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by
Seymour M. Hersh June 25, 2007
The New Yorker
On the afternoon of
May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned
to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his
senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings
before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about
abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week,
revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing
prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had
appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response,
Administration officials had insisted that only a few
low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not
torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had
uncovered the scandal.
If there was a
redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the thoroughness and
the passion of the Army’s initial investigation. The inquiry had
begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was
stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in
March. In it he found:
Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal
abuses were inflicted on several detainees . . . systemic and
illegal abuse.
Taguba was met at the
door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General
Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant.
Craddock’s daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba’s two
children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort
Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, “Craddock
just said, very coldly, ‘Wait here.’ ” In a series of interviews
early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he
understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his
career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to
him that the abused detainees were “only Iraqis.” Even so, he
was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was
finally ushered in.
“Here . . . comes . .
. that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!”
Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended
by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the
Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard
Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and
General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with
Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment
nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to
know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the
setting.”
In the meeting, the
officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell
us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it
abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described
a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an
interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not
abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”
Rumsfeld was
particularly concerned about how the classified report had
become public. “General,” he asked, “who do you think leaked the
report?” Taguba responded that perhaps a senior military leader
who knew about the investigation had done so. “It was just my
speculation,” he recalled. “Rumsfeld didn’t say anything.” (I
did not meet Taguba until mid-2006 and obtained his report
elsewhere.) Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the
information he needed. “Here I am,” Taguba recalled Rumsfeld
saying, “just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a
copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have
to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this.” As
Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, “He’s looking at me. It was a
statement.”
At best, Taguba said,
“Rumsfeld was in denial.” Taguba had submitted more than a dozen
copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon
and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida,
which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld’s
conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military
leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of
them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually
read it. (Schoomaker later sent Taguba a note praising his
honesty and leadership.) When Taguba urged one lieutenant
general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I
don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do
with that information, once you know what they show?”
Taguba also knew that
senior officials in Rumsfeld’s office and elsewhere in the
Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from
Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance,
within days of the first complaint. On January 13, 2004, a
military policeman named Joseph Darby gave the Army’s Criminal
Investigation Division (C.I.D.) a CD full of images of abuse.
Two days later, General Craddock and Vice-Admiral Timothy
Keating, the director of the Joint Staff of the J.C.S., were
e-mailed a summary of the abuses depicted on the CD. It said
that approximately ten soldiers were shown, involved in acts
that included:
Having male detainees pose nude while female guards pointed at
their genitals; having female detainees exposing themselves to
the guards; having detainees perform indecent acts with each
other; and guards physically assaulting detainees by beating and
dragging them with choker chains.
Taguba said, “You
didn’t need to ‘see’ anything—just take the secure e-mail
traffic at face value.”
I learned from Taguba
that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the
sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both
detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi
woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others
have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos
were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal
investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba
said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform
sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in
any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any
public government mention of it. Such images would have added an
even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib.
“It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing
women’s panties,” Taguba said.
On January 20th, the
chief of staff at Central Command sent another e-mail to Admiral
Keating, copied to General Craddock and Lieutenant General
Ricardo Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq. The chief of staff
wrote, “Sir: update on alleged detainee abuse per our
discussion. DID IT REALLY HAPPEN? Yes, currently have 4
confessions implicating perhaps 10 soldiers. DO PHOTOS EXIST?
Yes. A CD with approx 100 photos and a video—CID has these in
their possession.”
In subsequent
testimony, General Myers, the J.C.S. chairman, acknowledged,
without mentioning the e-mails, that in January information
about the photographs had been given “to me and the Secretary up
through the chain of command. . . . And the general nature of
the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse,
was described.”
Nevertheless,
Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House
Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no
idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact
someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do
something,’ ” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had
known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but
we didn’t.”
Rumsfeld told the
legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared,
“it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the
photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the
Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I
didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically
when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:
There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain
back sometime after January 13th . . . I don’t remember
precisely when, but sometime in that period of January,
February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along
fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the
President didn’t know, and you didn’t know, and I didn’t know.
“And, as a result,
somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they
are,” Rumsfeld said.
Taguba, watching the
hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony
was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if
he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of
knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps
Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because
he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad
news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld is very
perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s
suffering from C.R.S.—Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit
himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.”
It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate
and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred
with his denials.
“The whole idea that
Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from
terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have
abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high
standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot
of officers with them.”
