The Economist placed a picture of a detainee on its cover under the headline “RESIGN, RUMSFELD.” Similar calls came from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Democratic members of Congress. Though I didn’t often find myself in agreement with them, I was quickly coming to the same conclusion, although for quite different reasons. I believed my resignation as secretary might demonstrate accountability on the part of the U.S. government. I thought that my resignation might also allow the administration and the Iraqi people to move beyond the scandal.
On May 5, at 10:00 in the morning, one week After the photos became public, I walked into the Oval Office with a handwritten note. “Mr. President,” it said, “I want you to know that you have my resignation as Secretary of Defense any time you feel it would be helpful to you.”8 I told him that if the controversy over the abuse kept growing, I might not be effective in managing the Department. I also said that I believed someone needed to be held accountable.
Bush had been deeply affected by the photographs. He shared my view on the importance of accountability.
“Don, someone’s head has to roll on this one,” he said. I told the President he had my resignation, and I thought he should accept it. However, I left our meeting without a decision.
That evening, Bush called me at the Pentagon. He said he had thought the matter over. “Your leaving is a terrible idea,” he said. “I don’t accept your resignation.”
He asked if there was anyone else he should hold accountable by firing them, and he raised General Myers as a possibility. “Mr. President,” I replied, “you would be firing the wrong person.”
There was a rationale for firing a senior official. I understood and shared the President’s need to hold someone at the top accountable for what had happened. But it would have been unjust to fire General Myers, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not in the chain of command and had no direct line of responsibility in the abuse at Abu Ghraib.
I too wanted to demonstrate accountability by removing those at senior levels who were ultimately responsible for the lack of training, supervision, discipline, and professionalism that led to the inexcusable actions at the prison. As I discovered in the weeks After the abuse came to light, responsibility was diffuse.
Complicating matters was the fact that there were two lines of responsibility: the operational chain of command through CENTCOM, and the administrative chain of command through the Army. The operational chain of command started with the Commander in Chief and ran through me to the CENTCOM combatant commander to the U.S. commander in Iraq down to military officials at Abu Ghraib prison. The administrative chain of command started with me and ran through the secretary and chief of staff of the Army. I hoped that each chain of command quickly would identify where the primary responsibility lay and that we could hold accountable the appropriate senior officers.* That is not what happened. To help put the matter behind the Defense Department, I determined that President Bush deserved an option, and that left nobody but me.
On May 7, 2004, I crossed the Potomac and headed up Independence Avenue to Capitol Hill to testify on the abuses. In Washington there was speculation as to whether I might resign on the spot. There were also suggestions that more members of Congress might personally demand my resignation at the hearing. As I made my way to the Capitol, protesters lined the entrances to the Senate and House office buildings, some carrying signs accusing me, the President, and the military of war crimes.
In my testimony and subsequent press conferences on Abu Ghraib, I wanted to express my deep feelings of disgust and outrage at these indefensible acts. But there was a legal limit on what I could say publicly. The servicemen and-women depicted in the photos were awaiting trial by courts-martial. In the military justice system, the judge, jury, and prosecutor are all members of the Defense Department, and any comment made by an official in the chain of command—military or civilian—risks exerting what is called “unlawful command influence” on the outcome of the trial. If I had expressed my strongly held opinion on the guilt of those involved, it could have made it impossible to hold them accountable by law. My public statements on Abu Ghraib were carefully calibrated with legal advice. Most Americans were understandably outraged at those who had committed these acts, and they wanted to know that President Bush and I were outraged as well. Unfortunately, because both of us were at the top of the chain of command, we had to take care that our words were properly measured.
In seven hours of testimony to the Senate and House Armed Services committees alongside General Myers and Army officials, I explained what we knew about the Abu Ghraib abuse and that we were determined to do our best to make sure it never happened again.* I opened my testimony by raising the question of who bore responsibility for what had taken place. “These events occurred on my watch.” I said. “As Secretary of Defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility.”9
On behalf of the Department, I apologized to the President, the Congress, the country, and the Iraqi detainees who were in military custody. Promising a full investigation, I regretted that those of us at the Pentagon had not known about the abuse—and had not seen the pictures—earlier. I stressed the importance of a full, open airing of what had taken place at Abu Ghraib and of a transparent system to punish the illegal acts. “[H]owever terrible the setback,” I said, “this is also an occasion to demonstrate to the world the difference between those who believe in democracy and human rights and those who believe in rule by the terrorist code.”10 I ended with an appeal to the members of Congress, to Americans, and to the world. “Judge us by our actions,” I said. “[W]atch how a democracy deals with wrongdoing and scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes and weaknesses.”11
During my testimony, Senator Evan Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana, asked me if my resignation would help undo some of the damage to our reputation.
“That’s possible,” I responded. I did not volunteer that I had already submitted it to the President.
