CONFIRMED RUMSFELD AND CAMBONE ARE TOAST!

Military Intelligence
The Pentagon is trying to steer the investigation away from Military Intelligence, but it isn't working. A new investigation is starting to see what it's role was in the prison scandal. This will blow the whole think sky high. They will find it is wider than the one prison and that it stems from the tactics originated at Gitmo by General Miller that were transferred to other Iraq prisons.

The scathing report we know of so far covered only the one prison, not the others in which the Red Cross and others have reported abuses of detainees.

Cambone and Rumsfeld must be really sweating this new development.

BBB

Protecting the System
Editorial
Protecting the System
Wednesday, May 12, 2004; Page A22
Washington Post

THE BUSH administration still seeks to mislead Congress and the public about the policies that contributed to the criminal abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Yesterday's smoke screen was provided by Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Mr. Cambone assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that the administration's policy had always been to strictly observe the Geneva Conventions in Iraq; that all procedures for interrogations in Iraq were sanctioned under the conventions; and that the abuses of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison were consequently the isolated acts of individuals. These assertions are contradicted by International Red Cross and Army investigators, by U.S. generals overseeing the prisoners, and by Mr. Cambone himself.

Start with adherence to the Geneva Conventions, which Mr. Cambone's boss, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, has publicly derided as outdated and which the administration acknowledges are not being adhered to at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison. Mr. Cambone said yesterday that the administration considered all detainees at Abu Ghraib to be covered by either the Third or Fourth Geneva Convention. But he also confirmed a statement by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the current commander at Abu Ghraib, that techniques officially available for interrogation have included hooding, sleep deprivation and stress positions. An official report by the Red Cross confirms that those techniques as well as harsher ones have been used systematically, and not only at Abu Ghraib. The report says they have been employed by tactical military intelligence units all over Iraq, including at a permanent facility at the Baghdad airport. According to Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), an Army report says that the policy for Iraq specifies that permission of the commanding general can be sought for the use of "sleep management, sensory deprivation, isolation longer than 30 days and dogs."

The Third Geneva Convention, which applies to prisoners of war and captured insurgents, says that they "may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind" as a way to make them answer questions. The Fourth Geneva Convention, which covers people under foreign occupation, says "no physical or moral coercion shall be exercised against" them, "in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties." A senior Army official, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, testified that the Army believes its "harsh" techniques are allowed under these provisions. The Red Cross, which is designated by the conventions as their monitoring organization, believes otherwise: That the U.S. practices are in violation was one of the principal findings of its February report. U.S. forces were systematically breaking the conventions in five major ways, the report found, three of which concerned the treatment of prisoners under interrogation. It described the abuse as "standard operating procedure."

Mr. Cambone made no attempt to reconcile his claim of U.S. adherence to international law with the actual procedures his office has helped to promulgate. Instead he insisted that the crimes at Abu Ghraib -- which, though they went beyond the established practices, were based on the same principles -- were the responsibility of the guards and their commanders, and not the intelligence-gathering system. In this he was contradicted by the witness sitting next to him, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who repeated the conclusion of his own investigation: that the practices were introduced by intelligence interrogators who were improperly placed in command of the guards.

These contradictions go to the heart of this scandal and its impact. The sickening abuse of Iraqi prisoners will do incalculable damage to American foreign policy no matter how the administration responds. But if President Bush and his senior officials would acknowledge their complicity in playing fast and loose with international law and would pledge to change course, they might begin to find a way out of the mess. Instead, they hope to escape from this scandal without altering or even admitting the improper and illegal policies that lie at its core. It is a vain hope, and Congress should insist on a different response.

BBB
I notice that newspaper editorial boards are finally picking up on the same issues that I found telling, that Rumsfeld and Cambone are dangerous men.---BBB
--------------------------------------------------------------
By Robert Schlesinger, Boston Globe Staff,
This story ran on page A8 of the Boston Globe on 6/8/2003.

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/159/nation/Expanding_role_of_Defense_Department_spurs_concerns+.shtml

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Defense's responsibilities have grown beyond anything that military commanders had imagined at the end of the Cold War, according to national security specialists; some have voiced worry that the department's expanding roles could tax the Pentagon's resources or compromise some civilian authorities.

Nearly 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is no more talk about a budgetary ''peace dividend'' or trimming US forces. The US military is not only operating in more places around the world than at any other time since World War II, but it has also expanded into areas previously reserved for other government agencies: establishing a new intelligence unit, launching a homeland defense command, and exerting growing influence in foreign policy.

''You've got people doing things, certainly from the Pentagon perspective, that they wouldn't have dreamed of 15 years ago or even 10 years ago,'' said Andrew F. Krepinevich, a former Defense Department official who runs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense policy institute.

While it has become fashionable to ascribe the expansion to the ambitions of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, its roots are more complex, growing out of long-term trends that began with the end of the Cold War and from the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Some national security specialists worry that this expansion could hurt US policy and the military itself. Even with Bush budget increases, including a requested $15 billion this year, the military can handle only so many missions at a time.

For example, while George Bush campaigned in 2000 against using the military for nation building, US forces have subsequently assumed that sort of mission in Afghanistan and Iraq.

''Certainly through the 1990s, as we found ourselves in these lower-level conflicts that you would not term as world wars, but to look at the Kosovos or the Bosnias or the Afghanistans, we are putting the military right on the edge of political roles,'' said Tad Oelstrom, a retired three-star Air Force general who heads a national security program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

Oelstrom said that, in many cases, the US military's role in other countries has increased beyond defense-related activities. ''The military all along has wondered whether or not they are prepared to do this and what they should do or shouldn't do,'' said Oelstrom.

Some specialists worry that as the military is used, other traditional instruments of foreign policy can suffer and atrophy. The State Department, they fear, could be undercut, and the intelligence community could become distorted and politicized.

''You've got many different tools of national power, and if you've got one that is very muscular and well developed, and you have others that in comparison are a bit more anemic . . . you have a tendency to use the one that's well-developed,'' said Clark Murdock, a former defense official who works at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The newly created position of undersecretary of defense for intelligence underscores the changes in progress at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld said the post would not duplicate the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, or other members of the intelligence community.

Stephen Cambone, the new undersecretary, said last month that the existing agencies ''will all go about doing their tasks,'' but that his unit will ensure that they are meeting the intelligence needs laid out by the Pentagon.

The mission, he said, ''is to try to get to them a sense of what the priorities are for the department.''

But the office's mandate was drawn broadly, giving Cambone direct control over the Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency as well as the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

Those agencies are officially part of the Department of Defense, answering both to Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet. But giving Cambone explicit authority over the agencies allows him far-reaching authority that intelligence specialists said cuts into a major piece of Tenet's turf.

Jay Farrar, a former employee in the Defense Department and National Security Council who works with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that Cambone's broad authority is not a coincidence. ''It's one more step in the Defense Department seeking to consolidate major control over the intelligence apparatus of the United States,'' Farrar said.

