From an article in the Post: “Some U.S. officials said Rumsfeld was resistant to repeated warnings from Iraq governor L. Paul Bremer — delivered as early as last fall — that the United States was detaining too many Iraqis for too long and in poor conditions. Bremer told Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials that if the problem persisted, the political fallout in Iraq would be serious, the officials said.”
And following up on Thursday’s post about the prohibitive political costs of canning Rumsfeld, this from the same article in the Post: “A White House official said that it is the view of a number of people close to Bush that getting rid of Rumsfeld would be ‘a self-inflicted political and policy wound disproportionate to the secretary’s responsibility for this human failure on the part of a small number of soldiers.'”
Finally, the same Post article suggests something I’d heard from a source on Wednesday: that the Miller report from last October — the one that seemed to recommend more Gitmo-style rules for interrogations and imprisonment in Iraq — was itself ordered because of reports of problems with the detention of prisoners in the country. As for myself, I still have some question whether Miller was sent out there — remember he went in August and September — because the insurgency was heating up at the time and it was felt that … well, more needed to be done.
