Amputations and murder at Abu Ghraib: report
February 7, 2005 - 8:28AM
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Unqualified US military medics stationed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison carried out amputations, recycled used chest tubes and lacked medical supplies to treat the overcrowded jail's inmates after the fall of Baghdad, according to a Time magazine report.
The report, to hit newsstands tomorrow, also said a medic was ordered, by one account, to cover up a homicide inside the jail.
Although the prison just outside Baghdad was jammed with as many as 7000 detainees -- some of whom displayed serious mental illnesses -- no US doctor was in residence for most of 2003 following the US-led invasion of Iraq.
The report said "with straitjackets unavailable, tethers -- like the leash held by Private Lynndie England -- were put to use at Abu Ghraib to control unruly or mentally disturbed detainees, sometimes with the concurrence of a doctor."
England has been charged with abusing Iraqi detainFees at the jail. She was infamously photographed holding a leash attached to the neck of a naked Iraqi inmate sprawled on a cell block floor.
In a statement obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, Time reported that an Army medic based at Abu Ghraib spoke of examining 800 to 900 detainees daily as they were admitted. If he worked a 12-hour day, that gave him less than one minute for each exam.
The report cited National Guard Captain Kelly Parrson, a physician's assistant at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and 2004. Parrson was seriously injured by a mortar during an insurgent attack that targeted the jail.
Parrson told Time there were times when he and other non-physicians carried out amputations and other procedures on inmates that should have been performed by surgeons.
"I took off an ankle and a lower leg," he recalls. "There was no one else, and if it was death or amputation, you just had to do it."
"When somebody died, we just took out their chest tube and inserted it into another, living person," he said.
The National Guard captain cited a shortage of catheters, breathing tubes, orthopaedic supplies, including casts used to treat bone fractures caused by shrapnel from high explosives.
Another officer, who is a psychologist, estimated that 5 per cent of prisoners suffered from mental illnesses, yet for long periods no doctor was on site to treat such inmates.
Doctor David Auch, commander of the reserve company that supported medical operations at Abu Ghraib in 2003, said medics at one point used a helmet to protect a mentally unwell inmate who banged his head against cell walls.
Improvised padded gloves and plastic handcuffs were used to restrain the troubled inmate and a thin leather tether was also used to restrain the man.
Auch said neither he nor his medical staff were consulted about an Iraqi, later dubbed Ice Man, when he was first brought to the prison for interrogation by US military intelligence.
The detainee subsequently died during questioning in the middle of the night under circumstances that have been officially ruled a homicide by the military.
According to statements made during an army inquiry, military personnel ordered the body put on ice and then spirited it away after medics had attached a fake IV to the dead man's arm in an apparent attempt to create the impression he was still alive.
Auch told Time that he had not been questioned as part of the army's probe into the homicide.
But he told the magazine a medic told him he was ordered by a military intelligence officer to participate in the ruse and to never discuss it.
The Pentagon has declined to comment on the case while it continues its investigation into the man's death.
In the past year, the US military says it has set up a 52-bed hospital at the jail, staffed by 200 highly trained medical personnel.
The number of detainees in US custody stands at about 3,000. The interim Iraqi government also holds prisoners at the jail, Time added
http://www.smh.com.au/news/After-Saddam/No...?oneclick=true#
Full Version: Prisoner Abuse News, Commentary & Discussion
More Abu Ghraib prisoners freed
Sun Feb 6, 2005 11:47 AM GMT
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. authorities have released more than 300 inmates from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, taking the number set free this year to 800, according to Iraq's Human Rights ministry.
The ministry, which is involved in reviewing the cases of those being held at detention facilities in Iraq, said on Sunday it expected more prisoners to be freed in the coming weeks.
More than 8,000 people are still being held at facilities in Iraq, 1,000 of them with charges pending against them in Iraq's central criminal court. The rest are due to have their status reviewed every 90-120 days.
"The release of 350 detainees this week further demonstrates our determination that every detainee receives full consideration of their cases and only those deemed true security threats to our nation are held in the internment camps," the Ministry said in a statement.
Since the ministry joined a U.S.-run board set up last August to review detainees' detention, nearly 4,000 prisoners have been freed from prisons.
Most were rounded up during U.S. military raids on suspicion of working for or assisting the anti-U.S. insurgency. But many claim to have no involvement with militants and say they are rounded up randomly on little grounds.
Most of those still in detention are being held at Camp Bucca, a U.S.-run facility in southern Iraq. Following last year's scandal of prisoner abuse by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib, efforts have been made to clean up the prison and transfer detainees.
Eight U.S. soldiers were implicated for their role in the Abu Ghraib abuse and several have been court-martialed. One of the ringleaders was this year sentenced to 10 years jail.
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticl...Q-PRISONERS.xml
Sun Feb 6, 2005 11:47 AM GMT
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. authorities have released more than 300 inmates from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, taking the number set free this year to 800, according to Iraq's Human Rights ministry.
The ministry, which is involved in reviewing the cases of those being held at detention facilities in Iraq, said on Sunday it expected more prisoners to be freed in the coming weeks.
More than 8,000 people are still being held at facilities in Iraq, 1,000 of them with charges pending against them in Iraq's central criminal court. The rest are due to have their status reviewed every 90-120 days.
"The release of 350 detainees this week further demonstrates our determination that every detainee receives full consideration of their cases and only those deemed true security threats to our nation are held in the internment camps," the Ministry said in a statement.
Since the ministry joined a U.S.-run board set up last August to review detainees' detention, nearly 4,000 prisoners have been freed from prisons.
Most were rounded up during U.S. military raids on suspicion of working for or assisting the anti-U.S. insurgency. But many claim to have no involvement with militants and say they are rounded up randomly on little grounds.
Most of those still in detention are being held at Camp Bucca, a U.S.-run facility in southern Iraq. Following last year's scandal of prisoner abuse by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib, efforts have been made to clean up the prison and transfer detainees.
Eight U.S. soldiers were implicated for their role in the Abu Ghraib abuse and several have been court-martialed. One of the ringleaders was this year sentenced to 10 years jail.
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticl...Q-PRISONERS.xml
We MUST do something about this! Please contact cable & Broadcast TV. Please contact your Congressional Representatives. Ask people on other websites to do the same! We can not allow a few low level soldiers to take the fall for the Bush Administration. We must DEMAND a full investigation by a special prosecutor. Our Country's honor is at stake!
http://www.independent.com/news/news952.htm
by Sam Kornell
OUTSOURCING TORTURE: Since September 11, the Bush administration has sent an estimated 150 people to foreign countries to be tortured during interrogations, according to a new report by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker ("Outsourcing Torture," February 7). In a practice called "extraordinary rendition," U.S. government agents transport people they deem undesirable to countries such as Egypt and Syria, where they are subject to interrogation methods illegal under international and American law. According to Mayer, people identified as terrorists by CIA informants are kidnapped by hooded or masked American agents and flown on CIA-owned jets to American military bases on foreign soil. The captives are given little, if any, legal protection; in most cases, they disappear after being delivered. Mayer reported several specific cases of torture, most of them taking place in Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and Jordan. Mayer also quoted the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan as saying that he knew of "at least three" instances in which the U.S. sent suspects to Uzbekistan, where "they were almost certainly tortured." Uzbekistan is known for boiling captives, sometimes to death. Extraordinary rendition is known and endorsed by top levels of the White House, Mayer reported. A related story in last Saturday's New York Times detailed the case of Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen who claimed he was severely beaten by Egyptian and American agents at a prison in Egypt, and sexually abused at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay. Habib was recently released from Guantanamo after 40 months of detention. He was not and has not been charged with any crime.
by Sam Kornell
OUTSOURCING TORTURE: Since September 11, the Bush administration has sent an estimated 150 people to foreign countries to be tortured during interrogations, according to a new report by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker ("Outsourcing Torture," February 7). In a practice called "extraordinary rendition," U.S. government agents transport people they deem undesirable to countries such as Egypt and Syria, where they are subject to interrogation methods illegal under international and American law. According to Mayer, people identified as terrorists by CIA informants are kidnapped by hooded or masked American agents and flown on CIA-owned jets to American military bases on foreign soil. The captives are given little, if any, legal protection; in most cases, they disappear after being delivered. Mayer reported several specific cases of torture, most of them taking place in Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and Jordan. Mayer also quoted the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan as saying that he knew of "at least three" instances in which the U.S. sent suspects to Uzbekistan, where "they were almost certainly tortured." Uzbekistan is known for boiling captives, sometimes to death. Extraordinary rendition is known and endorsed by top levels of the White House, Mayer reported. A related story in last Saturday's New York Times detailed the case of Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen who claimed he was severely beaten by Egyptian and American agents at a prison in Egypt, and sexually abused at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay. Habib was recently released from Guantanamo after 40 months of detention. He was not and has not been charged with any crime.
FOX's Cowan denied that interrogators participated in Abu Ghraib abuse
FOX News contributor and retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Bill Cowan claimed that it was "guards, not interrogators" who allegedly committed abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In fact, the official Pentagon report examining the role of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib concluded that military intelligence officers had committed abuses during interrogations.
From the February 15 edition of FOX News' The O'Reilly Factor:
O'REILLY: Now, Colonel Cowan, do you think that there's a "torture crisis," as [Sen. Edward] Kennedy [D-MA] put it?
COWAN: No, not at all, Bill, but there are instances certainly of torture happening, and, you know, we have to remember that after Abu Ghraib, after the revelations of what guards, not interrogators, what guards had done at Abu Ghraib to prisoners, that indeed, that reflected in how hostages were then handled inside Iraq.
According to the report by Major General George R. Fay, whom the Pentagon assigned to specifically examine the role of military intelligence in the alleged misconduct, both military police ("guards") and military intelligence personnel ("interrogators") committed abuses, and a few military intelligence officers also condoned abuses that they did not themselves commit. From the Fay report:
MG [Major General] Fay has found that from 25 July 2003 to 6 February 2004, twenty-seven 205 MI BDE [Military Intelligence Brigade] Personnel allegedly requested, encouraged, condoned or solicited Military Police (MP) personnel to abuse detainees and/or participated in detainee abuse and/or violated established interrogation procedures and applicable laws and regulations during interrogation operations at Abu Ghraib. Most, though not all, of the violent or sexual abuses occurred separately from scheduled interrogations and did not focus on persons held for intelligence purposes.
The Fay report also found that Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, bears "responsibility as the Commander ... for the abuses that occurred and went undetected for a considerable length of time" in part because he "[f]ailed to take aggressive action against Soldiers who violated the ICRP [Theater Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policies], the CJTF-7 [Combined Joint Task Force Seven] interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy and the Geneva Conventions" and because he "[f]ailed to take appropriate action regarding the ICRC [International Committee for the Red Cross] reports of abuse." The New York Times reported on January 17 that according to a lawyer for a sergeant accused of abuse at Abu Ghraib, a military judge refused to allow Pappas and other high-ranking officers to testify in his client's case "because prosecutors planned to charge them."
