Seymour Hersh: Rumsfeld Approved Torture Program

The Gray Zone by Seymour M. Hersh

How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.

The New Yorker

http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in
the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but
in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret
operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al
Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.
Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American
intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of
elite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the
war on terror.

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, during appearances last week before Congress
to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from
explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an
unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that
he was telling the public all that he knew about the
story. He said, "Any suggestion that there is not a
full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the
damage it has done, I think, would be a
misunderstanding." The senior C.I.A. official, asked
about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone,
his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, "Some
people think you can bullshit anyone."

The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks
after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the
American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start,
the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the
war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came
up against major command-and-control problems. For
example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in
sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on
them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an
unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy
that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah
Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at
the United States Central Command headquarters, in
Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the
time an attack was approved, the target was out of
reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a
self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to
political correctness. One officer described him to me
that fall as "kicking a lot of glass and breaking
doors." In November, the Washington Post reported that,
as many as ten times since early October, Air Force
pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban
members in their sights but had been unable to act in
time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar
problems throughout the world, as American Special
Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected
terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval
from local American ambassadors and brief their
superiors in the chain of command.

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. America’s most successful
intelligence operations during the Cold War had been
saps, including the Navy’s submarine penetration of
underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and
construction of the Air Force’s stealth bomber. All the
so-called "black" programs had one element in common:
the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to
conclude that the normal military classification
restraints did not provide enough security.

"Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to
take on a high-value target-a standup group to hit
quickly," a former high-level intelligence official
told me. "He got all the agencies together-the C.I.A.
and the N.S.A.-to get pre-approval in place. Just say
the code word and go." The operation had across-the-
board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice,
the national-security adviser. President Bush was
informed of the existence of the program, the former
intelligence official said.

The people assigned to the program worked by the book,
the former intelligence official told me. They created
code words, and recruited, after careful screening,
highly trained commandos and operatives from America’s
elite forces-Navy seals, the Army’s Delta Force, and
the C.I.A.’s paramilitary experts. They also asked some
basic questions: "Do the people working the problem
have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the
mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some
special- access programs are never fully briefed to
Congress."

In theory, the operation enabled the Bush
Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive
intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas
and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too
important for transfer to the military’s facilities at
Guantanamo, Cuba. They carried out instant
interrogations-using force if necessary-at secret
C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world.
The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command
center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for
those pieces of information critical to the "white," or
overt, world.

Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials,
including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were "completely read
into the program," the former intelligence official
said. The goal was to keep the operation protected.
"We’re not going to read more people than necessary
into our heart of darkness," he said. "The rules are
’Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’"

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the
program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-
Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003.
The office was new; it was created as part of
Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was
unpopular among military and civilian intelligence
bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had
little experience in running intelligence programs,
though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a
committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an
emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States.
He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld.
"Remember Henry II-’Who will rid me of this meddlesome
priest?’" the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a
laugh, last week. "Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says,
Cambone will do ten times that much."

Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He
shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and
assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as
too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the
C.I.A.’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state
conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of
mass destruction. Cambone’s military assistant, Army
Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also
controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted
headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an
Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.

Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic
battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be
given control of all special-access programs that were
relevant to the war on terror. Those programs, which
had been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct,
were monitored by Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had
experience in counter-intelligence programs. Cambone
got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the
Pentagon. Asked for comment on this story, a Pentagon
spokesman said, "I will not discuss any covert
programs; however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his
position as the Under- Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence until March 7, 2003, and had no
involvement in the decision-making process regarding
interrogation procedures in Iraq or anywhere else."

In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in
the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war
on terror. "It was an active program," the former
intelligence official told me. "It’s been the most
important capability we have for dealing with an
imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden
is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing
threat with a real capability to hit the United States-
and do so without visibility." Some of its methods were
troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however.

By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was
involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former
official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces
operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam
Hussein and- without success-for Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction. But they weren’t able to stop the evolving
insurgency.