In response to
detailed queries about this article, Colonel Gary Keck, a
Pentagon spokesman, said in an e-mail, “The department did not
promulgate interrogation policies or guidelines that directed,
sanctioned, or encouraged abuse.” He added, “When there have
been abuses, those violations are taken seriously, acted upon
promptly, investigated thoroughly, and the wrongdoers are held
accountable.” Regarding early warnings about Abu Ghraib, Colonel
Keck said, “Former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has stated
publicly under oath that he and other senior leaders were not
provided pictures from Abu Ghraib until shortly before their
release.” (Rumsfeld, through an aide, declined to answer
questions, as did General Craddock. Other senior commanders did
not respond to requests for comment.)
During the next two
years, Taguba assiduously avoided the press, telling his
relatives not to talk about his work. Friends and family had
been inundated with telephone calls and visitors, and, Taguba
said, “I didn’t want them to be involved.” Taguba retired in
January, 2007, after thirty-four years of active service, and
finally agreed to talk to me about his investigation of Abu
Ghraib and what he believed were the serious misrepresentations
by officials that followed. “From what I knew, troops just don’t
take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any
form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders
were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military
police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of
command. “These M.P. troops were not that creative,” he said.
“Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented
from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited
to a box.”
General Taguba is a
slight man with a friendly demeanor and an unfailingly polite
correctness. “I came from a poor family and had to work hard,”
he said. “It was always shine the shoes on Saturday morning for
church, and wash the car on Saturday for church. And Saturday
also for mowing the lawn and doing yard jobs for church.”
His father, Tomas, was
born in the Philippines and was drafted into the Philippine
Scouts in early 1942, at the height of the Japanese attack on
the joint American-Filipino force led by General Douglas
MacArthur. Tomas was captured by the Japanese on the Bataan
peninsula in April, 1942, and endured the Bataan Death March,
which took thousands of American and Filipino lives. Tomas
escaped and joined the underground resistance to the Japanese
before returning to the American Army, in July, 1945.
Taguba’s mother,
Maria, spent much of the Second World War living across the
street from a Japanese-run prisoner-of-war camp in Manila.
Taguba remembers her vivid accounts of prisoners who were
bayonetted arbitrarily or whose fingernails were pulled out.
Antonio, the eldest son (he has six siblings), was born in
Manila in 1950. Maria and Tomas were devout Catholics, and their
children were taught respect and, Taguba recalls, “above all,
integrity in how you lived your life and practiced your
religion.”
In 1961, the family
moved to Hawaii, where Tomas retired from the military and took
a civilian job in logistics, preparing units for deployment to
Vietnam. A year after they arrived, Antonio became a U.S.
citizen. By then, as a sixth grader, he was delivering
newspapers, serving as an altar boy, and doing well in school.
He went to Idaho State University, in Pocatello, with help from
the Army R.O.T.C., and graduated in 1972. As a newly
commissioned second lieutenant, he was five feet six inches tall
and weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. His Army service began
immediately: he led troops at the platoon, company, battalion,
and brigade levels at bases in South Korea, Germany, and across
America. (He married in 1981, and has two grown children.) In
1986, Taguba, then a major, was selected to attend the College
of Naval Command and Staff at the Naval War College, in Newport,
Rhode Island. While there, he wrote an analysis of Soviet
ground-attack planning that became required reading at the
school. He was promoted, ahead of his peers, to become a colonel
and then a general. On the way, Taguba earned three master’s
degrees—in public administration, international relations, and
national-security studies.
“I’ll talk to you
about discrimination,” he said one morning, while discussing,
without bitterness, his early years as an Army officer. “Let’s
talk about being refused to be served at a restaurant in public.
Let’s talk about having to do things two times, and being
accused of not speaking English well, and having to pay myself
for my three master’s degrees because the Army didn’t think I
was smart enough. So what? Just work your ass off. So what? The
hard work paid off.”
Taguba had joined the
Army knowing little about his father’s military experience. “He
saw the ravages and brutality of war, but he wasn’t about to
brag about his exploits,” Taguba said. “He didn’t say anything
until 1997, and it took me two years to rebuild his records and
show that he was authorized for an award.” On Tomas’s eightieth
birthday, he was awarded the Bronze Star and a prisoner-of-war
medal in a ceremony at Schofield Barracks, in Hawaii. “My father
never laughed,” Taguba said. But the day he got his medal “he
smiled—he had a big-ass smile on his face. I’d never seen him
look so proud. He was a bent man with carpal-tunnel syndrome,
but at the end of the medal ceremony he stood himself up and
saluted. I cried, and everyone in my family burst into tears.”
Richard Armitage, a
former Navy counter-insurgency officer who served as Deputy
Secretary of State in the first Bush term, recalled meeting
Taguba, then a lieutenant colonel, in South Korea in the early
nineteen-nineties. “I was told to keep an eye on this young
guy—‘He’s going to be a general,’ ” Armitage said. “Taguba was
discreet and low key—not a sprinter but a marathoner.”
