Hersh on Rumsfeld

sigh...
_____________

THE GRAY ZONE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bull**** anyone.”

The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America’s most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy’s submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force’s stealth bomber. All the so-called “black” programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.

“Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target—a standup group to hit quickly,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “He got all the agencies together—the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.—to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.” The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.



The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America’s élite forces—Navy seals, the Army’s Delta Force, and the C.I.A.’s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: “Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress.”

In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military’s facilities at Guantánamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations—using force if necessary—at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the “white,” or overt, world.

Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read into the program,” the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II—‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”

Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone’s military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.

Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the Pentagon. Asked for comment on this story, a Pentagon spokesman said, “I will not discuss any covert programs; however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his position as the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence until March 7, 2003, and had no involvement in the decision-making process regarding interrogation procedures in Iraq or anywhere else.”

In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. “It was an active program,” the former intelligence official told me. “It’s been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States—and do so without visibility.” Some of its methods were troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however.

By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and—without success—for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren’t able to stop the evolving insurgency.



In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of Baathist “dead-enders,” criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda followers. The Administration measured its success in the war by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted members of the old regime—reproduced on playing cards—had been captured. Then, in August, 2003, terror bombings in Baghdad hit the Jordanian Embassy, killing nineteen people, and the United Nations headquarters, killing twenty-three people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the U.N. mission. On August 25th, less than a week after the U.N. bombing, Rumsfeld acknowledged, in a talk before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that “the dead-enders are still with us.” He went on, “There are some today who are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they suggest that this represents some sort of failure on the part of the Coalition. But this is not the case.” Rumsfeld compared the insurgents with those true believers who “fought on during and after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany.” A few weeks later—and five months after the fall of Baghdad—the Defense Secretary declared,“It is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in Iraq than in the United States.”

Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that the war was going badly. The increasingly beleaguered and baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that the insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. “When you understand that they’re organized in a cellular structure,” General John Abizaid, the head of the Central Command, declared, “that . . . they have access to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you’ll understand how dangerous they are.”

The American military and intelligence communities were having little success in penetrating the insurgency. One internal report prepared for the U.S. military, made available to me, concluded that the insurgents’“strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good.” According to the study:

Their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable targets and particular individuals has been the result of painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance. Inside information has been passed on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop movements and daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition from within the Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi Police force which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi ministries and from within pro-insurgent individuals working with the CPA’s so-called Green Zone.


The study concluded, “Politically, the U.S. has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council”—the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.—“as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA.”

By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon’s political and military misjudgments was clear. Donald Rumsfeld’s “dead-enders” now included not only Baathists but many marginal figures as well—thugs and criminals who were among the tens of thousands of prisoners freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general amnesty. Their desperation was not driving the insurgency; it simply made them easy recruits for those who were. The analyst said, “We’d killed and captured guys who had been given two or three hundred dollars to ‘pray and spray’”—that is, shoot randomly and hope for the best. “They weren’t really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency.” In many cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the Baath Party. The analyst said that the insurgents “spent three or four months figuring out how we operated and developing their own countermeasures. If that meant putting up a hapless guy to go and attack a convoy and see how the American troops responded, they’d do it.” Then, the analyst said, “the clever ones began to get in on the action.”

By contrast, according to the military report, the American and Coalition forces knew little about the insurgency: “Human intelligence is poor or lacking . . . due to the dearth of competence and expertise. . . . The intelligence effort is not coördinated since either too many groups are involved in gathering intelligence or the final product does not get to the troops in the field in a timely manner.” The success of the war was at risk; something had to be done to change the dynamic.



The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that “detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.”

Miller’s concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to “Gitmoize” the prison system in Iraq—to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba—methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in “stress positions” for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

“They weren’t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,” the former intelligence official told me. “No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it’s working. We’re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We’re getting good stuff. But we’ve got more targets”—prisoners in Iraqi jails—“than people who can handle them.”

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap’sauspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”

The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included “recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. “How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib—whether military police or military intelligence—was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others—military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program—wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn’t know,” Karpinski told me. “I called them the disappearing ghosts. I’d seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I’d see them months later. They were nice—they’d always call out to me and say, ‘Hey, remember me? How are you doing?’” The mysterious civilians, she said, were “always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.” Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski’s leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”

The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. “There’s nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk,” he told me. “What could be more boring than needing the coöperation of logistical planners?” The only difficulty, the former official added, is that, “as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We’ve never had a case where a special-access program went sour—and this goes back to the Cold War.”

In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame. “The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone,” he said. “This is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.” When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, “but he’s responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we’ve changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means.”



Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had they witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at any trial, however, is why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men.

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

“This **** has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know the rules, that’s another.”

In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.” The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.



The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.

The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. “You can’t cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access program? So you hope that maybe it’ll go away.” The Pentagon’s attitude last January, he said, was “Somebody got caught with some photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it.” Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring: “‘We’ve got a glitch in the program. We’ll prosecute it.’ The cover story was that some kids got out of control.”

In their testimony before Congress last week, Rumsfeld and Cambone struggled to convince the legislators that Miller’s visit to Baghdad in late August had nothing to do with the subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee that the interplay between Miller and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had only a casual connection to his office. Miller’s recommendations, Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own role, he said, was mainly to insure that the “flow of intelligence back to the commands” was “efficient and effective.” He added that Miller’s goal was “to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence.”

