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You said that in your day, torture was a firing offense. Were any agents fired for involvement in torture while you were in the CIA?
Yeah. Remember those two guys in Guatemala [CIA agents Terry Ward and Frederick Brugger]? They were running the Guatemalan colonel who was alleged to have been involved in the torture and death of the husband of an American woman, Jennifer Harbury. That's a key case that people have forgotten. Those guys weren't even involved. But they didn't report it quickly enough, and Sen. Bob Torricelli of New Jersey leaked it to the papers. Administratively they didn't report it, and these guys were forced to retire. That's how serious it was, torture. And the colonel wasn't even involved, as it turned out.
In his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the violence at Abu Ghraib "fundamentally un-American." But the Washington Post reported Tuesday that the CIA general counsel issued a new set of interrogation rules after the Sept. 11 attacks authorizing methods that cause temporary physical or mental pain. Isn't that torture? And can we conclude from that that the torture in Iraq was officially sanctioned?
Sure, it's classical torture. Any pain, whether it's being forced to squat down or bend over, is torture. Putting a cloth over your head and pouring water over you so you choke, that's torture. I think [the CIA directive] was probably meant for the 9/11 prisoners who were taken last year, not necessarily for Iraq, but someone transferred it over to Iraq. It was so systematic that I suspect that someone higher up the line said, "Just get these people to talk."
Perhaps it's more of a wink-and-nod approach?
It looks more systematic than that. The fact they were moving prisoners around tells me that. I've been to Abu Ghraib [as an ABC News consultant after the Iraq invasion]. You can't move prisoners around there unless the commander of the prison is aware of it. If you've got an ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] visit -- and they're supposedly moving people out to abandoned buildings so they're not questioned -- then you've got to have someone other than the [military police] approving this. It's a large facility; it's a huge ground. If you take people out of their cells, handcuff them, and move them to another block, it's not something a small group of rogue M.P.'s could have done.
What is the prison like?
It's grim. It's cement blocks. People lived in communal rooms and, according to people who'd been in the prison that I talked to, there were no beds. You had to sleep on cement floors, and it was so crowded you had to sleep on your side. There were no toilets, just holes. I was in it right after the Iraq invasion. The doors were open -- the only people in there were Iraqis looting it. I can't imagine what they were looting. All the records were burned. They had portraits of Saddam Hussein on the wall, a mural of Saddam holding this little girl on his lap, wearing his best suit. Can you imagine being tortured and coming out to see Papa Saddam sitting there?
And now the Americans -- at least in the minds of Iraqis and many others in the Middle East -- are no better than Saddam?
That's right. The U.S. was going to go in and win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, and instead we take over Abu Ghraib when we should have torn it down. It's just enormously symbolic. It's sort of like going into Baghdad and tearing down the central mosque and building a synagogue in its place. I don't think [U.S. policymakers] really get the full picture of this.
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