IHT : This is not a war for the Pentagon: Unleash the CIA

This is not a war for the Pentagon: Unleash the CIA

By Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon | July 24, 2007

As the National Intelligence Estimate issued last week confirms, a terrorist haven has emerged in Pakistan's tribal belt. And as recent revelations about an aborted 2005 operation in the region demonstrate, the U.S. Defense Department is chronically unable to conduct the sort of missions that would disrupt terrorist activity there and in similarly ungoverned places.

These are perhaps the most important kind of counterterrorism missions. Because the Pentagon has shown that it cannot carry them out, the Central Intelligence Agency should be given the chance to perform them.

The story of the scrubbed 2005 operation illustrates why the Pentagon is incapable of doing what needs to be done. The preparations for the mission to capture or kill Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, appear to have unfolded like others before it. Intelligence was received about a high-level Qaeda meeting. A small snatch or kill operation was to be carried out by Special Operations.

But military brass added large numbers of troops to conduct additional intelligence, force protection, communications and extraction work. At that point, as one senior intelligence official told The New York Times, "The whole thing turned into the invasion of Pakistan," and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pulled the plug.

Similar decision-making led to the failure to mount critical operations on at least three occasions during the Clinton administration. The most notable was the effort to get the Pentagon to conduct a ground operation against the Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan beginning in late 1998.

The Clinton White House repeatedly requested options involving ground forces that could hunt and destroy terrorists in Afghanistan. Repeatedly, senior military officials declared such a mission "would be Desert One," referring to the disastrous 1980 effort to free American hostages in Iran. When the Pentagon finally delivered a plan, the deployment envisioned would have been sufficient to take and hold Kabul but not to surprise and pin down a handful of terrorists.

The Zawahri stand-down is even more telling. It occurred four years into the war on terrorism, when the basic questions about the nature of the Qaeda threat had been settled and the U.S., in the oft-intoned phrase of the Bush administration, was said to be always "on the offensive." Moreover, it happened on Rumsfeld's watch, he the most dominating secretary of defense in memory, who overruled military planners routinely as he micromanaged the deployment to Iraq. Even Rumsfeld, who viewed special forces as the keystone of a transformed 21st-century U.S. military, could not keep on track a mission that would have stunned Al Qaeda.

Highly mobile, highly lethal counterterrorism operations are clearly possible. Israel scored victories with raids in Uganda, Tunis and Beirut, in the 1970s and 1980s. Other countries, like Germany, have carried out similar operations, like the Mogadishu raid of 1977 that freed passengers on a Lufthansa plane hijacked to Somalia by the Baader-Meinhof gang.

An operation in Pakistan's tribal areas - setting aside the issue of whether this could politically upend President Pervez Musharraf - would be extremely difficult. But it is hard to believe it is impossible.

Since the Desert One debacle, the United States has poured vast resources into its special forces. The Special Operations Command budget has nearly doubled since 2001, and it is expected to grow 150 percent over five years. The command includes more than 50,000 troops, the equivalent of three or four infantry divisions. The best of them - Delta Force and the Navy SEALs - have developed into highly skilled unconventional forces.

Yet fear of failure and casualties has meant they are seldom, if ever, deployed for such counterterrorism operations. In theory, the best place in the government for small-scale missions to be planned and executed is the Pentagon, because snatch or kill teams should be plugged into a larger military support team. The reality, unfortunately, is that they can't be plugged in without being bogged down.

Senior officers, trained to understand the American way of war to mean overwhelming force and superior firepower, view special ops outside a war zone as something to be avoided at all cost. This has been true even in lower-risk efforts to capture war criminals in the Balkans. The record demonstrates that the U.S. military is simply incapable of adapting its culture to embrace such operations. The Pentagon should just stop planning for missions it won't launch.

While the CIA doesn't have an unblemished record, its counterterrorism operations have shown more promise than the Pentagon's. The agency has already had some successes operating in ungoverned spaces. In the first reported attack in such a region, a CIA-operated Predator drone launched a missile that killed a Qaeda lieutenant in Yemen in 2002. Since then, the Predator has been used to strike Al Qaeda at least eight times, although with limited success.

At least initially, the trigger in these attacks was pulled by CIA operatives, not soldiers.

The record of a small, vulnerable CIA paramilitary force in Afghanistan in 2001 was more impressive. The group's audacious reconnaissance work and direction of local warlords in action against the Taliban provided the most significant battlefield success of the post-9/11 period. Without this risky, cold-start intervention, the American troops that followed the agency into Afghanistan would have gone in blind.

The agency's history of ill-conceived covert political operations from the 1950s through the 1970s may cause some to worry. That agency, however, no longer exists. Congressional hearings and legislation, as well as fear of casualties, have given the clandestine service its own case of risk aversion, though it seems less severe than the Pentagon's.

America has failed in Pakistan, and is failing in Iraq, to achieve a primary aim of its counterterrorism policy: preventing Al Qaeda from acquiring safe havens. The military has shown itself to be a poor instrument for fighting terrorism, and there are now thousands of jihadists who weren't in Iraq at the time of the 2003 invasion. When the inevitable American drawdown occurs, the U.S. will need a way to keep the terrorists off balance in Iraq and to disrupt the conveyor belt that is already moving fighters to places like Lebanon, North Africa and Europe.

With new leadership at both the CIA and the Defense Department, the Bush administration has a chance to fix this problem. The missing ingredient for success with the most important kind of counterterrorism missions is not courage or technical capacity - the uniformed personnel are unsurpassed - but organizational culture. With a small fraction of the resources that the Pentagon has for special operations, the CIA could develop the paramilitary capacity America profoundly needs.

Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Steven Simon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, were members of the National Security Council staff from 1994 to 1999.

NYT : U.S. Aborted Raid on Qaeda Chiefs in Pakistan in ’05

U.S. Aborted Raid on Qaeda Chiefs in Pakistan in ’05

By MARK MAZZETTI | Published: July 8, 2007

WASHINGTON, July 7 — A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had ballooned from a small number of military personnel and C.I.A. operatives to several hundred, was cumbersome and put too many American lives at risk, the current and former officials said. He was also concerned that it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas, the officials said.

The decision to halt the planned “snatch and grab” operation frustrated some top intelligence officials and members of the military’s secret Special Operations units, who say the United States missed a significant opportunity to try to capture senior members of Al Qaeda.

Their frustration has only grown over the past two years, they said, as Al Qaeda has improved its abilities to plan global attacks and build new training compounds in Pakistan’s tribal areas, which have become virtual havens for the terrorist network.

In recent months, the White House has become increasingly irritated with Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, for his inaction on the growing threat of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

About a dozen current and former military and intelligence officials were interviewed for this article, all of whom requested anonymity because the planned 2005 mission remained classified.

Spokesmen for the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and the White House declined to comment. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed about the planned operation.

The officials acknowledge that they are not certain that Mr. Zawahri attended the 2005 meeting in North Waziristan, a mountainous province just miles from the Afghan border. But they said that the United States had communications intercepts that tipped them off to the meeting, and that intelligence officials had unusually high confidence that Mr. Zawahri was there.

Months later, in early May 2005, the C.I.A. launched a missile from a remotely piloted Predator drone, killing Haitham al-Yemeni, a senior Qaeda figure whom the C.I.A. had tracked since the meeting.

It has long been known that C.I.A. operatives conduct counterterrorism missions in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Details of the aborted 2005 operation provide a glimpse into the Bush administration’s internal negotiations over whether to take unilateral military action in Pakistan, where General Musharraf’s fragile government is under pressure from dissidents who object to any cooperation with the United States.

Pentagon officials familiar with covert operations said that planners had to consider the political and human risks of undertaking a military campaign in a sovereign country, even in an area like Pakistan’s tribal lands, where the government has only tenuous control. Even with its shortcomings, Pakistan has been a vital American ally since the Sept. 11 attacks, and the militaries of the two countries have close ties.

The Pentagon officials said tension was inherent in any decision to approve such a mission: a smaller military footprint allows a better chance of a mission going undetected, but it also exposes the units to greater risk of being killed or captured.

Officials said one reason Mr. Rumsfeld called off the 2005 operation was that the number of troops involved in the mission had grown to several hundred, including Army Rangers, members of the Navy Seals and C.I.A. operatives, and he determined that the United States could no longer carry out the mission without General Musharraf’s permission. It is unlikely that the Pakistani president would have approved an operation of that size, officials said.

Some outside experts said American counterterrorism operations had been hamstrung because of concerns about General Musharraf’s shaky government.

“The reluctance to take risk or jeopardize our political relationship with Musharraf may well account for the fact that five and half years after 9/11 we are still trying to run bin Laden and Zawahri to ground,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.

Those political considerations have created resentment among some members of the military’s Special Operations forces.

“The Special Operations guys are tearing their hair out at the highest levels,” said a former Bush administration official with close ties to those troops. While they have not received good intelligence on the whereabouts of top Qaeda members recently, he said, they say they believe they have sometimes had useful information on lower-level figures.

“There is a degree of frustration that is off the charts, because they are looking at targets on a daily basis and can’t move against them,” he said.

In early 2005, after learning about the Qaeda meeting, the military developed a plan for a small Navy Seals unit to parachute into Pakistan to carry out a quick operation, former officials said.

But as the operation moved up the military chain of command, officials said, various planners bulked up the force’s size to provide security for the Special Operations forces.

“The whole thing turned into the invasion of Pakistan,” said the former senior intelligence official involved in the planning. Still, he said he thought the mission was worth the risk. “We were frustrated because we wanted to take a shot,” he said.

Several former officials interviewed said the operation was not the only occasion since the Sept. 11 attacks that plans were developed to use a large American military force in Pakistan. It is unclear whether any of those missions have been executed.

Some of the military and intelligence officials familiar with the 2005 events say it showed a rift between operators in the field and a military bureaucracy that has still not effectively adapted to hunt for global terrorists, moving too cautiously to use Special Operations troops against terrorist targets.

That criticism has echoes of the risk aversion that the officials said pervaded efforts against Al Qaeda during the Clinton administration, when missions to use American troops to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan were never executed because they were considered too perilous, risked killing civilians or were based on inadequate intelligence. Rather than sending in ground troops, the Clinton White House instead chose to fire cruise missiles in what became failed attempts to kill Mr. bin Laden and his deputies — a tactic Mr. Bush criticized shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Since then, the C.I.A. has launched missiles from Predator aircraft in the tribal areas several times, with varying degrees of success. Intelligence officials say they believe that in January 2006, an airstrike narrowly missed killing Mr. Zawahri, who hours earlier had attended a dinner in Damadola, a Pakistani village.

General Musharraf cast his lot with the Bush administration in the hunt for Al Qaeda after the 2001 attacks, and he has periodically ordered Pakistan’s military to conduct counterterrorism missions in the tribal areas, provoking fierce resistance there. But in recent months he has pulled back, prompting Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to issue stern warnings in private that he risked losing American aid if he did not step up efforts against Al Qaeda, senior administration officials have said.

Officials said that mid-2005 was a period when they were gathering good intelligence about Al Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan’s tribal areas. By the next year, however, the White House had become frustrated by the lack of progress in the hunt for Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri.