Though Bush told me I should not resign, the matter still was not settled in my mind. The previous week had been excruciating because the scandal was so damaging to our armed forces and the country. I generally thrived under pressure, but I wasn’t thriving now. Abu Ghraib was threatening to consume the Defense Department, eclipsing the fine work thousands of servicemen and-women did every day. The Democratic National Committee was already using Abu Ghraib to raise funds for its campaigns.
That Sunday—Mother’s Day—our children called and told me they were with me no matter what I decided. Vice President Cheney said that with Iraq in such a difficult condition, the President wanted me at the Defense Department. “You have to stay,” he urged in a phone call.
I was later reminded of an episode more than a half century earlier. In April 1952, when I was studying naval science in college, the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Hobson struck the aircraft carrier USS Wasp in the dark of night. The Hobson sank to the Atlantic seafloor with 176 men aboard.12 The commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander W. J. Tierney, went down with the vessel. A Navy board of inquiry ultimately concluded that Tierney was to be held responsible for the incident. It could not have been easy to demand accountability from a commanding officer who lost his life. Nevertheless, there is a tradition on the sea and in our Navy that with authority comes responsibility and accountability. The Navy’s venerable tradition regrettably seemed not to have taken hold to the same extent in the other military services. The case of the Hobson said a lot about leadership—and its consequences.
On May 10, 2004, President Bush came to the Pentagon for a briefing on Iraq. At the end of the briefing, I asked the President if I could see him alone. As we sat at the round table in my office overlooking the Pentagon’s River Entrance, I handed him a second letter of resignation.13 “By this letter I am resigning as Secretary of Defense,” it read. “I have concluded that the damage from the acts of abuse that happened on my watch, by individuals for whose conduct I am ultimat
ely responsible, can best be responded to by my resignation.” As he read my letter, Bush was quiet.
“Mr. President, the Department of Defense will be better off if I resign,” I insisted.
“That’s not true,” he responded, tossing the letter across the table back to me.
I told the President my mind was made up. Nonetheless, he insisted that he wanted some time to think about it and to consult with others. The next day, Vice President Cheney came to the Pentagon. “Don, thirty-five years ago this week, I went to work for you,” he said, “and on this one you’re wrong.”
In the end, Bush refused to accept my resignation. He had concluded that my departure would not make Abu Ghraib go away, and that he preferred to have me stay to manage the problem and the Department. For some in the United States and around the world, Abu Ghraib was a metaphor. The pictures from the prison had come to symbolize the war many had come to oppose. The President may have felt that my resignation might embolden the critics of the war effort, who would frame it as an indication of the administration’s guilt and argue that it proved the Iraq war was hopeless.
As much as I believed I was right to resign, I eventually accepted the President’s decision and agreed to stay and continue to manage the scandal, while working to keep the Pentagon, two wars, and our major transformation efforts moving forward. I now believe that this was a misjudgment on my part. Abu Ghraib and its follow-on effects, including the continued drumbeat of “torture” maintained by partisan critics of the war and the President, became a damaging distraction.* More than anything else I have failed to do, and even amid my pride in the many important things we did accomplish, I regret that I did not leave at that point.
Hundreds of individuals inside the Defense Department and on independent panels outside spent thousands of hours looking into the reasons that the abuse at Abu Ghraib occurred. One thing that became clear was that the crimes had nothing whatsoever to do with interrogation or intelligence gathering. The U.S. soldiers shown in the photographs were not interrogators, nor were they involved in collecting intelligence from those detainees. Further, the individuals they were abusing were not intelligence targets undergoing interrogations. The guards were not following any guidelines or policies approved at any level. They were a small group of disturbed individuals abusing the Iraqis they were in charge of guarding.
Part of the cause of Abu Ghraib was a lack of training. Part of it was a lack of discipline and supervision. And part of it was the failure from the outset of the Department of the Army and Joint Staff to provide the appropriate and agreed-upon staff and support to General Sanchez’s headquarters in Iraq, which made it difficult, if not impossible, for his busy command to oversee adequately the growing population of Iraqi detainees in prisons like Abu Ghraib.
I directed officials at the Pentagon to cooperate fully with the numerous investigations underway—some of which I ordered. Vice Admiral Albert Church, a cousin of the crusading Senator Frank Church who led the Senate’s intelligence investigations in the 1970s, conducted one of them. “One point is clear,” he concluded. “[W]e found no direct (or even indirect) link between interrogation policy and detainee abuse.”* A nonpartisan investigation led by two former Secretaries of Defense, James Schlesinger and Harold Brown, which included the late Congresswoman Tillie Fowler and retired General Charles Horner, found that “There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities.”16 After twelve nonpartisan, independent reviews and investigations of Defense Department detainee policies,17 not one found evidence that abuse had been encouraged or condoned by senior officials in the Defense Department—military or civilian.†
On May 29, 2004, at the height of the controversy, I attended the dedication of the World War II Memorial on the Washington Mall. A number of people came up to me to offer encouragement. The most unusual was a gray haired former president and husband of the junior senator from New York who was castigating the administration over the scandal at the same time.
