Hersh on Rumsfeld

the y not only do bad things, they do bad things incompetently.

 

Army, CIA want torture truths exposed
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published 5/18/2004 7:16 AM


WASHINGTON, May 18 (UPI) -- Efforts at the top level of the Bush administration and the civilian echelon of the Department of Defense to contain the Iraq prison torture scandal and limit the blame to a handful of enlisted soldiers and immediate senior officers have already failed: The scandal continues to metastasize by the day.

Over the past weekend and into this week, devastating new allegations have emerged putting Stephen Cambone, the first Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, firmly in the crosshairs and bringing a new wave of allegations cascading down on the head of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when he scarcely had time to catch his breath from the previous ones.

Even worse for Rumsfeld and his coterie of neo-conservative true believers who have run the Pentagon for the past 3½ years, three major institutions in the Washington power structure have decided that after almost a full presidential term of being treated with contempt and abuse by them, it's payback time.

Those three institutions are: The United States Army, the Central Intelligence Agency and the old, relatively moderate but highly experienced Republican leadership in the United States Senate.

None of those groups is chopped liver: Taken together they comprise a devastating Grand Slam.

The spearhead for the new wave of revelations and allegations - but by no means the only source of them - is veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. In a major article published in the New Yorker this week and posted on to its Web-site Saturday, Hersh revealed that a high-level Pentagon operation code-named Copper Green "encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation" of Iraqi prisoners. He also cited Pentagon sources and consultants as saying that photographing the victims of such abuse was an explicit part of the program meant to force the victims into becoming blackmailed reliable informants.

Hersh further claimed in his article that Rumsfeld himself approved the program and that one of his four or five top aides, Cambone, set it up in Baghdad and ran it.

These allegations of course are anathema to the White House, Rumsfeld and their media allies. In a highly unusual step for any newspaper, the editorially neo-conservative tabloid New York Post ran an editorial Monday seeking to ridicule and discredit Hersh. However, it presented absolutely no evidence to query, let alone discredit the substance of his article and allegations.

Instead, the New York Post editorial inadvertently pointed out one, but by no means all, of the major sources for Hersh's information. The editorial alleged that Hersh had received much of his material from the CIA.

Based on the material Hersh quoted, his legendary intelligence community contacts were probably sources for some of his information. However, Hersh has also enjoyed close personal relations with many now high-ranking officers in the United States Army, going all the way back to his prize-winning coverage and scoops in Vietnam more than 30 years ago.

Indeed, intelligence and regular Army sources have told UPI that senior officers and officials in both communities are sickened and outraged by the revelations of mass torture and abuse, and also by the incompetence involved, in the Abu Ghraib prison revelations. These sources also said that officials all the way up to the highest level in both the Army and the Agency are determined not to be scapegoated, or allow very junior soldiers or officials to take the full blame for the excesses.

President George W. Bush in his weekly radio address Saturday claimed that the Abu Ghraib abuses were only "the actions of a few" and that they did not "reflect the true character of the Untied States armed forces."

But what enrages many serving senior Army generals and U.S. top-level intelligence community professionals is that the "few" in this case were not primarily the serving soldiers who were actually encouraged to carry out the abuses and even then take photos of the victims, but that they were encouraged to do so, with the Army's well-established safeguards against such abuses deliberately removed by high-level Pentagon civilian officials.

Abuse and even torture of prisoners happens in almost every war on every side. But well-run professional armies, and the U.S. Army has always been one, take great pains to guard against it and limit it as much as possible. Even in cases where torture excesses are regarded as essential to extract tactical information and save lives, commanders in most modern armies have taken care to limit such "dirty work" to very small units, usually from special forces, and to keep it as secret as possible.

For senior Army professionals know that allowing patterns of abuse and torture to metastasize in any army is annihilating to its morale and tactical effectiveness. Torturers usually make lousy combat soldiers, which is why combat soldiers in every major army hold them in contempt.

Therefore, several U.S. military officers told UPI, the idea of using regular Army soldiers, including some even just from the Army Reserve or National Guard, and encouraging them to inflict such abuses ran contrary to received military wisdom and to the ingrained standards and traditions of the U.S. Army.

The widespread taking of photographs of the victims of such abuses, they said, clearly revealed that civilian "amateurs" and not regular Army or intelligence community professionals were the driving force in shaping and running the programs under which these abuses occurred.

