I'm posting this article by Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker because the link to it doesn't seem to be working. It's available at http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040517fa_fact2 .
May 10, 2004 |
CHAIN OF COMMAND by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How the Department of Defense
mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-17 Posted 2004-05-09
In his devastating report on conditions at Abu Ghraib prison, in
Iraq, Major General Antonio M. Taguba singled out only three
military men for praise. One of them, Master-at-Arms William J.
Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, should be commended, Taguba wrote,
because he “knew his duties and refused to participate in improper
interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI”—military
intelligence—“personnel at Abu Ghraib.” Elsewhere in the report it
became clear what Kimbro would not do: American soldiers, Taguba
said, used “military working dogs to frighten and intimidate
detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually
biting a detainee.”
Taguba’s report was triggered by a soldier’s decision to give Army
investigators photographs of the sexual humiliation and abuse of
prisoners. These images were first broadcast on “60 Minutes II” on
April 28th. Seven enlisted members of the 372nd Military Police
Company of the 320th Military Police Battalion, an Army reserve
unit, are now facing prosecution, and six officers have been
reprimanded. Last week, I was given another set of digital
photographs, which had been in the possession of a member of the
320th. According to a time sequence embedded in the digital files,
the photographs were taken by two different cameras over a
twelve-minute period on the evening of December 12, 2003, two
months after the military-police unit was assigned to Abu Ghraib.
An Iraqi prisoner and American military dog handlers. Other
photographs show the Iraqi on the ground, bleeding.
One of the new photographs shows a young soldier, wearing a dark
jacket over his uniform and smiling into the camera, in the
corridor of the jail. In the background are two Army dog handlers,
in full camouflage combat gear, restraining two German shepherds.
The dogs are barking at a man who is partly obscured from the
camera’s view by the smiling soldier. Another image shows that the
man, an Iraqi prisoner, is naked. His hands are clasped behind his
neck and he is leaning against the door to a cell, contorted with
terror, as the dogs bark a few feet away. Other photographs show
the dogs straining at their leashes and snarling at the prisoner.
In another, taken a few minutes later, the Iraqi is lying on the
ground, writhing in pain, with a soldier sitting on top of him,
knee pressed to his back. Blood is streaming from the inmate’s leg.
Another photograph is a closeup of the naked prisoner, from his
waist to his ankles, lying on the floor. On his right thigh is what
appears to be a bite or a deep scratch. There is another, larger
wound on his left leg, covered in blood.
There is at least one other report of violence involving American
soldiers, an Army dog, and Iraqi citizens, but it was not in Abu
Ghraib. Cliff Kindy, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a
church-supported group that has been monitoring the situation in
Iraq, told me that last November G.I.s unleashed a military dog on
a group of civilians during a sweep in Ramadi, about thirty miles
west of Fallujah. At first, Kindy told me, “the soldiers went house
to house, and arrested thirty people.” (One of them was Saad
al-Khashab, an attorney with the Organization for Human Rights in
Iraq, who told Kindy about the incident.) While the thirty
detainees were being handcuffed and laid on the ground, a firefight
broke out nearby; when it ended, the Iraqis were shoved into a
house. Khashab told Kindy that the American soldiers then “turned
the dog loose inside the house, and several people were bitten.”
(The Defense Department said that it was unable to comment about
the incident before The New Yorker went to press.)
When I asked retired Major General Charles Hines, who was
commandant of the Army’s military-police school during a
twenty-eight-year career in military law enforcement, about these
reports, he reacted with dismay. “Turning a dog loose in a room of
people? Loosing dogs on prisoners of war? I’ve never heard of it,
and it would never have been tolerated,” Hines said. He added that
trained police dogs have long been a presence in Army prisons,
where they are used for sniffing out narcotics and other contraband
among the prisoners, and, occasionally, for riot control. But, he
said, “I would never have authorized it for interrogating or
coercing prisoners. If I had, I’d have been put in jail or kicked
out of the Army.”
The International Red Cross and human-rights groups have repeatedly
complained during the past year about the American military’s
treatment of Iraqi prisoners, with little success. In one case,
disclosed last month by the Denver Post, three Army soldiers from a
military-intelligence battalion were accused of assaulting a female
Iraqi inmate at Abu Ghraib. After an administrative review, the
three were fined “at least five hundred dollars and demoted in
rank,” the newspaper said.
