[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 107 (Friday, September 10, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9063-S9066]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               THE ADMINISTRATION'S INCOMPETENCE ON IRAQ

  Mr. KENNEDY. Yesterday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held two 
hearings to consider the reports by General Fay and General Jones and 
the report by former Defense Secretary Schlesinger about the Abu Ghraib 
prison debacle.
  The abuses at Abu Ghraib are just one part of a much larger failure, 
for which our soldiers have been paying a high price since day one. 
Because of the Bush administration's arrogant ideological incompetence 
and its bizarre ``mission accomplished'' mentality, our troops and our 
intelligence officers and our diplomats had neither the resources nor 
the guidance needed to deal with the worsening conditions that steadily 
began to overwhelm them and continue to do so.

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  On issue after issue in Iraq, the administration has failed the basic 
test of competence.
  Before the war, the administration mishandled the intelligence, 
causing great damage to U.S. respect in the world, making the war on 
terrorism far harder to win. It is preposterous for the administration 
to pretend that the war in Iraq has made America safer. No President in 
America's history has done more damage to our country and our security 
than President Bush.
  The American people know where the buck stops.
  The administration bungled prewar diplomacy on Iraq, leaving us 
isolated and unable to obtain real allied support.
  The administration failed to consider the possibility that the 
liberation of Iraq might not be the cakewalk they predicted. They 
failed to consider the possibility that their preoccupation with Iraq 
could undo much of our achievement in Afghanistan and give the al-Qaida 
terrorists time to regroup and plan murderous new assaults.
  Far too many of our soldiers were not adequately trained for their 
mission in Iraq and they did not have adequate equipment for their 
missions either.
  The administration failed to send enough troops to do the job of 
keeping the peace. They disbanded the Iraqi army, and they are 
struggling now to recreate it.
  The administration's failures have also put a huge strain on the Army 
and our Reserve Forces and imposed great hardships on the families of 
our soldiers.
  The number of insurgents in Iraq has gone up. The number of brutal 
attacks has gone up, and so have the casualties.
  When President Bush recklessly declared ``mission accomplished,'' the 
civilian leaders in the Department of Defense took him seriously and 
left our Armed Forces in Iraq underprepared, understaffed, and underled 
for the mission that was only just beginning.
  President Bush has stated that the war in Iraq was a catastrophic 
success. He is half right--the war has been a catastrophe.
  The war has been a catastrophe for our soldiers, who were foolishly 
sent to war with no plan--no plan--to win the peace.
  The war has been a catastrophe for their loved ones.
  The war has been a catastrophe for our Nation's standing in the world 
and for the war on terror. As I have said, it has distracted us from 
the real threat of al-Qaida in Afghanistan and elsewhere, made the war 
against terrorism far harder to win, and made America more hated in the 
world than at any other time in our history.
  Nothing I have said detracts from the extraordinary heroism of our 
soldiers. They have responded to their mission in Iraq with immense 
courage and dedication. But their outstanding service does not and 
cannot excuse the incompetence of their civilian leaders.
  That incompetence was on vivid display again yesterday, in the Armed 
Services Committee, where we heard testimony on the report by General 
Jones and General Fay about Iraq. Their findings were chilling.
  Their report states point blank that the Pentagon expected our 
troops, under General Sanchez, to provide stability and support for the 
Coalition Provisional Authority ``in a relatively nonhostile 
environment'' in Iraq. Those are the exact words of the report--``a 
relatively nonhostile environment.''
  That description is no surprise. The administration had been doing 
its best to convince the American people that the war would be easy.
  In February 2003, Secretary Rumsfeld told troops that the war ``could 
last, you know, 6 days, 6 weeks, I doubt 6 months.'' As Secretary 
Rumsfeld well knows, it has now been three times as long as that, with 
no end in sight.
