An article in The New Yorker Magazine says that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and one of his top aides authorized the expansion of a secret program that permitted harsh interrogations of detained members of Al Qaeda to be used against prisoners in Iraq, including detainees at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
The article, to be published in the May 24 edition of The New Yorker, said that the expansion of the “special access program” allowed authorities in charge of Abu Ghraib to engage in degrading and humiliating practices.
The article said, “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 effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.”
The clandestine Defence Department operation was known as a Special Access Program (SAP).
Its rules were: “Grab whom you must. Do what you want,” according to one former intelligence official cited by Hersh.
The US defence secretary’s decision to import such techniques into Iraq, after their use in Afghanistan, was opposed by members of US intelligence organisations, the report said.
The report goes on to say that Rumsfeld left the detailed planning to Pentagon intelligence chief Steve Cambone, but that the programme was ultimately approved by Rumsfeld and the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers.
Mr. Rumsfeld’s decision in the matter had, in effect, shifted the blame for the abuses from himself to lower-level military guards.
I truly think Rumsfeld should be kicked out.
He’s a liar and I don’t believe he didn’t know about what was happening in the prisons. It’s obvious he authorized all that abuse.