Army commanders had a different response when, on January 13th, a
military policeman presented Army investigators with a computer
disk containing graphic photographs. The images were being swapped
from computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion. The
Army’s senior commanders immediately understood they had a
problem—a looming political and public-relations disaster that
would taint America and damage the war effort.
One of the first soldiers to be questioned was Ivan Frederick, the
M.P. sergeant who was in charge of a night shift at Abu Ghraib.
Frederick, who has been ordered to face a court-martial in Iraq for
his role in the abuse, kept a running diary that began with a knock
on his door by agents of the Army’s Criminal Investigations
Division (C.I.D.) at two-thirty in the morning on January 14th. “I
was escorted . . . to the front door of our building, out of sight
from my room,” Frederick wrote, “while . . . two unidentified males
stayed in my room. ‘Are they searching my room?’” He was told yes.
Frederick later formally agreed to permit the agents to search for
cameras, computers, and storage devices.
On January 16th, three days after the Army received the pictures,
Central Command issued a blandly worded, five-sentence press
release about an investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that it was
then that he learned of the allegations. At some point soon
afterward, Rumsfeld informed President Bush. On January 19th,
Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the officer in charge of
American forces in Iraq, ordered a secret investigation into Abu
Ghraib. Two weeks later, General Taguba was ordered to conduct his
inquiry. He submitted his report on February 26th. By then,
according to testimony before the Senate last week by General
Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, people
“inside our building” had discussed the photographs. Myers, by his
own account, had still not read the Taguba report or seen the
photographs, yet he knew enough about the abuses to persuade “60
Minutes II” to delay its story.
At a Pentagon news conference last week, Rumsfeld and Marine
General Peter Pace, the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
insisted that the investigation into Abu Ghraib had moved routinely
through the chain of command. If the Army had been slow, it was
because of built-in safeguards. Pace told the journalists, “It’s
important to know that as investigations are completed they come up
the chain of command in a very systematic way. So that the
individual who reports in writing [sends it] up to the next level
commander. But he or she takes time, a week or two weeks, three
weeks, whatever it takes, to read all of the documentation, get
legal advice [and] make the decisions that are appropriate at his
or her level. . . . That way everyone’s rights are protected and we
have the opportunity systematically to take a look at the entire
process.”
In interviews, however, retired and active-duty officers and
Pentagon officials said that the system had not worked. Knowledge
of the nature of the abuses—and especially the politically toxic
photographs—had been severely, and unusually, restricted.
“Everybody I’ve talked to said, ‘We just didn’t know’—not even in
the J.C.S.,” one well-informed former intelligence official told
me, emphasizing that he was referring to senior officials with whom
such allegations would normally be shared. “I haven’t talked to
anybody on the inside who knew—nowhere. It’s got them scratching
their heads.” A senior Pentagon official said that many of the
senior generals in the Army were similarly out of the loop on the
Abu Ghraib allegations.
Within the Pentagon, there was a spate of fingerpointing last week.
One top general complained to a colleague that the commanders in
Iraq should have taken C4, a powerful explosive, and blown up Abu
Ghraib last spring, with all of its “emotional baggage”—the prison
was known for its brutality under Saddam Hussein—instead of turning
it into an American facility. “This is beyond the pale in terms of
lack of command attention,” a retired major general told me,
speaking of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. “Where were the flag
officers? And I’m not just talking about a one-star,” he added,
referring to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander at
Abu Ghraib who was relieved of duty. “This was a huge leadership
failure.”
The Pentagon official told me that many senior generals believe
that, along with the civilians in Rumsfeld’s office, General
Sanchez and General John Abizaid, who is in charge of the Central
Command, in Tampa, Florida, had done their best to keep the issue
quiet in the first months of the year. The official chain of
command flows from General Sanchez, in Iraq, to Abizaid, and on to
Rumsfeld and President Bush. “You’ve got to match action, or
nonaction, with interests,” the Pentagon official said. “What is
the motive for not being forthcoming? They foresaw major diplomatic
problems.”
