Time For Accountability At The Top

The Guardian has published two excerpts from Seymour Hersh's new book, Chain Of Command.

Part One here.

Part Two here.

Hersh quotes new information from inside sources to show that the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib was a direct result of Bush's decision to waver Geneva Convention rules, coupled with Rumsfeld's wilfull failure to respond to a growing chorus of complaints, and that it spread to Iraq from Guantanamo Bay as a direct result of White House and Pentagon decisions.

Here's his description of "recreation time" at Gitmo:

"...some prisoners would be strapped into heavy jackets, similar to straitjackets, with their arms locked behind them and their legs straddled by straps. Goggles were placed over their eyes, and their heads were covered with a hood. The prisoner was then led at midday into what looked like a narrow fenced-in dog run - the adviser told me that there were photographs of the procedure - and given his hour of recreation. The restraints forced him to move, if he chose to move, on his knees, bent over at a 45-degree angle. Most prisoners just sat and suffered in the heat."

Hersh carefully reconstructs the machinations within the Bush administration, particularly Rumsfeld's failure to respond to blatantly obvious abuses:

"There was, we now know, a fantastical quality to the earnest discussions inside the White House in 2002 about the good and bad of the interrogation process at Guantánamo. Rice and Rumsfeld knew what many others involved in the prisoner discussions did not - that sometime in late 2001 or early 2002, the president had signed a top-secret finding, as required by law, authorising the defence department to set up a specially recruited clandestine team of special forces operatives and others who would defy diplomatic niceties and international law and snatch - or assassinate, if necessary - identified "high-value" al-Qaida operatives anywhere in the world.

Equally secret interrogation centres would be set up in allied countries where harsh treatments were meted out, unconstrained by legal limits or public disclosure. The programme was hidden inside the defence department as an "unacknowledged" special-access programme (SAP), whose operational details were known only to a few in the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House.

The SAP owed its existence to Rumsfeld's desire to get the US special forces community into the business of what he called, in public and internal communications, "manhunts", and to his disdain for the Pentagon's senior generals. In the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of the generals and admirals to act aggressively. Soon after September 11, he repeatedly made public his disdain for the Geneva convention. Complaints about the United States' treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said, in early 2002, amounted to "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation".

One of Rumsfeld's goals was bureaucratic: to give the civilian leadership in the Pentagon, and not the CIA, the lead in fighting terrorism. Throughout the existence of the SAP, which eventually came to Abu Ghraib prison, a former senior intelligence official told me, "There was a periodic briefing to the National Security Council [NSC] giving updates on results, but not on the methods." Did the White House ask about the process? The former officer said that he believed that they did, and that "they got the answers".

Hersh claims the guilt for this abuse goes all the way to the top of the chain of command:

"Rumsfeld's most fateful decision, endorsed by the White House, came at a time of crisis in August 2003 when the defence secretary expanded the highly secret SAP into the prisons of Iraq. The roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal therefore lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few army reservists, but in the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion - and eye-for-an-eye retribution - in fighting terrorism."

The Pentagon has already brushed the book aside, saying Hersh's investigation "apparently contains many of the numerous unsubstantiated allegations and inaccuracies which he has made in the past based upon unnamed sources ... investigations have determined that no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have authorized or condoned the abuses seen at Abu Ghraib. If any of Hersh's anonymous sources wish to come forward ... the department welcomes them to do so."

Rumsfeld admitted on Friday that he approved the use of harsh interrogation measures, but only for Guantanamo. He defends himself with moral relativity:

"Does it rank up there with chopping someone's head off on television? It doesn't."

I wonder if Saddam will be able to use the same line of defence in his trial.