Word: pentagonal
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According to Senator Reed, Pentagon officials should also expect questions on the Hill about what is not being spent. Case in point: the Marine Corps, traditionally the most frugal of the services, has borne the brunt of the burden of fighting in Iraq, yet has seen billions pared from its funding. The Marines' new special-ops unit--a pet project of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's--wanted $65 million for such equipment as sophisticated nightscopes and computer-mapping systems, but the Administration refused the request. The Marines are still flying around Iraq in Vietnam-era helicopters--yet $1 billion...
...fleeing the battle in Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2001. The month before 9/11, he tried to enter the U.S. through Orlando, Fla.--while 9/11 leader Mohamed Atta waited for him in the airport parking lot--but was deported after he became evasive with an immigration agent. The Pentagon contends that over time al-Qahtani, known as Detainee 063, proved an invaluable source, identifying al-Qaeda financial contacts in several Arab countries, describing meetings with the organization's top leadership and fingering at least 30 other Guantánamo detainees as bodyguards of Osama bin Laden...
...January speaking through an interpreter with al-Qahtani at Guantánamo, Gutierrez, the first person to report publicly on his mind-set since his story broke, says he now recants his previous incriminating statements, claiming they were extracted under extreme duress. That may not be surprising. Nor was Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman's response: that "the al-Qaeda training manual specifically encourages those captured to make false claims of abuse." But the more that becomes known about the al-Qahtani case--a unique window into the otherwise secretive practices at Guantánamo--the greater the government's vulnerability to challenges...
...Pentagon report in July 2005 found that al-Qahtani had been subjected to treatment that was--though not a violation of Defense Department policy-- cumulatively "abusive and degrading." It specifically recommended that the commandant of Guantánamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller, be reprimanded for failing to adequately monitor the interrogation of a high-value detainee, believed to be al-Qahtani. But Miller's superior, Southern Command Commander General Bantz Craddock, decided against the reprimand. Congress last December passed a provision, sponsored by Senator John McCain of Arizona, that bars U.S. personnel from engaging in "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment...
When al-Qahtani still didn't break, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally authorized a series of harsh interrogation techniques for him. Concern about the legality of some of those methods prompted the Pentagon to outlaw their use in January 2003, barely a month after Rumsfeld authorized them. Gutierrez says al-Qahtani "painfully described how he could not endure the months of isolation, torture and abuse, during which he was nearly killed, before making false statements to please his interrogators." As documented in the interrogation log, at one point al-Qahtani became seriously dehydrated because of his refusal to drink...