There are a several very strange items floating in today’s front page New York Times piece on Camp Nama, the torture chamber run by Special Operations forces at Baghdad airport.

Consider: American soldiers treated prisoners so viciously that even the CIA blanched, and prohibited its officers from taking part in interrogations at the prison.

A knee-jerk response awaits: How bad does abuse have to be before the CIA would object?

Torture is the CIA’s baby. When the possibility of some restriction on America’s divine right to torture opened up, this administration was primarily concerned that it not effect the CIA. In case after case of prisoner abuse, it has turned out that soldiers witnessed CIA interrogations and copied tactics. When a prisoner was murdered, odds are the CIA, or CIA-sponsored thugs, were there — acting with complete immunity.

The suggestion that the torture at Camp Nama was too harsh for the CIA doesn’t make sense on its face, and even less so when you read the details in the NYT story. Camp Nama showed an Abu Ghraib-like mixture of classic physical and psychological torture of prisoners, combined with sadistic delight in power. Soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, constricted their breathing and senses with hoods, subjected them to horrible smells, noise, and cold, kicked them, burned them, poured water on them to make them believe they were drowning. And then they got creative, using prisoners as targets in a paintball game.

Once you let people torture, someone always discovers its fun side.

Horrendous abuse, to be sure, but nothing that would shock the conscience of anyone’s whose job it is to do this.

On August 3, 2003, the CIA objected to something going on at Camp Nama, but it wasn’t the harshness of prisoner treatment. That simply makes no sense.

But this isn’t the first time the CIA has pulled out. In his 2004 piece on "Copper Green," the special access programs the Pentagon set up to use physical coercion and sexual humiliation to pry intelligence from Iraqi prisoners, Seymour Hersh reported that the agency had a similar reaction at Abu Ghraib:

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan — pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets — and now you want to use it for
cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’ ” — the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its  involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret , and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation.

CIA fear of exposure makes a bit more sense than CIA squeamishness or moral objections.

The NYT discusses a second objection which is equally odd. Defense Intelligence Agency officers, according to the Times, also complained about the way prisoners were treated at Camp Nama, and the agency’s director wrote to Stephen Cambone about the reports of abuse.

You are about the enter the Twilight Zone:

Admiral Jacoby’s memo also provoked an angry reaction from Mr. Cambone.

"Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable," Mr. Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin. "In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26."

Cambone?

Let’s return to Hersh: Cambone ran this program, and insisted on controlling it. He probably didn’t have much to do with the paintball game, but the rest of it — the special forces having permission to abuse prisoners, shrouded in secrecy — was all, Seymour Hersh informed us all two years ago, in Rumsfeld’s and Cambone’s program.

The New York Times article adds important details to Hersh’s old story — most ominously, that the unit’s operations "are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy" — but it also seems determined to let those who designed this program off the hook. They report Cambone’s objections — and his memo is vague enough that it isn’t entirely clear what he’s objecting to — but also note that the extent of abuses committed at Camp Nama may never be fully revealed because of "the secrecy surrounding the unit," without ever explaining the source of that secrecy.

They used to have a very good reporter who wouldn’t have let that pass. They can now read him in The New Yorker.