In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld
and his aides still had a limited view of the
insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of
Baathist "dead-enders," criminal gangs, and foreign
terrorists who were Al Qaeda followers. The
Administration measured its success in the war by how
many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted
members of the old regime-reproduced on playing cards-
had been captured. Then, in August, 2003, terror
bombings in Baghdad hit the Jordanian Embassy, killing
nineteen people, and the United Nations headquarters,
killing twenty-three people, including Sergio Vieira de
Mello, the head of the U.N. mission. On August 25th,
less than a week after the U.N. bombing, Rumsfeld
acknowledged, in a talk before the Veterans of Foreign
Wars, that "the dead-enders are still with us." He went
on, "There are some today who are surprised that there
are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they
suggest that this represents some sort of failure on
the part of the Coalition. But this is not the case."
Rumsfeld compared the insurgents with those true
believers who "fought on during and after the defeat of
the Nazi regime in Germany." A few weeks later-and five
months after the fall of Baghdad-the Defense Secretary
declared,"It is, in my view, better to be dealing with
terrorists in Iraq than in the United States."

Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization
that the war was going badly. The increasingly
beleaguered and baffled Army leadership was telling
reporters that the insurgents consisted of five
thousand Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. "When you
understand that they’re organized in a cellular
structure," General John Abizaid, the head of the
Central Command, declared, "that . . . they have access
to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you’ll
understand how dangerous they are."

The American military and intelligence communities were
having little success in penetrating the insurgency.
One internal report prepared for the U.S. military,
made available to me, concluded that the
insurgents’"strategic and operational intelligence has
proven to be quite good." According to the study:

Their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable
targets and particular individuals has been the
result of painstaking surveillance and
reconnaissance. Inside information has been passed
on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop movements
and daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition
from within the Iraqi security services, primarily
the Iraqi Police force which is rife with sympathy
for the insurgents, Iraqi ministries and from within
pro-insurgent individuals working with the CPA’s so-
called Green Zone.

The study concluded, "Politically, the U.S. has failed
to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by
dealing with what caused them in the first place. The
disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been
the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate
government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional
Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that
most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council"-the Iraqi
body appointed by the C.P.A.-"as the legitimate
authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the
CPA."

By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of
the Pentagon’s political and military misjudgments was
clear. Donald Rumsfeld’s "dead-enders" now included not
only Baathists but many marginal figures as well-thugs
and criminals who were among the tens of thousands of
prisoners freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of
a prewar general amnesty. Their desperation was not
driving the insurgency; it simply made them easy
recruits for those who were. The analyst said, "We’d
killed and captured guys who had been given two or
three hundred dollars to ’pray and spray’"-that is,
shoot randomly and hope for the best. "They weren’t
really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by
wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency." In
many cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been
members of the Baath Party. The analyst said that the
insurgents "spent three or four months figuring out how
we operated and developing their own countermeasures.
If that meant putting up a hapless guy to go and attack
a convoy and see how the American troops responded,
they’d do it." Then, the analyst said, "the clever ones
began to get in on the action."

By contrast, according to the military report, the
American and Coalition forces knew little about the
insurgency: "Human intelligence is poor or lacking . .
. due to the dearth of competence and expertise. . . .
The intelligence effort is not coordinated since either
too many groups are involved in gathering intelligence
or the final product does not get to the troops in the
field in a timely manner." The success of the war was
at risk; something had to be done to change the
dynamic.

The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by
Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in
the Army prison system who were suspected of being
insurgents. 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 interrogation."

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. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally
declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of
international terrorist networks to be illegal
combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the
Geneva Conventions.)

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they
expanded the scope of the sap, bringing its
unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos
were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The
male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to
sexual humiliation.

"They weren’t getting anything substantive from the
detainees in Iraq," the former intelligence official
told me. "No names. Nothing that they could hang their
hat on. Cambone says, I’ve got to crack this thing and
I’m tired of working through the normal chain of
command. I’ve got this apparatus set up-the black
special-access program-and I’m going in hot. So he
pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing
last summer. And it’s working. We’re getting a picture
of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is
flowing into the white world. We’re getting good stuff.
But we’ve got more targets"-prisoners in Iraqi
jails-"than people who can handle them."

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former
intelligence official told me: not only would he bring
the sap’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some
of the Army military-intelligence officers working
inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap’s auspices. "So
here are fundamentally good soldiers-military-
intelligence guys- being told that no rules apply," the
former official, who has extensive knowledge of the
special-access programs, added. "And, as far as they’re
concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be
kept within Defense Department channels."

The military-police prison guards, the former official
said, included "recycled hillbillies from Cumberland,
Maryland." He was referring to members of the 372nd
Military Police Company. Seven members of the company
are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at
Abu Ghraib. "How are these guys from Cumberland going
to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn’t know what
it’s doing."

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. It was not clear who was who, even to
Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander
of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer
ostensibly in charge. "I thought most of the civilians
there were interpreters, but there were some civilians
that I didn’t know," Karpinski told me. "I called them
the disappearing ghosts. I’d seen them once in a while
at Abu Ghraib and then I’d see them months later. They
were nice-they’d always call out to me and say, ’Hey,
remember me? How are you doing?’" The mysterious
civilians, she said, were "always bringing in somebody
for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going
out." Karpinski added that she had no idea who was
operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found
that Karpinski’s leadership failures contributed to the
abuses.)

By fall, according to the former intelligence official,
the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough.
"They said, ’No way. We signed up for the core program
in Afghanistan-pre-approved for operations against
high- value terrorist targets-and now you want to use
it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled
off the streets’"-the sort of prisoners who populate
the Iraqi jails. "The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,"
and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib,
the former official said.

The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the
intelligence community. There was fear that the
situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of
the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had
been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. "This
was stupidity," a government consultant told me.
"You’re taking a program that was operating in the
chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless
terror group, and bringing it into a structured,
traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos
would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a
conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-
five thousand soldiers."

The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris
for the Abu Ghraib disaster. "There’s nothing more
exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than
dealing with an important national security issue
without dealing with military planners, who are always
worried about risk," he told me. "What could be more
boring than needing the cooperation of logistical
planners?" The only difficulty, the former official
added, is that, "as soon as you enlarge the secret
program beyond the oversight capability of experienced
people, you lose control. We’ve never had a case where
a special-access program went sour-and this goes back
to the Cold War."

In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who
spent much of his career directly involved with
special- access programs, spread the blame. "The White
House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the
Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone," he said. "This
is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the
program." When it came to the interrogation operation
at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to
Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the
consultant added, "but he’s responsible for the checks
and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we’ve
changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and
created conditions where the ends justify the means."

Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused
M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to
plead guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that
senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the
abuse had they witnessed it. One of the questions that
will be explored at any trial, however, is why a group
of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them from
small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in
a manner that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men.

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. One book that was
frequently cited was "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab
culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by
Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at,
among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and
who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page
chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo
vested with shame and repression. "The segregation of
the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the
other minute rules that govern and restrict contact
between men and women, have the effect of making sex a
prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world," Patai
wrote. Homosexual activity, "or any indication of
homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of
sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are
private affairs and remain in private." The Patai book,
an academic told me, was "the bible of the neocons on
Arab behavior." 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. The government
consultant said, "I was told that the purpose of the
photographs was to create an army of informants, people
you could insert back in the population." The idea was
that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and
gather information about pending insurgency action, the
consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the
insurgency continued to grow.

"This shit has been brewing for months," the Pentagon
consultant who has dealt with saps told me. "You don’t
keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them
get bitten by dogs. This is sick." The consultant
explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had
served for years on active duty in the military, had
been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside
Abu Ghraib. "We don’t raise kids to do things like
that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing.
But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know
the rules, that’s another."

In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the
requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying
out the war on terror had led a group of senior
military legal officers from the Judge Advocate
General’s (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within
five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of
the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on
International Human Rights. "They wanted us to
challenge the Bush Administration about its standards
for detentions and interrogation," Horton told me.
"They were urging us to get involved and speak in a
very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue.
The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and
it’s going to occur." The military officials were most
alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors
in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. "They
said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being
created as a result of a policy decision at the highest
levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut
out of the policy formulation process." They told him
that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of
exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had
come to an end.

The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th,
when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned
to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s
Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a
CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report
made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President
Bush.

The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The
C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former
intelligence official said. "You can’t cover it up. You
have to prosecute these guys for being off the
reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they
were covered by the special-access program? So you hope
that maybe it’ll go away." The Pentagon’s attitude last
January, he said, was "Somebody got caught with some
photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it."
Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House, the official
added, was reassuring: "’We’ve got a glitch in the
program. We’ll prosecute it.’ The cover story was that
some kids got out of control."

In their testimony before Congress last week, Rumsfeld
and Cambone struggled to convince the legislators that
Miller’s visit to Baghdad in late August had nothing to
do with the subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure
the Senate Armed Services Committee that the interplay
between Miller and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez,
the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had only a casual
connection to his office. Miller’s recommendations,
Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own role, he
said, was mainly to insure that the "flow of
intelligence back to the commands" was "efficient and
effective." He added that Miller’s goal was "to provide
a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the
expeditious collection of intelligence."

