Hill hearing focuses on war’s progress

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By Gordon Lubold
Times staff writer

It was billed as an opportunity to hear from the troops. But a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee in Washington Nov. 3 became more of a morale-boosting session led by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., committee chairman.

A “Full Committee hearing on Your Troops — Their Stories,” as it was advertised, did not feature any real “troops,” per se. No Sergeant Snuffys or Lance Corporal Beltbuckles just back from war to tell the folks on Capitol Hill what’s really going on.

Instead, Hunter invited a gung-ho Army command sergeant major, an Army colonel — son of Gen. Creighton Abrams of Abrams tank fame — and a Marine one-star general who works on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide to the Marine Corps commandant.

Despite their past contributions to the war effort, none of the three had been in Iraq more recently than early 2005, and the Marine general had not deployed there since last year.

At a time when the American public is increasingly concerned about the war in Iraq and President Bush’s own political problems are sinking his approval ratings, the hearing seemed to be an attempt to buoy everyone’s spirits, even though most of the 62 committee members didn’t show up.

“There’s been a lot of progress in Iraq,” Hunter began, asking the three service members to help build a “complete picture” of what’s going on in Iraq.

“I hope you will give us insight on what Congress can do better to help the war effort,” said Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the committee’s ranking Democrat.

Testifying were Marine Brig. Gen. John Kelly, legislative assistant to the Commandant and former assistant division commander for the 1st Marine Division, who returned from Iraq last year; Col. Robert Abrams, former commander of the 1st Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division; and Command Sgt. Maj. Neil Citola, former command sergeant major of the 1st Cavalry Division and now command sergeant major of III Corps.

The three painted as best a picture as they could from recollections of their deployments to Iraq, discussing troop strength, reconstruction, professional military education and retention, among other things.

On reconstruction, for example, Abrams mentioned the fact that a sewage treatment center in Iraq that had not been operating in 16 years years was up and running, giving the local citizenry a project with immediate impact.

“Sewage is actually flowing out of Sadr City,” Abrams said.

Then the discussion turned to media coverage of the war. While Abrams said he had had relatively good experiences with the media, others said they told only negative stories about the war and were disinclined to report the good-news stories.

Kelly described the disillusionment his two Marine sons felt when they returned from Iraq to find the story the media was telling at home didn’t seem to jibe with the Iraq war they knew.

“That was demoralizing to them,” he said. “I’m an old guy and I kind of understand it, but they’re young, and they don’t understand it,” he told the half-dozen committee members who attended the hearing.

One Democrat on the panel, Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas, then raised a question about secret U.S. detention camps around the world, based on a controversial report in The Washington Post.

Reyes wondered if America had “stopped being the good guys,” and expressed concerned that the report suggested another Abu Ghraib scenario might be in the making, a reference to the prison scandal in Baghdad that led to the court-martial of a number of U.S. troops.

Reyes asked the witnesses if it was hard to keep soldiers and Marines focused on their jobs in Iraq amid these kinds of reports.

“We are a nation of laws,” Citola told Reyes. “And we must hold ourselves accountable.”

That led Duncan to angrily denounce the newspaper report, saying it was typical of the way the paper covered negative subjects. He announced that he had asked his staff to do a comparison of the number of stories The Post had written about Abu Ghraib and the number of reports the paper had published about the Normandy invasion during World War II.

The result, he said, was that the Post had written far more stories about the prison scandal in Iraq than one of the highlights of the Greatest Generation.

With that, the hearing swiftly came to a close.