Congress toughens war oversight role

Despite genuine outrage over the images of torture in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, the GOP-controlled Congress is resisting using its oversight powers to ramp up a full-blown investigation.

Since declaring a war on terror after Sept. 11, the Bush administration has enjoyed an almost complete absence of oversight hearings on White House conduct of the war. From quick approval of the resolution to use force in Iraq to easy votes on "emergency" spending requests, Congress has backed the White House, even in the face of what both sides of the aisle dubbed excessive secrecy and contempt for Congress's oversight role.

But the grim images from a prison in Baghdad are changing that calculus. On Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was grilled for more than six hours before House and Senate panels. The Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees are preparing follow-up hearings as early as this week.

Even more than graphic nature of the images, the scandal highlights how irrelevant Congress has become in the conduct of the war. Many senators reserved their sharpest rebukes for Mr. Rumsfeld's failure even to inform them that there was an issue of prison abuse or that images of it were about to run on national television just hours after the secretary met in a closed session with members of the panel.

It was a humiliating reminder that Congress is often irrelevant in wartime, but rarely as obviously as the war in Iraq. "That's why Congress is usually so angry when a war is over," says Senate historian Richard Baker, citing the precedents of World War II and the Vietnam War. After both wars, Congress voted itself increased powers against the executive branch.

Now, the pace and pressure of the coming hearings will be key in determining just how aggressive Congress is in forcing changes in the administration's war policy - or in changing the tenor of dealings between the White House and Capitol Hill.

"This is what comes of not bringing Congress into the loop," says Ross Baker, a political scientist at the Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Still, Mr. Baker adds that other considerations may put the brakes on an all-out investigation: "Their aggressiveness is self-limiting, because they don't want to undermine the president - or themselves - in the next election."

Both Democrats and Republicans are now calling for full disclosure of photographs and videos related to prisoner abuse. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the explosive nature of these photos," says Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina.

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