In early 2006, President Bush ordered a “surge” of dozens of C.I.A. agents to Pakistan, hoping that an influx of intelligence operatives would lead to better information, officials said. But that has brought the United States no closer to locating Al Qaeda’s top two leaders. The latest message from them came this week, in a new tape in which Mr. Zawahri urged Iraqis and Muslims around the world to show more support for Islamist insurgents in Iraq.

In his recently published memoir, George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director, said the intelligence about Mr. bin Laden’s whereabouts during the Clinton years was similarly sparse. The information was usually only at the “50-60% confidence level,” he wrote, not sufficient to justify American military action.

“As much as we all wanted Bin Ladin dead, the use of force by a superpower requires information, discipline, and time,” Mr. Tenet wrote. “We rarely had the information in sufficient quantities or the time to evaluate and act on it.”

New Yorker : The General's Report

The General's Report

How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties.

by Seymour M. Hersh | June 25, 2007

On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week, revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.

If there was a redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army’s initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found:

Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees . . . systemic and illegal abuse.

Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant. Craddock’s daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba’s two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, “Craddock just said, very coldly, ‘Wait here.’ ” In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were “only Iraqis.” Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.

“Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!” Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.”

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

Rumsfeld was particularly concerned about how the classified report had become public. “General,” he asked, “who do you think leaked the report?” Taguba responded that perhaps a senior military leader who knew about the investigation had done so. “It was just my speculation,” he recalled. “Rumsfeld didn’t say anything.” (I did not meet Taguba until mid-2006 and obtained his report elsewhere.) Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. “Here I am,” Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, “just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this.” As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, “He’s looking at me. It was a statement.”

At best, Taguba said, “Rumsfeld was in denial.” Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld’s conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually read it. (Schoomaker later sent Taguba a note praising his honesty and leadership.) When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”

Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld’s office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint. On January 13, 2004, a military policeman named Joseph Darby gave the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D.) a CD full of images of abuse. Two days later, General Craddock and Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, the director of the Joint Staff of the J.C.S., were e-mailed a summary of the abuses depicted on the CD. It said that approximately ten soldiers were shown, involved in acts that included:

Having male detainees pose nude while female guards pointed at their genitals; having female detainees exposing themselves to the guards; having detainees perform indecent acts with each other; and guards physically assaulting detainees by beating and dragging them with choker chains.

Taguba said, “You didn’t need to ‘see’ anything—just take the secure e-mail traffic at face value.”

I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said.

On January 20th, the chief of staff at Central Command sent another e-mail to Admiral Keating, copied to General Craddock and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq. The chief of staff wrote, “Sir: update on alleged detainee abuse per our discussion. DID IT REALLY HAPPEN? Yes, currently have 4 confessions implicating perhaps 10 soldiers. DO PHOTOS EXIST? Yes. A CD with approx 100 photos and a video—CID has these in their possession.”

In subsequent testimony, General Myers, the J.C.S. chairman, acknowledged, without mentioning the e-mails, that in January information about the photographs had been given “to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. . . . And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described.”

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’ ” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:

There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime after January 13th . . . I don’t remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn’t know, and you didn’t know, and I didn’t know.

“And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.

Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S.—Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.” It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”

In response to detailed queries about this article, Colonel Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman, said in an e-mail, “The department did not promulgate interrogation policies or guidelines that directed, sanctioned, or encouraged abuse.” He added, “When there have been abuses, those violations are taken seriously, acted upon promptly, investigated thoroughly, and the wrongdoers are held accountable.” Regarding early warnings about Abu Ghraib, Colonel Keck said, “Former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has stated publicly under oath that he and other senior leaders were not provided pictures from Abu Ghraib until shortly before their release.” (Rumsfeld, through an aide, declined to answer questions, as did General Craddock. Other senior commanders did not respond to requests for comment.)

During the next two years, Taguba assiduously avoided the press, telling his relatives not to talk about his work. Friends and family had been inundated with telephone calls and visitors, and, Taguba said, “I didn’t want them to be involved.” Taguba retired in January, 2007, after thirty-four years of active service, and finally agreed to talk to me about his investigation of Abu Ghraib and what he believed were the serious misrepresentations by officials that followed. “From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. “These M.P. troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”

General Taguba is a slight man with a friendly demeanor and an unfailingly polite correctness. “I came from a poor family and had to work hard,” he said. “It was always shine the shoes on Saturday morning for church, and wash the car on Saturday for church. And Saturday also for mowing the lawn and doing yard jobs for church.”

His father, Tomas, was born in the Philippines and was drafted into the Philippine Scouts in early 1942, at the height of the Japanese attack on the joint American-Filipino force led by General Douglas MacArthur. Tomas was captured by the Japanese on the Bataan peninsula in April, 1942, and endured the Bataan Death March, which took thousands of American and Filipino lives. Tomas escaped and joined the underground resistance to the Japanese before returning to the American Army, in July, 1945.

Taguba’s mother, Maria, spent much of the Second World War living across the street from a Japanese-run prisoner-of-war camp in Manila. Taguba remembers her vivid accounts of prisoners who were bayonetted arbitrarily or whose fingernails were pulled out. Antonio, the eldest son (he has six siblings), was born in Manila in 1950. Maria and Tomas were devout Catholics, and their children were taught respect and, Taguba recalls, “above all, integrity in how you lived your life and practiced your religion.”

In 1961, the family moved to Hawaii, where Tomas retired from the military and took a civilian job in logistics, preparing units for deployment to Vietnam. A year after they arrived, Antonio became a U.S. citizen. By then, as a sixth grader, he was delivering newspapers, serving as an altar boy, and doing well in school. He went to Idaho State University, in Pocatello, with help from the Army R.O.T.C., and graduated in 1972. As a newly commissioned second lieutenant, he was five feet six inches tall and weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. His Army service began immediately: he led troops at the platoon, company, battalion, and brigade levels at bases in South Korea, Germany, and across America. (He married in 1981, and has two grown children.) In 1986, Taguba, then a major, was selected to attend the College of Naval Command and Staff at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. While there, he wrote an analysis of Soviet ground-attack planning that became required reading at the school. He was promoted, ahead of his peers, to become a colonel and then a general. On the way, Taguba earned three master’s degrees—in public administration, international relations, and national-security studies.

“I’ll talk to you about discrimination,” he said one morning, while discussing, without bitterness, his early years as an Army officer. “Let’s talk about being refused to be served at a restaurant in public. Let’s talk about having to do things two times, and being accused of not speaking English well, and having to pay myself for my three master’s degrees because the Army didn’t think I was smart enough. So what? Just work your ass off. So what? The hard work paid off.”

Taguba had joined the Army knowing little about his father’s military experience. “He saw the ravages and brutality of war, but he wasn’t about to brag about his exploits,” Taguba said. “He didn’t say anything until 1997, and it took me two years to rebuild his records and show that he was authorized for an award.” On Tomas’s eightieth birthday, he was awarded the Bronze Star and a prisoner-of-war medal in a ceremony at Schofield Barracks, in Hawaii. “My father never laughed,” Taguba said. But the day he got his medal “he smiled—he had a big-ass smile on his face. I’d never seen him look so proud. He was a bent man with carpal-tunnel syndrome, but at the end of the medal ceremony he stood himself up and saluted. I cried, and everyone in my family burst into tears.”

Richard Armitage, a former Navy counter-insurgency officer who served as Deputy Secretary of State in the first Bush term, recalled meeting Taguba, then a lieutenant colonel, in South Korea in the early nineteen-nineties. “I was told to keep an eye on this young guy—‘He’s going to be a general,’ ” Armitage said. “Taguba was discreet and low key—not a sprinter but a marathoner.”

At the time, Taguba was working for Major General Mike Myatt, a marine who was the officer in charge of strategic talks with the South Koreans, on behalf of the American military. “I needed an executive assistant with brains and integrity,” Myatt, who is now retired and living in San Francisco, told me. After interviewing a number of young officers, he chose Taguba. “He was ethical and he knew his stuff,” Myatt said. “We really became close, and I’d trust him with my life. We talked about military strategy and policy, and the moral aspect of war—the importance of not losing the moral high ground.” Myatt followed Taguba’s involvement in the Abu Ghraib inquiry, and said, “I was so proud of him. I told him, ‘Tony, you’ve maintained yourself, and your integrity.’ ”

Taguba got a different message, however, from other officers, among them General John Abizaid, then the head of Central Command. A few weeks after his report became public, Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in the back seat of a Mercedes sedan with Abizaid. Abizaid’s driver and his interpreter, who also served as a bodyguard, were in front. Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet warning: “You and your report will be investigated.”

“I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”

THE INVESTIGATION

Taguba was given the job of investigating Abu Ghraib because of circumstance: the senior officer of the 800th Military Police Brigade, to which the soldiers in the photographs belonged, was a one-star general; Army regulations required that the head of the inquiry be senior to the commander of the unit being investigated, and Taguba, a two-star general, was available. “It was as simple as that,” he said. He vividly remembers his first thought upon seeing the photographs in late January of 2004: “Unbelievable! What were these people doing?” There was an immediate second thought: “This is big.”

Taguba decided to keep the photographs from most of the interrogators and researchers on his staff of twenty-three officers. “I didn’t want them to prejudge the soldiers they were investigating, so I put the photos in a safe,” he told me. “Anyone who wanted to see them had to have a need-to-know and go through me.” His decision to keep the staff in the background was also intended to insure that none of them suffered damage to his or her career because of involvement in the inquiry. “I knew it was going to be very sensitive because of the gravity of what was in front of us,” he said.

The team spent much of February, 2004, in Iraq. Taguba was overwhelmed by the scale of the wrongdoing. “These were people who were taken off the streets and put in jail—teen-agers and old men and women,” he said. “I kept on asking these questions of the officers I interviewed: ‘You knew what was going on. Why didn’t you do something to stop it?’ ”

Taguba’s assignment was limited to investigating the 800th M.P.s, but he quickly found signs of the involvement of military intelligence—both the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, commanded by Colonel Thomas Pappas, which worked closely with the M.P.s, and what were called “other government agencies,” or O.G.A.s, a euphemism for the C.I.A. and special-operations units operating undercover in Iraq. Some of the earliest evidence involved Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan, whose name was mentioned in interviews with several M.P.s. For the first three weeks of the investigation, Jordan was nowhere to be found, despite repeated requests. When the investigators finally located him, he asked whether he needed to shave his beard before being interviewed—Taguba suspected that he had been dressing as a civilian. “When I asked him about his assignment, he says, ‘I’m a liaison officer for intelligence from Army headquarters in Iraq.’ ” But in the course of three or four interviews with Jordan, Taguba said, he began to suspect that the lieutenant colonel had been more intimately involved in the interrogation process—some of it brutal—for “high value” detainees.

“Jordan denied everything, and yet he had the authority to enter the prison’s ‘hard site’ ”—where the most important detainees were held—“carrying a carbine and an M9 pistol, which is against regulations,” Taguba said. Jordan had also led a squad of military policemen in a shoot-out inside the hard site with a detainee from Syria who had managed to obtain a gun. (A lawyer for Jordan disputed these allegations; in the shoot-out, he said, Jordan was “just another gun on the extraction team” and not the leader. He noted that Jordan was not a trained interrogator.)

