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by
Seymour M. Hersh June 25, 2007
The New Yorker
On the
afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M.
Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon
conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to
testify the next day, in televised hearings before the
Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about
abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week,
revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs
showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually
humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker.
In response, Administration officials had insisted that
only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that
America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that
the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.
If there was a
redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the
thoroughness and the passion of the Army’s initial
investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was
led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at
the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he
found:
Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton
criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees . .
. systemic and illegal abuse.
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.”
In the
meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu
Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz
asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At
that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked
detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an
interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said,
‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”
Rumsfeld was
particularly concerned about how the classified report
had become public. “General,” he asked, “who do you
think leaked the report?” Taguba responded that perhaps
a senior military leader who knew about the
investigation had done so. “It was just my speculation,”
he recalled. “Rumsfeld didn’t say anything.” (I did not
meet Taguba until mid-2006 and obtained his report
elsewhere.) Rumsfeld also complained about not being
given the information he needed. “Here I am,” Taguba
recalled Rumsfeld saying, “just a Secretary of Defense,
and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not
seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress
tomorrow and talk about this.” As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba
said, “He’s looking at me. It was a statement.”
At best,
Taguba said, “Rumsfeld was in denial.” Taguba had
submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through
several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central
Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the
war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld’s
conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior
military leaders on the report, but he received no
indication that any of them, with the exception of
General Schoomaker, had actually read it. (Schoomaker
later sent Taguba a note praising his honesty and
leadership.) When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to
look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I
don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do
you do with that information, once you know what they
show?”
Taguba also
knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld’s office and
elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic
account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of
their potential strategic significance, within days of
the first complaint. On January 13, 2004, a military
policeman named Joseph Darby gave the Army’s Criminal
Investigation Division (C.I.D.) a CD full of images of
abuse. Two days later, General Craddock and Vice-Admiral
Timothy Keating, the director of the Joint Staff of the
J.C.S., were e-mailed a summary of the abuses depicted
on the CD. It said that approximately ten soldiers were
shown, involved in acts that included:
Having male detainees pose nude while female guards
pointed at their genitals; having female detainees
exposing themselves to the guards; having detainees
perform indecent acts with each other; and guards
physically assaulting detainees by beating and dragging
them with choker chains.
Taguba said,
“You didn’t need to ‘see’ anything—just take the secure
e-mail traffic at face value.”
I learned from
Taguba that the first wave of materials included
descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with
his son, who were both detainees. Several of these
images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring
her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s
report noted that photographs and videos were being held
by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations
and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said
that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in
uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not
made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings,
nor has there been any public government mention of it.
Such images would have added an even more inflammatory
element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough
that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s
panties,” Taguba said.
On January
20th, the chief of staff at Central Command sent another
e-mail to Admiral Keating, copied to General Craddock
and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Army
commander in Iraq. The chief of staff wrote, “Sir:
update on alleged detainee abuse per our discussion. DID
IT REALLY HAPPEN? Yes, currently have 4 confessions
implicating perhaps 10 soldiers. DO PHOTOS EXIST? Yes. A
CD with approx 100 photos and a video—CID has these in
their possession.”
In subsequent
testimony, General Myers, the J.C.S. chairman,
acknowledged, without mentioning the e-mails, that in
January information about the photographs had been given
“to me and the Secretary up through the chain of
command. . . . And the general nature of the photos,
about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was
described.”
Nevertheless,
Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the
House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to
have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our
hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look,
this is terrible. We need to do something,’ ” Rumsfeld
told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner,
and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”
Rumsfeld told
the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba
report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my
knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the
senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”;
at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until
last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been
made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:
There were rumors of photographs in a criminal
prosecution chain back sometime after January 13th . . .
I don’t remember precisely when, but sometime in that
period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part
of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding
along fine is the fact that the President didn’t know,
and you didn’t know, and I didn’t know.
“And, as a
result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press,
and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.
Taguba,
watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that
Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The
photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see
them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was
hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone
had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because
he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss
bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld
is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap.
There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S.—Can’t Remember
Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people
are lying to protect themselves.” It distressed Taguba
that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House
appearances by senior military officers who concurred
with his denials.
“The whole
idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the
nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He
and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea
of the values and high standards that are expected of
them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”
In response to
detailed queries about this article, Colonel Gary Keck,
a Pentagon spokesman, said in an e-mail, “The department
did not promulgate interrogation policies or guidelines
that directed, sanctioned, or encouraged abuse.” He
added, “When there have been abuses, those violations
are taken seriously, acted upon promptly, investigated
thoroughly, and the wrongdoers are held accountable.”
