A few weeks ago I wrote that the House Government Reform Committee had taken the uncommon step of sending a subpoena to the Department of Defense and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to compel the release of documents related to abuses at Abu Ghraib, and a whistleblower who reported them.
The subpoena’s deadline was July 14, and according to commitee spokespeople, the Pentagon made it in time.
The committee now has “a large stack” of papers, spokesman Robert White told me, as well as a list of documents DoD would not release. “We’re still looking through all the documents to see what they gave us,” White told me yesterday afternoon. “There are some things they told us they excluded, for a variety of reasons, and our lawyers and their lawyers arte still talking about that.”
White wouldn’t give me a timetable of when the public might learn what’s in those files, or what kind of documents are missing.