Drop charges against Lynndie

[Pure]

The England interview, is on the 'net, just saw it. ("Rocky Mountain News" broadcast)

http://kcnc.dayport.com/viewer/viewerpage.php?Art_ID=2314

Check it out.

 

[AngeloMichael]

She's a 21 year old hs graduate from smallville, West Va. You don't expect her to make the best defense, for chrissakes. Yes, "following orders" is inadequate as a defense.

Have you read Taguba's report or his testimony?

Items such as 'failure of leadership' and lack of proper training might be mentioned.

I'd add, misinformation from the very top as to the applicability of the Geneva conventions.

All of the above detract from the requisite 'intent' for conviction.
Further they operate as mitigating factors in assigning punishment, if there were a conviction.

Though she may deserve retraining or re-education, she does not deserve incarceration, imnsho.

I skimmed through a lot of Taguba's report and one thing I recall is that there was mention of a Navy dog handler at the prison who refused to participate in impropper interrogations because he knew it was wrong.

If he refused so could have Lynndie. You can't tell me she wasn't given any training on the supervison of military prisoners and the articles of the Geneva convention pertaining to that during basic training.

She had the knowledge to make the right decision, she just chose not to, and she needs to answer for that. Maybe re-education or retraining is all she will recieve, that's up to a court martial, I just think she needs to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

 

[Guest]

I have seen exceprts of that Lynndie England interview, and, I have to say, I have lost any shred of misguided sympathy towards her that I might have previously held (and, that was very little indeed).

She showed absolutely no sign of remorse. She said she, "didn't think what was happening was wrong." Uh, hello? Talk about de-humanizing those in your captivity. She said she was just doing as she was told.

All she had to do was refuse.

She is either very easily led or very, very stupid. Seems like that stupidity was infectious.

I agree with Angelo, she should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, along with EVERYONE else involved.

Lou

 

[shereads]

Everyone else involved.

I wonder if they sleep at night. Do the people who engineered this war, and Chalabi who invented the WMD to achieve it - do they feel proud of what they've accomplished?

Rumsfeld was angry about the photos, not about the acts themselves. "We were caught off guard by the existence of all these digital cameras."

Caught off guard. He was caught off guard by one hell of a lot more than that.

"There are no good targets in Afghanistan. There are lots of good targets in Iraq."

Osama bin Laden is laughing his ass off somewhere. We played the game exactly the way he hoped we would.

 

[Pure]

Angelo said,

//You can't tell me she wasn't given any training on the supervison of military prisoners and the articles of the Geneva convention pertaining to that during basic training.//

Actually I can. It's quite clear in the T report and testimony.

 

[Pure]

Lou said,
//She is either very easily led or very, very stupid.//

Ah yes, I recall that in Texas, the lower your IQ the more likely you are to get the death penalty. A US custom?

I'm reminded of the other poster who thought she should get two years and Rummy, ten. (Hey a Princeton degree's gotta be worth something.)

 

[Pure]

Meyerson, in Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19190-2004May11.html

[start excerpt]
And clearly, no one sought to train those Guardsmen assigned to duty at Abu Ghraib prison in the rudiments of the Geneva Conventions and our Army's regulations on the treatment of prisoners. Instead, they were thrown into a system that was being redesigned to "Gitmo-ize" the treatment of detainees there -- that is, to deal with prisoners the same way we treat the al Qaeda prisoners and others at our Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, free from prying eyes and the codes of either civilian or military law.

And Gitmo-ize the prisoners is just what some of our guards at Abu Ghraib did. Some prisoners, apparently, were Gitmo-ized to death.

It defies all belief that the young women and men of an Army Reserve unit from West Virginia were some kind of sadistic cult just waiting to be called away from their civilian lives to torture prisoners in Iraq. I doubt they brought the hoods, the dogs, the nightsticks with them. They were doing the very dirty work of an occupation that, as it's developed, could hardly be more counterproductive to our ultimate goal -- the liberalization of the Islamic world -- if we'd planned it that way.

But then, at the White House and at the highest (that is, civilian) levels of the Pentagon, every assumption about the occupation was rooted in fantasy. And on that topic and its role in the affairs of the occupiers and the occupied, I defer to Ireland's great poet, William Butler Yeats. "We fed the heart on fantasy," he wrote, "the heart grew brutal on the fare."
======


For something like Angelo's pov, a trifle more forgiving, see Applebaums column:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19186-2004May11.html

//But don't argue that anything -- your religion, your education, your material background -- would automatically make you accept or reject that order either. In hindsight, it seems clear that Pfc. England is a villain, and that Spec. Darby is a hero. Yet nothing in the biography of either predicts those labels. //

 

[Ann Vremont]

Originally posted by Pure

Rumsfeld told a Senate committee that Pentagon (news - web sites) lawyers had approved methods such as sleep deprivation and dietary changes as well as rules permitting prisoners to be made to assume stress positions.