Hersh has spearheaded the waves of revelations of shocking abuse. But other major U.S. media organizations are now charging in behind him to confirm and extend his reports. They are able to do so because many senior veteran professionals in both the CIA and the Army were disgusted by the revelations of the torture excesses. Now they are being listened to with suddenly receptive ears on Capitol Hill.

Republican members in the House of Representatives have kept discipline and silence on the revelations. But with the exception of the increasingly isolated and embarrassed Senate Republican Leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, other senior mainstream figures in the GOP Senate majority have refused to go along with any cover-up.

Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Richard Lugar of Indiana, Pat Roberts of Kansas and John Warner of Virginia have all been outspoken in their condemnation of the torture excesses. And they did so even before the latest, most far-reaching and worst of the allegations and reports surfaced. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, lost no time in hauling Rumsfeld before it to testify.

The pattern of the latest wave of revelations is clear: They are coming from significant numbers of senior figures in both the U.S. military and intelligence services. They reflect the disgust and contempt widely felt in both communities at the excesses; and at long last, they are being listened to seriously by senior Republican, as well as Democratic, senators on Capitol Hill.

Rumsfeld and his team of top lieutenants have therefore now lost the confidence, trust and respect of both the Army and intelligence establishments. Key elements of the political establishment even of the ruling GOP now recognize this.

Yet Rumsfeld and his lieutenants remain determined to hang on to power, and so far President Bush has shown every sign of wanting to keep them there. The scandal, therefore, is far from over. The revelations will continue. The cost of the abuses to the American people and the U.S. national interest is already incalculable: And there is no end in sight.

 

Drip, drip, drip...
_____________

Memos Reveal War Crimes Warnings

Could Bush administration officials be prosecuted for 'war crimes' as a result of new measures used in the war on terror? The White House's top lawyer thought so

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff
Investigative Correspondent
Newsweek
Updated: 1:21 p.m. ET May 18, 2004May 17

The White House's top lawyer warned more than two years ago that U.S. officials could be prosecuted for "war crimes" as a result of new and unorthodox measures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism, according to an internal White House memo and interviews with participants in the debate over the issue.

The concern about possible future prosecution for war crimes—and that it might even apply to Bush adminstration officials themselves— is contained in a crucial portion of an internal January 25, 2002, memo by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales obtained by NEWSWEEK. It urges President George Bush declare the war in Afghanistan, including the detention of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, exempt from the provisions of the Geneva Convention.

In the memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimes—defined in part as "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. Noting that the law applies to "U.S. officials" and that punishments for violators "include the death penalty," Gonzales told Bush that "it was difficult to predict with confidence" how Justice Department prosecutors might apply the law in the future. This was especially the case given that some of the language in the Geneva Conventions—such as that outlawing "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment" of prisoners—was "undefined."

One key advantage of declaring that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters did not have Geneva Convention protections is that it "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales wrote.

"It is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441 [the War Crimes Act]," Gonzales wrote.

The best way to guard against such "unwarranted charges," the White House lawyer concluded, would be for President Bush to stick to his decision—then being strongly challenged by Secretary of State Powell— to exempt the treatment of captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from Geneva convention provisions.

"Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that (the War Crimes Act) does not apply which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution," Gonzales wrote.

The memo—and strong dissents by Secretary of State Colin Powell and his chief legal advisor, William Howard Taft IV—are among hundreds of pages of internal administration documents on the Geneva Convention and related issues that have been obtained by NEWSWEEK and are reported for the first time in this week's magazine. Newsweek made some of them available online today.

 

The prisoner-abuse scandal at home
The stories sound familiar: Muslim prisoners beaten and sexually humiliated by American guards. But it happened in Brooklyn, not Baghdad.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg



May 19, 2004 | BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- The American guards took Mohamed Maddy's glasses before they slammed him into the wall. A portly middle-aged father of two, Maddy was crying, trying to move his shoulder in front of him so it would take the blow, but they kept smashing him into the concrete, leaving him with dark purple bruises. Then they told him to strip, and when he balked at removing his underwear -- "I am Muslim, I can't do it," he said -- they screamed, "****ing Muslim! Take them off!"

They made him bend over and said, "Take your hand and open your ass." He sobbed harder as they performed a cavity search. Afterward, they told him to get dressed and put him in handcuffs and leg irons connected by a chain to his waist. They ordered him to run and then stepped on his leg chain so he'd fall down, only to be yanked back up and forced to run again, over and over. Without his glasses, Maddy couldn't see where he was going, but he thinks he was running in circles.

Finally he was thrown in a cell. For the first month, the light was left on 24 hours a day. If he tried to shield his eyes and snatch a moment of sleep, the guards would kick the doors. On the rare occasions when he was taken out, he was strip-searched, often twice in the same day, even if he hadn't been out of the guards' sight. Sometimes they did the searches in public. Sometimes they laughed and jeered. An official report later concluded that many of these searches had nothing to do with safety -- they were about punishment and humiliation.

Stories like Maddy's have lately been pouring out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but he's never been to those countries. Maddy's ordeal took place at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where 84 of the 762 Muslim immigrants who were detained after Sept. 11 were held. The torture there wasn't nearly as severe as it was at Abu Ghraib, and, according to recent reports, at Guantánamo in Cuba. But there are striking similarities, suggesting that what happened in Iraq may be an escalation of a pattern of human rights violations that began almost as soon as the World Trade Center crumbled.

In April 2003, as the war in Iraq dominated the headlines, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General issued a 239-page report titled "The September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of Aliens Held on Immigration Charges in Connection with the Investigation of the September 11 Attacks." Then, in December, the Inspector General's Office issued a supplemental 49-page report detailing abuses at the Metropolitan Detention Center, where Maddy was held. In its May 24 issue, Newsweek revealed that attorneys for two detainees are pressing to release 300 hours of videotape that captured the abuses -- tapes that were cited in the reports on the detention center, but that have never been made public.

As the reports document, prisoners being held at MDC in connection with Sept. 11 were regularly stripped and sexually humiliated. Prolonged sleep deprivation was common. Guards regularly slammed inmates against walls. Several detainees claimed they were also punched and kicked. In Passaic County Jail, prisoners were menaced with dogs. At several prisons, people were put in solitary confinement for weeks or even months. They were denied access to visitors. Many were never charged with any crime.

The reports paint a picture of mass roundups conducted without probable cause, followed by "prolonged confinement for many detainees, sometimes under extremely harsh conditions." It lists some of the rather specious justifications given for classifying people as Sept. 11 detainees. One man was "arrested, detained on immigration charges, and treated as a September 11 detainee because a person called the FBI to report that the [redacted] grocery store in which the alien worked, is operated by numerous Middle Eastern men, 24 hrs -- 7 days a week. Each shift daily has 2 or 3 men ... Store was closed day after crash, reopened days and evenings. Then later on opened during midnight hours. Too many people to run a small store."

Something similar seems to have happened in Iraq, where the Red Cross estimated that between 70 and 90 percent of the inmates at Abu Ghraib were innocent. On May 5, a U.N. working group on arbitrary detention issued a statement saying, "According to the information received by the Working Group, the majority of persons in detention in Iraq have been arrested during public demonstrations, at checkpoints and in house raids. They are being considered 'security detainees' or 'suspected of anti-Coalition activities'. The Working Group's Chairperson-Rapporteur is seriously disturbed by the fact that these persons have not been granted access to a court to be able to challenge the lawfulness of their detention, as required by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights."

Policies of arbitrary detention often lead to coercive interrogation and abuse, says David Cole, professor of law at Georgetown University and author of "Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism." In both America and Iraq, he says, "the approach was to sweep broadly, to pick people up on little or no evidence other than their religious or ethnic identity. That process puts a premium on interrogation because the whole idea is that we don't know who the bad guys are, so your job as an interrogator is to find out who they are through interrogation. When they say we don't know anything about it, it's going to put pressure on interrogators to use coercive methods. Anytime you abandon the presumption of innocence and adopt a broad, sweeping detention policy, it's going to lead to questionable interrogation tactics."

It's not clear whether the guards in Brooklyn and those in Baghdad adopted similar tactics independently, or whether they were acting under similar orders. As Seymour Hersh has reported in the New Yorker, the Defense Department authorized policies in Guantánamo and Iraq that were designed to enable interrogations. According to Hersh, they included sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, "exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in 'stress positions' for agonizing lengths of time."

Milder versions of these methods were employed at MDC, but there's no evidence that guards there were acting under orders from federal officials. Still, says Cole, "[R]eports of [abuse] are so consistent among domestic detainees that it seems it must have been a policy choice. Assuming the best of the policy makers, would assume they're doing it for interrogation purposes."

