Abu Ghraib Opened Up

Sy Hersh opens up the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses - Surprise: The methodology was rubber-stamped by Rumsfeld.

Sure I'm skeptical. I have to be. But Sy Hersh doesn't make very many mistakes. in the latest New Yorker online piece, Hersh meticulously crafts a piece worthy of his esteemed reputation. Here's a bit:

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."

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[Special Access Program], 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."

Of course 'plausible deniability' can still be maintained. This is certain to garner a full, exhaustive investigation into prisoner abuses at all U.S. military retention facilities.

The article is Hersh's second 'My Lai' if it holds up. I have every confidence that it will. The question is: Do we have the courage to find out?

Read it. Download it. Give a copy to everyone you know...okay, a link will suffice.