September 14, 2004

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  Bush team 'knew of abuse' at Guantánamo
  
  Oliver Burkeman in Washington
  Monday September 13, 2004
  The Guardian
  
  Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantánamo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation.

  
  

  The investigation, by the veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, quotes one former marine at the camp recalling sessions in which guards would "fuck with [detainees] as much as we could" by inflicting pain on them.
  

  The Bush administration repeatedly assured critics that inmates were granted recreation periods, but one Pentagon adviser told Hersh how, for some prisoners, they consisted of being left in straitjackets in intense sunlight with hoods over their heads.
  

  Hersh provides details of how President George Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate "high-value" suspects - considered by many to be in defiance of international law - an officially "unacknowledged" programme that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantánamo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  

  
  

  A CIA analyst visited Guantánamo in summer 2002 and returned "convinced that we were committing war crimes" and that "more than half the people there didn't belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces," a CIA source told Hersh.

  
  

  The analyst submitted a report to General John Gordon, an aide to Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush's national security adviser.
  

  Ms Rice saw the document by autumn of the same year, and called a high-level meeting at which she asked Mr Rumsfeld, to deal with the problem.
  

  But after he vowed to act, "the Pentagon went into a full-court stall", a former White House official is quoted as saying.
  

     
  

  A senior intelligence official told Hersh: "I was told [by FBI agents] that the military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them and making them stand until they got hypothermia."
  

  The secret "special access programme" facilitating much of the mistreatment of prisoners, widely held to have contravened the Geneva convention, was established following a direct order from the president.
  

  Hersh reports that a secret document signed by Mr Bush in February 2002 stated: "I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world."
  

  Hersh's book reports that an army officer communicated concerns over abuses at Abu Ghraib both to General John Abizaid, the US central command (Centcom) chief at the time.
  

   
   
  

  The officer told Hersh: "I said there are systematic abuses going on in the prisons. Abizaid didn't say a thing. He looked at me - beyond me, as if to say, 'Move on. I don't want to touch this.'"
  

  The administration is being accused of concealing up to 100 "ghost detainees" from the Red Cross, which must be granted access to prisoners of war and other detainees under the Geneva convention.
  

  Mr Rumsfeld told reporters on Friday he had approved the use of harsh interrogation measures, but that they had only been meant for Guantánamo.
  

  

  
  

   Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, who was responsible for military jails in Iraq, meets with Donald Rumsfeld. 

  
  

   

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