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Taguba issued a tough report, which was then leaked to the press—and thus was largely responsible for preventing the scandal from being swept entirely under the rug. Rather than thank Taguba for upholding the honor of the U.S. military, the Bush administration singled him out for ridicule, retribution, and forced retirement.
Taguba told Seymour Hersh of a chilling conversation he had with Gen. John Abizaid, then head of Central Command, a few weeks after Taguba's report became public in 2004. Sitting in the back of Abizaid's Mercedes sedan in Kuwait, Abizaid quietly told Taguba, "You and your report will be investigated."
"I'd been in the Army 32 years by then," Taguba told Hersh, "and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia."
Getting Squared Away
The Army, to its credit, was able to push brownnoses like Abizaid off to the margins and, more important, to keep Mafia-type lawyers out of the process of updating the Army Field Manual for interrogation. Such was not the case at CIA, where Mob lawyers continued to prosper—including the one who offered interrogators the following basic guidance: "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."
I like to think that our nation's decisions are not totally bereft of moral considerations, and that a majority of Americans would agree that torture—like rape or slavery—is intrinsically evil.
But it is also intrinsically dumb. And an Army general with guts said precisely that on the very day President Bush was extolling the merits of "alternative sets of procedures" for interrogation.
Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, a career intelligence officer and expert in interrogations, minced no words in describing the new Army Field Manual (FM 2-22.3, Human Intelligence Collection Operations). He stressed that it is "consistent with the requirements of law, the Detainee Treatment Act, and the Geneva Conventions, and that it was endorsed by the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI, Kimmons said "coordinated laterally with the CIA."
Doesn't take a crackerjack intelligence analyst to figure out why the CIA would not "endorse" it.
As a former Army intelligence officer who had to commit the previous interrogation field manual virtually to memory, I was particularly proud that Kimmons had the guts to seize the bull by the horns:
Conceding past "transgressions and mistakes," Kimmons insisted: "No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.
"Moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress through the use of abusive techniques would be of questionable credibility. And additionally, it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can't go there.
"Some of our most significant successes on the battlefield have been—in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically all of them have accrued from expert interrogators using mixtures of authorized, humane interrogation practices in clever ways that you would hope Americans would use them, to push the envelope within the bookends of the legal, moral, and ethical—now as further defined by this field manual. So we don't need abusive practices in there. Nothing good will come from them."
Kimmons emphasized that the new manual is written in "straightforward language for use by soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines; it is not written for lawyers." He explained that the field manual explicitly prohibits torture or cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment or punishment.
No-Torture Commandments
Among the specific prohibitions mentioned by Kimmons were:
