Category Archives: Iraq Atrocities

Here's William Safire defending Donald Rumsfeld last week as the Cabinet member soooo concerned with civil rights:

Shortly after 9/11, with the nation gripped by fear and fury, the Bush White House issued a sweeping and popular order to crack down on suspected terrorists. The liberal establishment largely fell cravenly mute. A few lonely civil libertarians spoke out. When I used the word “dictatorial,” conservatives, both neo- and paleo-, derided my condemnation as “hysterical.”

One Bush cabinet member paid attention. Rumsfeld appointed a bipartisan panel of attorneys to re-examine that draconian edict. As a result, basic protections for the accused Qaeda combatants were included in the proposed military tribunals.

Perhaps because of those protections, the tribunals never got off the ground. (The Supreme Court will soon, I hope, provide similar legal rights to suspected terrorists who are U.S. citizens.) But in the panic of the winter of 2001, Rumsfeld was one of the few in power concerned about prisoners' rights.

It smelled like fiction back then, since I recalled that the Pentagon had written rules for Gitmo trials that were so harsh that even administration lawyers rebelled against the first draft. Now here's Seymore Hersch in the New Yorker, with a different set of facts about how Rumsfeld is soooo sensitive to prisoner rights:

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. 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.”

1. Who you gonna believe?

2. Looks like that search for the persons responsible that Rumsfeld promised us may not take too long.

3. When did Bush first learn of this order?

3A. If Bush knew in advance, is that why he said Rumsfeld is the best Secretary of Defense ever? (Version (i) Bush knew in advance and supported Rumsfeld in order to ensure Rumsfeld's silence; version (ii) Bush knew in advance, agreed with the policy and still does, and that's why he thinks Rumsfeld is so great.)

3B. If Bush didn't know of this order at all when he ranked Rumsfeld above George Marshall, would he like a mulligan?

4. Was Safire lying on purpose, tactically, the way he usually does, or did his friend play him for a patsy?

Cryptome (in the heroic rather than creepy mode) has the full text of Red Cross Report on Iraq POWs, or to give it its full title, “Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the Treatment by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation.”

Secret prisons. Harsh interrogations. Heard this one before?

Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations: The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.

At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said.

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as “water boarding,” in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

How many detention faciilities does the CIA run? How many prisoners? How long are they held? Are they released?

And those are the easy questions. The tough ones are about how often the CIA launders its torture through foreign intelligence agencies.

According to Milblogger Citizen Smash, one of the stories I linked to below is false: there is no general order preventing soldiers in Iraq from using e-mail, but rather a localized rule to stop GI's helping themselves to private bandwidth. According to Smash it's an example of how rumors get started:

It would appear that KBR contractors at Ginmar’s camp had set up their own wireless Internet system, and some industrious GIs have since set up their own unofficial Internet café, piggy-backing off the KBR system. But now the KBR folks are upset that the soldiers are slowing down their access (poor babies), so they’ve decided to end the “free ride.”

Not, he says, a general rule blocking access. Rather, the general rule was and remains that e-mail access is spotty, and mostly a matter of private enterprise.

Even the UK's Telegraph is running away from this one.

Rumsfeld is running this operation like a pizza parlour: Mr Rumsfeld has expressed his profound regret, although it is not entirely clear whether that is chiefly for the treatment of the Iraqis or the political damage that the scandal has caused the US government. He has, however, refused to resign, and – according to the recent polls – 70 per cent of the American public agrees with his decision.

I found it rather confusing, however, when Mr Rumsfeld also indicated that he would “resign in a minute” if he felt he could not be an effective leader. On that basis, he should be gone already: he has already proved an ineffective leader, and will be much less effective in the wake of this miserable scandal. For what has leaked out of Abu Ghraib, along with the stomach-churning whiff of chaos and sadism, is the fundamental incompetence in the running of the US military from the top down.

As for George W. Bush, the Telegraph produces the best narrative of events from a bureaucratic perspective I've seen yet. Read this article and ask yourself how it could be that no one told the President?

At some stages the answer plausibly is, 'Because no one showed the pictures to Rumsfeld' (perhaps on the theory that if you keep the pictures locked in a safe in Iraq, they're less likely to leak?) and thus he had no chance to see just how bad it was.

But the plausibility of that answer vanishes once the Pentagon learned that 60 Minutes had the pictures. And still no one told Bush. Rumsfeld et al are trying to say it was just a mistake. No way. Too many people made that mistake. No, it's either a massive CYA attempt gone wrong (and you'd think they'd been around too long the think the press would sit on this story for long? or are they that used to a tame press?) or, most likely, no one thought to tell GWB because, well, why would you?

(I'd sure like to know when they told Cheney — why hasn't anyone asked that question?)

Read Pentagon Okayed Tough Questioning Methods in the Washington Post. Then, at least for the sake of the argument, assume that none of the practices are, legally, “torture” and that none violate international or US law but instead represent the measured outer limit of what can be done to fight terrorism. (Without actually reading them, I'm not prepared to say whether this is a fair assessment, but I would very much like it to be.)

Two things still jump out.

1. The Post doesn't know if these rules applied at Abu Ghraib. We do know that the brass took extraordinary action to keep out a highly trained military lawyer. Were there other rules in effect (and, followed or broken? is there a paper trail?) or no rules?

2. These chilling words: “Separate CIA guidelines exist for agency-run detention centers.” Do they have written rules? Who monitors to see if they re followed? How many camps are there in the American secret prison archipelago? How many prisoners? How long do they stay in? Do they get out?

See BOP News for the relevant parts of the Rummy transcript. Seems the discussion cut off just before it got to the meat.