MORE TO COME ON PRISON ABUSE

May 20, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
What Prison Scandal?
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Maybe anyone who was once married to Liz Taylor — at a time when she favored tiger-striped pantsuits and Clyde's chicken wings — would not flinch at wrangling with another aging sex symbol and demanding diva: Rummy.

Or maybe, at 77, Senator John Warner is at a stage in life where he can't be intimidated into putting a higher value on Republican re-election prospects than on what he sees as the common good.

In a bracing display of old-fashioned public spiritedness, the courtly Virginian joined up with the crusty Arizonan, John McCain, to brush back Rummy and the partisan whippersnappers in Congress who are yelping that the Senate Armed Services Committee's public hearings into prison abuse by American soldiers are distracting our warriors from taking care of business in Iraq.

"I think the Senate has become mesmerized by cameras, and I think that's sad," said a California Republican, Representative Duncan Hunter.

Then Senator John Cornyn of Texas weighed in, suggesting that Mr. Warner, a Navy officer in World War II, a Marine lieutenant in the Korean War and a Navy secretary under Nixon, and Mr. McCain, who lived in a dirt suite at the Hanoi Hilton for five years, were not patriotic. Their "collective hand-wringing," Mr. Cornyn sniffed, could be "a distraction from fighting and winning the war."

Rummy had a dozen Republican senators over to the Pentagon for breakfast on Tuesday, and Mr. Cornyn said the secretary was exasperated by the "all-consuming nature" of the Congressional hearings.

The man who David Plotz of Slate says is widely "considered one of the dumbest members of Congress" chimed in, dumbly. Following up on his inane rant defending the soldiers accused of abuse at Abu Ghraib and whingeing about "humanitarian do-gooders," Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma wondered whether Mr. Warner was trying to help the Democrats with public hearings.

The most absurd cut was delivered by Speaker Dennis Hastert, who responded to Mr. McCain's contention that Congress should not enact tax cuts during wartime because it prevented a sense of shared sacrifice by barking: "John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda. There is sacrifice in this country."

It just shows how completely flipped out the Republicans are about how the Iraq occupation is going that they are turning on a war hero and P.O.W., and on a man who enlisted in not one war, but two.

It's hard to believe that even if the generals weren't testifying here, they could do much to stop the spiral into anarchy there, with each day bringing some new horror.

Gen. John Abizaid told the panel that the hearing helped establish an image in the Arab world that Americans face up to their problems and handle them in the open. Certainly, he wasn't echoing the often Panglossian view of Donald Rumsfeld yesterday. He predicted that "the situation will become more violent" after the June 30 transfer of power and that he might then require more than the 135,000 troops now in Iraq.

Senator McCain, who has long advocated more troops, said that the Pentagon and its cheerleaders were silly to think they could throw a blanket over incendiary developments. "It's only a matter of time before the Pentagon's new disc of abuse pictures starts bouncing around the Internet," he said.

When I asked about Mr. Hastert's crack about visiting Walter Reed, the man whose temper used to be so close to the surface just laughed. "My," Mr. McCain murmured, "they certainly are angry. There has been some obvious resentment because of my `independence' for a long time."

He reiterated that he would never run with John Kerry. "I'm a loyal Republican," he said. "A lot of their resentment goes back to campaign finance reform."

I asked whether Mr. Warner, who helped Mr. McCain, as a shattered P.O.W., reorient to America after Vietnam, was a good example of the exemplars he writes about in his new meditation, "Why Courage Matters."

Agreeing that his colleague had shown strength, Mr. McCain concluded: "I believe from my experience that the only way you get one of these things behind you is to get everything out as quickly as possible."

Open and sharing Bushies. Now there's a novel concept.


E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com