Sleep deprivation, stress positions and dietary changes are standard for prisoners that will be interrogated. Making someone kneel on the frost covered ground for an hour on hands and knees in their underwear is acceptable, or flat on their stomach with their hands cuffed behind their hands for 8 hours, etc. My husband's favorite technique was taking eyeglasses away during questioning for those with the very thick glasses. (He is nearly blind as a bat himself, so knows just how effective the technique is.) Lights only have to be turned out for a very brief period every 24 hours, etc. This is pre-Bush policy. It's only when the extreme conditions are "living" conditions or when they are so extreme they meet the definition of "torture" or extreme degradation (forced simulation of sex acts with other men) that standards are violated and crimes committed.

And, for what it's worth, Army interrogators go through strenuous interrogations as the subject of the interrogation themselves as do the MPs they work with.

Ann

 

[Pure]

so what do you think of the list of [20][correction] approved methods, that's been shown around (at some of the hearings). i've not yet seen a copy. much is euphemisms, so it's hard to tell; 'sleep adjustment' and 'dietary change' (what is that, no food for three days, then rotten pork for the muslims?)

in any case, there's no debate that there are easier and harder methods, and some in the (alleged) gray areas. the Israelis authorized shaking (labeled as 'moderate physical methods') as not too harsh; but when you grab a shirt and shake a person violently, sometimes he dies, as they found.

there is a debate as to the overall effectiveness of the harsher methods, *esp assuming they are photgraphed and become public knowledge* in the country whose hearts and minds you're trying to win. (or lacking that, intimidate). what say you?

 

[hiddenself]

Oh, sure, very humane

Sleep deprivation, stress positions and dietary changes are standard for prisoners that will be interrogated.

"Standard" or approved by US perhaps. ICRC, Amnesty International and (I think) the Geneva Conventions do not agree. This latter sticky issue is one reason why Bush and Co. came up with the term "enemy combatants" (it has no legal meaning under international law), so that they can employ these measures and circumvent international law in Guantanamo and elsewhere. Such measures are illegal under US law -- prison guards cannot employ them in US prisons for example (they'd be guilty of torture under current law). But I suppose foreign enemy combatants are subhuman and not worthy of such niceties.

PS By the way, the US has repeatedly objected to such measures when practiced by other governments in the past -- it has considered them "human rights violations."

PPS Apparently, even the Pentagon is admitting as much now:

Sen. Jack Reed (news, bio, voting record) asked Pace if a foreign nation held a U.S. Marine in a cell, naked with a bag over his head, squatting with his arms uplifted for 45 minutes, whether would that be a good interrogation technique or a Geneva Convention violation.

"I would describe it as a violation, sir," replied Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

 

[Pure]

One of those charged. Charles A. Graner. Corrections background.

Query: Why are those with a background in the civilized correction practices of US (not like the barbarities in Iraq) turning up as the abusers and torturers?


NY Times:

A military judge will arraign Specialist [Charles A.] Graner along with Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II and Sgt. Javal C. Davis on May 20, but no date has been set for a court-martial, a spokesman for the American command, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, said in Baghdad.

Specialist Graner, 35, a former marine who served in the first American military operation in Iraq more than a decade ago, has become a central figure in the Abu Ghraib scandal, and a subject of controversy.

His fellow soldiers in the 372nd Military Police Company, which is based in Maryland, say they considered him a voice of strength and experience. Iraqi detainees, however, feared and loathed him, saying he routinely beat, humiliated and intimidated them, military investigators have said.

His former service as a guard at one of the toughest, most secure prisons in Pennsylvania, State Correctional Institution Greene, has also been raised as a subject of concern by some people, including Representative John P. Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania and a former marine.

Specialist Graner was not among dozens of corrections officers accused in a major mistreatment scandal at the state prison in the 1990's, and a suit accusing him of beating a handcuffed inmate was dismissed. But he was fired, and Congressman Murtha has questioned how Specialist Graner could later have been given a supervisory role at Abu Ghraib.

 

[Pure]

Approved tecniques

http://www.cfr.org/background/background_iraq_torture.php

IRAQ
Interrogation and Torture

Updated: May 13, 2004
[Council on Foreign Relations]

Did the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib amount to torture?

Some of it likely did, experts say. The worst abuses—including beatings and forced sexual acts—depicted in the photographs and documented in an Army investigation of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad may qualify as torture under the term’s internationally accepted definition. As such, the abuses could be considered war crimes. But experts also caution that the line between torture and other illegal but less grave breaches of the laws of war—such as cruel, humiliating, or degrading treatment—is not clear. “It’s a question of degree, it’s a continuum,” says James Ross, the senior legal adviser at Human Rights Watch. In each case of abuse, lawyers must weigh the circumstances of the case and the physical and mental harm inflicted on the victim.

What is torture?

