Jolt of Reality to the Senate

The Rip van Winkle U.S. Senate has awakened to the reality that things are not going well in Iraq. Bravo.

The United States announced its invasion of Iraq last year as a return to the rule of law. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal has hurt the U.S. around the world, but the greatest harm has been erasure of remaining Iraqi trust in that aim. To repair the damage, it will take more than the prosecution of a few military police officers and announcements that justice is being done.

The Senate Armed Services Committee at least seems interested in trying. Its questioning of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials about the despicable abuse of Iraqi prisoners was a strong prologue to a more thorough inquiry.

Underlining the need was the dispute during the Senate hearings between two witnesses, a general and a civilian, over whether military police or military intelligence was in charge at the prison. Such basic questions cannot go unanswered. Seven military police have been charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal, and several higher officers have been reprimanded, which should end their careers. But that does not close the books.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has energetically tried to determine who bears responsibility for Abu Ghraib. On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, he was to the point: “We need to take this up [the chain of command] as far as it goes, and we need to do it quickly.” That is especially the case after Newsweek magazine’s report that White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales wrote to President Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks that the Geneva Convention’s strict limitations on questioning enemy prisoners were “obsolete.”

The Senate also must address the current New Yorker magazine report by Seymour Hersh that Rumsfeld himself secretly approved a plan to use harsh methods of questioning Iraqi prisoners. The Pentagon said Hersh’s report contained errors but did not specify them, and the White House dismissed it with equal lack of specificity.

The Army announced last week that it was banning some heavily criticized prison practices, including hooding prisoners or forcing them to stand naked. Military officials should have very publicly changed the procedures as soon as they learned of the abuses, in January, but they kept quiet until pictures were leaked to news organizations.

As with so much in Iraq, from reconstituting an army to requesting United Nations help, the White House acted long after it should have, and Congress too often turned a blind eye. The delays have cost lives and burned up the remaining goodwill of allies. At least the Senate remains concerned for that goodwill and unwilling to accept bland condescension in place of thorough explanations.