[A-List] US military: Seymour Hersh exposé

[Michael Keaney]

Rumsfeld's dirty war on terror

In an explosive extract from his new book, Seymour Hersh reveals how, in a
fateful decision that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the US defence
secretary gave the green light to a secret unit authorised to torture
terrorist suspects

Monday September 13, 2004
The Guardian

In the late summer of 2002, a CIA analyst made a quiet visit to the
detention centre at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where an
estimated 600 prisoners were being held, many, at first, in steel-mesh cages
that provided little protection from the brutally hot sun. Most had been
captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan during the campaign against the
Taliban and al-Qaida.

The Bush administration had determined, however, that they were not
prisoners of war but "enemy combatants", and that their stay at Guantánamo
could be indefinite, as teams of CIA, FBI, and military interrogators sought
to prise intelligence from them. In a series of secret memorandums written
earlier in the year, lawyers for the White House, the Pentagon and the
justice department had agreed that the prisoners had no rights under federal
law or the Geneva convention. President Bush endorsed the finding, while
declaring that the al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were nevertheless to be
treated in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva
convention - as long as such treatment was also "consistent with military
necessity".

But the interrogations at Guantánamo were a bust. Very little useful
intelligence had been gathered, while prisoners from around the world
continued to flow into the base, and the facility constantly expanded. The
CIA analyst had been sent there to find out what was going wrong. He was
fluent in Arabic and familiar with the Islamic world. He was held in high
respect within the agency, and was capable of reporting directly, if he
chose, to George Tenet, the CIA director. The analyst did more than just
visit and inspect. He interviewed at least 30 prisoners to find out who they
were and how they ended up in Guantánamo. Some of his findings, he later
confided to a former CIA colleague, were devastating.

"He came back convinced that we were committing war crimes in Guantánamo,"
the colleague told me. "Based on his sample, more than half the people there
didn't belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces," including
two captives, perhaps in their 80s, who were clearly suffering from
dementia. "He thought what was going on was an outrage," the CIA colleague
added. There was no rational system for determining who was important.

Two former administration officials who read the analyst's highly classified
report told me that its message was grim. According to a former White House
official, the analyst's disturbing conclusion was that "if we captured some
people who weren't terrorists when we got them, they are now".

That autumn, the document rattled aimlessly around the upper reaches of the
Bush administration until it got into the hands of General John A Gordon,
the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, who reported
directly to Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser and the
president's confidante. Gordon, who had retired from the military as a
four-star general in 2000 had served as a deputy director of the CIA for
three years. He was deeply troubled and distressed by the report, and by its
implications for the treatment, in retaliation, of captured American
soldiers. Gordon, according to a former administration official, told
colleagues that he thought "it was totally out of character with the
American value system", and "that if the actions at Guantánamo ever became
public, it'd be damaging to the president".

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, there had been much debate inside
the administration about what was permissible in the treatment of prisoners
and what was not. The most suggestive document, in terms of what was really
going on inside military prisons and detention centres, was written in early
August 2002 by Jay S Bybee, head of the justice department's office of legal
counsel. "Certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not
produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within [a
legal] proscription against torture," Bybee wrote to Alberto R Gonzales, the
White House counsel. "We conclude that for an act to constitute torture, it
must inflict pain that is difficult to endure. Physical pain amounting to
torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious
physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or
even death." (Bush later nominated Bybee to be a federal judge.)

"We face an enemy that targets innocent civilians," Gonzales, in turn, would
tell journalists two years later, at the height of the furore over the abuse
of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "We face an enemy that lies in
the shadows, an enemy that doesn't sign treaties."

Gonzales added that Bush bore no responsibility for the wrongdoing. "The
president has not authorised, ordered or directed in any way any activity
that would transgress the standards of the torture conventions or the
torture statute, or other applicable laws," Gonzales said. In fact, a secret
statement of the president's views, which he signed on February 7, 2002
contained a loophole that applied worldwide: "I determine that none of the
provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or
elsewhere throughout the world," the president asserted.