Unlike some forms of cruel or inhumane treatment, such as neglect in an overcrowded prison, torture has to be carried out with a specific purpose in mind. That is the definition of torture in the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, an international agreement ratified by 136 nations, including the United States. According to the convention,

“The term torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering—whether physical or mental—is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as”:
obtaining a confession from him or another person;


punishing him for an act he or another person has committed or is suspected of having committed; or


intimidating or coercing him or another person.

Who commits the abuse is also relevant. To count as torture, the act must be “inflicted by, at the instigation of, or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

Have the reports of alleged torture at Abu Ghraib been documented?

Yes. The Red Cross, in a report presented to coalition authorities in February, said some incidents documented in Iraq between March and October 2003 “were tantamount to torture.” The internal Army investigation completed in February by Major General Antonio M. Taguba stopped short of using the word torture. Instead, it said that “several U.S. Army soldiers have committed egregious acts and grave breaches of international law at Abu Ghraib [prison] and Camp Bucca, Iraq.”

What did the Red Cross report find?

It said that ill-treatment during interrogation was systematic “in regard to persons arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an ’intelligence’ value.” It continued: “In these cases, [detainees] under supervision of military intelligence were at a high risk of being subjected to a variety of harsh treatments ranging from insults, threats, and humiliations to both physical and psychological coercion, which in some cases was tantamount to torture.”

The Red Cross report did not specify which types of ill-treatment rose to the level of torture. But it recorded a series of abuses it found to be illegal under international law, including:

placing hoods on prisoners to impede proper breathing, for sometimes up to four consecutive days, sometimes in conjunction with beatings;


beating with hard objects, including pistols and rifles;


threats of ill treatment and reprisal against family members;


stripping detainees and leaving them naked for several days in solitary confinement in empty and lightless cells;


parading naked detainees, sometimes with women’s underwear over their heads, in front of other prisoners and guards; and


regularly handcuffing prisoners, naked or in their underwear, to cell bars in positions intended to cause great discomfort.

What did the Taguba report show?

That report found that severe mismanagement by officers and a lack of training contributed to a pattern of misconduct at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons. It also faulted an “ambiguous command relationship” between military intelligence and military police at the prison, which led to a situation in which military police became involved in preparing conditions for interrogations. Among the abuses it recorded at Abu Ghraib:


punching, slapping, and kicking detainees;


using military working dogs without muzzles to intimidate detainees, and in at least one case allowing one to bite and severely injure a detainee; and


forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate while being photographed and videotaped.

Seven soldiers are expected to face court-martials—three have already been scheduled—and seven supervisors have been reprimanded. Six additional investigations into the allegations of abuse are ongoing.

Is torture ever allowed?

No, under international and U.S. law. “It is absolutely prohibited and cannot be justified under any circumstances,” according to a summary of existing law on the subject by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Torture is banned by many conventions and treaties. In international law they include:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the U.N. General Assembly. It states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”


The 1949 Geneva Conventions, which lay out the humanitarian laws of war and occupation. Torture is considered a “grave breach” of the convention and, therefore, a war crime.


The 1984 Convention Against Torture, which states that “no exceptional circumstances, such as a state of war, threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency may be invoked as a justification for torture.” Further, it makes a torturer responsible for his actions even if he was ordered to commit the crime. In addition, this convention makes torture a crime of “universal jurisdiction”—any country can prosecute torture that took place anywhere in the world, regardless of whether its citizens were involved.


A variety of international declarations governing the proper treatment of detainees including: the 1955 Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, the 1979 Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials, and the 1990 Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners.

How are these international laws enforced?

In general, each country is responsible for prosecuting violations of these laws by its own citizens. In practice, this has led to spotty enforcement and little accountability in countries unwilling to prosecute the crime.

What documents ban torture in U.S. law?
They include:
The U.S. Constitution, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment.”


The Uniform Military Code of Justice, which applies to U.S. military personnel and bans cruelty toward, or oppression or maltreatment of, any person subject to a soldier’s orders.


U.S. federal law, particularly U.S. Code 18, section 2340, which states that torture carries a sentence of up to 20 years, or, if the victim dies, life in prison or the death penalty. This section incorporates the 1984 Torture Convention into U.S. law with some changes.

Do some sanctioned U.S. interrogation practices cross the line into torture?

This is a matter of heated debate. U.S. officials deny that any of its sanctioned interrogation practices qualify as torture. But some human rights groups, citing legal precedents in the United States and other countries, say that some do. At issue are interrogation techniques often referred to as “stress and duress” or “coercive” practices used in some interrogations in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq, as well as, some experts say, other U.S.-run detention centers in the war on terror.

These techniques permit interrogators to use sensory and sleep deprivation and pain to encourage suspects to talk but are not intended to result in lasting harm. Human rights lawyers say that most of these techniques are illegal under international law. U.S. officials disagree, and say that their use has been vetted and approved by Pentagon lawyers.

