Buried People, Buried Facts

Buried people, buried facts. The last paragraph of this morning's Times story on the murder of 24 Iraqi civilians by US Marines is this:

On Tuesday, the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said President Bush first became aware of the episode after the Time magazine inquiry, when he was briefed by Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser. "When this comes out, all the details will be made available to the public, so we'll have a picture of what happened," Mr. Snow said.

This is a startling admission by the White House, shoved to the end of the story and ignored. It's public information now that the Marine leadership knew about the murders very soon after they happened (five days after, according to the Boston Globe). If it's true that the president was informed of military crimes which occurred in November of 2005 only by reading a March 2006 issue of Time magazine, today's statement by Tony Snow is evidence of the military's intention to at least minimize the investigation, if not cover it up completely. But if the president did know about the murders earlier than March 2006, why didn't he tell us? Would the public ever have known about the worst recorded US military atrocity since My Lai if it were not for Time magazine's report?