New Yorker says Rumsfeld Culpable

[mburbank]

This story is gthering momentum and is about to explode. Hersh's New Yorker article and a three part piece for Newsweek are now on line.

Here's an excerpt of an analysis article on Hersh's information from Slate.

"Read together, the magazine articles spell out an elaborate, all-inclusive chain of command in this scandal. Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone's deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaida suspects at Guantanamo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogations—from the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone else—but said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out. Meanwhile, those involved in the interrogations included officers from military intelligence, the CIA, and private contractors, as well as the mysterious figures from the Pentagon's secret operation."


Hersh is no slouch Journalist. This is devestating stuff, and my prediction is it's going to get huge quickly.

The basic gist is that Rummy authorized torture and speciffically sexual humiliation for Al Quaeda operatives. He thought it worked well, so when they couldn't find WMD in Iraq, and then the insurgency started, he decided to use it there. The Pentagon is in full throated denail. But Rummy has made many serious enemies in his own party as he attempted to gain control of military policy at all lvels and take over control of intelligence gathering from the CIA. is failure to plan realistically for the aftermath of overthrowing Sadaam hasn't won him any friends, nor has his dismissal of the State Department. Republicans in congress are less than pleased with this fiiasco as well, and party loyalty is stretched pretty thin just now.

Naldo asked a few months back if any of us could think of a single scenario that might cost W. the election. This might be that scenario. When I posted this story it was so low profile, no one even commented. My prediction is it is going to dominate headlines in the coming months.