| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 9:46 pm Post subject: Pentagon seeks to quash Rumsfeld report |
| http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=C2LWBMHDLXMXECRBAE0CFFA?type=worldNews&storyID=511697§ion=news
Pentagon seeks to quash Rumsfeld report
Sun 16 May, 2004 19:56
By Jim Wolf
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon has tried to quash a report that abuse of Iraqi prisoners grew out of a secret plan approved by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to toughen interrogation methods to fight a growing insurgency.
Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said on Sunday that abuses shown in pictures published around the world had "no basis in any sanctioned program, training manual, instruction or order in the Department of Defence."
The Bush administration is struggling to damp down outrage over the abuse and insists a number of low-level guards were to blame for the harsh tactics used to soften up those interrogated at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
The New Yorker magazine said Rumsfeld authorised expanding to Abu Ghraib the methods used in Afghanistan against suspected members of al Qaeda, blamed for the September 11 attacks.
Citing current and former U.S. intelligence officials, The New Yorker said the interrogation methods were part of a secret "special access program" that gave advance approval to kill, capture or interrogate so-called high-value targets in the war against terrorism.
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.
CHARGES "OUTLANDISH"
A former intelligence official told the magazine Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved this but may not have known about the abuse.
Di Rita said: "Assertions apparently being made in the latest New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib and the abuse of Iraqi detainees are outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture."
"No responsible official of the Department of Defence approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos," he added in the statement on the Pentagon's Web site.
"This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defence," Di Rita said.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, interviewed on German television during a visit to Berlin, said: "As far as we can tell there is really nothing to the story."
Seven military police reservists have been charged after pictures showed grinning troops beside detainees piled atop one another, forced to engage in sex acts and photographed in other poses aimed at humiliating them in the prison late last year.
Secretary of State Colin Powell was asked on Sunday if Abu Ghraib prison, a torture chamber under ousted President Saddam Hussein, should be razed or if he believed Rumsfeld should resign, as has been demanded by many Democrats.
"We'll have to decide what's the best action," he said in an interview from Jordan on the ABC program This Week. "But there's no question that this incident has given us a black eye throughout the world."
CAUSE OF ABUSE
Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on CBS's "Face The Nation" the latest New Yorker report added a "very significant subject" to be investigated by the panel.
Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican also on the Armed Services Committee, said he did not think the reservists accused of the abuse acted without being instructed. "We need to take this as far up as it goes and we need to do it quickly," he said on the NBC program "Meet the Press."
Rumsfeld returned on Friday from a surprise trip to Iraq and Abu Ghraib prison, calling the scandal a "body blow."
The United States recognises that the Geneva Conventions outlawing prisoner abuse apply to the war in Iraq. But it has said al Qaeda "terrorism" suspects do not qualify as prisoners of war under the terms of the treaty.
Newsweek on Sunday disclosed a memorandum by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales written in January 25, 2002, that said "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war."
"In my judgement, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions," he said. | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 5:38 am Post subject: Colorado lawyers defend Army private Lynndie England |
| http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,119653,00.html
'She's the Youngest and the Lowest Grade'
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
This is a partial transcript from "Hannity & Colmes", May 10, 2004, that has been edited for clarity.
SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: Private First Class Lynndie England (search), the soldier prominent in several of the now notorious prison abuse pictures, has officially been charged with assaulting detainees at the prison in Iraq.
A team of Denver area lawyers have taken on her case. Joining us now are three of those attorneys: Rose Mary Zapor, Carol McGuire and Danielle Guebert are with us.
Guys, welcome aboard. Thank you for being with us.
Rose Mary, let me start with you. We see these pictures. Your client is prominent in most of them -- many of them, let's say, the ones that have been released.
How do you explain, and more specifically, especially with the smiling face?
ROSE MARY ZAPOR, ATTORNEY FOR PFC ENGLAND: You know, we haven't spoken directly with our client yet, and so we don't know why she's smiling in those photographs. We don't know if she was told to do so. We don't know all of the particulars of how those photographs were staged.
HANNITY: You've never spoken with her?
ZAPOR: I've spoken with her family and with the family attorney, and Mr. R. Shea has spoken with her, and he's on his way to North Carolina right now, and he will be meeting with her off base.
HANNITY: What are they telling you is the reason for what it is she's doing, especially, you look at this?
ZAPOR: We have not discussed the particulars of the photographs, why she's smiling or why she's pointing or why she's doing anything in those photographs.
HANNITY: Don't they look...?
ZAPOR: All we know is that the civilian authorities improperly undermined the military chain of command, that these military people were cut off from their chain of command.
And we're told that these photographs were to be used in interrogation of subsequent prisoners, to help gain further information to protect our country.
HANNITY: Carl, I'm just trying to look at these pictures objectively here. And I'm thinking, you go before a jury one day, and those pictures with those smiles and that leash and the pointing and everything else, don't you think you have an uphill battle, objectively speaking?
CARL MCGUIRE, ATTORNEY FOR PFC ENGLAND: I think that what we have here is a young lady who's being used as a scapegoat, who was told to do these things by civilian intelligence agencies.
HANNITY: Wait a minute. Carl, Carl, wouldn't she have an obligation not to do something to a detainee if she knows it's wrong?
MCGUIRE: Well, you know, here's the problem is that when you're a 21- year-old E-3, you're told to follow orders. And if you don't follow those orders, someone can die, someone can get hurt.
So if you take the time to say, "I'm not sure if this is a legal order," you're going to go to a court-martial.
HANNITY: How could you make that case if you're in a prison and you're pulling a guy around by a leash or you're pointing to their genital areas. Or they have bags on their head and are not a threat to anybody? How could you make the case that somebody's life is in jeopardy?
MCGUIRE: What I'm saying is that she was being told by civilian intelligence agencies that they needed to use these pictures in order to get information from other inmates who had come into the prison.
They can show them that, look, this is what's going to happen if you don't work with us and give us the information. You're going to be subjugated by a small, demure American woman, and that that form of humiliation was enough that we're being told worked well to get intelligence information.
ALAN COLMES, CO-HOST: Danielle, you -- the attorneys are making this sound very benign, as if these were just posed pictures, nobody got hurt.
But we know, we're hearing from the Red Cross (search) that people did get hurt, people were threatened, all kinds of threats. Abuse, physical abuse, that's what the Red Cross report says. Is it as benign, really, as you're saying it is?
DANIELLE GUEBERT, ATTORNEY FOR PFC ENGLAND: Well, first and foremost, I entered on this case today, so I have not even had an opportunity to completely review the information that we have. And I haven't had an opportunity to be completely briefed by Rose Mary and by Carl.
COLMES: Let me ask Rose Mary that question, then. What about this? You make it sound like these were just posed pictures, as if these were models just posing to make other prisoners know what would happen if they didn't agree.
Yet we've heard reports of all kinds of abuse from the Red Cross and others. Are we to believe that these were just not very painful pictures? We have naked people. We have all kinds of reports of physical abuse.
ZAPOR: That's true. There are all kinds of reports of things happening in that prison which were -- which was supposedly under the command of Brigadier General Karpinski.
However, she was not allowed to visit her own command. She was excluded from that part of the prison, and therefore the military discipline broke down.
In terms of the abuse that's listed by the Red Cross and, I believe there is a report out by other military agencies, our client is not mentioned in those reports as far as we know at this time.
COLMES: Carl, what responsibility does your client have for what we are seeing, and who knows what happened beyond what we see in the pictures? But what is her culpability here and responsibility?
MCGUIRE: And ultimately, that's for a jury of her peers to decide in the military. What is her culpability? What was her responsibility? And what other agencies were also responsible for this?
Because I certainly haven't seen anything from the CIA being brought up on charges. Other officers may have gotten letters of reprimand, but they're not facing a court-martial. So that issue of culpability will be determined at a court of law.
COLMES: Rose Mary, the attorney you mentioned before, Georgio Rochet, says the military is short on troops and untrained people are being used as guards. And the military generals and Rumsfeld are hiding behind a 20-year-old farm girl from West Virginia who lives in a trailer park. That's his quote.
Do you concur with that? Is that what the problem is here?
ZAPOR: Well, the problem is that our client is the only person from these photographs and from this situation who is present in the United States. We believe because of that, as well as the fact that she is the weakest of the group -- she's the youngest; she is the lowest grade -- that they are using her, as they believe they can use her as a scapegoat. The higher ups in this group are not being brought to task.
HANNITY: Thank you guys for being with us. And we'll be checking in. I'm sure we're going to do a lot more on this in the days and weeks to come.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_2876552,00.html
Colorado lawyers defend private
She's a scapegoat in scandal, they say
By Lynn Bartels, Rocky Mountain News
May 11, 2004
An Army private shown in photographs allegedly abusing Iraqi prisoners is scheduled to meet today with her lead attorney, a Coloradan who specializes in military affairs.
