Deep Blade Journal

US atrocities against prisoners are far more than “isolated aberrations”

The hearing before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on the treatment of Iraqi Prisoners last Friday revealed some truth about why, what Donald Rumsfeld now calls “incidents of physical violence toward prisoners–acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman”, are happening to detainees under US care in its Terror War.

Here is an excerpt of how Michigan Senator Carl Levin opened questioning of Secretary Rumsfeld last Friday:

General Taguba’s finding that, quote, ‘Personnel assigned to the 372nd M.P. Company were directed to change facility procedures to set the conditions for military intelligence interrogations’, is bolstered by pictures that suggest that the sadistic abuse was part of an organized and conscious process of intelligence gathering.

In other words, those abusive actions do not appear to be aberrant conduct by individuals, but part of a conscious method of extracting information.

If true, the planners of this process are at least as guilty as those who carried out the abuses.

The president’s legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, reportedly wrote in a memorandum that the decision to avoid invoking the Geneva Conventions, quote, ‘preserves flexibility in the war on terrorism’.

Belittling or ignoring the Geneva Conventions invites our enemies to do the same and increases the danger to our military service men and women. It also sends a disturbing message to the world that America does not feel bound by internationally accepted standards of conduct.

The findings of General Taguba’s report, as reported on a public Web site, raise a number of disturbing issues. For example, how far up the chain was there implicit or explicit direction or approval or knowledge of these prisoner abuses? Why was a joint interrogation and detention facility at Abu Ghraib established in a way which led to the subordination of the military police brigade to the military intelligence unit conducting interrogation activities?

In response, Secretary Rumsfeld offered an apology for what he now deems, “terrible acts [that] were perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military”, but no real examination of the doctrine driving the “military intelligence unit conducting interrogation activities” was offered.

A sketch of answers to Levin’s questions are suggested by precious few press accounts. One of these appeared in a May 7 Joe Conason piece on Salon.com described how Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith spearheaded a Pentagon move to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity that would make torture of prisoners easier. Conason writes about the questions raised about the development of this policy:

Scott Horton, a partner at Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler who now chairs the Committee on International Law of the Association of the Bar of New York City, says he was approached last spring by ’senior officers’ in the Judge Advocate General Corps [JAG], the military’s legal division, who ‘expressed apprehension over how their political appointee bosses were handling the torture issue’. Horton, who once represented late Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, was serving as the chairman of the bar association’s Committee on Human Rights law when the JAG officers first contacted him…

Indeed, Horton says that the JAG officers specifically warned him that Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, one of the most powerful political appointees in the Pentagon, had significantly weakened the military’s rules and regulations governing prisoners of war. The officers told Horton that Feith and the Defense Department’s general counsel, William J. Haynes II, were creating ‘an atmosphere of legal ambiguity’ that would allow mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Haynes, who was recently nominated to a federal appeals court seat by President Bush, is responsible for legal issues concerning prisoners and detainees. But the general counsel takes his marching orders from Feith, an attorney whose scorn for international human rights law was summed up by his assessment of Protocol One, the 1977 Geneva accord protecting civilians, as law in the service of terrorism.

And today, in a new article in the New Yorker, Chain Of Command: How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib (May 17 issue), Seymour Hersh adds:

No amount of apologetic testimony or political spin last week could mask the fact that, since the attacks of September 11th, President Bush and his top aides have seen themselves as engaged in a war against terrorism in which the old rules did not apply. In the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of senior Pentagon generals and admirals to act aggressively. By mid-2002, he and his senior aides were exchanging secret memorandums on modifying the culture of the military leaders and finding ways to encourage them ‘to take greater risks.’ One memo spoke derisively of the generals in the Pentagon, and said, ‘Our prerequisite of perfection for actionable intelligence has paralyzed us. We must accept that we may have to take action before every question can be answered’. The Defense Secretary was told that he should ‘break the belt-and-suspenders mindset within today’s military… we over-plan for every contingency…. We must be willing to accept the risks’….

The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process.

Hersh described how this policy of high-risk operation had been unfolding in another New Yorker article back on Dec. 15, 2003 (Moving Targets: Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?).

Hersh wrote,

The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq… A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination….

The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls Manhunts“.

Hersh goes on in this article to expose US planning that in Iraq surely is a red hot potato:

Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers–again, in secret–when full-field operations begin. (Neither the Pentagon nor Israeli diplomats would comment. ‘No one wants to talk about this’, an Israeli official told me. ‘It’s incendiary. Both governments have decided at the highest level that it is in their interests to keep a low profile on U.S.-Israeli cooperation’ on Iraq.) The critical issue, American and Israeli officials agree, is intelligence. There is much debate about whether targeting a large number of individuals is a practical–or politically effective–way to bring about stability in Iraq, especially given the frequent failure of American forces to obtain consistent and reliable information there….

An American who has advised the civilian authority in Baghdad said, ‘The only way we can win is to go unconventional. We’re going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We’ve got to scare the Iraqis into submission”…

The official went on, “It’s not the way we usually play ball, but if you see a couple of your guys get blown away it changes things. We did the American things–and we’ve been the nice guy. Now we’re going to be the bad guy, and being the bad guy works.”

In the same New Yorker article, Hersh introduces a colleague of Douglas Feith:

The rising star in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon is Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who has been deeply involved in developing the new Special Forces approach….

