Excerpts from Newsweekâs lead article
Donald Rumsfeld likes to be in total control. He wants to know all the details, including the precise interrogation techniques used on enemy prisoners. Since 9/11 he has insisted on personally signing off on the harsher methods used to squeeze suspected terrorists held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The conservative hard-liners at the Department of Justice have given the secretary of Defense a lot of leeway. It does not violate the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, the lawyers have told Rumsfeld, to put prisoners in ever-more-painful "stress positions" or keep them standing for hours on end, to deprive them of sleep or strip them naked. According to one of Rumsfeldâs aides, the secretary has drawn the line at interrogating prisoners for more than 24 hours at a time or depriving them of light. ....
In Iraq, Rumsfeldâs aides say, the Defense secretary delegated responsibility for interrogation methods to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the ground commander of the occupying forces. ....
"If thereâs a failure, itâs me," said Rumsfeld to the senators. "These events occurred on my watch. As secretary of Defense I am accountable for them, and I take full responsibility." Rumsfeld offered his "deepest apology" to the victims of abuse and announced that they would be compensated. Would he resign? "Itâs a fair question," he replied to interrogators during a long, grim day of hearings before both the Senate and House Armed Services committees. "Since this firestorm started, I have given a good deal of thought to the question ... If I thought that I could not be effective, I certainly wouldnât want to serve. And I have to wrestle with that." ....
There is also growing evidence that Rumsfeld, or his top deputies and aides, did not want to hear the rumblings from such suspect organizations as the Red Cross and the State Department. ....
Rumsfeldâs strengths have always been his weaknesses. His imperious manner and biting questions, his obsession with control, his occasional slipperiness, have alienated a large number of senior military officers, particularly in the Army. When his aggressive approach to prisoner interrogation began to backfire, no brave officer rose up to brace him, warn him or rescue him from a situation that Rumsfeld now describes as a "catastrophe." His failure may or may not cost him his job. But the cost to Americaâs standing in the world (and not just the Arab world) is beyond calculation.
Rumsfeld is the most powerful secretary of Defense ever, but his method of consolidating control has proved to be a Faustian bargain. He gained authority over the uniformed military by getting control over what most senior officers care most deeply about: their careers. In a switch from the post-Vietnam era, when the military essentially ran the Pentagon and kept civilian leaders at armâs length, Rumsfeld decides who gets the good jobs. Three-star and sometimes even two-star generals receive their assignments directly from the secretary. And the message he conveys to them, says one well-connected retired senior officer, is clear: "Itâs my way or no way." ...
One senior government official describes a "moat" around the secretary of Defense that is guarded by "dragons." Chief among the dragons, when it comes to Iraq, is the No. 3 man at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Cerebral and somewhat pompous, Feith is extremely unpopular among top Army officers. They blame Feith, an ardent neoconservative, for hyping the Iraqi threat and then failing to properly prepare for the aftermath of the war. Nominally, at least, he is also responsible for the military-prison system in Iraq. "We set broad policy," says Feith. ....
In the days and weeks ahead, it is likely to emerge that the International Committee of the Red Cross, the State Department and the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Ambassador Paul Bremer in Baghdad, all warned of mounting problems in the prisonsânot just in Iraq but in Afghanistan as well. The Red Cross brought its complaints to the State Departmentâs attention "regularly and consistently over a lengthy period" dating all the way back to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, one top State Department official told NEWSWEEK. A 24-page report delivered to the Pentagon in February tells of systemic "use of ill treatment"âmost graphically, seven shootings of unarmed prisoners, sometimes from watchtowers. The abuses were "tantamount to torture," the report states.
Aides to Bremer say that last August the American proconsul became concerned about reports of detainees who were removed from their families and crowded into makeshift prisons in and around Baghdad, including Abu Ghraib, Saddamâs notorious dungeon and torture chamber downtown. Bremer began urging military and Bush-administration officials to improve the state of affairs. How hard he rang the bell is not clear. "The CPA always viewed this as a military issue," says one administration officialâi.e., someone elseâs responsibility. Likewise, by about November of last year, Secretary of State Colin Powell was bringing up prisoner abuse at meetings of top administration officials, including Rumsfeld. Powell has always been a strong supporter of adhering to the Geneva Conventions, the international accords that safeguard the rights of captured soldiers and civilian detainees in time of war. But it does not appear, from what is known thus far, that Powell was very urgent or vocal about his warnings. Nor does it seem that national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, whose job is to coordinate policy among agencies, swung into action in any forceful way.
In January came the first reports of the grotesque humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A whistle-blowerâa soldier with a sense of decencyâslid a computer disk with some hair-raising pictures under an investigatorâs door. The military publicly announced that it was launching an investigation. With the usual can-do attitude, the report up the chain to the secretary of Defense was situation-under-control. Rumsfeld did not ask to see the pictures.
For a forward-leaning detail man, Rumsfeld was strangely passive. It does not seem to have occurred to him that the photos could be devastating. Last week he protested that he could not very well have reached down into the investigation and asked to see the evidence. Since he might have to rule on the fates of defendants facing courts-martial, Rumsfeld and his aides could not be seen prejudging the case or influencing it in any way. Rumsfeld, who normally mocks lawyers as worrywart bureaucrats and nitpickers, was demonstrating unusual legal fastidiousness. ....
It is also possible that Rumsfeld did not want to know too much. In his public statements he has consistently said that prisoners would be protected by the Geneva Conventions or (for so-called illegal combatants) treated in the spirit of those standards. But he had to suspect that behind bars and out of sight the going would get rough, however careful he was about signing off on particular interrogation techniques. The fact that at least 25 prisoners have died in U.S. custody since 9/11 was a pretty strong hint that something was going wrong.
And yet there was Rumsfeld and his faithful (perhaps too faithful) JCS chairman, General Myers, telling Congress last week that they had read the report of their own investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, only after it was widely quoted by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker. Rumsfeld, who commands the most powerful military in the history of the world, verged on the pathetic in the hearings, complaining that he had been unable to get hold of a plastic disk with the offending pictures until only the night before. ... 
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