Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman so much for allowing this intervention, and I begin by commending my colleagues from Pennsylvania and Hawaii and the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt). It…
Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman so much for allowing this intervention, and I begin by commending my colleagues from Pennsylvania and Hawaii and the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt).
It is my intention to offer into this discussion The New Yorker article entitled The Gray Zone by Seymour Hersh, which raises one of these other incidents that the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) has referred to, and that is, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the ongoing furor that has taken place around the world.
I would like to ask my colleagues in the course of our discussion this evening whether they feel a need for an investigation conducted from the outside as the 9/11 Commission has, which
it recently concluded, the Warren Commission in terms of the John F. Kennedy assassination, because this problem is beginning to tarnish our Nation's war against terrorism, and without a full and complete and impartial investigation, we will add another way of undermining our national moral authority.
I just wanted to point out that it is mentioned in this article that will be reprinted that, ``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 CIA and the NSA, to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.' The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleeza Rice, the national security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.''
Here, ``Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate `high value' targets in the Bush administration's war on terror.''
The people, and I conclude with this, ``the people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me,'' this is Seymour Hersh. ``They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America's elite forces, Navy SEALs, the Army's Delta Force, and the CIA'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 other words, a deliberate development of a plan not only to commit these outrageous atrocities that have shocked the world but a way to avoid congressional scrutiny.
I will insert this article that I referred to earlier at this point in the Record.
[From The New Yorker, May 17, 2004]
The Gray Zone
(By Seymour M. Hersh)
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the
criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a
decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been
focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of
prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the
American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of
elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war
on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present
American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation,
known inside the intelligence community by several code
words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion
and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to
generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in
Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of
this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from
Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's
clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to
testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from
explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an
unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was
telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said,
``Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of
what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would
be a misunderstanding.'' The senior C.I.A. official, asked
about Rumsfeld's testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his
Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, ``Some people think
you can bullshit anyone.''
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after
the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of
Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration's
search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its
worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major
command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that
had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance
before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing
began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile
convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah
Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the
United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa,
Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack
was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was
apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to
attack that was due to political correctness. One officer
described him to me that fall as ``kicking a lot of glass and
breaking doors.'' In November, the Washington Post reported
that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force
pilots believed they'd had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban
members in their sights but had been unable to act in time
because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems
throughout the world, as American Special Forces units
seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells
were compelled to get prior approval from local American
ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of
command.
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized
the establishment of a highly secret program that was given
blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible,
interrogate ``high value'' targets in the Bush
Administration's war on terror. A special-access program, or
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. All the so-
called ``black'' programs had one element in common: the
Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the
normal military classification restraints did not provide
enough security.
``Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take
on a high-value 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 elite 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 Guantanamo, 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.
Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including
Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, were ``completely read into the program,''
the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep
the operation protected. ``We're not going to read more
people than necessary into our heart of darkness,'' he said.
``The rules are `Grab whom you must. Do what you want.'''
One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the
program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of
Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new;
it was created as part of Rumsfeld's reorganization of the
Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian
intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because
he had little experience in running intelligence programs,
though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a
committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging
ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known
instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. ``Remember Henry II--
`Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?''' the senior
C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week.
``Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten
times that much.''
Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He
shared Rumsfeld's disdain for the analysis and assessments
proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and
chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.'s inability, before
the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein
harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone's military
assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry)
Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated
unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech
at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with
Satan.
Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle
within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of
all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on
terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the
Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth
deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence
programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently
left
the Pentagon. Asked for comment on this story, a Pentagon
spokesman said, ``I will not discuss any covert programs;
however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his position as the
Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence until March 7,
2003, and had no involvement in the decision-making process
regarding interrogation procedures in Iraq or anywhere
else.''
In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the
Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror.
``It was an active program,'' the former intelligence
official told me. ``It's been the most important capability
we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover
where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove
an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United
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. But they weren't able to stop
the evolving insurgency.
In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and
his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing
it as little more than the work of Baathist ``dead-enders,''
criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda
followers. The Administration measured its success in the war
by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most
wanted members of the old regime--reproduced on playing
cards--had 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 later--and five months
after the fall of Baghdad--the Defense Secretary declared,
``It is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in
Iraq than in the United States.''
Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that
the war was going badly. The increasingly beleaguered and
baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that the
insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal to
Saddam Hussein. ``When you understand that they're organized
in a cellular structure,'' General Jon Abizaid, the head of
the Central Command declared, ``that . . . they have access
to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you'll understand
how dangerous they are.''
The American military and intelligence communities were
having little success in penetrating the insurgency. One
internal report prepared for the U.S. military, made
available to me, concluded that the insurgents' ``strategic
and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good.''
According to the study:
Their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable targets
and particular individuals has been the result of painstaking
surveillance and reconnaissance. Inside information has been
passed on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop movements and
daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition from within the
Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi Police force
which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi
ministries and from within pro-insurgent individuals working
with the CPA's so-called Green Zone.