A report by the ICRC, whose staff visited Abu Ghraib, also chronicled alleged abuse at Abu Ghraib during interrogations:
In certain cases, such as in Abu Ghraib military intelligence section, methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information. Several military intelligence officers confirmed to the ICRC that it was part of the military intelligence process to hold a person deprived of his liberty naked in a completely dark and empty cell for a prolonged period to use inhumane and degrading treatment, including physical and psychological coercion, against persons deprived of their liberty to secure their cooperation.
[...]
In mid October 2003, the ICRC visited persons deprived of their liberty undergoing interrogation by military intelligence officers in Unit 1A, the "Isolation section" of "Abu Ghraib" Correctional Facility. Most of these persons deprived of their liberty had been arrested in early October. During the visit, ICRC delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation of the persons deprived of their liberty with their interrogator. In particular they witnessed the practice of keeping persons deprived of their liberty completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness, allegedly for several consecutive days. Upon witnessing such cases, the ICRC interrupted its visits and requested an explanation from the authorities. The military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was "part of the process". The process appeared to be a give-and-take policy whereby persons deprived of their liberty were "drip-fed" with new items (clothing, bedding, hygiene articles, lit cell, etc) in exchange for their "cooperation".
The investigation of Abu Ghraib by Major General Antonio M. Taguba found that interrogators had specifically asked military police to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation" of detainees:
I find that contrary to the provision of AR 190-8, and the findings found in MG Ryder's Report, Military Intelligence (MI) interrogators and Other US Government Agency's (OGA) interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses. Contrary to the findings of MG Ryder's Report, I find that personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to "set the conditions" for MI interrogations
http://mediamatters.org/items/printable/200502170001
FOX News contributor and retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Bill Cowan claimed that it was "guards, not interrogators" who allegedly committed abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In fact, the official Pentagon report examining the role of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib concluded that military intelligence officers had committed abuses during interrogations.
From the February 15 edition of FOX News' The O'Reilly Factor:
O'REILLY: Now, Colonel Cowan, do you think that there's a "torture crisis," as [Sen. Edward] Kennedy [D-MA] put it?
COWAN: No, not at all, Bill, but there are instances certainly of torture happening, and, you know, we have to remember that after Abu Ghraib, after the revelations of what guards, not interrogators, what guards had done at Abu Ghraib to prisoners, that indeed, that reflected in how hostages were then handled inside Iraq.
According to the report by Major General George R. Fay, whom the Pentagon assigned to specifically examine the role of military intelligence in the alleged misconduct, both military police ("guards") and military intelligence personnel ("interrogators") committed abuses, and a few military intelligence officers also condoned abuses that they did not themselves commit. From the Fay report:
MG [Major General] Fay has found that from 25 July 2003 to 6 February 2004, twenty-seven 205 MI BDE [Military Intelligence Brigade] Personnel allegedly requested, encouraged, condoned or solicited Military Police (MP) personnel to abuse detainees and/or participated in detainee abuse and/or violated established interrogation procedures and applicable laws and regulations during interrogation operations at Abu Ghraib. Most, though not all, of the violent or sexual abuses occurred separately from scheduled interrogations and did not focus on persons held for intelligence purposes.
The Fay report also found that Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, bears "responsibility as the Commander ... for the abuses that occurred and went undetected for a considerable length of time" in part because he "[f]ailed to take aggressive action against Soldiers who violated the ICRP [Theater Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policies], the CJTF-7 [Combined Joint Task Force Seven] interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy and the Geneva Conventions" and because he "[f]ailed to take appropriate action regarding the ICRC [International Committee for the Red Cross] reports of abuse." The New York Times reported on January 17 that according to a lawyer for a sergeant accused of abuse at Abu Ghraib, a military judge refused to allow Pappas and other high-ranking officers to testify in his client's case "because prosecutors planned to charge them."
A report by the ICRC, whose staff visited Abu Ghraib, also chronicled alleged abuse at Abu Ghraib during interrogations:
In certain cases, such as in Abu Ghraib military intelligence section, methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information. Several military intelligence officers confirmed to the ICRC that it was part of the military intelligence process to hold a person deprived of his liberty naked in a completely dark and empty cell for a prolonged period to use inhumane and degrading treatment, including physical and psychological coercion, against persons deprived of their liberty to secure their cooperation.
[...]
In mid October 2003, the ICRC visited persons deprived of their liberty undergoing interrogation by military intelligence officers in Unit 1A, the "Isolation section" of "Abu Ghraib" Correctional Facility. Most of these persons deprived of their liberty had been arrested in early October. During the visit, ICRC delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation of the persons deprived of their liberty with their interrogator. In particular they witnessed the practice of keeping persons deprived of their liberty completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness, allegedly for several consecutive days. Upon witnessing such cases, the ICRC interrupted its visits and requested an explanation from the authorities. The military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was "part of the process". The process appeared to be a give-and-take policy whereby persons deprived of their liberty were "drip-fed" with new items (clothing, bedding, hygiene articles, lit cell, etc) in exchange for their "cooperation".
The investigation of Abu Ghraib by Major General Antonio M. Taguba found that interrogators had specifically asked military police to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation" of detainees:
I find that contrary to the provision of AR 190-8, and the findings found in MG Ryder's Report, Military Intelligence (MI) interrogators and Other US Government Agency's (OGA) interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses. Contrary to the findings of MG Ryder's Report, I find that personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to "set the conditions" for MI interrogations
http://mediamatters.org/items/printable/200502170001
Two more Soldiers sentenced for Abu Ghraib abuse
By Spc. Matthew Chlosta
February 10, 2005
FORT HOOD, Texas (Army News Service, Feb. 10, 2005) -- The seventh Soldier to face court-martial for abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib was sentenced Feb. 4 after pleading guilty to dereliction of duty, making false official statements and battery.
Sgt. Javal Davis, 372nd Military Police Company, was sentenced by a military panel of four officers and five enlisted Soldiers to: six months in a military prison; reduction in rank to private (E-1) and a bad conduct discharge upon completion of his prison time.
Three days earlier, Spc. Roman Krol, Company A, 325th Military Intelligence Battalion, pleaded guilty Feb. 1 to conspiracy and maltreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib.
Krol had made a pretrial plea agreement with prosecutors, and chose to have his sentence decided by a military judge. He was sentenced to reduction in rank to private (E-1), a bad conduct discharge and confinement for 10 months.
Davis' court-martial began the same day, Feb. 1, with a defense motion to dismiss charges because of "unlawful command influence."
Judge Col. James Pohl listened to arguments from both sides before he denied the motion.
After Pohl's ruling, Davis pleaded guilty to three charges. Before Pohl could accept the pleas, the judge was required to question Davis to obtain supporting facts for the pleas.
Davis told Pohl he intentionally stepped on the hands and feet of a pile of hooded, handcuffed, naked Iraqi detainees; that he fell with his full weight of 220 lbs. on the detainees, "they were in a gaggle on the floor," Davis said.
"I wasn't trying to hurt them, just trying to scare them," Davis said. "They were zip-tied. They were not a threat to me at the time."
Davis said he lied about his actions to investigators to try to get out of trouble.
When Pohl asked Davis why he had abused the Iraqi prisoners
Davis explained, "I lost it. It didn't justify what I did."
Davis also said he witnessed and failed to report detainee abuse by former Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, 372nd MP Co.
"I should've reported it. I had a duty to stop this," Davis told Pohl.
After the judge was satisfied the guilty pleas were valid, the panel was seated to decide Davis' sentence.
The prosecution team began by presenting their sentencing case, which included playing a portion of Davis' taped testimony.
After the government rested, the defense called 20
witnesses, including numerous family members, Feb. 2-3.
Paul Bergrin, Davis' civilian defense counsel, argued Davis was guilty and had pleaded guilty to take full responsibility for his actions.
But Bergrin tactically elicited testimony from several witnesses who said Davis was "a good Soldier," who had cracked for just 10 seconds.
Compared with former Spc. Charles Graner Jr.'s defense during his court-martial at Fort Hood in January (that military intelligence was in charge and responsible), Davis' contention was the environment and atmosphere at the prison contributed to his actions.
Former Army Sgt. Kenneth Davis described Abu Ghraib to Bergrin and the panel, saying, "It was hell on earth."
One defense witness, Maj. David DiNenna, operations officer, 11th MP Brigade, who was stationed at Abu Ghraib from July 2003 to February 2004 said, "The conditions there (Abu Ghraib) were deplorable. It was always challenging."
Bergrin also had two expert witnesses, one an expert on the various forces and influences leading to violence, testify about what transpired at Abu Ghraib after reviewing official reports.
"Iraqis showed ingratitude while American Soldiers were sacrificing their lives, this devalued the lives of the Iraqi prisoners," Dr. Ervin Staub, professor of Psychology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said.
Both experts cited a famous Stanford study from the 1970s
and drew parallels between that study and how the lawlessness and horrendous conditions at Abu Ghraib set up the potential for prisoner abuse by Soldiers as the atmosphere deteriorated sociologically and psychologically.
"The environment was a kind of anything goes attitude,"
Staub said. "Supervision is crucial in this environment. Rules don't mean very much if you don't enforce them.
"There was tremendous social disorganization at Abu Ghraib," Dr. Stjepan Mestrovic, functional sociologist, professor of Sociology, Texas A&M University. "According to the reports, MI was not sure what MPs could do and vice versa."
Davis made an un-sworn statement before the panel. He described Abu Ghraib as something akin to the "Mad Max" movie come to life.
"There were more detainees than MPs," Davis said. "We were trying to help people and they're trying to kill us.
When talking about his actions on the night of Nov. 8, 2003, Davis broke down in tears on the stand several times and was apologetic in his testimony.
"I'm embarrassed to be sitting up here in front of the world," Davis said. "I don't know what I was thinking. I shouldn't have done that. I am deeply sorry. I am deeply apologetic to the Iraqis I stepped on. I ask for your forgiveness.
"To the gentlemen and NCOs on the panel, I sincerely give my deepest apologies," Davis continued, "I've made some mistakes; I'm here to answer for."
The prosecutor, Maj. Michael Holley, Staff Judge Advocate, III Corps, argued after Davis' statement, "Conditions affected things. We either are or we're not responsible for our actions."
Holley recommended a sentence of: a bad conduct discharge, reduction in rank to E-1 (private), jail time between 12-24 months. Holley conceded Davis should keep his pay and allowances while in prison, so as not to punish his children.
Defense attorney Bergrin offered, "Seven years of honorable service, except for ten seconds. When you're living like an animal it gets to you and to the prisoners."
"He is a father and a man who stood up and took responsibility," Bergrin said. "There is no tomorrow for Javal Davis. We ask for justice. Weigh that 10-second regression against the whole man's life.
"Sometimes you make bad decisions, bad choices," Bergrin argued. "It's an Article 15 type of offense, it truly is."
According to Capt. Chuck Neill, Staff Judge Advocate's Office, III Corps, Davis' pretrial plea agreement capped his maximum sentence at 18 months confinement. The panel members did not know about the pretrial sentencing agreement, so they could independently determine sentencing based on testimony and evidence presented during the case. Davis will serve the lesser sentence meted out by the panel.
In a joint statement released after the sentence, the prosecutors Holley and Capt. Chris Graveline, III Corps, said, "The care and time taken to resolving this Soldier's sentence is indicative of the military's commitment to both maintaining good order and discipline and to protecting the rights of the individual Soldier."