The fear is that giving the Pentagon greater influence will politicize the intelligence process by encouraging reports that support current policies, rather than reporting trends and developments that challenge them. ''It looked like a classic case of you can't get the intelligence you want from the intelligence community, you create your own unit,'' said Mel Goodman, a former CIA analyst who teaches at the National War College and is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. ''The civilian side of the intelligence community gets weaker and weaker, and it's obvious that Rumsfeld's playing a policy game to get intelligence to support policy.''

Complaints about the quality and availability of intelligence during the first Gulf War prompted a decadelong military effort to gain more influence over the gathering and disseminating of intelligence. Rumsfeld has been a critic of the intelligence community since chairing a 1998 commission that examined national missile defense. Some analysts argue that the reform was needed. ''It is an iteration of how to organize intelligence to get us better information,'' Oelstrom said.

The Pentagon's growing profile extends beyond intelligence. The end of the Cold War opened swaths of the globe into which the US military has become engaged or more deeply enmeshed, especially in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Current US military operations include Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Colombia, the former Yugoslavia, South Korea, the Philippines, and former Soviet states such as Georgia.

In the process, regional combatant commanders have gained a stature that, in many cases, overshadows the role of ambassadors in the regions. The military commanders have greater resources, bigger staffs, and better access to intelligence than ambassadors serving in the same countries.

''Part of the reason why a regional combatant commander has such prestige throughout a region is if he visits a country, has an entire entourage, [he] is the manifestation of American power in a way that an individual diplomat isn't,'' Murdock said.

That has been exacerbated by Rumsfeld's activist view of the defense secretary's role in formulating foreign policy, often behind the scenes in frequent missives -- ''Rummygrams'' -- to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others.

Rumsfeld and Powell ''have strong personalities, but they aren't necessarily on the same page, which I think is good, not bad,'' said Oelstrom, who argues that competing ideas and visions can yield a balanced foreign policy. But potential problems lie in over-reliance on the military for foreign policy, according to Murdock and others.

One new job for the military is the Pentagon's evolving role in homeland defense. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Pentagon has added an assistant secretary for homeland defense and last year created a northern command to coordinate the military response to domestic threats.

Though it can occasionally be called upon to support civilian authorities in times of major need or disaster, the military is constitutionally barred from law enforcement in the United States. The creation of the command has raised the specter for some that that division is eroding.

''There are two views on it,'' said Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. ''One is that it's very scary that we now have the military trying to play what has traditionally been a civilian, domestic, non-DOD role. But . . . I don't think anybody really can make an assessment about what's going on right now.''
----------------------------------------

Globe Correspondent Bryan Bender contributed to this report. Robert Schlesinger can be reached at [email protected].

Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations
May 13, 2004 - New York Times
Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations
By JAMES RISEN, DAVID JOHNSTON and NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, May 12 ?- The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.

At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said.

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.

Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees. Interrogators were trying to find out whether there might be another attack planned against the United States.

The methods employed by the C.I.A. are so severe that senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have directed its agents to stay out of many of the interviews of the high-level detainees, counterterrorism officials said. The F.B.I. officials have advised the bureau's director, Robert S. Mueller III, that the interrogation techniques, which would be prohibited in criminal cases, could compromise their agents in future criminal cases, the counterterrorism officials said.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, President Bush signed a series of directives authorizing the C.I.A. to conduct a covert war against Osama bin Laden's Qaeda network. The directives empowered the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda leaders, but it is not clear whether the White House approved the specific rules for the interrogations.

The White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment on the matter.

The C.I.A. detention program for Qaeda leaders is the most secretive component of an extensive regime of detention and interrogation put into place by the United States government after the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan that includes the detention facilities run by the military in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

There is now concern at the agency that the Congressional and criminal inquiries into abuses at Pentagon-run prisons and other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan may lead to examinations of the C.I.A's handling of the Qaeda detainees. That, in turn, could expose agency officers and operations to the same kind of public exposure as the military now faces because of the Iraq prison abuses.

So far, the agency has refused to grant any independent observer or human rights group access to the high-level detainees, who have been held in strict secrecy. Their whereabouts are such closely guarded secrets that one official said he had been told that Mr. Bush had informed the C.I.A. that he did not want to know where they were.

The authorized tactics are primarily those methods used in the training of American Special Operations soldiers to prepare them for the possibility of being captured and taken prisoners of war. The tactics simulate torture, but officials say they are supposed to stop short of serious injury.

Counterrorism officials say detainees have also been sent to third countries, where they are convinced that they might be executed, or tricked into believing they were being sent to such places. Some have been hooded, roughed up, soaked with water and deprived of food, light and medications.

Many authorities contend that torture and coercive treatment is as likely to provide information that is unreliable as information that is helpful.

Concerns are mounting among C.I.A. officers about the potential consequences of their actions. "Some people involved in this have been concerned for quite a while that eventually there would be a new president, or the mood in the country would change, and they would be held accountable," one intelligence source said. "Now that's happening faster than anybody expected."

The C.I.A.'s inspector general has begun an investigation into the deaths of three lower-level detainees held by the C.I.A in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department is also examining the deaths.

The secret detention system houses a group of 12 to 20 prisoners, government officials said, some under direct American control, others ostensibly under the supervision of foreign governments.

The C.I.A. high-level interrogation program seemed to show early results with the capture of Abu Zubaida in April 2002. Mr. Zubaida was a close associate of Mr. bin Laden's and had run Al Qaeda's recruiting, in which young men were brought from other countries to training camps in Afghanistan.

Under such intensive questioning, Mr. Zubaida provided useful information identifying Jose Padilla, a low-level Qaeda convert who was arrested in May 2002 in connection with an effort to build a dirty bomb. Mr. Zubaida also helped identify Mr. Mohammed as a crucial figure in the 9/11 plot, counterterrorism officials said.

A few other detainees have been identified by the Bush administration, like Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another 9/11 plotter and Walid Ba'Attash, who helped plan the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998 and the attack on the Navy destroyer Cole in October 2000.

Some of the prisoners have never been identified by the government. Some may have only peripheral ties to Al Qaeda. One Middle Eastern man, who had been identified by intelligence officials as a money launderer for Mr. bin Laden, was captured in the United Arab Emirates. He traveled there when some of the emirates' banks froze his accounts. When the U.A.E. government alerted the the C.I.A. that he was in the country, the man was arrested and subsequently disappeared into the secret detention program.

In the interrogation of Mr. Mohammed, C.I.A. officials became convinced that he was not being fully cooperative about his knowledge of the whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden. Mr. Mohammed was carrying a letter written by Mr. bin Laden to a family member when he was captured in Pakistan early in 2003. The C.I.A. officials then authorized even harsher techniques, according to officials familiar with the interrogation.

The C.I.A. has been operating its Qaeda detention system under a series of secret legal opinions by the agency's and Justice Department lawyers. Those rules have provided a legal basis for the use of harsh interrogation techniques, including the water-boarding tactic used against Mr. Mohammed.