Regardless of who ordered the abuse, prison officials were operating under loosened legal constraints that encouraged mistreatment. "There was a perception of guilt imposed in both cases," says Nancy Chang, senior litigation attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Those detained in America, like those in Guantánamo and Iraq, "were abused as enemy combatants or potential enemy combatants. They were treated quite differently from regular prisoners. They were placed under the most extreme conditions of confinement without any prior determination that they posed a danger."

In both the United States and Iraq, the tactics were similar, even if the severity was not.

Images of the abuse at Abu Ghraib have forced Mohamed Maddy to relive the eight months he spent in American prisons, and especially the months he spent at the special housing unit at the Metropolitan Detention Center. "I can see that it is almost the same," he writes in an e-mail from Cairo, where he's lived with his two sons since being deported in May 2002. "[W]e were all pushed viciously against the wall, hands tied behind back, chains on both legs, lots of hits on the face and the rest of the body, severe humiliation like I never saw before, they were cursing us almost every minute of the day and prevented us from sleeping. In brief, the treatment was very inhuman and against all human rights and ethics."

Of course, this may sound like the hyperbole of a traumatized man, but the inspector general's report on conditions at MDC confirm most of what he says. "[W]e concluded that it was inappropriate for staff members in the ADMAX SHU [Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit] to routinely film strip searches showing the detainees naked, and that on occasion staff members inappropriately used strip searches to intimidate and punish detainees," the report says. It cites videotapes of the strip searches in which the voices of female officers can clearly be heard, confirming detainees' reports that they were stripped in front of women. On some tapes, the report says, "staff members laughed, exchanged suggestive looks and made funny noises before and during strip searches."

The report also found evidence of routine physical abuse. "[W]e concluded, based on videotape evidence, detainees' statements, witnesses' observations, and staff members who corroborated some allegations of abuse, that some MDC staff members slammed and bounced detainees into the walls at the MDC and inappropriately pressed detainees' heads against walls," the report says. "We also found that some officers inappropriately twisted and bent detainees' arms, hands, wrists, and fingers, and caused them unnecessary physical pain; inappropriately carried or lifted detainees; and raised or pulled detainees' arms in painful ways. In addition, we believe some officers improperly used handcuffs, occasionally stepped on compliant detainees' leg restraint chains, and were needlessly forceful and rough with the detainees -- all conduct that violates [Bureau of Prisons] policy."

There were also numerous reports that, in addition to the lights being left on in the cell for 24 hours a day, officers went out of their way to keep detainees awake. "For example, one detainee claimed that officers kicked the doors non-stop in order to keep the detainees from sleeping," the inspector general's report says. "He stated that for the first two or three weeks he was at the MDC, one of the officers walked by about every 15 minutes throughout the night, kicked the doors to wake up the detainees, and yelled things such as, 'Mother****ers,' 'Assholes,' and 'Welcome to America.' ... Another detainee said that officers would not let the detainees sleep during the day or night from the time he arrived at the MDC in the beginning of October through mid-November 2001."

Almost all the 9/11 prisoners at MDC were being held for interrogation, not because police had any evidence connecting them to terrorism. Maddy was one of the few in the unit who had actually committed a crime -- while working for a passenger services company at JFK airport, he had smuggled his wife and sons into the country.

Today, Maddy lives in a cacophonous Cairo suburb where car horns compete with mournful Arab pop singers and small boys driving donkey carts clatter down dusty side streets. He's a hospitable man who cooks me a dinner of grilled chicken and Greek salad while his teenage sons, Eslam and Karim, play a James Bond video game on their Xbox and listen to the soundtrack from Eminem's "8 Mile." Friendly as he is, though, he can't hide a sadness that's made him lose interest in everything in the world except his boys and his misfortunes.

In prison, he was questioned "six, seven or eight times," he says, usually about how often he went to the mosque and whether he knows any "bad people in the USA." Not being a radical man -- he has a picture of Bill Clinton hanging on the wall of his Cairo apartment -- he was little help. "I tell them the truth, but they say, 'You are liar,'" he says.

Indeed, several detainees say it was their professions of innocence that led to weeks of solitary confinement and other torments.

Khaled Betar, 34, is a happy-go-lucky blue-eyed bachelor from Amman, Jordan, whose friends know him as a bit of a womanizer. Radical Islam holds no attraction for him -- he's an agnostic who tends to see both his Arab and Muslim identity as an accident of birth. The first time he prayed to Allah was when he was thrown in prison by FBI agents who accused him of membership in al-Qaida.

