Seymour Hersh has an excellent, and extremely depressing new article in the June 25 issue of the New Yorker, about the investigation of Abu Ghraib and other abuse of prisoners. It is the first article I've seen containing extensive interviews with Major General Antonio Taguba, who was forced to retire this past January. And as usual, Hersh interviewed numerous other people.
It's not so much that the article contains anything new and startling, although there are revelations about some truly disgusting conduct at Abu Ghraib that I hadn't previously heard about (including the forced sexual humiliation of a father with his son watching, and a female detainee being forcibly sodomized by a male guard) as how it paints the reaction of bureaucracies (and although it's many other things, the military is definitely a bureaucracy) to those who tell their superiors things that their superiors would really rather not hear. Rather clearly, the bureaucracy was more upset with General Taguba for revealing the conduct than it was with the conduct itself.
It's a 9 page article that is well worth reading in its entirety, and I can barely scratch the surface here. But after introducing General Taguba and describing his background as the son of a Filipino veteran of the Army, Hersh begins by describing Taguba's first meeting with Rumsfeld and his military aide after the existence of his report was revealed:
Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant. Craddock’s daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba’s two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, "Craddock just said, very coldly, ‘Wait here.’ " In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were "only Iraqis." Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.
"Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!" Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, "I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting."
General Taguba seems convinced, as many of us suspected, that many of those very high in the chain of command above the people who have been prosecuted had the means of knowing what was going on long before they have admitted to doing so, and that if they didn't know the details, it's because they didn't WANT to know the details.
Very quickly, General Taguba realized that his Army career was effectively over:
Taguba had been scheduled to rotate to the Third Army’s headquarters, at Fort McPherson, Georgia, in June of 2004. He was instead ordered back to the Pentagon, to work in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs. "It was a lateral assignment," Taguba said, with a smile and a shrug. "I didn’t quibble. If you’re going to do that to me, well, O.K. We all serve at the pleasure of the President." A retired four-star Army general later told Taguba that he had been sent to the job in the Pentagon so that he could "be watched." Taguba realized that his career was at a dead end.
It seems apparent that Rumsfeld and the other higher-ups thought that General Taguba had leaked his report himself, although Sy Hersh makes it clear that Taguba wasn't HIS original source, and that he hadn't even met Taguba until mid-2006, and had obtained his report elsewhere.
Although he had realized it was coming, the end of General Taguba's career came with what seems to be a brutally peremptory phone call:
In January of 2006, Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff. "This is your Vice," he told Taguba. "I need you to retire by January of 2007." No pleasantries were exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for years, and, Taguba said, "He offered no reason."
But in addition to the interviews with General Taguba, Hersh includes extensive interviews with other. There are stories of a C.I.D. investigation into abuses by special operations forces not being able to be completed, because the C.I.D. investigators were refused the proper clearances. Given what happened when the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility sought the clearances necessary to investigate the actions of DOJ attorneys in connection with the NSA surveillance programs, denial of the required level of security clearances seems to have been almost standard operating procedure by this administration in heading off the possibility of embarrassing investigations.
Hersh also tells of an investigation of General Geoffrey Miller's conduct at Guantanamo, and his responsbility for the abuse that happened there. The investigating General, Air Force Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, determined that Miller was responsible for the abuse and should be "held accountable" and "admonished." These recommendations were expressly rejected by General Craddock, Rumsfeld's former personal military aide who had greeted General Taguba so coldly, and who had recently been promoted and placed in command of the U.S. Southern Command, in which role he had ultimate responsibility for Guantanamo within the uniformed military. One thing General Schmidt said to Sy Hersh is chilling, if not that suprising: "I found some things that didn’t seem right. For lack of a camera, you could have seen in Guantánamo what was seen at Abu Ghraib." He described the interrogation of one Saudi who was suspected of being the "20th hijacker," who was questioned for 20 hours per day for at least 54 days while being manacled, chained to the floor, and threatened with dogs.
Hersh also goes into detail about how the message was delivered to the CIA to "do what you gotta do" in interrogations, because "You know how important it is," without either the President or George Tenet every explicitly authorizing any abusive conduct.
PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE ARTICLE, if you read ANYTHING this weekend.
I will close my description of the article, and of this diary, with the final paragraph, which is a quote from General Taguba:
"From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service," Taguba said. "And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable."