New Book Says Bush Officials Were Told of Detainee Abuse (NYT)

Senior military and national security officials in the Bush administration were repeatedly warned by subordinates in 2002 and 2003 that prisoners in military custody were being abused, according to a new book by a prominent journalist.

Seymour M. Hersh, a writer for The New Yorker who earlier this year was among the first to disclose details of the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, makes the charges in his book "Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" (HarperCollins), which is being released Monday. The book draws on the articles he has written about the campaign against terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Hersh asserts that a Central Intelligence Agency analyst who visited the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the late summer of 2002 filed a report of abuses there that drew the attention of Gen. John A. Gordon, a deputy to Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser. ..

Where will these power-wielding assholes turn?

When I consider looking back,...ten years from now,...at all the "red flag" publications that have been produced in a quaint two years of my existence,...my imagination changes every single day.

Isn't that a felony?

Lying is the official policy of this weevil-infested administration.

term that Rumsfeld avoids like the plague PRISONER TORTURE?

They probably didn't, however, at any time, TORTURE them, if we are to trust Rumsfeld.

:kick:

Bush, Cheney, Condi, Rummy and a few others will need a ride.

has Bush scared the sheeple so much that they'll actually think more highly of Bush for this? "Well, Bush is willing to torture people to keep people in Frog's Ass, Missouri safe from terra. He gets my vote."

Ugh.

Both approved. Bush would have known had he been paying attention. Approved anyway.

She wouldn't answer the question directly but kept repeated the line that they did what they were told was within the rules of the Geneva Accords. Of course, Blitzer never ventured to ask the obvious question: "Did you consider torture permissible under the Geneva Accords?"

:kick:

Though I probably won't be able to read it until January (damn grad school). This is the sort of information that the sheeple need to know.

Rumsfeld's dirty war on terror

In an explosive extract from his new book, Seymour Hersh reveals how, in a fateful decision that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the US defence secretary gave the green light to a secret unit authorised to torture terrorist suspects
Read part two

Monday September 13, 2004
The Guardian

In the late summer of 2002, a CIA analyst made a quiet visit to the detention centre at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where an estimated 600 prisoners were being held, many, at first, in steel-mesh cages that provided little protection from the brutally hot sun. Most had been captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan during the campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaida.

The Bush administration had determined, however, that they were not prisoners of war but "enemy combatants", and that their stay at Guantánamo could be indefinite, as teams of CIA, FBI, and military interrogators sought to prise intelligence from them. In a series of secret memorandums written earlier in the year, lawyers for the White House, the Pentagon and the justice department had agreed that the prisoners had no rights under federal law or the Geneva convention. President Bush endorsed the finding, while declaring that the al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were nevertheless to be treated in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva convention - as long as such treatment was also "consistent with military necessity".

But the interrogations at Guantánamo were a bust. Very little useful intelligence had been gathered, while prisoners from around the world continued to flow into the base, and the facility constantly expanded. The CIA analyst had been sent there to find out what was going wrong. He was fluent in Arabic and familiar with the Islamic world. He was held in high respect within the agency, and was capable of reporting directly, if he chose, to George Tenet, the CIA director. The analyst did more than just visit and inspect. He interviewed at least 30 prisoners to find out who they were and how they ended up in Guantánamo. Some of his findings, he later confided to a former CIA colleague, were devastating.

"He came back convinced that we were committing war crimes in Guantánamo," the colleague told me. "Based on his sample, more than half the people there didn't belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces," including two captives, perhaps in their 80s, who were clearly suffering from dementia. "He thought what was going on was an outrage," the CIA colleague added. There was no rational system for determining who was important.

Two former administration officials who read the analyst's highly classified report told me that its message was grim. According to a former White House official, the analyst's disturbing conclusion was that "if we captured some people who weren't terrorists when we got them, they are now".

(much more)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1303294,00.html

WHY hasn't this come out yet - and will it ever? Washington Post, New Yorker Magazine sitting on these photos and videos?? Could this story be the Dems' October surprise?

:shrug: