In “Chain of Command,” in the May 17, 2004, issue of The New Yorker, Seymour M. Hersh describes new photos he has obtained of a dog attacking a naked Iraqi detainee at Abu Ghraib prison on December 12, 2003. The photos, which had been in the possession of a member of the 320th Military Police Battalion, show the Iraqi with his hands clasped behind his back, “leaning against the door to a cell, contorted with terror, as the dogs bark a few feet away,” Hersh reports. In another photo, 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.” 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, tells Hersh, “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.”
• Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Marine General Peter Pace, Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted last week that the investigation into Abu Ghraib had moved routinely through the chain of command, but retired and active-duty officers and Pentagon officials say that the “the system had not worked,” Hersh reports. “Knowledge of the investigation—and especially its politically toxic photographs—had been severely, and unusually, restricted.” One former intelligence official says, “Everybody I’ve talked to said, ‘We just didn’t know’—not even in the J.C.S.” Noting that he was referring to senior officials whom such allegations would normally reach, the official adds, “I haven’t talked to anybody on the inside who knew—nowhere.” A senior Pentagon official says that many senior generals believe that, along with the civilians in Rumsfeld’s office, General Ricardo Sanchez and General John Abizaid, who is in charge of Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, had done their best to keep the issue quiet in the first months of the year. “You’ve got to match actions, or nonaction, with interests. What is the motive for not being forthcoming? They foresaw major diplomatic problems.”
• Hersh also reveals that it was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the new head of prison operations in Iraq, who first recommended, when he was commander of the task force in charge of the prison at Guantanamo, that Army prisons “be geared, first and foremost, to interrogations and the gathering of information needed for the war effort.” In his report, Miller wrote that “detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation ... to provide a safe, secure, and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence.” General Sanchez issued the order that gave the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade tactical control over the Abu Ghraib prison. “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,” Hersh writes.
• “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,” Hersh reports. The C.I.A. has acknowledged that its Inspector General is investigating abuses at Abu Ghraib, including the death of a prisoner. One source familiar with one of the unfolding investigations tells Hersh that the victim was the man whose photograph, which shows his battered body packed in ice, has circulated around the world. Military-intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib reportedly wore unmarked uniforms or civilian clothes while on duty. “You couldn’t tell them apart,” the person familiar with the investigation says. “The blurring of identities,” Hersh writes, “meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly, the military policemen on duty, to know who was doing what to whom.”
www.drudgereport.com
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