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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
For Tauscher, the scandal is a case of déjà vu. In 2002 and 2003, during the feverish run-up to war with Iraq, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, frustrated with the analysis it was receiving from the CIA about the level of threat posed by Saddam Hussein, took the extraordinary step of setting up a secretive, in-house intelligence shop, staffed by handpicked hawks, to help maneuver stories that Iraq was an imminent "weapons of mass destruction"-level threat around the normal intelligence-vetting process. That effort was a success in providing the impetus that the Bush administration used to drive the country into war, but those stories have since been revealed as disinformation, much of it originating with neoconservative favorite Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi who boasted about being a "hero in error."
Fast-forward to the summer of 2003. Frustrated with the lack of good intelligence about the absent WMDs and the simmering internal Iraqi resistance, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon reportedly took the extraordinary step of allowing Iraq's largest prison, Abu Ghraib, to be put under the command of military intelligence instead of the military police. The idea was to turn the detention center into an intelligence-gathering outfit and, contrary to longtime Army regulations, make M.P.'s an integral part of the interrogation process to "soften up" the prisoners.
"Do you see a pattern?" asks Tauscher, who raised concerns last year about the administration's top-down pressure to produce a certain kind of war intelligence. It was the same type of pressure that led Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who oversees the U.S. fighting force in Iraq, to hand over authority of Abu Ghraib to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade last Nov. 19. Then, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who at the time was running Camp X-Ray at Guantànamo Bay, where prisoners are detained indefinitely as unlawful "enemy combatants" outside the Geneva Convention, gave orders to "Gitmo-ize" the prison.
"Miller was sent to turn Abu Ghraib into an intelligence production center rather than a detention facility, and that's where the Geneva Convention stuff starts to get in the way of winning the war," Pike says. The obvious differences between the two prisons -- X-Ray holds those thought to have ties to al-Qaida -- seem to have been overlooked in an effort to uncover better intelligence. The International Red Cross, in fact, has reported that 70 to 90 percent of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib have been imprisoned there by mistake, simply rounded up in dragnets.
"The White House was frustrated by the lack of information being obtained from detainees and was screaming for intelligence about WMDs and insurgent leaders," says Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief. "Commanders were under pressure from Washington, and that translated into taking off the gloves."
