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<font size=3>THE GRAY ZONE<br>
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH<br>
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact" eudora="autourl">http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact</a><br><br>
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How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.<br>
Issue of 2004-05-24<br>
Posted 2004-05-15<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
“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. <br>
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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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.’”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br>
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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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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: <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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. <br>
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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.”<br><br>
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.) <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.)<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br>
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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. <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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.<br>
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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. <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York, posed
the essential question facing the senators: <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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?’”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br>
<img src="http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/images/spacer.gif" width=18 height=18 alt="[]"><br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
“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.”<img src="http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/images/dingbat.gif" alt="[]"><br><br>
<br>
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