How A Secret
Pentagon Program
Came To Abu Ghraib
By Seymour M.
Hersh
17 May, 2004
The
New Yorker
The roots of the
Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a
few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which
had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of
prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfelds decision embittered the American
intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat
units, and hurt Americas prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews
with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagons
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 Rumsfelds long-standing desire to wrest control of Americas
clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Rumsfeld, during
appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was
precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in
an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling
the public all that he knew about the story. He said, Any suggestion
that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the
damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding. The
senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfelds testimony and that
of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, Some
people think you can bullshit anyone.
The Abu Ghraib story
began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks,
with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the
Administrations search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and
its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control
problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight
had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th,
the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an
automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah
Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States
Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize
a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of
reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating
hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer
described him to me that fall as kicking a lot of glass and breaking
doors. In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many
as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed theyd
had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been
unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar
problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking
to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to
get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors
in the chain of command.
Rumsfeld reacted
in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly
secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture
and, if possible, interrogate high value targets in the
Bush Administrations war on terror. A special-access program,
or sapsubject to the Defense Departments most stringent
level of securitywas set up, with an office in a secure area of
the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary
equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps.
Americas most successful intelligence operations during the Cold
War had been saps, including the Navys submarine penetration of
underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of
the Air Forces stealth bomber. All the so-called black
programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his
deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints
did not provide enough security.
Rumsfelds
goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value targeta
standup group to hit quickly, a former high-level intelligence
official told me. He got all the agencies togetherthe C.I.A.
and the N.S.A.to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code
word and go. The operation had across-the-board approval from
Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President
Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence
official said.
The people assigned
to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official
told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening,
highly trained commandos and operatives from Americas élite
forcesNavy seals, the Armys 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 militarys
facilities at Guantánamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogationsusing
force if necessaryat secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered
around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command
center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of
information critical to the white, or overt, world.
Fewer than two hundred
operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were completely read into
the program, the former intelligence official said. The goal was
to keep the operation protected. Were not going to read
more people than necessary into our heart of darkness, he said.
The rules are Grab whom you must. Do what you want.
One Pentagon official
who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was
named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The
office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfelds reorganization
of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence
bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience
in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff
director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging
ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead
for his closeness to Rumsfeld. Remember Henry IIWho
will rid me of this meddlesome priest? the senior C.I.A.
official said to me, with a laugh, last week. Whatever Rumsfeld
whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.
Cambone was a strong
advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfelds 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. Cambones 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. Its been the most
important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If
we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove
an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United Statesand
do so without visibility. Some of its methods were troubling and
could not bear close scrutiny, however.
By then, the war
in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some assignments in Iraq,
the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives
secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein andwithout successfor
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they werent able to stop
the evolving insurgency.
In the first months
after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides still had a limited
view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of Baathist
dead-enders, criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who
were Al Qaeda followers. The Administration measured its success in
the war by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted
members of the old regimereproduced on playing cardshad
been captured. Then, in August, 2003, terror bombings in Baghdad hit
the Jordanian Embassy, killing nineteen people, and the United Nations
headquarters, killing twenty-three people, including Sergio Vieira de
Mello, the head of the U.N. mission. On August 25th, less than a week
after the U.N. bombing, Rumsfeld acknowledged, in a talk before the
Veterans of Foreign Wars, that the dead-enders are still with
us. He went on, There are some today who are surprised that
there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they suggest that
this represents some sort of failure on the part of the Coalition. But
this is not the case. Rumsfeld compared the insurgents with those
true believers who fought on during and after the defeat of the
Nazi regime in Germany. A few weeks laterand five months
after the fall of Baghdadthe Defense Secretary declared,It
is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in Iraq than in
the United States.
Inside the Pentagon,
there was a growing realization that the war was going badly. The increasingly
beleaguered and baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that the
insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein.
When you understand that theyre organized in a cellular
structure, General John Abizaid, the head of the Central Command,
declared, that . . . they have access to a lot of money and a
lot of ammunition, youll understand how dangerous they are.
The American military
and intelligence communities were having little success in penetrating
the insurgency. One internal report prepared for the U.S. military,
made available to me, concluded that the insurgentsstrategic
and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good. According
to the study:
Their ability to
attack convoys, other vulnerable targets and particular individuals
has been the result of painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance.
Inside information has been passed on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop
movements and daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition from within
the Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi Police force which
is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi ministries and from
within pro-insurgent individuals working with the CPAs so-called
Green Zone.
The study concluded, Politically, the U.S. has failed to date.
Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused
them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of
Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate
government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb
the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing
Councilthe Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.as
the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the
CPA.