Regarding early warnings about Abu Ghraib, Colonel Keck
said, “Former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has stated
publicly under oath that he and other senior leaders
were not provided pictures from Abu Ghraib until shortly
before their release.” (Rumsfeld, through an aide,
declined to answer questions, as did General Craddock.
Other senior commanders did not respond to requests for
comment.)
During the
next two years, Taguba assiduously avoided the press,
telling his relatives not to talk about his work.
Friends and family had been inundated with telephone
calls and visitors, and, Taguba said, “I didn’t want
them to be involved.” Taguba retired in January, 2007,
after thirty-four years of active service, and finally
agreed to talk to me about his investigation of Abu
Ghraib and what he believed were the serious
misrepresentations by officials that followed. “From
what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves
to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge
of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were
clear, however: he was to investigate only the military
police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the
chain of command. “These M.P. troops were not that
creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance,
but I was legally prevented from further investigation
into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”
General Taguba
is a slight man with a friendly demeanor and an
unfailingly polite correctness. “I came from a poor
family and had to work hard,” he said. “It was always
shine the shoes on Saturday morning for church, and wash
the car on Saturday for church. And Saturday also for
mowing the lawn and doing yard jobs for church.”
His father,
Tomas, was born in the Philippines and was drafted into
the Philippine Scouts in early 1942, at the height of
the Japanese attack on the joint American-Filipino force
led by General Douglas MacArthur. Tomas was captured by
the Japanese on the Bataan peninsula in April, 1942, and
endured the Bataan Death March, which took thousands of
American and Filipino lives. Tomas escaped and joined
the underground resistance to the Japanese before
returning to the American Army, in July, 1945.
Taguba’s
mother, Maria, spent much of the Second World War living
across the street from a Japanese-run prisoner-of-war
camp in Manila. Taguba remembers her vivid accounts of
prisoners who were bayonetted arbitrarily or whose
fingernails were pulled out. Antonio, the eldest son (he
has six siblings), was born in Manila in 1950. Maria and
Tomas were devout Catholics, and their children were
taught respect and, Taguba recalls, “above all,
integrity in how you lived your life and practiced your
religion.”
In 1961, the
family moved to Hawaii, where Tomas retired from the
military and took a civilian job in logistics, preparing
units for deployment to Vietnam. A year after they
arrived, Antonio became a U.S. citizen. By then, as a
sixth grader, he was delivering newspapers, serving as
an altar boy, and doing well in school. He went to Idaho
State University, in Pocatello, with help from the Army
R.O.T.C., and graduated in 1972. As a newly commissioned
second lieutenant, he was five feet six inches tall and
weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. His Army service
began immediately: he led troops at the platoon,
company, battalion, and brigade levels at bases in South
Korea, Germany, and across America. (He married in 1981,
and has two grown children.) In 1986, Taguba, then a
major, was selected to attend the College of Naval
Command and Staff at the Naval War College, in Newport,
Rhode Island. While there, he wrote an analysis of
Soviet ground-attack planning that became required
reading at the school. He was promoted, ahead of his
peers, to become a colonel and then a general. On the
way, Taguba earned three master’s degrees—in public
administration, international relations, and
national-security studies.
“I’ll talk to
you about discrimination,” he said one morning, while
discussing, without bitterness, his early years as an
Army officer. “Let’s talk about being refused to be
served at a restaurant in public. Let’s talk about
having to do things two times, and being accused of not
speaking English well, and having to pay myself for my
three master’s degrees because the Army didn’t think I
was smart enough. So what? Just work your ass off. So
what? The hard work paid off.”
Taguba had
joined the Army knowing little about his father’s
military experience. “He saw the ravages and brutality
of war, but he wasn’t about to brag about his exploits,”
Taguba said. “He didn’t say anything until 1997, and it
took me two years to rebuild his records and show that
he was authorized for an award.” On Tomas’s eightieth
birthday, he was awarded the Bronze Star and a
prisoner-of-war medal in a ceremony at Schofield
Barracks, in Hawaii. “My father never laughed,” Taguba
said. But the day he got his medal “he smiled—he had a
big-ass smile on his face. I’d never seen him look so
proud. He was a bent man with carpal-tunnel syndrome,
but at the end of the medal ceremony he stood himself up
and saluted. I cried, and everyone in my family burst
into tears.”
Richard
Armitage, a former Navy counter-insurgency officer who
served as Deputy Secretary of State in the first Bush
term, recalled meeting Taguba, then a lieutenant
colonel, in South Korea in the early nineteen-nineties.