The attorney, Giorgio Ra'Shadd, of Centennial, flew to North Carolina Monday night to meet with Pfc. Lynndie England, a reservist who is now at Fort Bragg.
Other members of England's Colorado-based legal team held a news conference Monday night in downtown Denver to repeat their insistence that England was merely following orders.
They said she is a scapegoat for a scandal that some international newspapers have dubbed "Torturegate." In all, seven soldiers have been charged with mistreating Iraqi prisoners.
Among the photographs released is one of England with a cigarette in her mouth, appearing to be smirking at a group of naked Iraqi prisoners.
"Her family says she was grimacing at the smoke," said attorney Rose Mary Zapor, of Littleton.
Zapor said attorneys are considering filing a motion to move the proceedings to Fort Carson in El Paso County, in part because England's lawyers are based in Colorado.
The most important issue is where England can receive a fair trial, said one of her attorneys, Carl McGuire, of Fort Morgan.
The attorneys offered little new information in the prisoner scandal, which has outraged the Arab world and President Bush alike. England's attorneys said Bush's comments that the soldiers involved will be punished will make it more difficult for England to get a fair trial.
The attorneys stressed that England was the "lowest of the low" in the military command. They said she had all of four weeks training as a clerk processing prisoners.
They also said when she appeared in the pictures she was following orders from others, including the CIA. The photographs, her attorneys said, were shown to other Iraqi prisoners who were told the same would happen to them if they did not cooperate and provide information.
England was sent back to the United States from Iraq because she was pregnant. The father is another soldier who also is accused of mistreating prisoners. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 7:21 pm Post subject: Rumsfeld knew. He's got to go. |
| Subj: Rumsfeld knew. He's got to go.
Date: 5/18/04 10:30:51 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From: moveon-help@list.moveon.org
Dear MoveOn member:
As America learns more about the prisoner abuse scandal, it's becoming
clear that the path to the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib prison began
at Donald Rumsfeld's office in the Pentagon. According to an article
in the New Yorker magazine, a policy put in place by Secretary Rumsfeld
"encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners
in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency
in Iraq." [1]
Despite this horrible scandal and the cascading failures of U.S.
military policy in Iraq, President Bush says that Rumsfeld is doing "a
superb job." In the absence of presidential leadership, Congress must
step in and hold the administration accountable.
Please call your Senators and Representative today and tell them to
call on President Bush to fire Donald Rumsfeld.
Senator Dianne Feinstein
Washington, DC: 202-224-3841
Senator Barbara Boxer
Washington, DC: 202-224-3553
Congresswoman Jane Harman
Washington, DC: 202-225-8220
Please let us know you're calling, at:
http://www.moveon.org/callrumsfeld.html?id=2850-2353143-VNN.Rl0pWYQFjTVSJ.qaXw
President Bush approved a policy that the Geneva Convention wouldn't
apply to suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters held in Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba. When the war in Iraq started to go badly, Rumsfeld extended
these aggressive interrogation policies to Iraqi prisons. According
to the current issue of Newsweek,
"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.’" [2]
High-level officials in the Pentagon were sent from Guantanamo Bay to
Iraq to implement the more aggressive policies, and it appears that
command of the prison was placed in the hands of military intelligence
officers. Techniques that had been approved only for suspected al-Qaeda
terrorists were suddenly applied to Iraqi prisoners (up to 90% of whom
were mistakenly detained, according to the Red Cross) [3].
Despite the eagerness of the Bush administration to blame the torture
at Abu Ghraib on a few rogue soldiers, it is now clear that real
responsibility lies at the top of the chain of command.
As the Commander-in-Chief, it's President Bush’s job to decide who runs
the Pentagon. If he won't take the steps that are needed to restore
American credibility around the world, Congress needs to use its power
to convince the president to do the right thing - whether it issues a
clear public call for the Secretary's resignation or whether it uses
other leverage to force the Administration’s hand.
Please call your elected Representatives today and ask them to do the
right thing, for America’s sake.
Thanks for making these important calls,
- Carrie, Joan, Noah, Peter, and Wes
The MoveOn.org team
Tuesday, May 18th, 2004
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040524fa_fact
THE GRAY ZONE, How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Seymour M. Hersh, 5/24/2004, New Yorker
[2] "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."
John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff, 5/24/04 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4989422/site/newsweek/
[3] Red Cross: Iraq Abuse Widespread, Routine
Alexander G. Higgins, 5/10/04. For AP story on this report, see:
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040511/D82G3F9G1.html
_______________
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http://moveon.org/s?i=2850-2353143-VNN.Rl0pWYQFjTVSJ.qaXw | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed May 19, 2004 3:47 am Post subject: M.P.'s Received Orders to Strip Iraqi Detainees |
| http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/18/politics/18ABUS.html?pagewanted=print&position=
May 18, 2004
INTERROGATIONS
M.P.'s Received Orders to Strip Iraqi Detainees
By ERIC SCHMITT and DOUGLAS JEHL
ASHINGTON, May 17 — The American officer who was in charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison has told a senior Army investigator that intelligence officers sometimes instructed the military police to force Iraqi detainees to strip naked and to shackle them before questioning them. But he said those measures were not imposed "unless there is some good reason."
The officer, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, also told the investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, that his unit had "no formal system in place" to monitor instructions they had given to military guards, who worked closely with interrogators to prepare detainees for interviews. Colonel Pappas said he "should have asked more questions, admittedly" about abuses committed or encouraged by his subordinates.
The statements by Colonel Pappas, contained in the transcript of a Feb. 11 interview that is part of General Taguba's 6,000-page classified report, offer the highest-level confirmation so far that military intelligence soldiers directed military guards in preparing for interrogations. They also provide the first insights by the senior intelligence officer at the prison into the relationship between his troops and the military police. Portions of Colonel Pappas's sworn statements were read to The New York Times by a government official who had read the transcript.
Testimony from guards and detainees at a preliminary hearing for a soldier accused of abuse said that orders from interrogators at Abu Ghraib had stopped short of the graphic abuse seen in the photographs at the center of the prison scandal.
The interrogation techniques Colonel Pappas described were used on detainees protected by the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit inhumane treatment of prisoners. Military officials said on Monday that the United States had months ago quietly abandoned an early plan to designate as unlawful combatants some of the prisoners captured by American forces in Iraq. No prisoners in Iraq were classified as unlawful combatants.
That means that even foreign fighters and suspected Al Qaeda members captured in Iraq, along with Iraqis captured as prisoners of war and insurgents, have remained protected by the Geneva Conventions.
The option of designating prisoners captured in Iraq as unlawful combatants "has not been foreclosed, but this is not under consideration," a senior military official said.
The role of military intelligence officials and civilian contract interrogators at Abu Ghraib is still under investigation by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, the deputy chief of Army intelligence.
Colonel Pappas confirmed in his statements that his unit had enacted several changes recommended by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the head of detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, whom the Pentagon sent to Iraq in August and September to review detention operations.
A major finding of General Miller's visit, Colonel Pappas said, was "to provide dedicated M.P.'s in support of interrogations."
Several military police officers and their commanders at Abu Ghraib have said that military intelligence officers directed them to "set the conditions" to enhance the questioning. When General Taguba asked what safeguards existed to ensure that guards "understand the instructions or limits of instructions, or whether the instructions were legal," Colonel Pappas acknowledged that there were no assurances.
"There would be no way for us to actually monitor whether that happened," Colonel Pappas told General Taguba. "We had no formal system in place to do that."
Colonel Pappas continued, "To my knowledge, instructions given to the M.P.'s, other than what I have mentioned, such as shackling, making detainees strip down or other measures used on detainees before interrogations, are not typically made unless there is some good reason."
Individual interrogation plans were drafted for each detainee, and were approved by Colonel Pappas or his deputy, he said. In every case, he said, the plans followed the guidance in the rules of interrogation that Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top ground commander in Iraq, approved on Oct. 12.
In his report, General Taguba concluded that Colonel Pappas was "either directly or indirectly responsible" for the actions of those who mistreated and humiliated Iraqi prisoners.
Colonel Pappas is a 23-year Army veteran who began his military career after graduating in 1981 from Rutgers University, where he was part of the R.O.T.C. program. He took command of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade in July, after the unit had been in Iraq for more than three months, as part of the V Corps, which is based in Heidelberg, Germany.
Colonel Pappas has declined all interview requests, including one made on Monday through a spokesman for the Army's V Corps in Germany.
