[Peace-discuss] How Rumsfeld Micromanaged Torture

[C. G. Estabrook]

[As Americans, responsible for this government, we should be outraged at 
these excrescences' betrayal of the promise of our country. The anti-war 
movement will not have succeeded until they are in prison.  --CGE]
	
	April 30, 2007
	"Make Sure This Happens!!"
	How Rumsfeld Micromanaged Torture
	By ANDREW COCKBURN

When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld boasted, as he did frequently, 
of his unrelenting focus on the war on terror, his audience would have 
been startled, maybe even shocked, to discover the activities that 
Rumsfeld found it necessary to supervise in minute detail. Close command 
and control of far away events from the Pentagon were not limited to the 
targeting of bombs and missiles. Thanks to breakthroughs in 
communications, the interrogation and torture of prisoners could be 
monitored on a real time basis also.

The first prisoner to experience such attention from Rumsfeld's office, 
or the first that we know about, was an American citizen, John Walker 
Lindh, a young man from California whose fascination with Islam had led 
him to enlist in the Taliban. Shortly thereafter, he and several hundred 
others surrendered to the Northern Alliance warlord Abdu Rashid Dostum 
in return for a promise of safe passage. Dostum broke the deal, herding 
the prisoners into a ruined fortress near Mazar-e-Sharif. Lindh managed 
to survive, though wounded, and eventually fell into the hands of the 
CIA and Special Forces, who proceeded to interrogate him.

According to documents later unearthed by Richard Serrano of the Los 
Angeles Times, a Special Forces intelligence officer was informed by a 
Navy Admiral monitoring events in Mazar-e-Sharif that "the Secretary of 
Defense's Counsel (lawyer William Haynes) has authorized him to 'take 
the gloves off' and ask whatever he wanted." In the course of the 
questioning Lindh, who had a bullet in his leg, was stripped naked, 
blindfolded, handcuffed, and bound to a stretcher with duct tape. In a 
practice that would become more familiar at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq 18 
months later, smiling soldiers posed for pictures next to the naked 
prisoner. A navy medic later testified that he had been told by the lead 
military interrogator that "sleep deprivation, cold and hunger might be 
employed" during Lindh's interrogations. Meanwhile, his responses to the 
questioning, which ultimately went on for days, were relayed back to 
Washington, according to the documents disclosed to Serrano, every hour, 
hour after hour. Someone very important clearly wanted to know all the 
details.

Lindh was ultimately tried and sentenced in a U.S. court, but Rumsfeld 
was in no mood to extend any kind of legal protection to other captives. 
As the first load of prisoners arrived at the new military prison camp 
at Guantanamo, Cuba, on January 11, 2002, he declared them "unlawful 
combatants" who "do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention." In 
fact, the Geneva Conventions provide explicit protection to anyone taken 
prisoner in an international armed conflict, even when they are not 
entitled to actual prisoner of war status, but no one at that time was 
in a mood to contradict the all-powerful secretary of defense.

A year after Haynes, his chief counsel, had passed the message that 
interrogators should "take the gloves off" when questioning the hapless 
John Walker Lindh and report the results on an hourly basis, Rumsfeld 
was personally deciding on whether interrogators could use "stress 
positions" (an old CIA technique) like making prisoners stand for up to 
four hours, or exploit "individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, to 
induce stress," or strip them naked, or question them for 28 hours at a 
stretch, without sleep, or use "a wet towel and dripping water to induce 
the misperception of suffocation". These and other methods, 
euphemistically dubbed "counter-resistance techniques" in Pentagon 
documents that always avoided the word "torture," were outlined in an 
"action memo" submitted on November 27, 2002, for Rumsfeld's approval by 
Haynes. The lawyer noted that Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard 
General Richard Myers (respectively deputy defense secretary, 
under-secretary for policy and chairman of the joint chiefs) had already 
agreed that Rumsfeld should approve all but the most severe options, 
such as the wet towel, without restriction. A week later, Rumsfeld 
scrawled his signature in the "approved" box but added, "However, I 
stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"

The answer, of course, was that he could always sit down if he felt like 
it, and in any case, according to a sworn statement by Air Force Lt. 
General Randall Schmidt, appointed in 2005 to investigate charges by FBI 
officials that there had been widespread abuse at Guantanamo, Rumsfeld's 
signature was merely for the record; he had given verbal approval for 
the techniques two weeks before. In any event, sitting down at will was 
not an option available to Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi inmate in 
Guantanamo who soon began to feel the effects of Rumsfeld's 
authorization in the most direct way. Qahtani, alleged to have been 
recruited for the 9/11 hijackings only to fail to gain entry into the 
U.S., had been under intense questioning for months.