It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York, posed the essential question facing the senators:

If, indeed, General Miller was sent from Guantánamo to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence from detainees, then it is fair to conclude that the actions that are at point here in your report [on abuses at Abu Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller’s arrival and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved.. . .Therefore, I for one don’t believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone and the Defense Department as to exactly what General Miller’s orders were . . . how he carried out those orders, and the connection between his arrival in the fall of ’03 and the intensity of the abuses that occurred afterward.


Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the former intelligence official told me, Miller was “read in”—that is, briefed—on the special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. “His job is to save what he can,” the former official said. “He’s there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability.” As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence official added, “He goes into it not knowing ****. And then: ‘Holy cow! What’s going on?’”

If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the special-access program. “If you give away the fact that a special-access program exists,”the former intelligence official told me, “you blow the whole quick-reaction program.”

One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld’s account of his initial reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of curiosity. One factor may have been recent history: there had been many previous complaints of prisoner abuse from organization like Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had not been provided with details of alleged abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges. “You read it, as I say, it’s one thing. You see these photographs and it’s just unbelievable. . . . It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t video. It wasn’t color. It was quite a different thing.” The former intelligence official said that, in his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials had not studied the photographs because “they thought what was in there was permitted under the rules of engagement,” as applied to the sap. “The photos,” he added, “turned out to be the result of the program run amok.”

The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But, he said, “it was their permission granted to do the sap, generically, and there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses.”

This official went on, “The black guys”—those in the Pentagon’s secret program—“say we’ve got to accept the prosecution. They’re vaccinated from the reality.” The sap is still active, and “the United States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?” The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. “If you even give a hint that you’re aware of a black program that you’re not read into, you lose your clearances,” the former official said. “Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended—the poor kids at the end of the food chain.”

The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. “The Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn’t know how to do it,” the former intelligence official said.



Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to many conservatives, defended the Administration’s continued secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib. “Why keep it black?” the consultant asked. “Because the process is unpleasant. It’s like making sausage—you like the result but you don’t want to know how it was made. Also, you don’t want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison.”

The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as “a tumor” on the war on terror. He said, “As long as it’s benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it—it becomes a malignant tumor.”

The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said, “created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we’re going to end up with another Church Commission”—the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. “When the **** hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?” the consultant asked. “You do it selectively and with intelligence.”

“Congress is going to get to the bottom of this,” the Pentagon consultant said. “You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the system.” He added, “When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines.”

Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, “If this is true, it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.”

“In an odd way,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, “the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.” Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. “Some jags hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war,” Roth told me. “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”

 

From the beginning of his tenure, there were reports that Rumsfeld wanted the whole intelligence community under his purview.

It's pretty clear he screwed the pooch. I know the cons and nero-cons and still asleep Republicans are going to blast me for "politicizing" this, but... there is not a modern president that would have allowed such a bureaucratic power grab to even be considered except for the current resident. Bush either didn't know what Rummy 's aims were or didn't care or was too stupid to realize the ramifications. Regardless, it is a tragedy for this country.

 

No pictures, but there are documents out there...
_____________
Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher


By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A01


Army intelligence officers suspected that a Syrian and admitted jihadist who was detained at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad knew about the illegal flow of money, arms and foreign fighters into Iraq. But he was smug, the officers said, and refused to talk. So last November, they devised a special plan for his interrogation, going beyond what Army rules normally allowed.

An Army colonel in charge of intelligence-gathering at the prison, spelling out the plan in a classified cable to the top U.S. military officer in Iraq, said interrogators would use a method known as "fear up harsh," which military documents said meant "significantly increasing the fear level in a security detainee." The aim was to make the 31-year-old Syrian think his only hope in life was to talk, undermining his confidence in what they termed "the Allah factor."

According to the plan, interrogators needed the assistance of military police supervising his detention at the prison, who ordinarily play no role in interrogations under Army regulations. First, the interrogators were to throw chairs and tables in the man's presence at the prison and "invade his personal space."

Then the police were to put a hood on his head and take him to an isolated cell through a gantlet of barking guard dogs; there, the police were to strip-search him and interrupt his sleep for three days with interrogations, barking and loud music, according to Army documents. The plan was sent to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

A spokesman for Sanchez declined to comment yesterday, and so it remains uncertain whether the plan was one of 25 requests for unusually tough interrogations that Army officials in Washington have said he approved between October and the present. All involved prolonged isolation of detainees, the officials said on Friday, adding that Sanchez last week issued an order barring requests for approval of particularly severe questioning tactics.

But the fact that a plan for such intense and highly organized pressure was proposed by Col. Thomas M. Pappas -- a senior military intelligence officer in Iraq who took his job at the insistence of a general dispatched from the Pentagon -- suggests a wider circle of involvement in aggressive and potentially abusive interrogations of Iraqi detainees, encompassing officers higher up the chain of command, than the Army has previously detailed.

While the Army has blamed the physical abuses documented in soldiers' photographs on a handful of night-shift soldiers at Abu Ghraib who ignored rules on humane treatment, government officials and humanitarian experts say the order indicates the abuses could instead have been an outgrowth of harsh treatment that had been approved.

They suggest in particular that military intelligence officials may not only have improperly tolerated physical abuses, as stated in the Army's official internal report, but also that they may have deliberately set the stage for them. According to a hypothesis now being explored by members of Congress, this stage was set through a directed collaboration between two units of military police and intelligence officers, virtually unprecedented in recent Army practice.

The interrogation plan for the Syrian "clearly allows for a crossing of the line into abusive behavior," said James Ross, a senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch who reviewed it for The Washington Post.

What makes its wording so troubling, Ross added, is that it allows "wide authority for soldiers conducting interrogations. . . . Were the superior officer to agree to these techniques, it would be opening the door for any soldier or officer to be committing abusive acts and believe they were doing so" with official sanction.

