US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, acting at the request of then CIA director George Tenet, ordered military officials in Iraq last November to hold a man suspected of being a senior Iraqi terrorist at a high-level detention center there but not list him on the prison's rolls, senior Pentagon and intelligence officials said Wednesday.
This prisoner and other "ghost detainees" were hidden largely to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their treatment and conditions, and to avoid disclosing their location to an enemy, officials said.
Major-General Antonio Taguba, the Army officer who in February investigated abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, criticized the practice of allowing ghost detainees there and at other detention centers in Iraq as "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law."
This prisoner, who has not been named, is believed to be the first said to have been kept off the books at the orders of Rumsfeld and Tenet. He was not held at Abu Ghraib, but at another prison, Camp Cropper, on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport, officials said.
Pentagon and intelligence officials said the decision to hold the detainee without registering him -- at least initially -- was in keeping with the administration's legal opinion about the status of those viewed as an active threat in wartime.
Seven months later, however, the detainee -- a reputed senior officer of Ansar al-Islam, a group the US has linked to al-Qaeda and blames for some attacks in Iraq -- is still languishing at the prison but has only been questioned once more, in what government officials acknowledged was an extraordinary lapse.
"Once he was placed in military custody, people lost track of him," a senior intelligence official conceded Wednesday night. "The normal review processes that would keep track of him didn't."
The detainee was described by the intelligence official as someone "who was actively planning operations specifically targeting US forces and interests both inside and outside of Iraq."
The Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Wednesday night that officials at Camp Cropper, where about 100 detainees deemed to have the highest intelligence value are held, questioned their superiors up the chain of command several times in recent months about what to do with the suspect.
But only in the last two weeks has Rumsfeld's top aide for intelligence policy, Stephen Cambone, personally called CIA officials to request that the agency go get the suspect or else have him go into the prison's regular reporting system.
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