Taguba said that Jordan’s “record reflected an extensive intelligence background.” He also had reason to believe that Jordan was not reporting through the chain of command. But Taguba’s narrowly focussed mission constrained the questions he could ask. “I suspected that somebody was giving them guidance, but I could not print that,” Taguba said.

“After all Jordan’s evasiveness and misleading responses, his rights were read to him,” Taguba went on. Jordan subsequently became the only officer facing trial on criminal charges in connection with Abu Ghraib and is scheduled to be court-martialled in late August. (Seven M.P.s were convicted of charges that included dereliction of duty, maltreatment, and assault; one defendant, Specialist Charles Graner, was sentenced to ten years in prison.) Last month, a military judge ruled that Jordan, who is still assigned to the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, had not been appropriately advised of his rights during his interviews with Taguba, undermining the Army’s allegation that he lied during the Taguba inquiry. Six other charges remain, including failure to obey an order or regulation; cruelty and maltreatment; and false swearing and obstruction of justice. (His lawyer said, “The evidence clearly shows that he is innocent.”)

Taguba came to believe that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq, and some of the generals assigned to the military headquarters in Baghdad had extensive knowledge of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib even before Joseph Darby came forward with the CD. Taguba was aware that in the fall of 2003—when much of the abuse took place—Sanchez routinely visited the prison, and witnessed at least one interrogation. According to Taguba, “Sanchez knew exactly what was going on.”

Taguba learned that in August, 2003, as the Sunni insurgency in Iraq was gaining force, the Pentagon had ordered Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander at Guantánamo, to Iraq. His mission was to survey the prison system there and to find ways to improve the flow of intelligence. The core of Miller’s recommendations, as summarized in the Taguba report, was that the military police at Abu Ghraib should become part of the interrogation process: they should work closely with interrogators and intelligence officers in “setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.”

Taguba concluded that Miller’s approach was not consistent with Army doctrine, which gave military police the overriding mission of making sure that the prisons were secure and orderly. His report cited testimony that interrogators and other intelligence personnel were encouraging the abuse of detainees. “Loosen this guy up for us,” one M.P. said he was told by a member of military intelligence. “Make sure he has a bad night.”

The M.P.s, Taguba said, “were being literally exploited by the military interrogators. My view is that those kids”—even the soldiers in the photographs—“were poorly led, not trained, and had not been given any standard operating procedures on how they should guard the detainees.”

Surprisingly, given Taguba’s findings, Miller was the officer chosen to restore order at Abu Ghraib. In April, 2004, a month after the report was filed, he was reassigned there as the deputy commander for detainee operations. “Miller called in the spring and asked to meet with me to discuss Abu Ghraib, but I waited for him and we never did meet,” Taguba recounted. Miller later told Taguba that he’d been ordered to Washington to meet with Rumsfeld before travelling to Iraq, but he never attempted to reschedule the meeting.

If they had spoken, Taguba said, he would have reminded Miller that at Abu Ghraib, unlike at Guantánamo, very few prisoners were affiliated with any terrorist group. Taguba had seen classified documents revealing that there were only “one or two” suspected Al Qaeda prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Most of the detainees had nothing to do with the insurgency. A few of them were common criminals.

Taguba had known Miller for years. “We served together in Korea and in the Pentagon, and his wife and mine used to go shopping together,” Taguba said. But, after his report became public, “Miller didn’t talk to me. He didn’t say a word when I passed him in the hallway.”

Despite the subsequent public furor over Abu Ghraib, neither the House nor the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings led to a serious effort to determine whether the scandal was a result of a high-level interrogation policy that encouraged abuse. At the House Committee hearing on May 7, 2004, a freshman Democratic congressman, Kendrick Meek, of Florida, asked Rumsfeld if it was time for him to resign. Rumsfeld replied, “I would resign in a minute if I thought that I couldn’t be effective. . . . I have to wrestle with that.” But, he added, “I’m certainly not going to resign because some people are trying to make a political issue out of it.” (Rumsfeld stayed in office for the next two and a half years, until the day after the 2006 congressional elections.) When I spoke to Meek recently, he said, “There was no way Rumsfeld didn’t know what was going on. He’s a guy who wants to know everything, and what he was giving us was hard to believe.”

Later that month, Rumsfeld appeared before a closed hearing of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which votes on the funds for all secret operations in the military. Representative David Obey, of Wisconsin, the senior Democrat at the hearing, told me that he had been angry when a fellow subcommittee member “made the comment that ‘Abu Ghraib was the price of defending democracy.’ I said that wasn’t the way I saw it, and that I didn’t want to see some corporal made into a scapegoat. This could not have happened without people in the upper echelon of the Administration giving signals. I just didn’t see how this was not systemic.”

Obey asked Rumsfeld a series of pointed questions. Taguba attended the closed hearing with Rumsfeld and recalled him bristling at Obey’s inquiries. “I don’t know what happened!” Rumsfeld told Obey. “Maybe you want to ask General Taguba.”

Taguba got a chance to answer questions on May 11th, when he was summoned to appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Under-Secretary Stephen Cambone sat beside him. (Cambone was Rumsfeld’s point man on interrogation policy.) Cambone, too, told the committee that he hadn’t known about the specific abuses at Abu Ghraib until he saw Taguba’s report, “when I was exposed to some of those photographs.”

Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, tried to focus on whether Abu Ghraib was the consequence of a larger detainee policy. “These acts of abuse were not the spontaneous actions of lower-ranking enlisted personnel,” Levin said. “These attempts to extract information from prisoners by abusive and degrading methods were clearly planned and suggested by others.” The senators repeatedly asked about General Miller’s trip to Iraq in 2003. Did the “Gitmo-izing” of Abu Ghraib—especially the model of using the M.P.s in “setting the conditions” for interrogations—lead to the abuses?

Cambone confirmed that Miller had been sent to Iraq with his approval, but insisted that the senators were “misreading General Miller’s intent.” Questioned on that point by Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, Cambone said, “I don’t know that I was being told, and I don’t know that General Miller said that there should be that kind of activity that you are ascribing to his recommendation.”

Reed then asked Taguba, “Was it clear from your reading of the [Miller] report that one of the major recommendations was to use guards to condition these prisoners?” Taguba replied, “Yes, sir. That was recommended on the report.”

At another point, after Taguba confirmed that military intelligence had taken control of the M.P.s following Miller’s visit, Levin questioned Cambone:

LEVIN: Do you disagree with what the general just said?
CAMBONE: Yes, sir.
LEVIN: Pardon?
CAMBONE: I do.

Taguba, looking back on his testimony, said, “That’s the reason I wasn’t in their camp—because I kept on contradicting them. I wasn’t about to lie to the committee. I knew I was already in a losing proposition. If I lie, I lose. And, if I tell the truth, I lose.”

Taguba had been scheduled to rotate to the Third Army’s headquarters, at Fort McPherson, Georgia, in June of 2004. He was instead ordered back to the Pentagon, to work in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs. “It was a lateral assignment,” Taguba said, with a smile and a shrug. “I didn’t quibble. If you’re going to do that to me, well, O.K. We all serve at the pleasure of the President.” A retired four-star Army general later told Taguba that he had been sent to the job in the Pentagon so that he could “be watched.” Taguba realized that his career was at a dead end.

Later in 2004, Taguba encountered Rumsfeld and one of his senior press aides, Lawrence Di Rita, in the Pentagon Athletic Center. Taguba was getting dressed after a workout. “I was tying my shoes,” Taguba recalled. “I looked up, and there they were.” Rumsfeld, who was putting his clothes into a locker, recognized Taguba and said, “Hello, General.” Di Rita, who was standing beside Rumsfeld, said sarcastically, “See what you started, General? See what you started?”

Di Rita, who is now an official with Bank of America, recalled running into Taguba in the locker room but not his words. “Sounds like my brand of humor,” he said, in an e-mail. “A comment like that would have been in an attempt to lighten the mood for General Taguba.” (Di Rita added that Taguba had “my personal respect and admiration” and that of Rumsfeld. “He did a terrific job under difficult circumstances.”) However, Taguba was troubled by the encounter, and later told a colleague, “I’m now the problem.”

DENIABILITY

A dozen government investigations have been conducted into Abu Ghraib and detainee abuse. A few of them picked up on matters raised by Taguba’s report, but none followed through on the question of ultimate responsibility. Military investigators were precluded from looking into the role of Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders in the Pentagon; the result was that none found any high-level intelligence involvement in the abuse.

An independent panel headed by James R. Schlesinger, a former Secretary of Defense, did conclude that there was “institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels” for Abu Ghraib, but cleared Rumsfeld of any direct responsibility. In an August, 2004, report, the Schlesinger panel endorsed Rumsfeld’s complaints, citing “the reluctance to move bad news up the chain of command” as the most important factor in Washington’s failure to understand the significance of Abu Ghraib. “Given the magnitude of this problem, the Secretary of Defense and other senior DoD officials need a more effective information pipeline to inform them of high-profile incidents,” the report said. Schlesinger and his colleagues apparently were unaware of the early e-mail messages that had informed the Pentagon of Abu Ghraib.

The official inquiries consistently provided the public with less information about abuses than outside studies conducted by human-rights groups. In one case, in November, 2004, an Army investigation, by Brigadier General Richard Formica, into the treatment of detainees at Camp Nama, a Special Forces detention center at Baghdad International Airport, concluded that detainees who reported being sodomized or beaten were seeking sympathy and better treatment, and thus were not credible. For example, Army doctors had initially noted that a complaining detainee’s wounds were “consistent with the history [of abuse] he provided. . . . The doctor did find scars on his wrists and noted what he believed to be an anal fissure.” Formica had the detainee reëxamined two days later, by another doctor, who found “no fissure, and no scarring. . . . As a result, I did not find medical evidence of the sodomy.” In the case of a detainee who died in custody, Formica noted that there had been bruising to the “shoulders, chest, hip, and knees” but added, “It is not unusual for detainees to have minor bruising, cuts and scrapes.” In July, 2006, however, Human Rights Watch issued a fifty-three-page report on the “serious mistreatment” of detainees at Camp Nama and two other sites, largely based on witness accounts from Special Forces interrogators and others who served there.

Formica, asked to comment, wrote in an e-mail, “I conducted a thorough investigation . . . and stand by my report.” He said that “several issues” he discovered “were corrected.” His assignment, Formica noted, was to investigate a unit, and not to conduct “a systematic analysis of Special Operations activities.”

The Army also protected General Miller. Since 2002, F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo had been telling their superiors that their military counterparts were abusing detainees. The F.B.I. complaints were ignored until after Abu Ghraib. When an investigation was opened, in December, 2004, General Craddock, Rumsfeld’s former military aide, was in charge of the Army’s Southern Command, with jurisdiction over Guantánamo—he had been promoted a few months after Taguba’s visit to Rumsfeld’s office. Craddock appointed Air Force Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, a straight-talking fighter pilot, to investigate the charges, which included alleged abuses during Miller’s tenure.

“I followed the bread-crumb trail,” Schmidt, who retired last year, told me. “I found some things that didn’t seem right. For lack of a camera, you could have seen in Guantánamo what was seen at Abu Ghraib.”

