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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (188602)	5/16/2004 1:14:07 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1573989

<font color=brown> This article pretty much confirms what I had suspected......Rummy is too hands on to be outside the loop even on prisoner abuse. What rankles me is Bush saying Rummy has done a "superb job". Forgetting the prisoner abuse for a moment, I don't see anything 'superb' about the current mess in Iraq. They must think we're two year olds and will believe anything that spills out of their mouths. <font color=black> ********************************************************** Last update: May 15, 2004 at 11:37 PM Report: Rumsfeld OK'd measures David Johnston, New York Times May 16, 2004 WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and one of his top aides authorized the expansion of a secret program that had permitted harsh interrogations of detained members of Al-Qaida, 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 Hersh, reported that Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, had approved the use of the tougher interrogation techniques in Iraq in 2003 to extract better information from Iraqi prisoners to counter the growing insurgency threat in the country. 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," 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." 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. 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 Rumsfeld and 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 Hersh's article. They said that they were aware of no high-level decision to use highly coercive interrogation techniques on Iraqi prisoners. A military official who worked on detention issues in Iraq in 2003 described a similar covert task force of military and intelligence operatives but said it did not direct the interrogation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The official said that the covert operators involved in the program worked out of their own highly secret and well-guarded compound in Baghdad, where they held captives incommunicado and questioned them for relatively short periods of time before turning them over to the jailers at Abu Ghraib. The official said the Baghdad compound where the team worked was so closely controlled that other military and intelligence personnel could not enter it without clearance or the authorization of the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. The official declined to discuss what interrogation techniques the covert team used in Iraq. "It was a battlefield thing," the official said. "You get people. You question them, then you turn them over to people who can get more out of them." At the Pentagon, the chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita vigorously denied the allegations that Cambone directed a covert program to encourage the coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to improve intelligence gathering. "It's pure, unadulterated fantasy," 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." In other developments: • Six of the defendants in the Abu Ghraib abuse case once bunked together in a tent in Baghdad. But as the most important military prosecutions since Vietnam unfold this week, each soldier is struggling to explain away seemingly irrefutable evidence captured in frame after frame of disturbing images, and they are pointing fingers at one another, minimizing their roles and blaming the government. One defendant, Spc. Megan Ambuhl, says she was merely a bystander who treated the Iraqi detainees kindly, giving them copies of the Qur'an and making sure their meals contained no pork. Spc. Jeremy Sivits, in a statement to investigators, described brutal conduct by Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick II and Spc. Charles Graner Jr., who in turn called him a liar. Then there is Sgt. Javal Davis. His lawyer, Paul Bergrin, accuses the government of abusing him by interrogating him for 20 sleepless hours right after he worked a 60-hour shift at Abu Ghraib. The defendants' challenge is to convince military courts that the pictures of abusive treatment of Iraqi detainees, which have generated a storm of criticism, do not begin to tell the whole story. Each has a personal version of events but one theme unites them: They contend they were following orders at the prison. • Secretary of State Colin Powell sounded a note of contrition before an audience of Arab leaders in Jordan, saying the hearts of his countrymen "ached" over the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal and vowing that America would learn from its mistakes. • London's Daily Mirror newspaper issued a front-page apology for publishing faked photographs of the alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners by British forces. startribune.com