Secrecy and wishful thinking, the Pentagon official said, are
defining characteristics of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, and shaped its
response to the reports from Abu Ghraib. “They always want to delay
the release of bad news—in the hope that something good will
break,” he said. The habit of procrastination in the face of bad
news led to disconnects between Rumsfeld and the Army staff
officers who were assigned to planning for troop requirements in
Iraq. A year ago, the Pentagon official told me, when it became
clear that the Army would have to call up more reserve units to
deal with the insurgency, “we had call-up orders that languished
for thirty or forty days in the office of the Secretary of
Defense.” Rumsfeld’s staff always seemed to be waiting for
something to turn up—for the problem to take care of itself,
without any additional troops. The official explained, “They were
hoping that they wouldn’t have to make a decision.” The delay meant
that soldiers in some units about to be deployed had only a few
days to prepare wills and deal with other family and financial
issues.
The same deliberate indifference to bad news was evident in the
past year, the Pentagon official said, when the Army conducted a
series of elaborate war games. Planners would present best-case,
moderate-case, and worst-case scenarios, in an effort to assess
where the Iraq war was headed and to estimate future troop needs.
In every case, the number of troops actually required exceeded the
worst-case analysis. Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and
civilian officials in the Pentagon continued to insist that future
planning be based on the most optimistic scenario. “The optimistic
estimate was that at this point in time”—mid-2004—“the U.S. Army
would need only a handful of combat brigades in Iraq,” the Pentagon
official said. “There are nearly twenty now, with the international
coalition drying up. They were wildly off the mark.” The official
added, “From the beginning, the Army community was saying that the
projections and estimates were unrealistic.” Now, he said, “we’re
struggling to maintain a hundred and thirty-five thousand troops
while allowing soldiers enough time back home.”
In his news conference last Tuesday, Rumsfeld, when asked whether
he thought the photographs and stories from Abu Ghraib were a
setback for American policy in Iraq, still seemed to be in denial.
“Oh, I’m not one for instant history,” he responded. By Friday,
however, with some members of Congress and with editorials calling
for his resignation, Rumsfeld testified at length before House and
Senate committees and apologized for what he said was
“fundamentally un-American” wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. He also
warned that more, and even uglier, disclosures were to come.
Rumsfeld said that he had not actually looked at any of the Abu
Ghraib photographs until some of them appeared in press accounts,
and hadn’t reviewed the Army’s copies until the day before. When he
did, they were “hard to believe,” he said. “There are other photos
that depict . . . acts that can only be described as blatantly
sadistic, cruel, and inhuman.” Later, he said, “It’s going to get
still more terrible, I’m afraid.” Rumsfeld added, “I failed to
recognize how important it was.”
NBC News later quoted U.S. military officials as saying that the
unreleased photographs showed American soldiers “severely beating
an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi
prisoner, and ‘acting inappropriately with a dead body.’ The
officials said there also was a videotape, apparently shot by U.S.
personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.”
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.” With operations involving
the death of foreign enemies, the memo went on, the planning should
not be carried out in the Pentagon: “The result will be decision by
committee.”
The Pentagon’s impatience with military protocol extended to
questions about the treatment of prisoners caught in the course of
its military operations. Soon after 9/11, as the war on terror got
under way, Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly made public his disdain for
the Geneva conventions. Complaints about America’s treatment of
prisoners, Rumsfeld said in early 2002, amounted to “isolated
pockets of international hyperventilation.”
The effort to determine what happened at Abu Ghraib has evolved
into a sprawling set of related investigations, some of them
hastily put together, including inquiries into twenty-five
suspicious deaths. Investigators have become increasingly concerned
with the role played not only by military and intelligence
officials but also by C.I.A. agents and private-contract employees.
In a statement, the C.I.A. acknowledged that its Inspector General
had an investigation under way into abuses at Abu Ghraib, which
extended to the death of a prisoner. A source familiar with one of
the investigations told me that the victim was the man whose
photograph, which shows his battered body packed in ice, has
circulated around the world. A Justice Department prosecutor has
been assigned to the case. The source also told me that an Army
intelligence operative and a judge advocate general were seeking,
through their lawyers, to negotiate immunity from prosecution in
return for testimony.