Schmidt found that Miller, with the encouragement of Rumsfeld, had focussed great attention on the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was believed to be the so-called “twentieth hijacker.” Qahtani was interrogated “for twenty hours a day for at least fifty-four days,” Schmidt told investigators from the Army Inspector General’s office, who were reviewing his findings. “I mean, here’s this guy manacled, chained down, dogs brought in, put in his face, told to growl, show teeth, and that kind of stuff. And you can imagine the fear.”

At Guantánamo, Schmidt told the investigators, Miller “was responsible for the conduct of interrogations that I found to be abusive and degrading. The intent of those might have been to be abusive and degrading to get the information they needed. . . . Did the means justify the ends? That’s fine. . . . He was responsible.”

Schmidt formally recommended that Miller be “held accountable” and “admonished.” Craddock rejected this recommendation and absolved Miller of any responsibility for the mistreatment of the prisoners. The Inspector General inquiry endorsed Craddock’s action. “I was open with them,” Schmidt told me, referring to the I.G. investigators. “I told them, ‘I’ll do anything to help you get the truth.’ ” But when he read their final report, he said, “I didn’t recognize the five hours of interviews with me.”

Schmidt learned of Craddock’s reversal the day before they were to meet with Rumsfeld, in July, 2005. Rumsfeld was in frequent contact with Miller about the progress of Qahtani’s interrogation, and personally approved the most severe interrogation tactics. (“This wasn’t just daily business, when the Secretary of Defense is personally involved,” Schmidt told the Army investigators.) Nonetheless, Schmidt was impressed by Rumsfeld’s demonstrative surprise, dismay, and concern upon being told of the abuse. “He was going, ‘My God! Did I authorize putting a bra and underwear on this guy’s head and telling him all his buddies knew he was a homosexual?’ ”

Schmidt was convinced. “I got to tell you that I never got the feeling that Secretary Rumsfeld was trying to hide anything,” he told me. “He got very frustrated. He’s a control guy, and this had gotten out of control. He got pissed.”

Rumsfeld’s response to Schmidt was similar to his expressed surprise over Taguba’s Abu Ghraib report. “Rummy did what we called ‘case law’ policy—verbal and not in writing,” Taguba said. “What he’s really saying is that if this decision comes back to haunt me I’ll deny it.”

Taguba eventually concluded that there was a reason for the evasions and stonewalling by Rumsfeld and his aides. At the time he filed his report, in March of 2004, Taguba said, “I knew there was C.I.A. involvement, but I was oblivious of what else was happening” in terms of covert military-intelligence operations. Later that summer, however, he learned that the C.I.A. had serious concerns about the abusive interrogation techniques that military-intelligence operatives were using on high-value detainees. In one secret memorandum, dated June 2, 2003, General George Casey, Jr., then the director of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, issued a warning to General Michael DeLong, at the Central Command:

CIA has advised that the techniques the military forces are using to interrogate high value detainees (HVDs) . . . are more aggressive than the techniques used by CIA who is [sic] interviewing the same HVDs.

DeLong replied to Casey that the techniques in use were “doctrinally appropriate techniques,” in accordance with Army regulations and Rumsfeld’s direction.

THE TASK FORCES

Abu Ghraib had opened the door on the issue of the treatment of detainees, and from the beginning the Administration feared that the publicity would expose more secret operations and practices. Shortly after September 11th, Rumsfeld, with the support of President Bush, had set up military task forces whose main target was the senior leadership of Al Qaeda. Their essential tactic was seizing and interrogating terrorists and suspected terrorists; they also had authority from the President to kill certain high-value targets on sight. The most secret task-force operations were categorized as Special Access Programs, or S.A.P.s.

The military task forces were under the control of the Joint Special Operations Command, the branch of the Special Operations Command that is responsible for counterterrorism. One of Miller’s unacknowledged missions had been to bring the J.S.O.C.’s “strategic interrogation” techniques to Abu Ghraib. In special cases, the task forces could bypass the chain of command and deal directly with Rumsfeld’s office. A former senior intelligence official told me that the White House was also briefed on task-force operations.

The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who “didn’t think the photographs were that bad”—in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?’ ” A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’ ”

A recently retired C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen years in the clandestine service, told me that the task-force teams “had full authority to whack—to go in and conduct ‘executive action,’ ” the phrase for political assassination. “It was surrealistic what these guys were doing,” the retired operative added. “They were running around the world without clearing their operations with the ambassador or the chief of station.”

J.S.O.C.’s special status undermined military discipline. Richard Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, told me that, on his visits to Iraq, he increasingly found that “the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the field would say, ‘I don’t care what he says. I’m going to do what I want.’ We’ve sacrificed the chain of command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT”—the global war on terrorism. “You’re painting on a canvas so big that it’s hard to comprehend,” Armitage said.

Thomas W. O’Connell, who resigned this spring after nearly four years as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, defended the task forces. He blamed the criticisms on the resentment of the rest of the military: “From my observation, the operations run by Special Ops units are extraordinarily open in terms of interagency visibility to embassies and C.I.A. stations—even to the point where there’s been a question of security.” O’Connell said that he dropped in unannounced to Special Operations interrogation centers in Iraq, “and the treatment of detainees was aboveboard.” He added, “If people want to say we’ve got a serious problem with Special Operations, let them say it on the record.”

Representative Obey told me that he had been troubled, before the Iraq war, by the Administration’s decision to run clandestine operations from the Pentagon, saying that he “found some of the things they were doing to be disquieting.” At the time, his Republican colleagues blocked his attempts to have the House Appropriations Committee investigate these activities. “One of the things that bugs me is that Congress has failed in its oversight abilities,” Obey said. Early last year, at his urging, his subcommittee began demanding a classified quarterly report on the operations, but Obey said that he has no reason to believe that the reports are complete.

A former high-level Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned “to back off” on the investigation, because “it would spill over to more important things.” A spokesman for Warner acknowledged that there had been pressure on the Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to it—insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May 7th testimony, for example, to the Secretary’s great displeasure.

An aggressive congressional inquiry into Abu Ghraib could have provoked unwanted questions about what the Pentagon was doing, in Iraq and elsewhere, and under what authority. By law, the President must make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and inform the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush Administration unilaterally determined after 9/11 that intelligence operations conducted by the military—including the Pentagon’s covert task forces—for the purposes of “preparing the battlefield” could be authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, without telling Congress.

There was coördination between the C.I.A. and the task forces, but also tension. The C.I.A. officers, who were under pressure to produce better intelligence in the field, wanted explicit legal authority before aggressively interrogating high-value targets. A finding would give operatives some legal protection for questionable actions, but the White House was reluctant to put what it wanted in writing.

A recently retired high-level C.I.A. official, who served during this period and was involved in the drafting of findings, described to me the bitter disagreements between the White House and the agency over the issue. “The problem is what constituted approval,” the retired C.I.A. official said. “My people fought about this all the time. Why should we put our people on the firing line somewhere down the road? If you want me to kill Joe Smith, just tell me to kill Joe Smith. If I was the Vice-President or the President, I’d say, ‘This guy Smith is a bad guy and it’s in the interest of the United States for this guy to be killed.’ They don’t say that. Instead, George”—George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A. until mid-2004—“goes to the White House and is told, ‘You guys are professionals. You know how important it is. We know you’ll get the intelligence.’ George would come back and say to us, ‘Do what you gotta do.’ ”

Bill Harlow, a spokesman for Tenet, depicted as “absurd” the notion that the C.I.A. director told his agents to operate outside official guidelines. He added, in an e-mailed statement, “The intelligence community insists that its officers not exceed the very explicit authorities granted.” In his recently published memoir, however, Tenet acknowledged that there had been a struggle “to get clear guidance” in terms of how far to go during high-value-detainee interrogations.

The Pentagon consultant said in an interview late last year that “the C.I.A. never got the exact language it wanted.” The findings, when promulgated by the White House, were “very calibrated” to minimize political risk, and limited to a few countries; later, they were expanded, turning several nations in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia into free-fire zones with regard to high-value targets. I was told by the former senior intelligence official and a government consultant that after the existence of secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe was revealed, in the Washington Post, in late 2005, the Administration responded with a new detainee center in Mauritania. After a new government friendly to the U.S. took power, in a bloodless coup d’état in August, 2005, they said, it was much easier for the intelligence community to mask secret flights there.

“The dirt and secrets are in the back channel,” the former senior intelligence officer noted. “All this open business—sitting in staff meetings, etc., etc.—is the Potemkin Village stuff. And the good guys—like Taguba—are gone.”

In some cases, the secret operations remained unaccountable. In an April, 2005, memorandum, a C.I.D. officer—his name was redacted—complained to C.I.D. headquarters, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, about the impossibility of investigating military members of a Special Access Program suspected of prisoner abuse:

[C.I.D.] has been unable to thoroughly investigate . . . due to the suspects and witnesses involvement in Special Access Programs (SAP) and/or the security classification of the unit they were assigned to during the offense under investigation. Attempts by Special Agents . . . to be “read on” to these programs has [sic] been unsuccessful.

The C.I.D. officer wrote that “fake names were used” by members of the task force; he also told investigators that the unit had a “major computer malfunction which resulted in them losing 70 per cent of their files; therefore, they can’t find the cases we need to review.”

The officer concluded that the investigation “does not need to be reopened. Hell, even if we reopened it we wouldn’t get any more information than we already have.”

CONSEQUENCES

Rumsfeld was vague, in his appearances before Congress, about when he had informed the President about Abu Ghraib, saying that it could have been late January or early February. He explained that he routinely met with the President “once or twice a week . . . and I don’t keep notes about what I do.” He did remember that in mid-March he and General Myers were “meeting with the President and discussed the reports that we had obviously heard” about Abu Ghraib.

Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career.

In January of 2006, Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff. “This is your Vice,” he told Taguba. “I need you to retire by January of 2007.” No pleasantries were exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for years, and, Taguba said, “He offered no reason.” (A spokesperson for Cody said, “Conversations regarding general officer management are considered private personnel discussions. General Cody has great respect for Major General Taguba as an officer, leader, and American patriot.”)

“They always shoot the messenger,” Taguba told me. “To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal—that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.”

Taguba went on, “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the explicit images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

FT : Concern as spy chief quits to join Rice

Concern as spy chief quits to join Rice

John Negroponte's abrupt shift from being the first US director of national intelligence to number two at the State Department reflects continued troubles in the intelligence community and a further concentration of power around Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state.

Analysts see the return of the career diplomat to the State Department as part of a broader and somewhat confused reshuffle of the Bush administration that began with the sacking of Donald Rumsfeld as defence secretary and has Iraq and the wider Middle East as its focus.

Mr Negroponte's expected replacement by a retired admiral, Mike McConnell, would also mean that key intelligence posts would all be filled by active or former military personnel – an issue of concern to civilians in the community.

Officials said President George W. Bush would announce the changes on Friday, possibly including his nomination of Zalmay Khalilzad, ambassador to Baghdad, as the new US envoy to the UN.

There was also speculation on Thursday night that Ryan Crocker, US ambassador to Pakistan, would replace Mr Khalilzad in Baghdad, and that David Petraeus would replace George Casey, the senior US general in Iraq. Gen Petraeus's appointment would be taken as a signal that the US military could change course in Iraq to emphasise a "hearts and minds" approach, designed to isolate the insurgents and reduce support for sectarian groups.

