c-span2 House Armed Services--unbelievable GOP resistance

[berry]

It's about Abu Ghraib. The GOPers are pathetic. One woman from Michigan lobbed the "you're hurting the troops" accusation. Chair is Duncan Hunter of CA and though Dems are asking for the Red Cross document, Hunter is saying they have no right because they haven't yet done their homework and read every word of the Taguba Report. He keeps saying 6000 pages (so the lost 2000 pages are found?). ALL the Dems are really angry!

This is worth watching. (Though Hunter makes my blood boil, and so do his fellow thugs.)

[berry]

1. Well it's over now--I may have come in late, or it was a short meeting.

The vicious Michgan Rep is Mrs. Miller.

Ellen Tauscher had an amendment up to require DOD to provide more docs (maybe only the Red Cross one? or maybe others too). The Dems lost 28-21. This was a successful bid by Hunter et al to slow down the Cong oversight on the torture issue. But the GOP arguments were almost taunts, they were so transparent. The main one: people who want to know all the facts about the torture are "politicizing" it. Augh.

[Lin]

2. Yea, well the GOP knows ALL about wanting details and how TO politicize

it's all they did for YEARS to Clinton,

it kills me that nobody ever raises the possibility of what WJC might have accomplished had he not been haunted by thugs nipping at his heels (and crotch) year after year afer year after.....arrrrgh sorry got off on rant.

Lots and lots of ranting for three 1/2 years now :-(

[berry]

3. Yeah--I find myself ranting a lot too, always justified mind you.

This armed services committee session was of course more of the same. But I actually was stunned to realize that the GOP isn't even pretending to care about the torture now. That Ms. Miller from Michigan pulled out the repulsive talking point that the Abu Ghraib behavior wasn't all that bad--nobody cut off anyone's head. And Hunter was taunting the Democrats who (he said) already had the Taguba report--which was so long that they couldn't possibly be serious in bothering the busy Pentagon for more docs. They had plenty to read already (and hadn't done it all yet--he was scolding them). Hunter's smug taunting made me want to slap him.

So that's the plan. Turn out 1000s of pages (no matter the quality--and we know now that Taguba was limited in what he could ask of whom) and then declare that a request for more info is just plain greedy, or worse. That's what the WH did when the pressure was on for Bush* to produce his Nat'l Guard records--a document dump, but not in anything that could be called "good faith".

I WAS pleased to see the Dems fighting back.