By the fall, a military
analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagons political and military
misjudgments was clear. Donald Rumsfelds dead-enders
now included not only Baathists but many marginal figures as wellthugs
and criminals who were among the tens of thousands of prisoners freed
the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general amnesty. Their
desperation was not driving the insurgency; it simply made them easy
recruits for those who were. The analyst said, Wed killed
and captured guys who had been given two or three hundred dollars to
pray and spraythat is, shoot randomly and hope
for the best. They werent really insurgents but down-and-outers
who were paid by wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency.
In many cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the
Baath Party. The analyst said that the insurgents spent three
or four months figuring out how we operated and developing their own
countermeasures. If that meant putting up a hapless guy to go and attack
a convoy and see how the American troops responded, theyd do it.
Then, the analyst said, the clever ones began to get in on the
action.
By contrast, according
to the military report, the American and Coalition forces knew little
about the insurgency: Human intelligence is poor or lacking .
. . due to the dearth of competence and expertise. . . . The intelligence
effort is not coördinated since either too many groups are involved
in gathering intelligence or the final product does not get to the troops
in the field in a timely manner. The success of the war was at
risk; something had to be done to change the dynamic.
The solution, endorsed
by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with
those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents.
A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the
detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been
summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures.
The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General
Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders
in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of
the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that detention
operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.
Millers concept,
as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to Gitmoize
the prison system in Iraqto make it more focussed on interrogation.
He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods
used in Cubamethods that could, with special approval, include
sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing
prisoners in stress positions for agonizing lengths of time.
(The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other
captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants,
and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)
Rumsfeld and Cambone
went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap, bringing
its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate
in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated
roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.
They werent
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, Ive got to crack this thing and
Im tired of working through the normal chain of command. Ive
got this apparatus set upthe black special-access programand
Im going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins
flowing last summer. And its working. Were getting a picture
of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white
world. Were getting good stuff. But weve got more targetsprisoners
in Iraqi jailsthan people who can handle them.
Cambone then made
another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me:
not only would he bring the saps rules into the prisons; he would
bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside
the Iraqi prisons under the sapsauspices. So here are fundamentally
good soldiersmilitary-intelligence guysbeing told that no
rules apply, the former official, who has extensive knowledge
of the special-access programs, added. And, as far as theyre
concerned, this is a covert operation, and its to be kept within
Defense Department channels.
The military-police
prison guards, the former official said, included recycled hillbillies
from Cumberland, Maryland. He was referring to members of the
372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now
facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. How
are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve
doesnt know what its doing.
Who was in charge
of Abu Ghraibwhether military police or military intelligencewas
no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives,
some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military
police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many othersmilitary
intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the
men from the special-access programwore civilian clothes. It was
not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then
the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer
ostensibly in charge. I thought most of the civilians there were
interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didnt know,
Karpinski told me. I called them the disappearing ghosts. Id
seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then Id see them months
later. They were nicetheyd always call out to me and say,
Hey, remember me? How are you doing? The mysterious
civilians, she said, were always bringing in somebody for interrogation
or waiting to collect somebody going out. Karpinski added that
she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba
found that Karpinskis leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)
By fall, according
to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A.
had had enough. They said, No way. We signed up for the
core program in Afghanistanpre-approved for operations against
high-value terrorist targetsand now you want to use it for cabdrivers,
brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streetsthe
sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. The C.I.A.s
legal people objected, and the agency ended its sap involvement
in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.
The C.I.A.s
complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There
was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure
of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before
Iraq, a valuable cover operation. This was stupidity, a
government consultant told me. Youre taking a program that
was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless
terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone.
Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures
of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand
soldiers.
The former senior
intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. Theres
nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing
with an important national security issue without dealing with military
planners, who are always worried about risk, he told me. What
could be more boring than needing the coöperation of logistical
planners? The only difficulty, the former official added, is that,
as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight
capability of experienced people, you lose control. Weve never
had a case where a special-access program went sourand this goes
back to the Cold War.
In a separate interview,
a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved
with special-access programs, spread the blame. The White House
subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it
to Cambone, he said. This is Cambones 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
hes responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that,
since 9/11, weve changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism,
and created conditions where the ends justify the means.
Last week, statements
made by one of the seven accused M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who
is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that
senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had they
witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at any trial,
however, is why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of
them from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner
that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men.
The notion that
Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking
point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the
March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was
The Arab Mind, a study of Arab culture and psychology, first
published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught
at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in
1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex,
depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. The
segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the
other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and
women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in
the Arab world, Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, or any
indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of
sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and
remain in private. The Patai book, an academic told me, was the
bible of the neocons on Arab behavior. In their discussions, he
said, two themes emergedone, that Arabs only understand
force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.
The government consultant
said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind
the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that
some prisoners would do anythingincluding spying on their associatesto
avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The
government consultant said, I was told that the purpose of the
photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert
back in the population. The idea was that they would be motivated
by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency
action, the consultant said. If so, it wasnt effective; the insurgency
continued to grow.
