HERSH: Rummy/Cheney/Bush All Knew About Torture At Abu Ghraib

[kpete]

Amy Goodman Interviews Seymour Hersh

And again, by March, you’ve got a chain of command, you’ve got a lot of generals working for a very tough guy, Rumsfeld. They know this incident went down. They know everybody knows a lot about it. Rumsfeld has testified differently about when he talked to the President on various occasions, either late January, early February, but certainly he and Myers both testified they spent time with Bush on this. And I have two things to say about that. One, of course, is, if nobody knew anything and we had no idea how serious it is and, as Rumsfeld has said repeatedly in testimony, 18,000 court-martials a year, why are they talking to the President about it? What do they have to tell the President for about it if it’s not -- if nothing anybody had any idea how serious it was?

And given the fact that they did talk to the President -- and what the President did is really the crux of what I see. That’s how I ended my story writing about this. Bush, at some point, whether it was in January, February or March, was made aware of the details, maybe not all the salient details, but many of them. And what did he do?Did he say, “Rummy, I want some generals heads”? Did he say, “I want an investigation”? Did he say, “We’ve got to stop this practice”? What he did was, Amy, was nada. So inside the chain, this very sensitive, you know, hummahumma instrument of the military, everybody knew by the spring of ’04 investigating detainee abuse is not a way to get a third star if you’re two-star and not a way to get ahead.


...............

And so, what he stumbled into, what he was really dealing with, was, as I wrote in the article, is the decision of the Secretary of Defense -- and I’m told with the concurrence of Cheney, one never knows where the President is on this, but I assume he had to be aware of what was going on, Cheney certainly was -- they decided in the fall of ’03 we were doing what they call “strategic interrogation” -- I’m not quite sure what that means -- strategic interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo. And it was decided to send a commander of Guantanamo, a major general named Geoff Miller, to Iraq to train the kids there, instruct them and set up rules and procedures for doing strategic interrogation. And so, you were bringing in some of the Special Forces, and some of the more high-level intelligence activity techniques into Abu Ghraib.

more at:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17903.htm

[DeepModem Mom]

1. K&R

[Tom Joad]

2. so? Dems don't think it's a serious offense. Remember, no matter what

impeachment is off the table.

[glitch]

3. Who the hell do you think ordered it? (not you op, rhetorical) nt

[triguy46]

4. Well, duh.

[cassiepriam]

5. That was exactly what I was going to say. This is not a news flash.

[EFerrari]

6. Hersh got Taguba to go on record. That is new and important, imo. n/t

[Disturbed]

7. "Knowing" something & proving it are two different concepts.

Documentation is required in this case to prove any accusastions against the higher ups. Congress obviously did not wish to delve further into this. This case was buried. Now it has re-surfaced. Will any higher ups be prosecuted for War Crimes?

[EFerrari]

8. I agree. The proof isn't solid yet but like so many things about

these thugs, it's the pattern of behavior. It can't possibly be a few "bad apples" at Abu Graib if the same behavior has been documented at Gitmo and in Afghanistan and by people who survived rendition well enough to go public. :shrug:

I give up on the Senate. They won't move unless Bush tortures one of their own children on the floor. But, there is more impetus in the House (I said, hopefully).

/oops