Rumsfeld's dirty war on terror
In an explosive extract from his new book, Seymour
Hersh reveals how, in a fateful decision that led to the
abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the US defence
secretary gave the green light to a secret unit
authorised to torture terrorist suspects
Read part two
Monday September 13, 2004
The Guardian
In the late summer of 2002, a CIA
analyst made a quiet visit to the
detention centre at the US Naval Base
at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where an
estimated 600 prisoners were being
held, many, at first, in steel-mesh
cages that provided little protection from
the brutally hot sun. Most had been
captured on the battlefield in
Afghanistan during the campaign
against the Taliban and al-Qaida.
The Bush administration had
determined, however, that they were not
prisoners of war but "enemy
combatants", and that their stay at Guantánamo could be
indefinite, as teams of CIA, FBI, and military interrogators
sought to prise intelligence from them. In a series of secret
memorandums written earlier in the year, lawyers for the White
House, the Pentagon and the justice department had agreed
that the prisoners had no rights under federal law or the Geneva
convention. President Bush endorsed the finding, while declaring
that the al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were nevertheless to be
treated in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva
convention - as long as such treatment was also "consistent
with military necessity".
But the interrogations at Guantánamo were a bust. Very little
useful intelligence had been gathered, while prisoners from
around the world continued to flow into the base, and the facility
constantly expanded. The CIA analyst had been sent there to
find out what was going wrong. He was fluent in Arabic and
familiar with the Islamic world. He was held in high respect
within the agency, and was capable of reporting directly, if he
chose, to George Tenet, the CIA director. The analyst did more
than just visit and inspect. He interviewed at least 30 prisoners
to find out who they were and how they ended up in
Guantánamo. Some of his findings, he later confided to a former
CIA colleague, were devastating.
"He came back convinced that we were committing war crimes
in Guantánamo," the colleague told me. "Based on his sample,
more than half the people there didn't belong there. He found
people lying in their own faeces," including two captives,
perhaps in their 80s, who were clearly suffering from dementia.
"He thought what was going on was an outrage," the CIA
colleague added. There was no rational system for determining
who was important.
Two former administration officials who read the analyst's highly
classified report told me that its message was grim. According
to a former White House official, the analyst's disturbing
conclusion was that "if we captured some people who weren't
terrorists when we got them, they are now".
That autumn, the document rattled aimlessly around the upper
reaches of the Bush administration until it got into the hands of
General John A Gordon, the deputy national security adviser for
combating terrorism, who reported directly to Condoleezza Rice,
the national security adviser and the president's confidante.
Gordon, who had retired from the military as a four-star general
in 2000 had served as a deputy director of the CIA for three
years. He was deeply troubled and distressed by the report, and
by its implications for the treatment, in retaliation, of captured
American soldiers. Gordon, according to a former administration
official, told colleagues that he thought "it was totally out of
character with the American value system", and "that if the
actions at Guantánamo ever became public, it'd be damaging to
the president".
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, there had been much
debate inside the administration about what was permissible in
the treatment of prisoners and what was not. The most
suggestive document, in terms of what was really going on
inside military prisons and detention centres, was written in
early August 2002 by Jay S Bybee, head of the justice
department's office of legal counsel. "Certain acts may be cruel,
inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of
the requisite intensity to fall within [a legal] proscription against
torture," Bybee wrote to Alberto R Gonzales, the White House
counsel. "We conclude that for an act to constitute torture, it
must inflict pain that is difficult to endure. Physical pain
amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain
accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure,
impairment of bodily function, or even death." (Bush later
nominated Bybee to be a federal judge.)
"We face an enemy that targets innocent civilians," Gonzales, in
turn, would tell journalists two years later, at the height of the
furore over the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"We face an enemy that lies in the shadows, an enemy that
doesn't sign treaties."
Gonzales added that Bush bore no responsibility for the
wrongdoing. "The president has not authorised, ordered or
directed in any way any activity that would transgress the
standards of the torture conventions or the torture statute, or
other applicable laws," Gonzales said. In fact, a secret
statement of the president's views, which he signed on February
7, 2002 contained a loophole that applied worldwide: "I
determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our
conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the
world," the president asserted.
John Gordon had to know what he was up against in seeking a
high-level review of prison policies at Guantánamo, but he
persevered. Finally, the former White House official recalled,
"We got it up to Condi."
As the CIA analyst's report was making its way to Rice, in late
2002 there were a series of heated complaints about the
interrogation tactics at Guantánamo from within the FBI, whose
agents had been questioning detainees in Cuba since the prison
opened. A few of the agents began telling their superiors what
they had witnessed, which, they believed, had little to do with
getting good information.
"I was told," a senior intelligence official recalled, "that the
military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring
cold water over them, and making them stand until they got
hypothermia. The agents were outraged. It was wrong and also
dysfunctional." The agents put their specific complaints in
writing, the official told me, and they were relayed, in emails and
phone calls, to officials at the department of defence, including
William J Haynes II, the general counsel of the Pentagon. As far
as day-to-day life for prisoners at Guantánamo was concerned,
nothing came of it.
The unifying issue for General Gordon and his supporters inside
the administration was not the abuse of prisoners at
Guantánamo, the former White House official told me: "It was
about how many more people are being held there that shouldn't
be. Have we really got the right people?" The briefing for
Condoleezza Rice about problems at Guantánamo took place in
the autumn of 2002. It did not dwell on the question of torture or
mistreatment. The main issue, the former White House official
told me, was simply, "Are we getting any intelligence? What is
the process for sorting these people?"