At the time, Taguba
was working for Major General Mike Myatt, a marine who was the
officer in charge of strategic talks with the South Koreans, on
behalf of the American military. “I needed an executive
assistant with brains and integrity,” Myatt, who is now retired
and living in San Francisco, told me. After interviewing a
number of young officers, he chose Taguba. “He was ethical and
he knew his stuff,” Myatt said. “We really became close, and I’d
trust him with my life. We talked about military strategy and
policy, and the moral aspect of war—the importance of not losing
the moral high ground.” Myatt followed Taguba’s involvement in
the Abu Ghraib inquiry, and said, “I was so proud of him. I told
him, ‘Tony, you’ve maintained yourself, and your integrity.’ ”
Taguba got a different
message, however, from other officers, among them General John
Abizaid, then the head of Central Command. A few weeks after his
report became public, Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in
the back seat of a Mercedes sedan with Abizaid. Abizaid’s driver
and his interpreter, who also served as a bodyguard, were in
front. Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet warning: “You
and your report will be investigated.”
“I wasn’t angry about
what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,”
Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and
it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”
THE INVESTIGATION
Taguba was given the
job of investigating Abu Ghraib because of circumstance: the
senior officer of the 800th Military Police Brigade, to which
the soldiers in the photographs belonged, was a one-star
general; Army regulations required that the head of the inquiry
be senior to the commander of the unit being investigated, and
Taguba, a two-star general, was available. “It was as simple as
that,” he said. He vividly remembers his first thought upon
seeing the photographs in late January of 2004: “Unbelievable!
What were these people doing?” There was an immediate second
thought: “This is big.”
Taguba decided to keep
the photographs from most of the interrogators and researchers
on his staff of twenty-three officers. “I didn’t want them to
prejudge the soldiers they were investigating, so I put the
photos in a safe,” he told me. “Anyone who wanted to see them
had to have a need-to-know and go through me.” His decision to
keep the staff in the background was also intended to insure
that none of them suffered damage to his or her career because
of involvement in the inquiry. “I knew it was going to be very
sensitive because of the gravity of what was in front of us,” he
said.
The team spent much of
February, 2004, in Iraq. Taguba was overwhelmed by the scale of
the wrongdoing. “These were people who were taken off the
streets and put in jail—teen-agers and old men and women,” he
said. “I kept on asking these questions of the officers I
interviewed: ‘You knew what was going on. Why didn’t you do
something to stop it?’ ”
Taguba’s assignment
was limited to investigating the 800th M.P.s, but he quickly
found signs of the involvement of military intelligence—both the
205th Military Intelligence Brigade, commanded by Colonel Thomas
Pappas, which worked closely with the M.P.s, and what were
called “other government agencies,” or O.G.A.s, a euphemism for
the C.I.A. and special-operations units operating undercover in
Iraq. Some of the earliest evidence involved Lieutenant Colonel
Steven L. Jordan, whose name was mentioned in interviews with
several M.P.s. For the first three weeks of the investigation,
Jordan was nowhere to be found, despite repeated requests. When
the investigators finally located him, he asked whether he
needed to shave his beard before being interviewed—Taguba
suspected that he had been dressing as a civilian. “When I asked
him about his assignment, he says, ‘I’m a liaison officer for
intelligence from Army headquarters in Iraq.’ ” But in the
course of three or four interviews with Jordan, Taguba said, he
began to suspect that the lieutenant colonel had been more
intimately involved in the interrogation process—some of it
brutal—for “high value” detainees.
“Jordan denied
everything, and yet he had the authority to enter the prison’s
‘hard site’ ”—where the most important detainees were
held—“carrying a carbine and an M9 pistol, which is against
regulations,” Taguba said. Jordan had also led a squad of
military policemen in a shoot-out inside the hard site with a
detainee from Syria who had managed to obtain a gun. (A lawyer
for Jordan disputed these allegations; in the shoot-out, he
said, Jordan was “just another gun on the extraction team” and
not the leader. He noted that Jordan was not a trained
interrogator.)
Taguba said that
Jordan’s “record reflected an extensive intelligence
background.” He also had reason to believe that Jordan was not
reporting through the chain of command. But Taguba’s narrowly
focussed mission constrained the questions he could ask. “I
suspected that somebody was giving them guidance, but I could
not print that,” Taguba said.
“After all Jordan’s
evasiveness and misleading responses, his rights were read to
him,” Taguba went on. Jordan subsequently became the only
officer facing trial on criminal charges in connection with Abu
Ghraib and is scheduled to be court-martialled in late August.
(Seven M.P.s were convicted of charges that included dereliction
of duty, maltreatment, and assault; one defendant, Specialist
Charles Graner, was sentenced to ten years in prison.) Last
month, a military judge ruled that Jordan, who is still assigned
to the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, had not been
appropriately advised of his rights during his interviews with
Taguba, undermining the Army’s allegation that he lied during
the Taguba inquiry. Six other charges remain, including failure
to obey an order or regulation; cruelty and maltreatment; and
false swearing and obstruction of justice. (His lawyer said,
“The evidence clearly shows that he is innocent.”)
Taguba came to believe
that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq, and
some of the generals assigned to the military headquarters in
Baghdad had extensive knowledge of the abuse of prisoners in Abu
Ghraib even before Joseph Darby came forward with the CD. Taguba
was aware that in the fall of 2003—when much of the abuse took
place—Sanchez routinely visited the prison, and witnessed at
least one interrogation. According to Taguba, “Sanchez knew
exactly what was going on.”
Taguba learned that in
August, 2003, as the Sunni insurgency in Iraq was gaining force,
the Pentagon had ordered Major General Geoffrey Miller, the
commander at Guantánamo, to Iraq. His mission was to survey the
prison system there and to find ways to improve the flow of
intelligence. The core of Miller’s recommendations, as
summarized in the Taguba report, was that the military police at
Abu Ghraib should become part of the interrogation process: they
should work closely with interrogators and intelligence officers
in “setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the
internees.”
Taguba concluded that
Miller’s approach was not consistent with Army doctrine, which
gave military police the overriding mission of making sure that
the prisons were secure and orderly. His report cited testimony
that interrogators and other intelligence personnel were
encouraging the abuse of detainees. “Loosen this guy up for us,”
one M.P. said he was told by a member of military intelligence.
“Make sure he has a bad night.”
The M.P.s, Taguba
said, “were being literally exploited by the military
interrogators. My view is that those kids”—even the soldiers in
the photographs—“were poorly led, not trained, and had not been
given any standard operating procedures on how they should guard
the detainees.”
Surprisingly, given
Taguba’s findings, Miller was the officer chosen to restore
order at Abu Ghraib. In April, 2004, a month after the report
was filed, he was reassigned there as the deputy commander for
detainee operations. “Miller called in the spring and asked to
meet with me to discuss Abu Ghraib, but I waited for him and we
never did meet,” Taguba recounted. Miller later told Taguba that
he’d been ordered to Washington to meet with Rumsfeld before
travelling to Iraq, but he never attempted to reschedule the
meeting.
If they had spoken,
Taguba said, he would have reminded Miller that at Abu Ghraib,
unlike at Guantánamo, very few prisoners were affiliated with
any terrorist group. Taguba had seen classified documents
revealing that there were only “one or two” suspected Al Qaeda
prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Most of the detainees had nothing to do
with the insurgency. A few of them were common criminals.
Taguba had known
Miller for years. “We served together in Korea and in the
Pentagon, and his wife and mine used to go shopping together,”
Taguba said. But, after his report became public, “Miller didn’t
talk to me. He didn’t say a word when I passed him in the
hallway.”
Despite the subsequent
public furor over Abu Ghraib, neither the House nor the Senate
Armed Services Committee hearings led to a serious effort to
determine whether the scandal was a result of a high-level
interrogation policy that encouraged abuse. At the House
Committee hearing on May 7, 2004, a freshman Democratic
congressman, Kendrick Meek, of Florida, asked Rumsfeld if it was
time for him to resign. Rumsfeld replied, “I would resign in a
minute if I thought that I couldn’t be effective. . . . I have
to wrestle with that.” But, he added, “I’m certainly not going
to resign because some people are trying to make a political
issue out of it.” (Rumsfeld stayed in office for the next two
and a half years, until the day after the 2006 congressional
elections.) When I spoke to Meek recently, he said, “There was
no way Rumsfeld didn’t know what was going on. He’s a guy who
wants to know everything, and what he was giving us was hard to
believe.”
Later that month,
Rumsfeld appeared before a closed hearing of the House Defense
Appropriations Subcommittee, which votes on the funds for all
secret operations in the military. Representative David Obey, of
Wisconsin, the senior Democrat at the hearing, told me that he
had been angry when a fellow subcommittee member “made the
comment that ‘Abu Ghraib was the price of defending democracy.’
I said that wasn’t the way I saw it, and that I didn’t want to
see some corporal made into a scapegoat. This could not have
happened without people in the upper echelon of the
Administration giving signals. I just didn’t see how this was
not systemic.”
