Article says Rumsfeld backed interrogation methods

By David Johnston
The New York Times

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The article, by Seymour Hersh, reports that Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, approved the use of the tougher interrogation techniques in Iraq in 2003 in an effort to extract better information from Iraqi prisoners to counter the growing insurgency threat in the country.

Hersh's account, to be published in the May 24 issue of the magazine, said that the expansion of the "special access program" allowed authorities in charge of Abu Ghraib to engage in degrading and sexually humiliating practices. It was posted yesterday on The New Yorker's Web site.

Across the Bush administration, officials yesterday disputed several of the critical details in Hersh's article. They said that there was no high-level decision or command that they were aware of to use highly coercive interrogation techniques on prisoners.

Hersh first detailed alleged abuses of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the May 10 edition of The New Yorker. In 1970, he won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968.

Rumsfeld, who has apologized for the prison abuses, has said that they were conducted by lower-level military forces without the approval of senior commanders.

One of the central unresolved questions of the prison-abuse scandal is whether the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners was ordered by senior military or civilian officials.

Administration officials yesterday pointed to testimony before Congress in which several administration officials acknowledged that the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees in Iraq and therefore did not permit the use of coercive tactics.

At the Pentagon, the chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, vigorously denied the allegations that Cambone directed a covert program to encourage the coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to improve intelligence gathering.

"It's pure, unadulterated fantasy," Di Rita said in a telephone interview. "We don't discuss covert programs, but nothing in any covert program would have led anyone to sanction activity like what was seen on those videos."

"No responsible official in this department, including Secretary Rumsfeld, would or could have been involved in sanctioning the physical coercion or sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners," Di Rita said.
 
Di Rita said Cambone was not involved in setting detainee policy in Iraq. "Cambone had no involvement in any matter involved in detainee management," Di Rita said. "That's part of the fevered imagination of conspiracy theorists."

Hersh's 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 an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq."

The article suggested that Rumsfeld and Cambone had, in effect, shifted the blame for the abuses away from top civilians at the Pentagon to lower-level military police guards who are facing disciplinary proceedings in military courts.

Some elements of The New Yorker story have been previously reported, including the development by the CIA of a special interrogation program for prisoners captured in Afghanistan, which was reported by The Washington Post last week. That program, authorized by government legal opinions, included the use of coercive interrogation methods. A version of that story was reported by The Seattle Times.

Hersh writes that Cambone carried out Rumsfeld's directive to use the coercive interrogation methods.

The article said that by the summer of 2003, U.S. military and intelligence agencies were growing fearful about the strength of the insurgency and were frustrated at the poor intelligence they were getting from detainees. Some officials, speaking on background, acknowledged that as the insurgency worsened in Iraq last summer, there was rising concern about how to improve intelligence about future attacks.

One solution to these concerns, Hersh wrote, "was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents." Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, the article said, expanding the scope of a secret program by "bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan."