WASHINGTON — Just a few weeks ago, Congress was pushing hard to get to the bottom of the prison abuse scandal in Iraq. Top military officials and witnesses were being hauled up to Capitol Hill, where senators took the rare step of swearing them in amid a lineup that a senior Pentagon official said "made them look like criminals."
Now, with a delayed military investigation eating into the calendar, momentum has distinctly slowed at a time when the political calendar — with two major party conventions and a fall election — is growing more complicated.
The prospect of bombshells and damaging investigative reports coming out during the height of the political campaign or around the conventions is a concern for both the Bush administration and the Republicans who control both houses of Congress. But complicating it all is the contentious case of documents allegedly missing from an investigative report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba on abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
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Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been holding off on further grilling of Pentagon managers and field generals until his committee gets a report overseen by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay on the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American troops.
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