Hersh: Rumsfeld backed harsh tactics

From Sunday's New York Times:

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and one of his top aides authorized the expansion of a secret program that permitted harsh interrogations of detained members of Al Qaeda to be used against prisoners in Iraq, including detainees at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, according to an article in The New Yorker Magazine.

The article, by Seymour M. Hersh, reports that Mr. Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, approved the use of the tougher interrogation techniques in Iraq in 2003 in an effort to extract better information from Iraqi prisoners to counter the growing insurgency threat in the country.

Here's a link to the New Yorker article posted today (and in the May 24 print edition): The Gray Zone. Did secret Pentagon decisions trigger the Abu Ghraib scandal?

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

And later in the piece:

“This shit has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know the rules, that’s another.”

In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.” The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.

Amazing revelations. How is it that Hersh is almost the only reporter with well-placed sources inside the Pentagon?

Personal postage

Here's an idea for your inner yuppie, from Peter Suciu in the May 17 Newsweek: Put your image on a U.S. stamp.

Even in our increasingly high-tech age, the lowly postage stamp still serves a crucial role. So if you'd like to make your letter stand out through rain, sleet, snow and dark of night, a little personalization might do the trick. Avery Creative Postage Labels will combine your photos with a U.S. Postage Service stamp into a custom self-adhesive postage label that is ready for your envelope.

At the company's Web site, you simply upload and attach a digital photo to a variety of current stamp designs, including American Flag, Love, Candy Hearts and Garden Bouquet, with more designs planned for the future.

The photos you submit must meet with postage regulations, so no obscene or offensive images will be accepted. A sheet of 20 Creative Postage Labels with 37-cent stamps will cost you about $20, plus $2.95 for shipping. Orders are typically processed and shipped within seven to 10 days through, you guessed it, the U.S. Postal Service.

A photo accompanying the item in Newsweek shows what looks like a single long stamp, with your image on the left half and a traditional stamp image on the right. Fun, if a bit pricey.