Deeper and Deeper

The Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal just keeps getting worse.

Last week’s high-profile hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee featured numerous instances in which the official line, that the abuses were committed solely by rogue soldiers who kept their superiors in the dark, fell apart in the wake of testimony by said superiors that, well, maybe they did know about it here and there. For his part, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in his Senate testimony earlier this month, repeatedly claimed that he didn’t know any details about the abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges, and he certainly never authorized or encouraged anything like this.

Now we have Seymour Hersh, who originally broke the scandal in last month’s New Yorker, with a new claim of something appalling: that a secret Pentagon program code-named Copper Green “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.”

And who signed off on this program? None other than Donald Rumsfeld.

The program, on which President Bush was reportedly briefed, was designed to take away responsibility for prisoner interrogation in Iraq from the CIA and give it to the Pentagon, bringing the environment more into line with the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A former intelligence officer quoted in Hersh’s article described the program as “grab whom you must, do what you want.” (For the record, a Pentagon press release vociferously criticized the Hersh report, calling it “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.”)

According to Hersh, military intelligence officers took over the interrogation process and were given free rein to do whatever they wanted. With so many interrogators, contractors and others walking around Abu Ghraib out of uniform, even the military officer supposedly in charge of the prison, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was unsure who was who. The end result, according to a Pentagon consultant, was one in which “the ends justify the means.”

As for Rumsfeld’s denials, Hersh says the secretary was notified of the abuses just days after military policeman Joseph Darby blew the whistle two months earlier. It may well be that Rumsfeld simply ignored those reports, believing them to be routine interrogation procedures under the new rules. (In the aftermath of the revelations, the Pentagon supposedly revised the interrogation policies to explicitly prohibit such abuses, although it’s far more telling that most of the attention was given to barring photography.)

As if all that wasn’t enough, it was also revealed that the Pentagon program was rooted in a memo by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, written shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in which he claimed that al Qaeda prisoners were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. “In my judgment,” Gonzales wrote, “this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

“Quaint?” The prohibition of torture and other physical pressures is “quaint?”

Then again, the Bush Administration has always claimed that al Qaeda prisoners held at Guantanamo were not subject to the Geneva Convention’s protections. And since the object of the secret Pentagon program was to “Gitmo-ize” the operations at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, we should not be terribly surprised that the situation spun out of control as spectacularly as it did.

In a way, the Abu Ghraib scandal is indicative of the Iraq mess as a whole; the Administration marched us into this situation with ideological blinders firmly in place, refusing to even consider the possibility that all might not go exactly as according to plan. The only response to anything going wrong is a desperate attempt to spin the story into something – anything – less damaging.

But when this spin-proof scandal emerged (after all, it’s kind of difficult to put a happy face on physical and sexual abuse), the White House dug in and refused to hold anyone other than grunt-level soldiers accountable. The problem is that this approach no longer works. It is now public knowledge that these tactics were approved by those higher up the chain of command, and it remains to be seen how (or indeed if) the Administration will react.