Truth - Al Franken [114]
The crowd of MPs did just that.
We had gone to Abu Ghraib because, in the Christmas of 2004, the soldiers there needed a morale lift. Although the Lynndie Englands and the Charles Graners were long gone, these guys were operating under a stigma. In a way, the men and women I performed for at Abu Ghraib were victims of torture as well. And so are all our troops in Iraq.
Testifying before Congress on April 29, 2004, Paul Wolfowitz was asked how many Americans had been killed in Iraq. Wolfowitz replied:
It’s approximately 500, of which—I can get the exact numbers—approximately 350 are combat deaths.
The actual number at the time was 722, of which 521 were killed in combat. He was off by a third, and, not surprisingly, on the low end. How could Paul Wolfowitz, the number two man in the Pentagon, the man more responsible than anyone for the invasion of Iraq, make such a bad guess? And why did he have to guess at all?
As people who listen to my show know, I have thought and thought about that moment. And the only explanation I can come up with is that he does not care.
The next Saturday, I happened to run into Wolfowitz at the White House Correspondents Dinner. “You want to hear the joke I’ve been using about your not knowing how many of our troops had died in Iraq?” I asked. The small group that had gathered around us made it impossible for him to say no.
“Okay. Here it is. ‘Paul Wolfowitz was off by a third when he was asked how many Americans have died in Iraq. The good news, however, is that he won the office pool.’ ” As the others laughed, Wolfowitz gave a wan smile, as if to acknowledge that it was bad form for the deputy secretary of defense to be so unfamiliar with the casualty count in an ongoing war.
One guy who you’d think would definitely know how many troops have died in Iraq would be Donald Rumsfeld. After all, the family of every soldier killed in action receives a personally signed letter from the secretary of defense. It’s the least he could do. Or so I thought. Actually, it turns out that the least he could do was send form letters to the next of kin signed with an Autopen.
When former Colonel David Hackworth wrote a column on November 22, 2004, reporting that two colonels had told him that Rumsfeld had “relinquished this sacred duty to a signature device,” Pentagon spokesman Jim Turner denied the charge, saying that “Rumsfeld signs the letters himself.”
Stars and Stripes reporter Leo Shane hammered away at the story until he got a straight answer. Sort of. “In the interest of ensuring timely contact with grieving family members,” Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said of Rumsfeld, “he has not individually signed each letter.” Perfect. Not only did he not sign the letters. He lied about it.
What kept Rumsfeld so busy that he couldn’t sign the killed-in-action letters by hand? As it so happens, my researchers obtained a document that might shed some light.
By the spring of 2004, Ahmed Chalabi had been bloodied in his first skirmishes with his former ally, the Bush administration. In early May, the Defense Intelligence Agency ended its monthly $340,000 stipend to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. A few weeks later, U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police raided his home and offices, seizing computers, dozens of rifles, and a large number of documents, as well as detaining three guards.
An Iraqi judge issued an arrest warrant, charging Chalabi with counterfeiting and money laundering. Even worse, he was accused by top U.S. intelligence officials of feeding sensitive intelligence to the Iranian government, including security information that could “get people killed.”
Paul Wolfowitz, Chalabi’s former patron, admitted at the time, “There are aspects of his recent behavior that are puzzling to me.”
Operating on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, Chalabi found an unlikely ally in the erratic Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who had led several bloody uprisings against U.S. troops in the holy cities of Karbala