In deciding not to invoke the unlawful combatant designation on any prisoners in Iraq, the Bush administration appears to have concluded that detention and interrogation procedures permitted under the Geneva Conventions were adequate even for suspected Al Qaeda members captured in Iraq. The conventions spell out protections that include monitoring by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The United States said at the outset of the war that no one captured in Iraq would be sent to the American prison at Guantánamo Bay that houses Al Qaeda suspects detained in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and none have been.
That new approach is a sharp reversal from the one that Pentagon officials described after the major phase of the war in Iraq ended last May. Then, American officers said that the thousands of prisoners in Iraq were being sorted to determine who among them should be labeled unlawful combatants. The Bush administration has applied that status to Al Qaeda members elsewhere and has used it to justify their indefinite detention at the American base at Guantánamo Bay under conditions not subject to the conventions.
Last May, Col. Karl Goetze, the staff judge advocate for occupation land forces in Iraq, said at a Pentagon briefing that the military intended to segregate "unlawful combatants" from Iraqi prisoners who should be treated as prisoners of war.
"Foreign fighters could fall into the category of unlawful combatants," Colonel Goetze said. He said he expected that only a small percentage of the prisoners in Iraq would be designated "unlawful combatants," but he said, "These are the individuals who raised up, took arms, not carrying them in an open manner, not wearing uniforms; in other words, engaging in tactics and techniques that were not in accordance with the law of armed combat."
On Monday, however, a senior military officer said in an e-mail message that "no persons in Iraq have been declared unlawful combatants." The Iraqi prisoners held in the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib have been labeled security detainees. In testimony addressing the scandal over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners there, American officials have said that the Geneva accords are "fully applicable" to all prisoners held by the United States in Iraq.
Bush administration officials in Iraq have referred often to the presence of foreign fighters among those opposing American forces in Iraq, but American officials have never specified how many foreign fighters are being held captive by the United States. American officials have promised that all Iraqi prisoners would be kept in Iraq, but they have been less explicit about whether the same rules would apply to foreigners.
On Monday, a senior Defense Department official said that high-level Iraqi prisoners held at a site on the outskirts of the Baghdad airport were now being permitted up to three hours of time outside each day, more than the International Committee for the Red Cross observed and described in a February 2004 report.
In the February report, the Red Cross committee said that the estimated 100 prisoners at the site, designated as "high value detainees" by the United States, were being held in isolation for months at a time for as long as 23 hours a day without sunlight. The senior defense official said that representatives of the Red Cross committee had visited the site twice since February, and appeared satisfied with the way the prisoners, who include Tariq Aziz and other former advisers to Saddam Hussein, were being treated.
The Iraq Survey Group, along with another agency that the official would not name, is principally in charge of the interrogation of those prisoners, he said. But he said the rules for their detention and interrogation were set by the Central Command.
Rumsfeld Knew: Iraq Prison Abuse Part of Pentagon-Approved Black Ops Program:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/17/1431219
PENTAGON NEOCON CABAL ORDERED IRAQ PRISON TORTURE:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/05/17/pentagon-neocon-cabal-ordered-iraq-prison-torture.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed May 19, 2004 3:54 am Post subject: NEOCONS ORDERED IRAQ PRISON TORTURE |
| Jason Vest had earlier written the 'Men from JINSA and CSP' article
( http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest ) for 'The Nation' about the JINSA/PNAC Neocon cabal at the Pentagon as he just came out with the following article for 'The Nation' as well which connects the neocons to the torture in the Iraqi prison (s). You can also listen his excellent interview about such on the 'To the Point' national radio program from earlier today on your computer via the following URL:
http://www.moretothepoint.com/cgi-bin/db/kcrw.pl?show_code=tp&air_date=5/18/04&tmplt_type=Show
Implausible Denial
by Jason Vest
Writing in the December 16, 2002, edition of The Nation, I broke the
news--and explored the concerns many in the US intelligence community
had--about Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's quiet success in
prevailing upon Congress to authorize the creation of a new senior
position at the Pentagon,the Under Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence. Several months later, in the pages of the Columbia
Journalism Review, I followed up with a piece devoted to the media's
utter lack of interest--perhaps best demonstrated by the absence of
any reporter from a farcical confirmation hearing--in the new Under
Secretary himself, Stephen Cambone.
Despite his status as the Pentagon's über-intelligence
authority, in the initial days of the breaking Abu Ghraib scandal
Cambone was virtually invisible. When Rumsfeld was called to the Hill
to testify before the Armed Services Committee on May 7, however,
Cambone was unexpectedly summoned to the witness table from his chair
behind Rumsfeld. That cameo appearance resulted in a more expansive
return appearance on May 11, in which Cambone less than deftly tried
to undermine Abu Ghraib investigator Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba.
(Cambone disputed the general's conclusion that military intelligence
units effectively controlled the prison's military police
detachment.) Cambone also reacted adversely to Senator Jack Reed's
assertion (confirmed by Taguba) that recommendations made in a report
on improving intelligence collection at Abu Ghraib by then-chief
Guantánamo Bay interrogator Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller clearly
called for the use of MPs in interrogations, which helped create an
environment that begot the subsequent abuse and torture in the tiers.
As a May 12 Washington Post editorial points out, Cambone's office
approved interrogation practices that are in direct violation of the
Geneva Conventions.
At the May 11 hearings, Cambone and another senior Defense Department
official, Army intelligence chief Lieut. Gen Keith Alexander,
essentially cast themselves as mere Pentagon representatives fielding
questions about Abu Ghraib--and not as men who might bear any
responsibility for what they desperately tried to cast as an aberrant
and isolated incident. Yet many of their assertions on May 11 are in
fact contradicted by statements they made before the same committee a
month before, as well as a year-old memo outlining the
responsibilities of Cambone's office.
The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, or OUSD(I) in
Pentagonese, was originally conceived by Rumsfeld as a centralizing
measure, a way to give him "one dog to kick" rather than a "whole
kennel" of individual civilian and uniformed defense intelligence
agencies. In choosing the person responsible for ostensibly bringing
unprecedented order and control to the Pentagon's spy shops, the
Secretary chose Cambone, a man with no intelligence experience but a
favored protégé and loyal partisan who had served on
Rumsfeld's ballistic missile threat commission and worked with the
neoconservative Project for the New American Century. Previously
principal deputy to Under Secretary for Policy Doug Feith (and, in
that capacity, liaison between Feith and the ideological intelligence
analysis unit that would later morph into the notorious Office of
Special Plans), Cambone went out of his way in his confirmation
hearings to say that he would closely "consult and coordinate" with
Feith to "insure [that] DoD-related intelligence activity supports
the goals" of the Pentagon's policy shop.
Two months after Cambone's confirmation, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz described his new portfolio in a detailed internal
Pentagon memo. Reflecting the seriousness and specificity of
Cambone's mission, an organizational chart appended to the memo shows
a generic under secretary with six deputies, including one for
warfighting and operations, whose duties include specific liaison
with the intelligence elements of each of the armed services, each
individual combatant command, and the under secretary for policy. The
document itself explicitly states that Cambone's office will, among
other things:
provide oversight and policy guidance for all DoD intelligence
activities; provide policy oversight of all the intelligence
organizations within the DoD, to include ensuring these organizations
are manned, trained, equipped and structured to support the
missions of the Department; provide assessments of and advice [to]
the Secretary and CJCS [Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff] on the
adequacy of military intelligence performance; exercise management
and oversight of all DoD counterintelligence and security activities;
coordinate DoD intelligence and intelligence-related policy, plans,
programs, requirements and resource allocations; oversee provision of
intelligence support and involvement in information operations,
focused on assessments in support of operations.
None of this should leave much to the imagination, especially when it
comes to policies and practices pertaining to the dimensions of human
intelligence collection that involve interrogations conducted by
military intelligence. Yet when asked by Senator John Warner if his
office has "overall responsibility for policy concerning the handling
of detainees," Cambone dodged with a "not precisely, sir,"
effectively denying any responsibility as set forth in his charge by
Wolfowitz. Rather, Cambone said, he only reactively "became involved
in this issue from the perspective of assuring there was a flow of
intelligence back to the commands and done in an efficient and
effective way."
Cambone's subsequent comments were in a similar vein, and lead one to
conclude that either this particular under secretary was willfully
obfuscating, or that he was providing yet another glaring example of
the old adage that "military intelligence" is a contradiction in
terms. Nothing pertinent crossed his desk; things were always
"signed out at the command level." Though he's had time to reflect on
the whole affair, Cambone can't really say how he thinks any of it
happened: "I don't know the facts, it's for me, hard to explain."
Key reports were seen only belatedly, "well after they were issued"
or not at all, because they were "only delivered at command level."
