The Hindu : International : `Rumsfeld knew of prisoner abuse'

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Tuesday, Sep 14, 2004

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International

`Rumsfeld knew of prisoner abuse'

By Oliver Burkeman

WASHINGTON, SEPT. 13. Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantanamo Bay reached the highest levels of the George W. Bush's administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defence Secretary, chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation published exclusively in the Guardian today.

One Pentagon adviser told the veteran journalist, Seymour Hersh, how some prisoners were left in straitjackets in intense sunlight with hoods over their heads.

Revelations

Mr. Hersh provides details of how the U.S. President approved 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 Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Mr. Hersh, who broke the story of the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War, makes his revelations in a new book, "Chain of Command".

A CIA analyst visited Guantanamo 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 Mr. 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. ``Why didn't Condi do more? She made the same mistake I made. She got the Secretary of Defence to say he's going to take care of it.''

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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