This shit
has been brewing for months, the Pentagon consultant who has dealt
with saps told me. You dont keep prisoners naked in their
cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick. The consultant
explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years
on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army
guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. We dont raise kids to do things
like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, thats one thing. But
when you give the authority to kids who dont know the rules, thats
another.
In 2003, Rumsfelds
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 Generals (jag) Corps to pay two
surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman
of the New York City Bar Associations 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 its going to occur. The military
officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors
in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. They said there
was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a
policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers
were being cut out of the policy formulation process. They told
him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary
application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.
The abuses at Abu
Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military
policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Armys
Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs.
Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed
President Bush.
The inquiry presented
a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue,
the former intelligence official said. You cant cover it
up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation.
But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access
program? So you hope that maybe itll go away. The Pentagons
attitude last January, he said, was Somebody got caught with some
photos. Whats the big deal? Take care of it. Rumsfelds
explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring:
Weve got a glitch in the program. Well prosecute
it. The cover story was that some kids got out of control.
In their testimony
before Congress last week, Rumsfeld and Cambone struggled to convince
the legislators that Millers visit to Baghdad in late August had
nothing to do with the subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure the
Senate Armed Services Committee that the interplay between Miller and
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq,
had only a casual connection to his office. Millers recommendations,
Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own role, he said, was mainly
to insure that the flow of intelligence back to the commands
was efficient and effective. He added that Millers
goal was to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that
supports the expeditious collection of intelligence.
It was a hard sell.
Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York, posed the essential question
facing the senators:
If, indeed, General
Miller was sent from Guantánamo to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring
more actionable intelligence from detainees, then it is fair to conclude
that the actions that are at point here in your report [on abuses at
Abu Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Millers arrival
and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those MPs
and the military intelligence that were involved.. . .Therefore, I for
one dont believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone
and the Defense Department as to exactly what General Millers
orders were . . . how he carried out those orders, and the connection
between his arrival in the fall of 03 and the intensity of the
abuses that occurred afterward.
Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the former intelligence
official told me, Miller was read inthat is, briefedon
the special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to
assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its
glaring headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and
international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison
system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. His job
is to save what he can, the former official said. Hes
there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability.
As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence official added, He
goes into it not knowing shit. And then: Holy cow! Whats
going on?
If General Miller
had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone,
would not have been able to mention the special-access program. If
you give away the fact that a special-access program exists,the
former intelligence official told me, you blow the whole quick-reaction
program.
One puzzling aspect
of Rumsfelds account of his initial reaction to news of the Abu
Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of curiosity. One
factor may have been recent history: there had been many previous complaints
of prisoner abuse from organization like Human Rights Watch and the
International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them with ease.
Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had not been
provided with details of alleged abuses until late March, when he read
the specific charges. You read it, as I say, its one thing.
You see these photographs and its just unbelievable. . . . It
wasnt three-dimensional. It wasnt video. It wasnt
color. It was quite a different thing. The former intelligence
official said that, in his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon
officials had not studied the photographs because they thought
what was in there was permitted under the rules of engagement,
as applied to the sap. The photos, he added, turned
out to be the result of the program run amok.
The former intelligence
official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or General
Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But, he said, it was
their permission granted to do the sap, generically, and there was enough
ambiguity, which permitted the abuses.
This official went
on, The black guysthose in the Pentagons secret
programsay weve got to accept the prosecution. Theyre
vaccinated from the reality. The sap is still active, and the
United States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is,
how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?
The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was
allowed to know of its existence. If you even give a hint that
youre aware of a black program that youre not read into,
you lose your clearances, the former official said. Nobody
will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefendedthe
poor kids at the end of the food chain.
The most vulnerable
senior official is Cambone. The Pentagon is trying now to protect
Cambone, and doesnt know how to do it, the former intelligence
official said.
Last week, the government
consultant, who has close ties to many conservatives, defended the Administrations
continued secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib. Why
keep it black? the consultant asked. Because the process
is unpleasant. Its like making sausageyou like the result
but you dont want to know how it was made. Also, you dont
want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. Remember, we went
to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do
is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison.
The former intelligence
official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the
prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations
in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of
resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as a tumor
on the war on terror. He said, As long as its benign and
contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing
the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose
itit becomes a malignant tumor.
The Pentagon consultant
made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said,
created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place.
And now were going to end up with another Church Commissionthe
1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church,
of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades.
Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable
to handle its discretionary power. When the shit hits the fan,
as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal? the consultant asked.
You do it selectively and with intelligence.
Congress is
going to get to the bottom of this, the Pentagon consultant said.
You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in
the system. He added, When you live in a world of gray zones,
you have to have very clear red lines.
Senator John McCain,
of Arizona, said, If this is true, it certainly increases the
dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do
all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.
In an odd
way, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch,
said, the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion
for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that
is authorized. Since September 11th, Roth added, the military
has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on
detainees. Some jags hate this and are horrified that the tolerance
of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war, Roth
told me. Were giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore
the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.