Newsweek has a similar story, which I assume is also being denied. (In their account, Bush, Rumsfiend and Ashcroft all signed off on the secret system for getting more information out of prisoners. Like you were thinking Bush didn't have any responsibility because he didn't know anything about it, huh?)
The Nation comments on the subject, recalling some contradictory (surprise!) statements from Undersecretary of Defense, Stephen Cambone between last November and his testimony before the Senate committee on prisoner abuse.
What may be more surprising than the revelations in Hersh's piece is the fact that leads to the Abu Ghraib skullduggery were hidden in plain sight--and that the Pentagon press corps all but ignored them. Though Cambone has been an exceptionally sub rosa figure in his position as DoD's intelligence chief, on November 21, 2003, he sat down for a rare on-record meeting over breakfast with the Defense Writers Group. Again in contrast to his May 11 comments, in which he cast himself as a benign bureaucrat largely out of the loop, his November comments offer a glimpse into the mechanics of how Cambone's office was assertively taking the lead in coordinating intelligence operations in Iraq.
...Though a few journalists elsewhere had raised concerns about the gray areas Defense Intelligence operations might be getting into--as well as Cambone's interest in bringing all uniformed Special Operations under his aegis--there were no follow-up questions, and Cambone's comments went virtually unreported.
...Having been much more right than not in his reporting on the current Administration, it's unlikely that Hersh's story is, as Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita quickly characterized it, "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error," since the neglected public utterances of Cambone not only track with Hersh's reporting but that of R. Jeffrey Smith in the Washington Post for May 16. (Cambone is prominent in Smith's story, succinctly titled "Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher." And he figures as well in a remarkable article for the May 24 edition of Newsweek by John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff, "The Roots of Torture," which not only points to Cambone's deep involvement in the intelligence-gathering apparatus in Iraq but demonstrates that the climate for the "stress and duress" interrogation techniques used at Abu Ghraib was "officially approved at the highest levels of the government" as part of a secret system "adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions." )
article
...Though a few journalists elsewhere had raised concerns about the gray areas Defense Intelligence operations might be getting into--as well as Cambone's interest in bringing all uniformed Special Operations under his aegis--there were no follow-up questions, and Cambone's comments went virtually unreported.
...Having been much more right than not in his reporting on the current Administration, it's unlikely that Hersh's story is, as Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita quickly characterized it, "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error," since the neglected public utterances of Cambone not only track with Hersh's reporting but that of R. Jeffrey Smith in the Washington Post for May 16. (Cambone is prominent in Smith's story, succinctly titled "Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher." And he figures as well in a remarkable article for the May 24 edition of Newsweek by John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff, "The Roots of Torture," which not only points to Cambone's deep involvement in the intelligence-gathering apparatus in Iraq but demonstrates that the climate for the "stress and duress" interrogation techniques used at Abu Ghraib was "officially approved at the highest levels of the government" as part of a secret system "adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions." )
I used to know a guy who was a parolee from a federal penetentiary (having served time in several jails and pens over the course of his lifetime). He told me that the standard criminal's response to any charge is denial ("deny, deny, deny"). Even, he said, if you get caught red-handed.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
Update 9:15pm: Billmon has a post from Jordan, where he's attending the World Economic Forum. He says Colin Powell is there, and someone apparently asked him about the New Yorker article. Powell, he says, "punted".
His discription sounds more like Powell didn't get off the bench.
Powell's press conference was delayed by a half an hour, so I had to run out after just 10 minutes or so to catch another session. I'm told that he was indeed asked about Hersh's article, and that he punted - declined to comment. I guess he really is fed up with covering for the "Gestapo."
