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The New Yorker
June 25, 2007
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.”
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.” |