Congressional testimony by Defense Department and Army officials over the past two weeks has highlighted the fact that the abuses in Iraq -- which mostly occurred in the last quarter of 2003 -- came at a time of heightened pressures in Washington for more robust intelligence-gathering, because of proliferating attacks on U.S. forces and the dwindling intelligence on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction.

Although no direct links have been found between the documented abuses and orders from Washington, Pentagon officials who spoke on the condition that they not be named say that the hunt for data on these two topics was coordinated during this period by Defense Undersecretary Stephen A. Cambone, the top U.S. military intelligence official and long one of the closest aides to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The coincidence in timing has in turn prompted several lawmakers to say they intend to probe more deeply in coming weeks to determine whether the specialists and sergeants handling the prison guard dogs and pulling hoods over prisoners' heads were in fact implementing policy directives instigated by Washington that may have set the stage for abuses.

"We've got no proof that a person in authority told them to do this activity," Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the Army's deputy chief of staff, said on May 11.

But three directives in particular have already begun to attract congressional scrutiny: The first is a classified report by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller on Sept. 9, 2003, demanding that the military police at Abu Ghraib be dedicated and trained to set "the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees." The report, which Cambone has testified was presented to his deputy William Boykin, contained five recommendations spelling out how this was to occur and reported it had already begun.

The second is an Oct. 12 classified memo signed by Sanchez that demanded a "harmonization" of military policing and intelligence work at Abu Ghraib for the purpose of ensuring "consistency with the interrogation policies . . . and maximiz[ing] the efficiency of the interrogation."

The memo, obtained by The Washington Post, also states "it is imperative that interrogators be provided reasonable latitude to vary their approach," depending on a detainee's background, strengths, resistance and other factors. It also explicitly demands humane treatment and requires that any dogs present during the interrogations be muzzled.

The third is a Nov. 19 memo from Sanchez's office that formally placed the two key Abu Ghraib cellblocks where the abuses occurred under the control of Pappas and his 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. It was 11 days later, after this memo placed the military police responsible for "security of detainees and base protection" in Pappas's hands, that he sought, in his memo to Sanchez, to draw military police explicitly into applying pressure on the Syrian.

The fact that prison interrogations were so directly controlled by these military directives, as well as the apparent cultural sophistication of some of the abuses, has already led some lawmakers to conclude that much more experienced and senior officers were involved than the seven military police now charged by the Army with wrongdoing.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) expressed skepticism during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last Tuesday, for example, that a group of military police from rural Maryland and West Virginia "would have chosen bizarre sexual humiliations that were specifically designed to be offensive to Muslim men [as the photos depicted]. . . . It implies too much knowledge. . . . And that is why, even though I do not yet have the evidence, I cannot help but suspect that others were involved."

Alexander did nothing to steer her away from that idea. "Well, ma'am, your logic is correct. I think that the difficult part is to find out who told whom what to do."

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) expressed similar concerns on May 7. "On the surface, you could portray the 800th MP Brigade as a Reserve unit with poor leadership and poor training," he told top Pentagon officials at the hearing that day. "However, the abuse of prisoners is not merely the failure of an MP brigade; it's a failure of the chain of command."

Military Police


At the heart of the unfolding congressional probe into what happened at Abu Ghraib is the conduct there of two units: the 800th Military Police Brigade, an Army reserve unit based in Uniondale, N.Y., and the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, a regular Army unit principally based in Germany and Italy.

Two months after the end of the war, when members of the 800th brigade were preparing to go home, they were abruptly told they were being assigned to take over the Iraqi prison system. Looting in the weeks after the war ended had reduced Abu Ghraib and virtually every other prison to a shambles, producing acute shortages of supplies and eliminating such amenities as water and electricity.

"It's difficult for people who are not on the ground in Iraq to understand how nonexistent the detention infrastructure was when we arrived," said a senior official with the U.S.-led occupation. "There was no reliable labor force to work in the prisons. . . . It was in total disarray."

Almost immediately, the brigade's chain of command was tangled, as was the case with many military units in Iraq. Its work was directly supervised by the U.S. military's deputy commander in Iraq, Army Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, but Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski said she also "answered to" L. Paul Bremer and to a regional commander in Kuwait.

The brigade, like its specific components assigned to Abu Ghraib, was trained not to oversee the detention of prisoners in jails, but to resettle prisoners of war. "They were assigned there because there was a shortage of specialty units," Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, testified last week before a House Government Reform subcommittee.

All of the Iraqi prisons were understaffed because promised civilian contractors never appeared, Karpinski said. Unlike the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which has 800 police guarding 640 detainees, Karpinski had one soldier available to guard every 10 detainees in a prison population that included men and women of varying ages, criminals, terrorists and mentally ill persons.

"It's like being in Dodge City in the 1870's without speaking the same language," said a newsletter home last summer from the 372nd Military Police Company, the Cresaptown, Md., unit assigned in October to guard Abu Ghraib. "The prison 'detainee' climate is becoming more strained as the months drag on," the December newsletter said. "We take each day as it comes, do our jobs, and wait for the day when we all get to go home."

Discipline among the soldiers slumped over time, according to internal Army reports. Military police were permitted to wear civilian clothes to boost morale, but it contributed to sloppiness about other rules, investigators concluded; platoon leaders encouraged some of their soldiers to carry concealed weapons while walking among the detainees, a violation of regulations. Punishments for minor offenses were rare; a climate of leniency developed.

