Mickey Kaus Demands A Cover Up

Mickey Kaus is the new Oliver North. Without the hair and the service in Vietnam. (The running around his home naked, waiving a revolver, we don't want to know.) To Kaus, the real scandal of the U.S. military's abuse of prisoners of war is not the mistreatment itself, but congressional demands for information and oversight.

Senator Daschle's Outrage: Leave it to a U.S. Senator to confront shameful acts of inhumanity that endanger the nation and get all outraged over ... a disregard of Congressional prerogatives! "Why were we not told in a classified briefing why this happened, and that it happened at all?" asked Senator Daschle, in a complaint echoed by Senators McCain and Warner. "That is inexcusable; it's an outrage." (Why, they had to hear it on CBS! They were unprepared!) Leave it to our get-a-new-angle media culture to play up these self-serving institutional complaints as if they were in the same universe as the abuse itself. No wonder politicians succeed by running against Washington. ....

How, exactly, would briefing senators have helped the situation? It wouldn't have stopped the abuse, which had already transpired. Mainly, it would have multiplied the number of potentially talkative people who knew, increasing the chance that the news would get out and do the damage to America's reputation that it has done, no? Daschle's complaint is a traditional means by which Senators and Congresspersons protect their careers by distancing themselves from a scandal. ('We didn't know!') It's also part of the routinization of horror, in which a jarring and morally charged event gets sucked into a more familiar and arid Washington dispute, losing its valence. Too bad that while America starts to yawn at Daschle's "outrage," the rest of the world is still sputtering with rage at the original offense. ...

Predictably, the Republican Kaus targets his attack on a Democrat, Daschle, though the article to which Kaus links makes clear that Republicans on the Senate Armed Services committee were equally outraged at the Administration's nondisclosure.

Kaus also complains that briefing the Senate would result in the disclosure of the information, increasing the chance that the news would harm the reputation of America (read: the Bush Administration). Does anyone believe for a second that the Iraqi people don't know what is happening in Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in their own country?

Not to mention the linked article states this: "Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) complained that when Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials came to Capitol Hill last week -- hours before CBS's '60 Minutes II' first aired photographs of Iraqi prisoners being physically abused and sexually humiliated -- they neglected to mention the coming disclosure." How exactly would disclosure to Daschle hours before the 60 Minutes II program -- which the Administration knew was coming -- "increase[] the chance that the news would get out?"

But the most telling point of Kaus's poorly-written diatribe is his refusal to acknowledge a Congressional role in the prosecution of the War against Iraq. He suggests the Senate Armed Services Committee has no need, or right, to know what the military is doing in Iraq. Congress's demand for information about the war, why, that's just "self-serving institutional complaints." And to Kaus, it would be just fine if the American public never learned of the abuse of war prisoners. (We must consider our rep!)

How would have disclosure to senators helped the situation? Well, any disclosure makes it less likely the same abuses happen again (or, less likely to be photographed again). It makes it more likely that the perpetrators, and those who ordered or permitted those soliders to act, are given appropriate punishments. And it makes it more difficult for the Administration to sell their next brutal venture to the American people.