“I was told to keep an eye on this young guy—‘He’s going
to be a general,’ ” Armitage said. “Taguba was discreet
and low key—not a sprinter but a marathoner.”
At the time,
Taguba was working for Major General Mike Myatt, a
marine who was the officer in charge of strategic talks
with the South Koreans, on behalf of the American
military. “I needed an executive assistant with brains
and integrity,” Myatt, who is now retired and living in
San Francisco, told me. After interviewing a number of
young officers, he chose Taguba. “He was ethical and he
knew his stuff,” Myatt said. “We really became close,
and I’d trust him with my life. We talked about military
strategy and policy, and the moral aspect of war—the
importance of not losing the moral high ground.” Myatt
followed Taguba’s involvement in the Abu Ghraib inquiry,
and said, “I was so proud of him. I told him, ‘Tony,
you’ve maintained yourself, and your integrity.’ ”
Taguba got a
different message, however, from other officers, among
them General John Abizaid, then the head of Central
Command. A few weeks after his report became public,
Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in the back seat of
a Mercedes sedan with Abizaid. Abizaid’s driver and his
interpreter, who also served as a bodyguard, were in
front. Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet
warning: “You and your report will be investigated.”
“I wasn’t
angry about what he said but disappointed that he would
say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army
thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that
I thought I was in the Mafia.”
THE
INVESTIGATION
Taguba was
given the job of investigating Abu Ghraib because of
circumstance: the senior officer of the 800th Military
Police Brigade, to which the soldiers in the photographs
belonged, was a one-star general; Army regulations
required that the head of the inquiry be senior to the
commander of the unit being investigated, and Taguba, a
two-star general, was available. “It was as simple as
that,” he said. He vividly remembers his first thought
upon seeing the photographs in late January of 2004:
“Unbelievable! What were these people doing?” There was
an immediate second thought: “This is big.”
Taguba decided
to keep the photographs from most of the interrogators
and researchers on his staff of twenty-three officers.
“I didn’t want them to prejudge the soldiers they were
investigating, so I put the photos in a safe,” he told
me. “Anyone who wanted to see them had to have a
need-to-know and go through me.” His decision to keep
the staff in the background was also intended to insure
that none of them suffered damage to his or her career
because of involvement in the inquiry. “I knew it was
going to be very sensitive because of the gravity of
what was in front of us,” he said.
The team spent
much of February, 2004, in Iraq. Taguba was overwhelmed
by the scale of the wrongdoing. “These were people who
were taken off the streets and put in jail—teen-agers
and old men and women,” he said. “I kept on asking these
questions of the officers I interviewed: ‘You knew what
was going on. Why didn’t you do something to stop it?’ ”
Taguba’s
assignment was limited to investigating the 800th M.P.s,
but he quickly found signs of the involvement of
military intelligence—both the 205th Military
Intelligence Brigade, commanded by Colonel Thomas
Pappas, which worked closely with the M.P.s, and what
were called “other government agencies,” or O.G.A.s, a
euphemism for the C.I.A. and special-operations units
operating undercover in Iraq. Some of the earliest
evidence involved Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan,
whose name was mentioned in interviews with several
M.P.s. For the first three weeks of the investigation,
Jordan was nowhere to be found, despite repeated
requests. When the investigators finally located him, he
asked whether he needed to shave his beard before being
interviewed—Taguba suspected that he had been dressing
as a civilian. “When I asked him about his assignment,
he says, ‘I’m a liaison officer for intelligence from
Army headquarters in Iraq.’ ” But in the course of three
or four interviews with Jordan, Taguba said, he began to
suspect that the lieutenant colonel had been more
intimately involved in the interrogation process—some of
it brutal—for “high value” detainees.
“Jordan denied
everything, and yet he had the authority to enter the
prison’s ‘hard site’ ”—where the most important
detainees were held—“carrying a carbine and an M9
pistol, which is against regulations,” Taguba said.
Jordan had also led a squad of military policemen in a
shoot-out inside the hard site with a detainee from
Syria who had managed to obtain a gun. (A lawyer for
Jordan disputed these allegations; in the shoot-out, he
said, Jordan was “just another gun on the extraction
team” and not the leader. He noted that Jordan was not a
trained interrogator.)
Taguba said
that Jordan’s “record reflected an extensive
intelligence background.” He also had reason to believe
that Jordan was not reporting through the chain of
command. But Taguba’s narrowly focussed mission
constrained the questions he could ask. “I suspected
that somebody was giving them guidance, but I could not
print that,” Taguba said.