Were the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib normal “stress and duress” techniques?

No, U.S. officials say. They go well beyond what has been sanctioned by Pentagon lawyers and have been described by officials as illegal, sadistic, and aberrant acts. On the other hand, some human rights advocates charge that the use of more moderate “stress and duress techniques” created an atmosphere that allowed the abuses to occur. U.S. officials strongly deny this claim.

How do we know “stress and duress” techniques are being used?

Until recently, reports of these techniques came from unnamed U.S. officials, complaints to human rights organizations, and press reports. Since the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison erupted in late April, however, two government documents discussing such techniques have surfaced. One is an April 2003 Pentagon memo that approved some 20 interrogation techniques for war-on-terrorism detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison. This document remains classified, but some of its contents were leaked to The Washington Post and later confirmed by Pentagon officials. The other is a list of “Interrogation Rules of Engagement” that applied in Iraq. This was released by the Senate Armed Services Committee May 11 at a Senate hearing on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

What techniques are approved for use in Guantanamo?

According to The Washington Post, they include:
reversing detainees’ normal sleep patterns;


exposing detainees to heat, cold, and “sensory assault,” including loud music and bright lights; and


forcing prisoners to stand for up to four hours at a time.

Interrogators must justify that harsh treatment is “militarily necessary,” according to accounts of the document. Once approved, the treatment must be accompanied by “appropriate medical monitoring.” U.S. officials have declared prisoners in Guantanamo Bay “illegal combatants” and therefore not covered by the Geneva Conventions.

Were the same techniques approved for use in Iraq?

U.S. officials say that because the protections of the Geneva Conventions apply to prisoners in Iraq, interrogation procedures approved for use there are more restrictive than those in use in Guantanamo. The list of coercive measures used in Guantanamo interrogations was given to commanders in Iraq, Lieutenant General Lance Smith, the deputy commander of the U.S. Central Command, said in congressional testimony May 11. But, he said, it had been made clear that “many” of those measures could not be used.

Approved measures in Iraq, according to the Senate list, include:
dietary manipulation, such as modifying meal times and food served;


sleep adjustment, including reversing detainees’ normal sleep patterns;


sleep deprivation, including keeping detainees awake for up to 72 hours;


isolation for longer than 30 days;


permitting the presence of muzzled military dogs during interrogations;


forcing detainees to stand or sit in an uncomfortable position for up to 45 minutes; and


sensory deprivation, such as complete darkness and isolation, for up to 72 hours.

Interrogators who wish to use these techniques need the case-by-case approval of the commanding general in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, according to the document. In addition, the document says that interrogations must “always be humane and lawful”; that “detainees will never be touched in a malicious or unwanted manner”; and that the Geneva Conventions apply.

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

Not to change the subject, but I wasn’t shocked to learn that some American group in Iraq was stooping to torture. I was a bit surprised to learn that they were operating from inside the military. What did shock me, was that anyone could still be shocked by that information.

The news has been filled with stories of American involvement in the torture of suspected terrorists – even those legally within America.

Torture is one of the few new American occupations, about which Lou Dobbs does not complain of being outsourced. They call it “extraordinary rendition.”

The most notorious case is that of Canadian, Maher Arar, detained while passing through the John F. Kennedy International Airport, on his way between a family visit to Tunisia and his home in Montreal, Quebec.

I won’t bore you here with the details. You can easily learn how the Bush Administration usually keeps its hands unsullied, while dealing in torture.

Just Google the terms “extraordinary rendition” or “Maher Arar.”

Or check the Washington Post story from Nov. 4, 2003.

 

[Pure]

Hi Virtual,
Yes, it appears 'outsourcing' has been going on for some time; shipping certain prisoners to 'friendly' countries that torture.

Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher

[Washington Post, May 16, 2004]

By R. Jeffrey Smith
[start quoted excerpts]
Army intelligence officers suspected that a Syrian and admitted jihadist who was detained at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad knew about the illegal flow of money, arms and foreign fighters into Iraq. But he was smug, the officers said, and refused to talk. So last November, they devised a special plan for his interrogation, going beyond what Army rules normally allowed.

An Army colonel in charge of intelligence-gathering at the prison, spelling out the plan in a classified cable to the top U.S. military officer in Iraq, said interrogators would use a method known as "fear up harsh," which military documents said meant "significantly increasing the fear level in a security detainee." The aim was to make the 31-year-old Syrian think his only hope in life was to talk, undermining his confidence in what they termed "the Allah factor."

According to the plan, interrogators needed the assistance of military police supervising his detention at the prison, who ordinarily play no role in interrogations under Army regulations. First, the interrogators were to throw chairs and tables in the man's presence at the prison and "invade his personal space."