There is no more chilling evidence of just how closely connected 
Secretary Rumsfeld was to the culture of torture so defiantly adopted by 
the Bush administration than Schmidt's 55-page statement, which at times 
takes on an informal, almost emotional tone. Schmidt is adamant that 
Rumsfeld intended the techniques "for Mister Kahtani (sic) number one." 
And so Qahtani's jailers now began forcing him to stand for long 
periods, isolating him, stripping him, telling him to bark like a dog, 
and more. "There were no limits put on this and no boundaries", Schmidt 
reported. After a few days, the sessions had to be temporarily suspended 
when Qahtani's heartbeat slowed to 35 beats a minute. "Somewhere", 
General Schmidt observes, "there had to be a throttle on this", and the 
"throttle" controlling the interrogation was ultimately Rumsfeld, who 
was "personally involved", the general stresses, "in the interrogation 
of one person." Bypassing the normal chain of command, the secretary 
called the prison chief directly on a weekly basis for reports on 
progress with Qahtani.

Years before, a G.D. Searle executive had remarked on Rumsfeld's 
practice of "diving down in the weeds" to check on details, but this was 
a whole new departure. At one point in Schmidt's description of his 
interview with the secretary during his investigation, it appears that 
Rumsfeld was bemused by the practical consequences of his edicts: "Did 
[I] say 'put a bra and panties on this guy's head and make him dance 
with another man?'" Schmidt quotes him as remarking defensively. To 
which Schmidt, in his statement, answers that Rumsfeld had indeed 
authorized such specific actions by his broad overall approval.

Sometime in mid-August 2003, Rumsfeld took action to deal with the 
question of "insurgency" in Iraq once and for all. During an 
intelligence briefing in his office he reportedly expressed outrage at 
the quality of intelligence he was receiving from Iraq, which he loudly 
and angrily referred to as "shit", banging the table with his fist "so 
hard we thought he might break it",according to one report. His 
principal complaint was that the reports were failing to confirm what he 
knew to be true -- that hostile acts against U.S. forces in Iraq were 
entirely the work of FSLs ["Former Saddam Loyalists"] and dead-enders. 
Scathingly, he compared the quality of the Iraqi material with the 
excellent intelligence that was now, in his view, being extracted from 
the prisoners at Guantanamo, or "Gitmo," as the military termed it, 
under the able supervision of prison commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey 
Miller. Rumsfeld concluded his diatribe with a forthright instruction to 
Stephen Cambone [under-secretary of defense for intelligence] that 
Miller be ordered immediately to the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, 
where the unfortunate PUCs [Persons Under Confinement] were ending up, 
and "Gitmo-ise it." Cambone in turn dispatched the deputy undersecretary 
of defense for intelligence, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, a fervent 
Christian fundamentalist given to deriding the Muslims' Allah as "an 
idol," to Cuba to brief Miller on his mission.

Boykin must have given Miller careful instruction, for he arrived in 
Iraq fully prepared, bringing with him experts such as the female 
interrogator who favored the technique of sexually taunting prisoners, 
as well as useful tips on the use of dogs as a means of intimidating 
interviewees. First on his list of appointments was Lt. Ricardo Sanchez, 
who had succeeded McKiernan as the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq. 
It must have been an instructive conversation, since within 36 hours 
Sanchez issued instructions on detainee interrogation that mirrored 
those authorized by Rumsfeld for use at Guantanamo in December the 
previous year that gave cover to techniques including hooding, nudity, 
stress positions, "fear of dogs," and "mild" physical contact with 
prisoners. There were some innovations in Sanchez' instructions however, 
such as sleep and dietary manipulation. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the 
overall commander of the U.S. military prison system in Iraq at that 
time, later insisted that she did not know what was being done to the 
prisoners at Abu Gharib, though she did recall Miller remarking that "at 
Guantanamo Bay we learned that the prisoners have to earn every single 
thing that they have" and "if you allow them to believe at any point 
that they are more than a dog, then you've lost control of them".

The techniques were apparently fully absorbed by the Abu Ghraib 
interrogators and attendant military police, as became apparent when 
photographs snapped by the MPs finally began to surface, initially on 
CBS News' 60 Minutes in late April 2004. When Rumsfeld first learned 
that there were pictures extant of naked, humiliated and terrified 
prisoners being abused by cheerful soldiers, he said, according to an 
aide who was present, "I didn't know you were allowed to bring cameras 
into a prison."

It is not clear when Rumsfeld first saw the actual photographs. He 
himself testified under oath to Congress that he saw them first in 
expurgated form when they were published in the press, and only got to 
look at the originals nine days later after his office had been "trying 
to get one of the disks for days and days".

The army's criminal investigation division began a probe on January16, 
2004, after Joseph Darby, a soldier not involved in the abuse, slipped 
the investigators a CD carrying some of the photos. As the CID 
investigation set to work, Karpinski, according to her later testimony, 
asked a sergeant at the prison, "What's this about photographs?" The 
sergeant replied, "Ma'am, we've heard something about photographs, but I 
have no idea. Nobody has any details, and Ma'am, if anybody knows, 
nobody is talking." When she asked to see the logbooks kept by the 
military intelligence personnel, she was told that the CID had cleared 
up everything. However, when she went to look for herself, she found 
they had missed something, a piece of paper stuck on a pole outside a 
little office used by the interrogators. "It was a memorandum signed by 
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, authorizing a short list, maybe 6 or 8 
techniques: use of dogs; stress positions; loud music; deprivation of 
food; keeping the lights on, those kinds of things," Karpinski said. 
Over to the side of the paper was a line of handwriting, which to her 
appeared to be in the same hand and with the same ink as the signature. 
The line read: "Make sure this happens!!"