Cambone is apparently still in the dark regarding concerns voiced by
the Coalition Provisional Authority and the State Department about
prisoner treatment: "I'm not aware of those complaints," he said or,
to clarify, "per se, in that sense, no." Though he's the senior
Defense Department official responsible for intelligence, Cambone
"did not discuss with anybody at Joint Task Force 7" interrogation
procedure recommendations, especially ones that dealt with the
transmission or dissemination of intelligence. As late as this past
February--when most other senior officials were keenly aware of the
problems at Abu Ghraib--"I still didn't know that there was a
significant issue here." And when General Miller made his trip to
Iraq, that was really under someone else's auspices, and merely with
the "encouragement" of OUSD(I).
And one certainly shouldn't consider it anything like
"collaboration" that Cambone's deputy for warfighting and
operations, Lieut. Gen. William Boykin (yes, that Boykin, of
anti-Islam "My God is bigger than your God" fame), was subsequently
briefed by Miller on his trip to Iraq; Boykin then briefed Cambone.
What makes this all the more remarkable, though, is how different in
tone and substance Cambone's comments are compared with his
appearance along with all the military intelligence chiefs--before
the same committee on April 7. Review the transcript of that hearing
and it seems as if Cambone and every element of the US military are
working hand in glove. Recapping his first year as OUSD(I), Cambone
effusively praised his uniformed colleagues and seemed to take
particular delight in crowing about how closely his office was
working with combatant commanders in Iraq on virtually every
intelligence angle:
We undertook a major effort to support the transition from Fifth
Corps to the Third Corps in Iraq, and the stand up of the Combined
Joint Task Force Seven. We continue to be actively engaged with
General Sanchez and General Fast, who is G2 [Army intelligence], in
assisting the development of the intelligence architecture there, in
providing counterintelligence support, in assisting the army and
others with the transition, particularly their tactical HUMINT [human
intelligence] teams and the like...the effort to improve capabilities
within Iraq at the operational and tactical level has been so
successful that [General Abizaid] has asked us to undertake a similar
effort with his architecture in Afghanistan.
In that hearing, Cambone introduced Army military intelligence chief
Lieut. Gen. Keith Alexander as having a "great deal of information"
on the Army's intelligence efforts in Iraq. Of particular pride to
Alexander, who expressly thanked Cambone for being "superb in
providing us support"--is a program he declined to mention at his May
11 hearing but showcased on April 7. In that instance, after
discussing the successful capture of an Iraqi general and the rapid
sharing of intelligence between Defense Department intelligence
agencies, Alexander said he chose to share that example
because, one, it shows you how important tactical questioning,
analysis and interrogation is to our folks; and two, how we are
training them today. We call Intel Support to Combating Terrorism.
It's done at Fort Huachuca, and it uses the lessons learned from
Guantánamo to our folks in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And also
the benefits for tactical questioning, for those soldiers on the
ground to know how to ask the right questions of these guys is being
taught through every one of our centers and every one of our schools
and centers throughout the United States before soldiers deploy.
Aside from this, the only other public mention of the Intelligence
Support to Combating (or Counter) Terrorism program is in the
February 13, 2003, edition of the Fort Huachuca base newspaper, which
describes it as a crash course for military intelligence officers
bound only for Guantánamo---but that the course will quickly
become "globally oriented," as "the threat is not just in
Afghanistan, it's also in the Philippines and the Middle East." While
there is no mention in the article of Geneva Conventions-specific
training--and while no mention of this unique training program was
made on Tuesday--Alexander spent much of his time in the May 11
hearing emphasizing the strict adherence of his military intelligence
officers to the standard training manuals, and trying to convince a
skeptical committee that the whole Abu Ghraib mess likely begins and
ends with nothing more than "a group of undisciplined military
police." Yet on May 12, ABC News interviewed two former Fort Huachuca
interrogation trainees who said that since early last year, "The US
military has been teaching future interrogators how to cause physical
pain while questioning detainees but remain technically within limits
set by the Geneva Conventions."
Cambone can't have it both ways. The Armed Services Committee should
thoroughly investigate the discrepancies between Cambone's and
Alexander's April 7 and May 11 testimonies, and should recall the
pair to the Hill for a more precise interrogation (in line with the
Geneva Conventions, of course). In the end, the only place for
Rumsfeld's "one dog to kick" may not be at his master's feet, but in
the doghouse.
This article can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040531&s=vest
Implausible Denial II
by Jason Vest
On Saturday, May 15--twenty-four hours after The Nation published
"Implausible Denial"--The New Yorker posted on its website Seymour
Hersh's latest Abu Ghraib-related investigative report. Its central
revelation: The interrogations at Abu Ghraib were part of a highly
classified Special Access Program (SAP) code-named Copper Green,
authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ultimately
overseen by Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen
Cambone. Originally a joint CIA-Pentagon program in Afghanistan that
utilized highly trained Special Operations personnel, Copper Green
eventually expanded to Iraq, Hersh reports, where Cambone decided it
would begin using non-Special Operations personnel--including
military intelligence officers and other military personnel--to begin
questioning prisoners whose status was outside the program's original
brief. The CIA objected and withdrew from the program, while Cambone
apparently tasked Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, former Guantánamo
Bay interrogations chief, with "Gitmo-izing" Iraq's prison system.
What may be more surprising than the revelations in Hersh's piece is
the fact that leads to the Abu Ghraib skullduggery were hidden in
plain sight--and that the Pentagon press corps all but ignored them.
Though Cambone has been an exceptionally sub rosa figure in his
position as DoD's intelligence chief, on November 21, 2003, he sat
down for a rare on-record meeting over breakfast with the Defense
Writers Group. Again in contrast to his May 11 comments, in which he
cast himself as a benign bureaucrat largely out of the loop, his
November comments offer a glimpse into the mechanics of how Cambone's
office was assertively taking the lead in coordinating intelligence
operations in Iraq.
Noting first that his office has "one group of people over to do an
assessment" and that another was getting ready to go, Cambone said
that "the requirement for an increased level of intelligence support
became increasingly evident as we went through a period between
early July/late August.... In that late August time frame, a
delegation went over there from the Department and included people
from the CIA to look at how we were structured, whether we had
proper arrangement at the division level, whether that information,
as it was being compiled at the divisional level, was being moved
from that level up to the CJTF-7 [Combined Joint Task Force-7] level
in an expeditious manner."
Cambone further stated that the group "came back with a list of
somewhere close to eighty or ninety recommendations," and went on to
describe a rapid infusion of personnel and technology for
intelligence-related endeavors. He also noted that the Director of
Central Intelligence, George Tenet, had "made a number of adjustments
in his complement of people in Iraq" as part of a "concerted effort
to lash up much more tightly the work that is done in the context of
the CIA activities with those being done by the Department to ensure
there is [a] cross-flow of information and cooperation."
The specifics of any of those eighty to ninety recommendations--as
well as the nature of then-joint CIA/DoD operations and the staffing
and leadership of the August delegation to Iraq, which may have
covered Miller's mission--were not, apparently, of interest to the
members of the Defense Writers Group. Though a few journalists
elsewhere had raised concerns about the gray areas Defense
Intelligence operations might be getting into--as well as Cambone's
interest in bringing all uniformed Special Operations under his
aegis--there were no follow-up questions, and Cambone's comments went
virtually unreported.
Cambone's remarks at the breakfast also bring into potentially
clearer focus the role in Abu Ghraib of Lieut. Gen. William "Jerry"
Boykin, his deputy for intelligence and warfighting support. "It is
an office," Cambone says of Boykin's shop, "that is designed to
assure the types of capabilities we have just been talking about
here, whether it is people, or it is resources, or it is material, or
it is information, is moved forward to the people who need it at
various levels of command and operation in order for them to execute
their mission."
Having been much more right than not in his reporting on the current
Administration, it's unlikely that Hersh's story is, as Pentagon
spokesman Lawrence Di Rita quickly characterized it, "outlandish,
conspiratorial, and filled with error," since the neglected public
utterances of Cambone not only track with Hersh's reporting but that
of R. Jeffrey Smith in the Washington Post for May 16. (Cambone is
prominent in Smith's story, succinctly titled "Knowledge of Abusive
Tactics May Go Higher." And he figures as well in a remarkable
article for the May 24 edition of Newsweek by John Barry, Michael
Hirsh and Michael Isikoff, "The Roots of Torture," which not only
points to Cambone's deep involvement in the intelligence-gathering
apparatus in Iraq but demonstrates that the climate for the "stress
and duress" interrogation techniques used at Abu Ghraib was
"officially approved at the highest levels of the government" as part
of a secret system "adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of
the Geneva Conventions." ) Indeed, last week Di Rita himself
described Cambone in a way not unlike that of Hersh and the Post:
"Somebody who thinks through issues in all their dimensions, and in
whom the Secretary has enormous confidence."
