The Pentagon strongly denies the claims made in Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker piece: Pentagon Denies Rumsfeld OK’d Prison Plan.

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 spokesman Lawrence Di Rita issued a statement calling the claims “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.” …

According to the story, which hits newsstands Monday, the initial operation Rumsfeld authorized gave blanket approval to kill or capture and interrogate “high value” targets in the war on terrorism. The program stemmed from frustrating efforts to capture high-level terrorists in the weeks after the start of U.S. bombings in Afghanistan.

The program got approval from President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Bush was informed of its existence, the officials told Hersh.

Under the program, Hersh wrote, commandos carried out instant interrogations — using force if necessary — at secret CIA detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the commanders at the Pentagon.

Last year, Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone, his undersecretary for intelligence, expanded the scope of the Pentagon’s program and brought its methods to Abu Ghraib, Hersh wrote. …

“No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos,” Di Rita said in his statement. “This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense.”

Di Rita also said Cambone has never had any responsibility for any detainee or interrogation programs.