Posted on 05/11/2004 9:39:49 AM PDT by kattracks
Democrats howling for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for not informing them of reports of prisoner abuse in Baghdad are ignoring the fact that concerned parents of an accused soldier informed 16 members of Congress - top Democrats such as Senators Hillary Clinton, Edward Kennedy and John D. Rockefeller - and the governor of West Virginia of the burgeoing scandal as far back as February 26th of this year. None of these 17 people acted to disclose the detailed information contained in the letters.While the media has created a firestorm about the abuse allegations at Abu Ghraib prison, only one TV network, MSNBC, disclosed the names of the 16 members of Congress when one of the letter writers, William Lawson, mentioned them during a telephone interview.
No further mention of the names was made by MSNBC.
Otherwise, the mainstream media has circled the wagons in a blatant attempt to protect their Democratic allies in the Senate from charges of hypocrisy in condemning Secretary Rumsfeld for not informing them of what they already knew, through both Army press releases and the 17 letters.
Lawson, the uncle of one of the accused soldiers, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick, gave NewsMax.com the names of the 16 members of Congress and West Virginia's governor as well as the text of the explosive letters in a series of faxes.
Here are the the 17 names, all Democrats except for Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, Sgt. Frederick's congressman:
Senators Jack Reed, Mark Dayton, Robert Byrd, Bill Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mark Pryor, Edward Kennedy, Benjamin Nelson, Hillary Clinton, Joseph Lieberman, Daniel Akaka, Paul Sarbanes, John D. Rockefeller, Governor Mark Warner and Rep. Roscoe Bartlett.
Senator Byrd's office would not even accept the letter e-mailed to him on the grounds it was too long.
Bartlett said he was looking into the matter.
Sarbanes said he had written the the "appropriate officials."
Rockefeller begged off on the grounds that he was barred by privacy rules.
Senator Joe Lieberman is the only one of these members of Congress who has defended Donald Rumsfeld and the world's mission in Iraq.
In fact, Senators Reed and Dayton were nearly abusive in holding the feet of Sec. Rumsfeld, Gen. Myers et alii to the fire last week - and here we find that they knew of the abuse allegations months ago.
They could only have been feigning outrage, since they have been long aware of what was going on at Abu Ghraib; the e-mail letters fully alerted the 16 Democrats and Governor Warner of the prisoner abuse accusations.
Moreover the U.S. Central Command told the media of an investigation into abuses on Jan. 16, just days after a report by a whistleblower.
"They told everyone in the world there were allegations of abuse and they were being investigated," Secretary Rumsfeld told reporters. On March 20, he added, Central Command "announced not only allegations, but they listed the types of abuses."
Lawson, a 23-year Army veteran, and other relatives of Sgt. Frederick, told the 17 they feared that he and the other accused MPs were being made scapegoats "to save some general's carrer."
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