Abu Ghraib Was "A Political Smear"

Former Carter SecDef James Schlesinger has delivered another big, fat “FU” to the Bush Administration’s left-wing tormentors.

Opines the Wall Street Journal:

Since Operation Enduring Freedom began in October 2001, the U.S. has handled about 50,000 detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and other venues of the war on terror. Among those, about 300 allegations of abuse have arisen. And as of this month 155 investigations have resulted in 66 substantiated cases of mistreatment. Only about a third of those cases were related to interrogation, while another third happened at the point of capture, ‘frequently under uncertain, dangerous and violent circumstances.’

So notes Tuesday's report from the Independent Panel to Review DOD Detention Operations, empowered in May by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and chaired by former Pentagon chief James Schlesinger. The report offers invaluable perspective on the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib and is devastating to those who've sought to pin blame on an alleged culture of lawlessness going all the way to the top of the Bush Administration.

John Kerry must be even more disoriented by the Swift boat story than he appears if he thinks now's the time to call for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation.

Wow. That’s quite a display of (well-deserved) woofing from the normally staid, restrained Journal op-eders.

Mr. Schlesinger and his fellow panelists, having already had long and distinguished careers, have no motivation to risk their own reputations for Mr. Rumsfeld's. They have produced what's to date the definitive assessment of what went wrong, and the bottom line could hardly be more clear: While the Abu Ghraib abuses deserve to be punished, like other wartime excesses, the allegations that they had anything to do with so-called ‘torture memos’ and a Pentagon ‘culture of permissiveness’ are nothing but a political smear. [my emphasis]

Maybe it’s Mr. Apocalypse Now who should quit the campaign and resign his senate seat instead, seeing as how he’s responsible for endangering far more American POWs than the number of Iraqi terrorists the “late shift” at Abu Ghraib ever dressed up in Victoria’s Secret.