[Peace-discuss] Seymour Hersh's latest New Yorker article skewers Rumsfeld, Part 2

[Phil Stinard]

I'm sending this out in two parts, because it was so big that it bounced.  
This is part 2  --Phil

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

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

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 shit. 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 shit 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.”