Rumsfeld backed abuse, article says

WASHINGTON — Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and one of his top aides authorized the expansion of a secret program that had permitted harsh interrogations of detained members of al-Qaida, allowing these methods to be used against prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to an article in The New Yorker.

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

Hersh's account, to be published in the May 24 issue of the magazine, said that the expansion of the "special access program" allowed authorities in charge of Abu Ghraib to engage in degrading and sexually humiliating practices. It was posted on Saturday on The New Yorker's Web site.

"According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials," Hersh wrote, "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."

Hersh's reporting cast new light on an important question in the prisoner abuse scandal — whether senior military or civilian officials ordered the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. Rumsfeld, who has apologized for the abuses, has said that they were carried out by lower-level forces without the approval of senior commanders.

The article suggested that Rumsfeld and Cambone had, in effect, shifted the blame for the abuses away from top civilians at the Pentagon to lower-level military police guards who are facing disciplinary proceedings in military courts.

On Saturday, officials in the Bush administration disputed several of the critical details of Hersh's article. They said that they were aware of no high-level decision to use highly coercive interrogation techniques on Iraqi prisoners.

A military official who worked on detention issues in Iraq in 2003 described a similar covert task force of military and intelligence operatives but said it did not direct the interrogation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

The official said that the covert operators involved in the program worked out of their own highly secret and well-guarded compound in Baghdad, where they held captives incommunicado and questioned them for relatively short periods of time before turning them over to the jailers at Abu Ghraib.