Another case stemming from abuse at Abu Ghraib convened a pretrail hearing at Fort Hood Feb. 6. The government dropped a specification of an indecent acts charge against for Spc. Sabrina Harman, 372nd MP Company. She is still facing charges of conspiracy, maltreatment and dereliction of duty.
The dismissed charge immediately shaved her possible maximum sentence from 11.5 years to 6.5 years.
Harman has a pretrial hearing scheduled for Mar. 6. Her court-martial is set to begin the following day.
(Editor’s note: Spc. Matthew Chlosta is a member of the 4th Public Affairs Detachment at Fort Hood.)
http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/print.php?story_id_key=6843
By Spc. Matthew Chlosta
February 10, 2005
FORT HOOD, Texas (Army News Service, Feb. 10, 2005) -- The seventh Soldier to face court-martial for abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib was sentenced Feb. 4 after pleading guilty to dereliction of duty, making false official statements and battery.
Sgt. Javal Davis, 372nd Military Police Company, was sentenced by a military panel of four officers and five enlisted Soldiers to: six months in a military prison; reduction in rank to private (E-1) and a bad conduct discharge upon completion of his prison time.
Three days earlier, Spc. Roman Krol, Company A, 325th Military Intelligence Battalion, pleaded guilty Feb. 1 to conspiracy and maltreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib.
Krol had made a pretrial plea agreement with prosecutors, and chose to have his sentence decided by a military judge. He was sentenced to reduction in rank to private (E-1), a bad conduct discharge and confinement for 10 months.
Davis' court-martial began the same day, Feb. 1, with a defense motion to dismiss charges because of "unlawful command influence."
Judge Col. James Pohl listened to arguments from both sides before he denied the motion.
After Pohl's ruling, Davis pleaded guilty to three charges. Before Pohl could accept the pleas, the judge was required to question Davis to obtain supporting facts for the pleas.
Davis told Pohl he intentionally stepped on the hands and feet of a pile of hooded, handcuffed, naked Iraqi detainees; that he fell with his full weight of 220 lbs. on the detainees, "they were in a gaggle on the floor," Davis said.
"I wasn't trying to hurt them, just trying to scare them," Davis said. "They were zip-tied. They were not a threat to me at the time."
Davis said he lied about his actions to investigators to try to get out of trouble.
When Pohl asked Davis why he had abused the Iraqi prisoners
Davis explained, "I lost it. It didn't justify what I did."
Davis also said he witnessed and failed to report detainee abuse by former Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, 372nd MP Co.
"I should've reported it. I had a duty to stop this," Davis told Pohl.
After the judge was satisfied the guilty pleas were valid, the panel was seated to decide Davis' sentence.
The prosecution team began by presenting their sentencing case, which included playing a portion of Davis' taped testimony.
After the government rested, the defense called 20
witnesses, including numerous family members, Feb. 2-3.
Paul Bergrin, Davis' civilian defense counsel, argued Davis was guilty and had pleaded guilty to take full responsibility for his actions.
But Bergrin tactically elicited testimony from several witnesses who said Davis was "a good Soldier," who had cracked for just 10 seconds.
Compared with former Spc. Charles Graner Jr.'s defense during his court-martial at Fort Hood in January (that military intelligence was in charge and responsible), Davis' contention was the environment and atmosphere at the prison contributed to his actions.
Former Army Sgt. Kenneth Davis described Abu Ghraib to Bergrin and the panel, saying, "It was hell on earth."
One defense witness, Maj. David DiNenna, operations officer, 11th MP Brigade, who was stationed at Abu Ghraib from July 2003 to February 2004 said, "The conditions there (Abu Ghraib) were deplorable. It was always challenging."
Bergrin also had two expert witnesses, one an expert on the various forces and influences leading to violence, testify about what transpired at Abu Ghraib after reviewing official reports.
"Iraqis showed ingratitude while American Soldiers were sacrificing their lives, this devalued the lives of the Iraqi prisoners," Dr. Ervin Staub, professor of Psychology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said.
Both experts cited a famous Stanford study from the 1970s
and drew parallels between that study and how the lawlessness and horrendous conditions at Abu Ghraib set up the potential for prisoner abuse by Soldiers as the atmosphere deteriorated sociologically and psychologically.
"The environment was a kind of anything goes attitude,"
Staub said. "Supervision is crucial in this environment. Rules don't mean very much if you don't enforce them.
"There was tremendous social disorganization at Abu Ghraib," Dr. Stjepan Mestrovic, functional sociologist, professor of Sociology, Texas A&M University. "According to the reports, MI was not sure what MPs could do and vice versa."
Davis made an un-sworn statement before the panel. He described Abu Ghraib as something akin to the "Mad Max" movie come to life.
"There were more detainees than MPs," Davis said. "We were trying to help people and they're trying to kill us.
When talking about his actions on the night of Nov. 8, 2003, Davis broke down in tears on the stand several times and was apologetic in his testimony.
"I'm embarrassed to be sitting up here in front of the world," Davis said. "I don't know what I was thinking. I shouldn't have done that. I am deeply sorry. I am deeply apologetic to the Iraqis I stepped on. I ask for your forgiveness.
"To the gentlemen and NCOs on the panel, I sincerely give my deepest apologies," Davis continued, "I've made some mistakes; I'm here to answer for."
The prosecutor, Maj. Michael Holley, Staff Judge Advocate, III Corps, argued after Davis' statement, "Conditions affected things. We either are or we're not responsible for our actions."
Holley recommended a sentence of: a bad conduct discharge, reduction in rank to E-1 (private), jail time between 12-24 months. Holley conceded Davis should keep his pay and allowances while in prison, so as not to punish his children.
Defense attorney Bergrin offered, "Seven years of honorable service, except for ten seconds. When you're living like an animal it gets to you and to the prisoners."
"He is a father and a man who stood up and took responsibility," Bergrin said. "There is no tomorrow for Javal Davis. We ask for justice. Weigh that 10-second regression against the whole man's life.
"Sometimes you make bad decisions, bad choices," Bergrin argued. "It's an Article 15 type of offense, it truly is."
According to Capt. Chuck Neill, Staff Judge Advocate's Office, III Corps, Davis' pretrial plea agreement capped his maximum sentence at 18 months confinement. The panel members did not know about the pretrial sentencing agreement, so they could independently determine sentencing based on testimony and evidence presented during the case. Davis will serve the lesser sentence meted out by the panel.
In a joint statement released after the sentence, the prosecutors Holley and Capt. Chris Graveline, III Corps, said, "The care and time taken to resolving this Soldier's sentence is indicative of the military's commitment to both maintaining good order and discipline and to protecting the rights of the individual Soldier."
Another case stemming from abuse at Abu Ghraib convened a pretrail hearing at Fort Hood Feb. 6. The government dropped a specification of an indecent acts charge against for Spc. Sabrina Harman, 372nd MP Company. She is still facing charges of conspiracy, maltreatment and dereliction of duty.
The dismissed charge immediately shaved her possible maximum sentence from 11.5 years to 6.5 years.
Harman has a pretrial hearing scheduled for Mar. 6. Her court-martial is set to begin the following day.
(Editor’s note: Spc. Matthew Chlosta is a member of the 4th Public Affairs Detachment at Fort Hood.)
http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/print.php?story_id_key=6843
TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?
Issue of 2004-05-10
Posted 2004-04-30
In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world’s most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women—no accurate count is possible—were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits.
In the looting that followed the regime’s collapse, last April, the huge prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything that could be removed, including doors, windows, and bricks. The coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center added. Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners, however—by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers—were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of “crimes against the coalition”; and a small number of suspected “high-value” leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.
Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no training in handling prisoners.
General Karpinski, who had wanted to be a soldier since she was five, is a business consultant in civilian life, and was enthusiastic about her new job. In an interview last December with the St. Petersburg Times, she said that, for many of the Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, “living conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned that they wouldn’t want to leave.”
A month later, General Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly suspended, and a major investigation into the Army’s prison system, authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, was under way. A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:
Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added—“detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence.” Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their “extremely sensitive nature.”
The photographs—several of which were broadcast on CBS’s “60 Minutes 2” last week—show leering G.I.s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who are forced to assume humiliating poses. Six suspects—Staff Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II, known as Chip, who was the senior enlisted man; Specialist Charles A. Graner; Sergeant Javal Davis; Specialist Megan Ambuhl; Specialist Sabrina Harman; and Private Jeremy Sivits—are now facing prosecution in Iraq, on charges that include conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty toward prisoners, maltreatment, assault, and indecent acts. A seventh suspect, Private Lynndie England, was reassigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after becoming pregnant.
The photographs tell it all. In one, Private England, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head, as he masturbates. Three other hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners are shown, hands reflexively crossed over their genitals. A fifth prisoner has his hands at his sides. In another, England stands arm in arm with Specialist Graner; both are grinning and giving the thumbs-up behind a cluster of perhaps seven naked Iraqis, knees bent, piled clumsily on top of each other in a pyramid. There is another photograph of a cluster of naked prisoners, again piled in a pyramid. Near them stands Graner, smiling, his arms crossed; a woman soldier stands in front of him, bending over, and she, too, is smiling. Then, there is another cluster of hooded bodies, with a female soldier standing in front, taking photographs. Yet another photograph shows a kneeling, naked, unhooded male prisoner, head momentarily turned away from the camera, posed to make it appear that he is performing oral sex on another male prisoner, who is naked and hooded.
Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. “Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other—it’s all a form of torture,” Haykel said.
Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood.
The 372nd’s abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine—a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide. On April 9th, at an Article 32 hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury) in the case against Sergeant Frederick, at Camp Victory, near Baghdad, one of the witnesses, Specialist Matthew Wisdom, an M.P., told the courtroom what happened when he and other soldiers delivered seven prisoners, hooded and bound, to the so-called “hard site” at Abu Ghraib—seven tiers of cells where the inmates who were considered the most dangerous were housed. The men had been accused of starting a riot in another section of the prison. Wisdom said:
SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. . . . I do not think it was right to put them in a pile. I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage. The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. . . . I left after that.
When he returned later, Wisdom testified:
I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.” I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”
Wisdom testified that he told his superiors what had happened, and assumed that “the issue was taken care of.” He said, “I just didn’t want to be part of anything that looked criminal.”
The abuses became public because of the outrage of Specialist Joseph M. Darby, an M.P. whose role emerged during the Article 32 hearing against Chip Frederick. A government witness, Special Agent Scott Bobeck, who is a member of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or C.I.D., told the court, according to an abridged transcript made available to me, “The investigation started after SPC Darby . . . got a CD from CPL Graner. . . . He came across pictures of naked detainees.” Bobeck said that Darby had “initially put an anonymous letter under our door, then he later came forward and gave a sworn statement. He felt very bad about it and thought it was very wrong.”
Questioned further, the Army investigator said that Frederick and his colleagues had not been given any “training guidelines” that he was aware of. The M.P.s in the 372nd had been assigned to routine traffic and police duties upon their arrival in Iraq, in the spring of 2003. In October of 2003, the 372nd was ordered to prison-guard duty at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, at thirty-seven, was far older than his colleagues, and was a natural leader; he had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections. Bobeck explained:
What I got is that SSG Frederick and CPL Graner were road M.P.s and were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run.
