Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld last year personally approved a series of aggressive interrogation techniques for suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks and help prevent future ones, Pentagon officials said Thursday.
Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 a request five months earlier by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who had arrived at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in November 2002 to oversee prisoners. Miller sought permission to use a broad range of extraordinary “nondoctrinal” questioning techniques on an Al Qaeda detainee, a general with the Pentagon’s Judge Advocate General’s office said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
[…]
The effort to define how far interrogators can go in pressuring detainees for information without violating international law exposed the rift between interrogators and JAG lawyers, who considered some of the techniques Miller proposed to be illegal.
“You had intelligence officials that might have been pulling in a direction that was different from the lawyers,” Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said. “It’s a competitive process.”
[…]
Rumsfeld trimmed the list of requested interrogation techniques by about one-third, and he insisted that he personally approve a “handful” of techniques, the senior Pentagon lawyer and the JAG official said. Rumsfeld approved the revised proposal in April 2003.
I’m just wondering what that “handful of techniques” are. And the article isn’t clear, but it sounds as if Rumsfeld also insisted that he approve particular instances of their use. If that’s the case, you have to wonder how many cases of torture Donald Rumsfeld personally signed off on.
That’s the kind of evidence that war crimes trials are made of.
Ezra Klein agrees with Matt Yglesias that Bush making a speech a week is not exactly an inpired way of pressing his new PR campaign called “Iraq-is-a-quagmire-instead-of-the-cakewalk-I -promised-but-I’m-resolutely-stupid-so-you-should-vote-for-me-anyway,” because his speeches only make him look bad.
To me, his speeches have always been laughable — not for the content, which is quite often very well done, if completely wrong — but by the overblown and obviously coached delivery combined with the totally blank look in his eye. He’s like a Japanese speaking actor playing a role in phonetic English. No matter how passionately he delivers the lines, the inflection and the rhythm are always off because he doesn’t understand the language he’s speaking.
But as much as I find his speeches to be ridiculous (the one where he evoked the words of Pericles is a particular side splitter) I always remind myself that the bobble-head pundits’ favorite description of any speech he has ever delivered is “he hit it out of the park.”
The mediatools have been hard on Junior these last couple of weeks. They are sure to feel uncomfortable about that and be overcome with the desire to give him a little love. So, don’t be surprised if they blissfully gasp and squirm with heavy lidded Noonanesque pleasure at his masterful masculine prowess tomorrow night.
But, if they do, do not despair. They are mediawhores, after all, and there is so much juicy stuff, from dirty pictures to Iranian spies to Republican civil war going on, that they’ll be easily distracted from their codpiece slobbering.
And it’s always possible that the fact his face looks like he spent the night in a gutter (again) will make even Nooner see him less as a mythic cowboy and more like the inbred frat boy he really is.
What a fitting illustration of a world leader who has fallen flat on his face.
Via Susan at Suburban Guerrilla I am vastly relieved to learn that when the Bush administration says its going to put an end to the problems in Iraqi prisons and elsewhere, they mean it:
Mobile phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Business newspaper reported today.
Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.
“Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq,” it said, adding that a “total ban throughout the US military” is in the works.
The chain of command was obvious to Liang, who came home in January after fulfilling her 22-month active-duty contract with the Reserves. MPs were directed by OGAs and military intelligence officers, she said. But orders were couched as repeated suggestions on how to ‘break down’ prisoners: ‘[Play] loud music, yell at them, scare them, give them cold showers and don’t let them have towels or clothes,’ Liang told NEWSWEEK. The OGAs would disappear only to return hours later for a new round of interrogation. ‘He’s still not talking,’ Liang recalls an OGA saying to her. ‘Do something more.’ This was the drill, day and night.
The bad stuff happened after dusk, she said. While daylight brought a string of visitors — medics, Red Cross officials, high-ranking officers — the dogs came out at night. The second-shifters brought in DVD movies to watch on their computers. Liang said she saw an image on the laptop of Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr. —one of those awaiting trial after investigators described him as one of the ringleaders in the alleged prisoner abuses. The photograph was of a snarling military dog held inches from a prone Iraqi prisoner’s face. At the 4 a.m. shift change, she asked, ‘Why dogs?’The prisoner had been handcuffed and scared with the dogs so he’d break, someone told her. It was common to arrive at work and see a prisoner standing on a box, naked, shivering and wearing a hood, she told NEWSWEEK. One morning she came in and saw blood on the walls, although nobody could explain exactly how it got there.