-
Obey asked
Rumsfeld a series of pointed questions. Taguba attended the
closed hearing with Rumsfeld and recalled him bristling at
Obey’s inquiries. “I don’t know what happened!” Rumsfeld
Taguba got a chance to
answer questions on May 11th, when he was summoned to appear
before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Under-Secretary
Stephen Cambone sat beside him. (Cambone was Rumsfeld’s point
man on interrogation policy.) Cambone, too, told the committee
that he hadn’t known about the specific abuses at Abu Ghraib
until he saw Taguba’s report, “when I was exposed to some of
those photographs.”
Carl Levin, Democrat
of Michigan, tried to focus on whether Abu Ghraib was the
consequence of a larger detainee policy. “These acts of abuse
were not the spontaneous actions of lower-ranking enlisted
personnel,” Levin said. “These attempts to extract information
from prisoners by abusive and degrading methods were clearly
planned and suggested by others.” The senators repeatedly asked
about General Miller’s trip to Iraq in 2003. Did the
“Gitmo-izing” of Abu Ghraib—especially the model of using the
M.P.s in “setting the conditions” for interrogations—lead to the
abuses?
Cambone confirmed that
Miller had been sent to Iraq with his approval, but insisted
that the senators were “misreading General Miller’s intent.”
Questioned on that point by Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode
Island, Cambone said, “I don’t know that I was being told, and I
don’t know that General Miller said that there should be that
kind of activity that you are ascribing to his recommendation.”
Reed then asked
Taguba, “Was it clear from your reading of the [Miller] report
that one of the major recommendations was to use guards to
condition these prisoners?” Taguba replied, “Yes, sir. That was
recommended on the report.”
At another point,
after Taguba confirmed that military intelligence had taken
control of the M.P.s following Miller’s visit, Levin questioned
Cambone:
LEVIN: Do you disagree with what the general just said?
CAMBONE: Yes, sir.
LEVIN: Pardon?
CAMBONE: I do.
Taguba, looking back
on his testimony, said, “That’s the reason I wasn’t in their
camp—because I kept on contradicting them. I wasn’t about to lie
to the committee. I knew I was already in a losing proposition.
If I lie, I lose. And, if I tell the truth, I lose.”
Taguba had been
scheduled to rotate to the Third Army’s headquarters, at Fort
McPherson, Georgia, in June of 2004. He was instead ordered back
to the Pentagon, to work in the office of the Assistant
Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs. “It was a lateral
assignment,” Taguba said, with a smile and a shrug. “I didn’t
quibble. If you’re going to do that to me, well, O.K. We all
serve at the pleasure of the President.” A retired four-star
Army general later told Taguba that he had been sent to the job
in the Pentagon so that he could “be watched.” Taguba realized
that his career was at a dead end.
Later in 2004, Taguba
encountered Rumsfeld and one of his senior press aides, Lawrence
Di Rita, in the Pentagon Athletic Center. Taguba was getting
dressed after a workout. “I was tying my shoes,” Taguba
recalled. “I looked up, and there they were.” Rumsfeld, who was
putting his clothes into a locker, recognized Taguba and said,
“Hello, General.” Di Rita, who was standing beside Rumsfeld,
said sarcastically, “See what you started, General? See what you
started?”
Di Rita, who is now an
official with Bank of America, recalled running into Taguba in
the locker room but not his words. “Sounds like my brand of
humor,” he said, in an e-mail. “A comment like that would have
been in an attempt to lighten the mood for General Taguba.” (Di
Rita added that Taguba had “my personal respect and admiration”
and that of Rumsfeld. “He did a terrific job under difficult
circumstances.”) However, Taguba was troubled by the encounter,
and later told a colleague, “I’m now the problem.”
DENIABILITY
A dozen government
investigations have been conducted into Abu Ghraib and detainee
abuse. A few of them picked up on matters raised by Taguba’s
report, but none followed through on the question of ultimate
responsibility. Military investigators were precluded from
looking into the role of Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders in
the Pentagon; the result was that none found any high-level
intelligence involvement in the abuse.
An independent panel
headed by James R. Schlesinger, a former Secretary of Defense,
did conclude that there was “institutional and personal
responsibility at higher levels” for Abu Ghraib, but cleared
Rumsfeld of any direct responsibility. In an August, 2004,
report, the Schlesinger panel endorsed Rumsfeld’s complaints,
citing “the reluctance to move bad news up the chain of command”
as the most important factor in Washington’s failure to
understand the significance of Abu Ghraib. “Given the magnitude
of this problem, the Secretary of Defense and other senior DoD
officials need a more effective information pipeline to inform
them of high-profile incidents,” the report said. Schlesinger
and his colleagues apparently were unaware of the early e-mail
messages that had informed the Pentagon of Abu Ghraib.