According to leaks put out by Reuters and ABC on Thursday night, Mr Bush is also expected to replace John Abizaid with Admiral William Fallon as head of central command, which oversees the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

With a week to go before Mr Bush is expected to announce his "new way forward in Iraq", the president spoke on Thursday for nearly two hours by video conference with Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister.

Less than two years ago, Mr Negroponte was elevated to co-ordinate all 16 distinct spy agencies following the 9/11 commission probe into the intelligence failures surrounding al-Qaeda's attacks. However, former intelligence officials say that the overhaul only succeeded in creating another layer of bureaucracy with inadequate powers.

Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst who has accused the Bush administration of ignoring the agency's findings before invading Iraq, said Mr Negroponte had been unfairly criticised by some in Congress and that he did not have enough control over the defence department's intelligence operations.

Reuel Gerecht, a former CIA officer and a critic of the agency, called the creation of the director of national intelligence (DNI) a "lame idea".

"It has only made an overstaffed intelligence establishment even fatter," he said.

Another former CIA operative who asked not to be named said Mr Negroponte had never wanted the job and had clashed with Mr Rumsfeld, who controlled more than 80 per cent of the intelligence budget. "Negroponte gave in," he said.

Tensions between the DNI and the Pentagon may ease with the replacement of Mr Rumsfeld by Robert Gates, a former CIA director who has said he wants to yield important Pentagon intelligence activities.

Mr Gates is expected to appoint Lt-Gen James Clapper, who had fallen out of favour with Mr Rumsfeld, as his top intelligence official.

Former intelligence officials said Mr Negroponte was tired of bureaucratic turf wars and wanted to return to his diplomatic career.

Mr McConnell, a former head of the National Security Agency, is tipped to leave his consulting job to replace Mr Negroponte.

Members of Congress expressed dismay at Mr Negroponte's early departure, concerned at the apparent disarray at the top of the intelligence apparatus.

Mr Negroponte, who was the first post-occupation ambassador to Iraq, brings his experience to the State Department at a time when Ms Rice is focused on shoring up Iraq's government while building alliances among Arab allies to contain Iran and moderate the Palestinian leadership.

At a press conference, Tony Snow, White House spokesman, rolled his eyes at a suggestion that Ms Rice, perhaps the closest in the cabinet to the president and now no longer challenged by Mr Rumsfeld, was set to move on.

Additional reporting by Edward Luce in Washington

Copyright 2007 Financial Times

Frontline: The Torture Question: Interviews: Janis Karpinski

Frontline interviews Janis Karpinski

In your book you describe that drive from Kuwait into Iraq, that first time you went in. Give me your sense of what it was like to drive up that road.

Well, it doesn't make any difference what anybody expects. I've traveled in the Middle East before. I've been in Kuwait, and I've been in other parts of the Middle East. But, it was completely different than what I expected.

As soon as we crossed the border from Kuwait into Iraq, there was a prevalence of fear. There was dust and heat. I mean, you can't see it, but I could feel it from everybody we passed, from everybody we stopped and spoke to from the units, there was this fear. It was almost like a lingering feeling that this was not over yet. They weren't convinced that the fight had really moved into or up to closer to Baghdad or in other parts of Iraq. And I didn't get the impression from soldiers that they felt completely safe.

Along the road there were broken down-vehicles, there were abandoned vehicles, there were burned out vehicles. And there were berms along certain parts of the main supply routes, MSRs, as they were called. And not the whole way, but there was berming where some of the engineer equipment, or troops that were moving through had bermed up some of the sand. And on the other side of those berms, there were very often people that were shooting RPGs or a variety of weapons.

Iraqis.

Iraqis, or the remaining opposition. Everybody called them Iraqis, but nobody really knew if they were border crossers, or if they were just disgruntled people, or fearful people, or whoever they were, but they were not of the coalition. This was the opposition.

So in spite of the fact that the war was allegedly over, there was not a feeling of peaceful operations taking hold. It was the leftover, the carcasses of the vehicles and the houses that had been hit initially in that first push through from Kuwait through Iraq. But, it was not anything like what I saw in Baghdad. As we got closer, as we approached the city probably from well, 45 to 50 kilometers outside of Baghdad, the destruction was everywhere. And if you passed a gas station that was actually operational, a fuel station, the lines were miles long waiting for people to get gas. …

Take me to that first meeting with Gen. [Ricardo] Sanchez [shortly after you arrived in Iraq].

… My predecessor brought me in to meet Gen. Sanchez, and he was a rather unpleasant person. And maybe up until that point Gen. Sanchez did not even realize that the new military police brigade commander was a female, because from the jump it was an insult to him that he had to rely very heavily on a general officer, commander of a Reserve unit to do this critical mission, and then you layer on top of that this insult to a warrior's instinct that it's a female. So he was not a very pleasant personality. Whether that had anything to do with me or not he'll never say, but that was my first impression.
I will continue to ask how they can continue to blame seven rogue soldiers on the night shift, when there is the preponderance of hard information from a variety of sources [that] says otherwise.

He was not full of information. He was very sketchy. He said that he needed us there several days before, [and] when we were going to get up there, we were going to be working with the people down at the Coalition Provisional Authority to restore the jails and the prisons and get these criminals off the streets.

... There was no discussion about whether we were equipped or whether we had the right number of people or anything else. It didn't seem to be a concern to him, or a consideration. ...

Tell me a little bit about the preparedness of the unit.

Before I was selected for a promotion to brigadier general, and before I was selected to command the 800th Military Police Brigade, I was already serving full time as the chief of staff for the 81st Regional Support Command, which was the Army Reserve's largest support command. … So I know what the standard was for our units.

We wouldn't let units leave if they were ill equipped or ill prepared or inappropriate for the position that they were filling. And then three months into it, about March timeframe, they came up with this what I've come to call a harebrained scheme about cross-leveling people to fill vacancies. So if you have a unit that's authorized [for] 150 soldiers, and 50 of those soldiers now ... are not qualified -- maybe they're not trained; maybe they have a medical limitation; maybe they have a personal problem, situation, whatever…

Well, in the interest of getting these units pushed out the door, the chief of the Army Reserve and the chief of the National Guard Bureau decided that this cross-leveling scheme would work, and they would bring in soldiers with those qualifications to fill vacancies in these units. Well, right from the jump, that goes contrary to what the Army has always been about, and that's working together as a unit, as a team, in cohesion.

Units were being pushed out of the mobilization stations for deployments, and there was a minimum requirement. The unit was obviously not going to be at 100 percent, but they could not deploy if they were [at] less than 92 percent strength, qualification, appropriate fields, those kind of things. And equipment was not a consideration for some of these locations. Like I said, I know what our standard was in our units, but I saw once I got into the theater that the standard was clearly lacking in some of the other locations. …

The 800th MP Brigade eventually had the same size area of responsibility as Gen. Sanchez. But he had a component of toys. He had a full aviation brigade; he had all of the up-armored equipment he needed; he had all of the combat firepower he needed; he had divisions all over the place. We didn't have any of those things.

You have to plug into a mother ship, for lack of a better expression, the mother ship being CJTF-7 [Combined Joint Task Force Seven]. Well, when we got to Baghdad, the door was closed, and they never opened it. They never embraced us or welcomed us or anything; never made us feel like we were an important component of the team.

You were like the poor stepchild.

We were. And their justification for that was all of the obvious and probably many things that I'm not and hope never to be aware of. But we were a Reserve brigade. We had Reserve and National Guard units. We had military policy personnel assigned. We had the security and detention operation as a mission. We could have become a drain on their resources. So what did they do? They just denied us any access to the resources. ...

Although every single day I was requesting from the CJTF-7 funding, support, forced protection most importantly, it fell on deaf ears. And the deputy commander, Gen. Sanchez's deputy, said to me many times: "You're just not a priority, Janis. Your units are securing Iraqis, bad guys. Some of them were shooting at us a couple of months ago. You're not a priority. My priority is taking care of my units first." I said: "I'm one of those units, too, sir. My soldiers deserve the same attention that the other soldiers are getting."

At one point he tried to reason with me: "You see, you're a Reserve brigade. We have limitations on what we can give to you, but we're trying. We're trying to support you." Well, meanwhile down in Kuwait, the headquarters down there wasn't interested in supporting us at all. "You belong to the CJTF-7 now." So we were the brigade that was not only the stepchild, but we were caught in the middle between people at the senior level who didn't like each other. And they didn't care what our eventual outcome was, of success or failure.

Do you have any special training in prison warden work?

No. My battalion was prisoner-of-war operation. We were very successful. They had a long history of success. They were deployed during the first Gulf War. I was not the battalion commander at the time, but the soldiers were well trained. I had been out on these training exercises many times during the course of five years to see units in the field, to watch what they were doing, to know what they were capable of doing and to deploy with my own units, to practice the mission. ...

Describe your first visit to the now infamous Abu Ghraib.

… We drove out there -- and again, you, it was even more extraordinary driving on this main supply route from the Coalition Provisional Headquarters, out to the Green Zone, out to Abu Ghraib over miles of the most dangerous MSR [main supply route] in the theater. We did occasionally see Bradleys or heavy combat firepower, but at that time there was no developing IED or roadside bomb problem to worry about. Our main concern was people that might be popping up over the berm and firing an RPG or a hand grenade at some of the vehicles.

You're already on edge; your stress level is up considerably; the awareness is unbelievable, how fine-tuned and extreme it becomes. And we got to Abu Ghraib, and I can see, [driving] down the MSR, I can see this huge wall that seems like it goes on for acres. And in fact, it did. And that was the key point of using Abu Ghraib at all. There was this 20-foot-high wall; for the [most] part, at least where we could see from that side, approaching Abu Ghraib, it was not breached. In other facilities, the locals, when they were looting the facilities, they actually removed sections of the walls before they started looting the interiors of these different jails and prisons. But Abu Ghraib, this 20-foot wall was intact. And it was huge. …

You could see three towers. And I said, "Oh, well, they've got good visual." And they said, "Nobody's in the towers because people are shooting at them from the outside." And I said, you know, "It's not a secure area?" "Well, not yet."

So I get to the facility. We go inside, and other than this 20-foot wall, I can tell you that there was nothing at Abu Ghraib that was intact. From the minute we went into the entry control point, with a couple of MPs [military police] standing there controlling access to the extent that they could, everything was rubble. There was huge chunks of concrete; there was rebar; there was metal; there were pieces of metal sheeting and roofs and glass everywhere. It was almost like a disguise from this outside wall that what you were going to see inside was something that resembled a prison.

Some structures were still standing. but everything had been looted or blown to bits or carted off. The doors of all the cells had been removed. The most difficult problem was that the infrastructure [was] out at Abu Ghraib: Water was looted or destroyed; the electrical pipes had been pulled down, and they looted the cooper wire out of the infrastructure. There was no light; there was no running water. There was nothing out there that was working at all. This company, the only the communication they had was their radio systems in their military vehicles.

They were holding a couple of hundred prisoners that were largely, probably 99 percent, Iraqi criminals -- nonviolent crimes, but they had been policed up by the divisions and then turned over to Abu Ghraib, waiting for transfer to other facilities in Baghdad as they became available. ...

