Gen. Casey: Shinseki mistreated

Posted by Aamer Madhani at 6:15 am CST

For the record-and with quite a bit of prodding- Army chief of staff nominee Gen. George Casey made it known Thursday that he felt retired Gen. Eric Shinseki wasn’t treated all that nicely by the old guard in the Defense Department.

Shinkseki, of course, was the Army general who under persistent questioning from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) less than month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he thought it would take hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to keep the peace in post-war Iraq.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, would deride Shinseki as being wildly off-the-mark to speculate it would take more troops to occupy Iraq than to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The general, who was due to end his term as the chief of the army four months later, quietly retired after contradicting Rumsfeld’s plan to operate with a lighter force. Not one top civilian from the defense department attended his retirement ceremony, seen as a slap in the face by some top military officers.

Many critics of the White House’s handling of the war, including Levin, have pointed to Shinseki’s treatment as setting an atmosphere of fear among commanders on the ground in Iraq.

At Thursday's confirmation hearing for Casey, who is finishing up a troubled 2-1/2 year tour as the top commander in Iraq, it was Levin, now the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who asked Casey what he thought of Shinseki’s treatment.

For much of Casey’s tenure in Iraq, he was on the record against increasing the U.S. troop level in Iraq. But in recent weeks, Casey has gotten firmly behind President Bush’s plan to send 21,500 more troops to Baghdad and the Al Anbar province.

Here's the exchange between Casey and Levin:

SEN. LEVIN: You've talked a little bit about what General Shinseki said here about needing more troops, about the way he was treated. Do you have any feelings about the way he was treated after he spoke honestly about his opinion?

GEN. CASEY: I don't think he was treated well.

SEN. LEVIN: You've indicated on a number of occasions that your efforts were thwarted by Iraqi leaders…By the way, I couldn't agree with you more relative to Shinseki. I think he was treated miserably, and that message, I think, was an insult to everybody in uniform. But I'll leave it at that. You gave me an answer which is perfectly consistent with what I just said, although perhaps not as purple in its prose.