One set of legal memorandums, the officials said, advises government officials that if they are contemplating procedures that may put them in violation of American statutes that prohibit torture, degrading treatment or the Geneva Conventions, they will not be responsible if it can be argued that the detainees are formally in the custody of another country.

The Geneva Conventions prohibit "violence to life and person, in particular . . . cruel treatment and torture" and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."

Regarding American anti-torture laws, one administration figure involved in discussions about the memorandums said: "The criminal statutes only apply to American officials. The question is how involved are the American officials."

The official said the legal opinions say restrictions on procedures would not apply if the detainee could be deemed to be in the custody of a different country, even though American officials were getting the benefit of the interrogation. "It would be the responsibility of the other country," the official said. "It depends on the level of involvement."

Like the more numerous detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the high-level Qaeda prisoners have also been defined as unlawful combatants, not as prisoners of war. Those prisoners have no standing in American civilian or military courts.

The Bush administration began the program when intelligence agencies realized that a few detainees captured in Afghanistan had such a high intelligence value that they should be separated from the lower-level figures who had been sent to a military installation at Guantánamo Bay, which officials felt was not suitable.

There was little long-term planning. The agency initially had few interrogators and no facilities to house the top detainees. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency began to search for remote sites in friendly countries around the world where Qaeda operatives could be kept quietly and securely.

"There was a debate after 9/11 about how to make people disappear," a former intelligence official said.

The result was a series of secret agreements allowing the C.I.A. to use sites overseas without outside scrutiny.

So far, the Bush administration has not said what it intends to do over the long term with any of the high-level detainees, leaving them subject to being imprisoned indefinitely without any access to lawyers, courts or any form of due process.

Some officials have suggested that some of the high-level detainees may be tried in military tribunals or officially turned over to other countries, but counterterrorism officials have complained about the Bush administration's failure to have an "endgame" for these detainees. One official said they could also be imprisoned indefinitely at a new long-term prison being built at Guantánamo.

General Took Guantánamo Rules to Iraq for Handling of Prison
May 13, 2004 - New York Times
General Took Guantánamo Rules to Iraq for Handling of Prisoners
By TIM GOLDEN and ERIC SCHMITT

When Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller arrived in Iraq last August with a team of military police and intelligence specialists, the group was confronted by chaos.

In one prison yard, a detainee was being held in a scorching hot shipping container as punishment, one team member recalled. An important communications antenna stood broken and unrepaired. Prisoners walked around barefoot, with sores on their feet and signs of untreated illness. Garbage was everywhere.

Perhaps most important, with the insurgency raging in Iraq, there was no effective system at the prisons for wringing intelligence from the prisoners, officials said.

"They had no rules for interrogations," a military officer who traveled to Iraq with General Miller said. "People were escaping and getting shot. We tried to offer them some very basic recommendations."

According to information from a classified interview with the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib prison, General Miller's recommendations prompted a shift in the interrogation and detention procedures there. Military intelligence officers were given greater authority in the prison, and military police guards were asked to help gather information about the detainees.

Whether those changes contributed to the abuse of prisoners that grew horrifically more serious last fall is now at the center of the widening prison scandal.

General Miller's recommendations were based in large part on his command of the detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he won praise from the Pentagon for improving the flow of intelligence from terrorist suspects and prisoners of the Afghanistan war.

In Iraq, General Miller's team gave officers at the prisons copies of the procedures that had been developed at Guantánamo to interrogate and punish the prisoners, according to the officer who traveled with him. Computer specialists and intelligence analysts explained the systems they had used in Cuba to process information and report it back to the United States.

General Miller also recommended streamlining the command structure at the prisons, much as was done when military intelligence and military police units were merged when he took command of Joint Task Force Guantánamo in November 2002.

But to at least a few of the officers who met General Miller in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib crisis was partly rooted in what they described as his determination to apply his Guantánamo experience in Iraq. Senators raised similar concerns on Tuesday at the Armed Services Committee.

General Miller and some of his former aides have dismissed the notion that his visit to Iraq helped unleash the abuses. They argue that if his prescriptions had any link to the problems there, it was because they were misinterpreted by ineffective commanders in a chaotic environment.

"When you don't have rules and you let lower-level people decide things on an arbitrary and capricious basis, you're going to have problems," the officer who accompanied General Miller said. "Our reference to techniques was to say, `You need a policy.' "

A Democratic Senate aide who reviewed General Miller's report on the Iraqi prisons said he had sought to revamp the intelligence apparatus in Iraq primarily to improve the collection and transmission of broader, strategic information about the insurgency that was particularly important to senior military officials.

To those officials, the work at Guantánamo by General Miller, a former paratrooper from Menard, Tex., made him an obvious candidate for Iraq.

By the time he took over in Cuba, most of the detainees there had been in custody for nearly a year. Still, General Miller was credited by Pentagon officials with using interrogations there to produce a valuable historical account of the workings and financing of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, among other subjects, officials said.

His hard-charging attitude has also raised questions that go beyond interrogation methods. He was the official most responsible for pressing a case last year against a Muslim chaplain at the base, Capt. James J. Yee, that was initially billed as a major episode of espionage. In March, the military announced that it would drop all charges.

At the Senate hearing on Tuesday, the deputy commander of American forces in the Middle East, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, said General Miller, now the chief of interrogations and detentions in Iraq, had made it clear to the officers he briefed on his 10-day visit to Iraq that some of the procedures developed in Cuba could not be applied there.

But despite the vast differences between the settings, two officials who worked with General Miller in Cuba suggested that he offered very similar solutions to some problems he found in Iraq.

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, in his report on Iraqi prison abuses, said General Miller's recommendation of a guard force that "sets the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees" violated Army doctrine; the report hinted that it might also have contributed to the abuses.

The Taguba report also highlighted General Miller's recommendation that commanders in Iraq form and train a prison guard force "subordinate to the Joint Interrogation Debriefing Center (J.I.D.C.) Commander" that "sets the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees."

The former director of that interrogation center, Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, was implicated in the abuses by General Taguba and is under investigation in a separate military inquiry.

At Guantánamo the role of guards in intelligence gathering was largely limited to observing the detainees' behavior and trying to detect their leaders, according to interrogators who worked there.

A fundamental difference between Iraq and Guantánamo was the Bush administration's determination that the Geneva Conventions did not govern the treatment of the detainees in Cuba. However, military officers who served in Cuba said the controls on coercive interrogation methods appeared to have been stronger at Guantánamo than they were in Iraq.

Because the administration had designated the Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees at Guantánamo as "enemy combatants" ?- to whom it would accord humane treatment but not other rights granted by the Conventions ?- military officers in Cuba soon grew concerned that they were operating without clear rules.

According to several officers who served at Guantánamo, the methods, begun in early 2002, included depriving detainees of sleep; leaving them in cold, air-conditioned rooms; placing them in "stress positions"; and forcing them to stand or crouch for long periods, sometimes with their arms extended, until exhausted.