  In March 2003, Vice President Cheney said we would ``be greeted as 
liberators'' and dismissed out of hand any suggestion that we would be 
viewed as conquerors in a long, bloody occupation.
  Before the war, the Pentagon flagrantly ignored the postwar planning 
carried out by the State Department in its ``Future of Iraq'' project. 
The civilian leaders at the Defense Department were dismissive of any 
opposing view. They were convinced that the war would be easy, cheap, 
and fast.
  They ridiculed General Shinseki, then Chief of Staff of the Army, and 
Larry Lindsey, formerly President Bush's top economic advisor, who said 
that a successful war in Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of 
soldiers, and hundreds of billions of dollars.
  They put their own ideology above practical military planning, and we 
continue to see the catastrophic results today.
  Simply put, the civilians at the Pentagon did not anticipate or 
prepare for the insurgent fighting that occurred, despite the prewar 
warnings from military leaders.
  Even after the shameful failure at Abu Ghraib came to light, the 
administration continued to pour out statements that were completely at 
odds with the facts.
  On May 7 this year, Secretary Rumsfeld testified before the Armed 
Services Committees of both Houses of Congress. He told Senators that 
``a small number of the U.S. military'' had perpetuated the abuses. He 
told the House that ``a few members of the U.S. military were 
responsible.'' A week later, President Bush tried to minimize the 
scandal by saying it involved ``disgraceful conduct by a few American 
troops.''
  But as we now know, it wasn't just a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib.
  The Fay Report found 54 military intelligence, military police, 
medics, and civilian contractors who had ``some degree of 
responsibility or complicity in the abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib. 
Leaders in key positions failed to properly supervise the interrogation 
operations at the prison.''
  The Fay Report identified not just individual failures but systemic 
failures, including: ``inadequate interrogation doctrine and training, 
an acute shortage of MP and MI soldiers, the lack of clear lines of 
responsibility between the MP and MI chains of command, the lack of 
clear interrogation policy for the Iraq Campaign.''
  The Schlesinger Report found that military leaders in and out of Iraq 
and civilian leaders in the Department of Defense ``failed in their 
duties and that such failures contributed directly or indirectly to 
detainee abuse.'' The report faults the Secretary of Defense and the 
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for failing to ``set in motion 
the development of a more effective alternative course of action.'' 
Plainly, senior leaders did not do what was necessary to prevent these 
abuses.
  Secretary Rumsfeld told the Armed Services committee that the abuses 
were brought to light by Specialist Joseph Darby in January 2004, and 
the military chain of command ``acted promptly on learning of those 
abuses.''
  This claim, too, is false. Senior leaders had ample warning that 
these abuses were occurring long before January 2004.
  General Jones' report found that indications and warnings had 
surfaced at General Sanchez's level ``that additional oversight and 
corrective actions were needed in the handling of detainees,'' 
including at Abu Ghraib.
  The report pointed to many specific warnings from within the Army 
about clear problems that were ignored by the Pentagon's civilian 
leadership. It cited an incident in which a detainee was abused at Camp 
Cropper after a prison riot. It cited investigations by the Army's 
Criminal Investigative Division into incidents of abuse and 
disciplining soldiers. It cited the death of a CIA detainee at Abu 
Ghraib. It cited the totally inadequate filing system for tracking 
detainees, which consisted of a hodge-podge of computers and filing 
boxes.
  The civilian leaders at the Pentagon also had ample warnings from 
outside the Army, which they also ignored. The International Committee 
of the Red Cross reported on abuses in the prisons as early as May 
2003, soon after the fall of Baghdad. During a visit to Abu Ghraib 5 
months later, in October 2003, Red Cross inspectors were so upset by 
what they found that they halted their visit and demanded an immediate 
explanation from U.S. military authorities. Yet the worst abuses at the 
prison occurred over the next 3 months, from October to December of 
that year.
  Clearly, Secretary Rumsfeld misled the Congress and the American 
people when he said that the leadership had