Then the police were to put a hood on his head and take him to an isolated cell through a gantlet of barking guard dogs; there, the police were to strip-search him and interrupt his sleep for three days with interrogations, barking and loud music, according to Army documents. The plan was sent to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

A spokesman for Sanchez declined to comment yesterday, and so it remains uncertain whether the plan was one of 25 requests for unusually tough interrogations that Army officials in Washington have said he approved between October and the present. All involved prolonged isolation of detainees, the officials said on Friday, adding that Sanchez last week issued an order barring requests for approval of particularly severe questioning tactics.

But the fact that a plan for such intense and highly organized pressure was proposed by Col. Thomas M. Pappas -- a senior military intelligence officer in Iraq who took his job at the insistence of a general dispatched from the Pentagon -- suggests a wider circle of involvement in aggressive and potentially abusive interrogations of Iraqi detainees, encompassing officers higher up the chain of command, than the Army has previously detailed.

While the Army has blamed the physical abuses documented in soldiers' photographs on a handful of night-shift soldiers at Abu Ghraib who ignored rules on humane treatment, government officials and humanitarian experts say the order indicates the abuses could instead have been an outgrowth of harsh treatment that had been approved.

They suggest in particular that military intelligence officials may not only have improperly tolerated physical abuses, as stated in the Army's official internal report, but also that they may have deliberately set the stage for them. According to a hypothesis now being explored by members of Congress, this stage was set through a directed collaboration between two units of military police and intelligence officers, virtually unprecedented in recent Army practice.

The interrogation plan for the Syrian "clearly allows for a crossing of the line into abusive behavior," said James Ross, a senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch who reviewed it for The Washington Post.

What makes its wording so troubling, Ross added, is that it allows "wide authority for soldiers conducting interrogations. . . . Were the superior officer to agree to these techniques, it would be opening the door for any soldier or officer to be committing abusive acts and believe they were doing so" with official sanction.

Congressional testimony by Defense Department and Army officials over the past two weeks has highlighted the fact that the abuses in Iraq -- which mostly occurred in the last quarter of 2003 -- came at a time of heightened pressures in Washington for more robust intelligence-gathering, because of proliferating attacks on U.S. forces and the dwindling intelligence on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction.

Although no direct links have been found between the documented abuses and orders from Washington, Pentagon officials who spoke on the condition that they not be named say that the hunt for data on these two topics was coordinated during this period by Defense Undersecretary Stephen A. Cambone, the top U.S. military intelligence official and long one of the closest aides to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The coincidence in timing has in turn prompted several lawmakers to say they intend to probe more deeply in coming weeks to determine whether the specialists and sergeants handling the prison guard dogs and pulling hoods over prisoners' heads were in fact implementing policy directives instigated by Washington that may have set the stage for abuses.

"We've got no proof that a person in authority told them to do this activity," Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the Army's deputy chief of staff, said on May 11.

But three directives in particular have already begun to attract congressional scrutiny: The first is a classified report by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller on Sept. 9, 2003, demanding that the military police at Abu Ghraib be dedicated and trained to set "the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees." The report, which Cambone has testified was presented to his deputy William Boykin, contained five recommendations spelling out how this was to occur and reported it had already begun.

The second is an Oct. 12 classified memo signed by Sanchez that demanded a "harmonization" of military policing and intelligence work at Abu Ghraib for the purpose of ensuring "consistency with the interrogation policies . . . and maximiz[ing] the efficiency of the interrogation."

The memo, obtained by The Washington Post, also states "it is imperative that interrogators be provided reasonable latitude to vary their approach," depending on a detainee's background, strengths, resistance and other factors. It also explicitly demands humane treatment and requires that any dogs present during the interrogations be muzzled.

The third is a Nov. 19 memo from Sanchez's office that formally placed the two key Abu Ghraib cellblocks where the abuses occurred under the control of Pappas and his 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. It was 11 days later, after this memo placed the military police responsible for "security of detainees and base protection" in Pappas's hands, that he sought, in his memo to Sanchez, to draw military police explicitly into applying pressure on the Syrian.

The fact that prison interrogations were so directly controlled by these military directives, as well as the apparent cultural sophistication of some of the abuses, has already led some lawmakers to conclude that much more experienced and senior officers were involved than the seven military police now charged by the Army with wrongdoing.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) expressed skepticism during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last Tuesday, for example, that a group of military police from rural Maryland and West Virginia "would have chosen bizarre sexual humiliations that were specifically designed to be offensive to Muslim men [as the photos depicted]. . . . It implies too much knowledge. . . . And that is why, even though I do not yet have the evidence, I cannot help but suspect that others were involved."

Alexander did nothing to steer her away from that idea. "Well, ma'am, your logic is correct. I think that the difficult part is to find out who told whom what to do."

