The full New Yorker article by Hersh is here, with excerpts following:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact
THE GRAY ZONE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib. Issue of 2004-05-24 Posted 2004-05-15
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 élite 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...
....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."...
..."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...
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 Guantánamo, 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...
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...
...Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs [sap] that were relevant to the war on terror....
[Mission creep follows by moving the SAP over to Iraq and implementing it to form a counter-insurgency program by late Summer 2003 as attacks on Iraq CPA mount..]
...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 coördinated 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 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 Guantánamo, 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."
[This recommendation of subordinating the needs of MP guard duty to the needs of MI interrogation and intelligence, was stiffly rejected in the Taguba report, contra Miller and the Gitmo model]
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....
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So there it is. I take it back. Seymour Hersh did see the trees and the forest but either wanted to unravel the story piecemeal or had to break it down in weekly installments for the New Yorker venue. I assume he will continue to peel this story layer by layer for awhile longer to inflict the maximum damage on this administration. I couldn't wish for a better agony.
But there needs to be some background on when and how the House and Senate Committees were briefed. Let's take some of these jackoffs out while you're at it, Sy. This last week the stolidly disingenuous frumps at the Congressional committees were up in arms about being left in the dark---maybe they were---maybe they turned the lights out and then complained it was too dark to see. Sure they hadn't seen these particular pictures and maybe they didn't know this particular story of torture was going to hit the fan. But I will bet they knew all about SAP and approved it through back channels. I guess we wait and see.
The next link here has to go over to unmask the plausible deniability fraud by Congressional oversight (I swear to God, I didn't know...), and more particularly over to link up with domestic implementations of the Patriot Act. If I had anything solid on the Patriot Act wing of this sort of shit and I was Hersh, I would wait a few weeks until the military and DoD miseries were played out in the news---then I would hit the bastards all over again with domestic round-up, detention, interrogation, torture and disposal stories of Arab Americans and innocent foreign nationals here for business or family reasons. The real point would be to create a kind of background of public loathing for the Supreme Court to savor as they write their opinion on elements of the Patriot Act this summer.
Let's see, time lines. This is mid-May. Another week or two is about it on the Iraqi torture story, as long as other details can be fed to keep the flames going: Afghanistan, Kuwait, Guantanamo, and maybe some secret bullshit CIA locations---in Germany. That would really help toss some fat on the fire. Old cold war CIA stations in Germany used to torture Muslims. The Germans would certainly like to hear all about that... Probable places would be in and around Ramstein and Wiesbaden.
In WWII after the surrender of Germany, my uncle a captain in the Army was re-assigned from an artillary unit to Wiesbaden to process refugees and determine their home origin, either East or West German. So I would guess, Wiesbaden as good place to start. But it would much simpler to just look at a map that showed Army MI locations in Germany and other `sensitive' locations.
Oh, let's not forget to get some linkage to the UK and Israeli intelligence as possible models or consultants. Let's take our only two allies with us.
Isn't John Warner (R), chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee investigating this whole mess from Virginia? Isn't Virginia prime real estate for CIA, hang'm high federal judges, FBI, US attorneys from hell, secret courts, lotsa spy and secret police bullshit along with numerous military bases: Langley, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Myers, Quantico...? Maybe the US military bases and the federal court and prison system in Virginia are worth sniffing around for possible HVDs.
I am cheering for Hersh to make the connection passed Rumsfeld over to the domestic side and the Patriot Act and its gulag system. There's gotta be a Patriot Act torture-interrogation story somewhere in Virginia or Florida. Virginia and Florida would be my first targets of interest for domestic HVDs as they say over at CJTF-7...
C