IS THIS ALL THERE IS?

Pentagon Official Says Asking Army to Help Iraq Interrogators Did Not Lead to Prison Abuse (ERIC SCHMITT, 5/11/04, NY Times)

The Pentagon's top intelligence official urged last summer that an Army general be sent to Iraq to review how American military interrogators could gain more intelligence from Iraqi prisoners held at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

But the official, Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, said he had never advocated a policy of having military guards at the prison soften up prisoners for the interrogators.

Mr. Cambone's role in sending Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller and a team of experts to Abu Ghraib last August and September, and in pushing from the highest levels of the Pentagon for more and better intelligence to help fight insurgents in Iraq, will be a focus of hearings the Senate Armed Services Committee is to hold on Tuesday.

General Miller, the chief of interrogations and detentions in Iraq, has defended his recommendations from that visit to have prison guards prepare detainees for interrogations. He has said those recommendations played no role in the later abuse and humiliation of prisoners by some guards.

In impromptu testimony before the Senate committee on Friday, Mr. Cambone explained why General Miller had been sent to Iraq.

"We had then in Iraq a large body of people who had been captured on the battlefield that we had to gain intelligence from for force-protection purposes," said Mr. Cambone, who had been summoned from a group of aides sitting behind Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to respond to a senator's question. "He was asked to go over, at my encouragement, to take a look at the situation as it existed there."

Rumsfeld Aide Emerges From the Background: Stephen Cambone is set to testify before Congress on the prison abuse scandal in Iraq. (Greg Miller, May 11, 2004, LA Times)

[A] report prepared by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba suggested that the use of MPs in "setting the conditions" for interrogation may have created an environment in which harsh treatment of detainees was thought to be tolerated or encouraged. And military experts said that if responsibility for these policies reaches into the Pentagon, it probably touches Cambone's office.

"Somewhere at the bottom of this you'll find Cambone and his deputy, Boykin," said a former military intelligence official, referring to Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, Cambone's top deputy. "I think Cambone and Boykin are reflective of the whole neoconservative philosophy that these prisoners are undeserving of treatment as prisoners of war."

Others say Bush administration critics are seeking to take political advantage of the scandal — and push for Rumsfeld's ouster — by going after one of his top aides.

"I cannot see how anybody can reverse-engineer these [prisoner abuse] pictures back to a particular policy," said Danielle Pletka, a foreign policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute with close ties to Cambone and others at the Pentagon. She said Cambone had pushed hard to improve intelligence collection "but never to the point that it would violate human rights, not in a million years."

Cambone is often lumped in with other neoconservatives in the administration. But those who know him say that he is independent-minded and less ideological than many of his colleagues. Cambone was not a prominent public advocate for the war with Iraq, and he resisted painting rosy scenarios for its aftermath.

After earning a doctorate in political science at Claremont Graduate School in 1982, Cambone embarked on a career that kept him at the center of major military issues. He worked at a government weapons laboratory and as an analyst for a defense contractor. In 1998, he became staff director of a commission, headed by Rumsfeld, examining missile threats to the United States.

The commission concluded that intelligence agencies were underestimating threats to the U.S. Its influential findings urged spy agencies to be more aggressive in reaching judgments and analysts to be less constrained by what could be proved by available evidence. Critics say the commission's work set the stage for the sort of analysis that led to erroneous conclusions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Cambone remained close to Rumsfeld, helping to lead the Bush administration's defense transition team and holding a series of Pentagon positions culminating in his job overseeing military intelligence agencies.
Even some of those responsible for knowing what is happening in intelligence circles in the Pentagon say that Cambone operates with such secrecy that they too will be watching today to learn the extent of his role in the prisoner scandal.

Leadership Failure Is Blamed in Abuse: Soldiers' Actions Weren't Ordered, General Says (Bradley Graham and Thomas E. Ricks, May 12, 2004, Washington Post)

The Army general who investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad said yesterday that he had found no evidence the misconduct was based on orders from high-ranking officers or involved a deliberate policy to stretch legal limits on extracting information from detainees.

Instead, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba attributed the scandal to the willful actions of a small group of soldiers and to "a failure of leadership" and supervision by brigade and lower-level commanders.

Similarly, the Army's top intelligence officer, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, sought to portray the abuse as the deeds of a handful of military police soldiers, with the peripheral involvement of U.S. military intelligence personnel in Iraq.

But several senators challenged the notion that low-ranking soldiers could have devised the particularly humiliating measures on their own, and Taguba reported that military guards probably were influenced by intelligence personnel. He also clashed openly with the Pentagon official responsible for intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone, over the propriety and significance of a decision last November to place Abu Ghraib prison under the command of a military intelligence officer.

Appearing before a Senate panel investigating the prison scandal, Taguba testified that the move made military guards subject to the tactical control of interrogators, thus violating Army doctrine and blurring lines of responsibility. Cambone defended the decision as consistent with military standards and helpful to improving the gathering of intelligence.

Revealing the interrogation methods allowed in Iraq, the Armed Services Committee released a single-page titled "Interrogation Rules of Engagement," listing two categories of measures. The first showed basic techniques approved for all detainees, while the second involved tougher measures that required approval by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Among the items on the second list were stress positions for as long as 45 minutes, sleep deprivation for as long as 72 hours and use of muzzled dogs.

Cambone said the Bush administration's policy has been to apply the Geneva Conventions to the interrogation and other treatment of detainees in Iraq. But several senators expressed doubts about whether some of the listed techniques conform with international limits.

If this is truly the extent of the "abuse" and they were developing decent intelligence from particular sources, then isn't this ultimately just a problem of discipline and military order? The issue is really just whether troops and intelligence officers exceeded their orders.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2004 12:51 PM