Pummeling and humiliating and photographing Iraqi prisoners, Liang said, was the product of vague guidance, poor discipline, frustration that came with open-ended deployment, and boredom run amok. “I think it was just out of curiosity and boredom and anger,” she said. “You’re there 12 hours a day, every day, and you’re pissed off at everything going on around you. We were told we were going home in September. You want to take out your anger against other people in the unit, but you can’t do that. So some people took it out on the prisoners. What they [the MPs] did was wrong, but not everyone realizes that everyone in there attacked the Coalition forces and tried to kill us.”
Some abuse photographs lacked context, Liang told NEWSWEEK. Take the widely-published image of a prisoner with his arms pulled behind his back and handcuffed to a bed, women’s underwear pulled over his head. He was called “S–tboy,” for his habit of smearing excrement on himself and the walls. “People don’t know what kind of people were put inside that cellblock,” Liang said. “They were crazy people. ‘S–tboy’ would smear it all over himself. That was the reason he was handcuffed.” Liang said he spit on her as she tried to feed him. The underwear? “Just to make a joke,” she said, adding that she can’t recall who was responsible for it.
Another “crazy” man, in his late 20s, was brought in for allegedly looting. His refusal to eat meant the MPs fed him intravenously. He would babble over and over again: “I refuse to eat! Saddam’s going to come back and kill us!” The guards invented nicknames for prisoners based on movie and television characters, Liang said. There was “Gilligan,” a tiny, dim guy. There was “The Claw,” whose birth defect made one hand resemble a bird claw. There was “Froggy,” a man with bulging Marty Feldman eyes. And there was “Mr. Clean,” who bathed obsessively. (After Mr. Clean tried to kill a guard with a pistol someone had slipped into his cell, his nickname became “Trigger.”)
[…]
“I’m not embarrassed,” she said, “but I don’t tell people that I’m with the 372nd [MP Company] because people are going to ask questions.”
Well, as long as she’s not embarrassed. That’s all that matters. Because “people don’t understand” that those guys like “shitboy” and the mentally ill looter who refused to eat because Saddam was coming to kill him were dangerous terrorists who deserved what they got.
I’m glad she’s home now, nice and snug, going to college on the GI bill, looking forward to a long and happy life. Since she’s both brainless and soulless, I’m sure she’ll make a fine little Republican.
Speaking off the record, intelligence community sources have previously said they believe it “very likely” that al-Zarqawi is indeed long dead. Such a fact makes al-Zarqawi’s alleged killing of Berg difficult to reconcile, and there has been broad speculation that blaming al-Zarqawi is an administration ploy. Further anomalies surrounding Berg’s death have fueled added speculation.
The story goes on to discuss the various oddities surounding the capture and the video including some I hadn’t heard before.
I have a feeling that all the right wing hysteria about this story is going to prove extremely embarrassing to them before too long. There has been something wrong with it from the very beginning.
The other day I wrote a post about the pathetic Republican psyche and described them as “a bunch of paunchy middle aged men in ill fitting suits who never got laid when they were young, never went to war, never made a team or played in a rock band, so their dreams of masculine glory remain unfulfilled well into their 50’s.”
Remember the other day I told you nerds rule? Now, proof, from no less than the president of the United States, that they’re also very influential. You don’t believe me? Look where I’m standing!
[. . . ]
I just wish my old pals in high school could see me now: Neil the nerd, now Neil-the-invited-to-the-White-House nerd standing on the same hallowed ground as Fox super cool guys Wendell Goler, Jim Angle and James Rosen.
Take that football team captain. Take that all you cheerleaders who dismissed me as some freak of nature. Still a freak, but now a force of nature freak.
Just ask anyone. Just ask … the president of the United States.
Geez. That’s sad. The Frat Rat in chief would be the first guy in the room to give you an atomic wedgie, Neil.
Josh and Matt are teasing out the insider take on Chalabi so we don’t have to. They seem to agree that there probably isn’t anything new but rather that a power shift within the Bush administration that has caused the anti-Chalabi faction to flex its long abused muscles.
So we have really two possibilities here. One is that some piece of evidence came to light that changed the mind of Chalabi’s backers inside the beltway. The other is that there was simply a shift in the correlation of forces inside the government — no one changes their mind about Chalabi, it’s just that the anti-Chalabi forces, formerly weak, became strong. Hence the new policy.
One good piece of evidence for scenario two is the behavior of the out-of-government friends of Ahmed — David Frum and the AEI crowd. If an influential Chalabi-backer on the inside (call him, “Ronald Dumsfeld”) had changed his mind, then you would think Dumsfeld would call his fellow-travelers in the media and make his case. That might not convince all — or even most — of the media Chalabistas, but it would surely convince some of them. Instead, all of the nongovernmental Chalabi-fans seem to still be Chalabi fans, indicating that all the anti-Chalabi stuff coming out of the government is coming from traditional anti-Chalabi sources.
That’s assuming that there are any sane Chalabi backers in the first place. I think most of them are as blind about him as they are about everything else, so I doubt that they would believe there was anything wrong with their boy even if they saw him french kissing the Ayatollah Khomeni. The ties go way back and undergird the entire neocon movement and its traditional concern with Israeli affairs. After all their guru, Alfred Wohlstetter, is the one who introduced Chalabi to his bitch, Richard Perle:
Almost to a man, Washington’s hawks lavishly praise Chalabi. “He’s a rare find,” says Max Singer, a trustee and co-founder of the Hudson Institute. “He’s deep in the Arab world and at the same time he is fundamentally a man of the West.”
In Washington, Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. Chalabi’s partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon’s Middle-East policy offices — such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey.
The Washington partisans who want to install Chalabi in Arab Iraq are also those associated with the staunchest backers of Israel, particularly those aligned with the hard-right faction of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chalabi’s cheerleaders include the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). “Chalabi is the one that we know the best,” says Shoshana Bryen, director of special projects for JINSA, where Chalabi has been a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997. “He could be Iraq’s national leader,” says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of WINEP, whose board of advisers includes pro-Israeli luminaries such as Perle, Wolfowitz and Martin Peretz of The New Republic.
What makes Chalabi so attractive to the Washington war party? Most importantly, he’s a co-thinker: a mathematician trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago and a banker (who years ago hit it off with Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist who was a godfather of the neoconservative movement), a fellow mathematician and a University of Chicago strategist. In 1985, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) introduced Chalabi to Perle, then the undersecretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan and one of Wohlstetter’s leading acolytes. The two have been close ever since. In early October, Perle and Chalabi shared a podium at an American Enterprise Institute conference called “The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq,” which was held, appropriately enough, in AEI’s 12th-floor Wohlstetter Conference Center. “The Iraqi National Congress has been the philosophical voice of free Iraq for a dozen years,” Perle told me.
The CIA despises [Ahmed] Chalabi; the State Department despises him. They did everything they could to put him out of business. Now there is a deliberate effort to marginalize him.”
“He has devoted his life to freeing his country,” Perle added. “He is a man of enormous intelligence, and I believe the effort to marginalize him will fail. They will end up looking ridiculous.”
I don’t think even Rummy could drive a wedge between those two crazy young kids in love.
But the next morning, he said, doctors and dentists arrived to care for their injuries. Beds and pillows were brought back in. They were fed. Everyone was nice, Mr. Abd said. Then at night, the same crew with “Joiner” would return and strip them and handcuff them to the walls.
Much of the evidence of abuse at the prison came from medical documents. Records and statements show doctors and medics reporting to the area of the prison where the abuse occurred several times to stitch wounds, tend to collapsed prisoners or see patients with bruised or reddened genitals.