“After all
Jordan’s evasiveness and misleading responses, his
rights were read to him,” Taguba went on. Jordan
subsequently became the only officer facing trial on
criminal charges in connection with Abu Ghraib and is
scheduled to be court-martialled in late August. (Seven
M.P.s were convicted of charges that included
dereliction of duty, maltreatment, and assault; one
defendant, Specialist Charles Graner, was sentenced to
ten years in prison.) Last month, a military judge ruled
that Jordan, who is still assigned to the Army’s
Intelligence and Security Command, had not been
appropriately advised of his rights during his
interviews with Taguba, undermining the Army’s
allegation that he lied during the Taguba inquiry. Six
other charges remain, including failure to obey an order
or regulation; cruelty and maltreatment; and false
swearing and obstruction of justice. (His lawyer said,
“The evidence clearly shows that he is innocent.”)
Taguba came to
believe that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the Army
commander in Iraq, and some of the generals assigned to
the military headquarters in Baghdad had extensive
knowledge of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib even
before Joseph Darby came forward with the CD. Taguba was
aware that in the fall of 2003—when much of the abuse
took place—Sanchez routinely visited the prison, and
witnessed at least one interrogation. According to
Taguba, “Sanchez knew exactly what was going on.”
Taguba learned
that in August, 2003, as the Sunni insurgency in Iraq
was gaining force, the Pentagon had ordered Major
General Geoffrey Miller, the commander at Guantánamo, to
Iraq. His mission was to survey the prison system there
and to find ways to improve the flow of intelligence.
The core of Miller’s recommendations, as summarized in
the Taguba report, was that the military police at Abu
Ghraib should become part of the interrogation process:
they should work closely with interrogators and
intelligence officers in “setting the conditions for
successful exploitation of the internees.”
Taguba
concluded that Miller’s approach was not consistent with
Army doctrine, which gave military police the overriding
mission of making sure that the prisons were secure and
orderly. His report cited testimony that interrogators
and other intelligence personnel were encouraging the
abuse of detainees. “Loosen this guy up for us,” one M.P.
said he was told by a member of military intelligence.
“Make sure he has a bad night.”
The M.P.s,
Taguba said, “were being literally exploited by the
military interrogators. My view is that those kids”—even
the soldiers in the photographs—“were poorly led, not
trained, and had not been given any standard operating
procedures on how they should guard the detainees.”
Surprisingly,
given Taguba’s findings, Miller was the officer chosen
to restore order at Abu Ghraib. In April, 2004, a month
after the report was filed, he was reassigned there as
the deputy commander for detainee operations. “Miller
called in the spring and asked to meet with me to
discuss Abu Ghraib, but I waited for him and we never
did meet,” Taguba recounted. Miller later told Taguba
that he’d been ordered to Washington to meet with
Rumsfeld before travelling to Iraq, but he never
attempted to reschedule the meeting.
If they had
spoken, Taguba said, he would have reminded Miller that
at Abu Ghraib, unlike at Guantánamo, very few prisoners
were affiliated with any terrorist group. Taguba had
seen classified documents revealing that there were only
“one or two” suspected Al Qaeda prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Most of the detainees had nothing to do with the
insurgency. A few of them were common criminals.
Taguba had
known Miller for years. “We served together in Korea and
in the Pentagon, and his wife and mine used to go
shopping together,” Taguba said. But, after his report
became public, “Miller didn’t talk to me. He didn’t say
a word when I passed him in the hallway.”
Despite the
subsequent public furor over Abu Ghraib, neither the
House nor the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings
led to a serious effort to determine whether the scandal
was a result of a high-level interrogation policy that
encouraged abuse. At the House Committee hearing on May
7, 2004, a freshman Democratic congressman, Kendrick
Meek, of Florida, asked Rumsfeld if it was time for him
to resign. Rumsfeld replied, “I would resign in a minute
if I thought that I couldn’t be effective. . . . I have
to wrestle with that.” But, he added, “I’m certainly not
going to resign because some people are trying to make a
political issue out of it.” (Rumsfeld stayed in office
for the next two and a half years, until the day after
the 2006 congressional elections.) When I spoke to Meek
recently, he said, “There was no way Rumsfeld didn’t
know what was going on. He’s a guy who wants to know
everything, and what he was giving us was hard to
believe.”
Later that
month, Rumsfeld appeared before a closed hearing of the
House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which votes
on the funds for all secret operations in the military.
Representative David Obey, of Wisconsin, the senior
Democrat at the hearing, told me that he had been angry
when a fellow subcommittee member “made the comment that
‘Abu Ghraib was the price of defending democracy.’ I
said that wasn’t the way I saw it, and that I didn’t
want to see some corporal made into a scapegoat. This
could not have happened without people in the upper
echelon of the Administration giving signals. I just
didn’t see how this was not systemic.”
