OCTOBER 2007

The General's Report
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker

25 June 2007 Issue

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

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."

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller (left); Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone

Photos by AP/Wide World

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." ?
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