[[Page S9065]]

acted swiftly to address the abuses, when in fact, they allowed abuses 
to continue and allowed the situation to fester. They acted only when 
the public disclosure of the abuses in the press made it impossible for 
their cover-up to continue.
  The administration then attempted to minimize the abuses at Abu 
Ghraib as part of its overall strategy to bury any bad new from Iraq 
and hide its incompetence, or worse, from the American people. But as 
these reports show, the catastrophe is far too great to be wished away 
with political spin.
  The Jones-Fay report states very clearly that ``the military police 
and military intelligence units at Abu Ghraib were severely 
underresourced.''
  The report says that a failure to distinguish between Iraq and other 
theaters of operation led to ``confusion'' about which particular 
interrogation techniques were authorized in Iraq.
  It says, ``The intelligence structure was under-manned, 
underequipped, and inappropriately organized for counter-insurgency 
operations.''
  What the report is saying, put in plain language, is that the 
operation was botched--totally botched.
  We know from General Taguba's report that few, if any, of the 
military police assigned to Abu Ghraib were trained on how to run a 
prison, or even on the basic requirements of the Geneva Conventions.
  Yesterday, the generals told us that additional missions had 
overwhelmed General Sanchez's headquarters, leaving them unable to 
manage the growing crises at Abu Ghraib and unable to respond to the 
many warning signs from the Red Cross.
  We heard over and over again about the impossible strains imposed on 
General Sanchez and his headquarters, because he was suddenly forced to 
take on two huge missions in Iraq--supporting the Coalition Provisional 
Authority and beginning the reconstruction--in addition to fighting a 
growing insurgency.
  The Jones-Fay report says that General Sanchez was missing two-thirds 
of the personnel needed for his own command in Iraq. It says ``of the 
1,400 personnel required, the [Fifth] Corps staff transitioned to only 
495, or roughly a third, of the manning requirements.'' This was barely 
enough to fight the war, and far too few to rebuild a country or 
supervise the detention system.
  The obvious basic questions are who put our military forces in this 
untenable position? Who decided that the war would be short, cheap, and 
easy? Who decided that the war was over and that we needed to start 
rebuilding Iraq? Who decided to play ``Mission Accomplished?''
  The problems at Abu Ghraib are just symptoms of these larger 
failures. We sent our troops into battle without enough life-saving 
body armor and armor for their humvees on patrol. Those shortages were 
allowed to last for over a year, while our casualties continued to 
mount.
  We had far too few troops in place to prevent the looting of Baghdad 
and many other parts of the country.
  Huge ammunition depots went unguarded, and insurgents kept getting 
materials and bombs to use against our troops.
  We disbanded the Iraqi military, at one time the fourth largest 
military in the world, only to begin training a new one from scratch 
when the blunder was finally admitted.
  In his report, General Jones gave us a definition of a leadership 
failure: where ``leaders did not take charge, failed to provide 
appropriate guidance'', ``failed to accept responsibility or apply good 
judgment''. By this standard, and on this record, President Bush and 
his administration are clearly guilty of leadership failure.
  Despite these colossal failures of leadership and this gross 
incompetence, no one has been held accountable.
  The military holds its soldiers accountable for leadership failures. 
A few weeks ago, the Navy fired the captain of the USS John F. Kennedy 
aircraft carrier for running over a small boat in the Persian Gulf. The 
Navy didn't hide incompetence and gloss it over. It responded 
decisively and plainly stated that it had ``lost confidence'' in the 
captain's ability to operate the carrier safely. He was the eleventh 
commanding officer of the Navy to be fired this year alone. The Navy 
fired 14 commanding officers in 2003.
  In February 2004, the Commanding Officer of the frigate USS Samuel B 
Roberts was fired for a ``loss of confidence,'' after he spent a night 
off the ship during a port visit to Ecuador.
  In October 2003, the Commanding Officer of an EA-6B Prowler Aircraft 
Squadron lost his job after one of his jets skidded off a runway. The 
Navy cited a ``loss of confidence'' when they made the decision to 
dismiss him.
  In December 2003 and January 2004, Commanding Officers of the 
submarine, Jimmy Carter and the frigate USS Gary were fired, both for 
``loss of confidence.''
  For military officers in the Navy, the message is clear--if you fail, 
you're fired. The message to the civilian leadership in this 
administration is equally clear--if you fail there will be no 
consequences and no accountability, even if 1,000 American lives are 
lost.
  It is time for the Department of Defense run a tighter ship at all 
levels of command, including the civilian leadership. The civilian 
leaders at the Pentagon should be held at least to the same standard of 
accountability that military officers in the Navy are held to.
  Obviously, it is different to place overall blame on our military 
leaders when their only fault may well be that they couldn't talk their 
arrogant civilian leaders out of a flawed plan for Iraq.
  But someone must be held accountable for the massive failures in 
Iraq. The buck has to stop somewhere!
  Civilian control of the military is one of the great cornerstones of 
our democracy. But what if the civilian leaders don't know what they're 
doing, and mindlessly order our troops into battle unprepared?
  Alfred Lord Tennyson said it well in those lines in his famous poem, 
``Charge of the Light Brigade'':

     Not tho' the soldiers knew
     Someone had blundered.
     Theirs not to make reply,
     Theirs not to reason why,
     Theirs but to do and die.

  This is what the administration has done to our troops in Iraq, and 
if Tennyson were writing today, he might well call his poem, ``The 
Charge of the Bush Brigade.''
  Clearly, there must be accountability for this breathtaking 
incompetence, which has resulted in the death of over a thousand 
American soldiers so far, put more in daily danger, and weakened 
America's national security.
  Yesterday, at the Armed Services Committee, former Defense Secretary 
Harold Brown described the key to accountability:

       At each level, the question is loss of confidence. And in 
     the Navy, the loss of confidence goes with grounding your 
     ship. At a higher level the loss of confidence has to be 
     determined on a basis that's somewhat broader, the full 
     performance. And I think that applies at the highest military 
     levels. And it applies at the level of the Secretary of 
     Defense and his staff. . . . And the electorate has to decide 
     on the basis of its confidence at election time.

  This administration has had its chance--and it failed the basic test 
of competence. If failed to deploy adequate forces in Iraq to win the 
peace. It failed at Abu Ghraib. It failed in granting sweetheart deals 
to Halliburton. It has failed the loss of confidence test, the basic 
test of Presidential leadership.
  The President seeks re-election based on his ability to fight the war 
on terror.
  The administration has lost confidence of the so-called ``coalition 
of the willing.'' Country after country is withdrawing troops, leaving 
America responsible for 90 percent of all the troops on the ground and 
90 percent of all casualties.
  On November 2d, the American people will decide, whether a majority 
of the country have lost confidence in the President's leadership 
because of his failures in Iraq and his failures on a wide range of 
immense important domestic issues as well. There can only be one 
answer--America needs new leadership. As I have said before, the only 
thing America has to fear is 4 more years of George Bush.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. ALLEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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