At a private Oval Office meeting, Bush complained about learning of the existence of photographs showing Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and degraded from media accounts, the official said.
"He was not happy, and he let Secretary Rumsfeld know about it," the official said.
Now, this is hardly the most important aspect of this story, but there's an interesting question here: when was Bush first told about the existence of the Abu Ghreib pictures?
We know that the problems at Abu Ghreib were first discovered late last year and that the Army's internal investigation was completed in late February. Donald Rumsfeld and (presumably) Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been briefed on the investigation in January and might have decided that the military justice system and the CENTCOM chief could handle it. It wasn't unreasonable to believe that it didn't demand presidential level attention at that time.
But here's where that changes: CBS said in its original story that Myers had asked them "two weeks ago" to delay airing the story because the situation in Iraq at the time was so explosive. That means that by mid-April, when CBS was originally planning to run the story, Myers knew the photos had been leaked.
Now, Myers reports directly to both the president and the Secretary of Defense. And once CBS had gotten hold of the photos he had to know that (a) they were sure to become public fairly soon and (b) they were incredibly explosive.
So: did Myers keep this looming PR disaster to himself? Did he tell Rumsfeld that the pictures were about to become public? Did either of them tell Bush? Did he/they keep it to themselves because they thought it wasn't that important? Or because they were afraid to tell the president?
An interesting question is, "Did they tell Cheney, but not Bush?" Did Myers and Rumsfeld tell Chenney?
And whatever the case, what does all this say about the Bush management style? (hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil)
Had I known the names of the abusers and the times, dates, and locations of their planned abuse of prisoners, I would have moved Heaven and Earth to prevent it.
Nobody could have imagined that a motley crew of CIA personnel, civilian contractors, and untrained MPs, with a mandate to extract intelligence and total, unsupervised control over Iraqi prisoners, would be stupid enough to record the torture on camera...I mean nobody could have imagined they would abuse the very people we came to liberate.
And, I would like to add, we had no specific warnings that broom handles would be used to sodomize detainees overseas. Our intelligence only warned of domestic sodomy.
And our intelligence indicated that there would only be conventional, professional torturing. Nobody could have imagined that there would be sadistic, sexual, "spring break party 2004" torturing.