…A month after the fall of Baghdad, Cambone was the first senior Pentagon official to publicly claim, wrongly, as it turned out, that a captured Iraqi military truck might be a mobile biological-weapons laboratory.

Cambone also shares Rumsfeld’s views on how to fight terrorism. They both believe that the United States needs to become far more proactive in combating terrorism, searching for terrorist leaders around the world and eliminating them. And Cambone, like Rumsfeld, has been frustrated by the reluctance of the military leadership to embrace the manhunting mission. Since his confirmation, he has been seeking operational authority over Special Forces. ‘Rumsfeld’s been looking for somebody to have all the answers, and Steve is the guy’, a former high-level Pentagon official told me. ‘He has more direct access to Rummy than anyone else’.

Hersh also reported in December that, “One of the key planners of the Special Forces offensive is Lieutenant General William (Jerry) Boykin, Cambone’s military assistant”.

Boykin was the subject of news stories last October because he declared holy war with the Muslim world on video tape during Sunday-morning talks in uniform to church groups.

“Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army”, Boykin said. He declared that Bush was “not elected” but “appointed by God”. The Muslim world hates America, he said, “because we are a nation of believers”.

It was Cambone who appeared with Rumsfeld during Friday’s hearing

When Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island questioned Rumsfeld, Cambone also responded:

REED: Mr. Secretary, the Taguba report indicated the principal focus of Major General Miller’s team was on the strategic interrogation of detainees, internees in Iraq. Among its conclusion and its executive summary where that CJTF-7 did not have authorities or procedures in place to affect the unified strategy to detain, interrogate and report information from the detainees-internees in Iraq.

The executive summary also stated that detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation–an enabler for interrogation.

When General Miller was involved with Guantanamo DOD operations in another theater, he was sent to Iraq–I don’t think major generals in the United States Army make up policies about strategic interrogation of detainees unless they’ve coordinated and communicated to higher headquarters.

Did you ever see, approve or encourage this policy of enabling for interrogation? Did Secretary Cambone ever see, approve or encourage this policy at either facility?

RUMSFELD: I don’t recall that that policy came to me for approval. I think that what we knew from the beginning, since September 11th, is that we had three issues with respect to people that were detained.

One issue was to get them off the street, so they can’t kill again more innocent men, women and children, and keep them off. A second was the question of criminal prosecution for wrongdoing. And the third was to interrogate and see if additional information could be found that could prevent future terrorist acts against our country or our forces or our friends and allies.

So all of those things have been part since the beginning. They’re different functions, as you point out…

REED: Is that Secretary Cambone’s view too? Did he either see, approve or encourage? He’s behind you. Can he respond?

RUMSFELD: Sure he can respond.

CAMBONE: Sir, the…

WARNER: Would you identify yourself for the record. please?

CAMBONE: Yes, sir. My name is Steve Cambone. I’m the undersecretary for intelligence, Senator.

The original effort by the major general was done down with respect to Guantanamo and had to do with in fact whether or not we had the proper arrangement in the facilities in order to be able to gain the kind of intelligence we were looking from those prisoners in Guantanamo.

We had then in Iraq a large body of people who had been captured on the battlefield that we had to gain intelligence from for force protection purposes, and he was asked to go over, at my encouragement, to take a look at the situation as it existed there. And he made his recommendations. His recommendations were that.

REED: Were the recommendations made to you, Mr. Secretary? Did you approve them?

CAMBONE: To me directly, no. They were made to the command.

REED: But you were aware of the recommendations about…

CAMBONE: I was aware of those recommendations.

REED: … enabling interrogation?

CAMBONE: Excuse me, sir?

REED: You were you aware of those recommendations?

CAMBONE: I was aware that he went over, made the recommendation that we get a better coordination between those who are being held and those who are being interrogated.

REED: Mr. Secretary, were you aware that a specific recommendation was to use military police to enable in the interrogation process?

CAMBONE: In that precise language, no. But I knew that we were trying to get to the point where we were assuring that when they were in the general population, those that were under confinement were not undermining the interrogation process.

REED: So this was Major General Miller’s own policy?

CAMBONE: No, sir, it was not a policy. It was a recommendation that he made to the command.

REED: And so General Sanchez adopted this policy, making it a policy of the United States Army and the Department of Defense without consultation with you…

CAMBONE: Sir, I don’t think that’s a proper rendering of it.

REED: Well, I don’t know what the proper rendering is, but that seems to be at the core of this issue. Were you encouraging a policy that had military police officers enabling interrogations which created the situation where these…

CAMBONE: No, sir.

Has Mr. Cambone lied to Congress? Clearly, from Hersh’s reporting, he knows a heck of a lot more about the interrogation policy than he lets on. But his answer is couched in such convoluted language–a “recommendation” is not a “policy”–that his deniability seems to have been preserved. (I can’t tell whay “is” is in these remarks.)

This whole crew of depraved Pentagon should be sacked. It may be too late, as commentators are beginning to wonder aloud if “Like the Wehrmacht, we’ve descended into barbarity”.

Astonishing Additional coverage
Please see Billmon, beginning with the May 1 entry for a great deal of incredible coverage, including concerning use of “Israeli security services [that] are now the USA’s prime subcontractors in the Iraq dirty war”. Please use his right-hand arrow to scroll forward in his entries.