John Gordon had to know what he was up against in seeking a high-level
review of prison policies at Guantánamo, but he persevered. Finally, the
former White House official recalled, "We got it up to Condi."

As the CIA analyst's report was making its way to Rice, in late 2002 there
were a series of heated complaints about the interrogation tactics at
Guantánamo from within the FBI, whose agents had been questioning detainees
in Cuba since the prison opened. A few of the agents began telling their
superiors what they had witnessed, which, they believed, had little to do
with getting good information.

"I was told," a senior intelligence official recalled, "that the military
guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over
them, and making them stand until they got hypothermia. The agents were
outraged. It was wrong and also dysfunctional." The agents put their
specific complaints in writing, the official told me, and they were relayed,
in emails and phone calls, to officials at the department of defence,
including William J Haynes II, the general counsel of the Pentagon. As far
as day-to-day life for prisoners at Guantánamo was concerned, nothing came
of it.

The unifying issue for General Gordon and his supporters inside the
administration was not the abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo, the former
White House official told me: "It was about how many more people are being
held there that shouldn't be. Have we really got the right people?" The
briefing for Condoleezza Rice about problems at Guantánamo took place in the
autumn of 2002. It did not dwell on the question of torture or mistreatment.
The main issue, the former White House official told me, was simply, "Are we
getting any intelligence? What is the process for sorting these people?"

Rice agreed to call a high-level meeting in the White House situation room.
Most significantly, she asked Secretary Rumsfeld to attend. Rums feld, who
was by then publicly and privately encouraging his soldiers in the field to
get tough with captured prisoners, duly showed up, but he had surprisingly
little to say. One participant in the meeting recalled that at one point
Rice asked Rumsfeld "what the issues were, and he said he hadn't looked into
it". Rice urged Rumsfeld to do so, and added, "Let's get the story right."
Rumsfeld seemed to be in agreement, and Gordon and his supporters left the
meeting convinced, the former administration official told me, that the
Pentagon was going to deal with the issue.

Nothing changed. "The Pentagon went into a full-court stall," the former
White House official recalled. "I trusted in the goodness of man and thought
we got something to happen. I was naive enough to believe that when a
cabinet member" - he was referring to Rumsfeld - "says he's going to take
action, he will."

Over the next few months, as the White House began planning for the coming
war in Iraq, there were many more discussions about the continuing problems
at Guantánamo and the lack of useful intelligence. No one in the Bush
administration would get far, however, if he was viewed as soft on suspected
al-Qaida terrorism. "Why didn't Condi do more?" the official asked. "She
made the same mistake I made. She got the secretary of defence to say he's
going to take care of it."

There was, obviously, a difference between the reality of prison life in
Guantánamo and how it was depicted to the public in carefully stage-managed
news conferences and statements released by the administration. American
prison authorities have repeatedly assured the press and the public, for
example, that the al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were provided with a
minimum of three hours of recreation every week. For the tough cases,
however, according to a Pentagon adviser familiar with detainee conditions
in mid-2002, at recreation time 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.
One of the marines assigned to guard duty at Guantánamo in 2003, who has
since left the military, told me, after being promised anonymity, that he
and his enlisted colleagues at the base were encouraged by their squad
leaders to "give the prisoners a visit" once or twice a month, when there
were no television crews, journalists, or other outside visitors at the
prison.

"We tried to fuck with them as much as we could - inflict a little bit of
pain. We couldn't do much," for fear of exposure, the former marine, who
also served in Afghanistan, told me.

"There were always newspeople there," he said. "That's why you couldn't send
them back with a broken leg or so. And if somebody died, I'd get
court-martialled."
The roughing up of prisoners was sometimes spur-of-the-moment, the former
marine said: "A squad leader would say, 'Let's go - all the cameras on lunch
break.'" One pastime was to put hoods on the prisoners and "drive them
around the camp in a Humvee, making turns so they didn't know where they
were. [...] I wasn't trying to get information. I was just having a little
fun - playing mind control." When I asked a senior FBI official about the
former marine's account, he told me that agents assigned to interrogation
duties at Guantánamo had described similar activities to their superiors.

