prisoners by a ratio of 75 to 1 at Abu Ghraib, and at the headquarters of Lt.
Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, whose 495-member staff numbered only about one-third
of the authorized total. In the four months since the abuses at Abu
Ghraib first came to light, some of Mr. Rumsfeld's critics have demanded his
resignation, as a gesture of the accountability that the defense secretary
himself has promised. But while the panel chronicled failures all the way up
the civilian as well as the military command, all four members said that Mr.
Rumsfeld's errors were less severe than those made by uniformed officers, and
that he should not be forced from office for what they described as primarily
failures of omission. "If the head of a department had to resign every
time someone below him did something wrong, it'd be a very empty cabinet
table,'' said Harold Brown, defense secretary under President Jimmy Carter and a
panel member. Indeed, members of the panel went out of their way to praise Mr.
Rumsfeld for having tried to avert abuses by directing his staff beginning in
late 2002 to draw up rules for interrogation at the American detention facility
in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But they said confusion about those rules,
which were rewritten several times as part of a fierce Pentagon debate,
ultimately added to problems in Afghanistan and Iraq as the procedures were put
into force there, without adequate supervision, by military intelligence units
that were moved from Cuba to the Middle East. Mr. Rumsfeld, who was
briefed on the findings by video conference on Tuesday morning, responded later
in the day only with a brief statement, saying that the panel had provided
"important information and recommendations.'' "We have said from the
beginning that we would see that these incidents were fully investigated, make
findings, make the appropriate corrections, and make them public,'' Mr.
Rumsfeld said. As described by Tillie K. Fowler, another member of the
group and a former Republican congresswoman from Florida, the panel's mission
was to find out "how this happened and who let it happen,'' a reference to the
abuses that came to public attention in April with the publication of what have
now become infamous photographs. The abuses depicted in those
photographs themselves were primarily the work of a small group of wayward
soldiers, including the seven members of a military police unit who have already
been charged with the crime, the panel members said Tuesday. But the panel took
issue with the idea, voiced publicly by senior officials including Mr. Bush,
that the full array of misconduct at the prison was limited to no more than "a
few'' soldiers. "We found a string of failures that go well beyond an
isolated cellblock in Iraq,'' Ms. Fowler said at the Pentagon. "We
found fundamental failures throughout all levels of command, from the soldiers
on the ground to the Central Command and to the Pentagon," she said. "These
failures of leadership helped to set the conditions which allowed for the
abusive practice to take place.'' In addressing the role played by Mr.
Rumsfeld in particular, the panel's report emphasized the defense secretary's
decisions beginning on Dec. 2, 2002, to authorize for use at Guantánamo Bay 16
additional interrogation procedures more aggressive than the 17 methods long
approved as part of standard military practice. The next month, in response to
criticisms from the Navy, Mr. Rumsfeld rescinded a majority of the approved
measures, and directed that the remaining aggressive techniques could be used
only with his approval. But it was not until April 16, 2003, the report
said, that a final list of approved techniques for use at Guantánamo was issued.
It said that those changes "were an element contributing to uncertainties in the
field as to which techniques were authorized,'' and that ultimately "the
augmented techniques for Guantánamo migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq where they
were neither limited nor safeguarded.'' "Had the secretary of defense
had a wider range of legal opinions and a more robust debate regarding detainee
policies and operations, his policy of April 16, 2003, might well have been
developed and issued in early December 2002,'' the report said. "This would
have avoided the policy changes which characterized the Dec. 2, 2002, to April
16, 2003, period.'' In terms of postwar planning, members of the panel
faulted the Pentagon for assuming that the problems encountered in Iraq after a
full-scale American invasion in 2003 would be limited to the refugee issues that
followed the limited incursion of the Persian Gulf war of 1991. By last
summer, as it became clear "that there was a major insurgency growing in Iraq,''
the report said, senior leaders within the uniformed military and the Pentagon
"should have moved to meet the need for additional military police forces'' to
help guard prisoners at Abu Ghraib in particular, whose population had begun to
overwhelm the members of the 800th Military Police Brigade, who ultimately
became the primary agents in the acts of abuse. Here in particular, the
panel made clear its view that by October or November at least, the void should
have been filled by Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides. Using an acronym that
refers to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the report said, "It is the
judgment of this panel that in the future, considering the sensitivity of this
kind of mission, the OSD should assure itself that serious limitations in
detention/interrogation missions do not occur.''