Even before General Miller's arrival at Guantánamo, the military lawyer who had taken over as the staff judge advocate there, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, sought formal clarification of what were acceptable interrogation methods, Pentagon officials said. That request prompted a broad legal review of interrogation techniques by a working group of Pentagon lawyers.

When the review was completed in February 2003, it included a spreadsheet with 24 approved techniques, officials who viewed it said. For each method, the matrix indicated whether it posed problems under various United States and international laws, and at what level of the military bureaucracy it needed to be approved. The following month, a brief document spelling out specific guidelines for approved interrogation techniques was sent to Guantánamo.

General Miller and another officer on his team said they urged commanders in Iraq to draft their own guidelines. A chart of approved techniques, entitled the "Interrogation Rules of Engagement," was drawn up for American forces in Iraq on Oct. 12, 2003, barely a month after General Miller's visit.

"The recommendations that the team and I made was about how you could improve the interrogation process and the development and collection of intelligence," General Miller told reporters last Saturday. "Those recommendations that were made were based on the system that provided humane detention and excellent interrogation."

Three officials familiar with the methods approved for Guantánamo said they appeared to be more restrictive than those promulgated for Iraq. At Guantánamo, methods like extended isolation and putting detainees into "stress positions" require approval from senior Pentagon officials; in Iraq, they need only that of the task force commander.
--------------------------------------
Tim Golden reported from New York for this article and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

read this important op ed
Read this important op ed:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=691440#691440

mark

Another criminal act by Bush adm.
Another criminal act by the Bush adm.

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=692852#692852

I just knew he did it!
I just knew he did it! Seymour Hersh always gets it right
---BBB

May 16, 2004 - New York Times
INTERROGATIONS
Rumsfeld and Aide Backed Harsh Tactics, Article Says
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, May 15 ?- Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and one of his top aides authorized the expansion of a secret program that permitted harsh interrogations of detained members of Al Qaeda to be used against prisoners in Iraq, including detainees at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, according to an article in The New Yorker Magazine.

The article, by Seymour M. Hersh, reports that Mr. Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, approved the use of the tougher interrogation techniques in Iraq in 2003 in an effort to extract better information from Iraqi prisoners to counter the growing insurgency threat in the country.

Across the Bush administration, officials on Saturday disputed several of the critical details in Mr. Hersh's article. They said that there was no high-level decision or command that they were aware of to use highly coercive interrogation techniques on Iraqi prisoners.

Mr. Rumsfeld, who has apologized for the abuses, has said that the prison abuses were conducted by lower-level military forces without the approval of senior commanders.

One of the central unresolved questions of the prison abuse scandal is whether the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners was ordered by senior military or civilian officials.

Administration officials pointed on Saturday to testimony before Congress in which several administration officials acknowledged that the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees in Iraq and therefore did not permit the use of coercive tactics. But some officials, speaking on background, acknowledged that as the insurgency worsened in Iraq last summer, there was rising concern about how to improve intelligence about future attacks.

At the Pentagon, the chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, vigorously denied the allegations that Mr. Cambone directed a covert program to encourage the coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to improve intelligence gathering.

"It's pure, unadulterated fantasy," Mr. Di Rita said in a telephone interview. "We don't discuss covert programs, but nothing in any covert program would have led anyone to sanction activity like what was seen on those videos."

"No responsible official in this department, including Secretary Rumsfeld, would or could have been involved in sanctioning the physical coercion or sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners," Mr. Di Rita said.

Mr. Di Rita said Mr. Cambone was not involved in setting detainee policy in Iraq. "Cambone had no involvement in any matter involved in detainee management," Mr. Di Rita said. "That's part of the fevered imagination of conspiracy theorists."

The article, to published in the May 24 edition of The New Yorker, said that the expansion of the "special access program" allowed authorities in charge of Abu Ghraib to engage in degrading and humiliating practices.

The article said, "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 effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq."

In addition, the article said that Mr. Rumsfeld's decision in the matter had, in effect, shifted the blame for the abuses from himself to lower-level military guards.

Some elements of The New Yorker story have been previously reported, including the development by the C.I.A. of a special interrogation program for Qaeda prisoners captured in Afghanistan. That program, authorized by government legal opinions, included the use of coercive interrogation methods.

Mr. Hersh writes that Mr. Cambone carried out Mr. Rumsfeld's directive to use the coercive interrogation methods.

The article said that by the summer of 2003, American military and intelligence agencies were growing fearful about the strength of the insurgency and were frustrated at the poor intelligence they were getting from detainees.

Some of the officials identified by Mr. Hersh in the article have testified publicly about their actions in the prison abuse issue. Mr. Cambone testified for several hours before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, May 11, and was questioned extensively about what interrogation methods were approved for prisoners in Iraq and whether they complied with the Geneva rules.

Asked by Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, "What is the status" of detainees in the prison, he answered flatly, "They are there under either Article 3 or Article 4 of the Geneva Conventions." Those two articles pertain to prisoners or war or other prisoners, respectively.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. asked him whether military intelligence, C.I.A. and private contractors "all have identical rules and regulations in terms of interrogating the detainees or prisoners of war or combatants? Or is there any distinction between the three?"

"Within Iraq the rules of the Geneva Convention apply," said Mr. Cambone. "So therefore, the rules apply for all three."

Senator Kennedy asked: "My question is, do they have different kinds of rules of questioning? Do each of those services have rules? If they do have rules, how are they different?"

"I can speak for the D.O.D., contractor and military personnel, and those rules are the same," answered Mr. Cambone, carefully leaving out the question of what rules apply to the C.I.A.

Re: I just knew he did it!


Be careful of that assumption, he's a reporter not God.

Rumsfeld reportedly approved interrogation plan
Rumsfeld reportedly approved interrogation plan
By Jeremy Pelofsky
(Reuters) - May 15 2004 20:39

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a plan that brought unconventional interrogation methods to Iraq to gain intelligence about the growing insurgency, ultimately leading to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, the New Yorker magazine has reported.

Rumsfeld, who has been under fire for the prisoner abuse scandal, gave the green light to methods previously used in Afghanistan for gathering intelligence on members of al Qaeda, which the United States blames for the September 11, 2001, attacks, the magazine reported on its Web site on Saturday.

Pentagon spokesman Jim Turner said he had not seen the story and could not comment. The article hits newsstands on Monday.

U.S. interrogation techniques have come under scrutiny amid revelations that prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad were kept naked, stacked on top of one another, forced to engage in sex acts and photographed in humiliating poses.

Rumsfeld, who has rejected calls by some Democrats and a number of major newspapers to resign, returned on Friday from a surprise trip to Iraq and Abu Ghraib prison, calling the scandal a "body blow." Seven soldiers have been charged.

The abuse prompted worldwide outrage and has shaken U.S. global prestige as President George W. Bush seeks re-election in November. Bush has backed Rumsfeld and said the abuse was abhorrent but the wrongful actions of only a few soldiers.