-
Obey asked
Rumsfeld a series of pointed questions. Taguba
attended the closed hearing with Rumsfeld and
recalled him bristling at Obey’s inquiries. “I don’t
know what happened!” Rumsfeld
Taguba got a
chance to answer questions on May 11th, when he was
summoned to appear before the Senate Armed Services
Committee. Under-Secretary Stephen Cambone sat beside
him. (Cambone was Rumsfeld’s point man on interrogation
policy.) Cambone, too, told the committee that he hadn’t
known about the specific abuses at Abu Ghraib until he
saw Taguba’s report, “when I was exposed to some of
those photographs.”
Carl Levin,
Democrat of Michigan, tried to focus on whether Abu
Ghraib was the consequence of a larger detainee policy.
“These acts of abuse were not the spontaneous actions of
lower-ranking enlisted personnel,” Levin said. “These
attempts to extract information from prisoners by
abusive and degrading methods were clearly planned and
suggested by others.” The senators repeatedly asked
about General Miller’s trip to Iraq in 2003. Did the
“Gitmo-izing” of Abu Ghraib—especially the model of
using the M.P.s in “setting the conditions” for
interrogations—lead to the abuses?
Cambone
confirmed that Miller had been sent to Iraq with his
approval, but insisted that the senators were
“misreading General Miller’s intent.” Questioned on that
point by Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island,
Cambone said, “I don’t know that I was being told, and I
don’t know that General Miller said that there should be
that kind of activity that you are ascribing to his
recommendation.”
Reed then
asked Taguba, “Was it clear from your reading of the
[Miller] report that one of the major recommendations
was to use guards to condition these prisoners?” Taguba
replied, “Yes, sir. That was recommended on the report.”
At another
point, after Taguba confirmed that military intelligence
had taken control of the M.P.s following Miller’s visit,
Levin questioned Cambone:
LEVIN: Do you disagree with what the general just said?
CAMBONE: Yes, sir.
LEVIN: Pardon?
CAMBONE: I do.
Taguba,
looking back on his testimony, said, “That’s the reason
I wasn’t in their camp—because I kept on contradicting
them. I wasn’t about to lie to the committee. I knew I
was already in a losing proposition. If I lie, I lose.
And, if I tell the truth, I lose.”
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.
Later in 2004,
Taguba encountered Rumsfeld and one of his senior press
aides, Lawrence Di Rita, in the Pentagon Athletic
Center. Taguba was getting dressed after a workout. “I
was tying my shoes,” Taguba recalled. “I looked up, and
there they were.” Rumsfeld, who was putting his clothes
into a locker, recognized Taguba and said, “Hello,
General.” Di Rita, who was standing beside Rumsfeld,
said sarcastically, “See what you started, General? See
what you started?”
Di Rita, who
is now an official with Bank of America, recalled
running into Taguba in the locker room but not his
words. “Sounds like my brand of humor,” he said, in an
e-mail. “A comment like that would have been in an
attempt to lighten the mood for General Taguba.” (Di
Rita added that Taguba had “my personal respect and
admiration” and that of Rumsfeld. “He did a terrific job
under difficult circumstances.”) However, Taguba was
troubled by the encounter, and later told a colleague, “I’m
now the problem.”
DENIABILITY
A dozen
government investigations have been conducted into Abu
Ghraib and detainee abuse. A few of them picked up on
matters raised by Taguba’s report, but none followed
through on the question of ultimate responsibility.
Military investigators were precluded from looking into
the role of Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders in the
Pentagon; the result was that none found any high-level
intelligence involvement in the abuse.
An independent
panel headed by James R. Schlesinger, a former Secretary
of Defense, did conclude that there was “institutional
and personal responsibility at higher levels” for Abu
Ghraib, but cleared Rumsfeld of any direct
responsibility. In an August, 2004, report, the
Schlesinger panel endorsed Rumsfeld’s complaints, citing
“the reluctance to move bad news up the chain of
command” as the most important factor in Washington’s
failure to understand the significance of Abu Ghraib.
“Given the magnitude of this problem, the Secretary of
Defense and other senior DoD officials need a more
effective information pipeline to inform them of
high-profile incidents,” the report said. Schlesinger
and his colleagues apparently were unaware of the early
e-mail messages that had informed the Pentagon of Abu
Ghraib.
