The interrogation program at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison was so
"out of control" that the CIA "pulled their people out," the author
of a series of articles about abuse of prisoners at the facility
was quoted by CNN Sunday.?
Seymour Hersh, in his third article on the subject in The New
Yorker magazine, said the Pentagon's desperation to stop a
rising insurgency led it to unleash a secret program meant to seize
and interrogate terrorist leaders on Iraqis suspected of aiding
anti-American guerrillas.
"After the Afghan war got going, there was a lot of frustration
in the Pentagon," Hersh told CNN's "Late Edition." "We would get a
tip there was a terrorist somewhere ... but in order to send
special operations in there you had to talk to the American
ambassador, the American commander there."
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he said, made the decision
to "just cut it out."
"He set up the special unit [and] this team, all operating under
aliases, went around the world and did what they had to do."
The Pentagon vehemently denied the allegations made in Hersh's
article.
"Assertions apparently being made in the latest New
Yorker article on Abu Ghraib and the abuse of Iraqi detainees
are outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous
conjecture," Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita said.
The rules governing the secret operation, known as a special
access program, were, "Grab whom you must. Do what you want,"
according to a former intelligence official quoted in the
magazine's May 24 issue, on newsstands Monday.
Hersh told CNN the operation resulted in "a lot of information,"
so Rumsfeld and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen
Cambone "cut an order sending this secret group into Baghdad. The
instructions were, 'Let's get tougher.' "
The group -- a highly trained, covert team made up of Navy
SEALs, the Army's Delta Force and civilians from the intelligence
world -- was trying to fit intelligence-gathering techniques they
usually reserved for "high value targets" on the more "common
prisoners" found at Abu Ghraib -- with the help of military police
who had no idea what was going on, he said.
But by the end of October, Hersh said, something had gone
horribly wrong.
"Categorically, the CIA bailed out," he said. "They pulled their
people out from the interrogations going on at Abu Ghraib because
it was out of control."
The Pentagon, while pledging a thorough investigation to find
everyone responsible for the photographs of laughing military
police pointing at naked Iraqis forced to masturbate and other
humiliating activities, has focused its attention on seven military
police it says participated directly in the abuse.
But Hersh said it isn't plausible that military police were
wholly responsible.
"If you think a bunch of kinds from rural West Virginia and
Pennsylvania" decided to mistreat prisoners as took place at Abu
Ghraib, Hersh said, "absolutely not."
The purpose of some of the photos was the embarrassment factor,
Hersh said, and in that respect, they were posed, as some of the
seven MPs charged in the case have contended.
"For Arab men, sexual humiliation ... is a blackmail tool," he
said.
In his testimony last week before Congress, Rumsfeld -- barred
from discussing highly secret matters in public -- conveyed that he
was telling the public all he knew about the scandal.
The CIA pulled its people out of interrogations at Abu Ghraib
"because it was out of control," says Seymour Hersh.
In his article, Hersh quoted Rumsfeld as saying, "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."
Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday he had read a
summary of the New Yorker article and stressed that all war
prisoners should be treated humanely. "I haven't read the article
and I don't know anything about the substance of the article,"
Powell said. "I have just seen a quick summary of it. So I will
have to yield to the Defense Department to respond."
On Wednesday, the US Embassy in Afghanistan announced that the
military was investigating the alleged mistreatment of an Afghan
police colonel while in the custody of coalition forces.
The officer says he was stripped naked, photographed, kicked and
subjected to sexual taunting while being held by coalition forces
in August, according to an embassy statement.?
On Friday, the Pentagon announced that the US military will not
use certain prisoner interrogation procedures in Iraq and
Afghanistan, including sleep and sensory deprivation, as a result
of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.?
Earlier in the week, top officials acknowledged that some of the
techniques being reviewed could violate the Geneva Conventions,
which were adopted internationally as a way to protect prisoners of
war from abuse.
It remains unclear whether the ban applies to accused Taliban
and al-Qaeda detainees held by the US military in Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba.
(China Daily May 17, 2004)