The study concluded, ``Politically, the U.S. has failed to
date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing
with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that
is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the
insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it
behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the
sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the
Governing Council''--the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.--
``as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the
true power is the CPA.''
By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the
Pentagon's political and military misjudgments was clear.
Donald Rumsfeld's ``dead-enders'' now included not only
Baathists but many marginal figures as well--thugs and
criminals who were among the tens of thousands of prisoners
freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general
amnesty. Their desperation was not driving the insurgency; it
simply made them easy recruits for those who were. The
analyst said, ``We'd killed and captured guys who had been
given two or three hundred dollars to `pray and spray' ''--
that is, shoot randomly and hope for the best. ``They weren't
really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by
wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency.'' In many
cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the
Baath Party. The analyst said, that the insurgents ``spent
three of four months figuring out how we operated and
developing their own countermeasures. If that meant putting
up a hapless guy to go and attack a convoy and see how the
American troops responded, they'd do it.'' Then, the analyst
said.``the clever ones began to get in on the action.''
By contrast, according to the military report, the American
and Coalition forces knew little about the insurgency:
``Human intelligence is poor or lacking . . . due to the
dearth of competence and expertise. . . . The intelligence
effort is not coordinated 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 Guantanamo, 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. ``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
cooperation of logistical planners?'' The only difficulty,
the former official added, is that, ``as soon as you enlarge
the secret program beyond the oversight capability of
experienced people, you lose control. We've never had a case
where a special-access program went sour--and this goes back
to the Cold War.''
In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent
much of his career directly involved with special-access
programs, spread the blame. ``The White House subcontracted
this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to
Cambone,'' he said. ``This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld
and Myers approved the program.'' When it came to the
interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left
the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally
culpable, the consultant added, ``but he's responsible for
the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we've
changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created
conditions where the ends justify the means.''
Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused
M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead
guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that senior
commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had they
witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at
any trial, however, it why a group of Army Reserve military
policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their
prisoners as they did, in a manner that was especially
humiliating for Iraqi men.
The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual
humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington
conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion
of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was ``The Arab
Mind,'' a study of Arab culture and psychology, first
published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural
anthropologist who taught at, among other universities,
Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book
includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex,
depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression.
``The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . .
. and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict
contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex
a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,'' Patai
wrote. Homosexual activity, ``or any indication of homosexual
leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is
never given any publicity. These are private affairs and
remain in private.'' The Patai book, an academic told me, was
``the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.'' In their
discussions, he said, two themes emerged--``one, that Arabs
only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of
Arabs is shame and humiliation.''
The government consultant said that there may have been a
serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation
and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners
would do 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.
``This shit has been brewing for months,'' the Pentagon
consultant who has dealt with SAPs told me. ``You don't keep
prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by
dogs. This is sick.'' The consultant explained that he and
his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active
duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army
guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. ``We don't raise kids to do
things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that's one
thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don't know
the rules, that's another.''
In 2003, Rumsfeld's apparent disregard for the requirements
of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on
terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from
the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps to pay two surprise
visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then
chairman of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on
International Human Rights. ``They wanted us to challenge the
Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and
interrogation,'' Horton told me. ``They were urging us to get
involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much
out the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for
abuse, and it's going to occur.'' The military officials were
most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in
the interrogation process, Horton recalled. ``They said there
was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a
result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the
Pentagon. The JAG officers were being cut out of the policy
formulation process.'' They told him that, with the war on
terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the
Geneva Conventions had come to an end.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when
Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu
Gharib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army's Criminal
Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of
photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to
Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.
The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The
C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence
official said. ``You can't cover it up. You have to prosecute
these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you
prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access
program? So you hope that maybe it'll go away.'' The
Pentagon's attitude last January, he said, was ``Somebody got
caught with some photos. What's the big deal? Take care of
it.'' Rumsfeld's explanation to the White House, the official
added, was reassuring. ``We've got a glitch in the program.
We'll prosecute it.' The cover story was that some kids got
out of control.''
In their testimony before Congress last week, Rumsfeld and
Cambone struggled to convince the legislators that Miller's
visit to Baghdad in late August had nothing to do with the
subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure the Senate Armed
Services Committee that the interplay between Miller and
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in
Iraq, had only a casual connection to his office. Miller's
recommendations, Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own
role, he said, was mainly to insure that the ``flow of
intelligence back to the commands'' was ``efficient and
effective.'' He added that Miller's goal was ``to provide a
safe, secure and humane environment that supports the
expeditious collection of intelligence.''
It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of
New York, posed the essential question facing the senators:
If, indeed General Miller was sent from Guantanamo 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 you report [on abuses at Abu
Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller's arrival
and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by
those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved. .