In November 2002, army Major General Geoffrey Miller had relieved Generals
Dunlavey and Baccus, unifying the command at Guantánamo. Baccus was seen by
the Pentagon as soft - too worried about the prisoners' well-being. In
Senate hearings after Abu Ghraib, it became known that Miller was permitted
to use legally questionable interrogation techniques at Guantánamo, which
could include, with approval, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of
cold and heat, and placing prisoners in "stress positions" for agonising
lengths of time.

In May 2004, the New York Times reported that the FBI had instructed its
agents to avoid being present at interrogation sessions with suspected
al-Qaida members. The newspaper said the severe methods used to extract
information would be prohibited in criminal cases, and therefore could
compromise the agents in future legal proceedings against the suspects. "We
don't believe in coercion," a senior FBI official subsequently told me. "Our
goal is to get information and we try to gain the prisoners' trust. We have
strong feelings about it." The FBI official added, "I thought Rumsfeld
should have been fired long ago."

"They did it the wrong way," a Pentagon adviser on the war on terror told
me, "and took a heavy-handed approach based on coercion, instead of
persuasion - which actually has a much better track record. It's about rage
and the need to strike back. It's evil, but it's also stupid. It's not
torture but acts of kindness that lead to concessions. The persuasive
approach takes longer but gets far better results."

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".

By the time of Rumsfeld's meeting with Rice, his SAP was in its third year
of snatching or strong-arming suspected terrorists and questioning them in
secret prison facilities in Singapore, Thailand and Pakistan, among other
sites. The White House was fighting terror with terror.

On December 18 2001, American operatives participated in what amounted to
the kidnapping of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who had
sought asylum in Sweden. The Egyptians, believed by American intelligence to
be linked to Islamic militant groups, were abruptly seized in the late
afternoon and flown out of Sweden a few hours later on a US
government-leased Gulfstream private jet to Cairo, where they underwent
extensive and brutal interrogation. "Both were dirty," a former senior
intelligence official, who has extensive knowledge of special-access
programmes, told me, "but it was pretty blatant."

The seizure of Agiza and Zery attracted little attention outside of Sweden,
despite repeated complaints by human-rights groups, until May 2004 when a
Swedish television news magazine revealed that the Swedish government had
cooperated after being assured that the exiles would not be tortured or
otherwise harmed once they were sent to Egypt. Instead, according to a
television report, entitled The Broken Promise, Agiza and Zery, in handcuffs
and shackles, were driven to the airport by Swedish and, according to one
witness, American agents and turned over at plane-side to a group of
Americans wearing plain clothes whose faces were concealed. Once in Egypt,
Agiza and Zery have reported through Swedish diplomats, family members and
attorneys, that they were subjected to repeated torture by electrical shocks
distributed by electrodes that were attached to the most sensitive parts of
their bodies. Egyptian authorities eventually concluded, according to the
documentary, that Zery had few ties to ongoing terrorism, and he was
released from jail in October 2003, although he is still under surveillance.
Agiza was acknowledged by his attorneys to have been a member of Egyptian
Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group outlawed in Egypt, and also was once close
to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is outranked in al-Qaida only by Osama bin Laden.
In April 2004, he was sentenced to 25 years in an Egyptian prison.

-----

Rumsfeld's dirty war on terror (Part 2)

Seymour Hersh
Monday September 13, 2004
The Guardian

Fredrik Laurin, a Swedish journalist who worked on The Broken Promise,
extensively researched the leased Gulfstream jet that was used to take Zery
and Agiza to Cairo. Laurin told me that he was able to track the aircraft to
landings in Pakistan, Kuwait, Egypt, Germany, England, Ireland Morocco, as
well as the Washington DC area. It also made visits to Guantánamo. The
company told Laurin that the plane was leased almost exclusively to the US
government. Significantly, the records obtained by Laurin indicate that the
Gulfstream apparently halted its overseas trips from May 5 2004 - the week
after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke - until July 7, when it flew from Dulles
Airport in suburban Washington to Cairo.

