Report Commissioned By The U.S. Army Was Suppressed

US Army suppressed RAND report:

CARLO BASILONE: The New York Times recently reported that a 2005 RAND Corporation Report titled Rebuilding Iraq, which was commissioned by the US Army, was suppressed. The unclassified report is highly critical of all levels of planning leading up to the Iraq war. US Army regulations states the reports may only be censored for national security reasons. We spoke to Phyllis Bennis, a senior analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies and currently a fellow at the Transnational Institute in the Netherlands, about who might benefit from the document's suppression.

PHYLLIS BENNIS, INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES: The army insiders are saying that the reason it was kept secret was because they didn't want to anger Rumsfeld. And I'm sure that that's partly true. But the real issue now is: What's the significance of it surfacing now, at the moment when they're trying so desperately hard to stop talking about the origins of the war and the first five years of the war? Right now, all of the discourse is about how the surge worked, meaning just think about 2007, don't think about 2006, and certainly don't think about 2003, when people were dying in such horrific numbers. Don't even think about the first half of 2007, when the levels of death were higher than they had ever been in all the years of the war. Just think about the last six months. That's when the “surge” saw a diminished level of death and destruction. That's what they're trying to do is narrow the debate so that no one remembers the lies. It's as if the lies become truth if they just stay at war long enough. That's what they're trying to get the American people to believe…