The U.S. military has now prohibited several interrogation methods from being used in Iraq, including sleep and sensory deprivation and body "stress positions," Defence officials said on Friday.

SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM

The New Yorker said the interrogation plan was a highly classified "special access program," or SAP, that gave advance approval to kill, capture or interrogate so-called high-value targets in the battle against terror.

Such secret methods were used extensively in Afghanistan but more sparingly in Iraq -- only in the search for former President Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. As the Iraqi insurgency grew and more U.S. soldiers died, Rumsfeld and Defence Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone expanded the scope to bring the interrogation tactics to Abu Ghraib, the article said.

The magazine, which based its article on interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, reported the plan was approved and carried out last year after deadly bombings in August at the U.N. headquarters and Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad.

A former intelligence official quoted in the article said Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved the program but may not have known about the abuse.

'DO WHAT YOU WANT'

The rules governing the secret operation were "grab whom you must. Do what you want," the unidentified former intelligence official told the New Yorker.

Rumsfeld left the details of the interrogations to Cambone, the article quoted a Pentagon consultant as saying.

"This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program," said the Pentagon consultant in the article.

U.S. officials have admitted the abuse may have violated the Geneva Convention, which governs treatment of prisoners of war.

The New Yorker said the CIA, which approved using high-pressure interrogation tactics against senior al Qaeda leaders after the 2001 attacks, balked at extending them to Iraq and refused to participate

After initiating the secret techniques, the U.S. military began learning useful intelligence about the insurgency, the former intelligence official was quoted as saying.

How a secret Pentagon program came to Iraq prison by Hersh
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 **** 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."

Rumsfailed
Rumsfailed won't be fired or impeached because it will show the failure of the Govt. incl. the congress in the bogus war on terror in Iraq. Both the Dem and Repub majority still believe that the illegal invasion was the right thing to do and also believe that Iraq must be colonized.

The American people for the most part are simplistic minded and believe in the fairy tale of the good and just America. They cling to the notion that America stands for freedom and that the leaders are not dioblical and evil. The fairy tale is ingrained in most Americans so deep that fact and logic won't shake their mindset.

Pentagon Denies Report's Rumsfeld Claims
Pentagon Denies Report's Rumsfeld Claims
Sun May 16, 2004

(AP) NEW YORK - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the expansion of a secret program that encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to obtain intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq, The New Yorker reported Saturday.

The Defense Department strongly denied the claims made in the report, which cited unnamed current and former intelligence officials and was published on the magazine's Web site. Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita issued a statement calling the claims "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture."

The story, written by reporter Seymour Hersh, said Rumsfeld decided to expand the program last year, broadening a Pentagon operation from the hunt for al-Qaida in Afghanistan to interrogation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

Seven soldiers are facing military charges related to the abuse and humiliation of prisoners captured by the now-infamous photographs at the prison. Some of the soldiers and their lawyers have said military intelligence officials told military police assigned as guards to abuse the prisoners to make interrogations easier.

According to the story, which hits newsstands Monday, the initial operation Rumsfeld authorized gave blanket approval to kill or capture and interrogate "high value" targets in the war on terrorism. The program stemmed from frustrating efforts to capture high-level terrorists in the weeks after the start of U.S. bombings in Afghanistan.

The program got approval from President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Bush was informed of its existence, the officials told Hersh.

Under the program, Hersh wrote, commandos carried out instant interrogations ?- using force if necessary ?- at secret CIA detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the commanders at the Pentagon.

Last year, Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone, his undersecretary for intelligence, expanded the scope of the Pentagon's program and brought its methods to Abu Ghraib, Hersh wrote.

Critics say the interrogation rules, first laid out in September after a visit to Iraq by the then-commander of the prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, amounted to a green light for abuse.

Defense Department officials deny that, saying prisoners always are treated under guidelines of the Geneva Conventions.

"No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos," Di Rita said in his statement. "This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense."

Di Rita also said Cambone has never had any responsibility for any detainee or interrogation programs.

The intelligence sources told the magazine photos of the sexual abuse were used to intimidate prisoners and detainees into providing information on the insurgency. 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.

One intelligence official said the CIA ended its involvement with the program at Abu Ghraib prison by last fall.

"They said, 'No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan ?- pre-approved for operations against the high-value terrorist targets ?- and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets,'" the source said.

Newsweek confirms Hersh story re Rumsfeld
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
By John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek InternationalMay 24

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.

"There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11," as Cofer Black, the onetime director of the CIA's counterterrorist unit, put it in testimony to Congress in early 2002. "After 9/11 the gloves came off." Many Americans thrilled to the martial rhetoric at the time, and agreed that Al Qaeda could not be fought according to traditional rules. But it is only now that we are learning what, precisely, it meant to take the gloves off.

The story begins in the months after September 11, when a small band of conservative lawyers within the Bush administration staked out a forward-leaning legal position. The attacks by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, these lawyers said, had plunged the country into a new kind of war. It was a conflict against a vast, outlaw, international enemy in which the rules of war, international treaties and even the Geneva Conventions did not apply. These positions were laid out in secret legal opinions drafted by lawyers from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and then endorsed by the Department of Defense and ultimately by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, according to copies of the opinions and other internal legal memos obtained by NEWSWEEK.

The Bush administration's emerging approach was that America's enemies in this war were "unlawful" combatants without rights. One Justice Department memo, written for the CIA late in the fall of 2001, put an extremely narrow interpretation on the international anti-torture convention, allowing the agency to use a whole range of techniques?-including sleep deprivation, the use of phobias and the deployment of "stress factors"?-in interrogating Qaeda suspects. The only clear prohibition was "causing severe physical or mental pain"?-a subjective judgment that allowed for "a whole range of things in between," said one former administration official familiar with the opinion. On Dec. 28, 2001, the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel weighed in with another opinion, arguing that U.S. courts had no jurisdiction to review the treatment of foreign prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The appeal of Gitmo from the start was that, in the view of administration lawyers, the base existed in a legal twilight zone?-or "the legal equivalent of outer space," as one former administration lawyer described it. And on Jan. 9, 2002, John Yoo of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel coauthored a sweeping 42-page memo concluding that neither the Geneva Conventions nor any of the laws of war applied to the conflict in Afghanistan.

Cut out of the process, as usual, was Colin Powell's State Department. So were military lawyers for the uniformed services. When State Department lawyers first saw the Yoo memo, "we were horrified," said one. As State saw it, the Justice position would place the United States outside the orbit of international treaties it had championed for years. Two days after the Yoo memo circulated, the State Department's chief legal adviser, William Howard Taft IV, fired a memo to Yoo calling his analysis "seriously flawed." State's most immediate concern was the unilateral conclusion that all captured Taliban were not covered by the Geneva Conventions. "In previous conflicts, the United States has dealt with tens of thousands of detainees without repudiating its obligations under the Conventions," Taft wrote. "I have no doubt we can do so here, where a relative handful of persons is involved."