Bill Clinton walked across the large reception tent and shook my hand. He said something to the effect of “Mr. Secretary, no one with an ounce of sense thinks you had any way in the world to know about the abuse taking place that night in Iraq.” He added, “You’ll get through this.”18 I appreciated the gracious gesture.
The abuse at Abu Ghraib and illegal acts committed elsewhere in U.S. military detention facilities are part of the story of detention operations in wartime, to be sure. But they are only part of the story. Between 2001 and 2006, more than eighty thousand captured personnel passed through Defense Department custody. Of those, there were only a small number of documented cases of abuse. Each time there was an allegation of wrongdoing, it was promptly investigated and prosecuted when appropriate. The rare instances of abuse should not blind the world to the professionalism and skill of the tens of thousands of Americans in uniform who were entrusted with detainee operations.
CHAPTER 38
The Least Worst Place
“At the top there are no easy choices.”
—Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation
In the heat of war, human frailty can undermine discipline and corrupt behavior even among well-trained soldiers. World War II, for example, saw instances of war crimes committed against captured soldiers on both sides of the conflict.* Detention operations in war have also suffered from misjudgments. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment of more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans in desolate camps across the western United States although they were not enemies.
Even in nonmilitary, peacetime situations, detention is a difficult task, as the staggering statistics of murder, rape, and abuse in federal, state, and local prisons across the United States attest.† Whenever and wherever abuse of prisoners occurs—from Bagram to San Quentin—it is an evil deed and a shameful disservice to our country, our society, and the huge majority ofcivilian and military guards who perform their difficult duties with professionalism.
When it came to captured terrorists, I knew that housing and interrogating them would require close attention and inevitably arouse controversy. Each step of the way toward crafting a coherent policy, we confronted complicated legal and policy dilemmas. Some critics cast these issues as simple questions of right and wrong. On matter After matter, however, we found ourselves facing decisions for which the options available were all imperfect.
We were dealing with individuals capable of horrific acts of murder and destruction. Yet they were human beings in the custody of a nation that properly holds itself to high standards. Belief in human dignity is the underpinning of Western civilization and one of the chief differences between Americans and our enemy. I knew our government had to create a legal architecture that afforded detainees due process while protecting our national security. I also believed that we needed to reinforce the incentives embodied in the Geneva Conventions. The Conventions are treaties with the broad purpose of protecting innocent life by deterring violations of the laws of the war, such as targeting civilians, not just for ensuring the proper treatment of prisoners of war.
In the months and years following 9/11, most detainees in American custody were categorized as unlawful enemy combatants. They were enemies who had ignored the long-established rules of warfare and, as a result, effectively waived the privileges accorded to regular soldiers. Some of these captured detainees were terrorists and insurgents who had attacked—and, in many cases, killed—American and coalition forces. Inevitably, others would be in our custody by mistake, as is also the case in our domestic criminal justice system.
We also knew that some detainees possessed potentially time-sensitive information that could prevent future attacks and save American lives. But while it was important to obtain that information, it was also imperative to put rules and safeguards in place to govern interrogations. In keeping with my oath of office, it was my duty to help protect the country and the American people from all enemies, and to pre
serve and defend the Constitution. We had a responsibility to protect innocent civilians. I was among those obligated to see to the effective and proper interrogation and detention of those captured in the war against terrorists.
Since 9/11, our primary responsibility was to prevent another attack on our people. On a near daily basis we were receiving fragmentary pieces of intelligence on a range of threats. Terrorists could use suitcase radiation weapons, or vials of anthrax or smallpox, that could spread widely and quickly, devastating the populations of major American cities. The questioning of those in Department of Defense custody provided information that saved innocent American lives. I make no apology for that.
From the outset of the global war on terror, one of the Defense Department’s tasks was to fashion a process for deciding whom to hold and whom to release. I pressed military commanders and intelligence officials with a number of questions: How many detainees should we plan to hold? For how long? At what locations? For what purposes?
This was a war that could be long and have no definitive end. We were fighting irregular forces—al-Qaida and other terrorists—not military personnel of a nation that upheld the laws of war. Our enemies were extremists motivated by an ideology in which it is perfectly acceptable, indeed in their minds a sacred obligation, to kill ordinary civilians—men, women, and children.
The longer America held detainees, the more problems we would have. The guidance I gave to the Department was to be highly selective, so that we would hold as few detainees as possible. I wanted procedures in place for promptly evaluating those captured on the battlefield, to release as many as possible without compromising American lives, and to transfer as many others as possible to the custody of their home countries. As I frequently told the President and others, the last thing we wanted was for the United States, let alone the Department of Defense, to become “the world’s jailer.”3
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