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war crimes
-- Sunday, May 16, 2004 --

Many apologies to those who come here expecting laughs. Right now there's very little humor to be found. But! I promise a return to zany antics just as soon as I'm bored enough to write them!

If you haven't read this you need to now. You're going to hear a lot about it in the coming weeks and months. It's an article in the New Yorker by Seymour M. Hersh that has just blown the top off of the Iraqui abuse scandal. If you're too lazy to read the whole thing, at least read the bolded text in the next paragraph.

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

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. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

It's important you go through the whole thing. I'm still trying to figure out what, exactly, Rumsfeld knew. It seems clear he realized his orders would end up in violation of the Geneva Conventions, but I'm not sure yet if he approved any specifics.

The article goes on to explain that Bush knew of Copper Green, but it's kind of vague about whether or not he was in the loop about what it stood for specifically.

In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military’s facilities at Guantánamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations—using force if necessary—at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the “white,” or overt, world.

Now, of course I can see the value of that to some extent. Some information is time sensitive and going through conventional channels isn't always an option when you're trying to put down an insurgency, but giving carte blanche to an entire group of people to do whatever it wants isn't just dangerous, it's stupid. Not only have we walked all over international law, we're setting ourselves up for more terrorist attacks of the magnitude of 9/11. If the US subscribed to international governing bodies instead of just using them to get what it wants, our country could be looking at several war crimes convictions and we will definitely be pressured by some to turn people like Rumsfeld over (of course we won't. People have cried for Kissinger to stand trial for years and they've been ignored. We don't even recognize the Hague as a legitimate court).

If Rumsfeld isn't toppled by this whole thing, Stephen Cambone looks like he'll be the top official to get knocked off:

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, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. 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.”

Apparently the decision to go ahead with the torture tactics was spurred on by the failure of the intelligence community in Iraq. Insurgents have managed to find out more information about us than we have about them. Thus it was concluded something had to be done and the pictures we've seen of naked Iraqi's in hoods is the result.

Now the difference between what's going on in Iraq and what's going on in Guantánamo is that the Bush administration has declared the prisoners in Guantánamo "illegal combatants" who aren't protected by the Geneva Conventions. While I don't agree with the denial of legal rights to prisoners in Cuba either, the difference has been made clear. The Bush administration had not stated, unilaterally or otherwise, that Iraqi prisoners would not be treated in accordance with international law and if the government hadn't crossed the line before, it definitely has now.

Even worse, Hersh asserts that things were kicked up a notch in Iraq:

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the SAP ["special-access program subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security"], bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

What we have now in Abu Ghraib, and most likely elsewhere, is a complete and utter breakdown of military command. No one had any idea who was in charge or who the person standing next to them was. Military officials and agents walked around in civilian clothing and even the people supposedly in charge weren’t clued into who was who and what they were doing in the prison. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the one supposedly on top of things at Abu Ghraib is quoted as saying, “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn’t know. I called them the disappearing ghosts. I’d seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I’d see them months later.”

The author of the article appeared on CBS and said that according to one general, 60% of the people we have as prisoners aren’t even enemies and the International Red Cross is asserting that number is as high as 90%. So the people being tortured may not have any information anyway, rendering the whole situation even more senseless and inhumane than we assumed before.

The article in its entirety is about ten pages long and I’ve only gotten through 2/3 of it at this point. Again, this is something everyone needs to check out and make their own conclusions on. All I can say is that I personally am pretty appalled our government would condone this kind of “information gathering” against people who most likely have nothing to do with Hussein or the insurgency. It reminds me of the Vietnam War in a way. We created Vietcong by razing Vietnamese villages and murdering Vietnamese families. Of course they wanted revenge against the United States. I’m afraid we’re accomplishing the same in Iraq.

> KC 12:09 PM [108472406854158902]
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