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View Full Version : Rumsfeld's Rules: "Grab Whom You Must. Do What You Want."


sam h
05-15-2004, 11:27 PM
An interesting, and pretty damning, story was posted today on the New Yorker's Web site. I imagine it will be published in print next week. It is the most vivid and, to me at least, convincing take on how and why things went awry in Abu Ghraib that I have seen in the media to this point.

Like their other Abu Ghraib coverage, it is a Seymour Hersch piece. In it he claims, based on interviews with current and former intelligence officials, that the Abu Ghraib disaster is directly related to Rumsfeld's creation and mismanagement of a "black" program - esentially a secret, compartmentalized operation - after 9/11 to better wage the war in Afghanistan.

The original intent of the program was to cobble together a bunch of ruthless special forces types - both currently in the military and many civilians as well - who would be authorized to kill and interrogate "high-value targets" outside of normal oversight channels. Apparently, the primary impetus for putting the program together was a series of missed opportunities due to military red tape.

The people in this "black program" had only limited involvement in the invasion of Iraq and immediate after-war period. But when the aftermath of the war really started going badly late last summer and in the fall, people in the Pentagon decided that better intelligence was needed on the insurgents and that the place to start was with Iraqi prisoners. One step was to bring over the head of the interrogation center at Guantanamo, who briefed people in Iraq about a variety of ways to loosen tongues. Another, more drastic one, was to really bring the "black program" to Iraq and specifically to Abu Ghraib. The story claims that this was cooked up by Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence who was somewhat in charge of the "black program" and a very close Rumsfeld confidante.

Here is a chunk of the story (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact).

“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’sauspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”

The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included “recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. “How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib—whether military police or military intelligence—was 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 others—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. They were nice—they’d always call out to me and say, ‘Hey, remember me? How are you doing?’” The mysterious civilians, she said, were “always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.” Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski’s leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in 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.

The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”

The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. “There’s nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk,” he told me. “What could be more boring than needing the coöperation of logistical planners?”

sam h
05-16-2004, 12:48 AM
[ QUOTE ]
"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.

"The abuse evidenced in the videos and photos, and any similar abuse that may come to light in any of the ongoing half dozen investigations into this matter, has no basis in any sanctioned program, training manual, instruction, or order in the Department of Defense.

"No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos.

"To correct one of the many errors in fact, Undersecretary Cambone has no responsibility, nor has he had any responsibility in the past, for detainee or interrogation programs in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else in the world.

"This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense."

[/ QUOTE ]

That was a pretty quick turnaround on the press release. Perhaps somebody upstairs is worried.

Hersch, by the way, is the man who broke the Mai Lai massacre and somebody widely considered to have both excellent connections and very high journalistic integrity. I don't think anybody who has really followed his work would think it likely at all that he was A) suckered unknowingly by a bunch of disgruntled sources out to get the administration (he's too well-traveled and smart for that) or B) somebody who would essentially make this story up (he is clearly a critic of the administration, but just as clearly somebody who takes responsible journalism seriously).

andyfox
05-16-2004, 01:49 AM
"This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense."

Strange sentence, that one.

All the handwringing reminds me of the line from Casablanca when the officials says he's shocked, shocked, to find gamling going on and then they bring him his winnings.

sfer
05-16-2004, 09:57 AM
[ QUOTE ]
Hersch, by the way, is the man who broke the Mai Lai massacre and somebody widely considered to have both excellent connections and very high journalistic integrity.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, I'm not exactly a Rumsfeld apologist, and I love the New Yorker, but Hersch's record isn't entirely spotless. He was duped about 10 years ago by some JFK assassination hoaxers. And the way he was characterized by Woodward and Bernstein in "All the President's Men" certainly seems more than slightly odd. Anyway, to take another thought from ATPM, I kept thinking Non-Denial Denial as I read the Press Release Excerpts.