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.
"They had their own mission," the official said, distinguishing the effort from that of other prisons run by the U.S. military. "They picked up their own people. They were operating under their own rules. So we had nothing to do with that. It would have been a huge security violation for anyone else to be in there."
The official said the Baghdad compound where the team worked was so closely controlled that other military and intelligence personnel could not enter it without clearance or the authorization of the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. The official declined to discuss what interrogation techniques the covert team used in Iraq, but said it generally turned over its prisoners to the jailers at Abu Ghraib after 72 hours.
"It was a battlefield thing," the official said. "You get people. You question them, then you turn them over to people who can get more out of them."
The official said that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the commander of the U.S. military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, visited the compound in early September of last year, during a trip he made to Iraq to assess the problems with detention and interrogation efforts there. Miller was accompanied by a detention expert, who made some suggestions about the security of the compound.
The administration officials pointed to testimony before Congress in which several administration officials acknowledged that the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees in Iraq and therefore did not permit coercive tactics.
But some officials, speaking on background, acknowledged that as the insurgency worsened in Iraq last summer, there was rising concern about how to improve intelligence about future attacks.
One solution to these concerns, Hersh wrote, "was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents." Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, the article said, expanding the scope of a secret program by "bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan."
At the Pentagon, the chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, vigorously denied the allegations that Cambone directed a covert program to encourage the coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to improve intelligence gathering.
"It's pure, unadulterated fantasy," Di Rita said in a telephone interview. "We don't discuss covert programs, but nothing in any covert program would have led anyone to sanction activity like what was seen on those videos."
"No responsible official in this department, including Secretary Rumsfeld, would or could have been involved in sanctioning the physical coercion or sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners," Di Rita said.
"Cambone had no involvement in any matter involved in detainee management," Di Rita said.