General Faulted in Abu Ghraib Abuse
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| Fri, 08-27-2004 - 12:10am |
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August 27, 2004
ABU GHRAIB SCANDAL
Army's Report Faults General in Prison Abuse
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, Aug. 26 - Classified parts of the report by three Army generals on the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison say Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq, approved the use in Iraq of some severe interrogation practices intended to be limited to captives held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Afghanistan.
Moreover, the report contends, by issuing and revising the rules for interrogations in Iraq three times in 30 days, General Sanchez and his legal staff sowed such confusion that interrogators acted in ways that violated the Geneva Conventions, which they understood poorly anyway.
Military officials and others in the Bush administration have repeatedly said the Geneva Conventions applied to all prisoners in Iraq, even though members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban held in Afghanistan and Guantánamo did not, in their estimation, fall under the conventions.
But classified passages of the Army report say the procedures approved by General Sanchez on Sept. 14, 2003, and the revisions made when the Central Command found fault with the initial policy, exceeded the Geneva guidelines as well as standard Army doctrines.
General Sanchez and his aides have previously described the series of orders he issued, although not in as much detail as the latest report, which was released Wednesday with a few classified sections omitted. They have described his order of Oct. 12 as rescinding his order of Sept. 14.
But the Army's latest review instead finds that the later order "confused doctrine and policy even further,'' a classified part of the report says. It says the memorandum, while not authorizing abuse, effectively opened the way at Abu Ghraib last fall for interrogation techniques that Pentagon investigators have characterized as abusive, in dozens of cases involving dozens of soldiers at the prison in Iraq.
The techniques approved by General Sanchez exceeded those advocated in a standard Army field manual that provided the basic guidelines for interrogation procedures. But they were among those previously approved by the Pentagon for use in Afghanistan and Cuba, and were recommended to General Sanchez and his staff in the summer of 2003 in memorandums sent by a team headed by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, a commander at Guantánamo who had been sent to Iraq by senior Pentagon officials, and by a military intelligence unit that had served in Afghanistan and was taking charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib.
The report says the abusive techniques not sufficiently prohibited by General Sanchez included isolation and the use of dogs in interrogation. It says military police and military intelligence soldiers who used those practices believed they had been authorized by senior commanders.
"At Abu Ghraib, isolation conditions sometimes included being kept naked in very hot or very cold, small rooms, and/or completely darkened rooms, clearly in violation of the Geneva Conventions,'' a classified part of the report said.
The passages involving General Sanchez's orders were among several deleted from the version of the report by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay that was made public by the Pentagon on Wednesday.
Classified parts of the 171-page report were provided to The New York Times by a senior Defense Department official who said fuller disclosure of the findings would help public understanding of the causes of the prisoner abuse scandal.
Army officials said Thursday that some sections of the report had been marked secret because they referred to policy memorandums that were still classified.
But the report's discussion of the September and October orders, while critical of General Sanchez and his staff, do not disclose many new details of the orders and do not appear to contain sensitive material about interrogations or other intelligence-gathering methods.
They do show in much clearer detail than ever before how interrogation practices from Afghanistan and Guantánamo were brought to Abu Ghraib, and how poorly the nuances of what was acceptable in Iraq were understood by military intelligence officials in Iraq.
The classified sections of the Fay report reinforce criticisms made in another report, by the independent panel headed by James R. Schlesinger, the former defense secretary.
That panel argued that General Sanchez's actions effectively amounted to an unauthorized suspension of the Geneva Conventions in Iraq by categorizing prisoners there as unlawful combatants.
The Schlesinger panel described that reasoning as "understandable,'' but said General Sanchez and his staff should have recognized that they were "lacking specific authorization to operate beyond the confines of the Geneva Convention.''
In an interview on Thursday with reporters and editors of The Times, Gen. Paul J. Kern, the senior officer who supervised General Fay's work, said the Fay inquiry had not addressed whether General Sanchez was authorized to designate detainees in Iraq as unlawful combatants, as the administration has treated prisoners in Afghanistan.
A secret passage in the report, though, says that with General Sanchez's first order, on Sept. 14, national policies and those of his command "collided, introducing ambiguities and inconsistencies in policy and practice,'' adding, "Policies and practices developed and approved for use on Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees who were not afforded the protection of the Geneva Conventions now applied to detainees who did fall under the Geneva Conventions' protections." It goes on to cite several further problems with the order.
Asked whether General Sanchez's actions opened the door to use of interrogation techniques from Afghanistan, General Kern said, "He didn't close the door, and he should have."
Together, the Schlesinger and Fay reports spell out the sharpest criticism of missteps by American commanders in Iraq involving what they described as a crucial question of making clear to soldiers what was permitted and what was not in interrogation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
General Sanchez and his deputies have always maintained that the only approaches they authorized for use in Iraq were consistent with the Geneva Conventions, which spell out rules for the treatment of prisoners of war and other combatants. They have said the directive issued by General Sanchez in October had made it clear that the use of dogs and isolation could be used in interrogations only with the general's approval.
"Interrogators at Abu Ghraib used both dogs and isolation as interrogation practices," a classified part of the report said. "The manner in which they were used on some occasions clearly violated the Geneva Conventions."
The classified section of the Fay report also sheds new light on the role played by a secretive Special Operations Forces/Central Intelligence Agency task force that operated in Iraq and Afghanistan as a source of interrogation procedures that were put into effect at Abu Ghraib. It says that a July 15, 2003, "Battlefield Interrogation Team and Facility Policy,'' drafted by use by Joint Task Force 121, which was given the task of locating former government members in Iraq, was adopted "almost verbatim'' by the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, which played a leading role in interrogations at Abu Ghraib.
That task force policy endorsed the use of stress positions during harsh interrogation procedures, the use of dogs, yelling, loud music, light control, isolation and other procedures used previously in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Those measures were initially authorized by General Sanchez for use in Iraq in his September memorandum, then revoked in the policy he issued a month later, but not in a way understood by interrogators at Abu Ghraib to have banned those practices, the classified version of the Fay report said.
Among those who believed, incorrectly, that the use of dogs in interrogations could be approved without General Sanchez's approval was Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, the report said.
"Dogs as an interrogation tool should have been specifically excluded,'' a classified section of the report said. It criticized General Sanchez for not having fully considered "the implications for interrogation policy,'' and said the manner in which interrogators at Abu Ghraib used both dogs and isolations as interrogation practices "on some occasions clearly violated the Geneva Conventions.''
The role played by members of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, from Fort Bragg, N.C., some of whom were identified as having taken part in the abuses, is given particular attention in the classified parts of the report.
Members of the unit had earlier served in Afghanistan, where some were implicated in the deaths of two detainees that are still under investigation, and the report says commanders should have heeded more carefully the danger that members of the unit might again be involved in abusive behavior.
The unit had worked closely with Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan, and "at same point'' it "came to possess the JTF-121 interrogation policy'' used by the joint Special Operations/C.I.A. teams, the classified section of the report says.

http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101040517/wgraphics.html
For two years reports have piled up about "stress and duress" techniques military and CIA officers are using on al-Qaeda and Iraqi captives.
While nothing compared to the horrors of Saddam Hussein's regime, the actions of U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib unquestionably violated international law. What's more, for two years reports have piled up about "stress and duress" techniques military and CIA officers are using on al-Qaeda and Iraqi captives. Those tactics—torture lite—also go against international rules; their practice may have encouraged the crimes at Abu Ghraib.
The Techniques
Prisoners and human rights groups have described various coercive methods used by the U.S. on captives held overseas. U.S. officials admit to some of them.
Sleep Deprivation
Interrogators keep captives awake for days with bright lights and loud music.
Uncomfortable Positions
Prisoners are forced to stand or squat in positions for hours or are held in cramped spaces where they cannot sit, stand or lie down.
Shock Therapy
Soldiers "soften" captives before handing them over to interrogators. Prisoners are beaten, stripped, doused with water and subjected to drastic swings in temperature. They are often made to remain naked even while watched by female guards.
Sensory Deprivation
To disorient captives, interrogators place hoods, duct tape or darkened goggles over their eyes for hours at a time. Mind Games Interrogators cajole, scare or confuse prisoners. They threaten to send captives to countries with a known history of torture, like Egypt or Morocco. Occasionally the U.S. has carried out that threat.
The Law
The Third Geneva Convention forbids subjecting POWs to "cruel treatment and torture, outrages upon personal dignity and humiliating treatment." U.S. officials say Iraqi and Taliban captives are covered by the convention but al-Qaeda members are unlawful combatants and thus not covered. The convention says tribunals must decide a prisoner's status.
The Convention Against Torture defines torture as any act that inflicts severe pain or suffering, physical or mental. When the U.S. ratified the convention in 1990, it defined torture as anything cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment. The convention prohibits countries from handing over captives to another state known to employ torture.