Before arriving in America, Betar spent time working in both South Africa and Hamburg, Germany. He traveled to America in April 2001 for the same reason many immigrants do -- to earn money. A Jordanian family he knew owned a gas station in Stony Point, N.Y., and they gave him a job that paid around $2,000 a month -- nearly 10 times what he could make at home.

Betar had a six-month tourist visa that was still valid in late September 2001, when FBI agents showed up at his apartment to question him. "They asked me if I know any people who give speeches in the mosque, if I'm religious or not," he says. "They spoke to me for, like, half an hour and they asked me about my passport. I showed them my visa." The visa would expire in a week.

Knowing that, the agents waited 10 days before visiting Betar again. When they returned, there were two immigration agents with them. "They told me, your visa expired and you have to go with us to the detention," he says.

Betar would spend the next nine months in Passaic County Jail, where he was held as a material witness to the Sept. 11 attacks. "He was never charged with terrorism, never charged with being a threat to national security," says his attorney, Sin Yen Ling of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. "There were never any formal charges."

But there were many interrogations. Seven of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers spent time in Hamburg, a city with a Muslim population of 130,000. Betar had lived there, too, and investigators were convinced there was a connection.

During his first interview, there were four FBI agents. They showed him pictures of some of the hijackers, and asked if he knew them. "They told me one of the hijackers was in Germany," he says. "They said, 'How come you are Muslim and you don't know this guy?' That's what they told me! I told them, man, I can't know every Muslim!"

A few weeks later, the agents asked him if he would take a polygraph. He readily agreed, but after hours of questioning, he was told that he failed (he's never seen the transcript, and it wasn't given to his attorney). Several days later, he was given a second polygraph. Again, he was told that he failed, and he was taken to the hole. The guard told Betar he was acting on the FBI's orders.

"I was in a small cell. It's closed. There was an iron bed and mattress and blanket, that's all that you have. I stayed there 24 days. All the time, they keep the light on. Every day they came with dogs. The dogs made noise. Every day they took me from the room to search me. I'm in the room, how can I get anything?"

When he returned to the prison's general population after 24 days, "It was like a paradise for me," he says. "You can't imagine. The hole is terrible. It was the worst 24 days of my life. They make you crazy, really."

There was pressure, he says, to admit to some role in Sept. 11. "They just want me to say I know one of these people," he says. "They want anybody. If you are innocent, it doesn't matter for them. They just want to put anybody in the jail, to show people that they are working. If this happened in Syria, Iraq, it's normal, but in America it's different, really."

Eventually, though, the FBI cleared Betar of any terrorist ties, and he was deported back to Jordan.

A resilient man, Betar seems to have largely put his ordeal behind him. "Now, I'm all right," he says in Amman, where he and a friend have started a business selling nuts. "Sometimes you remember, you get depressed, but I'm normal now. I'm OK."

Maddy, who's found a job as an Internet marketing manager for a Cairo tourism company, hasn't done as well. He has memory lapses and trouble concentrating. "Sometimes at my job, it goes in my mind, everything that happened in the USA. I get nervous and have to leave what I'm doing. Never I forget. Everything's like videotape. I remember even when I'm sleeping. I don't feel safe when I'm sleeping. I don't feel good about my life." He wants to sue the Justice Department, but knows little about the American legal system, and isn't sure where to look for a lawyer to represent him pro bono.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, something further seemed to break in him. Shortly after the first pictures of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqis were published, he fired off an uncharacteristic message full of profanity and rage. "How much the American people hate the Muslim people!" he writes. "[W]e hate the stupid Bush and I will be happy when he go to the hell in November and I want tell him go, not come back. **** you Bush and your government."

Two days later, he was mortified by his outburst. "I would like to express my apology for using an inappropriate language, but I have bitter feelings that squeeze my heart and soul," he writes in a second e-mail. "It sounds like it is a policy for the American government to treat Arabs, especially Muslims, as bad as they can, and it is totally untrue that the behavior was individual incidents carried [out] by several guards."

"What I have saw with the Iraqi people made me feel very sick. It was really disgusting and made me review all that happened to me," he says.

Maddy wasn't terribly religious before, but in prison he moved closer to God, he says. Now, he fantasizes about suing the United States for what it put him through, and using the money to build a big mosque, white, with a green light shining from the minaret.

But first, he says, "I will give some money to my sons, so they don't need to go to the USA."

 

Sorry... that article was from Salon.com...