After the Abu Ghraib abuses were revealed, a former senior intelligence
official with direct information about the SAP gave me an account of how and
why the top-secret programme had begun. As the American-led hunt for
al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden began to stall, he said, it was clear that the
American intelligence operatives in the field were failing to get useful
intelligence in a timely manner. With the pressure mounting, some
information was being delivered via the CIA by friendly liaison intelligence
services - allies of the United States in the Middle East and south-east
Asia - who were not afraid to get rough with prisoners. The tough tactics
appealed to Rumsfeld and his senior civilian aides.

Rumsfeld then authorised the establishment of the highly secret programme,
which was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if
possible, interrogate high-value targets. The SAP - subject to the defence
department's most stringent level of security - was set up, with an office
in a secure area of the Pentagon. The people assigned to the programme
recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives
from US elite forces - navy seals, the army's delta force, and the CIA's
paramilitary experts.

"Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value
target - a stand-up group to hit quickly," the former senior intelligence
official told me. The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld
and from Condoleezza Rice. Fewer than 200 operatives and officials,
including Rumsfeld and General Myers [Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of
Staff], were "completely read into the programme", the former intelligence
official said. "The rules are 'Grab whom you must. Do what you want.'"

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the programme was Stephen
Cambone, the undersecretary of defence for intelligence. Cambone had worked
closely with Rumsfeld in a number of Pentagon jobs since the beginning of
the administration, but this office, to which he was named in March 2003,
was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld's reorganisation of the
Pentagon. Known for his closeness to Rumsfeld, Cambone was a strong advocate
for war against Iraq. He chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the CIA's inability
before the Iraq war to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harboured
weapons of mass destruction.

Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the
Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access
programmes that were relevant to the war on terror. In mid-2003, the SAP was
regarded, at least in the Pentagon, as one of the success stories of the war
on terror.

"It was an active programme," the former senior intelligence official told
me. "As this monster begins to take life, there's joy in the world. The
monster is doing well - real well" - at least from the perspective of those
involved who, according to the former officer, began to see themselves as
"masters of the universe in terms of intelligence".

I was initially told of the SAP's existence by members of the intelligence
community who were troubled by the programme's prima facie violation of the
Geneva convention; their concern was that such activities, if exposed, would
eviscerate the moral standing of the United States and expose American
soldiers to retaliation. In May 2004, a ranking member of Congress confirmed
its existence and further told me that President Bush had signed the
mandated finding officially notifying Congress of the SAP.

The legislator added that he had none the less been told very little about
the programme. Only a few members of the House and Senate leadership were
authorised by statute to be informed of it, and, even then, the legislators
were provided with little more than basic budget information. It's not clear
that the Senate and House members understood that the United States was
poised to enter the business of "disappearing" people.

The Pentagon may have judged the SAP a success, but by August 2003, the war
in Iraq was going badly and there was, once again, little significant
intelligence being generated in the many prisons in Iraq. The president and
his national security team turned for guidance to General Miller, the
"Gitmo" [Guantánamo] commander. Recounting that decision, one of the White
House officials who had supported General Gordon's ill-fated effort to
change prisoner policy asked me, rhetorically, "Why do I take a failed
approach at Guantánamo and move it to Iraq?"

By the autumn of 2003, a military analyst told me, the extent of the
Pentagon's political and military misjudgments in Iraq was clear. The
solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Cambone, was to get tough
with the Iraqi men and women in detention - to treat them behind prison
walls as if they had been captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan.
General Miller was summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison
interrogation procedures.

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step beyond "Gitmoizing", however: they expanded
the scope of the SAP, 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.