This article can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040531&s=vest2
Rumsfeld Knew: Iraq Prison Abuse Part of Pentagon-Approved Black Ops Program:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/17/1431219
PENTAGON NEOCON CABAL ORDERED IRAQ PRISON TORTURE:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/05/17/pentagon-neocon-cabal-ordered-iraq-prison-torture.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu May 20, 2004 7:48 am Post subject: Implausible Denial |
| This article can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040531&s=vest
Implausible Denial
by JASON VEST
[posted online on May 14, 2004]
Writing in the December 16, 2002, edition of The Nation, I broke the news--and explored the concerns many in the US intelligence community had--about Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's quiet success in prevailing upon Congress to authorize the creation of a new senior position at the Pentagon,the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Several months later, in the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review, I followed up with a piece devoted to the media's utter lack of interest--perhaps best demonstrated by the absence of any reporter from a farcical confirmation hearing--in the new Under Secretary himself, Stephen Cambone.
Despite his status as the Pentagon's über-intelligence authority, in the initial days of the breaking Abu Ghraib scandal Cambone was virtually invisible. When Rumsfeld was called to the Hill to testify before the Armed Services Committee on May 7, however, Cambone was unexpectedly summoned to the witness table from his chair behind Rumsfeld. That cameo appearance resulted in a more expansive return appearance on May 11, in which Cambone less than deftly tried to undermine Abu Ghraib investigator Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. (Cambone disputed the general's conclusion that military intelligence units effectively controlled the prison's military police detachment.) Cambone also reacted adversely to Senator Jack Reed's assertion (confirmed by Taguba) that recommendations made in a report on improving intelligence collection at Abu Ghraib by then-chief Guantánamo Bay interrogator Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller clearly called for the use of MPs in interrogations, which helped create an environment that begot the subsequent abuse and torture in the tiers. As a May 12 Washington Post editorial points out, Cambone's office approved interrogation practices that are in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.
At the May 11 hearings, Cambone and another senior Defense Department official, Army intelligence chief Lieut. Gen Keith Alexander, essentially cast themselves as mere Pentagon representatives fielding questions about Abu Ghraib--and not as men who might bear any responsibility for what they desperately tried to cast as an aberrant and isolated incident. Yet many of their assertions on May 11 are in fact contradicted by statements they made before the same committee a month before, as well as a year-old memo outlining the responsibilities of Cambone's office.
The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, or OUSD(I) in Pentagonese, was originally conceived by Rumsfeld as a centralizing measure, a way to give him "one dog to kick" rather than a "whole kennel" of individual civilian and uniformed defense intelligence agencies. In choosing the person responsible for ostensibly bringing unprecedented order and control to the Pentagon's spy shops, the Secretary chose Cambone, a man with no intelligence experience but a favored protégé and loyal partisan who had served on Rumsfeld's ballistic missile threat commission and worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century. Previously principal deputy to Under Secretary for Policy Doug Feith (and, in that capacity, liaison between Feith and the ideological intelligence analysis unit that would later morph into the notorious Office of Special Plans), Cambone went out of his way in his confirmation hearings to say that he would closely "consult and coordinate" with Feith to "insure [that] DoD-related intelligence activity supports the goals" of the Pentagon's policy shop.
Two months after Cambone's confirmation, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz described his new portfolio in a detailed internal Pentagon memo. Reflecting the seriousness and specificity of Cambone's mission, an organizational chart appended to the memo shows a generic under secretary with six deputies, including one for warfighting and operations, whose duties include specific liaison with the intelligence elements of each of the armed services, each individual combatant command, and the under secretary for policy. The document itself explicitly states that Cambone's office will, among other things:
provide oversight and policy guidance for all DoD intelligence activities; provide policy oversight of all the intelligence organizations within the DoD, to include ensuring these organizations are manned, trained, equipped and structured to support the missions of the Department; provide assessments of and advice [to] the Secretary and CJCS [Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff] on the adequacy of military intelligence performance; exercise management and oversight of all DoD counterintelligence and security activities; coordinate DoD intelligence and intelligence-related policy, plans, programs, requirements and resource allocations; oversee provision of intelligence support and involvement in information operations, focused on assessments in support of operations.
None of this should leave much to the imagination, especially when it comes to policies and practices pertaining to the dimensions of human intelligence collection that involve interrogations conducted by military intelligence. Yet when asked by Senator John Warner if his office has "overall responsibility for policy concerning the handling of detainees," Cambone dodged with a "not precisely, sir," effectively denying any responsibility as set forth in his charge by Wolfowitz. Rather, Cambone said, he only reactively "became involved in this issue from the perspective of assuring there was a flow of intelligence back to the commands and done in an efficient and effective way."
Cambone's subsequent comments were in a similar vein, and lead one to conclude that either this particular under secretary was willfully obfuscating, or that he was providing yet another glaring example of the old adage that "military intelligence" is a contradiction in terms. Nothing pertinent crossed his desk; things were always "signed out at the command level." Though he's had time to reflect on the whole affair, Cambone can't really say how he thinks any of it happened: "I don't know the facts, it's for me, hard to explain."
Key reports were seen only belatedly, "well after they were issued" or not at all, because they were "only delivered at command level." Cambone is apparently still in the dark regarding concerns voiced by the Coalition Provisional Authority and the State Department about prisoner treatment: "I'm not aware of those complaints," he said or, to clarify, "per se, in that sense, no." Though he's the senior Defense Department official responsible for intelligence, Cambone "did not discuss with anybody at Joint Task Force 7" interrogation procedure recommendations, especially ones that dealt with the transmission or dissemination of intelligence. As late as this past February--when most other senior officials were keenly aware of the problems at Abu Ghraib--"I still didn't know that there was a significant issue here." And when General Miller made his trip to Iraq, that was really under someone else's auspices, and merely with the "encouragement" of OUSD(I).
And one certainly shouldn't consider it anything like "collaboration" that Cambone's deputy for warfighting and operations, Lieut. Gen. William Boykin (yes, that Boykin, of anti-Islam "My God is bigger than your God" fame), was subsequently briefed by Miller on his trip to Iraq; Boykin then briefed Cambone.
What makes this all the more remarkable, though, is how different in tone and substance Cambone's comments are compared with his appearance along with all the military intelligence chiefs--before the same committee on April 7. Review the transcript of that hearing and it seems as if Cambone and every element of the US military are working hand in glove. Recapping his first year as OUSD(I), Cambone effusively praised his uniformed colleagues and seemed to take particular delight in crowing about how closely his office was working with combatant commanders in Iraq on virtually every intelligence angle:
We undertook a major effort to support the transition from Fifth Corps to the Third Corps in Iraq, and the stand up of the Combined Joint Task Force Seven. We continue to be actively engaged with General Sanchez and General Fast, who is G2 [Army intelligence], in assisting the development of the intelligence architecture there, in providing counterintelligence support, in assisting the army and others with the transition, particularly their tactical HUMINT [human intelligence] teams and the like...the effort to improve capabilities within Iraq at the operational and tactical level has been so successful that [General Abizaid] has asked us to undertake a similar effort with his architecture in Afghanistan.
In that hearing, Cambone introduced Army military intelligence chief Lieut. Gen. Keith Alexander as having a "great deal of information" on the Army's intelligence efforts in Iraq. Of particular pride to Alexander, who expressly thanked Cambone for being "superb in providing us support"--is a program he declined to mention at his May 11 hearing but showcased on April 7. In that instance, after discussing the successful capture of an Iraqi general and the rapid sharing of intelligence between Defense Department intelligence agencies, Alexander said he chose to share that example
because, one, it shows you how important tactical questioning, analysis and interrogation is to our folks; and two, how we are training them today. We call Intel Support to Combating Terrorism. It's done at Fort Huachuca, and it uses the lessons learned from Guantánamo to our folks in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And also the benefits for tactical questioning, for those soldiers on the ground to know how to ask the right questions of these guys is being taught through every one of our centers and every one of our schools and centers throughout the United States before soldiers deploy.
Aside from this, the only other public mention of the Intelligence Support to Combating (or Counter) Terrorism program is in the February 13, 2003, edition of the Fort Huachuca base newspaper, which describes it as a crash course for military intelligence officers bound only for Guantánamo---but that the course will quickly become "globally oriented," as "the threat is not just in Afghanistan, it's also in the Philippines and the Middle East." While there is no mention in the article of Geneva Conventions-specific training--and while no mention of this unique training program was made on Tuesday--Alexander spent much of his time in the May 11 hearing emphasizing the strict adherence of his military intelligence officers to the standard training manuals, and trying to convince a skeptical committee that the whole Abu Ghraib mess likely begins and ends with nothing more than "a group of undisciplined military police." Yet on May 12, ABC News interviewed two former Fort Huachuca interrogation trainees who said that since early last year, "The US military has been teaching future interrogators how to cause physical pain while questioning detainees but remain technically within limits set by the Geneva Conventions."
