[News] HERSH: How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.

[News at freedomarchives.org]

THE GRAY ZONE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact


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 sap­subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of 
security­was 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 
target­a standup group to hit quickly,” a former high-level intelligence 
official told me. “He got all the agencies together­the 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 forces­Navy 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 interrogations­using force if necessary­at 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 States­and 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 
and­without success­for 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 regime­reproduced on playing cards­had 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 later­and five months after the fall of 
Baghdad­the 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 
well­thugs 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 Iraq­to make it more focussed on 
interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the 
interrogation methods used in Cuba­methods 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 
up­the black special-access program­and 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 soldiers­military-intelligence guys­being 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 Ghraib­whether military police or military 
intelligence­was 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 
others­military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. 
officers, and the men from the special-access program­wore 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 
nice­they’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 Afghanistan­pre-approved for operations against 
high-value terrorist targets­and 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 sour­and 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 anything­including spying on their 
associates­to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and 
friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of 
the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could 
insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated 
by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency 
action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency 
continued to grow.

“This shit has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has 
dealt with saps told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and 
then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained 
that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty 
in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside 
Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after 
Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who 
don’t know the rules, that’s another.”

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, briefed­on the 
special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume 
control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring 
headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and international 
media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill 
respect for the Geneva Conventions. “His job is to save what he can,” the 
former official said. “He’s there to protect the program while limiting any 
loss of core capability.” As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence 
official added, “He goes into it not knowing shit. And then: ‘Holy cow! 
What’s going on?’”

If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like 
Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the 
special-access program. “If you give away the fact that a special-access 
program exists,”the former intelligence official told me, “you blow the 
whole quick-reaction program.”

One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld’s account of his initial reaction to news 
of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of 
curiosity. One factor may have been recent history: there had been many 
previous complaints of prisoner abuse from organization like Human Rights 
Watch and the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them 
with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had 
not been provided with details of alleged abuses until late March, when he 
read the specific charges. “You read it, as I say, it’s one thing. You see 
these photographs and it’s just unbelievable. . . . It wasn’t 
three-dimensional. It wasn’t video. It wasn’t color. It was quite a 
different thing.” The former intelligence official said that, in his view, 
Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials had not studied the 
photographs because “they thought what was in there was permitted under the 
rules of engagement,” as applied to the sap. “The photos,” he added, 
“turned out to be the result of the program run amok.”

The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging 
that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But, he 
said, “it was their permission granted to do the sap, generically, and 
there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses.”

This official went on, “The black guys”­those in the Pentagon’s secret 
program­“say we’ve got to accept the prosecution. They’re vaccinated from 
the reality.” The sap is still active, and “the United States is picking up 
guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the 
quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?” The program was protected 
by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its 
existence. “If you even give a hint that you’re aware of a black program 
that you’re not read into, you lose your clearances,” the former official 
said. “Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who 
are undefended­the 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 sausage­you 
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 it­it 
becomes a malignant tumor.”

The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, 
the consultant said, “created the conditions that allowed transgressions to 
take place. And now we’re going to end up with another Church 
Commission”­the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator 
Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the 
previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon 
leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. “When the shit 
hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?” the consultant 
asked. “You do it selectively and with intelligence.”

“Congress is going to get to the bottom of this,” the Pentagon consultant 
said. “You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the 
system.” He added, “When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to 
have very clear red lines.”

Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, “If this is true, it certainly 
increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I 
will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.”

“In an odd way,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights 
Watch, said, “the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for 
the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is 
authorized.” Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has 
systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. 
“Some jags hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment 
will come back and haunt us in the next war,” Roth told me. “We’re giving 
the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld 
has lowered the bar.”
[]




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