UNTIL the Democratic 'leadership' shakes their cowering fear and dread of CONFRONTING the Karl Rove / Dick Cheney / George W. Bush White House, they will go down in history as PATHETIC ENABLERS of the criminal abuses of that Bush White House - from sexual sadism, torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, to lies-to-war, to the looting of New Orleans reconstruction funds, to illegal warrantless surveillance (often of Democratic campaigns), to the dead-end Anthrax attacks on Congress, to the administration's greatest fraud, the gross, in-your-face CORRUPTION of HALLIBURTON and other contracts in Iraq that have stoked and fueled ("BRING IT ON!") the US miltiary killing insurgency there.
To this point, the Democrats are SO INVESTED in the NEO-CON agenda of imperial conquest at the point of US military force, that they are, at best, ENABLERS of Bush-Republican CORRUPTION and criminality, and at worst COMPLICIT.
The Democrat's kid-gloves treatment of former Secretary of War Don Rumsfeld, who according to sworn testimony LIED TO CONGRESS when he said that he had NO KNOWLEDGE of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib (US run prison in Iraq)- is just the latest case in point.
PERJURY, FRAUD, CORRUPTION, turning American soldiers into sexual sadists - the Democrats ONCE AGAIN adopt their "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" and by no means, "CONFRONT NO EVIL" attitude towards gross Republican administration CRIMINALITY.
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US defense chiefs denied knowledge of Abu Ghraib
[aka "Rumsfeld LIED TO CONGRESS in Torture testimony"]
AP news
June 17, 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070616/pl_afp/usiraqmilitaryprison_070616234741
NEW YORK (AFP) - A general who investigated US troops sexually humiliating Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison said in a report out Saturday that top Pentagon officials denied knowledge of lurid photographs of the acts.
Army Major General Antonio Taguba said he met with then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top officials and described to them some of the contents of a report he had prepared on the notorious prison.
But Rumsfeld testified before Congress the following day that he had no idea of the extent of the abuse, Taguba told the New Yorker magazine in an interview.
"He's trying to acquit himself and a lot of people who are lying to protect themselves," the magazine quoted him as saying, referring to Rumsfeld's May 7, 2004 testimony.
The photographs taken by US jailers humiliating prisoners who were naked or hooded, on leashes or piled in a pyramid, rocked the world, becoming one of the few things President George W. Bush has said he regretted about the war.
Taguba said that he described to Rumsfeld what he termed the "torture" of "a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum," the magazine reported.
He said that all high-level officials had avoided scrutiny while the jail keepers were tried in courts-martial.
"From what I knew, troops just don't take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups," Taguba told the New Yorker, adding that his orders were to investigate the military police only and not their superiors.
"These (military police) troops were not that creative," he said. "Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority," he told the magazine.