Cambone can't have it both ways. The Armed Services Committee should thoroughly investigate the discrepancies between Cambone's and Alexander's April 7 and May 11 testimonies, and should recall the pair to the Hill for a more precise interrogation (in line with the Geneva Conventions, of course). In the end, the only place for Rumsfeld's "one dog to kick" may not be at his master's feet, but in the doghouse.
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040531&s=vest2
Implausible Denial II
by JASON VEST
[posted online on May 17, 2004]
On Saturday, May 15--twenty-four hours after The Nation published "Implausible Denial"--The New Yorker posted on its website Seymour Hersh's latest Abu Ghraib-related investigative report. Its central revelation: The interrogations at Abu Ghraib were part of a highly classified Special Access Program (SAP) code-named Copper Green, authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ultimately overseen by Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone. Originally a joint CIA-Pentagon program in Afghanistan that utilized highly trained Special Operations personnel, Copper Green eventually expanded to Iraq, Hersh reports, where Cambone decided it would begin using non-Special Operations personnel--including military intelligence officers and other military personnel--to begin questioning prisoners whose status was outside the program's original brief. The CIA objected and withdrew from the program, while Cambone apparently tasked Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, former Guantánamo Bay interrogations chief, with "Gitmo-izing" Iraq's prison system.
What may be more surprising than the revelations in Hersh's piece is the fact that leads to the Abu Ghraib skullduggery were hidden in plain sight--and that the Pentagon press corps all but ignored them. Though Cambone has been an exceptionally sub rosa figure in his position as DoD's intelligence chief, on November 21, 2003, he sat down for a rare on-record meeting over breakfast with the Defense Writers Group. Again in contrast to his May 11 comments, in which he cast himself as a benign bureaucrat largely out of the loop, his November comments offer a glimpse into the mechanics of how Cambone's office was assertively taking the lead in coordinating intelligence operations in Iraq.
Noting first that his office has "one group of people over to do an assessment" and that another was getting ready to go, Cambone said that "the requirement for an increased level of intelligence support became increasingly evident as we went through a period between early July/late August.... In that late August time frame, a delegation went over there from the Department and included people from the CIA to look at how we were structured, whether we had proper arrangement at the division level, whether that information, as it was being compiled at the divisional level, was being moved from that level up to the CJTF-7 [Combined Joint Task Force-7] level in an expeditious manner."
Cambone further stated that the group "came back with a list of somewhere close to eighty or ninety recommendations," and went on to describe a rapid infusion of personnel and technology for intelligence-related endeavors. He also noted that the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, had "made a number of adjustments in his complement of people in Iraq" as part of a "concerted effort to lash up much more tightly the work that is done in the context of the CIA activities with those being done by the Department to ensure there is [a] cross-flow of information and cooperation."
The specifics of any of those eighty to ninety recommendations--as well as the nature of then-joint CIA/DoD operations and the staffing and leadership of the August delegation to Iraq, which may have covered Miller's mission--were not, apparently, of interest to the members of the Defense Writers Group. Though a few journalists elsewhere had raised concerns about the gray areas Defense Intelligence operations might be getting into--as well as Cambone's interest in bringing all uniformed Special Operations under his aegis--there were no follow-up questions, and Cambone's comments went virtually unreported.
Cambone's remarks at the breakfast also bring into potentially clearer focus the role in Abu Ghraib of Lieut. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, his deputy for intelligence and warfighting support. "It is an office," Cambone says of Boykin's shop, "that is designed to assure the types of capabilities we have just been talking about here, whether it is people, or it is resources, or it is material, or it is information, is moved forward to the people who need it at various levels of command and operation in order for them to execute their mission."
Having been much more right than not in his reporting on the current Administration, it's unlikely that Hersh's story is, as Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita quickly characterized it, "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error," since the neglected public utterances of Cambone not only track with Hersh's reporting but that of R. Jeffrey Smith in the Washington Post for May 16. (Cambone is prominent in Smith's story, succinctly titled "Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher." And he figures as well in a remarkable article for the May 24 edition of Newsweek by John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff, "The Roots of Torture," which not only points to Cambone's deep involvement in the intelligence-gathering apparatus in Iraq but demonstrates that the climate for the "stress and duress" interrogation techniques used at Abu Ghraib was "officially approved at the highest levels of the government" as part of a secret system "adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions." ) Indeed, last week Di Rita himself described Cambone in a way not unlike that of Hersh and the Post: "Somebody who thinks through issues in all their dimensions, and in whom the Secretary has enormous confidence." | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu May 20, 2004 8:15 am Post subject: M.P.'s Received Orders to Strip Iraqi Detainees |
| http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/18/politics/18ABUS.html?pagewanted=print&position=
May 18, 2004
INTERROGATIONS
M.P.'s Received Orders to Strip Iraqi Detainees
By ERIC SCHMITT and DOUGLAS JEHL
ASHINGTON, May 17 — The American officer who was in charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison has told a senior Army investigator that intelligence officers sometimes instructed the military police to force Iraqi detainees to strip naked and to shackle them before questioning them. But he said those measures were not imposed "unless there is some good reason."
The officer, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, also told the investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, that his unit had "no formal system in place" to monitor instructions they had given to military guards, who worked closely with interrogators to prepare detainees for interviews. Colonel Pappas said he "should have asked more questions, admittedly" about abuses committed or encouraged by his subordinates.
The statements by Colonel Pappas, contained in the transcript of a Feb. 11 interview that is part of General Taguba's 6,000-page classified report, offer the highest-level confirmation so far that military intelligence soldiers directed military guards in preparing for interrogations. They also provide the first insights by the senior intelligence officer at the prison into the relationship between his troops and the military police. Portions of Colonel Pappas's sworn statements were read to The New York Times by a government official who had read the transcript.
Testimony from guards and detainees at a preliminary hearing for a soldier accused of abuse said that orders from interrogators at Abu Ghraib had stopped short of the graphic abuse seen in the photographs at the center of the prison scandal.
The interrogation techniques Colonel Pappas described were used on detainees protected by the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit inhumane treatment of prisoners. Military officials said on Monday that the United States had months ago quietly abandoned an early plan to designate as unlawful combatants some of the prisoners captured by American forces in Iraq. No prisoners in Iraq were classified as unlawful combatants.
That means that even foreign fighters and suspected Al Qaeda members captured in Iraq, along with Iraqis captured as prisoners of war and insurgents, have remained protected by the Geneva Conventions.
The option of designating prisoners captured in Iraq as unlawful combatants "has not been foreclosed, but this is not under consideration," a senior military official said.
The role of military intelligence officials and civilian contract interrogators at Abu Ghraib is still under investigation by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, the deputy chief of Army intelligence.
Colonel Pappas confirmed in his statements that his unit had enacted several changes recommended by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the head of detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, whom the Pentagon sent to Iraq in August and September to review detention operations.
A major finding of General Miller's visit, Colonel Pappas said, was "to provide dedicated M.P.'s in support of interrogations."
Several military police officers and their commanders at Abu Ghraib have said that military intelligence officers directed them to "set the conditions" to enhance the questioning. When General Taguba asked what safeguards existed to ensure that guards "understand the instructions or limits of instructions, or whether the instructions were legal," Colonel Pappas acknowledged that there were no assurances.
"There would be no way for us to actually monitor whether that happened," Colonel Pappas told General Taguba. "We had no formal system in place to do that."
Colonel Pappas continued, "To my knowledge, instructions given to the M.P.'s, other than what I have mentioned, such as shackling, making detainees strip down or other measures used on detainees before interrogations, are not typically made unless there is some good reason."
Individual interrogation plans were drafted for each detainee, and were approved by Colonel Pappas or his deputy, he said. In every case, he said, the plans followed the guidance in the rules of interrogation that Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top ground commander in Iraq, approved on Oct. 12.
In his report, General Taguba concluded that Colonel Pappas was "either directly or indirectly responsible" for the actions of those who mistreated and humiliated Iraqi prisoners.
Colonel Pappas is a 23-year Army veteran who began his military career after graduating in 1981 from Rutgers University, where he was part of the R.O.T.C. program. He took command of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade in July, after the unit had been in Iraq for more than three months, as part of the V Corps, which is based in Heidelberg, Germany.
Colonel Pappas has declined all interview requests, including one made on Monday through a spokesman for the Army's V Corps in Germany.
In deciding not to invoke the unlawful combatant designation on any prisoners in Iraq, the Bush administration appears to have concluded that detention and interrogation procedures permitted under the Geneva Conventions were adequate even for suspected Al Qaeda members captured in Iraq. The conventions spell out protections that include monitoring by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The United States said at the outset of the war that no one captured in Iraq would be sent to the American prison at Guantánamo Bay that houses Al Qaeda suspects detained in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and none have been.