The White House was undeterred. By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. In the memo, which was written to Bush by Gonzales, the White House legal counsel told the president that Powell had "requested that you reconsider that decision." Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of U.S. soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. "As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote to Bush. "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." Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

Gonzales also argued that dropping Geneva would allow the president to "preserve his flexibility" in the war on terror. His reasoning? That U.S. officials might otherwise be subject to war-crimes prosecutions under the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales said he feared "prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges" based on a 1996 U.S. law that bars "war crimes," which were defined to include "any grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. As to arguments that U.S. soldiers might suffer abuses themselves if Washington did not observe the conventions, Gonzales argued wishfully to Bush that "your policy of providing humane treatment to enemy detainees gives us the credibility to insist on like treatment for our soldiers."

When Powell read the Gonzales memo, he "hit the roof," says a State source. Desperately seeking to change Bush's mind, Powell fired off his own blistering response the next day, Jan. 26, and sought an immediate meeting with the president. The proposed anti-Geneva Convention declaration, he warned, "will reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice" and have "a high cost in terms of negative international reaction." Powell won a partial victory: On Feb. 7, 2002, the White House announced that the United States would indeed apply the Geneva Conventions to the Afghan war?-but that Taliban and Qaeda detainees would still not be afforded prisoner-of-war status. The White House's halfway retreat was, in the eyes of State Department lawyers, a "hollow" victory for Powell that did not fundamentally change the administration's position. It also set the stage for the new interrogation procedures ungoverned by international law.

What Bush seemed to have in mind was applying his broad doctrine of pre-emption to interrogations: to get information that could help stop terrorist acts before they could be carried out. This was justified by what is known in counterterror circles as the "ticking time bomb" theory?-the idea that when faced with an imminent threat by a terrorist, almost any method is justified, even torture.

With the legal groundwork laid, Bush began to act. First, he signed a secret order granting new powers to the CIA. According to knowledgeable sources, the president's directive authorized the CIA to set up a series of secret detention facilities outside the United States, and to question those held in them with unprecedented harshness. Washington then negotiated novel "status of forces agreements" with foreign governments for the secret sites. These agreements gave immunity not merely to U.S. government personnel but also to private contractors. (Asked about the directive last week, a senior administration official said, "We cannot comment on purported intelligence activities.")

The administration also began "rendering"?-or delivering terror suspects to foreign governments for interrogation. Why? At a classified briefing for senators not long after 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet was asked whether Washington was going to get governments known for their brutality to turn over Qaeda suspects to the United States. Congressional sources told NEWSWEEK that Tenet suggested it might be better sometimes for such suspects to remain in the hands of foreign authorities, who might be able to use more aggressive interrogation methods. By 2004, the United States was running a covert charter airline moving CIA prisoners from one secret facility to another, sources say. The reason? It was judged impolitic (and too traceable) to use the U.S. Air Force.

At first?-in the autumn of 2001?-the Pentagon was less inclined than the CIA to jump into the business of handling terror suspects. Rumsfeld himself was initially opposed to having detainees sent into DOD custody at Guantanamo, according to a DOD source intimately involved in the Gitmo issue. "I don't want to be jailer to the goddammed world," said Rumsfeld. But he was finally persuaded. Those sent to Gitmo would be hard-core Qaeda or other terrorists who might be liable for war-crimes prosecutions, and who would likely, if freed, "go back and hit us again," as the source put it.

In mid-January 2002 the first plane-load of prisoners landed at Gitmo's Camp X-Ray. Still, not everyone was getting the message that this was a new kind of war. The first commander of the MPs at Gitmo was a one-star from the Rhode Island National Guard, Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus, who, a Defense source recalled, mainly "wanted to keep the prisoners happy." Baccus began giving copies of the Qur'an to detainees, and he organized a special meal schedule for Ramadan. "He was even handing out printed 'rights cards'," the Defense source recalled. The upshot was that the prisoners were soon telling the interrogators, "Go f?-- yourself, I know my rights." Baccus was relieved in October 2002, and Rumsfeld gave military intelligence control of all aspects of the Gitmo camp, including the MPs.

Pentagon officials now insist that they flatly ruled out using some of the harsher interrogation techniques authorized for the CIA. That included one practice?-reported last week by The New York Times?-whereby a suspect is pushed underwater and made to think he will be drowned. While the CIA could do pretty much what it liked in its own secret centers, the Pentagon was bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Military officers were routinely trained to observe the Geneva Conventions. According to one source, both military and civilian officials at the Pentagon ultimately determined that such CIA techniques were "not something we believed the military should be involved in."

But in practical terms those distinctions began to matter less. The Pentagon's resistance to rougher techniques eroded month by month. In part this was because CIA interrogators were increasingly in the same room as their military-intelligence counterparts. But there was also a deliberate effort by top Pentagon officials to loosen the rules binding the military.

Toward the end of 2002, orders came down the political chain at DOD that the Geneva Conventions were to be reinterpreted to allow tougher methods of interrogation. "There was almost a revolt" by the service judge advocates general, or JAGs, the top military lawyers who had originally allied with Powell against the new rules, says a knowledgeable source. The JAGs, including the lawyers in the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Richard Myers, fought their civilian bosses for months?-but finally lost. In April 2003, new and tougher interrogation techniques were approved. Covertly, though, the JAGs made a final effort. They went to see Scott Horton, a specialist in international human-rights law and a major player in the New York City Bar Association's human-rights work. The JAGs told Horton they could only talk obliquely about practices that were classified. But they said the U.S. military's 50-year history of observing the demands of the Geneva Conventions was now being overturned. "There is a calculated effort to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity" about how the conventions should be interpreted and applied, they told Horton. And the prime movers in this effort, they told him, were DOD Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith and DOD general counsel William Haynes. There was, they warned, "a real risk of a disaster" for U.S. interests.

The approach at Gitmo soon reflected these changes. Under the leadership of an aggressive, self-assured major general named Geoffrey Miller, a new set of interrogation rules became doctrine. Ultimately what was developed at Gitmo was a "72-point matrix for stress and duress," which laid out types of coercion and the escalating levels at which they could be applied. These included the use of harsh heat or cold; ?-withholding food; hooding for days at a time; naked isolation in cold, dark cells for more than 30 days, and threatening (but not biting) by dogs. It also permitted limited use of "stress positions" designed to subject detainees to rising levels of pain.