Army investigators have concluded that the brigade's low familiarity with Islamic culture provided a breeding ground for racism and a widespread conviction that Muslims were terrorists. One of its dog handlers insisted that the animals simply disliked Iraqis because of their appearance and smell.

One of the most notorious photos to emerge from the prison -- of naked and cuffed Iraqi men pushed together on the prison floor in a simulation of sex -- originated in a decision by guards to punish two Iraqis for raping a 14-year-old male detainee, the participants said. On another occasion, a guard attacked, beat and hung a handcuffed Iraqi by his wrists -- dislocating his shoulders -- in a fit of anger over the Iraqi's role in smuggling a pistol into the prison.

When Karpinski brought up a Red Cross complaint that intelligence officers had demanded recalcitrant prisoners be escorted back to their cells wearing women's underwear, a deputy to the chief intelligence officer joked about it.

"I told the commander to stop giving them Victoria's Secret catalogs," the deputy said in a roomful of officers, Karpinski recalled. She said she replied that the Red Cross would not appreciate that response.

Military Intelligence


The decision to place the prison's key cellblocks -- 1A and 1B, which held "security detainees" suspected of threatening U.S. forces or knowing about such threats -- under the direct control of the 205th MI Brigade came shortly after Miller visited Iraq in late August and early September at the request of Cambone, according to Cambone's congressional testimony last week.

Miller, a combat officer with no training in prisons or intelligence-gathering, had won accolades inside the Pentagon and attracted controversy outside it earlier in the year, when he oversaw a transformation of the military's long-term detention center at Guantanamo Bay from a disorganized bundle of tents into an efficient prison that routinely produced what officials have called "moderately valuable" intelligence for the war on terrorism.

Miller's signature achievement at the Cuban center was to implement a system of rewards and punishments in detainee housing, food, clothing and other treatment that provided incentives for use as leverage during interrogations. Cambone testified last week that he sent Miller to Iraq to help ensure "there was a flow of intelligence [from the jail] back to the commands and [that it was] done in an efficient and effective way."

Shortly after Miller's return, new rules were written for interrogation sessions involving detainees in cellblocks 1A and 1B, which stressed a collaboration between military police and intelligence officials while also providing safeguards such as legal reviews of the interrogation plans and scrutiny of how they were carried out. The rules were signed by Sanchez, but it remains unclear who -- if anyone -- in Washington may have seen them in draft or final form.

The reality in the field, Army investigators quickly learned, was an absence of any supervision or monitoring. Pappas, for example, told them that no procedures were in place for the independent monitoring of the interrogations and no personnel were available to do it, officials familiar with his testimony said. Moreover, most of the Army soldiers accused of abuse have said they were encouraged to undertake it by military intelligence officials in the prison, who sometimes merely observed and sometimes took part in it themselves.

"MI has . . . instructed us to place prisoners in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days," Army Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II said in a diary he wrote after being accused of wrongdoing.

One of the soldiers "was known to bang on the table, yell, scream, and maybe assaulted detainees during interrogations in the booth," said Sgt. Samuel Jefferson Provance III, a military intelligence officer who testified during a military court proceeding against one of the military policemen on May 1. "This was not to be discussed. It was kept 'hush-hush.' "

Although at least four Army lawyers were assigned to the military intelligence brigade and its offices at Abu Ghraib, it remains unclear whether they played a meaningful role in trying to block abuses. Maj. Gen. Thomas Romig, the service's judge advocate general, testified last week that the Army is reviewing their "resourcing and training" in the wake of the scandal.

Karpinski said in an interview last week that if the interrogation plan put forward by Pappas had been presented to her, "I would have said, 'Absolutely not. Not on my watch. Take your procedures somewhere else.' " If such a plan can be made, she said, "this whole thing is more offensive than I thought. That does sound like abuse and torture."

Robert K. Goldman, an American University law professor who teaches a course on the law of war, commented about the interrogation plan that, "in my view, a good deal of it crosses the line. . . . They are talking about breaking the detainee, and exercising extreme moral and possibly physical coercion."

Why is the dog there? he asked. "This is very coercive. It cannot be justified by any lawful interrogation technique." The strip searching of someone already being held in detention is clearly "to humiliate him. There is no question. . . . This is violative of the spirit if not the letter of the Geneva Conventions. It's like a B-grade movie."

 

Newsweek weighs in...
_____________
The Roots of Torture
The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war. A NEWSWEEK investigation


Tough tactics: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pushed for a Gitmo style approach to prisoner interrogations in Iraq
By John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff
NewsweekMay 24 issue -

It's not easy to get a member of Congress to stop talking. Much less a room full of them. But as a small group of legislators watched the images flash by in a small, darkened hearing room in the Rayburn Building last week, a sickened silence descended. There were 1,800 slides and several videos, and the show went on for three hours. The nightmarish images showed American soldiers at Abu Ghraib Prison forcing Iraqis to masturbate. American soldiers sexually assaulting Iraqis with chemical light sticks. American soldiers laughing over dead Iraqis whose bodies had been abused and mutilated. There was simply nothing to say. "It was a very subdued walk back to the House floor," said Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "People were ashen."

The White House put up three soldiers for court-martial, saying the pictures were all the work of a few bad-apple MPs who were poorly supervised. But evidence was mounting that the furor was only going to grow and probably sink some prominent careers in the process. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner declared the pictures were the worst "military misconduct" he'd seen in 60 years, and he planned more hearings. Republicans on Capitol Hill were notably reluctant to back Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And NEWSWEEK has learned that U.S. soldiers and CIA operatives could be accused of war crimes. Among the possible charges: homicide involving deaths during interrogations. "The photos clearly demonstrate to me the level of prisoner abuse and mistreatment went far beyond what I expected, and certainly involved more than six or seven MPs," said GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former military prosecutor. He added: "It seems to have been planned."

