Word: abizaid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...firestorm of outrage provoked by the Abu Ghraib pictures seemed to catch U.S. officials by surprise. Army General John Abizaid, chief of the U.S. Central Command that oversees Iraq, told TIME that after learning of the abuses in January, he sent word of it to General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Though military investigators had been aware for months that graphic photos existed, Pentagon officials showed no particular urgency in finding out how bad they were or informing anyone else about them. When Myers learned several weeks ago that CBS was about to air the pictures...
...refused to entirely rule out the use of other tactics, like sleep deprivation and "stress positions," if they were approved by a senior officer. A senior Pentagon official says Rumsfeld has taken a personal interest in coming up with a dollar figure to compensate Iraqis who have been wronged. Abizaid tells TIME that he thinks the outrage will fade as the U.S. demonstrates its willingness to take action against the perpetrators. "Our openness about it," he says, "is a lesson about the rule of law." As the President told Arab interviewers, "A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this...
...Franks' successor, John Abizaid, is by all accounts a fine Army officer, but one who spent years stressing the need for a "light footprint" inside Iraq that dragged out the death and dying on both sides. He'll retire soon to praise and pension. And General George Casey, Abizaid's underling and overall commander inside Iraq for the past 30 months, has just won promotion to Army chief of staff...
...Crashing the chain of command is not a trait where the Army has ever scored high in its promotion boards. And Casey, an Army brat whose dad died in a chopper crash in Vietnam, is a product of the service that created him; neither of his bosses, Gen. John Abizaid or outgoing chief Gen. John Schoonmaker, were exactly big truth-tellers when it came to talking to Congress...
...Republicans, for their part, are mad at Casey because they have no one else to be mad at. Rumsfeld is gone, Abizaid and Schoonmaker are leaving; Cheney is lodged, limpet-like, in the West Wing, awaiting his turn in the Libby trial. But taking down Casey for the conduct of a war that a bunch of guys in ties ordered the Army to prosecute under now-infamous limitations is certainly as perverse as what the Democrats are up to here. And it fits with the growing neoconservative critique of the war at the moment: it was not the idea that...