Bobeck also testified that witnesses had said that Frederick, on one occasion, “had punched a detainee in the chest so hard that the detainee almost went into cardiac arrest.”
At the Article 32 hearing, the Army informed Frederick and his attorneys, Captain Robert Shuck, an Army lawyer, and Gary Myers, a civilian, that two dozen witnesses they had sought, including General Karpinski and all of Frederick’s co-defendants, would not appear. Some had been excused after exercising their Fifth Amendment right; others were deemed to be too far away from the courtroom. “The purpose of an Article 32 hearing is for us to engage witnesses and discover facts,” Gary Myers told me. “We ended up with a c.i.d. agent and no alleged victims to examine.” After the hearing, the presiding investigative officer ruled that there was sufficient evidence to convene a court-martial against Frederick.
Myers, who was one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions of the nineteen-seventies, told me that his client’s defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence. He said, “Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?”
In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib. In a letter written in January, he said:
I questioned some of the things that I saw . . . such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell—and the answer I got was, “This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.” . . . . MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.
The military-intelligence officers have “encouraged and told us, ‘Great job,’ they were now getting positive results and information,” Frederick wrote. “CID has been present when the military working dogs were used to intimidate prisoners at MI’s request.” At one point, Frederick told his family, he pulled aside his superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Phillabaum, the commander of the 320th M.P. Battalion, and asked about the mistreatment of prisoners. “His reply was ‘Don’t worry about it.’”
In November, Frederick wrote, an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called “O.G.A.,” or other government agencies—that is, the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees—was brought to his unit for questioning. “They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower. . . . The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away.” The dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison’s inmate-control system, Frederick recounted, “and therefore never had a number.”
Frederick’s defense is, of course, highly self-serving. But the complaints in his letters and e-mails home were reinforced by two internal Army reports—Taguba’s and one by the Army’s chief law-enforcement officer, Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general.
Last fall, General Sanchez ordered Ryder to review the prison system in Iraq and recommend ways to improve it. Ryder’s report, filed on November 5th, concluded that there were potential human-rights, training, and manpower issues, system-wide, that needed immediate attention. It also discussed serious concerns about the tension between the missions of the military police assigned to guard the prisoners and the intelligence teams who wanted to interrogate them. Army regulations limit intelligence activity by the M.P.s to passive collection. But something had gone wrong at Abu Ghraib.
There was evidence dating back to the Afghanistan war, the Ryder report said, that M.P.s had worked with intelligence operatives to “set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews”—a euphemism for breaking the will of prisoners. “Such actions generally run counter to the smooth operation of a detention facility, attempting to maintain its population in a compliant and docile state.” General Karpinski’s brigade, Ryder reported, “has not been directed to change its facility procedures to set the conditions for MI interrogations, nor participate in those interrogations.” Ryder called for the establishment of procedures to “define the role of military police soldiers . . .clearly separating the actions of the guards from those of the military intelligence personnel.” The officers running the war in Iraq were put on notice.
Ryder undercut his warning, however, by concluding that the situation had not yet reached a crisis point. Though some procedures were flawed, he said, he found “no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices.” His investigation was at best a failure and at worst a coverup.
Taguba, in his report, was polite but direct in refuting his fellow-general. “Unfortunately, many of the systemic problems that surfaced during [Ryder’s] assessment are the very same issues that are the subject of this investigation,” he wrote. “In fact, many of the abuses suffered by detainees occurred during, or near to, the time of that assessment.” The report continued, “Contrary to the findings of MG Ryder’s report, I find that personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to ‘set the conditions’ for MI interrogations.” Army intelligence officers, C.I.A. agents, and private contractors “actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses.”
Taguba backed up his assertion by citing evidence from sworn statements to Army C.I.D. investigators. Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the accused M.P.s, testified that it was her job to keep detainees awake, including one hooded prisoner who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis. She stated, “MI wanted to get them to talk. It is Graner and Frederick’s job to do things for MI and OGA to get these people to talk.”
Another witness, Sergeant Javal Davis, who is also one of the accused, told C.I.D. investigators, “I witnessed prisoners in the MI hold section . . . being made to do various things that I would question morally. . . . We were told that they had different rules.” Taguba wrote, “Davis also stated that he had heard MI insinuate to the guards to abuse the inmates. When asked what MI said he stated: ‘Loosen this guy up for us.’‘Make sure he has a bad night.’‘Make sure he gets the treatment.’” Military intelligence made these comments to Graner and Frederick, Davis said. “The MI staffs to my understanding have been giving Graner compliments . . . statements like, ‘Good job, they’re breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They’re giving out good information.’”
When asked why he did not inform his chain of command about the abuse, Sergeant Davis answered, “Because I assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something. Also the wing”—where the abuse took place—“belongs to MI and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.”
Another witness, Specialist Jason Kennel, who was not accused of wrongdoing, said, “I saw them nude, but MI would tell us to take away their mattresses, sheets, and clothes.” (It was his view, he added, that if M.I. wanted him to do this “they needed to give me paperwork.”) Taguba also cited an interview with Adel L. Nakhla, a translator who was an employee of Titan, a civilian contractor. He told of one night when a “bunch of people from MI” watched as a group of handcuffed and shackled inmates were subjected to abuse by Graner and Frederick.
General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive non-judicial punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be relieved of duty and reprimanded. He further urged that a civilian contractor, Steven Stephanowicz, of CACI International, be fired from his Army job, reprimanded, and denied his security clearances for lying to the investigating team and allowing or ordering military policemen “who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by ‘setting conditions’ which were neither authorized” nor in accordance with Army regulations. “He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse,” Taguba wrote. He also recommended disciplinary action against a second CACI employee, John Israel. (A spokeswoman for CACI said that the company had “received no formal communication” from the Army about the matter.)
“I suspect,” Taguba concluded, that Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz, and Israel “were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib,” and strongly recommended immediate disciplinary action.
The problems inside the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from senior commanders. During Karpinski’s seven-month tour of duty, Taguba noted, there were at least a dozen officially reported incidents involving escapes, attempted escapes, and other serious security issues that were investigated by officers of the 800th M.P. Brigade. Some of the incidents had led to the killing or wounding of inmates and M.P.s, and resulted in a series of “lessons learned” inquiries within the brigade. Karpinski invariably approved the reports and signed orders calling for changes in day-to-day procedures. But Taguba found that she did not follow up, doing nothing to insure that the orders were carried out. Had she done so, he added, “cases of abuse may have been prevented.”
General Taguba further found that Abu Ghraib was filled beyond capacity, and that the M.P. guard force was significantly undermanned and short of resources. “This imbalance has contributed to the poor living conditions, escapes, and accountability lapses,” he wrote. There were gross differences, Taguba said, between the actual number of prisoners on hand and the number officially recorded. A lack of proper screening also meant that many innocent Iraqis were wrongly being detained—indefinitely, it seemed, in some cases. The Taguba study noted that more than sixty per cent of the civilian inmates at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society, which should have enabled them to be released. Karpinski’s defense, Taguba said, was that her superior officers “routinely” rejected her recommendations regarding the release of such prisoners.
Karpinski was rarely seen at the prisons she was supposed to be running, Taguba wrote. He also found a wide range of administrative problems, including some that he considered “without precedent in my military career.” The soldiers, he added, were “poorly prepared and untrained . . . prior to deployment, at the mobilization site, upon arrival in theater, and throughout the mission.”
General Taguba spent more than four hours interviewing Karpinski, whom he described as extremely emotional: “What I found particularly disturbing in her testimony was her complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of her command to both establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.”
Taguba recommended that Karpinski and seven brigade military-police officers and enlisted men be relieved of command and formally reprimanded. No criminal proceedings were suggested for Karpinski; apparently, the loss of promotion and the indignity of a public rebuke were seen as enough punishment.
After the story broke on CBS last week, the Pentagon announced that Major General Geoffrey Miller, the new head of the Iraqi prison system, had arrived in Baghdad and was on the job. He had been the commander of the Guantánamo Bay detention center. General Sanchez also authorized an investigation into possible wrongdoing by military and civilian interrogators.
As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.
The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence, however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as a C.I.D. agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is invariably counterproductive. “They’ll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth,” Rowell said. “‘You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say.’ You don’t get righteous information.”
Under the fourth Geneva convention, an occupying power can jail civilians who pose an “imperative” security threat, but it must establish a regular procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment decision and have their cases reviewed. Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guantánamo.
As the photographs from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States’ reputation in the world.
Captain Robert Shuck, Frederick’s military attorney, closed his defense at the Article 32 hearing last month by saying that the Army was “attempting to have these six soldiers atone for its sins.” Similarly, Gary Myers, Frederick’s civilian attorney, told me that he would argue at the court-martial that culpability in the case extended far beyond his client. “I’m going to drag every involved intelligence officer and civilian contractor I can find into court,” he said. “Do you really believe the Army relieved a general officer because of six soldiers? Not a chance.”
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040510fa_fact
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?
Issue of 2004-05-10
Posted 2004-04-30
In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world’s most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women—no accurate count is possible—were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits.
In the looting that followed the regime’s collapse, last April, the huge prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything that could be removed, including doors, windows, and bricks. The coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center added. Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners, however—by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers—were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of “crimes against the coalition”; and a small number of suspected “high-value” leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.
Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no training in handling prisoners.
General Karpinski, who had wanted to be a soldier since she was five, is a business consultant in civilian life, and was enthusiastic about her new job. In an interview last December with the St. Petersburg Times, she said that, for many of the Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, “living conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned that they wouldn’t want to leave.”
A month later, General Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly suspended, and a major investigation into the Army’s prison system, authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, was under way. A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:
Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added—“detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence.” Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their “extremely sensitive nature.”
The photographs—several of which were broadcast on CBS’s “60 Minutes 2” last week—show leering G.I.s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who are forced to assume humiliating poses. Six suspects—Staff Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II, known as Chip, who was the senior enlisted man; Specialist Charles A. Graner; Sergeant Javal Davis; Specialist Megan Ambuhl; Specialist Sabrina Harman; and Private Jeremy Sivits—are now facing prosecution in Iraq, on charges that include conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty toward prisoners, maltreatment, assault, and indecent acts. A seventh suspect, Private Lynndie England, was reassigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after becoming pregnant.
The photographs tell it all. In one, Private England, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head, as he masturbates. Three other hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners are shown, hands reflexively crossed over their genitals. A fifth prisoner has his hands at his sides. In another, England stands arm in arm with Specialist Graner; both are grinning and giving the thumbs-up behind a cluster of perhaps seven naked Iraqis, knees bent, piled clumsily on top of each other in a pyramid. There is another photograph of a cluster of naked prisoners, again piled in a pyramid. Near them stands Graner, smiling, his arms crossed; a woman soldier stands in front of him, bending over, and she, too, is smiling. Then, there is another cluster of hooded bodies, with a female soldier standing in front, taking photographs. Yet another photograph shows a kneeling, naked, unhooded male prisoner, head momentarily turned away from the camera, posed to make it appear that he is performing oral sex on another male prisoner, who is naked and hooded.