. . Therefore, I for one don't believe I yet have adequate
information from Mr. Cambone and the Defense Department as to
exactly what General Miller's orders were . . . how he
carried out those orders, and the connection between his
arrival in the fall of '03 and the intensity of the abuses
that occurred afterward.
Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the
former intelligence official told me, Miller was ``read
in''--that is, briefed--on the special-access operation. In
April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the
Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring
headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and
international media as the general who would clean up the
Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva
Conventions. ``His job is to save what he can,'' the former
official said. ``He's there to protect the program while
limiting any loss of core capability.'' As for Antonio
Taguba, the former intelligence official added, ``He goes
into it not knowing shit. And then: ``Holy cow! What's going
on?
If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify,
he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to
mention the special-access program. ``If you give away the
fact that a special-access program exists,'' the former
intelligence official told me, ``you blow the whole quick-
reaction program.''
One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld's account of his initial
reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack
of alarm and lack of curiosity. One factor may have been
recent history: there had been many previous complaints of
prisoner abuse from organizations like Human Rights Watch and
the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered
them with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services
Committee that he had not been provided with details of
alleged abuses until late March, when he read the specific
charges. ``You read it, as I say, it's one thing. You see
these photographs and it's just unbelievable. . . . It wasn't
three-dimensional. It wasn't video. It wasn't color. it was
quite a different thing.'' The former intelligence official
said that in his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon
officials had not studied the photographs because ``they
thought what was in there was permitted under the rules of
engagement,'' as applied to the SAP. ``The photos,'' he
added, ``turned out to be the result of the program run
amok.''
The former intelligence official made it clear that he was
not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that
atrocities were committed. But, he said, ``it was their
permission granted to do the SAP, generically, and there was
enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses.''
Thsi official went on, ``The black guys''--those in the
Pentagon's secret program--``say we've got to accept the
prosecution. they're vaccinated from the reality.'' The SAP
is still active, and ``the United States is picking up guys
for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the
quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?'' The program
was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was
allowed to know of its existence. ``If you even give a hint
that you're aware of a black program that you're not read
into, you lose your clearances,'' the former official said.
``Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are
those who are undefended--the poor kids at the end of the
food chain.''
The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. ``The
Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn't know
how to do it,'' the former intelligence official said.
Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to
many conservatives, defended the Administration's continued
secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib.;
``Why keep it black?'' the consultant asked. ``Because the
process is unpleasant. It's like making sausage--you like the
result but you don't want to know how it was made. Also, you
don't want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know.
Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The
last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you
treat Arab males in prison.''
The former intelligence official told me he feared that one
of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would
be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on
terror, which had already suffered from the draining of
resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as a ``a tumor''
on the war on terror. He said, ``As long as it's benign and
contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis
without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins
to grow, with nobody to diagnose it--it becomes a malignant
tumor.''
The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and
his superiors, the consultant said, ``created the conditions
that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we're
going to end up with another Church Commission''--the 1975
Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank
Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the
previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that
the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its
discretionary power. ``When the shit hits the fan, as it did
on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?'' the consultant asked.
``You do it selectively and with intelligence.''
``Congress is going to get to the bottom of this,'' the
Pentagon consultant said. ``You have to demonstrate that
there are checks and balances in the system.'' He added,
``When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have
very clear red lines.'''
Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, ``If this is true,
it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and
deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get
to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.''
``In an odd way,'' Kenneth Roth, the executive director of
Human Rights Watch, said, ``the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib
have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the
violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.''
Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has
systematically used third-degree techniques around the world
on detainees. ``Some JAGS hate this and are horrified that
the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in
the next war,'' Roth told me. ``We're giving the world a
ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld
has lowered the bar.''
No. This was from the author of the article, Seymour Hersh, the part that determined that the existence of a program was to avoid traceability, to have no budget that was reportable. So we did not have anything to even oversight, and then also that they could avoid congressional scrutiny and a requirement or obligation for being briefed to Congress.
Yes, but what I am trying to do is give us the basis of why there ought to be an investigation. I wish I could vet all of these statements, assertions, and I have as many questions as the gentleman probably does.
The problem is that we are now confronted with taking a few reservists and throwing them into a court-martial situation, when clearly this problem that has been exposed started with more than a few privates and corporals and sergeants, determining how they were going to commit these abuses; that this was sanctioned. This was planned, and I repeat again, the President was informed of the existence of the program, a former intelligence official talking to Seymour Hersh said.
This is an award-winning writer on the American government scene for many years. I need to know more, but I am certainly not going to walk away from this highly complex information that has been presented to us.
I do, because they said they were taking people walking off the streets, taxi drivers, in-laws of somebody who may be more seriously implicated, and that they were bringing in an expert from Guantanamo. They do not make them enemy combatants so that these folks have no rights under the Geneva Conventions whatsoever, and the whole thing reads like an absolute nightmare. They are naming names and they are naming strategies. This so-called, what do we call it, the secret access program.