Indeed, the single most iconic image to come out of the abuse scandal—that of a hooded man standing naked on a box, arms outspread, with wires dangling from his fingers, toes and penis—may do a lot to undercut the administration's case that this was the work of a few criminal MPs. That's because the practice shown in that photo is an arcane torture method known only to veterans of the interrogation trade. "Was that something that [an MP] dreamed up by herself? Think again," says Darius Rejali, an expert on the use of torture by democracies. "That's a standard torture. It's called 'the Vietnam.' But it's not common knowledge. Ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them."

Who might have taught them? Almost certainly it was their superiors up the line. Some of the images from Abu Ghraib, like those of naked prisoners terrified by attack dogs or humiliated before grinning female guards, actually portray "stress and duress" techniques officially approved at the highest levels of the government for use against terrorist suspects. It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques, and late last week Defense spokesman Larry DiRita said that "no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses." But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers—and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation—methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture."

The Bush administration created a bold legal framework to justify this system of interrogation, according to internal government memos obtained by NEWSWEEK. What started as a carefully thought-out, if aggressive, policy of interrogation in a covert war—designed mainly for use by a handful of CIA professionals—evolved into ever-more ungoverned tactics that ended up in the hands of untrained MPs in a big, hot war. Originally, Geneva Conventions protections were stripped only from Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. But later Rumsfeld himself, impressed by the success of techniques used against Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay, seemingly set in motion a process that led to their use in Iraq, even though that war was supposed to have been governed by the Geneva Conventions. Ultimately, reservist MPs, like those at Abu Ghraib, were drawn into a system in which fear and humiliation were used to break prisoners' resistance to interrogation.

 

The JAGs were against this...
__________

Advice Rejected
JAG Lawyers Say Political Appointees Ignored Their Warnings on Prisoner Treatment
By Jake Tapper and Clayton Sandell
ABCNEWS.com

W A S H I N G T O N, May 16, 2004— Lawyers from the military's Judge Advocate General's Corps, or JAG, had been urging Pentagon officials to ensure protection for prisoners for two years before the abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison came to light, current and former JAG officers told ABCNEWS.

But, the JAG lawyers say, political appointees at the Pentagon ignored their warnings, setting the stage for the Abu Ghraib abuses, in which military police reservists photographed each other subjecting Iraqi prisoners to physical abuse and sexual humiliation.

As the military's uniformed lawyers, JAG officers are in charge of instructing military commanders on how to adhere to domestic and international rules regarding the treatment of detainees.

"If we — 'we' being the uniformed lawyers — had been listened to, and what we said put into practice, then these abuses would not have occurred," said Rear Admiral Don Guter (ret.), the Navy Judge Advocate General from 2000 to 2002.

Specifically, JAG officers say they have been marginalized by Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, and William Haynes II, the Pentagon's general counsel, whom President Bush has nominated for a judgeship on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

In an interview with ABCNEWS, Feith denied any tensions whatsoever with JAG officers. He also denied that military lawyers disagreed with rules and practices coming from his office that pertained to detainees. "That's not true in my experience or my understanding of what's happened," Feith said.

But asked about some of these issues during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday, the current Army JAG, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Romig, was less dismissive, calling the charges "troubling" and saying, "We're trying to get to the bottom of it."

Under condition of anonymity, one current JAG officer told ABCNEWS that for the last two years, "the military lawyers have always been the ones speaking for greater protections and recognitions of rights for detainees — and the political appointees have argued for no recognition of rights and careful control of the process. That's an argument, to date, that the political appointees have won."

Several JAG sources report that, to form the rules for military tribunals, the Pentagon initially created a "Tiger Team" of Army JAG officers. But that team was soon disbanded by Haynes and the political appointee attorneys took over the process. JAG sources interpreted the move as being the result of military lawyers' insistence on greater rights and protections for detainees than what Haynes, Feith and others wanted to permit.

According to Guter, Pentagon political appointees often would call JAG officers just so they could claim military attorneys had been consulted. "Determinations had been made and they were just seeking to make a call to assure that they had buy-in," Guter said. "If you didn't agree, I think you were marginalized."

One time a political appointee called Guter to inform him about an issue pertaining to military tribunals for prisoners held there. Guter says the appointee told him he couldn't discuss the matter with anyone else, "including the team that had been put together to help work on the tribunals who worked for me." Guter says the appointee gave him a deadline, but "when I looked at my watch I had just 20 minutes to respond."

Matters got so frustrating that in May and October 2003, eight senior JAG officers took the rare step of going outside the chain of command to meet secretly with the New York City Bar Association, warning of a "disaster waiting to happen".

"They felt that there had been a conscious effort to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity surrounding these detention facilities, and that it had been done to give interrogators the broadest possible latitude in their conduct of operations," Scott Horton, former chair of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on International Human Rights, told ABCNEWS. Horton's meeting with the JAG officers was first reported by Salon.com.

This "atmosphere of legal ambiguity," JAG officials told ABCNEWS, began in early 2002, when the Bush administration decided the Geneva Conventions' rules for humane treatment of prisoners did not apply to the war on terror, and to the suspects seized in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo. For the war in Iraq, the Geneva Conventions were supposed to apply … but JAG sources say there was little to no clarification of that.

"When you say something down the chain of command like, 'The Geneva Conventions don't apply,' that sets the stage for the kind of chaos that we've seen," said Rear Admiral John Hutson (ret.), who was the Navy Judge Advocate General from 1997 to 2000.

