The Roots of Torture
The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war.
By John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff for Newsweek International.

Indeed, the single most iconic image to come out of the abuse scandal – that of a hooded man standing naked on a box, arms outspread, with wires dangling from his fingers, toes and penis – may do a lot to undercut the administration’s case that this was the work of a few criminal MPs. That’s because the practice shown in that photo is an arcane torture method known only to veterans of the interrogation trade. “Was that something that [an MP] dreamed up by herself? Think again,” says Darius Rejali, an expert on the use of torture by democracies. “That’s a standard torture. It’s called ‘the Vietnam.’ But it’s not common knowledge. Ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them.”
Who might have taught them? Almost certainly it was their superiors up the line. Some of the images from Abu Ghraib, like those of naked prisoners terrified by attack dogs or humiliated before grinning female guards, actually portray “stress and duress” techniques officially approved at the highest levels of the government for use against terrorist suspects. It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques, and late last – week Defense spokesman Larry DiRita said that “no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses.” But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America’s top military lawyers – and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation – methods that the Red Cross concluded were “tantamount to torture.”
The Bush administration created a bold legal framework to justify this system of interrogation, according to internal government memos obtained by NEWSWEEK. What started as a carefully thought-out, if aggressive, policy of interrogation in a covert war – designed mainly for use by a handful of CIA professionals – evolved into ever-more ungoverned tactics that ended up in the hands of untrained MPs in a big, hot war. Originally, Geneva Conventions protections were stripped only from Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. But later Rumsfeld himself, impressed by the success of techniques used against Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay, seemingly set in motion a process that led to their use in Iraq, even though that war was supposed to have been governed by the Geneva Conventions. Ultimately, reservist MPs, like those at Abu Ghraib, were drawn into a system in which fear and humiliation were used to break prisoners’ resistance to interrogation.

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The Gray Zone
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
By Sy Hersh for the New Yorker.

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

It’s been a long time coming on this one. I sure never thought he’d go out with *such* a bang.
But here it is — something I’ve been saying for a long time now 🙂

Donald Rumsfeld Should Go
(a ny times editorial)

The world is waiting now for a sign that President Bush understands the seriousness of what has happened. It needs to be more than his repeated statements that he is sorry the rest of the world does not “understand the true nature and heart of America.” Mr. Bush should start showing the state of his own heart by demanding the resignation of his secretary of defense.
This is far from a case of a fine cabinet official undone by the actions of a few obscure bad apples in the military police. Donald Rumsfeld has morphed, over the last two years, from a man of supreme confidence to arrogance, then to almost willful blindness. With the approval of the president, he sent American troops into a place whose nature and dangers he had apparently never bothered to examine.
We now know that no one with any power in the Defense Department had a clue about what the administration was getting the coalition forces into. Mr. Rumsfeld’s blithe confidence that he could run his war on the cheap has also seriously harmed the Army and the National Guard.

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