Such dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. “Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front of each other—it’s all a form of torture,” Haykel said.
Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood.
The 372nd’s abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine—a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide. On April 9th, at an Article 32 hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury) in the case against Sergeant Frederick, at Camp Victory, near Baghdad, one of the witnesses, Specialist Matthew Wisdom, an M.P., told the courtroom what happened when he and other soldiers delivered seven prisoners, hooded and bound, to the so-called “hard site” at Abu Ghraib—seven tiers of cells where the inmates who were considered the most dangerous were housed. The men had been accused of starting a riot in another section of the prison. Wisdom said:
SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. . . . I do not think it was right to put them in a pile. I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage. The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. . . . I left after that.
When he returned later, Wisdom testified:
I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.” I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”
Wisdom testified that he told his superiors what had happened, and assumed that “the issue was taken care of.” He said, “I just didn’t want to be part of anything that looked criminal.”
The abuses became public because of the outrage of Specialist Joseph M. Darby, an M.P. whose role emerged during the Article 32 hearing against Chip Frederick. A government witness, Special Agent Scott Bobeck, who is a member of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or C.I.D., told the court, according to an abridged transcript made available to me, “The investigation started after SPC Darby . . . got a CD from CPL Graner. . . . He came across pictures of naked detainees.” Bobeck said that Darby had “initially put an anonymous letter under our door, then he later came forward and gave a sworn statement. He felt very bad about it and thought it was very wrong.”
Questioned further, the Army investigator said that Frederick and his colleagues had not been given any “training guidelines” that he was aware of. The M.P.s in the 372nd had been assigned to routine traffic and police duties upon their arrival in Iraq, in the spring of 2003. In October of 2003, the 372nd was ordered to prison-guard duty at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, at thirty-seven, was far older than his colleagues, and was a natural leader; he had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections. Bobeck explained:
What I got is that SSG Frederick and CPL Graner were road M.P.s and were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run.
Bobeck also testified that witnesses had said that Frederick, on one occasion, “had punched a detainee in the chest so hard that the detainee almost went into cardiac arrest.”
At the Article 32 hearing, the Army informed Frederick and his attorneys, Captain Robert Shuck, an Army lawyer, and Gary Myers, a civilian, that two dozen witnesses they had sought, including General Karpinski and all of Frederick’s co-defendants, would not appear. Some had been excused after exercising their Fifth Amendment right; others were deemed to be too far away from the courtroom. “The purpose of an Article 32 hearing is for us to engage witnesses and discover facts,” Gary Myers told me. “We ended up with a c.i.d. agent and no alleged victims to examine.” After the hearing, the presiding investigative officer ruled that there was sufficient evidence to convene a court-martial against Frederick.
Myers, who was one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions of the nineteen-seventies, told me that his client’s defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence. He said, “Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?”
In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib. In a letter written in January, he said:
I questioned some of the things that I saw . . . such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell—and the answer I got was, “This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.” . . . . MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.
The military-intelligence officers have “encouraged and told us, ‘Great job,’ they were now getting positive results and information,” Frederick wrote. “CID has been present when the military working dogs were used to intimidate prisoners at MI’s request.” At one point, Frederick told his family, he pulled aside his superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Phillabaum, the commander of the 320th M.P. Battalion, and asked about the mistreatment of prisoners. “His reply was ‘Don’t worry about it.’”
In November, Frederick wrote, an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called “O.G.A.,” or other government agencies—that is, the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees—was brought to his unit for questioning. “They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately twenty-four hours in the shower. . . . The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away.” The dead Iraqi was never entered into the prison’s inmate-control system, Frederick recounted, “and therefore never had a number.”
Frederick’s defense is, of course, highly self-serving. But the complaints in his letters and e-mails home were reinforced by two internal Army reports—Taguba’s and one by the Army’s chief law-enforcement officer, Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general.
Last fall, General Sanchez ordered Ryder to review the prison system in Iraq and recommend ways to improve it. Ryder’s report, filed on November 5th, concluded that there were potential human-rights, training, and manpower issues, system-wide, that needed immediate attention. It also discussed serious concerns about the tension between the missions of the military police assigned to guard the prisoners and the intelligence teams who wanted to interrogate them. Army regulations limit intelligence activity by the M.P.s to passive collection. But something had gone wrong at Abu Ghraib.
There was evidence dating back to the Afghanistan war, the Ryder report said, that M.P.s had worked with intelligence operatives to “set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews”—a euphemism for breaking the will of prisoners. “Such actions generally run counter to the smooth operation of a detention facility, attempting to maintain its population in a compliant and docile state.” General Karpinski’s brigade, Ryder reported, “has not been directed to change its facility procedures to set the conditions for MI interrogations, nor participate in those interrogations.” Ryder called for the establishment of procedures to “define the role of military police soldiers . . .clearly separating the actions of the guards from those of the military intelligence personnel.” The officers running the war in Iraq were put on notice.
Ryder undercut his warning, however, by concluding that the situation had not yet reached a crisis point. Though some procedures were flawed, he said, he found “no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices.” His investigation was at best a failure and at worst a coverup.
Taguba, in his report, was polite but direct in refuting his fellow-general. “Unfortunately, many of the systemic problems that surfaced during [Ryder’s] assessment are the very same issues that are the subject of this investigation,” he wrote. “In fact, many of the abuses suffered by detainees occurred during, or near to, the time of that assessment.” The report continued, “Contrary to the findings of MG Ryder’s report, I find that personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to ‘set the conditions’ for MI interrogations.” Army intelligence officers, C.I.A. agents, and private contractors “actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses.”
Taguba backed up his assertion by citing evidence from sworn statements to Army C.I.D. investigators. Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the accused M.P.s, testified that it was her job to keep detainees awake, including one hooded prisoner who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis. She stated, “MI wanted to get them to talk. It is Graner and Frederick’s job to do things for MI and OGA to get these people to talk.”
Another witness, Sergeant Javal Davis, who is also one of the accused, told C.I.D. investigators, “I witnessed prisoners in the MI hold section . . . being made to do various things that I would question morally. . . . We were told that they had different rules.” Taguba wrote, “Davis also stated that he had heard MI insinuate to the guards to abuse the inmates. When asked what MI said he stated: ‘Loosen this guy up for us.’‘Make sure he has a bad night.’‘Make sure he gets the treatment.’” Military intelligence made these comments to Graner and Frederick, Davis said. “The MI staffs to my understanding have been giving Graner compliments . . . statements like, ‘Good job, they’re breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They’re giving out good information.’”
When asked why he did not inform his chain of command about the abuse, Sergeant Davis answered, “Because I assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something. Also the wing”—where the abuse took place—“belongs to MI and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.”
Another witness, Specialist Jason Kennel, who was not accused of wrongdoing, said, “I saw them nude, but MI would tell us to take away their mattresses, sheets, and clothes.” (It was his view, he added, that if M.I. wanted him to do this “they needed to give me paperwork.”) Taguba also cited an interview with Adel L. Nakhla, a translator who was an employee of Titan, a civilian contractor. He told of one night when a “bunch of people from MI” watched as a group of handcuffed and shackled inmates were subjected to abuse by Graner and Frederick.
General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive non-judicial punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be relieved of duty and reprimanded. He further urged that a civilian contractor, Steven Stephanowicz, of CACI International, be fired from his Army job, reprimanded, and denied his security clearances for lying to the investigating team and allowing or ordering military policemen “who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by ‘setting conditions’ which were neither authorized” nor in accordance with Army regulations. “He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse,” Taguba wrote. He also recommended disciplinary action against a second CACI employee, John Israel. (A spokeswoman for CACI said that the company had “received no formal communication” from the Army about the matter.)
“I suspect,” Taguba concluded, that Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz, and Israel “were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib,” and strongly recommended immediate disciplinary action.
The problems inside the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from senior commanders. During Karpinski’s seven-month tour of duty, Taguba noted, there were at least a dozen officially reported incidents involving escapes, attempted escapes, and other serious security issues that were investigated by officers of the 800th M.P. Brigade. Some of the incidents had led to the killing or wounding of inmates and M.P.s, and resulted in a series of “lessons learned” inquiries within the brigade. Karpinski invariably approved the reports and signed orders calling for changes in day-to-day procedures. But Taguba found that she did not follow up, doing nothing to insure that the orders were carried out. Had she done so, he added, “cases of abuse may have been prevented.”
General Taguba further found that Abu Ghraib was filled beyond capacity, and that the M.P. guard force was significantly undermanned and short of resources. “This imbalance has contributed to the poor living conditions, escapes, and accountability lapses,” he wrote. There were gross differences, Taguba said, between the actual number of prisoners on hand and the number officially recorded. A lack of proper screening also meant that many innocent Iraqis were wrongly being detained—indefinitely, it seemed, in some cases. The Taguba study noted that more than sixty per cent of the civilian inmates at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society, which should have enabled them to be released. Karpinski’s defense, Taguba said, was that her superior officers “routinely” rejected her recommendations regarding the release of such prisoners.
Karpinski was rarely seen at the prisons she was supposed to be running, Taguba wrote. He also found a wide range of administrative problems, including some that he considered “without precedent in my military career.” The soldiers, he added, were “poorly prepared and untrained . . . prior to deployment, at the mobilization site, upon arrival in theater, and throughout the mission.”
General Taguba spent more than four hours interviewing Karpinski, whom he described as extremely emotional: “What I found particularly disturbing in her testimony was her complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of her command to both establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.”
Taguba recommended that Karpinski and seven brigade military-police officers and enlisted men be relieved of command and formally reprimanded. No criminal proceedings were suggested for Karpinski; apparently, the loss of promotion and the indignity of a public rebuke were seen as enough punishment.
After the story broke on CBS last week, the Pentagon announced that Major General Geoffrey Miller, the new head of the Iraqi prison system, had arrived in Baghdad and was on the job. He had been the commander of the Guantánamo Bay detention center. General Sanchez also authorized an investigation into possible wrongdoing by military and civilian interrogators.
As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.
The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence, however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as a C.I.D. agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is invariably counterproductive. “They’ll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth,” Rowell said. “‘You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say.’ You don’t get righteous information.”
Under the fourth Geneva convention, an occupying power can jail civilians who pose an “imperative” security threat, but it must establish a regular procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment decision and have their cases reviewed. Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guantánamo.
As the photographs from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had enormous consequences: for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United States’ reputation in the world.
Captain Robert Shuck, Frederick’s military attorney, closed his defense at the Article 32 hearing last month by saying that the Army was “attempting to have these six soldiers atone for its sins.” Similarly, Gary Myers, Frederick’s civilian attorney, told me that he would argue at the court-martial that culpability in the case extended far beyond his client. “I’m going to drag every involved intelligence officer and civilian contractor I can find into court,” he said. “Do you really believe the Army relieved a general officer because of six soldiers? Not a chance.”
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040510fa_fact
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 "expletive deleted" 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’s auspices. “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 "expletive deleted" 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 "expletive deleted". 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 "expletive deleted" 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.”
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040524fa_fact
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 "expletive deleted" 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’s auspices. “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 "expletive deleted" 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 "expletive deleted". 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 "expletive deleted" 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.”
