So This Is What Accountability Looks Like?

[babylonsister]

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/specialguests/2007/mar/05/so_this_is_what_accountability_looks_like

Special Guests Blog
So This Is What Accountability Looks Like?

By Olivier Sylvain | bio

We all know that, for better or worse, appeals to support our troops these days are as politically expedient and ceremonial as ever. The Washington Post’s intrepid reporting on the “squalid living conditions for some outpatient soldiers at Walter Reed and bureaucratic problems that prevented many from getting the care they need” has shed light on the Bush administration’s own unevenly choreographed “support” for soldiers during a time of war.

Now, however, the Bush administration’s own cynical use of the “support the troops” mantra is in full bloom for all of us to see. Last week, the administration, through Army Secretary Francis Harvey, fired Major General George Weightman from his leadership post at the flagship military hospital in less than two weeks after the Post’s probing series of stories were published.

(According to today’s Post, Weightman’s replacement, Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, may even be more culpable since he was in charge until 2004 and has been an outspoken critic of the Post’s original reporting on Walter Reed.) Now, Bush has ordered the creation of a bipartisan commission to review conditions at military and veterans’ hospitals across the country. He will also devote his Saturday morning radio address to this issue.

Oh, so this is what accountability at the defense department is supposed to look like? (Never mind the perversely belated recent finding by the Pentagon’s inspector general about the “inappropriate” manipulation of intelligence that originated in the Defense Department.) Why weren’t heads being rolled and bipartisan commissions being ordered as early as spring 2004 when Seymour Hersh and 60 Minutes broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal story, or when, later that year, soldiers complained directly and quite publicly to Secretary Rumsfeld about inadequate equipment and underprotected combat vehicles?

The Bush administration now has shown to the world that it does indeed play the bloodiest kind of politics. Many critics already sensed that this administration was eager to reinterpret Clausewitz’s celebrated maxim that war “is a continuation of politics by other means.” Now, with the firing of General Weightman, the whole world and can see their game plan in plain sight.