Report: Rumsfeld OK'd plan for harsh interrogations
Pentagon denies secret program encouraged Iraqi prisoner abuse.
A new report by Seymour Hersh in the
The New Yorker magazine accuses US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld of
approving a secret operation that encouraged "physical coercion and sexual humiliation" of Iraqi prisoners. The article begins this way:
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 elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.
The report, published Saturday on
The New Yorker's website, cites a former intelligence official as saying that the rules for the secret program were "Grab whom you must. Do what you want."
The program was reportedly set up shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to circumvent command-and-control problems and legalistic hurdles in the search for Al Qaeda. Mr. Hersh reports that Mr. Rumsfeld "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." According to Hersh, "the operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser."
Hersh reports that the program was applied to the Iraq situation when the attacks by insurgents in Iraq began to mulitply and grow more sophisticated last fall. The coalition had a dearth of intelligence on the rapidly growing insurgency. In Hersh's words: "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 Guantanamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. ...
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. ... The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.
Pentagon spokesman Lawrence de Rita called the assertions "
outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture." He said:
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. ... This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense.
Besides Rumsfeld, the report focuses on Mr. Cambone, the under-secretary of defense for intelligence. Cambone was named to this post, which,
The New Yorker reports, was a new position "created as part of Rumsfeld's reorganization of the Pentagon" in March of 2003. Hersh cites a Pentagon consultant, who "spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs," as saying: "When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib ... Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone."
Columnist Robert Novak writes in the
Chicago Sun-Times that, if Rumsfeld survives the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal, "he
may have to lose one of his closest advisers: Stephen A. Cambone."
Republicans in Congress have privately informed the White House that if Rumsfeld is retained, somebody in authority must leave. The most likely candidate is Cambone, whose office has authority over the intelligence officers blamed for abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. He has not been a popular figure either with the uniformed officer corps or with Congress.
Meanwhile, the
Washington Post reports that US army intelligence officers "
devised a special plan" for the interrogation of a Syrian man detained in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He was reportedly strip-searched and deprived of sleep. The
Post reports that government officials and humanitarian experts are suggesting that military intelligence officials "may not only have improperly tolerated physical abuses, as stated in the Army's official internal report, but also that they may have deliberately set the stage for them."
Also,
The Guardian reports that "
dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp." The disclosures, made in an interview with a British prisoner freed last March, have sparked calls to make the videos available immediately.
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