A breaking news story originates from an article in the New Yorker magazine by Seymour M. Hersh, in which CIA officials leak the fact that Rumsfeld created a policy that led to the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, and that Bush was informed of the creation of the program and was told of the investigation into Abu Ghraib in January, at least three months before Bush claims to have known anything at all about it. The Bush administration is falling over itself to deny the story, but someone at the CIA seems rather miffed with Bush and is spilling the beans:

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.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

And the CIA is not taking kindly to it, apparently. The source Hersh quotes is a “senior official” at the CIA, who says that “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.”

The story, apparently, began in Afghanistan when Rumsfeld was extremely angry over the fact that legal clearances and authorizations slowed down attack times and sometimes caused our forces to miss their targets. Rumsfeld is described as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” His reactions was to create a “highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate ‘high value’ targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror.” This program, called an SAP, or “special access program,” allowed operatives to work without any authorization; in short, “Grab whom you must. Do what you want.”

Stephen Cambone, the new Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March 2003, was a strong advocate for war in Iraq, and his assistant was none other than Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, the same religious nut who commonly speaks in fundamentalist religious terms, and who stated publicly that the U.S. is a “Christian nation” and in the war on terror, we are fighting “Satan.” So already we have a great cast of characters here.

When things started going badly in Iraq, with insurgents killing our troops and causing chaos in the streets, Rumsfeld oversaw an effort to “get tough” with captured guerillas. Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had been in charge of Gitmo (an early effort to declassify and displace captured prisoners so the Bush administration could evade any U.S. or international law concerning their treatment), came to Iraq to “Gitmoize” the prisons in Iraq.

He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba—methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in “stress positions” for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the SAP, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

Hersh’s intelligence source claims Cambone was “tired of working through the normal chain of command,” and so in Iraq, used the program initiated by Rumsfeld in Afghanistan. But more than that, he brought in military intelligence people to the prisons like Abu Ghraib and told them that “no rules apply.” But the CIA was none too enamored of the idea:

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

What’s more, a Pentagon consultant claimed that the responsibility went higher than Cambone: “The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone. This is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.”

Then the cat got let out of the bag on January 13th when an Abu Ghraib MP reported what was going on to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, giving them a CD filled with images. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon figured they could try to cover it up, and it would go away. But an important piece of information is that not only did Rumsfeld know everything here, he also informed Bush about it. This directly contradicts Bush’s own claim that he did not hear about the matter until April 28th.

Hersh’s article is very well written and is highly informative; I would suggest that you read it in full.