Two doctors recognized that a detainee’s shoulder was hurt because he had his arms handcuffed over his head for what they said was “a long period.” They gave him an injection of painkiller, and sent him to an outside hospital for what appeared to be a dislocated shoulder, but did not report any suspicions of abuse. One medic, Staff Sgt. Reuben Layton, told investigators that he had found the detainee handcuffed in the same position on three occasions, despite instructing Specialist Graner to free the man.
“I feel I did the right thing when I told Graner to get the detainee uncuffed from the bed,” Sergeant Layton told investigators.
Sergeant Layton also said he saw Specialist Graner hitting a metal baton against the leg wounds of a detainee who had been shot. He did not report that incident.
Sgt. Neil Wallin, another medic, recorded on Nov. 14: “Patient has blood down front of clothes and sandbag over head,” noting three wounds requiring 13 stitches, above his eye, on his nose and on his chin.
Sergeant Wallin later told investigators that when he got to the prison: “I observed blood on the wall near a metal weld, which I believed to be the place where the detainee received his injury. I do not know how he was injured or if it was done by himself or another.”
He also told investigators that he had seen male detainees forced to wear women’s underwear and that he had seen a video in which a prisoner known to smear himself with his own feces repeatedly banged his head against the wall, “very hard.”
Helga Margot Aldape-Moreno, a nurse, told investigators that in September she reported to the cell to tend to a prisoner having a panic attack, and that, opening the door, she saw naked Iraqis in a human pyramid, with sandbags over their heads. Military police officers were yelling at the detainees, she said.
Ms. Aldape-Moreno tended to the prisoner, she said, then left the room and did not report what she saw until the investigation began in January.
Not exactly a bunch of Albert Schweitzers, were they?
On the other hand, the beginning of the article is about Joseph Darby, a person who put his humanity above his job.
WASHINGTON — The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.
“Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.
The Information Collection Program also “kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing” by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years.
An administration official confirmed that “highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel.”
The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month to Chalabi’s program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.
Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency’s Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi’s U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. “They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,” he said.
He described it as “one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history.”
“I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work,” he said.
That this came from the DIA means that Feith is in {big} trouble, I think.
It makes his old law partners words to Salon last week (later retracted) even more interesting:
“Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat,” says L. Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith, now the undersecretary of defense for policy, and a former friend and supporter of Chalabi and his aspirations to lead Iraq. “He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he’s got another.”
Zell, a Jerusalem attorney, continues to be a partner in the firm that Feith left in 2001 to take the Pentagon job. He also helped Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew Salem set up a new law office in Baghdad in late 2003. Chalabi met with Zell and other neoconservatives many times from the mid-1990s on in London, Turkey, and the U.S. Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: “He said he would end Iraq’s boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery].” But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend’s moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.
These neocons are even dumber than I realized.
Update: Either somebody didn’t get his talking points, or a full fledged knife fight is breaking out in the Pentagon:
Thursday’s raid appeared to be a final break between Mr Chalabi and his former US patrons.
But Gen Myers defended the INC, saying its military intelligence had been “useful and accurate” during the year-long occupation.
“The organisation that he is associated with has provided intelligence to our intelligence unit there in Baghdad that has saved soldiers’ lives,” he told a congressional committee.
Gen Myers’ comments reflect the personal support that Mr Chalabi enjoys in some sections of the administration, particularly the Pentagon. However, this support has been overriden by the importance attached to the political process by Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Lakhdar Brahimi, United Nations special envoy to Iraq. To them, Mr Chalabi has come to be seen as an obstacle to UN plans to form a caretaker government to assume sovereignty.
We are long overdue for some real analyses of Kerry’s strengths and weaknesses. So far, he is just being caricatured by the Republicans as a slimy opportunist and by the Democrats as an overqualified stiff. (Is it 2000 again?)
I am thinking that the way to interpret that is that he has the personality of Gore with the political savvy of Clinton, which isn’t a bad combo.The country might be ready for a little sober, programmatic seriousness after our little foray into rightwing fantasy. But, the Republicans aren’t going to just sit back and allow him to clean up the mess they’ve made; they are going to do everything they can to destroy him. For that you need good instincts, good timing and the ability to play rough and bounce back.
And, the Democrats definitely need somebody with some healthy self-confidence. If he wins, he’s going to need it.