The official inquiries
consistently provided the public with less information about
abuses than outside studies conducted by human-rights groups. In
one case, in November, 2004, an Army investigation, by Brigadier
General Richard Formica, into the treatment of detainees at Camp
Nama, a Special Forces detention center at Baghdad International
Airport, concluded that detainees who reported being sodomized
or beaten were seeking sympathy and better treatment, and thus
were not credible. For example, Army doctors had initially noted
that a complaining detainee’s wounds were “consistent with the
history [of abuse] he provided. . . . The doctor did find scars
on his wrists and noted what he believed to be an anal fissure.”
Formica had the detainee reëxamined two days later, by another
doctor, who found “no fissure, and no scarring. . . . As a
result, I did not find medical evidence of the sodomy.” In the
case of a detainee who died in custody, Formica noted that there
had been bruising to the “shoulders, chest, hip, and knees” but
added, “It is not unusual for detainees to have minor bruising,
cuts and scrapes.” In July, 2006, however, Human Rights Watch
issued a fifty-three-page report on the “serious mistreatment”
of detainees at Camp Nama and two other sites, largely based on
witness accounts from Special Forces interrogators and others
who served there.
Formica, asked to
comment, wrote in an e-mail, “I conducted a thorough
investigation . . . and stand by my report.” He said that
“several issues” he discovered “were corrected.” His assignment,
Formica noted, was to investigate a unit, and not to conduct “a
systematic analysis of Special Operations activities.”
The Army also
protected General Miller. Since 2002, F.B.I. agents at
Guantánamo had been telling their superiors that their military
counterparts were abusing detainees. The F.B.I. complaints were
ignored until after Abu Ghraib. When an investigation was
opened, in December, 2004, General Craddock, Rumsfeld’s former
military aide, was in charge of the Army’s Southern Command,
with jurisdiction over Guantánamo—he had been promoted a few
months after Taguba’s visit to Rumsfeld’s office. Craddock
appointed Air Force Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, a
straight-talking fighter pilot, to investigate the charges,
which included alleged abuses during Miller’s tenure.
“I followed the
bread-crumb trail,” Schmidt, who retired last year, told me. “I
found some things that didn’t seem right. For lack of a camera,
you could have seen in Guantánamo what was seen at Abu Ghraib.”
Schmidt found that
Miller, with the encouragement of Rumsfeld, had focussed great
attention on the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi
who was believed to be the so-called “twentieth hijacker.”
Qahtani was interrogated “for twenty hours a day for at least
fifty-four days,” Schmidt told investigators from the Army
Inspector General’s office, who were reviewing his findings. “I
mean, here’s this guy manacled, chained down, dogs brought in,
put in his face, told to growl, show teeth, and that kind of
stuff. And you can imagine the fear.”
At Guantánamo, Schmidt
told the investigators, Miller “was responsible for the conduct
of interrogations that I found to be abusive and degrading. The
intent of those might have been to be abusive and degrading to
get the information they needed. . . . Did the means justify the
ends? That’s fine. . . . He was responsible.”
Schmidt formally
recommended that Miller be “held accountable” and “admonished.”
Craddock rejected this recommendation and absolved Miller of any
responsibility for the mistreatment of the prisoners. The
Inspector General inquiry endorsed Craddock’s action. “I was
open with them,” Schmidt told me, referring to the I.G.
investigators. “I told them, ‘I’ll do anything to help you get
the truth.’ ” But when he read their final report, he said, “I
didn’t recognize the five hours of interviews with me.”
Schmidt learned of
Craddock’s reversal the day before they were to meet with
Rumsfeld, in July, 2005. Rumsfeld was in frequent contact with
Miller about the progress of Qahtani’s interrogation, and
personally approved the most severe interrogation tactics.
(“This wasn’t just daily business, when the Secretary of Defense
is personally involved,” Schmidt told the Army investigators.)
Nonetheless, Schmidt was impressed by Rumsfeld’s demonstrative
surprise, dismay, and concern upon being told of the abuse. “He
was going, ‘My God! Did I authorize putting a bra and
underwear on this guy’s head and telling him all his buddies
knew he was a homosexual?’ ”
Schmidt was convinced.
“I got to tell you that I never got the feeling that Secretary
Rumsfeld was trying to hide anything,” he told me. “He got very
frustrated. He’s a control guy, and this had gotten out of
control. He got pissed.”
Rumsfeld’s response to
Schmidt was similar to his expressed surprise over Taguba’s Abu
Ghraib report. “Rummy did what we called ‘case law’
policy—verbal and not in writing,” Taguba said. “What he’s
really saying is that if this decision comes back to haunt me
I’ll deny it.”
Taguba eventually
concluded that there was a reason for the evasions and
stonewalling by Rumsfeld and his aides. At the time he filed his
report, in March of 2004, Taguba said, “I knew there was C.I.A.
involvement, but I was oblivious of what else was happening” in
terms of covert military-intelligence operations. Later that
summer, however, he learned that the C.I.A. had serious concerns
about the abusive interrogation techniques that
military-intelligence operatives were using on high-value
detainees. In one secret memorandum, dated June 2, 2003, General
George Casey, Jr., then the director of the Joint Staff in the
Pentagon, issued a warning to General Michael DeLong, at the
Central Command:
CIA has advised that the techniques the military forces are
using to interrogate high value detainees (HVDs) . . . are more
aggressive than the techniques used by CIA who is [sic]
interviewing the same HVDs.
DeLong replied to
Casey that the techniques in use were “doctrinally appropriate
techniques,” in accordance with Army regulations and Rumsfeld’s
direction.
THE TASK FORCES
Abu Ghraib had opened
the door on the issue of the treatment of detainees, and from
the beginning the Administration feared that the publicity would
expose more secret operations and practices. Shortly after
September 11th, Rumsfeld, with the support of President Bush,
had set up military task forces whose main target was the senior
leadership of Al Qaeda. Their essential tactic was seizing and
interrogating terrorists and suspected terrorists; they also had
authority from the President to kill certain high-value targets
on sight. The most secret task-force operations were categorized
as Special Access Programs, or S.A.P.s.
The military task
forces were under the control of the Joint Special Operations
Command, the branch of the Special Operations Command that is
responsible for counterterrorism. One of Miller’s unacknowledged
missions had been to bring the J.S.O.C.’s “strategic
interrogation” techniques to Abu Ghraib. In special cases, the
task forces could bypass the chain of command and deal directly
with Rumsfeld’s office. A former senior intelligence official
told me that the White House was also briefed on task-force
operations.
The former senior
intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib
were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White
House who “didn’t think the photographs were that bad”—in that
they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret
task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he
said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference between
shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?’ ”
A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the
“basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but
protect the big picture.’ ”
A recently retired
C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen years in the
clandestine service, told me that the task-force teams “had full
authority to whack—to go in and conduct ‘executive action,’ ”
the phrase for political assassination. “It was surrealistic
what these guys were doing,” the retired operative added. “They
were running around the world without clearing their operations
with the ambassador or the chief of station.”
J.S.O.C.’s special
status undermined military discipline. Richard Armitage, the
former Deputy Secretary of State, told me that, on his visits to
Iraq, he increasingly found that “the commanders would say one
thing and the guys in the field would say, ‘I don’t care what he
says. I’m going to do what I want.’ We’ve sacrificed the chain
of command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT”—the
global war on terrorism. “You’re painting on a canvas so big
that it’s hard to comprehend,” Armitage said.
Thomas W. O’Connell,
who resigned this spring after nearly four years as the
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and
Low-Intensity Conflict, defended the task forces. He blamed the
criticisms on the resentment of the rest of the military: “From
my observation, the operations run by Special Ops units are
extraordinarily open in terms of interagency visibility to
embassies and C.I.A. stations—even to the point where there’s
been a question of security.” O’Connell said that he dropped in
unannounced to Special Operations interrogation centers in Iraq,
“and the treatment of detainees was aboveboard.” He added, “If
people want to say we’ve got a serious problem with Special
Operations, let them say it on the record.”
Representative Obey
told me that he had been troubled, before the Iraq war, by the
Administration’s decision to run clandestine operations from the
Pentagon, saying that he “found some of the things they were
doing to be disquieting.” At the time, his Republican colleagues
blocked his attempts to have the House Appropriations Committee
investigate these activities. “One of the things that bugs me is
that Congress has failed in its oversight abilities,” Obey said.
Early last year, at his urging, his subcommittee began demanding
a classified quarterly report on the operations, but Obey said
that he has no reason to believe that the reports are complete.
A former high-level
Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib
scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the
Armed Services Committee, was warned “to back off” on the
investigation, because “it would spill over to more important
things.” A spokesman for Warner acknowledged that there had been
pressure on the Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to
it—insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May 7th
testimony, for example, to the Secretary’s great displeasure.
An aggressive
congressional inquiry into Abu Ghraib could have provoked
unwanted questions about what the Pentagon was doing, in Iraq
and elsewhere, and under what authority. By law, the President
must make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert
operation, and inform the senior leadership of the House and the
Senate Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush Administration
unilaterally determined after 9/11 that intelligence operations
conducted by the military—including the Pentagon’s covert task
forces—for the purposes of “preparing the battlefield” could be
authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, without
telling Congress.