The relationship between military policing and intelligence forces
inside the Army prison system reached a turning point last fall in
response to the insurgency against the Coalition Provisional
Authority. “This is a fight for intelligence,” Brigadier General
Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, told a
reporter at a Baghdad press briefing in November. “Do I have enough
soldiers? The answer is absolutely yes. The larger issue is, how do
I use them and on what basis? And the answer to that is
intelligence . . . to try to figure out how to take all this human
intelligence as it comes in to us [and] turn it into something
that’s actionable.” The Army prison system would now be asked to
play its part.
Two months earlier, Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of
the task force in charge of the prison at Guantánamo, had brought a
team of experts to Iraq to review the Army program. His
recommendation was radical: that Army prisons be geared, first and
foremost, to interrogations and the gathering of information needed
for the war effort. “Detention operations must act as an enabler
for interrogation . . . to provide a safe, secure and humane
environment that supports the expeditious collection of
intelligence,” Miller wrote. The military police on guard duty at
the prisons should make support of military intelligence a
priority.
General Sanchez agreed, and on November 19th his headquarters
issued an order formally giving the 205th Military Intelligence
Brigade tactical control over the prison. General Taguba fearlessly
took issue with the Sanchez orders, which, he wrote in his report,
“effectively made an MI Officer, rather than an MP officer,
responsible for the MP units conducting detainee operations at that
facility. This is not doctrinally sound due to the different
missions and agenda assigned to each of these respective
specialties.”
Taguba also criticized Miller’s report, noting that “the
intelligence value of detainees held at . . . Guantánamo is
different than that of the detainees/internees held at Abu Ghraib
and other detention facilities in Iraq. . . . There are a large
number of Iraqi criminals held at Abu Ghraib. These are not
believed to be international terrorists or members of Al Qaeda.”
Taguba noted that Miller’s recommendations “appear to be in
conflict” with other studies and with Army regulations that call
for military-police units to have control of the prison system. By
placing military-intelligence operatives in control instead,
Miller’s recommendations and Sanchez’s change in policy undoubtedly
played a role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Taguba concluded
that certain military-intelligence officers and civilian
contractors at Abu Ghraib were “either directly or indirectly
responsible” for the abuses, and urged that they be subjected to
disciplinary action.
In late March, before the Abu Ghraib scandal became publicly known,
Geoffrey Miller was transferred from Guantánamo and named head of
prison operations in Iraq. “We have changed this—trust us,” Miller
told reporters in early May. “There were errors made. We have
corrected those. We will make sure that they do not happen again.”
Military-intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib repeatedly
wore “sterile,” or unmarked, uniforms or civilian clothes while on
duty. “You couldn’t tell them apart,” the source familiar with the
investigation said. The blurring of identities and organizations
meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly,
the military policemen on duty, to know who was doing what to whom,
and who had the authority to give orders. Civilian employees at the
prison were not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but
they were bound by civilian law—though it is unclear whether
American or Iraqi law would apply.
One of the employees involved in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib,
according to the Taguba report, was Steven Stefanowicz, a civilian
working for CACI International, a Virginia-based company. Private
companies like CACI and Titan Corp. could pay salaries of well over
a hundred thousand dollars for the dangerous work in Iraq, far more
than the Army pays, and were permitted, as never before in U.S.
military history, to handle sensitive jobs. (In a briefing last
week, General Miller confirmed that Stefanowicz had been reassigned
to administrative duties. A CACI spokeswoman declined to comment on
any employee in Iraq, citing safety concerns, but said that the
company still had not heard anything directly from the government
about Stefanowicz.)
Stefanowicz and his colleagues conducted most, if not all, of their
interrogations in the Abu Ghraib facilities known to the soldiers
as the Wood Building and the Steel Building. The interrogation
centers were rarely visited by the M.P.s, a source familiar with
the investigation said. The most important prisoners—the suspected
insurgency members deemed to be High Value Detainees—were housed at
Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, but the pressure on
soldiers to accede to requests from military intelligence was felt
throughout the system.
Not everybody went along. A company captain in a military-police
unit in Baghdad told me last week that he was approached by a
junior intelligence officer who requested that his M.P.s keep a
group of detainees awake around the clock until they began talking.
