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Rumsfeld ignored abuse evidence

Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantanamo Bay reached the highest levels of the George Bush's administration as early as autumn 2002, but Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation published in the Guardian yesterday.

The investigation, by the veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, quotes one former marine at the camp recalling sessions in which guards would "fuck with [detainees] as much as we could" by inflicting pain on them.

The Bush administration repeatedly assured critics that inmates were granted recreation periods, but one Pentagon adviser told Hersh how, for some prisoners, they consisted of being left in straitjackets in intense sunlight with hoods over their heads.

Hersh provides details of how the US president approved the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate "high-value" suspects -- considered by many to be in defiance of international law -- an officially "unacknowledged" program that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Hersh, who broke the story of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war, makes his revelations in a new book, Chain of Command which leaves senior figures in the Bush administration far more seriously implicated in the torture scandal than had been previously apparent.

A CIA analyst visited Guantanamo in summer 2002 and returned "convinced that we were committing war crimes" and that "more than half the people there didn't belong there. He found people lying in their own feces," a CIA source told Hersh.

The analyst submitted a report to General John Gordon, an aide to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Gordon was troubled, and, one former administration official told Hersh "that if the actions at Guantanamo ever became public, it'd be damaging to the president."

Rice saw the document by autumn of the same year, and called a high-level meeting at which she asked Rumsfeld, to deal with the problem.

But after he vowed to act, "the Pentagon went into a full-court stall," a former White House official is quoted as saying. "Why didn't Condi do more? She made the same mistake I made. She got the secretary of defense to say he's going to take care of it."

The investigation further suggests that CIA and FBI staff had already witnessed incidents at Guantanamo just as extreme as those that would subsequently be alleged by freed inmates.

A senior intelligence official told Hersh: "I was told [by FBI agents] that the military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them and making them stand until they got hypothermia."

The secret "special access program" facilitating much of the mistreatment of prisoners, widely held to have contravened the Geneva convention (on the rights of prisoners of war), was established following a direct order from the president.

Hersh reports that a secret document signed by Bush in February 2002 stated: "I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world."

In a statement, the Pentagon said Hersh's investigation "apparently contains many of the numerous unsubstantiated allegations and inaccuracies which he has made in the past based upon unnamed sources ... investigations have determined that no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have authorized or condoned the abuses seen at Abu Ghraib. If any of Hersh's anonymous sources wish to come forward ... the department welcomes them to do so."

Rumsfeld told reporters on Friday he had approved the use of harsh interrogation measures, but that they had only been meant for Guantanamo. He said the measures ought to be contrasted with those of terrorists. "Does it rank up there with chopping someone's head off on television?" he asked. "It doesn't."
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