i think frankly ric shinseki, who i do know well, he was chief of staff at the army when i was coming out of marine corps, there s no finer soldier that i know. what s happened at the va is something i know he is deeply troubled by and was surprised by. it really suggests a systemic problem of enormous proportions. and, you know, we have a saying in the military that a leader is responsible for all that his unit does and fails to do. and no one has lived up to that more than ric shinseki. and i think that s why probably today, in retrospect, he really feels that he should have known, and he regrets he didn t. but i think there s a lot of problems in the chain of command that kept him from knowing what he should have known. got a chain of command. general jim jones, congressman mike rogers, former ambassador nick burns, you have added immensely to our discussion today. i really appreciate you coming. thank you very much. and when we return,
va secretary eric shinseki is out. many democrats called for shinseki to be shown the dor. on friday president obama accepted the resignation and named deputy secretary sloan gibson as the replacement and house speaker boehner said it is not enough. general shinseki dedicated his life to our country and we thank him for our service. his resignation does not absolve the president of his responsibility to step in and make things right for our veterans. business as usual cannot continue. joining me on as chairman of the house committee is full disclosure is the congressman.
again, david, i don t know until we can work this through, but, again, the first issue is his health, and then we ll get into all the other parts as to what his conditions were like and the follow-on questions to his captivity. mr. secretary, i just want to touch on the other big story this week, of course, and that is secretary of the veterans affairs administration shinseki resigning amid this scandal within the va. there are questions about the care that veterans are getting today and the lack of service that they have gotten as the internal audit has found. you have got some 22,000 veterans from afghanistan, where you are, who will be returning home. how does this get fixed going forward? well, it must be fixed. that s first. let me, first, address general shinseki. as president obama said in thanking him for his service to our country over an entire career, we owe shinseki that
of it. i would bring somebody from the outside to get a handle on this thing. it should be quick. it should be severe. this notion that nobody gets fired in this town and everybody is a wonderful human being and the way they manage is just simply not the way the world works. if we want to get to the bottom of it, people i think need to be held accountable yesterday and at the same time a plan of implementation to get it fixed. senator jones, you probably knew general shinseki and know him well. do you think this was about politics or about his service at the va? i think frankly ric shinseki, who i do know well, he was chief of staff at the army when i was coming out of far reen core. there s no finer soldier that i know. what s happened at the va is something i know he is teachly troubled by and was surprised by. it really suggests a systemic
to me. almost by universal consensus in washington, everyone understood this was essential i a prewrittpre written kabuki theater sort of thing. everyone should fall on the sword. they kept the dream beat going. everybody agrees that it s unfair to shinseki. i think he was a bad manager, great american, great patriot, bad manager. they knew they had problems. his leak team lied to him, apparently, according to reports. there was an expectation, this is how these scandals unfold and the guy s got to do what he s got to do. you called for shinseki to be pushed out in his washington post column. he responded personally. he did. you got your wish. what has been accomplished except for the political appearances? i m not sure anything has. now we go into the long question of do we repair something that s been broken for decades and the likely answer to it is no. but shinseki dug his own grave here. the president made problems for