I’ve just realised that the Rumsfeld lackey that Sy Hersh fingers as directly responsible for creating and enlarging the Pentagon torture regime, Stephen Cambone (Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence), was mentioned in passing to another shady Iraq factoid back in July 2003. That article seems to corroborate the assertion that Cambone was given carte blanche to use torture to extract any and all information concerning Iraq’s “missing” WMDs. He’s also got a typical neocon background, working for and on behalf of various well-funded neocon ideological groups and corporations, and doing the Reagan memory shuffle by alternately claiming massive responsibilities and then denying all knowledge of particulars in front of political committees…
Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the CIA, viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the CIA’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambones military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.
Cambone [is] a man with no intelligence experience but a favored protg and loyal partisan who had served on Rumsfeld’s ballistic missile threat commission and worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century. Previously principal deputy to Under Secretary for Policy Doug Feith (and, in that capacity, liaison between Feith and the ideological intelligence analysis unit that would later morph into the notorious Office of Special Plans).
Earlier here.
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