While the interrogators at Gitmo were refining their techniques, by the summer of 2003 the "postwar" insurgency in Iraq was raging. And Rumsfeld was getting impatient about the poor quality of the intelligence coming out of there. He wanted to know: Where was Saddam? Where were the WMD? Most immediately: Why weren't U.S. troops catching or forestalling the gangs planting improvised explosive devices by the roads? Rumsfeld pointed out that Gitmo was producing good intel. So he directed Steve Cambone, his under secretary for intelligence, to send Gitmo commandant Miller to Iraq to improve what they were doing out there. Cambone in turn dispatched his deputy, Lt. Gen. William (Jerry) Boykin?-later to gain notoriety for his harsh comments about Islam?-down to Gitmo to talk with Miller and organize the trip. In Baghdad in September 2003, Miller delivered a blunt message to Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was then in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade running Iraqi detentions. According to Karpinski, Miller told her that the prison would thenceforth be dedicated to gathering intel. (Miller says he simply recommended that detention and intelligence commands be integrated.) On Nov. 19, Abu Ghraib was formally handed over to tactical control of military-intelligence units.

By the time Gitmo's techniques were exported to Abu Ghraib, the CIA was already fully involved. On a daily basis at Abu Ghraib, says Paul Wayne Bergrin, a lawyer for MP defendant Sgt. Javal Davis, the CIA and other intel officials "would interrogate, interview prisoners exhaustively, use the approved measures of food and sleep deprivation, solitary confinement with no light coming into cell 24 hours a day. Consequently, they set a poor example for young soldiers but it went even further than that."

Today there is no telling where the scandal will bottom out. But it is growing harder for top Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld himself, to absolve themselves of all responsibility. Evidence is growing that the Pentagon has not been forthright on exactly when it was first warned of the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib. U.S. officials continued to say they didn't know until mid-January. But Red Cross officials had alerted the U.S. military command in Baghdad at the start of November. The Red Cross warned explicitly of MPs' conducting "acts of humiliation such as [detainees'] being made to stand naked... with women's underwear over the head, while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and sometimes photographed in this position." Karpinski recounts that the military-intel officials there regarded this criticism as funny. She says: "The MI officers said, 'We warned the [commanding officer] about giving those detainees the Victoria's Secret catalog, but he wouldn't listen'." The Coalition commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and his Iraq command didn't begin an investigation until two months later, when it was clear the pictures were about to leak.

Now more charges are coming. Intelligence officials have confirmed that the CIA inspector general is conducting an investigation into the death of at least one person at Abu Ghraib who had been subject to questioning by CIA interrogators. The Justice Department is likely to open full-scale criminal investigations into this CIA-related death and two other CIA interrogation-related fatalities.

As his other reasons for war have fallen away, President Bush has justified his ouster of Saddam Hussein by saying he's a "torturer and murderer." Now the American forces arrayed against the terrorists are being tarred with the same epithet. That's unfair: what Saddam did at Abu Ghraib during his regime was more horrible, and on a much vaster scale, than anything seen in those images on Capitol Hill. But if America is going to live up to its promise to bring justice and democracy to Iraq, it needs to get to the bottom of what happened at Abu Ghraib.
-----------------------------------

With Mark Hosenball and Roy Gutman in Washington, T. Trent Gegax and Julie Scelfo in New York and Melinda Liu, Rod Nordland and Babak Dehghanpisheh in Baghdad

Stephen Cambone: Rumsfeld's henchman
http://www.atimes.com
Asia Times

Stephen Cambone: Rumsfeld's henchman

Stephen Cambone, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's right-hand man and under secretary of defense for Intelligence, was for the first time caught in the glare of media attention as part of the congressional inquiry into Iraq prison abuses at Abu Ghraib. [1] Under sharp questioning by a few senators on May 11, Cambone vigorously defended both Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy. Cambone's attempt to split hairs on whether the Geneva Conventions were applicable to intelligence gathering in Iraq and his awkward defense of the role of military intelligence in interrogations put him at odds with the US Army general who first investigated abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. As the first-ever under secretary of defense for intelligence, Cambone will likely come under increased fire as the prison scandal unfolds. Some of the most intense questioning of Cambone centered on whether the Geneva Conventions were "precisely" respected. What "precisely" Cambone knew and when he knew it, and what precisely was the role of military intelligence will be questions that Cambone will be required to answer.

Cambone, who as director of strategic defense policy during the first Bush administration under defense secretary Dick Cheney had been a prominent promoter of missile defense systems, served as the staff director of the two congressional commissions - one on missile defense and another on space weapons - chaired by Donald Rumsfeld in the late 1990s.

The two Rumsfeld commissions focused on the issues at the top of the list for the national-security militarists and the large military contractors: the ballistic-missile threat to the United States and US space-based defense capabilities. In the tradition of Team B, the unstated agenda of these commissions was to turn up pressure on the administration to support new weapons programs and substantially increase major military spending. [2] Both commissions received funding from defense-spending bills - in effect using taxpayers' revenues to subsidize them. But perusing the backgrounds and connections of the individuals charged with overseeing the commissions, Rumsfeld and his right-hand man Cambone, most observers at the time believed that the conclusions were preordained.

After Rumsfeld was named defense secretary, he made Cambone his special assistant in January 2001. Then, in March 2003, Cambone was appointed the first-ever under secretary for intelligence - a position that "will allow the Defense Department to consolidate its intelligence programs in a way that could undermine CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] head George Tenet's role", one defense analyst noted. [3] Well known and much despised by both military and civilian officials in the Pentagon prior to joining the second Bush administration, Cambone, serving as Rumsfeld's henchman and intelligence chief, soon began creating a new enemies list in the CIA and State Department.

While Cambone was directing the two Rumsfeld commissions, he also participated in two national-security strategy and military-transformation commissions sponsored by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP). The institute's 2001 report, "Rationale and Requirements for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control", and the PNAC's "Rebuilding America's Defenses" were blueprints for Rumsfeld's promised "revolution in military affairs". Several other PNAC associates, in addition to Rumsfeld himself, also served on the Rumsfeld commissions, including Paul Wolfowitz, Malcolm Wallop, William Schneider, and James Woolsey. Both the NIPP and PNAC studies seem to have served as blueprints for the defense policies initiated by the current administration of George W Bush with respect to nuclear policy, national security strategy and military transformation. [4, 5]

Despite - and perhaps because of - his close relationship to the defense secretary, Cambone is apparently widely disliked in the Pentagon. Tom Donnelly, PNAC military analyst and lead author of "Rebuilding America's Defenses", wrote in the Weekly Standard that "fairly or not, Cambone has long been viewed as Rumsfeld's henchman, almost universally loathed - but more important, feared - by the services". [6] The Washington Monthly reported in late 2001: "It would be hard to exaggerate how much Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top aide Stephen Cambone were hated within the Pentagon prior to September 11. Among other mistakes, Rumsfeld and Cambone foolishly excluded top civilian and military leaders when planning an overhaul of the military to meet new threats, thereby ensuring even greater bureaucratic resistance. According to the Washington Post, an army general joked to a [Capitol] Hill staffer that 'if he had one round left in his revolver, he would take out Steve Cambone'. Cambone's reputation in the building hasn't improved much since September 11, but Rumsfeld's has been transformed." [7]

When asked by the New York Times (April 11, 2003) if he thought hardliners in the Pentagon had politicized intelligence to support arguments for the war in Iraq, Cambone responded: "Any policymaker has certain views. Policymakers are where they are and doing what they do because they have a view." Further, he said: "The politicization of intelligence, I think, happens when intelligence is thought to be more than it is. And what it can be at best is a summary judgment at a given moment in time based on the information that one has been able to glean."