That new approach is a sharp reversal from the one that Pentagon officials described after the major phase of the war in Iraq ended last May. Then, American officers said that the thousands of prisoners in Iraq were being sorted to determine who among them should be labeled unlawful combatants. The Bush administration has applied that status to Al Qaeda members elsewhere and has used it to justify their indefinite detention at the American base at Guantánamo Bay under conditions not subject to the conventions.
Last May, Col. Karl Goetze, the staff judge advocate for occupation land forces in Iraq, said at a Pentagon briefing that the military intended to segregate "unlawful combatants" from Iraqi prisoners who should be treated as prisoners of war.
"Foreign fighters could fall into the category of unlawful combatants," Colonel Goetze said. He said he expected that only a small percentage of the prisoners in Iraq would be designated "unlawful combatants," but he said, "These are the individuals who raised up, took arms, not carrying them in an open manner, not wearing uniforms; in other words, engaging in tactics and techniques that were not in accordance with the law of armed combat."
On Monday, however, a senior military officer said in an e-mail message that "no persons in Iraq have been declared unlawful combatants." The Iraqi prisoners held in the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib have been labeled security detainees. In testimony addressing the scandal over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners there, American officials have said that the Geneva accords are "fully applicable" to all prisoners held by the United States in Iraq.
Bush administration officials in Iraq have referred often to the presence of foreign fighters among those opposing American forces in Iraq, but American officials have never specified how many foreign fighters are being held captive by the United States. American officials have promised that all Iraqi prisoners would be kept in Iraq, but they have been less explicit about whether the same rules would apply to foreigners.
On Monday, a senior Defense Department official said that high-level Iraqi prisoners held at a site on the outskirts of the Baghdad airport were now being permitted up to three hours of time outside each day, more than the International Committee for the Red Cross observed and described in a February 2004 report.
In the February report, the Red Cross committee said that the estimated 100 prisoners at the site, designated as "high value detainees" by the United States, were being held in isolation for months at a time for as long as 23 hours a day without sunlight. The senior defense official said that representatives of the Red Cross committee had visited the site twice since February, and appeared satisfied with the way the prisoners, who include Tariq Aziz and other former advisers to Saddam Hussein, were being treated.
The Iraq Survey Group, along with another agency that the official would not name, is principally in charge of the interrogation of those prisoners, he said. But he said the rules for their detention and interrogation were set by the Central Command.
Rumsfeld Knew: Iraq Prison Abuse Part of Pentagon-Approved Black Ops Program:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/17/1431219
PENTAGON NEOCON CABAL ORDERED IRAQ PRISON TORTURE:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/05/17/pentagon-neocon-cabal-ordered-iraq-prison-torture.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu May 20, 2004 8:18 am Post subject: Israeli experts in torture have taken part in the torture of |
| ttp://s023.dyndns.org/kawther/K20040519A.html
What follows is the translation of an article published on May 10th, 2004 in the Arabic Palestinian weekly newspaper Al-Manar (Arabic) a widely read newspaper which is published in East Jerusalem. I worked for the Al-Manar between 1991 and 1994. The editor has strong and credible sources in different Arab countries and in Israel.
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Israeli experts in torture have taken part in the torture of the Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib Jail
According to the Al-Manar report which was published on the first page of its edition number 673, The American forces killed 1400 Iraqi prisoner since they occupied Iraq and buried most of them in the desert, far away in the countryside. These prisoners died during torture sessions made by the torture teams, who cut parts of the prisoners bodies.
Al-Manar says that there are over 30,000 Iraqi prisoners spread in different American jails. There is 2100 women and girls among the prisoners, some of them are minors. All the women prisoners have passed through terrible torture sessions, some of them were raped.
Al-Manar points out that the torture instructions were sent in written to the jail guards and to the interrogators. The torture experts were following these instructions and this led to abuse of the the Iraqi prisoners. There torture team seriously harmed 37 children under the age of 13.
Al-Manars sources confirmed that there are Israeli experts of torture taking part in the torture of the Iraqi prisoners. The Israeli torture experts team has transferred to the country of Israel some of the Iraqi political prisoners and military officers to continue the investigation sessions there. Some of these prisoners have already died. The American torture teams add different kinds of inhuman torture in the Iraqi jails besides to the physical torture. They were forcing the prisoners to take different kinds of medicine during the torture session. The medical torture provoked serious symptoms on the prisoners health who had taken the medicine.
Al-Manar mentions that the officers in charge of torturing the detainees at the Iraqi prisons were sending daily reports for Washington with detailed information about the torture methods used at the Iraqi prisons. The reports mentioned that the Iraqi prisoners were also tortured in a prison in Qatar.
Al-Manar said that the American persons whose names have been spread in the news in relation to the now well-known scandal regarding torture of Iraqi prisoners were paid by other higher officers and political addresses in order to hide the real facts behind the torture of the Iraqis. There are high military and political officers involved in this case, but they are hiding behind the lower rank personnel.
Al-Manar sources ended the report saying that there are some American military personnel from the Intelligence and the military police who have more information about the torture in Iraq and who have written documents which were sent to President Georg Bush himself as well as to Pentagon and the military officers. These officers have disappeared. One of these officers was responsible for burying the Iraqi prisoners after their death.
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Do the Israelis really take part in torture of Iraqi prisoners? There are no western newspapers writing about the involvement of Israelis in the torture in Iraq, there was just some initial speculation about this when the scandal broke out, which quickly disappeared. But before answering this question, let us look at some ways in which the Israeli experts were torturing their Palestinian prisoners.
In brief and according to testimonies of women detainees which I collected during the first intifada by directly visiting and talking to these persons after they were released from Israeli imprisonment, and by searching through the Al-Haq Organization for the Human Rights in Ramallah.
Al-Shabah: during the first few days, there are likely to be at least two interrogation sessions each twenty four hours, each one lasting for several hours. Between the interrogation sessions, the detainee may be placed in the "Shabah" or "coffin". Both methods make sleep impossible. Shabah means that the detainee is made to squat stand with legs bent, or is made to sit handcuffed to the wall of an outdoor yard. The "Coffin" is a tiny cell measuring about one meter square into which the detainee is locked for hours at a time.
Beatings: Women are routinely slapped, and kicked during interrogation session if they do not readily answer questions. The interrogator will bang the women's head against the wall during the same session. This was the most common and easy way of torture at the Israeli jails in which the mental state of many prisoners had been severely affected.
Electric Shocks: the Israeli interrogators used the electric shock chair shock during the investigation. For example, nineteen year old Maryam Qadumi said that from the beginning of her interrogation, the Shabak, the Israeli Intelligence, had used electric shocks. The interrogators asked her questions and when she refused to talk, they took her to a room with a red light and a special chair. The chair was made of iron and leather and had wires attached to it. She was made to sit on it and a prison officer connected the wires to her legs and arms. She was extremely frightened. The interrogator who was in charge told the prison officer to turn on the current. After this session they took her to the tiny cell for a couple of hours and then took her back to the interrogation room.
Sexual Harassment: while the detainee is becoming progressively weaker from the combination of sleep, food deprivation and physical a abuse, she must also cope with a barrage of verbal sexual taunts, threats and in some cases actual assault. Generally these assaults occur during interrogation sessions.
Hanan Rahim describes her first interrogation session in the Jelme detention Center as follows. "It was my first arrest. The interrogator who was doing most of the talking kept insulting me, using sexual insults like "whore" or "bitch". He told me to look him in the eyes as he spoke to me, but I avoided his gaze, various threat were made to me, they said that would rape me and that they would kill me. They also said that they would put me with collaborators, and that since there were no women collaborators available, they would put me in a room with male collaborators."
The number of interrogators in each session varies, usually between about two and six. All the interrogators are male, the detainee is acutely aware that she is in their sole custody, there in nobody for her to complain to, or to seek protection from.
One of the most severe reported cases of sexual harassment and actual assault occurred to Fatma Abu Bakra from Gaza, who was being held in Ashkelon Jail. Fatma was interrogated for a period of fifty days, and eventually made a confession as a result of the sexual harassment. She reports:
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"An interrogator calling himself "Abu Allah", which mean "Father of God", took me to another room, I was alone and he played with my face and my body, breast and my genitals, then said "I want to get inside you now, this will be very beautiful and a big enjoyment". My hands were tied so I pushed his face away from me and started to hit my head against the wall. He ordered me to sit on floor in the corner, he then sat in front of me on a chair with his legs open. When I pushed his hands and body away, he used a megaphone to ask another policeman to bring him a special hat with a sponge and handcuffs. Apparently this special hat was to protect my head, he hand cuffed my hands behind my back, while he was doing that, I was shouting at him that I would expose what he was doing to the world. His response was "I want to fuck you inside and I don't care about you, and the public opinion, lawyers or the Red Cross". We were still alone in the room. Then he started to play with my body. He put this special hat on my head and went back to sitting the same way while I was in the corner. I screamed all the time and he said. "you have a nice body for fucking, and you must confess now and say anything, you have to say something otherwise I will transfer you from jail to the jail grave, I'll rape you then I will kill you".
