The New York Times | Prison Abuse: Rumsfeld Issued an Order to Hide Detainee in Iraq

"Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, acting at the request of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, ordered military officials in Iraq last November to hold a man suspected of being a senior Iraqi terrorist at a high-level detention center there but not list him on the prison's rolls, senior Pentagon and intelligence officials said Wednesday.

This prisoner and other 'ghost detainees' were hidden largely to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their treatment, and to avoid disclosing their location to an enemy, officials said."

Anyone Bubba who believes that the orders to torture prisoner's don't come straight from the top should consider this new bit of evidence to the contrary.

But wait, there's more, because the prison officials didn't want to hold on to these guys and kept pressing the Pentagon for orders:

At Camp Cropper, some prisoners had been held since June 2003 for nearly 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in small cells without sunlight, according to a report by the international Red Cross.

The suspected Ansar official was segregated from the other detainees and was not listed on the rolls. Under the order that had filtered down to General Sanchez, military police were not to disclose the detainee's whereabouts to the Red Cross pending further directives.

The prisoner fell into legal limbo as the military police pressed their superiors for guidance, which has still not formally come.