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) expressed similar concerns on May 7. "On the surface, you could portray the 800th MP Brigade as a Reserve unit with poor leadership and poor training," he told top Pentagon officials at the hearing that day. "However, the abuse of prisoners is not merely the failure of an MP brigade; it's a failure of the chain of command."
Military Police

At the heart of the unfolding congressional probe into what happened at Abu Ghraib is the conduct there of two units: the 800th Military Police Brigade, an Army reserve unit based in Uniondale, N.Y., and the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, a regular Army unit principally based in Germany and Italy. [end quoted excerpts]

 

[SlickTony]

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) expressed skepticism during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last Tuesday, for example, that a group of military police from rural Maryland and West Virginia "would have chosen bizarre sexual humiliations that were specifically designed to be offensive to Muslim men [as the photos depicted]. . . . It implies too much knowledge. . . . And that is why, even though I do not yet have the evidence, I cannot help but suspect that others were involved."

As I implied in a previous post, she's never read or seen Deliverance?

 

[Pure]

Zimbardo, the psychologist made the same points. You don't have to be an 'Arabist' to know that forced jerking off in from of a strange lady and your colleagues, and having an object shoved up your ass, is going to be embarrassing.

Also, having to be naked or sitting in your own poop is pretty obviously disconcerting.

I think it's clear, though, that General Miller and Pappas (head of MI at the prison) directed the putting the screws to folks-- 'gitmo-izing'. Though they didn't ever say, 'shove this up that guy's ass.'

 

[cantdog]

Deliverance or no Deliverance, what boots it? You do indeed keep saying that. It is very clever. Do you mean that the Senator should believe otherwise? That she should imagine no one in the building directed such things to be done? Or are you just being very clever about West Virginia for fun?

Please accept my laughter at your cleverness to stand for all laughter at this remark, so that you can be capable of ceasing to make this very very clever remark. [insert laughter here]

You see how powerless we are to stop torturing hyenas from doing whatever they like. The only tactic which Amnesty can employ with any degree of success to stop torture is to subject it to the light of day.

You see indications that the government of this country is setting aside anything: treaties, international law, international agreements to which it is signatory, common decency, human rights, the Golden Rule, indeed setting aside or working around every conceivable impediment so that they can manage, somehow, anyhow, to torture people, without trial, because they suspect them of some nebulous connection to something they dislike.

The light of day is now beginning to filter in to these things. So far, so good. What we find is, Lynndie doesn't believe she was doing anything wrong. Rummy doesn't believe anyone over there or anyone at Gitmo is doing anything wrong. Bush says the Geneva Convention rules are just legalese and that they don't apply to at least three new classes of detained people. Obviously they'll make up another class of people who don't get away without being tortured if they want to have one. And several people in the thread also believe nothing wrong was done.

Well, those people are mistaken. Bush is wrong to torture anyone, whatever class they might fall into. The commanders at Gitmo, the torturers at Gitmo, and their counterparts in the facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq are wrong. Torture is not acceptable. If it is acceptable to Rummy, then Rummy is wrong.

A secret police system with covert surveillance and the special privilege to haul people off without trial or defense and torture them-- this does not call for clever remarks. It is not a new thing, but it ain't a good thing, and it's not the kind of thing I need in my representative democracy. As a citizen of it, it is my duty to do what I can do to remove this system and its imprimatur on torture from it. Being clever about people from rural places doesn't help and isn't germane.

 

[SensualCealy]

After seeing an interview with her on tv the other day I wouldn't back up her story what so ever.

It is one thing to follow orders and its another to hold your moral ground. I think I'd rather be court marshalled for disobeying orders and not be personally humiliated across the world, than to follow orders and be a mochary of the U.S. service people.

For every one person that is herded into a pack, there is always one that will stand up for themselves and people around them to justify moral conduct.

I have one question, she was no longer in training, therefor no longer a magot, can she not think for herself?

I am proud of what the men and women are doing overseas and doubt Id have the guts to do what they do, its too bad there are Lynndies and others out there that are doing a disfavour to the U.S and other countries when we should be proud of their efforts.

Cealy
Proud to be a Canadian- Even if our Army and Navy sucks due to lack of funding!

 

[dr_mabeuse]

One thing I'm not clear on: just what was the legal status of the people in detention? Were they serving time? I mean, had they been tried and found guilty? Or were they awaiting trial? Or had they just been picked up on suspicion?

---dr.M.

 

[cloudy]

<snip> are you just being very clever about West Virginia for fun?

Please accept my laughter at your cleverness to stand for all laughter at this remark, so that you can be capable of ceasing to make this very very clever remark. [insert laughter here] <snip>

Being clever about people from rural places doesn't help and isn't germane.

Thank you, CD, for a very nice post.

Isn't the stereotyping going on here just as bad as Americans stereotyping Muslims?

Does the fact that these people were from a rural area mean that they are more or less predisposed to torturing people?

Please. What they did was just flat out wrong. Where they are from doesn't have a single thing to do with the issue.

