Rumsfeld out within 2 weeks
After reading this new Hersh article in New Yorker, I'm convinced that Rumsfeld is probably on his way out. Here are the key grafs:
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 élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, 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 growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
It looks like Rumsfeld ordered sexual humiliation to be used on prisoners. If that's true, then Rumsfeld is the type of scum who should not only be fired, but also imprisoned.
I know what some right-wingers are going to say: "Why should we worry about the treatment of these prisoners? Lives are at stake! We need information that will stop terrorist attacks."
To those critics I respond with these two grafs from the Hersh article:
By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.
The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that 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 valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, 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 a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”
Wingers have often compared the situation in Iraq to the ghettos in New York City. "Sure, there are a few deaths every day...but that's life in a rough society," the argument goes. Well then imagine if we tackled gang violence in South Central LA by imprisoning gang members and torturing them using sexual humiliation. It's an appropriate analogy.
I find complaints about Guantanamo Bay on the Left a bit tiresome because the detainees in Guantanamo are terrorists. In Iraq, we're talking about common criminals, members of organized militias and their relatives, and people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Should these people even be pressed, let alone tortured? Certainly not.
I genuinely believed that the torture in Iraq was isolated to a few twisted individuals. Instead, it was official government policy! How low have we fallen? And all of this occurred under the veil of secrecy. The Pentagon classified what it was doing in Iraqi prisons. They used "hill billies from West Virginia" to conduct the interrogations - these are people who didn't have the experience, education, or know-how to preside over this sort of thing - and that's why they were chosen! They were the classic henchman stereotype from a comic book - unintelligent, without a moral compass, and bumbling (it was the Pentagon's lowly henchmen who took pictures and documented what they were doing, ultimately exposing their masters' devious actions).
I strongly urge you to read this article. This is Pulitzer material...