The official
inquiries consistently provided the public with less
information about abuses than outside studies conducted
by human-rights groups. In one case, in November, 2004,
an Army investigation, by Brigadier General Richard
Formica, into the treatment of detainees at Camp Nama, a
Special Forces detention center at Baghdad International
Airport, concluded that detainees who reported being
sodomized or beaten were seeking sympathy and better
treatment, and thus were not credible. For example, Army
doctors had initially noted that a complaining
detainee’s wounds were “consistent with the history [of
abuse] he provided. . . . The doctor did find scars on
his wrists and noted what he believed to be an anal
fissure.” Formica had the detainee reëxamined two days
later, by another doctor, who found “no fissure, and no
scarring. . . . As a result, I did not find medical
evidence of the sodomy.” In the case of a detainee who
died in custody, Formica noted that there had been
bruising to the “shoulders, chest, hip, and knees” but
added, “It is not unusual for detainees to have minor
bruising, cuts and scrapes.” In July, 2006, however,
Human Rights Watch issued a fifty-three-page report on
the “serious mistreatment” of detainees at Camp Nama and
two other sites, largely based on witness accounts from
Special Forces interrogators and others who served
there.
Formica, asked
to comment, wrote in an e-mail, “I conducted a thorough
investigation . . . and stand by my report.” He said
that “several issues” he discovered “were corrected.”
His assignment, Formica noted, was to investigate a
unit, and not to conduct “a systematic analysis of
Special Operations activities.”
The Army also
protected General Miller. Since 2002, F.B.I. agents at
Guantánamo had been telling their superiors that their
military counterparts were abusing detainees. The F.B.I.
complaints were ignored until after Abu Ghraib. When an
investigation was opened, in December, 2004, General
Craddock, Rumsfeld’s former military aide, was in charge
of the Army’s Southern Command, with jurisdiction over
Guantánamo—he had been promoted a few months after
Taguba’s visit to Rumsfeld’s office. Craddock appointed
Air Force Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, a
straight-talking fighter pilot, to investigate the
charges, which included alleged abuses during Miller’s
tenure.
“I followed
the bread-crumb trail,” Schmidt, who retired last year,
told me. “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.”
Schmidt found
that Miller, with the encouragement of Rumsfeld, had
focussed great attention on the interrogation of
Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was believed to be the
so-called “twentieth hijacker.” Qahtani was interrogated
“for twenty hours a day for at least fifty-four days,”
Schmidt told investigators from the Army Inspector
General’s office, who were reviewing his findings. “I
mean, here’s this guy manacled, chained down, dogs
brought in, put in his face, told to growl, show teeth,
and that kind of stuff. And you can imagine the fear.”
At Guantánamo,
Schmidt told the investigators, Miller “was responsible
for the conduct of interrogations that I found to be
abusive and degrading. The intent of those might have
been to be abusive and degrading to get the information
they needed. . . . Did the means justify the ends?
That’s fine. . . . He was responsible.”
Schmidt
formally recommended that Miller be “held accountable”
and “admonished.” Craddock rejected this recommendation
and absolved Miller of any responsibility for the
mistreatment of the prisoners. The Inspector General
inquiry endorsed Craddock’s action. “I was open with
them,” Schmidt told me, referring to the I.G.
investigators. “I told them, ‘I’ll do anything to help
you get the truth.’ ” But when he read their final
report, he said, “I didn’t recognize the five hours of
interviews with me.”
Schmidt
learned of Craddock’s reversal the day before they were
to meet with Rumsfeld, in July, 2005. Rumsfeld was in
frequent contact with Miller about the progress of
Qahtani’s interrogation, and personally approved the
most severe interrogation tactics. (“This wasn’t just
daily business, when the Secretary of Defense is
personally involved,” Schmidt told the Army
investigators.) Nonetheless, Schmidt was impressed by
Rumsfeld’s demonstrative surprise, dismay, and concern
upon being told of the abuse. “He was going, ‘My God!
Did I authorize putting a bra and underwear on
this guy’s head and telling him all his buddies knew he
was a homosexual?’ ”
Schmidt was
convinced. “I got to tell you that I never got the
feeling that Secretary Rumsfeld was trying to hide
anything,” he told me. “He got very frustrated. He’s a
control guy, and this had gotten out of control. He got
pissed.”
Rumsfeld’s
response to Schmidt was similar to his expressed
surprise over Taguba’s Abu Ghraib report. “Rummy did
what we called ‘case law’ policy—verbal and not in
writing,” Taguba said. “What he’s really saying is that
if this decision comes back to haunt me I’ll deny it.”
