[Peace-discuss] Seymour Hersh's latest New Yorker article skewers Rumsfeld, Part 1

[Phil Stinard]

I'm sending this out in two parts, because it was so big that it bounced.  
--Phil

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact

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 bullshit 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 shit 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.”

... To be continued in the next post