"They weren't getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq," the
former intelligence official told me. "No names. Nothing that they could
hang their hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and I'm tired
of working through the normal chain of command. I've got this apparatus set
up - the black special-access programme - and I'm going in hot.

"So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And
it's working. We're getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the
intelligence is flowing into the white world. We're getting good stuff."

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official
told me: not only would he bring the SAP's rules into the prisons, he would
bring some of the army military intelligence officers working inside the
Iraqi prisons under the SAP's auspices.

"So here are fundamentally good soldiers - military intelligence guys -
being told that no rules apply," the former official said.

In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career
directly involved with special-access programmes, spread the blame. "The
White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon
subcontracted it to Cambone," he said. "This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld
and Myers approved the programme." When it came to the interrogation
operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone.
Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, "but he's
responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11 we've
changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism and created conditions where
the ends justify the means."

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence
officials, the Pentagon's operation - aspects of which were 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 insurgency. A senior CIA
official confirmed the details of this account and said that the operation
stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of clandestine
and paramilitary operations from the CIA.

Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib - whether military police or military
intelligence - was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core
special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison.
The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many
others - military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, CIA
officers, and the men from the SAP - wore civilian clothes. It was not clear
who was who, even to General Karpinski, then the commander of the 800
military police brigade. "I thought most of the civilians there were
interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn't know," Karpinski
told me. "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 mysterious
civilians, she said, were "always bringing in somebody for interrogation or
waiting to collect somebody going out". Karpinski added that she had no idea
who was operating in her prison system.

Military intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib repeatedly wore
"sterile", or unmarked, uniforms or civilian clothes while on duty. "You
couldn't tell them apart," a source familiar with the investigation said.
The blurring of identities and organisations meant that it was impossible
for the prisoners, or, significantly, the military policemen on duty, to
know who was doing what to whom and who had the authority to give orders.

By last autumn, according to the former intelligence official, the senior
leadership of the CIA had had enough. "They said, 'No way. We signed up for
the core programme in Afghanistan - pre-approved for operations against
high-value terrorist targets. And now you want to use it for cab drivers,
brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets.'" The CIA balked, the
former intelligence official said: "The agency checks with their lawyers and
pulls out," ending those of its activities in Abu Ghraib that related to the
SAP. (In a later conversation, a senior CIA official confirmed this
account.)

The CIA's complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community.
There was fear the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the
secret SAP, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valued
covert operation. "This was stupidity," a government consultant told me.
"You're taking a programme that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan
against al-Qaida, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a
structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump
into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an army of
135,000 soldiers."

In mid 2003, Rumsfeld's apparent disregard for the requirements of the
Geneva convention 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 in May 2004.
"They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. [ ... ]
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. The JAG
officers told him that, with the war on terror, a 50-year history of
exemplary application of the Geneva convention had come to an end.

In July 2004, I again spoke to Scott Horton, who has maintained contact with
a network of JAG lawyers. He told me that Rumsfeld and his civilian deputies
had pressured the army to conclude the pending investigations by late
August, before the Republican convention in New York. Horton added that the
politics were blatant.

Pentagon investigations, he said, "have a reputation for tending to
whitewash, but even taking this into account, the current investigations
seem to be setting new standards". Rumsfeld's office had circumscribed the
investigators' charge and also placed tight controls on the documents to be
made available. In other words, Horton said, "Rumsfeld has completely rigged
the investigations. My friends say we should expect something much akin to
the army inspector general's report - 'just a few rotten apples'."

But General Taguba's highly critical internal investigation into military
prisons in Iraq - which, together with the shocking photographs of prisoner
abuse, sparked the Abu Ghraib scandal in April - amounted to an unsparing
study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of army leadership at the
highest levels. The picture Taguba drew of Abu Ghraib was one in which army
regulations and the Geneva convention were routinely violated, and in which
much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to army
military intelligence units and civilian contract employees.

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.

· This is an edited extract from Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu
Ghraib, by Seymour M Hersh, published today by Penguin Press.