reported on intelligence failures surrounding 9/11, calling the U.S. agencies "confused, divided, and unsure about how the terrorists operated"; on the corruption of the Saudi royal family and its support for Osama bin Laden; on the instability of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal; and on U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, including a January 2002 story alleging that U.S. troops had inadvertently airlifted top al-Qaeda leaders to Pakistan. Iraq and Abu Ghraib In the lead-up to the launching of the Iraq War in 2003, Hersh argued against the claim that Saddam Hussein's alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction justified an invasion, and presented evidence that top Bush administration officials were ignoring facts that did not fit their belief that Saddam was connected to terrorism. On April 30, 2004, Hersh published the first of three articles in The New Yorker which detailed the U.S. military's torture and abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The story, titled "Torture at Abu Ghraib", was accompanied by a now-infamous photo of an Iraqi prisoner standing on a box and wearing a black pointed hood, his hands spread out and attached to electrodes. A short piece with the photo and others had appeared two days earlier in the CBS News magazine 60 Minutes II. Hersh described these photos, which he had also obtained: Hersh had obtained a secret 53-page report from an investigation under General Antonio Taguba, which had been submitted to the Army on March 3. It detailed more of the abuses, including pouring cold water and liquid from broken chemical lights on naked detainees, beatings with a broom stick and a chair, threatening males with rape, allowing guards to stitch wounds from a beating, sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and a broom stick, and using military dogs to intimidate. Hersh reported that intelligence teams, which included CIA officers and "interrogation specialists" from private military contractors, had directed the abuse. In his second and third articles, "The Gray Zone" and "Chain of Command", Hersh alleged that the abuse was part of a secret Pentagon program known as "Copper Green", which used physical abuse and sexual humiliation of prisoners in an effort to generate intelligence. He further stated that the program was expanded from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2003 with the approval of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, both as an attempt to deal with the growing insurgency and part of his