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040524fa_fact
August 26, 2004
Holding the Pentagon Accountable: For Abu Ghraib
or anyone with the time to wade through 400-plus pages and the resources to decode them, the two reports issued this week on the Abu Ghraib prison are an indictment of the way the Bush administration set the stage for Iraqi prisoners to be brutalized by American prison guards, military intelligence officers and private contractors.
The Army's internal investigation, released yesterday, showed that the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib went far beyond the actions of a few sadistic military police officers - the administration's chosen culprits. It said that 27 military intelligence soldiers and civilian contractors committed criminal offenses, and that military officials hid prisoners from the Red Cross. Another report, from a civilian panel picked by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, offers the dedicated reader a dotted line from President Bush's decision to declare Iraq a front in the war against terror, to government lawyers finding ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions, to Mr. Rumsfeld's bungled planning of the occupation and understaffing of the ground forces in Iraq, to the hideous events at Abu Ghraib prison.
That was a service to the public, but the civilian panel did an enormous disservice by not connecting those dots and walking away from any real exercise in accountability. Instead, Pentagon officials who are never named get muted criticism for issuing confusing memos and not monitoring things closely enough. This is all cast as "leadership failure" - the 21st-century version of the Nixonian "mistakes were made" evasion - that does not require even the mildest reprimand for Mr. Rumsfeld, who should have resigned over this disaster months ago. Direct condemnation is reserved for the men and women in the field, from the military police officers sent to guard prisoners without training to the three-star general in Iraq.
Still, the dots are there, making it clear that the road to Abu Ghraib began well before the invasion of Iraq, when the administration created the category of "unlawful combatants" for suspected members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban who were captured in Afghanistan and imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Interrogators wanted to force these prisoners to talk in ways that are barred by American law and the Geneva Conventions, and on Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department lawyers produced the infamous treatise on how to construe torture as being legal.
In December 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized things like hooding prisoners, using dogs to terrify them, forcing them into "stress positions" for long periods, stripping them, shaving them and isolating them. All this was prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, but President Bush had already declared on Feb. 7, 2002, that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Qaeda.
In January, the general counsel of the Navy objected, and Mr. Rumsfeld rescinded some of the extreme techniques. Then another legal review further narrowed the list, and Mr. Rumsfeld issued yet another memo on April 16, 2003. The Schlesinger panel said the memos confused field commanders, who thought that harsh interrogations were allowed, and that things could have been made clearer if Mr. Rumsfeld had allowed a real legal debate in the first place. Yet the panel places no fault on Mr. Rumsfeld for the cascade of disastrous events that followed.
According to the report, American forces began mistreating prisoners at the outset of the war in Afghanistan. Interrogators and members of military intelligence were sent from Afghanistan to Iraq, and the harsh interrogations "migrated" with them, the report said. But one of the panel's oddest failures is how it deals with this issue. It notes that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been running the prison in Guantánamo Bay, went to Iraq in August 2003, bringing the harsh interrogation rules with him. The report said Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, used his advice to approve a dozen "aggressive interrogation techniques," and that General Sanchez was "using reasoning" from the president's own memo. But in the strange logic of this report, that was not the fault of those who made the policies. The report assigns no responsibility to General Miller, nor does it say that he was sent to Iraq by Mr. Rumsfeld's staff.
All these decisions were happening in a chaotic context. The Schlesinger reports said the military failed to anticipate the insurgency in Iraq or react to it properly and was unprepared for the number of prisoners it had. Insufficient numbers of military police units were sent to Iraq in a disorganized fashion, many of them untrained reservists.
The panel was right in criticizing General Sanchez for not appreciating the scope of the disaster, but it made only the most glancing reference to the bigger problem: the Iraqi occupation force was too small. And that was a policy approved by Mr. Bush and designed by Mr. Rumsfeld, who wanted a lightning invasion by the sparest force possible, based on the ludicrous notion that Iraqis would not resist.
Still, the civilian panel said the politicians had only indirect responsibility for this mess, and Mr. Schlesinger made the absurd argument that firing Mr. Rumsfeld would aid "the enemy." That is reminiscent of the comment Mr. Bush made last spring when he visited the Pentagon to view images of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners and then announced that Mr. Rumsfeld was doing a "superb job." It may not be all that surprising from a commission appointed by the secretary of defense and run by two former secretaries of defense (Mr. Schlesinger and Harold Brown). But it seems less a rational assessment than an attempt to cut off any further criticism of the men at the top.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/opinion/...print&position=
Holding the Pentagon Accountable: For Abu Ghraib
or anyone with the time to wade through 400-plus pages and the resources to decode them, the two reports issued this week on the Abu Ghraib prison are an indictment of the way the Bush administration set the stage for Iraqi prisoners to be brutalized by American prison guards, military intelligence officers and private contractors.
The Army's internal investigation, released yesterday, showed that the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib went far beyond the actions of a few sadistic military police officers - the administration's chosen culprits. It said that 27 military intelligence soldiers and civilian contractors committed criminal offenses, and that military officials hid prisoners from the Red Cross. Another report, from a civilian panel picked by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, offers the dedicated reader a dotted line from President Bush's decision to declare Iraq a front in the war against terror, to government lawyers finding ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions, to Mr. Rumsfeld's bungled planning of the occupation and understaffing of the ground forces in Iraq, to the hideous events at Abu Ghraib prison.
That was a service to the public, but the civilian panel did an enormous disservice by not connecting those dots and walking away from any real exercise in accountability. Instead, Pentagon officials who are never named get muted criticism for issuing confusing memos and not monitoring things closely enough. This is all cast as "leadership failure" - the 21st-century version of the Nixonian "mistakes were made" evasion - that does not require even the mildest reprimand for Mr. Rumsfeld, who should have resigned over this disaster months ago. Direct condemnation is reserved for the men and women in the field, from the military police officers sent to guard prisoners without training to the three-star general in Iraq.
Still, the dots are there, making it clear that the road to Abu Ghraib began well before the invasion of Iraq, when the administration created the category of "unlawful combatants" for suspected members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban who were captured in Afghanistan and imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Interrogators wanted to force these prisoners to talk in ways that are barred by American law and the Geneva Conventions, and on Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department lawyers produced the infamous treatise on how to construe torture as being legal.
In December 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized things like hooding prisoners, using dogs to terrify them, forcing them into "stress positions" for long periods, stripping them, shaving them and isolating them. All this was prohibited by the Geneva Conventions, but President Bush had already declared on Feb. 7, 2002, that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Qaeda.
In January, the general counsel of the Navy objected, and Mr. Rumsfeld rescinded some of the extreme techniques. Then another legal review further narrowed the list, and Mr. Rumsfeld issued yet another memo on April 16, 2003. The Schlesinger panel said the memos confused field commanders, who thought that harsh interrogations were allowed, and that things could have been made clearer if Mr. Rumsfeld had allowed a real legal debate in the first place. Yet the panel places no fault on Mr. Rumsfeld for the cascade of disastrous events that followed.
According to the report, American forces began mistreating prisoners at the outset of the war in Afghanistan. Interrogators and members of military intelligence were sent from Afghanistan to Iraq, and the harsh interrogations "migrated" with them, the report said. But one of the panel's oddest failures is how it deals with this issue. It notes that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been running the prison in Guantánamo Bay, went to Iraq in August 2003, bringing the harsh interrogation rules with him. The report said Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, used his advice to approve a dozen "aggressive interrogation techniques," and that General Sanchez was "using reasoning" from the president's own memo. But in the strange logic of this report, that was not the fault of those who made the policies. The report assigns no responsibility to General Miller, nor does it say that he was sent to Iraq by Mr. Rumsfeld's staff.
All these decisions were happening in a chaotic context. The Schlesinger reports said the military failed to anticipate the insurgency in Iraq or react to it properly and was unprepared for the number of prisoners it had. Insufficient numbers of military police units were sent to Iraq in a disorganized fashion, many of them untrained reservists.
The panel was right in criticizing General Sanchez for not appreciating the scope of the disaster, but it made only the most glancing reference to the bigger problem: the Iraqi occupation force was too small. And that was a policy approved by Mr. Bush and designed by Mr. Rumsfeld, who wanted a lightning invasion by the sparest force possible, based on the ludicrous notion that Iraqis would not resist.
Still, the civilian panel said the politicians had only indirect responsibility for this mess, and Mr. Schlesinger made the absurd argument that firing Mr. Rumsfeld would aid "the enemy." That is reminiscent of the comment Mr. Bush made last spring when he visited the Pentagon to view images of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners and then announced that Mr. Rumsfeld was doing a "superb job." It may not be all that surprising from a commission appointed by the secretary of defense and run by two former secretaries of defense (Mr. Schlesinger and Harold Brown). But it seems less a rational assessment than an attempt to cut off any further criticism of the men at the top.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/opinion/...print&position=
Legalizing Torture
Wednesday, June 9, 2004; Page A20
THE BUSH administration assures the country, and the world, that it is complying with U.S. and international laws banning torture and maltreatment of prisoners. But, breaking with a practice of openness that had lasted for decades, it has classified as secret and refused to disclose the techniques of interrogation it is using on foreign detainees at U.S. prisons at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a matter of grave concern because the use of some of the methods that have been reported in the press is regarded by independent experts as well as some of the Pentagon's legal professionals as illegal. The administration has responded that its civilian lawyers have certified its methods as proper -- but it has refused to disclose, or even provide to Congress, the justifying opinions and memos.
This week, thanks again to an independent press, we have begun to learn the deeply disturbing truth about the legal opinions that the Pentagon and the Justice Department seek to keep secret. According to copies leaked to several newspapers, they lay out a shocking and immoral set of justifications for torture. In a paper prepared last year under the direction of the Defense Department's chief counsel, and first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, the president of the United States was declared empowered to disregard U.S. and international law and order the torture of foreign prisoners. Moreover, interrogators following the president's orders were declared immune from punishment. Torture itself was narrowly redefined, so that techniques that inflict pain and mental suffering could be deemed legal. All this was done as a prelude to the designation of 24 interrogation methods for foreign prisoners -- the same techniques, now in use, that President Bush says are humane but refuses to disclose.
There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of "national security." For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan -- that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism. The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy -- even if it is true, as the administration maintains, that its theories have not been put into practice. Even on paper, the administration's reasoning will provide a ready excuse for dictators, especially those allied with the Bush administration, to go on torturing and killing detainees.
Perhaps the president's lawyers have no interest in the global impact of their policies -- but they should be concerned about the treatment of American servicemen and civilians in foreign countries. Before the Bush administration took office, the Army's interrogation procedures -- which were unclassified -- established this simple and sensible test: No technique should be used that, if used by an enemy on an American, would be regarded as a violation of U.S. or international law. Now, imagine that a hostile government were to force an American to take drugs or endure severe mental stress that fell just short of producing irreversible damage; or pain a little milder than that of "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." What if the foreign interrogator of an American "knows that severe pain will result from his actions" but proceeds because causing such pain is not his main objective? What if a foreign leader were to decide that the torture of an American was needed to protect his country's security? Would Americans regard that as legal, or morally acceptable? According to the Bush administration, they should.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer
Wednesday, June 9, 2004; Page A20
THE BUSH administration assures the country, and the world, that it is complying with U.S. and international laws banning torture and maltreatment of prisoners. But, breaking with a practice of openness that had lasted for decades, it has classified as secret and refused to disclose the techniques of interrogation it is using on foreign detainees at U.S. prisons at Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a matter of grave concern because the use of some of the methods that have been reported in the press is regarded by independent experts as well as some of the Pentagon's legal professionals as illegal. The administration has responded that its civilian lawyers have certified its methods as proper -- but it has refused to disclose, or even provide to Congress, the justifying opinions and memos.