"War is the most difficult of human endeavors under the best of circumstances," Hutson said, "and if the rules aren't clear, it makes that most difficult endeavor even more difficult. And the result is that things break down at the bottom. If you throw the rules out, if you throw the gloves off, and you say these people are terrorists and beneath our dignity and beneath our rule of law, then you shouldn't be surprised when bad things happen."

Feith denied all of these charges. "There has not been, ever, any ambiguity about the strong support that the leadership of this department gives to the Geneva Conventions," he said.

Other decisions JAG officials disputed included using private contractors for interrogations — thus further blurring the lines of the chain of command — and keeping JAG officials away from Iraqi interrogation centers.

Rep. Steve Buyer, (R-Ind.), a JAG in the Army Reserves, wanted to offer his services in Iraq. But even though the Army wanted him there, Pentagon political appointees vetoed him going. Buyer told ABCNEWS' John Cochran that he tried to convey to his Pentagon civilian contact how important it was to ensure against the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and detainees, telling him: "You have to get somebody that's qualified in international law and the Geneva Conventions to serve in that brigade … I'm pretty shocked that this never happened."

Buyer was referring to the 800th Military Police Brigade, seven of whose reservists are now facing charges in the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.

Buyer isn't the only one to question why there didn't seem to be a significant JAG presence for interrogations at detention centers like Abu Ghraib. Horton says the JAGs who reached out to the New York City Bar Association complained about a new "practice" of keeping JAGs away. And Admiral Guter says when he was Navy JAG from 2000 until 2002, "JAGs were clamoring for assignments of this kind of importance, so I know they were available. And if they're available and you don't send them, then I have to say you don't send them on purpose."

 

Sy Hersh, directed to fellow guests Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Carl Levin (D-MI) on CBS' Face The Nation:

Let me just say this, though, to the senators…

…Believe me, I know our military is full of really dedicated people, and they can be very rough when they have to be.

But the kind of stuff that's gone on in this prison,…and with this program, has really offended some very senior people…

…If you convene a serious hearing…I assure you, some senior officers will come.

And, if you give them enough protection, [they will] tell you things that will really knock your socks off.

So go for it.

 

war stories
Locked in Abu Ghraib
The prison scandal keeps getting worse for the Bush administration.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, May 17, 2004, at 3:22 PM PT

The White House is about to get hit by the biggest tsunami since the Iran-Contra affair, maybe since Watergate. President George W. Bush is trapped inside the compound, immobilized by his own stay-the-course campaign strategy. Can he escape the massive tidal waves? Maybe. But at this point, it's not clear how.

If today's investigative shockers—Seymour Hersh's latest article in The New Yorker and a three-part piece in Newsweek—are true, it's hard to avoid concluding that responsibility for the Abu Ghraib atrocities goes straight to the top, both in the Pentagon and the White House, and that varying degrees of blame can be ascribed to officials up and down the chain of command.

Both stories are worth reading in full. The gist is that last year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put in place a secret operation that, in Hersh's words, "encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq."

This operation stemmed from an earlier supersecret program involving interrogation of suspected al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. A memo to President Bush from White House counsel Alberto Gonzales—excerpted in Newsweek—rationalized the program by noting that we need "to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American citizens." This new sort of war, he went on, renders the Geneva Conventions' limitations on interrogating enemy prisoners "obsolete" and "quaint."

This program, Hersh reports, was approved by the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the National Security Council. President Bush was "informed" of it. Hersh also notes that its harsh techniques yielded results; terrorists were rounded up as a result. So, last spring, after Saddam's regime fell in Iraq and Rumsfeld grew frustrated over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction or to learn anything about the insurgents who continued to resist the U.S.-led occupation, he put the same program in motion in Iraq.

That's when all hell broke loose, and conventional prisoners of war—whose wardens had up to that point been following Geneva rules—were suddenly treated like terrorists whose deadly secrets must immediately be squeezed out. Hence, the ensuing torture.

Read together, the magazine articles spell out an elaborate, all-inclusive chain of command in this scandal. Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone's deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaida suspects at Guantanamo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogations—from the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone else—but said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out. Meanwhile, those involved in the interrogations included officers from military intelligence, the CIA, and private contractors, as well as the mysterious figures from the Pentagon's secret operation.

That's a lot more people than the seven low-grade soldiers and reservists currently facing courts-martial.

So, what happens next?

First, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee have said they will keep their hearings going until they "get to the bottom of this." Republicans as well as Democrats are behaving in an unusually—and unexpectedly—aggressive fashion on the question of how high up the blame should go.

Second, the courts could get involved. Newsweek reports that the Justice Department is likely to investigate three deaths that occurred during CIA interrogations, possibly with an eye toward charges of homicide. War-crimes charges, for willful violation of the Geneva Conventions, are not out of the question. Rumsfeld and Cambone could conceivably face perjury charges; if the latest news stories are true, their testimony before the armed services committees—taken under oath—will certainly be examined carefully.

Third, Seymour Hersh seems to be on his hottest roll as an investigative reporter in 30 years, and the editors of every major U.S. daily newspaper aren't going to stand for it. "We're having our lunch handed to us by a weekly magazine!" one can imagine them shouting in their morning meetings. Scoops and counterscoops will be the order of the day.