We did get them some financing from the Coalition Provisional Authority to begin some of this cleanup work and everything. Two weeks later -- I'd been back several times -- but two weeks later was the first time that I said, "You know, this is really unbelievable." It was like they were using snow shovels to remove the rubble to certain locations.

Tell me about the buildup from a couple of hundred prisoners that day, up until it gets to whatever it gets to -- 8,000? How fast was the ramp-up in terms of population?

July, August, we had incoming prisoners. By and large, the vast majority of them were nonviolent Iraqi criminals caught moving, stealing gas, stealing a car, missing curfew, whatever it might be. And there [was] occasionally a violent prisoner that was arrested and had probably been released when Saddam opened all the jails up and released everybody in October, November of 2002. But by and large they were nonviolent, just disrupting combat operations, so turned over.

July and August, our prisoner population was probably total, in all of our 17 facilities, including the 300 remaining prisoners of war, was less than 2,000, with average intake of about 150 a week, 400 or 500 during the course of the month, and largely because, when the divisions policed these guys up in the course of their operations, they could make a decision that this was a bad guy or this was somebody that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

At the end of August -- again, without coordinating with anybody in the 800th MP Brigade, let alone the brigade commander-- the CJTF-7 made assignments to the divisions to undertake these raids to target specific individuals that were either terrorists, associates of terrorists or who had information about terrorists. And the reason for that was because, largely, they had that operation where the 101st got Uday and Qusay [Hussein, Saddam's sons] and the henchmen, and they exploited a lot of the information that they were able to obtain from that site. And so they turned over lists of people, divided it by the division sectors, and the divisions undertook these operations.

So on the 26th or whatever it was of August of 2003, in the dead of the night, these helicopters arrive and turn over 35 "security detainees" to Abu Ghraib. They were able to take them in because they had outside camps set up, and they needed to be isolated from the Iraqi prisoners. And my battalion commander is calling me frantically, saying: "Did you know anything about this? Why are we getting these people?" "No, didn't know anything about it. Let me see what I can find out." And this was going to continue, according to the deputy commander at CJTF-7. These were raids, and by the time that all of the raids were completed, it might be 1,500 or 2,000. …

This relatively new tag on these inbound detainees was "security detainee," which meant they would always remain under the control of the Coalition forces. They could not be housed near or with the criminal element that we were housing, principally, out at Abu Ghraib. And some of them were terrorists, and they were bad, bad people.

The exclusive military interrogation teams that we had out at Abu Ghraib at the time -- there was three or four of them. Each one was three individuals, and they did what they call an immediate interview. So with each one of these 35 security detainees that was coming into Abu Ghraib, they interviewed them, and in the course of just over 24 hours, they said all but two could be released. These two, for some reason in the interview there was information that developed that yes, they might in fact be really terrorists or have more information about where Saddam was, or whatever.

So every night I had a briefing over at the headquarters, and I briefed that we were going to release 33 of these people. And the deputy turned on me, and he said: "You are not to release anyone. Who told you to release anybody?" And I said: "I got that from the interrogators. They said they have no further intel value." And he shouted to get somebody from the intel section, and this captain comes running over there, and he launches into this, almost a tirade, against this captain, that he is not to release to anybody; he does not have the authority. If one person is released in error or if he finds out about it, he's going to come after him and take his head off. "Do you understand me, Captain?" And of course the captain is nodding yes, that he understands completely.

And then when he was dismissed, the deputy turns around and explains to me in a very calm demeanor that we can't release any of them because they might go back and tell their friends, and that could compromise the whole operation. And I said, "Thirty-five is one thing, sir, but if we're going to be required to hold several thousand --" It didn't make any difference. By the end of September, our prisoner population at Abu Ghraib alone had increased by 3,500.

So we charted July and August, and we were briefing every week [about] the increasing prisoner population and the ongoing efforts of restoring other jails that we could transfer prisoners, these Iraqi criminals, to. Abu Ghraib was not in a location for a prison operation. There are hostile communities on three sides of Abu Ghraib. The other side was farmland. And they were beginning to shoot mortars into Abu Ghraib. It's in the middle of the Sunni Triangle, and you don't run detention operations in the middle of a combat zone. You just don't do it. ...

Now, when we get these security detainees in, and family members know that "My brother Abdullah is not a terrorist. And they policed him up. All he was doing was returning a car or visiting his friend," or whatever the circumstances were, they're going to find out. And they knew that these prisoners were being held at Abu Ghraib, so they're launching attacks. They know that the person or the people who are being held are being held unfairly, and nobody seemed to care.

There were limitations put on the information about security detainees. They were not entitled to any visitations. Their names did not have to be entered on the database. That information did not have to be released to family members. It was a long list of everything that was contrary to what military police and soldiers are trained about. And it was a departure from all of the procedures we had been following all along. And by the end of October, the prisoner population of security detainees out at Abu Ghraib far outnumbered the Iraqi criminal element out there. And it was 5,000 or 6,000. ... We had about 360 military police personnel. ...

Where was the authority coming from? Who seemed to be in charge of these "special" detainees?

It was all coming from this ill-conceived plan by the CJTF-7 to find Saddam, to get more actionable intelligence, to do whatever it took through interrogations, to get the information that they wanted. I don't know if anybody believed, if Gen. Sanchez or Ambassador [Paul] Bremer believed, that if they found Saddam they would find Osama bin Laden. I don't know, because nobody ever included me in a meeting. Nobody ever said: "Does this make sense? Is this practical?"

In fact, despite our attempts to make things more manageable in all of these facilities, Gen. Sanchez kept assigning us more missions, requiring further spreading-thin of resources. ...

… How much do you know about what the interrogators are getting, are trying to get, are aiming for in this process of grabbing these detainees?

Well, I will tell you from my experience there, we had one or two military interrogation teams at several of our locations. ...We had the fewest number out at Abu Ghraib because [initially] we weren't holding any security detainees. They were [there] in case there was somebody that came in that maybe had a tattoo or some kind of a mark or was a known associate. Then the interrogation teams would kick right in and do their interview.

But they were, as I said, exclusively military members, and they were doing their job. They were doing it very well. They all belong to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. That was commanded by Col. Thomas Pappas. And they were spread all across Iraq in different facilities to do their thing.

I saw very little of what they actually did in terms of an interview or an interrogation. And the only reason I know that they were getting any kind of results was because they made a recommendation. They passed it to one of my battalion commanders that these prisoners could be released or they could be held in the general prisoner population as opposed to being held exclusively with the security detainees.

Now, they were of the like mind with the military police, because if you bring in prisoners, no matter who they are, detainees or Iraqi prisoners, and you hold them together for any longer than a couple of hours, they're all going to be saying the same story when you interview them, because they've had a chance to protect each other and build the story as they want to tell it.

So it was very important that these interrogation teams would do these interviews, these hasty interviews right away, and make an immediate determination. And they were very efficient. I would say that without hesitation. ...

But after these raids started to take effect, the military intelligence brigade commander was ordered by Gen. Sanchez to bring more interrogation teams to Abu Ghraib. So he removed them from different missions, wherever they were, and brought them to Abu Ghraib.

And then Gen. [Geoffrey D.] Miller's team visited. And in the course of his visit and subsequent to his visit, there were more interrogation teams showing up. But they, by and large, were not military members. They were contract interrogators. And repeatedly, from the military interrogators, from Col. Pappas, from his staff officers, repeatedly I heard that they were not getting any really viable information from any of them. The vast majority of them -- some estimates started at 75 percent; my estimate would be much higher, about 90 percent of them -- were innocent of any terrorism or related activity.

Did you feel the imperative to get information about the insurgency? Was it coming to Sanchez from Washington? Did it come to you? Did you pass it on?

From the security detention side of the hustle, I had concerns because the military intelligence brigade commander and a few of his senior staff officers would tell me, would share with me, that there was so much pressure being put on Col. Pappas to get more actionable intelligence. And it wasn't just pressure from Gen. Sanchez, who, on several occasions, put his finger in Col. Pappas' chest and told him, in no uncertain terms, he wanted the information, and he was holding Pappas responsible for getting it. ... He was under tremendous pressure to make these interrogations work. …

Col. Pappas, who never did an interrogation himself and never worked in interrogations before, was being held responsible for finding [Saddam]. ...

[Was military intelligence a kind of] different animal?

Military intelligence has a different objective. Their objective, their goal is to get information to the commander on the battlefield. And in this case, it was to get information to the commander of the CJTF-7 in an effort to get this situation in Iraq under control -- this growing insurgency, Saddam still on the loose, widely suspected that he was orchestrating all of this insurgent activity.

The military police, on the other hand, are trained, and were trying to take care of prisoners, get them medical attention if necessary, treat them fairly and humanely, in compliance with Geneva Conventions. And so the way that it's supposed to work, by doctrine, is that interrogators will come and request a particular prisoner, and then take them out to a separate interrogation facility to do their thing, and never the two shall mix.

The military police know that when they sign that individual out, he's in good health. He has no signs of bruising or anything else, and has not eaten for 24 hours or has eaten too much in 24 hours -- whatever the circumstances might be, and they put that in a log. [They then] turn the prisoner over to an interrogation team, who then remove them to an interrogation facility. And whatever goes on in an interrogation facility goes on in an interrogation facility. They come back, and they turn the same prisoner over to the military police personnel, who make any notes if there's any signs of bruising or beatings or anything. But they do a complete shakedown and make sure that the person hasn't picked up a weapon or an implement en route, and they put him back in the cell.

[Before Gen. Miller's visit] did that line get blurred? Was there pressure from Pappas, [Gen. Barbara] Fast and others to have the MPs do things, soften people up, segregate them, deal with them in a separate way?

There was no pressure. There was no blurring of the lines. I looked at the logbooks when I went out to these different facilities. And remember that most of our prisoners at Abu Ghraib were being held in these outside compounds. So one prisoner would not be taken out, beaten up and returned that way, and the whole compound not get excited about it.

These events and the photographs occurred exclusively in Cellblock 1A, and some in 1B. But the majority of it took place in Cellblock 1A. And that was under the control of Col. Pappas and the military intelligence interrogators from the beginning of September, in the course of Miller's visit. …

If Sanchez is acting the way Sanchez is acting, finger in the chest of Pappas, pushing hard, … how much pressure do you figure is coming his way from [the Pentagon] at that time?

Oh, absolutely they were. Because they were having these video teleconferences from the Pentagon with General Sanchez.

Tell me about this.

And I never sat in on one of them. But afterwards, he would be particularly ornery. And, you know, people that did sit in on the conferences said that Gen. Sanchez was getting beat up by Rumsfeld, or he didn't have correct answers. They were becoming very impatient. And he was using Col. Pappas' name a lot in those video teleconferences, so.

He, Sanchez.

He being Sanchez. … They'd have these video teleconferences where they would call and ask, you know, "What are the interrogations producing?" Because the mindset apparently at that time -- and it was prevalent down at Coalition Provisional Authority and over at the headquarters -- the mindset was that these insurgents were increasing. The insurgency was increasing in activity because Saddam was still influencing them. And even they expected with the demise of Uday and Qusay and the henchmen, that it would start to unfold, that, you know, it would start to collapse.