This week, thanks again to an independent press, we have begun to learn the deeply disturbing truth about the legal opinions that the Pentagon and the Justice Department seek to keep secret. According to copies leaked to several newspapers, they lay out a shocking and immoral set of justifications for torture. In a paper prepared last year under the direction of the Defense Department's chief counsel, and first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, the president of the United States was declared empowered to disregard U.S. and international law and order the torture of foreign prisoners. Moreover, interrogators following the president's orders were declared immune from punishment. Torture itself was narrowly redefined, so that techniques that inflict pain and mental suffering could be deemed legal. All this was done as a prelude to the designation of 24 interrogation methods for foreign prisoners -- the same techniques, now in use, that President Bush says are humane but refuses to disclose.
There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of "national security." For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan -- that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism. The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy -- even if it is true, as the administration maintains, that its theories have not been put into practice. Even on paper, the administration's reasoning will provide a ready excuse for dictators, especially those allied with the Bush administration, to go on torturing and killing detainees.
Perhaps the president's lawyers have no interest in the global impact of their policies -- but they should be concerned about the treatment of American servicemen and civilians in foreign countries. Before the Bush administration took office, the Army's interrogation procedures -- which were unclassified -- established this simple and sensible test: No technique should be used that, if used by an enemy on an American, would be regarded as a violation of U.S. or international law. Now, imagine that a hostile government were to force an American to take drugs or endure severe mental stress that fell just short of producing irreversible damage; or pain a little milder than that of "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." What if the foreign interrogator of an American "knows that severe pain will result from his actions" but proceeds because causing such pain is not his main objective? What if a foreign leader were to decide that the torture of an American was needed to protect his country's security? Would Americans regard that as legal, or morally acceptable? According to the Bush administration, they should.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A...anguage=printer
February 23, 2005
American Accused in a Plot to Assassinate Bush
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
ASHINGTON, Feb. 22 - An American student who was imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for the last 20 months was returned to the United States and accused by the Justice Department on Tuesday of plotting with members of Al Qaeda in 2003 to assassinate President Bush.
In an indictment unsealed in federal court in Alexandria, Va., the student, a 23-year-old American citizen named Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, is charged with providing material support for terrorism. Mr. Abu Ali is accused of training with Al Qaeda overseas and wanting to "become a planner of terrorist operations" like Mohammed Atta or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, two Qaeda leaders central to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The indictment's accusations rely mainly on the testimony of several unnamed co-conspirators.
While American officials said they took the threat seriously, the indictment suggests that any plot to assassinate Mr. Bush did not move beyond the discussion stages among extremists in Saudi Arabia, and Mr. Abu Ali was not charged under the federal statute on assassinations.
Friends of Mr. Abu Ali and defense lawyers denied that he was part of any terrorist plot and accused the Justice Department of an overzealous prosecution. They said that Mr. Abu Ali, a valedictorian at an Islamic high school in suburban Washington, was the victim of torture at the hands of the Saudis after his arrest there in June 2003, an assertion that a federal judge in Washington appeared to validate in a recent ruling in a lawsuit brought by Mr. Abu Ali's family to force his release.
Mr. Abu Ali was returned to the United States this week to face charges of providing material support to terrorists. At a brief hearing on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Alexandria, he did not enter a plea but offered through his lawyers to provide evidence of Saudi torture in the form of markings on his back.
The judge declined, putting off the torture issue until a later hearing. Edward B. MacMahon, a defense lawyer for Mr. Abu Ali, said in an interview after the hearing that the judge "would have seen evidence of torture, scars."
"He looks like someone who's been whipped," Mr. MacMahon said, "and it's a very disturbing event for this country when our government is willing to use evidence obtained by torture in another country."
"It's lies. It's all lies," said Omar Abu Ali, Mr. Abu Ali's father, after the hearing, according to The Associated Press. "The government lied from the very first day."
Mr. Abu Ali has been at the center of a prolonged international conflict over his detention by the Saudis, as the defendant's family in the United States has said the United States effectively orchestrated his detention and interrogation in Saudi Arabia.
The family sued to force Mr. Abu Ali's release from Saudi custody, saying American officials threatened to declare him an enemy combatant and send him to a detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, if he did not cooperate. Judge John D. Bates has not issued a ruling on Mr. Abu Ali's detention, but he has expressed support for many of the family's central contentions and skepticism toward those of the government.
In an opinion in December, Judge Bates wrote, "There has been at least some circumstantial evidence that Abu Ali has been tortured during interrogations with the knowledge of the United States." He added that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who were present for Saudi interrogations, "have despaired at his continued detention, and more than one United States official has stated that Abu Ali is no longer a threat to the United States and there is no active interrogation."
Saudi and American officials denied on Tuesday that Mr. Abu Ali had been tortured. "We have seen no evidence that Abu Ali was tortured or mistreated while in Saudi custody," said a senior Justice Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.
Justice Department officials declined to discuss why they had decided to bring terrorism charges against Mr. Abu Ali now, after past indications that some F.B.I. investigators did not consider him a threat.
"I suspect it's no coincidence that this man sat in detention for 20 months until a federal judge in the United States was threatening to require the American government to disclose its arrangements with the Saudi government for holding him," said David D. Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who is representing Mr. Abu Ali's family in the case. "The lawsuit gave the government a tremendous incentive to bring some charges."
Mr. Abu Ali is the oldest of five children of Omar and Faten Abu Ali, who moved to Houston from their native Jordan in the 1970's for the father to study mathematics. The father has worked at the Saudi Embassy in Washington for more than 20 years in computer operations, embassy officials said.
After the family moved to Northern Virginia in the suburbs of Washington, Mr. Abu Ali attended high school at the Islamic Saudi Academy, a private school in Alexandria that serves hundreds of children of Saudi citizens and is subsidized by the Saudi government. He graduated in 1999 as valedictorian of his class.
Shaker El Sayed, a friend of the family, said Mr. Abu Ali taught Islamic studies to young children at the Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church in his spare time during high school. After studying engineering briefly at the University of Maryland, he moved to Saudi Arabia in 2000 to study the Koran at the Islamic University of Medina.
"By then," Mr. El Sayed said, "he wanted to be a teacher or a Muslim scholar."
Mr. Abu Ali returned to Virginia in 2000 but resumed his studies in Saudi Arabia in the fall of 2002. It was then, the Justice Department asserted in Mr. Abu Ali's indictment, that he sought to become an operative of Al Qaeda through contacts with his former roommate at the Islamic University of Medina.
The indictment, citing the testimony of several unnamed co-conspirators, states that in 2002 and 2003, Mr. Abu Ali and a Qaeda associate "discussed plans for Abu Ali to assassinate President of the United States George W. Bush." The indictment says that they discussed two options in which Mr. Abu Ali "would get close enough to the president to shoot him on the street" or would "detonate a car bomb." One member of Al Qaeda gave him a "religious blessing" to kill Mr. Bush, the government charged.
Mr. Abu Ali received training from Qaeda associates in the use of weapons, hand grenades and other explosives, as well as in document forgery, and he wanted to travel to Afghanistan to take part in violent "jihad" against American military personnel there, the indictment charges. Qaeda associates also gave him 7,750 Saudi riyals, or the equivalent of $2,066, to buy a laptop computer, a cellphone and books, it states.
The Saudis, apparently acting in consultation with American officials, entered his classroom and arrested him on June 11, 2003, while he was taking his final exams at the Islamic University of Medina. American investigators said at the time that they suspected that he had links to other terrorist suspects in Saudi Arabia who were implicated in a plot in Northern Virginia to use paintball games as paramilitary training and who were arrested at the same time. Some were later convicted of supporting terrorism.
Law enforcement officials said they had no indication that any Qaeda plot to assassinate Mr. Bush moved to the stage of actual operations, but the Justice Department said it considered Mr. Abu Ali a serious threat.
"After the devastating terrorist attack and murders of Sept. 11," said Paul J. McNulty, the United States attorney in Alexandria, Mr. Abu Ali "turned his back on America and joined the cause of Al Qaeda."
"He now stands charged with some of the most serious offenses our nation can bring against supporters of terrorism," Mr. McNulty said.
The charges, if borne out in court, would represent one of the more notable terrorism prosecutions in many months brought by the Justice Department on the domestic front. Several of the government's major terror prosecutions, including cases in Detroit, Brooklyn and Albany, have suffered significant setbacks in the courtroom or collapsed altogether amid questions about prosecutors' tactics.
John Files contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/23/politics...QAJ6Li8O+nYNnQA
American Accused in a Plot to Assassinate Bush
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
ASHINGTON, Feb. 22 - An American student who was imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for the last 20 months was returned to the United States and accused by the Justice Department on Tuesday of plotting with members of Al Qaeda in 2003 to assassinate President Bush.
In an indictment unsealed in federal court in Alexandria, Va., the student, a 23-year-old American citizen named Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, is charged with providing material support for terrorism. Mr. Abu Ali is accused of training with Al Qaeda overseas and wanting to "become a planner of terrorist operations" like Mohammed Atta or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, two Qaeda leaders central to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The indictment's accusations rely mainly on the testimony of several unnamed co-conspirators.
While American officials said they took the threat seriously, the indictment suggests that any plot to assassinate Mr. Bush did not move beyond the discussion stages among extremists in Saudi Arabia, and Mr. Abu Ali was not charged under the federal statute on assassinations.
Friends of Mr. Abu Ali and defense lawyers denied that he was part of any terrorist plot and accused the Justice Department of an overzealous prosecution. They said that Mr. Abu Ali, a valedictorian at an Islamic high school in suburban Washington, was the victim of torture at the hands of the Saudis after his arrest there in June 2003, an assertion that a federal judge in Washington appeared to validate in a recent ruling in a lawsuit brought by Mr. Abu Ali's family to force his release.
Mr. Abu Ali was returned to the United States this week to face charges of providing material support to terrorists. At a brief hearing on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Alexandria, he did not enter a plea but offered through his lawyers to provide evidence of Saudi torture in the form of markings on his back.
The judge declined, putting off the torture issue until a later hearing. Edward B. MacMahon, a defense lawyer for Mr. Abu Ali, said in an interview after the hearing that the judge "would have seen evidence of torture, scars."
"He looks like someone who's been whipped," Mr. MacMahon said, "and it's a very disturbing event for this country when our government is willing to use evidence obtained by torture in another country."
"It's lies. It's all lies," said Omar Abu Ali, Mr. Abu Ali's father, after the hearing, according to The Associated Press. "The government lied from the very first day."
Mr. Abu Ali has been at the center of a prolonged international conflict over his detention by the Saudis, as the defendant's family in the United States has said the United States effectively orchestrated his detention and interrogation in Saudi Arabia.