Cambone's work on missile-defense issues extends well beyond his participation on the influential Rumsfeld missile-threat commission. According to the Carnegie Non-Proliferation Project, "As director of strategic defense policy, [Cambone] was a major contributor to president [George H W ] Bush's decision to refocus the SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative] program in 1991 and developed the concept for a global protection system. He was a member of the high-level group appointed by the president to discuss the global protection system with Russia, US allies and other states. In addition, he was responsible for addressing and resolving policy issues that arose in the compliance review group (DOD [Department of Defense] organization to oversee compliance with the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty) and the strategic systems committee of the Defense Acquisition Board, which is responsible for approving DOD weapon-system acquisition." [8]

Before he joined the Bush Sr administration, Cambone worked for SRS Technologies, a defense contractor. SRS recently received a US$6 million contract to provide administrative and management support for the Missile Defense Agency. [9]

SRS has also received a lot of attention recently for its work on the controversial military effort to mine the passenger records of JetBlue. Torch Concepts, the SRS subcontractor that worked on the project, "worked directly with the army and had a specific mandate to ferret information out of [the] data stream [to find the] abnormal behavior of secretive people", said SRS's Bart Edsall in an interview with Wired News. Privacy advocates immediately cried foul when the story broke. Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said: "We should put the brakes on all these data-mining programs and have a serious national conversation, because travel data is just one example of the many kinds of data every data-mining operation wants to suck in from private business." [10]

Notes
1. Eric Schmitt, "Rumsfeld aide and general clash on abuse", New York Times, May 12, 2004.

2. Lisbeth Gronlund and David Wright, "What they didn't do", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November/December 1998.

3. John Prados quoted in TomPaine.com, April 14, 2003.

4. Michelle Ciarrocca and William D Hartung, Axis of Influence: Behind the Bush Administration's Missile Defense Revival, World Policy Institute, July 2002.

5. Rebuilding America's Defenses (PDF file), Project for the New American Century, September 2000.

6. Tom Donnelly, Rumsfeld the Radical, The Weekly Standard, September 9, 2002.

7. Paul Glastris, Who's Who, The Washington Monthly, November 2001.

8. Carnegie Non-Proliferation Project: National Missile Defense Debate, Biography.

9. Missile Defense Agency: New Procurements and Awards.

10. Ryan Singel and Noah Sachtman, Army admits using JetBlue data, Wired News, September 23, 2003.

11. Photo.

("Stephen Cambone", Right Web Profiles, Silver City, New Mexico: Interhemispheric Resource Center, May 2004.)

Rumsfeld's Long List of Failures
May 24, 2004
Rumsfeld's Long List of Failures
The muddles he has caused extend far past the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

COMMENTARY Los Angeles Times
By Anthony Lewis

By the normal standards of business or government, Donald Rumsfeld should long since have resigned or been fired as secretary of Defense.

The reason is not ideology, nor is it his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, horrifying though that may be. The reason is incompetence. His record in Iraq over the last 13 months is the most dramatically incompetent performance by a public official in recent American history.

United States forces entered Baghdad in triumph in April 2003. Today they cannot prevent an assassination on the doorstep of occupation headquarters. Insecurity roils the country. Six weeks before some uncertain form of sovereignty is to be turned over to an Iraqi regime, no one knows what that regime will be.

Rumsfeld is the man responsible. He sought and won the responsibility for postwar Iraq from President Bush. He and his aides tossed aside State Department studies on the difficulties to be expected. Rumsfeld relied for advice on Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi exile who was wanted for fraud in Jordan and who provided what many have described as fraudulent intelligence. Chalabi and his organization got $39 million from the U.S. government until it finally, last week, stopped the gravy train.

The speed with which Iraq unraveled was stunning, beginning immediately after the military victory. Mobs looted Iraqi institutions ?- and for two months, incredibly, U.S. forces did nothing effective to stop it. Every Iraqi government department except the oil ministry was looted. The great national museum and the national library were ransacked. Looters took beds from hospitals, computers from universities.

It was a disaster for the occupation that followed. Electricity and water supplies were hurt. But the psychological damage was worse. Iraqis saw the occupying forces as being grotesquely unprepared to provide elementary security. The U.S. has never recovered from that loss of confidence. Asked about the looting at the time, Rumsfeld dismissed it as "untidiness."

Rumsfeld's man in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, started out by disbanding the entire Iraqi army. The result was to leave hundreds of thousands of men on the street without income or dignity ?- a recipe for resentment. Lately, under the pressure of growing nationalist resistance, Bremer has started trying to undo his folly and rehire some former soldiers. He dealt with the confrontation in Fallouja by turning security in that city over to Saddam Hussein's former officers.

It was Rumsfeld who thought it was wise to violate the third Geneva Convention, to which this country is a signatory, and unilaterally label all the prisoners held at Guantanamo as "unlawful combatants" ?- without the right to the hearings required by the convention.

The policy brought condemnation around the world; a top British justice, Lord Steyn, said Guantanamo was a "legal black hole." Rumsfeld dismissed complaints about the treatment of prisoners as "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation."

Brushing aside the law at Guantanamo was a prelude to the lawlessness at Abu Ghraib.

The Economist magazine, one of the most pro-American voices in the world, said the Guantanamo policy was "both wrong and dangerous for America's reputation. It was wrong because it violated the very values and rule of law for which America was supposedly fighting." The Economist added that it was "a symbol of a 'we'll decide' arrogance."

The political performance of the occupation authority in Iraq, again under Rumsfeld's agent, Bremer, has been halting. Bremer resisted Iraqi calls for early elections ?- an unpersuasive position for a power supposedly bringing democracy to Iraq. He imposed on Iraq a transitional constitution written by Americans ?- and sure to be disowned by the Shiite majority in any truly sovereign Iraqi government.

And now, Abu Ghraib, according to Seymour Hersh in the last issue of the New Yorker, can be traced directly back to Rumsfeld.

The results of this parade of incompetence are terrible for the United States. Countries long friendly to us are seething with anti-American feelings. And it is hard to see any way out of the mess Rumsfeld has created in Iraq. We are now reduced to pleading for help from a United Nations we so recently scorned.

The honorable course for a public official responsible for such disasters is to resign. Lord Carrington, the British foreign secretary, showed how when he resigned after Argentina occupied Britain's Falkland Islands in 1982 ?- even though he was only remotely responsible. But then, Rumsfeld's boss has shown that responsibility for disaster does not matter. "You are a strong secretary of Defense," President Bush told him this month, "and the nation owes you a debt of gratitude."
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Anthony Lewis is a former columnist for the New York Times and the author of "Gideon's Trumpet" (1964, Random House).