There was coördination
between the C.I.A. and the task forces, but also tension. The
C.I.A. officers, who were under pressure to produce better
intelligence in the field, wanted explicit legal authority
before aggressively interrogating high-value targets. A finding
would give operatives some legal protection for questionable
actions, but the White House was reluctant to put what it wanted
in writing.
A recently retired
high-level C.I.A. official, who served during this period and
was involved in the drafting of findings, described to me the
bitter disagreements between the White House and the agency over
the issue. “The problem is what constituted approval,” the
retired C.I.A. official said. “My people fought about this all
the time. Why should we put our people on the firing line
somewhere down the road? If you want me to kill Joe Smith, just
tell me to kill Joe Smith. If I was the Vice-President or
the President, I’d say, ‘This guy Smith is a bad guy and it’s in
the interest of the United States for this guy to be killed.’
They don’t say that. Instead, George”—George Tenet, the director
of the C.I.A. until mid-2004—“goes to the White House and is
told, ‘You guys are professionals. You know how important it is.
We know you’ll get the intelligence.’ George would come back and
say to us, ‘Do what you gotta do.’ ”
Bill Harlow, a
spokesman for Tenet, depicted as “absurd” the notion that the
C.I.A. director told his agents to operate outside official
guidelines. He added, in an e-mailed statement, “The
intelligence community insists that its officers not exceed the
very explicit authorities granted.” In his recently published
memoir, however, Tenet acknowledged that there had been a
struggle “to get clear guidance” in terms of how far to go
during high-value-detainee interrogations.
The Pentagon
consultant said in an interview late last year that “the C.I.A.
never got the exact language it wanted.” The findings, when
promulgated by the White House, were “very calibrated” to
minimize political risk, and limited to a few countries; later,
they were expanded, turning several nations in North Africa, the
Middle East, and Asia into free-fire zones with regard to
high-value targets. I was told by the former senior intelligence
official and a government consultant that after the existence of
secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe was revealed, in the Washington
Post, in late 2005, the Administration responded with a
new detainee center in Mauritania. After a new government
friendly to the U.S. took power, in a bloodless coup d’état in
August, 2005, they said, it was much easier for the intelligence
community to mask secret flights there.
“The dirt and secrets
are in the back channel,” the former senior intelligence officer
noted. “All this open business—sitting in staff meetings, etc.,
etc.—is the Potemkin Village stuff. And the good guys—like
Taguba—are gone.”
In some cases, the
secret operations remained unaccountable. In an April, 2005,
memorandum, a C.I.D. officer—his name was redacted—complained to
C.I.D. headquarters, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, about the
impossibility of investigating military members of a Special
Access Program suspected of prisoner abuse:
involvement in Special
Access Programs (SAP) and/or the security classification of the
unit they were assigned to during the offense under
investigation. Attempts by Special Agents . . . to be “read on”
to these programs has [sic] been unsuccessful.
The C.I.D. officer
wrote that “fake names were used” by members of the task force;
he also told investigators that the unit had a “major computer
malfunction which resulted in them losing 70 per cent of their
files; therefore, they can’t find the cases we need to review.”
The officer concluded
that the investigation “does not need to be reopened. Hell, even
if we reopened it we wouldn’t get any more information than we
already have.”
CONSEQUENCES
Rumsfeld was vague, in
his appearances before Congress, about when he had informed the
President about Abu Ghraib, saying that it could have been late
January or early February. He explained that he routinely met
with the President “once or twice a week . . . and I don’t keep
notes about what I do.” He did remember that in mid-March he and
General Myers were “meeting with the President and discussed the
reports that we had obviously heard” about Abu Ghraib.
Whether the President
was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the
Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence
of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush
made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of
prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the
training of military police and interrogators, or the practices
of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush
acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The
President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the
military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes
against detainees was not conducive to a successful career.
In January of 2006,
Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the
Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff. “This is your Vice,” he told Taguba.
“I need you to retire by January of 2007.” No pleasantries were
exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for
years, and, Taguba said, “He offered no reason.” (A spokesperson
for Cody said, “Conversations regarding general officer
management are considered private personnel discussions. General
Cody has great respect for Major General Taguba as an officer,
leader, and American patriot.”)
“They always shoot the
messenger,” Taguba told me. “To be accused of being overzealous
and disloyal—that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for
doing what I was asked to do.”
Taguba went on, “There
was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the explicit
images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard operating
procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President
had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior
aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with
him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had
failed the nation.
“From the moment a
soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity,
and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the
senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my
peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the
fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib.
We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our
own principles and we violated the core of our military values.
The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even
today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible
should be held accountable.” ♦
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