The Challenges
Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees argued before the U.S. Supreme Court last month that their clients deserve access to courts to challenge their imprisonment.
The Center for Constitutional Rights filed suit against the Justice Department in January on behalf of Maher Arar, a Canadian arrested during a layover in New York City because of suspected al-Qaeda ties. He was deported to Syria, where the C.C.R. alleges he was tortured for months before winning release.
Justice Department and Pentagon Investigators are examining multiple prisoner deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. Three of those captives died while under interrogation by the CIA.
Blame for prison abuse rises to top.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/188071_abughraib27.html
Few people -- other than blind supporters of the way President Bush has conducted the war in Iraq -- will be surprised to learn that top Pentagon and U.S. Army officials have been implicated in the maltreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
Now an official commission for the first time linked the abuse with the guidance and policies set by top officials in Washington. Its language was not dramatic -- after all, its chairman, James R. Schlesinger, a former U.S. defense secretary, was handpicked for the inquiry by Donald Rumsfeld, the man many regard as the prime villain -- but its message was unmistakable.
The Schlesinger report places the blame for the scandal on Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who once called on intelligence officers to work more closely with military police to "manipulate an internee's emotions and weaknesses." Another report, by Maj. Gen. George Fay, recommends that at least 20 intelligence officers face punishment for their behavior, which included sanctioning the use of unmuzzled dogs to intimidate prisoners. All this further undermines the claim by the Bush administration that the abuse was the work of the few "bad apples" currently being court-martialed at a U.S. base in Mannheim.
It was not a claim that ever had much credibility. The same reports of systematic brutality, gunpoint interrogation, sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation that came from Abu Ghraib were also voiced by those released from Guantanamo Bay and Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Some of the measures were even enshrined in the official advice of Pentagon lawyers, who drew up a 72-point matrix of approved "stress and duress" techniques for use in interrogation. They were part of what the Red Cross denounced as "a general pattern of mistreatment of detainees" right across the prisons of Iraq.
Now an official U.S. commission has given its verdict, too. Whatever the show trials in Mannheim find, few will doubt that George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are guilty of setting the moral climate that allowed such behavior to take place.
I see this quite differently. When bush declared prisoners were "enemy combatants" and not subject to the conditions of the Genevia Convention, this gave them informal authorization, i.e., do it but don't get caught. Couple this with bushes sadistic tendences as mention in "Bush on the Couch" and I have to wonder exactly what instructions were implicitely being given. Don't forget this administration is extremely familiar with psychological manipulations.
DON'T STOP AT RUMSFELD!
Blame for Abu Ghraib goes higher
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpqabu283945107aug28,0,7477984.story?coll=ny-editorials-headlines
Independent assessments of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib should lay to rest White House attempts to limit blame to a few bad apples on the night shift. A panel headed by former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger found the Pentagon's civilian and military command responsible for conditions that led to "egregious abuses" at the U.S.-run prison. That includes Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A separate Army investigative report said the involvement of intelligence operatives with wider latitude in interrogation techniques also contributed to abuses at Abu Ghraib.
But responsibility goes farther up the line than that: All the way to President George W. Bush.
"The abuses were not just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards, and they are more than the failure of a few leaders to enforce proper discipline," the Schlesinger panel said. "There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels." Actually, at the highest level.
Bush set the stage for abuse in February 2002 when he declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaida prisoners and the Taliban were unlawful combatants unqualified for prisoner of war status. When the man at the top says the rules don't apply, abusive excesses are a predictable result.
Rumsfeld approved stronger interrogation techniques in December 2002 that migrated to Abu Ghraib, which was by then "seriously overcrowded and under-resourced."
With 50,000 prisoners in all and 300 allegations of abuse, it's clear that most were not mistreated. But Bush's insistence that his word is law in the war on terrorists has cost the nation a big chunk of the moral high ground.
Reports Criticize Medics for Overlooking Abuses.
The failures of Army medical staff members to prevent and report torture, as detailed in reports about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison this week, shows the need for more investigation and better training, medical ethicists and the Army itself said yesterday.
More...... http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/politics/27medic.html
Yes, I agree. As soon as I'd read that these prisoners would not be subject to the Geneva Conventions, I knew that the US planned to use torture as an interrogation tool. Unfortunately, many in the US, particularly after 9/11 agreed with this policy,
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