"NEW YORK - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the expansion of a secret program that encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to obtain intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq (news - web sites), The New Yorker reported Saturday.
The Defense Department strongly denied the claims made in the report, which cited unnamed current and former intelligence officials and was published on the magazine's Web site. Pentagon (news - web sites) spokesman Lawrence Di Rita issued a statement calling the claims 'outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.'
The story, written by reporter Seymour Hersh, said Rumsfeld decided to expand the program last year, broadening a Pentagon operation from the hunt for al-Qaida in Afghanistan (news - web sites) to interrogation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. "
Also: NPR's coverage of the prisoner abuse story up to May 7, 2004
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