BREAKING NEWS: Rumsfeld and Aide Ordered Torture & Abuse Tactics, Article Says
May 16, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON
nytimes.com.
WASHINGTON, May 15 — Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and one of his top aides authorized the expansion of a secret program that had permitted harsh interrogations of detained members of Al Qaeda, allowing these methods to be used against prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to an article in The New Yorker.
The article, by Seymour M. Hersh, reported that Mr. Rumsfeld and Stephen A. Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, had approved the use of the tougher interrogation techniques in Iraq in 2003 in an effort to extract better information from Iraqi prisoners to counter the growing insurgency threat in the country.
Mr. Hersh's account, to be published in the May 24 issue of the magazine, said that the expansion of the "special access program" allowed authorities in charge of Abu Ghraib to engage in degrading and sexually humiliating practices. It was posted on Saturday on The New Yorker's Web site.
"According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials," Mr. Hersh wrote, "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."
Mr. Hersh's reporting cast new light on an important question in the prisoner abuse scandal — whether senior military or civilian officials ordered the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. Mr. Rumsfeld, who has apologized for the abuses, has said that they were carried out by lower-level forces without the approval of senior commanders.
The article suggested that Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cambone had, in effect, shifted the blame for the abuses away from top civilians at the Pentagon to lower-level military police guards who are facing disciplinary proceedings in military courts.
On Saturday, officials in the Bush administration disputed several of the critical details of Mr. Hersh's article. They said that they were aware of no high-level decision to use highly coercive interrogation techniques on Iraqi prisoners.
The officials pointed to testimony before Congress in which several administration officials acknowledged that the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees in Iraq and therefore did not permit coercive tactics.
But some officials, speaking on background, acknowledged that as the insurgency worsened in Iraq last summer, there was rising concern about how to improve intelligence about future attacks.
One solution to these concerns, Mr. Hersh wrote, "was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents." Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cambone went a step further, the article said, expanding the scope of a secret program by "bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan."
At the Pentagon, the chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, vigorously denied the allegations that Mr. Cambone directed a covert program to encourage the coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to improve intelligence gathering.
"It's pure, unadulterated fantasy," Mr. Di Rita said in a telephone interview. "We don't discuss covert programs, but nothing in any covert program would have led anyone to sanction activity like what was seen on those videos."
"No responsible official in this department, including Secretary Rumsfeld, would or could have been involved in sanctioning the physical coercion or sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners," Mr. Di Rita said.
He said Mr. Cambone was not involved in setting detainee policy in Iraq. "Cambone had no involvement in any matter involved in detainee management," Mr. Di Rita said. "That's part of the fevered imagination of conspiracy theorists."
Some elements of the New Yorker article have been previously reported, including the development of a special interrogation program for Qaeda prisoners captured in Afghanistan. That program, authorized by government legal opinions that said that Qaeda prisoners were "illegal combatants" not protected by the Geneva Conventions, included the use of coercive interrogation methods, although it barred the use of torture as defined by federal statutes and international conventions.
In addition to saying that harsher methods had been authorized, the New Yorker article said that the Pentagon also had allowed the relaxed rules to apply to military intelligence officers, military special operations personnel, C.I.A. officers and civilians working as contractors.
Some of the officials identified in the article have testified about their actions in the prison abuse issue. Mr. Cambone testified for several hours before the Senate Armed Services Committee last Tuesday.
Asked by Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, "What is the status" of detainees in the prison, Mr. Cambone answered flatly, "They are there under either Article 3 or Article 4 of the Geneva Conventions." Those sections pertain to prisoners of war and other prisoners.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, asked him whether military intelligence, C.I.A. and private contractors "all have identical rules and regulations in terms of interrogating the detainees or prisoners of war or combatants" or whether there were any distinctions among the three.
Mr. Cambone said that he could speak for the Department of Defense and for "contractor and military personnel, and those rules are the same," leaving unanswered the question of what rules applied to the C.I.A. |