It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat
of New York, posed the essential question facing the
senators:

If, indeed, General Miller was sent from Guantanamo
to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring more actionable
intelligence from detainees, then it is fair to
conclude that the actions that are at point here in
your report [on abuses at Abu Ghraib] are in some
way connected to General Miller’s arrival and his
specific orders, however they were interpreted, by
those MPs and the military intelligence that were
involved.. . .Therefore, I for one don’t believe I
yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone and
the Defense Department as to exactly what General
Miller’s orders were . . . how he carried out those
orders, and the connection between his arrival in
the fall of ’03 and the intensity of the abuses that
occurred afterward.

Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public,
the former intelligence official told me, Miller was
"read in"-that is, briefed-on the special-access
operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to
assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal
hit, with its glaring headlines, General Sanchez
presented him to the American and international media
as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison
system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions.
"His job is to save what he can," the former official
said. "He’s there to protect the program while limiting
any loss of core capability." As for Antonio Taguba,
the former intelligence official added, "He goes into
it not knowing shit. And then: ’Holy cow! What’s going
on?’"

If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to
testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have
been able to mention the special-access program. "If
you give away the fact that a special-access program
exists,"the former intelligence official told me, "you
blow the whole quick-reaction program."

One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld’s account of his
initial reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib
investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of
curiosity. One factor may have been recent history:
there had been many previous complaints of prisoner
abuse from organization like Human Rights Watch and the
International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered
them with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services
Committee that he had not been provided with details of
alleged abuses until late March, when he read the
specific charges. "You read it, as I say, it’s one
thing. You see these photographs and it’s just
unbelievable. . . . It wasn’t three- dimensional. It
wasn’t video. It wasn’t color. It was quite a different
thing." The former intelligence official said that, in
his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials
had not studied the photographs because "they thought
what was in there was permitted under the rules of
engagement," as applied to the sap. "The photos," he
added, "turned out to be the result of the program run
amok."

The former intelligence official made it clear that he
was not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew
that atrocities were committed. But, he said, "it was
their permission granted to do the sap, generically,
and there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the
abuses."

This official went on, "The black guys"-those in the
Pentagon’s secret program-"say we’ve got to accept the
prosecution. They’re vaccinated from the reality." The
sap is still active, and "the United States is picking
up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they
protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its
cover?" The program was protected by the fact that no
one on the outside was allowed to know of its
existence. "If you even give a hint that you’re aware
of a black program that you’re not read into, you lose
your clearances," the former official said. "Nobody
will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are
those who are undefended-the poor kids at the end of
the food chain."

The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. "The
Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn’t
know how to do it," the former intelligence official
said.

Last week, the government consultant, who has close
ties to many conservatives, defended the
Administration’s continued secrecy about the special-
access program in Abu Ghraib. "Why keep it black?" the
consultant asked. "Because the process is unpleasant.
It’s like making sausage-you like the result but you
don’t want to know how it was made. Also, you don’t
want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know.
Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle
East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab
world know how you treat Arab males in prison."

The former intelligence official told me he feared that
one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse
scandal would be the undermining of legitimate
operations in the war on terror, which had already
suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He
portrayed Abu Ghraib as "a tumor" on the war on terror.
He said, "As long as it’s benign and contained, the
Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without
jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins
to grow, with nobody to diagnose it-it becomes a
malignant tumor."

The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone
and his superiors, the consultant said, "created the
conditions that allowed transgressions to take place.
And now we’re going to end up with another Church
Commission"-the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence,
headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which
investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two
decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the
Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its
discretionary power. "When the shit hits the fan, as it
did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?" the consultant
asked. "You do it selectively and with intelligence."

"Congress is going to get to the bottom of this," the
Pentagon consultant said. "You have to demonstrate that
there are checks and balances in the system." He added,
"When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to
have very clear red lines."

Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, "If this is
true, it certainly increases the dimension of this
issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all
possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other
allegations."

"In an odd way," Kenneth Roth, the executive director
of Human Rights Watch, said, "the sexual abuses at Abu
Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse
and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is
authorized." Since September 11th, Roth added, the
military has systematically used third-degree
techniques around the world on detainees. "Some jags
hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of
mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next
war," Roth told me. "We’re giving the world a ready-
made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld
has lowered the bar."