Cloudy (tired of being assumed to be ignorant just because I live in a rural area)

 

[ABSTRUSE]

One thing I'm not clear on: just what was the legal status of the people in detention? Were they serving time? I mean, had they been tried and found guilty? Or were they awaiting trial? Or had they just been picked up on suspicion?

---dr.M.

These are things I've been wondering also, anyone know the answer?

~A~

ps Cloudy, I like you Hicks

 

[Pure]

mab,

many had been picked up on suspicion. note that 300 were released the day after Rummy left. the army raids certain neighborhoods, and looks the the 15-30 year olds, and tries to figure who *might* know something about terrorism.

the Red Cross estimated 70-80 percent were not there under any specific charge.

J.

 

[Pure]

cant said,

Deliverance or no Deliverance, what boots it? You do indeed keep saying that. It is very clever. Do you mean that the Senator should believe otherwise? That she should imagine no one in the building directed such things to be done? Or are you just being very clever about West Virginia for fun?

Please accept my laughter at your cleverness to stand for all laughter at this remark, so that you can be capable of ceasing to make this very very clever remark. [insert laughter here]

you make some good points elsewhere in your post, but who is this 'you' that pops up repeatedly. please state whom you are addressing.

best,

J.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

I found this while searching around, it's long but very interesting.
~A~

May 17, 2004 | home





THE GRAY ZONE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”

The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America’s most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy’s submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force’s stealth bomber. All the so-called “black” programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.

“Rumsfeld’s goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target—a standup group to hit quickly,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “He got all the agencies together—the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.—to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go.” The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.



The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America’s élite forces—Navy seals, the Army’s Delta Force, and the C.I.A.’s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: “Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress.”

In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military’s facilities at Guantánamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations—using force if necessary—at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the “white,” or overt, world.

Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read into the program,” the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II—‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”

Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone’s military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.

Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the Pentagon. Asked for comment on this story, a Pentagon spokesman said, “I will not discuss any covert programs; however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his position as the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence until March 7, 2003, and had no involvement in the decision-making process regarding interrogation procedures in Iraq or anywhere else.”

In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. “It was an active program,” the former intelligence official told me. “It’s been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States—and do so without visibility.” Some of its methods were troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however.

By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and—without success—for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren’t able to stop the evolving insurgency.



In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of Baathist “dead-enders,” criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda followers. The Administration measured its success in the war by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted members of the old regime—reproduced on playing cards—had been captured. Then, in August, 2003, terror bombings in Baghdad hit the Jordanian Embassy, killing nineteen people, and the United Nations headquarters, killing twenty-three people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the U.N. mission. On August 25th, less than a week after the U.N. bombing, Rumsfeld acknowledged, in a talk before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that “the dead-enders are still with us.” He went on, “There are some today who are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they suggest that this represents some sort of failure on the part of the Coalition. But this is not the case.” Rumsfeld compared the insurgents with those true believers who “fought on during and after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany.” A few weeks later—and five months after the fall of Baghdad—the Defense Secretary declared,“It is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in Iraq than in the United States.”

Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that the war was going badly. The increasingly beleaguered and baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that the insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. “When you understand that they’re organized in a cellular structure,” General John Abizaid, the head of the Central Command, declared, “that . . . they have access to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you’ll understand how dangerous they are.”

The American military and intelligence communities were having little success in penetrating the insurgency. One internal report prepared for the U.S. military, made available to me, concluded that the insurgents’“strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good.” According to the study:

Their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable targets and particular individuals has been the result of painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance. Inside information has been passed on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop movements and daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition from within the Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi Police force which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi ministries and from within pro-insurgent individuals working with the CPA’s so-called Green Zone.


The study concluded, “Politically, the U.S. has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council”—the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.—“as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA.”

By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon’s political and military misjudgments was clear. Donald Rumsfeld’s “dead-enders” now included not only Baathists but many marginal figures as well—thugs and criminals who were among the tens of thousands of prisoners freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general amnesty. Their desperation was not driving the insurgency; it simply made them easy recruits for those who were. The analyst said, “We’d killed and captured guys who had been given two or three hundred dollars to ‘pray and spray’”—that is, shoot randomly and hope for the best. “They weren’t really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency.” In many cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the Baath Party. The analyst said that the insurgents “spent three or four months figuring out how we operated and developing their own countermeasures. If that meant putting up a hapless guy to go and attack a convoy and see how the American troops responded, they’d do it.” Then, the analyst said, “the clever ones began to get in on the action.”

By contrast, according to the military report, the American and Coalition forces knew little about the insurgency: “Human intelligence is poor or lacking . . . due to the dearth of competence and expertise. . . . The intelligence effort is not coördinated since either too many groups are involved in gathering intelligence or the final product does not get to the troops in the field in a timely manner.” The success of the war was at risk; something had to be done to change the dynamic.



The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that “detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.”

