Let’s connect a few dots in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Don’t miss this blockbuster story in USA Today. The paper obtained sworn testimony from Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the prison’s top officer overseeing interrogations. As you’d expect, much of it is self-serving–Jordan directly observed no abuse, his superiors and the CIA are the ones responsible for the torture, etc. As the paper notes, Major General Antonio Taguba heard Jordan’s assertions of ignorance and considered him a liar, as the testimony of others, in the words of Captain Donald Reese, pegs Jordan as “very involved with the interrogation process and the day-to-day activities that occurred.”
Jordan testified that he felt “pressure” from the White House and the Pentagon to “pull the intelligence out” of Abu Ghraib. White House staffers in September, he testified, implored him to get more information about the Iraqi insurgency. That plea was followed up by a November visit from Frances Fragos Townsend, the former NSC counterterrorism chief. (As my TNR colleague Ryan Lizza has noted, the post formerly held by Richard Clarke has become to the Bush administration what the drum throne was to Spinal Tap.) She confirmed the trip to USA Today, but stated, in the paper’s words, that “she did not discuss interrogation techniques or the need to obtain more information from detainees, and neither witnessed or heard about abuse of detainees.” And she called the idea that her Mesopotamian excursion pressured anyone at Abu Ghraib to get more information “ridiculous.”
So the top NSC counterterrorism official makes a visit to Iraq in November–which, you’ll recall, was the bloodiest month thus far for the U.S. occupation, so much so that it prompted the administration to shift its political strategy and schedule a transfer of sovereignty by June 30. She spent, by her reckoning, two hours at the Abu Ghraib prison, which the previous September the U.S. military had made “a central collection and interrogation point for anyone involved in attacks on coalition soldiers or Iraqi security forces,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal. She was shepherded around by the prison’s senior interrogation official, whom she recalls was “exceptionally polite.” And she says she spent 15 minutes in the actual “detention areas” of Abu Ghraib. Remember: She’s a White House terrorism official deep in the bowels of a military intelligence operation halfway around the world. And she didn’t discuss “the need to obtain more information from detainees”? Is there any other plausible explanation for her visit?
Now here come the dots. Abu Ghraib, by all accounts, was a pressure cooker for information, as that Journal piece referenced above clarifies. “The whole ball game over there is numbers,” a senior interrogator, Sergeant First Class Roger Brokaw, told the paper. “How many raids did you do last week? How many prisoners were arrested? How many interrogations were conducted? How many [intelligence] reports were written? It was incredibly frustrating.” Prisoners were spewing into the system at a pace of over 60 a day. Colonel Thomas Pappas, Jordan’s boss and commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, instituted a quota system for his interrogation teams. And there’s a serious reason why the pace is so hectic: Military commanders and their civilian superiors at the Pentagon were speaking, in the Journal‘s words, “pointedly about the need for more and better intelligence to crush the insurgency.” On November 19, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez placed Abu Ghraib under the “tactical control” of Pappas–even though his chief interrogation officer, Jordan, “lacked anything beyond a ‘passing familiarity’ with the rules and laws governing prisoner treatment,” as USA Today reports.
In late August, the commander of Guantanamo Bay, Major General Geoffrey Miller, made his famous trip to Abu Ghraib, “with my encouragement,” testified Pentagon intelligence czar Stephen A. Cambone, “to determine if the flow of information to [Sanchez’s command] and back to the subordinate commands could be improved.” The previous March, Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II had prepared a 100-page report explaining why Guantanamo interrogators were permitted to torture detainees “in order to respect the president’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign.” After receiving Miller’s briefing, the gloves apparently came off.
And Pappas wanted to make sure that his superiors knew that the operation was yielding results. He prepared documents about the prison based on what Miller had told him: one was titled, “Draft Update for the Secretary of Defense.” Now we know that the White House was flying senior NSC officials to Abu Ghraib for–well, they won’t say what for, but, to put it gently, there’s an interpretation that jumps out at me. Townsend arrived at Abu Ghraib at a moment of severe military challenge and subsequent political panic. It’s 100 percent understandable that the administration has an overwhelming need for actionable intelligence for use against the insurgents. Indeed, as Rumsfeld put it yesterday, “Certainly, that’s a fairly typical thing in a conflict.” What isn’t typical is that Rumsfeld and Townsend’s colleagues in the legal offices of the Bush administration had been arguing for nearly two years that under certain circumstances–circumstances they consider much like those in Iraq–torture is legal. What might she have been trying to find out at Abu Ghraib? What did she communicate back? And, Ms. Townsend, shouldn’t you answer these questions with your hand on a Bible?