At that moment a police woman knocked on the door and he quickly took his hands away from me. She told him something and he said, "I'm coming". She left the room and he was still sitting on the chair. He opened my handcuffs and went to the door. The whole time his condition was not normal. I was saw his pants zipper was open and the underwear was full. He left me and I was still sitting on the floor. When he came back, he took me out of the room and interrogated me in the presence of a policewoman. I can't say exactly what day this happened, but it was at night about 20PM. I didn't tell the interrogators or the policewoman about what happened to me. I was a afraid of his revenge, especially after he told me that he didn't care about public opinion, I want to say that I was too embarrassed to give details of this event to the male lawyer who came once to visit me, but it's easier for me now to talk in front of you as a woman. She added that there was another event concerning the interrogator "Steve". He had a picture in his pocket and often when he talked with me, he would take the picture out of his pocket and order me to look at it. I always refused and looked away. He then would yell at me and force me to look at it. I saw a picture the size of cigarette packet, of a man who who had a very big penis. He told me "That's me when I was young. Look how big my penis was. Now it's ten times bigger and I'm going to fuck you with this bigger penis". He tore of my clothes and I started screaming and hitting my head against the wall, "Abu Allah" and the policewoman were in the room at that time. "Abu Allah" stood between me and "Steve", and Steve took off his pants and underwear. I screamed and the policewoman covered her eyes with her hands and started laughing. Then he caught me and pushed my body while I continue screaming. Then he ejaculated on me and put his cloths back on, and began to hit me on the head. At that time Abu Allah had left and the policewoman was still in the room. I don't remember the exact date of this event. This all happened but it was two days after the event of "Abu Allah".
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For further sexual harassment stories and information concerning women harassed by the Israeli interrogators, don't hesitate to write me or to check the human rights sources, especially Al-Haq. I can also provide anyone interested in this matter with some of my researches.
In this article I just described some examples which came to mind after I read about the Iraqi prisoner torture testimony, in which I read that one of the interrogators told the Iraqi detainee while torturing him that he was called "the Evil Abu Allah". This reminded me of the Israeli sexual harassment during the interrogations by the Israeli experts "Steve" and the other one who called himself "Abu Allah" during the sexual torture of Palestinian women detainees. Actually, the Israeli interrogation and torture teams are using the same language everywhere they go, without limit.
Thinking about this I wondered if the same Israeli team of torture experts, Abu Allah", "Steve" and other qualified Israelis were torturing the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib ? The American Pentagon confirmed that there were a foreign interrogators at Abu Ghraib. That's mean there is a big possibility that the Israeli interrogators were taking part in the torture at the Iraqi jails. The Israeli interrogators are fluent in the Arabic language, and furthermore they have teached at U.S military schools. They are more trusted than the others by the U.S. and they have the same interests in Iraq as the U.S. It is not a secret that Israel itself was very interested in this war against Iraq, what better than executing it through their proxy, the U.S.
The Israeli Foreign Minister Salman Shoval was in a discussion with the U.S government about the particiation of Israeli companies in the "reconstruction" of Iraq, according to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot. Further informations about the presence of the Israelis in Iraq to which I have to point in this report comes from information in Turkish newspapers which was also published in Yediot Ahronot.
According to Yediot Ahronot, the Turkish government is very angry: the Turkish newspaper "Ashkam" published a report about Israeli activities of searching oil in the northern part of Iraq. The report mentioned that Israelis bought from the Kurdish people land in the Al-Mosul region and started searching for the oil there. The Turkish government was very angry with what the Israeli are doing, since these activities like will affect the Turkish interest in the region. Tthe two governments have reportedly exchanged several official letters concerning this matter.
Another Turkish newspaper, Jumhuriyah, wrote an article on the first page with the the title "Israel owns the Oil Lands, A second occupation in Iraq". Israels response was that "There was no connection between Israel and the Kurds in Iraq, and if there is an Israeli activities there, these belong to Israeli private companies". In general most of the Israeli private companies are owned by high-ranking military commanders, and there is no difference between the private Israeli companies and the governmental companies, or private and governmental interests. They all serve the interests of the Zionist occupation.
Finally, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Mustakbal (Arabic) and Arabic edition of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot both published on 15 May 2004 reports that the Turkish Government had cancelled all military contracts and agreements which were signed with Israel, and had frozen all the agreements which were to be signed. The decision included cancellation the other agreements which had been signed with American companies. This comes under the new policy of the Turkish Government, which refuses the strategy of military cooperation with Tel Aviv. The decision made during an official session held by Prime Minister Rajab Tayeb Erdogan with the presence of the Turkish Chief of Staff Hilmi Aozkok and Defense Minister Wajde Gonol. The Turkish Government declared that they will open new military bids, about which there will probably be talks with European companies from France, Britain and Germany.
The newspapers mention that Turkey refused the Israeli application to visit Ankara. Furthermore Mr. Abed-Allah Al-Gool, the Turkish Foreign Minister, cancelled an already scheduled visit to Israel. The President of Turkey Mr. Erdogan refused to welcome Premier Sharon at the airport of Ankara during his last visit to Turkey.
The projects which Turkia had signed with Israel and which have been cancelled by Turkey were: Development of a Turkish airplanes AF-15 and AF-16. Turkey also cancelled joint development of a Tank and industrialization deal with Israel. Turkey also cancelled an agreement to buy Israeli helicopters of Russian origin. These project had been signed in 1996. The volume of these two projects alone is reported to be about 6 billiion Dollars. According to the report, the Turkish Prime Minister also cancelled a secret agreement to buy 12 unmanned spy airplanes from Israel.
The question is, what are the real fact behind the cancellations of these agreements with Israeli and American companies at the same time? Is the Turkish government still angry with Israel because they are threatening their interests in the Kurdish lands in the northern part of Iraq? | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu May 20, 2004 9:33 am Post subject: Focus on the culprits! Rumsfeld's "intelligence" |
| Subj: Focus on the culprits! Rumsfeld's "intelligence"
Date: 5/20/04 2:24:29 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From: LAdams
In 1997, a group of hard-line radicals met and formed the PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY (PNAC). PNAC was the product of a marriage between the "neocons" and religious extremists. Funded by Rupert Murdoch and Richard Melon Scaiffe, the PNAC boasted prominent leaders of the right. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Jeb Bush were charter members, just to name a few.
At the onset, Iraq and several other Middle Eastern nations were their subjects of interest. In fact, they proposed invasion to establish a permanent U.S. military and economic presence in the region. In September 2000, they hoped for a "new Pearl Harbor" to ignite America to action in the Middle East. A year later (9/11/01), their wish came true. Coincidence? They forced themselves into the White House in 2001. The same group born in 1997 spread lies to entice America into war, and then members of the same group initiated the prisoner abuse interrogation program in which the Geneva Convention was violated at will. Bush called the Convention "obsolete" and "irrelevant." Attitude means everything, and his is that of dictator. Rumsfeld is simply carrying out the wishes of his boss. The rest is history.
The neocon group, OFFICE OF SPECIAL PLANS (OSP), was set up in the Pentagon by Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz to make fact out of lies. Intelligence gathering was diverted from the CIA to the private contractor OSP so that the neocons could manipulate intelligence without the obstruction of congressional oversight -- since information was derived from a "private" source. They succeeded. We went to war.
They set up another bogus group in the Pentagon, Special Access Program (SAP), to organize interrogation of prisoners outside the Geneva Convention and congressional oversight. They succeeded. Prisoners were abused, beated, and murdered.
The plotters used the same tactic to set up both, and the individuals in both groups are related by political and financial ties. They come from the same group.
They LIED us into WAR and could care less how many DIED. They twisted the truth, set up bogus private contractors to drain money from the national treasure and circumvent congressional oversight for their dirty deeds. They set up detention centers diametrically opposed to the Geneva Convention, breaching the most basic human rights provisions. They cover up all, not for our best interests, not for the best interests of Iraq, but their own. And now we face an election season where we should not be surprised at outright coup d'etat. The next big attack on the U.S. (permitted to happen) spells the end of the Republic. Are you ready?
Re-read Seymour Hersh's article; study its content. You too will gain a broader view of what's happening before our eyes. L.A.
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
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 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(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.
Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read on to 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.’”
“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.
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.
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.
...By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon’s political and military misjudgments was clear... 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’s auspices...
Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison at Abu Ghraib. The 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. 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, ““In an odd way,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. “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”
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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.
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