Rice agreed to call a high-level meeting in the White House
situation room. Most significantly, she asked Secretary
Rumsfeld to attend. Rums feld, who was by then publicly and
privately encouraging his soldiers in the field to get tough with
captured prisoners, duly showed up, but he had surprisingly little
to say. One participant in the meeting recalled that at one point
Rice asked Rumsfeld "what the issues were, and he said he
hadn't looked into it". Rice urged Rumsfeld to do so, and added,
"Let's get the story right." Rumsfeld seemed to be in agreement,
and Gordon and his supporters left the meeting convinced, the
former administration official told me, that the Pentagon was
going to deal with the issue.
Nothing changed. "The Pentagon went into a full-court stall," the
former White House official recalled. "I trusted in the goodness
of man and thought we got something to happen. I was naive
enough to believe that when a cabinet member" - he was
referring to Rumsfeld - "says he's going to take action, he will."
Over the next few months, as the White House began planning
for the coming war in Iraq, there were many more discussions
about the continuing problems at Guantánamo and the lack of
useful intelligence. No one in the Bush administration would get
far, however, if he was viewed as soft on suspected al-Qaida
terrorism. "Why didn't Condi do more?" the official asked. "She
made the same mistake I made. She got the secretary of
defence to say he's going to take care of it."
There was, obviously, a difference between the reality of prison
life in Guantánamo and how it was depicted to the public in
carefully stage-managed news conferences and statements
released by the administration. American prison authorities have
repeatedly assured the press and the public, for example, that
the al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were provided with a
minimum of three hours of recreation every week. For the tough
cases, however, according to a Pentagon adviser familiar with
detainee conditions in mid-2002, at recreation time some
prisoners would be strapped into heavy jackets, similar to
straitjackets, with their arms locked behind them and their legs
straddled by straps. Goggles were placed over their eyes, and
their heads were covered with a hood. The prisoner was then led
at midday into what looked like a narrow fenced-in dog run - the
adviser told me that there were photographs of the procedure -
and given his hour of recreation. The restraints forced him to
move, if he chose to move, on his knees, bent over at a
45-degree angle. Most prisoners just sat and suffered in the
heat.
One of the marines assigned to guard duty at Guantánamo in
2003, who has since left the military, told me, after being
promised anonymity, that he and his enlisted colleagues at the
base were encouraged by their squad leaders to "give the
prisoners a visit" once or twice a month, when there were no
television crews, journalists, or other outside visitors at the
prison.
"We tried to fuck with them as much as we could - inflict a little
bit of pain. We couldn't do much," for fear of exposure, the
former marine, who also served in Afghanistan, told me.
"There were always newspeople there," he said. "That's why you
couldn't send them back with a broken leg or so. And if
somebody died, I'd get court-martialled."
The roughing up of prisoners was sometimes
spur-of-the-moment, the former marine said: "A squad leader
would say, 'Let's go - all the cameras on lunch break.'" One
pastime was to put hoods on the prisoners and "drive them
around the camp in a Humvee, making turns so they didn't know
where they were. [...] I wasn't trying to get information. I was just
having a little fun - playing mind control." When I asked a senior
FBI official about the former marine's account, he told me that
agents assigned to interrogation duties at Guantánamo had
described similar activities to their superiors.
In November 2002, army Major General Geoffrey Miller had
relieved Generals Dunlavey and Baccus, unifying the command
at Guantánamo. Baccus was seen by the Pentagon as soft - too
worried about the prisoners' well-being. In Senate hearings after
Abu Ghraib, it became known that Miller was permitted to use
legally questionable interrogation techniques at Guantánamo,
which could include, with approval, sleep deprivation, exposure
to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in "stress
positions" for agonising lengths of time.
In May 2004, the New York Times reported that the FBI had
instructed its agents to avoid being present at interrogation
sessions with suspected al-Qaida members. The newspaper
said the severe methods used to extract information would be
prohibited in criminal cases, and therefore could compromise
the agents in future legal proceedings against the suspects.
"We don't believe in coercion," a senior FBI official subsequently
told me. "Our goal is to get information and we try to gain the
prisoners' trust. We have strong feelings about it." The FBI
official added, "I thought Rumsfeld should have been fired long
ago."
"They did it the wrong way," a Pentagon adviser on the war on
terror told me, "and took a heavy-handed approach based on
coercion, instead of persuasion - which actually has a much
better track record. It's about rage and the need to strike back.
It's evil, but it's also stupid. It's not torture but acts of kindness
that lead to concessions. The persuasive approach takes longer
but gets far better results."
There was, we now know, a fantastical quality to the earnest
discussions inside the White House in 2002 about the good and
bad of the interrogation process at Guantánamo. Rice and
Rumsfeld knew what many others involved in the prisoner
discussions did not - that sometime in late 2001 or early 2002,
the president had signed a top-secret finding, as required by
law, authorising the defence department to set up a specially
recruited clandestine team of special forces operatives and
others who would defy diplomatic niceties and international law
and snatch - or assassinate, if necessary - identified
"high-value" al-Qaida operatives anywhere in the world.
Equally secret interrogation centres would be set up in allied
countries where harsh treatments were meted out,
unconstrained by legal limits or public disclosure. The
programme was hidden inside the defence department as an
"unacknowledged" special-access programme (SAP), whose
operational details were known only to a few in the Pentagon,
the CIA and the White House.
The SAP owed its existence to Rumsfeld's desire to get the US
special forces community into the business of what he called, in
public and internal communications, "manhunts", and to his
disdain for the Pentagon's senior generals. In the privacy of his
office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of
the generals and admirals to act aggressively. Soon after
September 11, he repeatedly made public his disdain for the
Geneva convention. Complaints about the United States'
treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said, in early 2002, amounted
to "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation".
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