All of these hound-hunts will be fueled by the extraordinary levels of internecine feuding that have marked this administration for years. Until recently, Rumsfeld, with White House assistance, has quelled dissenters, but the already-rattling lid is almost certain to blow off soon. As has been noted, Secretary of State Colin Powell, tiring of his good-soldier routine, is attacking his adversaries in the White House and Pentagon with eyebrow-raising openness. Hersh's story states that Rumsfeld's secret operation stemmed from his "longstanding desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA." Hersh's sources—many of them identified as intelligence officials—seem to be spilling, in part, to wrest back control. Uniformed military officers, who have long disliked Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew for a lot of reasons, are also speaking out. Hersh and Newsweek both report that senior officers from the Judge Advocate General's Corps went berserk when they found out about Rumsfeld's secret operation, to the point of taking their concerns to the New York Bar Association's committee on international human rights.

The knives are out all over Washington—lots of knives, unsheathed and sharpened in many different backroom parlors, for many motives and many throats. In short, this story is not going away.

What is Bush to do? There's not much he can do. Many, including loyal Republicans worried about the election, are urging him to fire Rumsfeld. But that move probably wouldn't stop the investigations. In fact, the confirmation hearings for Rummy's replacement would serve as yet another forum for all the questions—about Abu Ghraib, the war in Iraq, and military policy generally—that the administration is trying to stave off. More than that, Bush has said repeatedly that he won't get rid of Rumsfeld. If he did, especially if he did so under political pressure, he would undermine his most appealing campaign slogan—that he stays the course, doesn't buckle, says what he means and does what he says.

If lesser officials are sacrificed—Cambone, Feith, and so forth—there is no guarantee that they will go gently, especially if they face possible criminal charges. The same, by the way, is true of Rumsfeld himself, a savvy survivor who can be expected to take some interesting memos with him—for possible widespread circulation—if he were forced to leave the building.

Much is at stake here—budgets, bailiwicks, careers, reputations, re-elections, to say nothing of national security and the future of Iraq. Get ready for a bumpy ride.

 

M.P.'s Received Orders to Strip Iraqi Detainees
By ERIC SCHMITT and DOUGLAS JEHL, NYTimes

Published: May 18, 2004


WASHINGTON, May 17 — The American officer who was in charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison has told a senior Army investigator that intelligence officers sometimes instructed the military police to force Iraqi detainees to strip naked and to shackle them before questioning them. But he said those measures were not imposed "unless there is some good reason."

The officer, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, also told the investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, that his unit had "no formal system in place" to monitor instructions they had given to military guards, who worked closely with interrogators to prepare detainees for interviews. Colonel Pappas said he "should have asked more questions, admittedly" about abuses committed or encouraged by his subordinates.

The statements by Colonel Pappas, contained in the transcript of a Feb. 11 interview that is part of General Taguba's 6,000-page classified report, offer the highest-level confirmation so far that military intelligence soldiers directed military guards in preparing for interrogations. They also provide the first insights by the senior intelligence officer at the prison into the relationship between his troops and the military police. Portions of Colonel Pappas's sworn statements were read to The New York Times by a government official who had read the transcript.

Testimony from guards and detainees at a preliminary hearing for a soldier accused of abuse said that orders from interrogators at Abu Ghraib had stopped short of the graphic abuse seen in the photographs at the center of the prison scandal.

The interrogation techniques Colonel Pappas described were used on detainees protected by the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit inhumane treatment of prisoners. Military officials said on Monday that the United States had months ago quietly abandoned an early plan to designate as unlawful combatants some of the prisoners captured by American forces in Iraq. No prisoners in Iraq were classified as unlawful combatants.

That means that even foreign fighters and suspected Al Qaeda members captured in Iraq, along with Iraqis captured as prisoners of war and insurgents, have remained protected by the Geneva Conventions.

The option of designating prisoners captured in Iraq as unlawful combatants "has not been foreclosed, but this is not under consideration," a senior military official said.

The role of military intelligence officials and civilian contract interrogators at Abu Ghraib is still under investigation by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, the deputy chief of Army intelligence.

Colonel Pappas confirmed in his statements that his unit had enacted several changes recommended by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the head of detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, whom the Pentagon sent to Iraq in August and September to review detention operations.

A major finding of General Miller's visit, Colonel Pappas said, was "to provide dedicated M.P.'s in support of interrogations."

Several military police officers and their commanders at Abu Ghraib have said that military intelligence officers directed them to "set the conditions" to enhance the questioning. When General Taguba asked what safeguards existed to ensure that guards "understand the instructions or limits of instructions, or whether the instructions were legal," Colonel Pappas acknowledged that there were no assurances.

"There would be no way for us to actually monitor whether that happened," Colonel Pappas told General Taguba. "We had no formal system in place to do that."

Colonel Pappas continued, "To my knowledge, instructions given to the M.P.'s, other than what I have mentioned, such as shackling, making detainees strip down or other measures used on detainees before interrogations, are not typically made unless there is some good reason."

Individual interrogation plans were drafted for each detainee, and were approved by Colonel Pappas or his deputy, he said. In every case, he said, the plans followed the guidance in the rules of interrogation that Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top ground commander in Iraq, approved on Oct. 12.

In his report, General Taguba concluded that Colonel Pappas was "either directly or indirectly responsible" for the actions of those who mistreated and humiliated Iraqi prisoners.

Colonel Pappas is a 23-year Army veteran who began his military career after graduating in 1981 from Rutgers University, where he was part of the R.O.T.C. program. He took command of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade in July, after the unit had been in Iraq for more than three months, as part of the V Corps, which is based in Heidelberg, Germany.

Colonel Pappas has declined all interview requests, including one made on Monday through a spokesman for the Army's V Corps in Germany.

