SASC hearings on prisoner abuse: partial transcript

TheJew thought these excerpts from the testimony of Secretary Brownlee, General Schoomaker, and General Mikolashek to the Senate Armed Services Committee deserved to be preserved in the blogosphere. These excerpts were aired on The NewsHour on Thursday July 22, 2004 during the news summary. Unfortunately The NewsHour has no transcripts of news summaries available online, only audio recordings (that doesn’t seem to be available any longer). I would like to add that this story was effectively buried by the September 11 commission report release.

This first exchange is between Senator Reed of Rhode Island and General Mikolashek and concerns ghost detainees.

Reed: There seems to be a pattern um , Did you examine this issue?

Mikolashek: During the conduct of our inspection we found no evidence of the so called ghost detainees that, that were in existence...

Reed: So let me understand your response, General, there's no, today, ghost detainees that you've found...

Mikolashek: That we have found, during our inspection? No sir,

Reed: But, Are you disputing General Taguba and the secretary of def...

Mikolashek: No sir I am not. We did not look at that, that detail, into that specific line on that par-ti-cu-lar eh, issue.

Reed: Well yeah

Mikolashek: We looked at, again, how we accounted for and -uh-uh- took care of the, of the detainees. And we...

Reed: Well General, I just think the premise of your report that there's been no systematic problems is under cut by the fact that you didn't look at some systematic problems. That was one.

Mikolashek: Well, we, we view the system as the accountability of uh, of detainees, sir, and that's, that was our, that was our approach...

This second exchange is between Senator McCain of Arizona and General Mikolashek. 

McCain: Unmuzzled dogs? Is that in keeping with, uh, those policies or violations of those policies?

Mikolashek: Sir, an un-muzzled-dog to be used in interrogation is in violation.

McCain: And yet those were approved by General Sanchez?

Mikolashek: Sir, we found no evidence of a un-muzzled-dog to be approved by General Sanchez. That may... Based on our, our work.

McCain: Ah, we did!

Obviously we cannot trust a military investigation to prove anything the military doesn’t want it to prove.