Report says Rumsfeld allowed Guantanamo abuse - Yahoo! News

Report says Rumsfeld allowed Guantanamo abuse - Yahoo! News: "Fri Apr 14, 6:17 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld allowed an 'abusive and degrading' interrogation of an al Qaeda detainee in 2002, the online magazine Salon reported on Friday, citing an Army document.
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In a report a
Pentagon spokesman denounced as 'fiction,' Salon quoted a December 2005 Army inspector general's report in which officers told of Rumsfeld's direct contact with the general overseeing the interrogation at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The report at www.salon.com, titled 'What Rumsfeld Knew,' comes amid calls by a string of respected military commanders for the Pentagon chief to resign to take responsibility for U.S. military setbacks in
Iraq.

Rumsfeld spoke regularly to Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, a key figure in the treatment of detainees in Iraq and Guantanamo, during the interrogation of Mohammed al-Kahtani, a Saudi suspected to have been an intended September 11 hijacker, the Salon report said.

Kahtani received 'degrading and abusive' treatment by soldiers who were following the interrogation plan Rumsfeld had approved, Salon said, quoting the 391-page report, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Over 54 days in late 2002, soldiers forced Kahtani to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, accused him of being a homosexual, forced him to wear women's underwear and made him perform 'dog tricks' on a leash, the Salon report said.

Salon cited Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt, an Army investigator, as saying in a sworn statement to the inspector general that 'The secretary of defense is personally involved in the interrogation of one person.'"