“I said, ‘No, we will not do that,’” the captain said. “The M.I.
commander comes to me and says, ‘What is the problem? We’re
stressed, and all we are asking you to do is to keep them awake.’ I
ask, ‘How? You’ve received training on that, but my soldiers don’t
know how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to
keep someone awake, and he doesn’t know how to do it, he’s going to
get creative.’” The M.I. officer took the request to the captain’s
commander, but, the captain said, “he backed me up.
“It’s all about people. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were failed by
their commanders—both low-ranking and high,” the captain said. “The
system is broken—no doubt about it. But the Army is made up of
people, and we’ve got to depend on them to do the right thing.”
In his report, Taguba strongly suggested that there was a link
between the interrogation process in Afghanistan and the abuses at
Abu Ghraib. A few months after General Miller’s report, Taguba
wrote, General Sanchez, apparently troubled by reports of
wrongdoing in Army jails in Iraq, asked Army Provost Marshal Donald
Ryder, a major general, to carry out a study of military prisons.
In the resulting study, which is still classified, Ryder identified
a conflict between military policing and military intelligence
dating back to the Afghan war. He wrote, “Recent intelligence
collection in support of Operation Enduring Freedom posited a
template whereby military police actively set favorable conditions
for subsequent interviews.”
One of the most prominent prisoners of the Afghan war was John
Walker Lindh, the twenty-one-year-old Californian who was captured
in December, 2001. Lindh was accused of training with Al Qaeda
terrorists and conspiring to kill Americans. A few days after his
arrest, according to a federal-court affidavit filed by his
attorney, James Brosnahan, a group of armed American soldiers
“blindfolded Mr. Lindh, and took several pictures of Mr. Lindh and
themselves with Mr. Lindh. In one, the soldiers scrawled ‘shithead’
across Mr. Lindh’s blindfold and posed with him. . . . Another told
Mr. Lindh that he was ‘going to hang’ for his actions and that
after he was dead, the soldiers would sell the photographs and give
the money to a Christian organization.” Some of the photographs
later made their way to the American media. Lindh was later
stripped naked, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, and placed in
a windowless shipping container. Once again, the affidavit said,
“military personnel photographed Mr. Lindh as he lay on the
stretcher.” On July 15, 2002, Lindh agreed to plead guilty to
carrying a gun while serving in the Taliban and received a
twenty-year jail term. During that process, Brosnahan told me, “the
Department of Defense insisted that we state that there was ‘no
deliberate’ mistreatment of John.” His client agreed to do so, but,
the attorney noted, “Against that, you have that photograph of a
naked John on that stretcher.”
The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq,
seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing
interrogation process. The Times published an interview last week
with Hayder Sabbar Abd, who claimed, convincingly, to be one of the
mistreated Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib photographs. Abd told
Ian Fisher, the Times reporter, that his ordeal had been recorded,
almost constantly, by cameras, which added to his humiliation. He
remembered how the camera flashed repeatedly as soldiers told to
him to masturbate and beat him when he refused.
One lingering mystery is how Ryder could have conducted his review
last fall, in the midst of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib,
without managing to catch it. (Ryder told a Pentagon press briefing
last week that his trip to Iraq “was not an inspection or an
investigation. . . . It was an assessment.”) In his report to
Sanchez, Ryder flatly declared that “there were no military police
units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices.”
Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as an agent of
the C.I.D., told me that Ryder was in a bureaucratic bind. The Army
had revised its command structure last fall, and Ryder, as provost
marshal, was now the commanding general of all military-police
units as well as of the C.I.D. He was, in essence, being asked to
investigate himself. “What Ryder should have done was set up a
C.I.D. task force headed by an 0-6”—full colonel—“with fifteen
agents, and begin interviewing everybody and taking sworn
statements,” Rowell said. “He had to answer questions about the
prisons in September, when Sanchez asked for an assessment.” At the
time, Rowell added, the Army prison system was unprepared for the
demands the insurgency placed on it. “Ryder was a man in a no-win
situation,” Rowell said. “As provost marshal, if he’d turned a
C.I.D. task force loose, he could be in harm’s way—because he’s
also boss of the military police. He was being eaten alive.”
Ryder may have protected himself, but Taguba did not. “He’s not
regarded as a hero in some circles in the Pentagon,” a retired Army
major general said of Taguba. “He’s the guy who blew the whistle,
and the Army will pay the price for his integrity. The leadership
does not like to have people make bad news public.”