That didn't happen. In fact, it got worse. So there must have been legitimacy to this prevailing attitude that you get Saddam, and this war is now going to start to turn in our favor. It was ridiculous because clearly some of the people that were learning how to shoot an RPG effectively didn't have anything to do with the Fedayeen.

And unfortunately, some of those people would be arrested and brought in. But in the initial interview, they were determined to be just simple Iraqi criminals. So they would be turned over to the Iraqi criminal element compound. It appeared that the military interrogation teams, as good as they are, as good as they were, they were not prepared or trained to determine who was an insurgent or who was a guerrilla, or who was a foreign fighter. They could not distinguish the small differences between a Syrian or a Yemeni or a Saudi and an Iraqi. No fault of their own -- people that are there now still can't do that. And of course the insurgency has become more effective than ever. …

What did Sanchez say he was [bringing in Gen. Miller] for?

He never told me. But his operations officer told me that this team was coming to assist with the interrogation operations. And I said, "Hey, if it means that they're going to be able to release more of these security detainees, fine with me." But he said, "Well, apparently, they're very successful down at Guantanamo Bay." And I said, "Yes sir. He has over 800 MPs to guard 600 prisoners down there, so our numbers are a little bit different. We have 8,000 prisoners, and we have 380 MPs to guard them." So he goes: "Well, you make a good point. Make sure you tell him that." ...

[What happened at your first meeting with him?]

… It was during that meeting that he used the expression that he was going to "Gitmoize" the operation. And military intelligence, they were all listening and pay attention and taking notes. And occasionally, I'd look across the room, and I'd see somebody roll their eyes or, you know, look down at their notepad.

Because I was thinking, he's going to learn in the next couple of hours that Iraq is not like Guantanamo Bay. We have people shooting at us here. We are not in full control of Abu Ghraib or anywhere else in this country yet. He's going to learn that very quickly. But this is not the kind of person that you can tell that to. He's sure of everything, and he clearly has all the answers.

One of the military interrogators said: "If we could do something quickly -- because we think we're doing what we know how to do -- our belief is that some of the people don't have any information, so putting them back in the box to get more information is fruitless. What would you recommend that we do to enhance our efforts immediately? Is there anything you could recommend -- you know … a fix, quick fix?"

And he said: "Well, there are no quick fixes, but I can tell you this. Just in talking to Gen. Fast, your boss, you're too nice to the prisoners. They don't know that you're in charge. And you have to be tough with them. Down at Guantanamo Bay, we are in charge from the minute the prisoner is captured and turned over to us, and they know that we're in charge. They never move anywhere without belly chains and leg irons and hand irons. They are given an orange jumpsuit. The rules that they follow are black and white, and they are escorted everywhere they go by two military police soldiers."

My hand refused to stay down, and I said: "Sir, our circumstances here in Iraq are different. You have 800 military police personnel to guard 650 prisoners [at Guantanamo], and we have 380 military police personnel to guard more than 4,000."

And he said: "You can take control in an easy way, and this is the way you do it, that they know that you're in charge. Everything that they earn" -- and he used that expression at that time. "You have to treat the prisoners like dogs. If you treat them, or if they believe that they're any different than dogs, you have effectively lost control of your interrogation from the very start. So they have to earn everything they get. And it works.

"This is what we do down at Guantanamo Bay. They come in; they're escorted everywhere; they're treated very aggressively. They have an orange jumpsuit. And they don't like those orange jumpsuits, because they see people in white jumpsuits and different-colored jumpsuits, and they want to be in that category. But they have to earn it. And if they're cooperative, and if they follow the rules, the first thing that they can earn is a white jumpsuit or a two-piece garment. ... It's actually a class structure." ...

I said: "Sir, we don't have enough money and enough funding for one jumpsuit alone, let alone exchanging colors of jumpsuits. We don't have hand irons and leg irons and belly chains. They're not moved that way. We don't have the ability to do those things you're doing down in Guantanamo Bay."

And he completely waved me off. He said, "It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter." He said, "My budget is $125 million a year at Guantanamo Bay, and I'm going to give Pappas all the financial resources he needs to make this happen."

I'm thinking, this is one Army, right? We can't [find] $25 to buy soap for prisoners in a prison in Baghdad, and he's going to give them $125 million to buy leg irons and hand irons and different-colored jumpsuits? Have at it, you know?

So I was pretty much turning him off to this idea. I believed, very naively, that he was going to discover in the course of his assistance visit that life was different in Iraq. And you could not turn a switch and get supplies and everything else delivered. But you want to do this? You want to Gitmoize the operation? Go forth and do great things. ...

But only one time during the course of the 10-day visit did I see Gen. Miller. He had visited a couple of our facilities. He went over to where the deck of cards were being held. I learned from Gen. Miller afterwards, when he was getting ready to go down and brief Gen. Sanchez, that he'd visited those facilities to determine which one would be the best location to centralize interrogation operations. So he made the determination that he wanted Abu Ghraib.

How does he tell you that?

... The day that he was getting ready to go down to brief Gen. Sanchez, he summoned me and told my operations officer that I couldn't bring a whole crew. I could bring my command sergeant major to talk about troop issues, and I could bring the operations officer. But he wanted to brief me from the visit, and he was going down to talk to Gen. Sanchez about his decisions.

So we go over to the briefing, and he's got his whole team assembled on one side of the conference table, about 20 of them. He's in the middle, and directly opposite from him, there were three places there for me, my operations officer and my command sergeant major. So we sit down, and I remember saying to my major, "We're kind of outnumbered here."

So he says: "OK, we've been here for 10 days, and we've seen a lot, a lot. And I want you to give me Abu Ghraib."

Just like that?

Just like that. I said to him: "Sir, Abu Ghraib is not mine to give you. It doesn't belong to me." So he says, "OK, everybody out, out." And simultaneously, his whole team stood up on that side of the table and left, as if it was planned. My guys, on the other hand, are sitting there looking at me. And I said, "Go on." And the command sergeant major says, "Ma'am?" And I said, "Just wait outside the door." …

I spoke up first. I said: "Look, sir, I don't know who told you I was going to be difficult. I'm not being difficult. Abu Ghraib is not mine to give you. It belongs to Ambassador Bremer. It belongs to the Coalition Provisional Authority. We're just doing detention operations out there." I started to [tell him] about the interim facility, and he said, "I don't care." He said, "Rick Sanchez. Rick Sanchez said I could have any facility I wanted, and I want Abu Ghraib." He said to me, "We can do this my way, or we can do this the hard way."

I wanted to say to him: "You know, we're on the same team here. What do you mean, the hard way?" I said: "Sir, if Ambassador Bremer says to turn Abu Ghraib over to you for interrogation operations, I'm not going to stand in the way. But it is not my facility. I don't have the authority to give it to you." And he didn't care. He clearly had the authority to take and use whatever facility he so chose to centralize interrogation operations.

He said he was going to use the MPs out there. They were going to know how to assist the interrogators. I said: "Sir, they're not trained to do interrogations. As I told you in your in brief, they don't move prisoners with leg irons." He said, "It's going to change." He said, "I'm leaving training materials with the commander, and we're going to change the nature of interrogation out at Abu Ghraib." … They wanted to blur the lines and then make them disappear altogether. …

He said that he had already started on this plan to bring these MILVANs [military-owned containers for transporting cargo] in to make individual cells out at Abu Ghraib. Now I'm thinking, we've got several thousand prisoners out there. How are you going to bring in all of these MILVANs, and where are they coming from? We couldn't even get building materials safely up from the port at Um Qasr, and he's going to bring in thousands of these MILVANs to build prison cells? …

I thought, they're going to somehow turn this around to us and say: "Well, it's your responsibility. They're prison cells, so find a way to make this work." Well, now all of a sudden, we're what, supposed to be a transportation brigade? So all of those fears were being processed through my mind. But it was this complete unawareness of what the obstacles were in Iraq, throughout Iraq -- not of my making, not of my doing, and I certainly knew that I didn't have the resources to fix it either. ...

After Miller has left, is Sanchez going easier on Pappas?

No, he is not. And in fact, Gen. Fast is now a far more frequent visitor out to Abu Ghraib and spending a lot of time with Col. Pappas and the interrogation teams. And there's more people arriving. Every day, there's more people arriving out at Abu Ghraib to be interrogators, and they either had experience in Afghanistan or down at Guantanamo Bay. Many of them were personally selected by Gen. Miller and sent to Iraq. ... Many of them were contractors.

I have to tell you that, at the time, number one, that wasn't my lane, so I wasn't paying attention. But I saw a lot more civilians. I thought they were all translators arriving out at Abu Ghraib, because my experience with the contractors up until that point was that they were all translators. ...

The number of security detainees coming into Abu Ghraib was growing enormously large. We were still working on transferring our Iraqi criminals out to other facilities, and we were very successful with that. So there was more interrogation teams, more resources showing up at Abu Ghraib, and they were still not getting the results from any of the interrogations.

Largely, in these outside compounds that were built for 500 people, by October and November, some of those compounds were over 500 people. So that's the number that were being held out there. Mortar fire as becoming more accurate, coming more often.

Many of my units at that time were leaving in November and December. So I had to bring a company up from another facility. They had been working with the multinationals down near Najaf. And that particular unit was already under strength. They were down to about 70 percent personnel strength, but it was the only company we had that had any kind of longevity left in the theater. They would not be due to rotate back to the United States until March, or at the latest April of 2004. …

So they come up to replace a 160-[person] military police company. They send about 60 soldiers up to replace this company. Their briefing is, Cellblock 1A and [1]B is largely under the control of the military intelligence, and it's people that are higher value or might have higher value in the information that they have. The outside compounds are pretty much under control, but they're overcrowded. The brigade is working on getting the release procedures stepped up. It's the best we can do.

So the experienced company that has far more personnel resources, they rotate home, and in comes the 372nd Military Police Company, at 50 percent strength at best, and not very happy because they know they're moving into a far more dangerous location as opposed to where they were.

Who's in that group?

At the time that this unit came up and got their briefing, Staff Sgt. [Ivan L. "Chip"] Frederick was in that group. [Pfc.] Lynndie England was in that group, [Spc. Megan] Ambuhl, [Sgt.] Javal Davis, all of the players photographed in those photographs that were released. ...

Sgt. [Charles] Graner was not in the original group that came up to Abu Ghraib. He in fact a week later was summoned up to Abu Ghraib away from his personnel security mission that he was doing for the multinationals, and brought up to Abu Ghraib specifically to work on the night shift in Cellblock 1A and [1]B. …

[What happened with this company? Was it] the "midnight shift at animal house"?

Well, I think that that was the spin that was put on what happened to cause these photographs to be taken. I believe that they were instructed by some of the other people in those photographs, or by people outside of the window of the photographs. I don't know who it would have been, but there's some likely possibilities.

People that were under tremendous pressure to get more actionable intelligence, then through the chain of command might give instructions to do whatever you need to do to get that information. It's open to interpretation: What do you mean by "do whatever we need to do"?

Now, you have some contractors, some civilians who are not under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, who have been sent there specifically to do interrogation work with great liberties to get more actionable intelligence, some of them sent specifically, identified and sent specifically by Gen. Miller because of their success in other locations.