In deciding not to invoke the unlawful combatant designation on any prisoners in Iraq, the Bush administration appears to have concluded that detention and interrogation procedures permitted under the Geneva Conventions were adequate even for suspected Al Qaeda members captured in Iraq. The conventions spell out protections that include monitoring by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The United States said at the outset of the war that no one captured in Iraq would be sent to the American prison at Guantánamo Bay that houses Al Qaeda suspects detained in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and none have been.

That new approach is a sharp reversal from the one that Pentagon officials described after the major phase of the war in Iraq ended last May. Then, American officers said that the thousands of prisoners in Iraq were being sorted to determine who among them should be labeled unlawful combatants. The Bush administration has applied that status to Al Qaeda members elsewhere and has used it to justify their indefinite detention at the American base at Guantánamo Bay under conditions not subject to the conventions.

Last May, Col. Karl Goetze, the staff judge advocate for occupation land forces in Iraq, said at a Pentagon briefing that the military intended to segregate "unlawful combatants" from Iraqi prisoners who should be treated as prisoners of war.

"Foreign fighters could fall into the category of unlawful combatants," Colonel Goetze said. He said he expected that only a small percentage of the prisoners in Iraq would be designated "unlawful combatants," but he said, "These are the individuals who raised up, took arms, not carrying them in an open manner, not wearing uniforms; in other words, engaging in tactics and techniques that were not in accordance with the law of armed combat."

On Monday, however, a senior military officer said in an e-mail message that "no persons in Iraq have been declared unlawful combatants." The Iraqi prisoners held in the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib have been labeled security detainees. In testimony addressing the scandal over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners there, American officials have said that the Geneva accords are "fully applicable" to all prisoners held by the United States in Iraq.

Bush administration officials in Iraq have referred often to the presence of foreign fighters among those opposing American forces in Iraq, but American officials have never specified how many foreign fighters are being held captive by the United States. American officials have promised that all Iraqi prisoners would be kept in Iraq, but they have been less explicit about whether the same rules would apply to foreigners.

On Monday, a senior Defense Department official said that high-level Iraqi prisoners held at a site on the outskirts of the Baghdad airport were now being permitted up to three hours of time outside each day, more than the International Committee for the Red Cross observed and described in a February 2004 report.

In the February report, the Red Cross committee said that the estimated 100 prisoners at the site, designated as "high value detainees" by the United States, were being held in isolation for months at a time for as long as 23 hours a day without sunlight. The senior defense official said that representatives of the Red Cross committee had visited the site twice since February, and appeared satisfied with the way the prisoners, who include Tariq Aziz and other former advisers to Saddam Hussein, were being treated.

The Iraq Survey Group, along with another agency that the official would not name, is principally in charge of the interrogation of those prisoners, he said. But he said the rules for their detention and interrogation were set by the Central Command.

 

Via Josh...
______________
In this new piece, Fred Kaplan hits on key point in the unfolding prison abuse scandal -- one that is, oddly, easy to overlook with all the daily revelations.

Set aside, for the moment, the underlying claims and misdeeds. Right out of the gate, multiple officials at the White House and the Pentagon pretty clearly lied about their own roles in putting in place the policies that led directly to what was taking place in those photos and went along with trying to pin the whole thing on these half dozen jokers whose pictures we've now seen again and again.

The whole progression of the story has an odd doubled-up quality. On the one hand we have repeated claims from top officials insisting that the abuses were the isolated work of a few miscreants. Then, simultaneously, we have numerous stories showing specific policy decisions (often confirmed on the record by slightly lower-level officials) which sanctioned pretty close to all the stuff we're seeing in those photos, even if not quite practiced with the same relish and glee.

This new article in Tuesday's Times says that the the head of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib apparently put military police at the disposal of interrogators and gave them orders to do stuff like strip detainees, shackle them and generally give them a working over (though only, he said, when there was "some good reason"). But, along with this, there was no superivision of what they were doing and no guidelines or rules given to them saying what was acceptable and what wasn't. And remember, this isn't the testimony of a disinterested observer, but rather someone who is on the line for a lot of it and who presumably has an interest in putting the best face possible on the situation.

At a minimum, that sounds like giving benzine, some cordite, a gallon of gas, firecrackers, and a hundred rolls of toilet paper to some teenagers, telling them to see if they could put it all together to have some fun in the neighborhood on Friday night and then leaving them to their own devices.

And, remember, that's the generous interpretation.


-- Josh Marshall

 

"At the same time, President Bush recognized that our nation will continue to be a strong supporter of the Geneva treaties. The president also reaffirmed our policy in the United States armed forces to treat Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in keeping with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention."

- Alberto Gonzales, 5/15/04 (NYT Op-Ed)


"The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians...In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

- Alberto Gonzales, 1/25/02 (Memorandum to the President, as reported in Newsweek 5/16/04)

 

Here's the paragraph in question...

Looks to me like Hersh offered no exoneration but was merely quoting a source who had an opinion... and had an opinion not exactly as favorable to Rummy as the Mowbray piece suggests... and the culpable quote is directed at the specific actions in the prison, not the overarching policy that made such abuses possible... looks like another example of selective editing...

In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame. “The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone,” he said. “This is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.” When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, “but he’s responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we’ve changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means.”

Anonymous sources talking about a program that is "subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security?" I'm shocked, especially since most of these folks, while being "former" are still probably involved in similar lines of work.

And talk about your obligatory exhoneration:

Maybe Hersh’s piece has quite a bit of truth in it.

The article ignores the fact that Newsweek, The Washington Post, the NYTimes and a host of other folks have come to similar conclusions.

This is a classic piece from the Fog Machine that has become the far right.