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Rumsfeld Ordered Secret Arrest in Iraq

Thursday June 17, 2004 1:31 PM


By MATT KELLEY

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - At the request of CIA Director George Tenet, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered the military to secretly hold a suspected terrorist in Iraq, a Pentagon spokesman said.

The suspected terrorist has been held since October without being given an identification number and without the International Committee of the Red Cross being notified, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. Both conditions violate the Geneva Accords on treatment of prisoners of war.

Rumsfeld ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to have the prisoner secretly detained on the day last October, when Tenet made the request, Whitman said.

``The director of central intelligence requested he not be assigned an internment serial number while the CIA worked to determnine his precise disposition,'' Whitman said.

The Bush administration has argued that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to suspected terrorists who do not follow the conventions themselves. But Rumsfeld and other administration officials have said the Geneva Conventions applied to all U.S. military activities in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.

The prisoner will be given a number and the Red Cross will be formally notified soon, Whitman said.

``The ICRC should have been notified about the detainee earlier,'' Whitman said. ``We should have taken steps, and we have taken the necessary steps to rectify the situation.''

The Iraqi prisoner is so far the only individual Defense Department officials have acknowledged shielding from the Red Cross. Before Wednesday's admission, Pentagon spokesmen would not confirm or deny if anyone was being held in secret.

``We've not talked about the location of specific detainees other than Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba simply because it gets into the classified realm,'' Air Force Maj. Michael Shavers said in an e-mail response to questions from The Associated Press on Wednesday, before the Iraq admission.

President Bush and members of his administration have said repeatedly that all detainees are treated humanely. Pentagon officials have argued that announcing the numbers or locations of all detainees would indicate the scope of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts to terrorist groups and give them ideas of sites to attack.

The military says detainees at the prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not mistreated, despite the Bush administration's argument that Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war do not apply to them.

Maj. David Kolarik, a spokesman for the military's Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, said all prisoners are treated ``in accordance with the principles'' of the Geneva Conventions ``to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.''

The secret prisoner in Iraq is believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam, a radical group which had been based in northern Iraq before the U.S. invasion last year. U.S. officials believe the man was involved in attacks on coalition troops, Whitman said.

The CIA asked the military to take custody of the man in October and asked that he not be given a prisoner number or disclosed to the Red Cross while officials determined his status, Whitman said.

The Bush administration contends that terrorist suspects are ``enemy combatants'' who do not have any protection under the Geneva Conventions. Military officials questioned the arrangement but those objections did not reach the highest levels in the Pentagon until last month, Whitman said.

``Certainly the people that had responsibility for maintaining him in custody knew that they had him, knew their instructions, knew that a disposition hadn't been determined for him and raised concern about it on a couple of occasions,'' Whitman said.