So they have inflated egos perhaps, and now they're facing the night shift of these prisoners with suspected more information than what they're sharing. And all the gloves come off. "Do whatever we need to do." So somebody, being one of these very seasoned contract interrogators, comes up with an idea that that when we bring a detainee in who's going to be subjected to interrogation, we have to spend six, eight hours working through this and trying to get to the starting point.

A photograph would be very helpful. Sit this individual down in the interrogation room. First picture that pops up on the computer, a laptop computer, or projected on a wall is this pyramid of naked prisoners. And you say: "Maybe you'll recognize somebody in here. Start talking, or tomorrow night you're on the bottom of the pile." You cut to the chase. And in interrogation, it saves valuable hours, valuable effort. And you get what you want, maybe anyway.

So, well, we need some pictures taken first. You take a personality similar to a Graner, and you say: "You know, you guys have done a great job up to this point. Sleep deprivation has worked, and they're really talking now. But we need you to do something else." And now you have photographs. Now, it takes an extraordinary mistake to put yourself in a photograph with these acts being set up or conducted.

But I can tell you that these soldiers, these MPs -- Lynndie England was not even an MP, nor was one of the other soldiers. He was a mechanic. OK, they were brought over there specifically to work with these, setting up these photographs and everything. Lynndie England might have been over there for a variety of reasons, but they were brought over there specifically that night. And I know, with no doubt, that these soldiers didn't wake up that morning and say: "Hey, let's go screw with some prisoners tonight. Let's take some pictures. Let's violate everything we know to be decent and correct and fair." Lynndie England surely did not show up in Iraq with a dog collar and a dog leash.

So those items either came from previous experience at other locations with interrogations, or other people with bizarre ideas brought those pieces of equipment independent of any instructions. But somebody who understood what humiliation is to an Arab person designed these techniques. And military police personnel do not study the Arab mind. But my guess is that interrogators should or do; at least they know more, maybe from previous experience or otherwise. But somebody instructed this group of people on the night shift to do these things, and if they made them believe that it would take them out of Abu Ghraib or out of Iraq a day, even one day sooner than what the plan was, that would be incentive enough to get them to do it. I can't tell you specifically, because even though I've been held accountable for all of those soldiers' behavior, I never had the chance to speak to any one of them from when those pictures first surfaced. ...

In November … the prison, by order, was transferred from control of the military police brigade to the military intelligence brigade.

So it was taken from you?

Yes, it was. And again, no discussion, no "Sit down; this is how it's going to change; this is why we're doing it." None whatsoever. I was not even in Baghdad when that decision was made. That decision was made by Gen. Fast. Gen. Fast went to the operations section of the headquarters. She was a staff officer. She wasn't a commander. No discussion with either Col. Pappas or myself.

And when the prison, by official order, was transferred under the control of the military intelligence brigade, ... it blurred the lines completely. You have a military intelligence commander in charge of all the operations, including detention, out at Abu Ghraib. And not only did he not have any idea about interrogations before he was placed in the middle of it, but he certainly had no idea whatsoever of detention operations or how military police personnel think. ...

The effect of this on a soldier, on an MP, any of them, is what?

… They fall back to their basic chain of command. A solider will talk to a squad leader, who will talk to a platoon sergeant, who will talk to the first sergeant, who will talk to the battalion commander, and on and on and on. Some of those people were missing. They didn't have a squad leader, or they didn't have a platoon sergeant. Or the platoon sergeant was being split into a million different places out there at Col. Pappas' instruction and being used in a variety of ways. So soldiers are trying to manage, and they're designing the rules that they're going to follow as they're following them -- whatever works. ...

We could not travel after dark, so I was not allowed to go out to Abu Ghraib or any other facility after dark. Col. Pappas was living out at Abu Ghraib at the time. He relocated out there at the instructions of Gen. Miller. So you have a colonel on site who is walking around, but likely knows anyway what's going on with interrogations. …

So maybe there was a plan to make some of the photographs, but they didn't want to get Col. Pappas involved or implicated or whatever. I don't know that from Col. Pappas, and I certainly don't know that from any of the people that were holding the cameras. But it was allegedly or apparently by design, a specific night, specific hours, when these kind of activities would be conducted, because there was no chance at all of Gen. Karpinski dropping in, because they knew that there were restrictions placed on travel after the hours of darkness. ...

When do you discover [what was really going on at Abu Ghraib]?

Sadly ... I didn't find out that anything was awry or amiss at Abu Ghraib until the 12th of January. I was at our other location, near the Iranian border, and I came back from a meeting with the leaders of that organization, and it was very close to midnight. But I made a habit out of checking my classified e-mail traffic, and I opened it up, and there was an e-mail in there from the commander of the Criminal Investigation Division [CID], and he was colonel. And the e-mail said, "Ma'am, just wanted to let you know I'm going in to brief the CG [Commanding General] " -- meaning Sanchez -- "on the progress of the investigation out at Abu Ghraib. This involves the allegations of detainee abuse and the photographs."

That was the first I heard of it. I didn't hear about it from Gen. Sanchez, the person who was going to accuse me of being irresponsible in the future. I didn't hear about it from Gen. Fast; I didn't hear about it from Col. Pappas; I didn't hear it about it from my battalion commander. Nobody in my brigade, in the operations center, knew anything about this ongoing investigation. So at daybreak the next day, we were on our way to Abu Ghraib to get some details or background. "What investigation? What ongoing? What photographs?"

What happened? Did you get a pit in your stomach? Your heart leaped to your throat?

Yes. I said, "This is what happens," in my mind, and I even said it out loud in so many words to my operations officer. ..."This is unbelievable. This is what happens when you transfer a prison under the control of people who have a different goal in mind." That was what I thought.

What was the goal?

The goal for the military intelligence people is to get information that will save soldiers and units from further attacks. And they don't really care about humane treatment of prisoners. ... They looked at the MPs to handle the medical, the food, the showers, the logistics of the operation. Were not interested in it at all. Again, it was a second-class priority, a third-class priority. ...

[How did the constant pressure to produce more intelligence affect the] company of MPs in 1A and 1B?

... In March they were scheduled to rotate back home to begin their redeployment from Kuwait. And they got down to Kuwait, and they were told that they weren't going anywhere, that they had been extended for 120 days. And those soldiers believed that they were going to be sent back up to Abu Ghraib, that they were going to be housed in a separate building on the grounds of Abu Ghraib to continue this detention mission, and that by design there was going to be a mortar attack, and they were all going to be killed, so all of the evidence of this investigation was going to be conveniently removed.

When they got notice of that extension, that's when those disks with the photographs made their way back to the United States and then found their way into the media channels. But I remember specifically sitting there at night, in January, reading that e-mail on the computer. And it was like a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach, saying, "This has gone terribly wrong." And [I] imagined that they had taken some pictures of prisoners behind the wire or behind the cell doors. Didn't have the details in that e-mail about what the photographs were all about, and never heard anything about the photographs until I saw them on the 23rd of January.

And I was absolutely shocked. People said, "Well, couldn't you imagine?" No, I couldn't imagine that the MPs were participating in any of this, that they -- I mean, I was just dumbfounded. ... And I only saw about a dozen of the photographs. But my office was spinning, I felt like the walls were closing in on me. It was unbelievable. And then the CID commander said to me, "And I'm supposed to tell you to go and see Gen. Sanchez after you see the photographs."

So I thought, you know, this is not going to be fun. And I was right. But it wasn't nearly what I expected from him, either. He hardly exchanged one word with me. ...

Somehow it became OK to make soldiers, PFCs at the specialist level, my responsibility. The rest of the chain of command that's a time-honored tradition of the Army goes away. I am held accountable for soldiers that I've never had a chance to exchange one word with or find out from them themselves what happened. And in fact was told by the JAG [judge advocate general] officer sitting in that room that night that I wasn't allowed to speak to them because they weren't under my control.

… I come into [Gen. Sanchez's] office and he's sitting on one side of the table, and I sit down at the other side, and he puts his hand on top of a piece of paper and turns it like this and pushes it at me. He doesn't even discuss it with me. And he is saying that the ongoing investigation has revealed that soldiers are misbehaving, but he's already removed them from their positions out there, and they're under his control at Camp Victory. Of the individuals that he mentions in the letter, he wants me to do an assessment of their leadership abilities and turn that report over to his deputy, Gen. Wodjakowski, the next day, within 24 hours. And he is admonishing me to take control of my brigade -- which is, by the way, spread all over the entire country of Iraq at 17 different prison facilities. …

Did you know you were going to get tagged right at that moment?

No, because I still, unfortunately, had this inherent trust in the system; that fine, do the investigation, and it's going to open up, and you're going to find out that of those 32 boots [in the photographs], there were contractors, there was military intelligence, that people may have known about this, but certainly not me, and the investigation is going to show that, because I believed at that time that the investigation was under the control of the Criminal Investigation Division, who was very thorough, and let the chips roll where they may. ...

Did you have any idea how big this would all play in the United States?

... I left Kuwait around the middle of April 2004, the 10th or the 11th or something like that. And I did so after a meeting with Gen. [David D.] McKiernan, when he said to me, "There was mistakes made, sure, but they weren't necessarily your mistakes. ... I would be very careful about discussing it until the investigation is completed, especially with those soldiers that you're so concerned with."

He said, "Look, there's a great future for Janis Karpinski in the Army Reserves." And he said, "Travel safe," and "There's a lot of lessons to be learned from this, and you can share that with other people."

When did you know that the administration's response was that it was the midnight shift at the animal house, that it was a bunch of rogue soldiers, enlisted people, that it was Col. Pappas and you and really never going to be [higher], at least in the short term? When did that dawn on you?

When I left Fort Benning [in Georgia] -- I had to go there to complete my demobilization process. And I was on leave, because I had accumulated leave in the time that I was on active duty. And I returned to my home in South Carolina. And it was 10:00 at night I guess. I get a phone call from my sister in New Jersey, and she says, "Do you have on 60 Minutes?" I said, "No, I don't watch the show." She said, "Turn it on." I said, "No, I don't watch it." She said, "Turn it on; you're on it."

And I turned it on, and here they were, talking, showing some of the photographs. And the only person's name that they mentioned in conjunction with those photographs was mine: "These soldiers belong to a company under the control of Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, a reservist from" wherever. And I remember sitting in the dark, watching that TV set, saying, "You have got to be kidding."

They did this. It was by design. They waited until I was back in the States, before I had even an inkling of going to the press to talk about any of this. ...

What happened to you? What did they do to you?

Oh, they just blamed me for everything -- silenced me, or attempted to silence me. Accused me of shoplifting in October of 2002 and used that as the reason to vacate my promotion to brigadier general, and have made me out to be a worthless, incapable leader. At the very beginning they were trying to make it appear like I had somehow crawled out from the back of a cave and said, "Make me a general, and I'll go to Iraq and fight this war." Baloney. I earned my promotions. I earned my promotions because I took the toughest jobs and was completely dedicated to the purpose of the Army Reserves and to the Army. And my soldiers throughout my career know that. I never had a bad day, ever, that involved a soldier.

And they can do whatever they want. They could make it appear any way they want. I will not be silenced, and I will continue to tell the truth. And I will continue to ask how they can continue to blame seven rogue soldiers on the night shift, when there is the preponderance of hard information from a variety of sources [that] says otherwise.