What Reward for Failure? Four More Years

Rummy, largely running the clusterfuck that is Iraq, regrets not finding WMD and underestimating the power of the insurgency and is still defiant on the issue of troop levels.

Looking back over the past four years, he acknowledged that the two biggest mistakes or misjudgments that had been made - though not necessarily by him - were the failure to discover any prohibited weapons in Iraq ("that's clearly a disappointment") and a lack of intelligence that predicted "the degree of insurgency today."

He remained defiant in the face of critics who say the United States failed to send enough troops to Iraq initially to handle postwar security and, now, to combat the insurgents.

He contended that the decision on troop levels was largely "out of my control," since he was following the advice and requests of his regional commanders, first Gen. Tommy R. Franks and now Gen. John P. Abizaid and Gen. George W. Casey Jr.

Riiiight.

Of course no mention of the torture issue which heats up by the hour. Now the ACLU has, through FOIA requests, found documents showing that Special Forces personnel threatened DOD staffers if they talked about what they saw.

Two Defense Department intelligence officials reported observing brutal treatment of Iraqi insurgents captured in Baghdad last June, several weeks after disclosures of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison there created a worldwide uproar, according to a memorandum disclosed today.

The memorandum, written by the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency to a senior Pentagon official, said that when the two members of his agency objected to the treatment, they were threatened and told to keep quiet by other military interrogators. The memorandum said that the Defense Intelligence Agency officials saw prisoners being brought in to a detention center with burn marks on their backs and complaining about sore kidneys.

For Rummy, everything is just hunky dory.

He said he enjoyed working with Mr. Bush, whom he called "an excellent executive," was in good health, had no young children and was eager to tackle of series of continuing professional challenges, from revamping the military's overseas basing arrangements to overhauling the Pentagon's personnel system.

Of all of them, Rumsfeld has failed the worst (Condi is a close second) yet he is richly rewarded. Imagine how sweet life would be for most of us if we had a boss who expected little more than loyalty and a stiff back. History will judge them fairly becasue they are on the wrong side of it.

Until then, all we can do is hope that some on our side have the courage to bring the torture issue front and center.