Taguba
eventually concluded that there was a reason for the
evasions and stonewalling by Rumsfeld and his aides. At
the time he filed his report, in March of 2004, Taguba
said, “I knew there was C.I.A. involvement, but I was
oblivious of what else was happening” in terms of covert
military-intelligence operations. Later that summer,
however, he learned that the C.I.A. had serious concerns
about the abusive interrogation techniques that
military-intelligence operatives were using on
high-value detainees. In one secret memorandum, dated
June 2, 2003, General George Casey, Jr., then the
director of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, issued a
warning to General Michael DeLong, at the Central
Command:
CIA has advised that the techniques the military forces
are using to interrogate high value detainees (HVDs) . .
. are more aggressive than the techniques used by CIA
who is [sic] interviewing the same HVDs.
DeLong replied
to Casey that the techniques in use were “doctrinally
appropriate techniques,” in accordance with Army
regulations and Rumsfeld’s direction.
THE TASK
FORCES
Abu Ghraib had
opened the door on the issue of the treatment of
detainees, and from the beginning the Administration
feared that the publicity would expose more secret
operations and practices. Shortly after September 11th,
Rumsfeld, with the support of President Bush, had set up
military task forces whose main target was the senior
leadership of Al Qaeda. Their essential tactic was
seizing and interrogating terrorists and suspected
terrorists; they also had authority from the President
to kill certain high-value targets on sight. The most
secret task-force operations were categorized as Special
Access Programs, or S.A.P.s.
The military
task forces were under the control of the Joint Special
Operations Command, the branch of the Special Operations
Command that is responsible for counterterrorism. One of
Miller’s unacknowledged missions had been to bring the
J.S.O.C.’s “strategic interrogation” techniques to Abu
Ghraib. In special cases, the task forces could bypass
the chain of command and deal directly with Rumsfeld’s
office. A former senior intelligence official told me
that the White House was also briefed on task-force
operations.
The former
senior intelligence official said that when the images
of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the
Pentagon and the White House who “didn’t think the
photographs were that bad”—in that they put the focus on
enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force
operations. Referring to the task-force members, he
said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference
between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or
in a prison?’ ” A Pentagon consultant on the war on
terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute
the kids in the photographs but protect the big
picture.’ ”
A recently
retired C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen
years in the clandestine service, told me that the
task-force teams “had full authority to whack—to go in
and conduct ‘executive action,’ ” the phrase for
political assassination. “It was surrealistic what these
guys were doing,” the retired operative added. “They
were running around the world without clearing their
operations with the ambassador or the chief of station.”
J.S.O.C.’s
special status undermined military discipline. Richard
Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, told me
that, on his visits to Iraq, he increasingly found that
“the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the
field would say, ‘I don’t care what he says. I’m going
to do what I want.’ We’ve sacrificed the chain of
command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT”—the
global war on terrorism. “You’re painting on a canvas so
big that it’s hard to comprehend,” Armitage said.
Thomas W.
O’Connell, who resigned this spring after nearly four
years as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special
Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, defended the task
forces. He blamed the criticisms on the resentment of
the rest of the military: “From my observation, the
operations run by Special Ops units are extraordinarily
open in terms of interagency visibility to embassies and
C.I.A. stations—even to the point where there’s been a
question of security.” O’Connell said that he dropped in
unannounced to Special Operations interrogation centers
in Iraq, “and the treatment of detainees was
aboveboard.” He added, “If people want to say we’ve got
a serious problem with Special Operations, let them say
it on the record.”
Representative
Obey told me that he had been troubled, before the Iraq
war, by the Administration’s decision to run clandestine
operations from the Pentagon, saying that he “found some
of the things they were doing to be disquieting.” At the
time, his Republican colleagues blocked his attempts to
have the House Appropriations Committee investigate
these activities. “One of the things that bugs me is
that Congress has failed in its oversight abilities,”
Obey said. Early last year, at his urging, his
subcommittee began demanding a classified quarterly
report on the operations, but Obey said that he has no
reason to believe that the reports are complete.
A former
high-level Defense Department official said that, when
the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then
the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned
“to back off” on the investigation, because “it would
spill over to more important things.” A spokesman for
Warner acknowledged that there had been pressure on the
Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to
it—insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May
7th testimony, for example, to the Secretary’s great
displeasure.
An aggressive
congressional inquiry into Abu Ghraib could have
provoked unwanted questions about what the Pentagon was
doing, in Iraq and elsewhere, and under what authority.
By law, the President must make a formal finding
authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and inform the
senior leadership of the House and the Senate
Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush
Administration unilaterally determined after 9/11 that
intelligence operations conducted by the
military—including the Pentagon’s covert task forces—for
the purposes of “preparing the battlefield” could be
authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief,
without telling Congress.
There was
coördination between the C.I.A. and the task forces, but
also tension. The C.I.A. officers, who were under
pressure to produce better intelligence in the field,
wanted explicit legal authority before aggressively
interrogating high-value targets. A finding would give
operatives some legal protection for questionable
actions, but the White House was reluctant to put what
it wanted in writing.
A recently
retired high-level C.I.A. official, who served during
this period and was involved in the drafting of
findings, described to me the bitter disagreements
between the White House and the agency over the issue.
“The problem is what constituted approval,” the retired
C.I.A. official said. “My people fought about this all
the time. Why should we put our people on the firing
line somewhere down the road? If you want me to kill Joe
Smith, just tell me to kill Joe Smith. If I was
the Vice-President or the President, I’d say, ‘This guy
Smith is a bad guy and it’s in the interest of the
United States for this guy to be killed.’ They don’t say
that. Instead, George”—George Tenet, the director of the
C.I.A. until mid-2004—“goes to the White House and is
told, ‘You guys are professionals. You know how
important it is. We know you’ll get the intelligence.’
George would come back and say to us, ‘Do what you gotta
do.’ ”
Bill Harlow, a
spokesman for Tenet, depicted as “absurd” the notion
that the C.I.A. director told his agents to operate
outside official guidelines. He added, in an e-mailed
statement, “The intelligence community insists that its
officers not exceed the very explicit authorities
granted.” In his recently published memoir, however,
Tenet acknowledged that there had been a struggle “to
get clear guidance” in terms of how far to go during
high-value-detainee interrogations.
The Pentagon
consultant said in an interview late last year that “the
C.I.A. never got the exact language it wanted.” The
findings, when promulgated by the White House, were
“very calibrated” to minimize political risk, and
limited to a few countries; later, they were expanded,
turning several nations in North Africa, the Middle
East, and Asia into free-fire zones with regard to
high-value targets. I was told by the former senior
intelligence official and a government consultant that
after the existence of secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe
was revealed, in the Washington Post, in late
2005, the Administration responded with a new detainee
center in Mauritania. After a new government friendly to
the U.S. took power, in a bloodless coup d’état in
August, 2005, they said, it was much easier for the
intelligence community to mask secret flights there.
“The dirt and
secrets are in the back channel,” the former senior
intelligence officer noted. “All this open
business—sitting in staff meetings, etc., etc.—is the
Potemkin Village stuff. And the good guys—like Taguba—are
gone.”
In some cases,
the secret operations remained unaccountable. In an
April, 2005, memorandum, a C.I.D. officer—his name was
redacted—complained to C.I.D. headquarters, at Fort
Belvoir, Virginia, about the impossibility of
investigating military members of a Special Access
Program suspected of prisoner abuse:
involvement in
Special Access Programs (SAP) and/or the security
classification of the unit they were assigned to during
the offense under investigation. Attempts by Special
Agents . . . to be “read on” to these programs has [sic]
been unsuccessful.
The C.I.D.
officer wrote that “fake names were used” by members of
the task force; he also told investigators that the unit
had a “major computer malfunction which resulted in them
losing 70 per cent of their files; therefore, they can’t
find the cases we need to review.”
The officer
concluded that the investigation “does not need to be
reopened. Hell, even if we reopened it we wouldn’t get
any more information than we already have.”
CONSEQUENCES
Rumsfeld was
vague, in his appearances before Congress, about when he
had informed the President about Abu Ghraib, saying that
it could have been late January or early February. He
explained that he routinely met with the President “once
or twice a week . . . and I don’t keep notes about what
I do.” He did remember that in mid-March he and General
Myers were “meeting with the President and discussed the
reports that we had obviously heard” about Abu Ghraib.
Whether the
President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when
e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the
abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March
(when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known
effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners
before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the
training of military police and interrogators, or the
practices of the task forces that he had authorized.
Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few
lower-level soldiers. The President’s failure to act
decisively resonated through the military chain of
command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against
detainees was not conducive to a successful career.
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.” (A
spokesperson for Cody said, “Conversations regarding
general officer management are considered private
personnel discussions. General Cody has great respect
for Major General Taguba as an officer, leader, and
American patriot.”)
“They always
shoot the messenger,” Taguba told me. “To be accused of
being overzealous and disloyal—that cuts deep into me. I
was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.”
Taguba went
on, “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the
explicit images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard
operating procedure to assume that this had to go
higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said
that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking
generals and admirals who stood with him as he
misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed
the nation.
“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.” ♦
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