The Pentagon ordered the sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners

I knew that Rumsfeld, with the blessings of Rice, Cheney, and Bush, created a lawless atmosphere that laid the conditions for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

It did not occur to me that Rumsfeld had authorized the selfsame abuse.

According to yet another stunning report from Sy Hersh in The New Yorker, the abuse was part of an extension of a secret intelligence program designed to get information from Taliban and al Qaeda agents in Afghanistan. But as frustration built during the growing insurgency in Iraq, Rumsfeld put Stephan Cambone, who had virtually no experience with military intelligence, in charge of the program and focused on prisoners in Iraqi jails.

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 is an astonishing story and one that must force Bush to dump Rumsfeld and much of the Pentagon's senior civilian leadership, along with some other uniformed leaders whose names have become familiar in recent months. Indeed, what a cast of characters:

Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld's disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.'s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone's military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.

The hubris mixed with short-sightedness of these guys has been truly spectacular. As Rumsfeld's "dead enders" and "foreign terrorists" had grown into a full blown anti-occupation insurgency, Cambone made the decision to "get tough" with Iraqi prisoners, and he brought General Miller, who had been running Guantanamo Bay, over to Iraq. Miller's recommendation was to begin using techniques in Iraq that had been successful at G. Bay, including sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, and prolonged "stress positions."

As troubling as those techniques are in practice, prior to Iraq they were practiced by trained personnel who knew where "the red lines were." Expanding them to Iraq -- and the much wider regular army establishment -- could not help but lead to disaster.

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap's rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under sap auspices. "So here are fundamentally good soldiers -- military-intelligence guys -- being told that no rules apply," the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. "And, as far as they're concerned, this is a covert operation, and it's to be kept within Defense Department channels."

The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included "recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland."? He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. "How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn't know what it's doing."

It strikes me that the administration's (continued) conflating of the attacks of September 11 and the war in Iraq continues to have not unexpected negative consequences. Not only is it bitterly frustrating that young men and women are fighting and, often, dying under the mistaken impression that they are getting payback for 9-11. But now we know that it also has lead to structural problems in the military, where techniques used by a small group of special forces units, hunting high value Islamic fascists, were adapted by the regular army adriversustrated cab drivers in Iraq.

And then there's the neocons' obsession with sex.

The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything --including spying on their associates -- to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, "I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population." The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn't effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

"This shit has been brewing for months," the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. "You don't keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick." The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. "We don't raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that's one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don't know the rules, that?s another."

Things have been drawing to this point for some time with even the Pentagon's JAGs going to the ACLU in New York to bring the human rights abuses ordered by the Pentagon's leadership to light.

It's going to be very interesting to see how the Republican controlled House and Senate will respond to these latest charges. There seems to be growing unease on The Hill with the Administration's imperial attitude towards Congressional oversight. And Senator McCain is a force to be reckoned with.

Sy Hersh's story must be read to be believed.