As the buck passes...
On Tuesday, as (Mr. Cambone, under secretary of defense for intelligence) jousted before the Senate Armed Services Committee with an Army general over the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, some of those strains were displayed. It was he, Mr. Cambone acknowledged, who gave high-level impetus to an overhaul of interrogation procedures at prisons in Iraq not long before the abuses took place.
Turns out this guy's day job is to coordinate the efforts of the 8 intelligence fiefdoms within Defense;
Twice a week, military officials say, Mr. Cambone convenes a conference call that includes the three-star generals and an admiral who run the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. In theory, each of those chiefs reports to Mr. Rumsfeld and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence; in practice, officials say, Mr. Cambone has made himself their most active overseer.
Sounds like he's become the go-to guy for the military to get the Pentagon's civilian point of view on everything to do with intelligence.
Which went wrong when it came to the tactical question of who handled interrogations in Iraqi prisons, and how...
And, since it's transpired that Guantanamo's (Gitmo) chief was the force behind the decision to squeeze Iraqi prisoners with harder earlier to gain intel ... what does that say about how it's been done secretly at Gitmo??
