Hersh on background to Abu Ghraib

Sy Hersh has yet another blockbuster piece on the Iraqi torture issue in the upcoming (May 24) issue of the New Yorker. This one details the institutional background, within the upper reaches of the Pentagon, to the whole “black” (secret) intelligence-gathering program.
Accpording to Hersh, this program had its origins in the Afghanistan-based war against Al-Qaeda. By November 2001, Hersh reports, SecDef Donald Rumsfeld had become so frustrated with the limitations that military-legal people were placing on the ability of Spceial Forces units to undertake kill or capture+interrogate missions against Qaeda suspects that he set up a whole “special-access program” (SAP) inside the Pentagon, separate from existing chains of command and quite secret, to coordinate those kinds of actions.
This SAP, Hersh writes, had a number of code-names. One was Copper Green. He writes:

Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read into the program,” the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.'”
One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon… He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II-‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?'” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”

Cambone’s military assistant was the infamous Gen. Boykin.
Hersh writes that people connected with this SAP played some role during the actual shooting war in Iraq in March and April 2003. But they were not called back to that theater till the fall of 2003…

By that time, it seemed clear to the folks in the Pentagon that they needed to develop more ‘human intelligence’ inside Iraq, and they needed to develop it fast. One part of the solution was to bring Gen. Geoffrey Miller across to Iraq from Gitmo. As the Taguba report stated, Miller (who is of course back in charge of the prisons in Iraq right now) recommended that: “detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.”
Another decision that Cambone made at that point, Hersh writes, was to “bring SAP’s rules into the [Iraqi] prisons”, and also to, “bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the SAP’s auspices.”
Hersh also adds seeming confirmation to what I wrote about here onMay 12, namely that there might have been some intended “method” in the relevant intel people’s apparent “madness” of allowing or encouraging the photographing of the sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners. He quotes an (un-named) “government consultant” as saying:

there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything–including spying on their associates–to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

Hersh also said that many people in the SAP had gotten their ideas about “Arab” views of sexuality, shame, and sexual humiliation from reading an old book called “The Arab Mind” by the Raphael Patai. (The book in question is a particularly twisted piece of ethnic stereotyping from a very mediocre Israeli author. No surprise, I guess, that it should find favor in the Rumsfeld Pentagon.)
Of course, as is the case with any “secret” government program, the anti-“terrorism” related SAP has generated its own web of lies of prevarications all around it. Hersh writes that sometime before the Abu Ghraib revelations became public (but his source notably did not say how long before…), Gen. Miller was briefed on the existence of the SAP (which is also referred to in the piece, interchangeably I think, as a “quick-reaction program”.) Hersh writes:

If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the special-access program. “If you give away the fact that a special-access program exists,” the former intelligence official told me, “you blow the whole quick-reaction program.”
… The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. “If you even give a hint that you’re aware of a black program that you’re not read into, you lose your clearances.” the former official said. “Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended–the poor kids at the end of the food chain.”

And ain’t that indeed just what we have seen?
Hersh does make some mention of the fairly strong unpopularity of programs like this one–or perhaps, more precisely, of this program–within the officer corps of the organized US military, where concern about the fate of one’s soldiers in the event they might be taken prisoner is still–thank God–a live concern, and support for both the general approach and the specifics of the Geneva Conventions is still quite strong.
He mentions that:

In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it?s going to occur.” The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The JAG officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.

Another report on these visits was published in an interesting article by Dana Priest and Dan Morgan in the May 13 WaPo. They reported that Horton, “received unsolicited visits in May and October by a total of eight military legal officers” who had expressed such concerns.