War and Piece: The Case of Rumsfeld's Forgotten "Suspect"

[BurtWorm]

The following is from Laura Rozen's blog:

http://www.warandpiece.com/

"Rumsfeld ordered prisoner held off the books: Iraqi terror suspect hidden from International Red Cross," NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports.

Pentagon officials tell NBC News that late last year, at the same time U.S. military police were allegedly abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered that one Iraqi prisoner be held “off the books” — hidden entirely from the International Red Cross and anyone else — in possible violation of international law.

It’s the first direct link between Rumsfeld and questionable though not violent treatment of prisoners in Iraq.

The Iraqi prisoner was captured last July...Shortly after the suspect’s capture, the CIA flew him to an undisclosed location outside Iraq for interrogation. But four months later the Justice Department suggested that holding him outside Iraq might be illegal, and the prisoner was returned to Iraq at the end of October.
That’s when Rumsfeld passed the order on to Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, to keep the prisoner locked up, but off the books.

And then what happened? The military forgot about the guy and seemed to have lost track of him! This important Ansar al Islam terrorist who Rumsfeld ordered had to be held off the books, because he had such potentially important intelligence information!

Once the prisoner was returned to Iraq, the interrogations ceased because the prisoner was entirely lost in the system.

Honestly no one accused Slobodan Milosevic of being incompetent, just brutal. But Rumsfeld -- should he be fired for incompetence or tried for war crimes?