NEW YORK (AP) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the expansion of a secret program that encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to obtain intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq, The New Yorker reported SaturdayThat sums it up. Here are a few choice bits from the New Yorker piece itself, authored by Seymour Hersch:
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 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...
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 interrogatio"n...
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...
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....
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...
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...
There's much more. Read the whole thing. Everyone's talking about this one.
Nota bene: While I am sure most of Hersch's article is quite accurate, I would not be surprised if someone fed him some bad info to injure his credibility. This sort of thing has happened to him before.
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