Miller’s concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to “Gitmoize” the prison system in Iraq—to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba—methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in “stress positions” for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

“They weren’t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,” the former intelligence official told me. “No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up—the black special-access program—and I’m going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it’s working. We’re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We’re getting good stuff. But we’ve got more targets”—prisoners in Iraqi jails—“than people who can handle them.”

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap’sauspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”

The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included “recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. “How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib—whether military police or military intelligence—was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others—military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program—wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn’t know,” Karpinski told me. “I called them the disappearing ghosts. I’d seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I’d see them months later. They were nice—they’d always call out to me and say, ‘Hey, remember me? How are you doing?’” The mysterious civilians, she said, were “always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.” Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski’s leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)

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 sap 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 sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. “This was stupidity,” a government consultant told me. “You’re taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers.”

The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. “There’s nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk,” he told me. “What could be more boring than needing the coöperation of logistical planners?” The only difficulty, the former official added, is that, “as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We’ve never had a case where a special-access program went sour—and this goes back to the Cold War.”

In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame. “The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone,” he said. “This is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.” When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, “but he’s responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we’ve changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means.”



Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had they witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at any trial, however, is why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men.

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

“This shit has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know the rules, that’s another.”

In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.” The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.



The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.

The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. “You can’t cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access program? So you hope that maybe it’ll go away.” The Pentagon’s attitude last January, he said, was “Somebody got caught with some photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it.” Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring: “‘We’ve got a glitch in the program. We’ll prosecute it.’ The cover story was that some kids got out of control.”

In their testimony before Congress last week, Rumsfeld and Cambone struggled to convince the legislators that Miller’s visit to Baghdad in late August had nothing to do with the subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee that the interplay between Miller and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had only a casual connection to his office. Miller’s recommendations, Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own role, he said, was mainly to insure that the “flow of intelligence back to the commands” was “efficient and effective.” He added that Miller’s goal was “to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence.”

It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York, posed the essential question facing the senators:

If, indeed, General Miller was sent from Guantánamo to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence from detainees, then it is fair to conclude that the actions that are at point here in your report [on abuses at Abu Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller’s arrival and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved.. . .Therefore, I for one don’t believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone and the Defense Department as to exactly what General Miller’s orders were . . . how he carried out those orders, and the connection between his arrival in the fall of ’03 and the intensity of the abuses that occurred afterward.


Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the former intelligence official told me, Miller was “read in”—that is, briefed—on the special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. “His job is to save what he can,” the former official said. “He’s there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability.” As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence official added, “He goes into it not knowing shit. And then: ‘Holy cow! What’s going on?’”

If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the special-access program. “If you give away the fact that a special-access program exists,”the former intelligence official told me, “you blow the whole quick-reaction program.”

One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld’s account of his initial reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of curiosity. One factor may have been recent history: there had been many previous complaints of prisoner abuse from organization like Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had not been provided with details of alleged abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges. “You read it, as I say, it’s one thing. You see these photographs and it’s just unbelievable. . . . It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t video. It wasn’t color. It was quite a different thing.” The former intelligence official said that, in his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials had not studied the photographs because “they thought what was in there was permitted under the rules of engagement,” as applied to the sap. “The photos,” he added, “turned out to be the result of the program run amok.”

The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But, he said, “it was their permission granted to do the sap, generically, and there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses.”

This official went on, “The black guys”—those in the Pentagon’s secret program—“say we’ve got to accept the prosecution. They’re vaccinated from the reality.” The sap is still active, and “the United States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?” The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. “If you even give a hint that you’re aware of a black program that you’re not read into, you lose your clearances,” the former official said. “Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended—the poor kids at the end of the food chain.”

The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. “The Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn’t know how to do it,” the former intelligence official said.



Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to many conservatives, defended the Administration’s continued secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib. “Why keep it black?” the consultant asked. “Because the process is unpleasant. It’s like making sausage—you like the result but you don’t want to know how it was made. Also, you don’t want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison.”

The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as “a tumor” on the war on terror. He said, “As long as it’s benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it—it becomes a malignant tumor.”

The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said, “created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we’re going to end up with another Church Commission”—the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. “When the shit hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?” the consultant asked. “You do it selectively and with intelligence.”

“Congress is going to get to the bottom of this,” the Pentagon consultant said. “You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the system.” He added, “When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines.”

Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, “If this is true, it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.”

“In an odd way,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, “the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.” Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. “Some jags hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war,” Roth told me. “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”

 

[Pure]

Thanks, abs,

I've heard of the story, and 'copper green', but not seen the details.

did you read the Cambone testimony before congress; he is an arrogant asshole, who does dirty work for Rummy.

if Rummy cant be gotten, maybe Cambone will take a fall.

there's some interesting stuff on this fellow 'Graner' (whose trial starts soon); documented former wife abuser; background as a prison guard.

that the higher ups found a few psychos to break heads and sodomize does not excuse these higher ups.