[Reader-list] The final (?) word on Abu Ghraib

[Vivek Narayanan]

The unknown unknowns of the Abu Ghraib scandal
Seymour Hersh: The 10 inquiries into prisoner abuse 
have let Bush and Co off the hook

Seymour Hersh
Saturday May 21, 2005
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1489115,00.html>

It's been over a year since I published a series of
articles in the New Yorker outlining the abuses at Abu
Ghraib. There have been at least 10 official military
investigations since then - none of which has
challenged the official Bush administration line that
there was no high-level policy condoning or overlooking
such abuse. The buck always stops with the handful of
enlisted army reservists from the 372nd Military Police
Company whose images fill the iconic Abu Ghraib photos
with their inappropriate smiles and sadistic posing of
the prisoners.

It's a dreary pattern. The reports and the subsequent
Senate proceedings are sometimes criticised on
editorial pages. There are calls for a truly
independent investigation by the Senate or House. Then,
as months pass with no official action, the issue
withers away, until the next set of revelations revives
it.

There is much more to be learned. What do I know? A few
things stand out. I know of the continuing practice of
American operatives seizing suspected terrorists and
taking them, without any meaningful legal review, to
interrogation centres in south-east Asia and elsewhere.
I know of the young special forces officer whose
subordinates were confronted with charges of prisoner
abuse and torture at a secret hearing after one of them
emailed explicit photos back home. The officer
testified that, yes, his men had done what the photos
depicted, but they - and everybody in the command -
understood such treatment was condoned by higher-ups.

What else do I know? I know that the decision was made
inside the Pentagon in the first weeks of the
Afghanistan war - which seemed "won" by December 2001 -
to indefinitely detain scores of prisoners who were
accumulating daily at American staging posts throughout
the country. At the time, according to a memo, in my
possession, addressed to Donald Rumsfeld, there were
"800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody".
I could not learn if some or all of them have been
released, or if some are still being held.

A Pentagon spokesman, when asked to comment, said that
he had no information to substantiate the number in the
document, and that there were currently about 100
juveniles being held in Iraq and Afghanistan; he did
not address detainees held elsewhere. He said they
received some special care, but added "age is not a
determining factor in detention ... As with all the
detainees, their release is contingent upon the
determination that they are not a threat and that they
are of no further intelligence value. Unfortunately, we
have found that ... age does not necessarily diminish
threat potential."

The 10 official inquiries into Abu Ghraib are asking
the wrong questions, at least in terms of apportioning
ultimate responsibility for the treatment of prisoners.
The question that never gets adequately answered is
this: what did the president do after being told about
Abu Ghraib? It is here that chronology becomes very
important.

The US-led coalition forces swept to seeming immediate
success in the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, and by
early April Baghdad had been taken. Over the next few
months, however, the resistance grew in scope,
persistence and skill. In August 2003 it became more
aggressive. At this point there was a decision to get
tough with the thousands of prisoners in Iraq, many of
whom had been seized in random raids or at roadside
checkpoints. Major General Geoffrey D Miller, an army
artillery officer who, as commander at Guantanamo, had
got tough with the prisoners there, visited Baghdad to
tutor the troops - to "Gitmo-ise" the Iraqi system.

By the beginning of October 2003 the reservists on the
night shift at Abu Ghraib had begun their abuse of
prisoners. They were aware that some of America's elite
special forces units were also at work at the prison.
Those highly trained military men had been authorised
by the Pentagon's senior leadership to act far outside
the normal rules of engagement. There was no secret
about the interrogation practices used throughout that
autumn and early winter, and few objections. In fact
representatives of one of the Pentagon's private
contractors at Abu Ghraib, who were involved in
prisoner interrogation, were told that Condoleezza
Rice, then the president's national security adviser,
had praised their efforts. It's not clear why she would
do so - there is still no evidence that the American
intelligence community has accumulated any significant
information about the operations of the resistance, who
continue to strike US soldiers and Iraqis. The night
shift's activities at Abu Ghraib came to an end on
January 13 2004, when specialist Joseph M Darby, one of
the 372nd reservists, provided army police authorities
with a disk full of explicit images. By then, these
horrors had been taking place for nearly four months.

Three days later the army began an investigation. But
it is what was not done that is significant. There is
no evidence that President Bush, upon learning of the
devastating conduct at Abu Ghraib, asked any hard
questions of Rumsfeld and his own aides in the White
House; no evidence that they took any significant
steps, upon learning in mid-January of the abuses, to
review and modify the military's policy toward
prisoners. I was told by a high-level former
intelligence official that within days of the first
reports the judicial system was programmed to begin
prosecuting the enlisted men and women in the photos
and to go no further up the chain of command.

In late April, after the CBS and New Yorker reports, a
series of news conferences and press briefings
emphasised the White House's dismay over the conduct of
a few misguided soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the
president's repeated opposition to torture. Miller was
introduced anew to the American press corps in Baghdad
and it was explained that the general had been assigned
to clean up the prison system and instil respect for
the Geneva conventions.

Despite Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo - not to mention Iraq
and the failure of intelligence - and the various roles
they played in what went wrong, Rumsfeld kept his job;
Rice was promoted to secretary of state; Alberto
Gonzales, who commissioned the memos justifying
torture, became attorney general; deputy secretary of
defence Paul Wolfowitz was nominated to the presidency
of the World Bank; and Stephen Cambone, under-secretary
of defence for intelligence and one of those most
directly involved in the policies on prisoners, was
still one of Rumsfeld's closest confidants. President
Bush, asked about accountability, told the Washington
Post before his second inauguration that the American
people had supplied all the accountability needed - by
re-electing him. Only seven enlisted men and women have
been charged or pleaded guilty to offences relating to
Abu Ghraib. No officer is facing criminal proceedings.

Such action, or inaction, has special significance for
me. In my years of reporting, since covering My Lai in
1969, I have come to know the human costs of such
events - and to believe that soldiers who participate
can become victims as well.

Amid my frenetic reporting for the New Yorker on Abu
Ghraib, I was telephoned by a middle-aged woman. She
told me that a family member, a young woman, was among
those members of the 320th Military Police Battalion,
to which the 372nd was attached, who had returned to
the US in March. She came back a different person -
distraught, angry and wanting nothing to do with her
immediate family. At some point afterward, the older
woman remembered that she had lent the reservist a
portable computer with a DVD player to take to Iraq; on
it she discovered an extensive series of images of a
naked Iraqi prisoner flinching in fear before two
snarling dogs. One of the images was published in the
New Yorker and then all over the world.

The war, the older woman told me, was not the war for
democracy and freedom that she thought her young family
member had been sent to fight. Others must know, she
said. There was one other thing she wanted to share
with me. Since returning from Iraq, the young woman had
been getting large black tattoos all over her body. She
seemed intent on changing her skin.

Extracted from The Chain of Command, published in
paperback by Penguin Press (#7.99)