Further indications of Rumsfeld's close interest in ongoing events at 
Abu Ghraib emerged in subsequent court proceedings. In May 2006, 
Sergeant Santos Cardona, an army dog handler was court-martialed at Fort 
Meade, Maryland. In stipulated (i.e., accepted by defense and 
prosecution) testimony, Maj. Michael Thompson, who had been assigned to 
the 325th Military Intelligence Battalion in the relevant period and 
reported to Col. Tom Pappas, the battalion commander, stated that he was 
frequently told by Pappas' executive assistant that "Mr. Donald Rumsfeld 
and Mr. Paul Wolfowitz" had called and were "waiting for reports". The 
defense also read aloud stipulated testimony from Steve Pescatore, a 
civilian interrogator employed by CACI, a corporation heavily contracted 
to assist in interrogations, who recalled being told by military 
intelligence personnel that Secretary Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz received 
"nightly briefings".

Needless to say, the numerous investigations of itself by the military 
high command concluded that no officer or official above the rank of 
colonel bore any responsibility for Abu Ghraib. Col. Pappas was granted 
immunity in return for his testimony against a dog handler. One of the 
investigations, conducted by former Defense Secretary Schlesinger (who 
had become a friend of Rumsfeld since the distant days of the Ford 
administration) concluded that the whole affair had been simply "animal 
house on the night shift", the acts of the untrained national guard 
military police unit from Cumberland, Maryland, and assigned to Abu Ghraib.

This strategy of deflecting responsibility downwards appears to have 
been crafted in the three desperate weeks that followed the first call 
for comment on the photographs from 60 Minutes' producer Mary Mapes. 
While Gen. Myers bought time with appeals to the broadcasters' 
patriotism, Rumsfeld's public affairs specialists went into crisis mode 
under the urgent direction of Larry DiRita, who had taken on Torie 
Clarke's responsibilities as Pentagon public affairs chief following her 
departure in April 2003.  To help in developing tactics to deal with the 
storm they knew would break once 60 Minutes went ahead, DiRita's staff 
summoned an "echo chamber" of public relations professionals, "all 
Republicans of course", as one official assured me, from big firms such 
as Hill and Knowlton to advise them. Naturally, the well-oiled system 
for delivering the official line through the medium of TV military 
analysts was brought into play. Retired Army Gen. David Grange, one of 
the stars of this system, got the tone exactly right on CNN. Responding 
to a question from Lou Dobbs that though there were six soldiers facing 
charges, "their superiors had to know what was going on here." Grange 
responded quickly: "Or they didn't know at all because they lacked the 
supervision of those soldiers or (were not) inspecting part of their 
command." In other words, the higher command's fault lay not in 
encouraging the torture at Abu Ghraib, but simply in failing to notice 
what the guards were up to. "These soldiers," continued Grange 
indignantly, "these few soldiers let down the rest of the force in Iraq 
and the United States, to include veterans like myself. It is unexcusable."

Meanwhile, Rumsfeld accepted full responsibility without taking any 
blame, a standard response for high officials implicated in scandal. He 
said had had no idea what was going on in his Iraqi prisons until 
Specialist Darby, whom he commended, alerted investigators, though he 
also claimed that a vague press release on the investigation issued in 
Baghdad at that time had in fact "broken the story" and alerted "the 
whole world." He said he had written not one but two letters of 
resignation to President Bush, which were rejected. Gen. Myers testified 
under oath that he never informed Rumsfeld that he was trying to 
persuade CBS to suppress their report. When a leaked internal report by 
Gen. Antonio Taguba detailing how "numerous incidents of sadistic, 
blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees" 
at Abu Ghraib had been published in the press and even on Fox TV a few 
days after the original CBS broadcast, Feith sent an urgent memo round 
the Pentagon warning officials not to read it, or even discuss it with 
family members.

What Rumsfeld did not mention in all his public protestations of regret 
over Abu Ghraib was that in the same month of May 2004 he had on his 
desk a report prepared by the Navy inspector general's office detailing 
the interrogation methods, refined in their cruelty, being practiced on 
Jose Padilla and other inmates in the South Carolina naval brig. 
Padilla, a Puerto Rican former gang member, found himself incarcerated 
on the direct authority of the secretary of defense, one of three 
prisoners accused of terrorism held in the jail and subjected to a 
carefully designed regime of isolation and sensory deprivation. Padilla, 
according to his attorneys, would ultimately spend 1,307 days in a 
nine-by-seven-foot cell, often chained to the ground by his wrists and 
torso and kept awake at night by guards using bright lights and loud 
noises. In repeated legal arguments, administration lawyers maintained 
that Rumsfeld was entitled to hold anyone deemed 'an enemy combatant' in 
his rapidly expanding prison system.

Excerpted from Rumsfeld by Andrew Cockburn. Copyright 2007 by Andrew 
Cockburn. Reprinted by permission by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & 
Schuster, Inc.

Andrew Cockburn is the author of Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and 
Catastrophic Legacy.

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