The family sued to force Mr. Abu Ali's release from Saudi custody, saying American officials threatened to declare him an enemy combatant and send him to a detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, if he did not cooperate. Judge John D. Bates has not issued a ruling on Mr. Abu Ali's detention, but he has expressed support for many of the family's central contentions and skepticism toward those of the government.
In an opinion in December, Judge Bates wrote, "There has been at least some circumstantial evidence that Abu Ali has been tortured during interrogations with the knowledge of the United States." He added that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who were present for Saudi interrogations, "have despaired at his continued detention, and more than one United States official has stated that Abu Ali is no longer a threat to the United States and there is no active interrogation."
Saudi and American officials denied on Tuesday that Mr. Abu Ali had been tortured. "We have seen no evidence that Abu Ali was tortured or mistreated while in Saudi custody," said a senior Justice Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.
Justice Department officials declined to discuss why they had decided to bring terrorism charges against Mr. Abu Ali now, after past indications that some F.B.I. investigators did not consider him a threat.
"I suspect it's no coincidence that this man sat in detention for 20 months until a federal judge in the United States was threatening to require the American government to disclose its arrangements with the Saudi government for holding him," said David D. Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who is representing Mr. Abu Ali's family in the case. "The lawsuit gave the government a tremendous incentive to bring some charges."
Mr. Abu Ali is the oldest of five children of Omar and Faten Abu Ali, who moved to Houston from their native Jordan in the 1970's for the father to study mathematics. The father has worked at the Saudi Embassy in Washington for more than 20 years in computer operations, embassy officials said.
After the family moved to Northern Virginia in the suburbs of Washington, Mr. Abu Ali attended high school at the Islamic Saudi Academy, a private school in Alexandria that serves hundreds of children of Saudi citizens and is subsidized by the Saudi government. He graduated in 1999 as valedictorian of his class.
Shaker El Sayed, a friend of the family, said Mr. Abu Ali taught Islamic studies to young children at the Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church in his spare time during high school. After studying engineering briefly at the University of Maryland, he moved to Saudi Arabia in 2000 to study the Koran at the Islamic University of Medina.
"By then," Mr. El Sayed said, "he wanted to be a teacher or a Muslim scholar."
Mr. Abu Ali returned to Virginia in 2000 but resumed his studies in Saudi Arabia in the fall of 2002. It was then, the Justice Department asserted in Mr. Abu Ali's indictment, that he sought to become an operative of Al Qaeda through contacts with his former roommate at the Islamic University of Medina.
The indictment, citing the testimony of several unnamed co-conspirators, states that in 2002 and 2003, Mr. Abu Ali and a Qaeda associate "discussed plans for Abu Ali to assassinate President of the United States George W. Bush." The indictment says that they discussed two options in which Mr. Abu Ali "would get close enough to the president to shoot him on the street" or would "detonate a car bomb." One member of Al Qaeda gave him a "religious blessing" to kill Mr. Bush, the government charged.
Mr. Abu Ali received training from Qaeda associates in the use of weapons, hand grenades and other explosives, as well as in document forgery, and he wanted to travel to Afghanistan to take part in violent "jihad" against American military personnel there, the indictment charges. Qaeda associates also gave him 7,750 Saudi riyals, or the equivalent of $2,066, to buy a laptop computer, a cellphone and books, it states.
The Saudis, apparently acting in consultation with American officials, entered his classroom and arrested him on June 11, 2003, while he was taking his final exams at the Islamic University of Medina. American investigators said at the time that they suspected that he had links to other terrorist suspects in Saudi Arabia who were implicated in a plot in Northern Virginia to use paintball games as paramilitary training and who were arrested at the same time. Some were later convicted of supporting terrorism.
Law enforcement officials said they had no indication that any Qaeda plot to assassinate Mr. Bush moved to the stage of actual operations, but the Justice Department said it considered Mr. Abu Ali a serious threat.
"After the devastating terrorist attack and murders of Sept. 11," said Paul J. McNulty, the United States attorney in Alexandria, Mr. Abu Ali "turned his back on America and joined the cause of Al Qaeda."
"He now stands charged with some of the most serious offenses our nation can bring against supporters of terrorism," Mr. McNulty said.
The charges, if borne out in court, would represent one of the more notable terrorism prosecutions in many months brought by the Justice Department on the domestic front. Several of the government's major terror prosecutions, including cases in Detroit, Brooklyn and Albany, have suffered significant setbacks in the courtroom or collapsed altogether amid questions about prosecutors' tactics.
John Files contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/23/politics...QAJ6Li8O+nYNnQA
World churches see illegality at Guantanamo
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml...ss/uk/worldNews
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml...ss/uk/worldNews
Father Shay Cullen of Preda.org says in his recent letter entitled 'We must never be afraid to protest against torture'' Nothing can justify a single moment of (such) inhuman treatment. The Bush administration officials who allow this and claim to be bible-reading Christians will never escape responsibility by abrogating international treaties that ban torture. They must be held accountable by international and federal laws banning inhuman treatment.
February 25, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Thrown to the Wolves
By BOB HERBERT
TTAWA
If John Ashcroft was right, then I was staring into the malevolent, duplicitous eyes of pure evil, the eyes of a man with the mass murder of Americans on his mind. But all I could really see was a polite, unassuming, neatly dressed guy who looked like a suburban Little League coach.
If Mr. Ashcroft was right, then Maher Arar should have been in a U.S. prison, not talking to me in an office in downtown Ottawa. But there he was, a 34-year-old man who now wears a perpetually sad expression, talking about his recent experiences - a real-life story with the hideous aura of a hallucination. Mr. Arar's 3-year-old son, Houd, loudly crunched potato chips while his father was being interviewed.
"I still have nightmares about being in Syria, being beaten, being in jail," said Mr. Arar. "They feel very real. When I wake up, I feel very relieved to find myself in my room."
In the fall of 2002 Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, suddenly found himself caught up in the cruel mockery of justice that the Bush administration has substituted for the rule of law in the post-Sept. 11 world. While attempting to change planes at Kennedy Airport on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities, interrogated and thrown into jail. He was not charged with anything, and he never would be charged with anything, but his life would be ruined.
Mr. Arar was surreptitiously flown out of the United States to Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he was kept like a nocturnal animal in an unlit, underground, rat-infested cell that was the size of a grave. From time to time he was tortured.
He wept. He begged not to be beaten anymore. He signed whatever confessions he was told to sign. He prayed.
Among the worst moments, he said, were the times he could hear babies crying in a nearby cell where women were imprisoned. He recalled hearing one woman pleading with a guard for several days for milk for her child.
He could hear other prisoners screaming as they were tortured.
"I used to ask God to help them," he said.
The Justice Department has alleged, without disclosing any evidence whatsoever, that Mr. Arar is a member of, or somehow linked to, Al Qaeda. If that's so, how can the administration possibly allow him to roam free? The Syrians, who tortured him, have concluded that Mr. Arar is not linked in any way to terrorism.
And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a sometimes-clownish outfit that seems to have helped set this entire fiasco in motion by forwarding bad information to American authorities, is being criticized heavily in Canada for failing to follow its own rules on the handling and dissemination of raw classified information.
Official documents in Canada suggest that Mr. Arar was never the target of a terror investigation there. One former Canadian official, commenting on the Arar case, was quoted in a local newspaper as saying "accidents will happen" in the war on terror.
Whatever may have happened in Canada, nothing can excuse the behavior of the United States in this episode. Mr. Arar was deliberately dispatched by U.S. officials to Syria, a country that - as they knew - practices torture. And if Canadian officials hadn't intervened, he most likely would not have been heard from again.
Mr. Arar is the most visible victim of the reprehensible U.S. policy known as extraordinary rendition, in which individuals are abducted by American authorities and transferred, without any legal rights whatever, to a regime skilled in the art of torture. The fact that some of the people swallowed up by this policy may in fact have been hard-core terrorists does not make it any less repugnant.
Mr. Arar, who is married and also has an 8-year-old daughter, said the pain from some of the beatings he endured lasted for six months.
"It was so scary," he said. "After a while I became like an animal."
A lawsuit on Mr. Arar's behalf has been filed against the United States by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer with the center, noted yesterday that the government is arguing that none of Mr. Arar's claims can even be adjudicated because they "would involve the revelation of state secrets."
This is a government that feels it is answerable to no one.
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/25/opinion/...print&position=
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Thrown to the Wolves
By BOB HERBERT
TTAWA
If John Ashcroft was right, then I was staring into the malevolent, duplicitous eyes of pure evil, the eyes of a man with the mass murder of Americans on his mind. But all I could really see was a polite, unassuming, neatly dressed guy who looked like a suburban Little League coach.
If Mr. Ashcroft was right, then Maher Arar should have been in a U.S. prison, not talking to me in an office in downtown Ottawa. But there he was, a 34-year-old man who now wears a perpetually sad expression, talking about his recent experiences - a real-life story with the hideous aura of a hallucination. Mr. Arar's 3-year-old son, Houd, loudly crunched potato chips while his father was being interviewed.
"I still have nightmares about being in Syria, being beaten, being in jail," said Mr. Arar. "They feel very real. When I wake up, I feel very relieved to find myself in my room."
In the fall of 2002 Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, suddenly found himself caught up in the cruel mockery of justice that the Bush administration has substituted for the rule of law in the post-Sept. 11 world. While attempting to change planes at Kennedy Airport on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities, interrogated and thrown into jail. He was not charged with anything, and he never would be charged with anything, but his life would be ruined.
Mr. Arar was surreptitiously flown out of the United States to Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he was kept like a nocturnal animal in an unlit, underground, rat-infested cell that was the size of a grave. From time to time he was tortured.
He wept. He begged not to be beaten anymore. He signed whatever confessions he was told to sign. He prayed.
Among the worst moments, he said, were the times he could hear babies crying in a nearby cell where women were imprisoned. He recalled hearing one woman pleading with a guard for several days for milk for her child.
He could hear other prisoners screaming as they were tortured.
"I used to ask God to help them," he said.
The Justice Department has alleged, without disclosing any evidence whatsoever, that Mr. Arar is a member of, or somehow linked to, Al Qaeda. If that's so, how can the administration possibly allow him to roam free? The Syrians, who tortured him, have concluded that Mr. Arar is not linked in any way to terrorism.
And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a sometimes-clownish outfit that seems to have helped set this entire fiasco in motion by forwarding bad information to American authorities, is being criticized heavily in Canada for failing to follow its own rules on the handling and dissemination of raw classified information.
Official documents in Canada suggest that Mr. Arar was never the target of a terror investigation there. One former Canadian official, commenting on the Arar case, was quoted in a local newspaper as saying "accidents will happen" in the war on terror.
Whatever may have happened in Canada, nothing can excuse the behavior of the United States in this episode. Mr. Arar was deliberately dispatched by U.S. officials to Syria, a country that - as they knew - practices torture. And if Canadian officials hadn't intervened, he most likely would not have been heard from again.
Mr. Arar is the most visible victim of the reprehensible U.S. policy known as extraordinary rendition, in which individuals are abducted by American authorities and transferred, without any legal rights whatever, to a regime skilled in the art of torture. The fact that some of the people swallowed up by this policy may in fact have been hard-core terrorists does not make it any less repugnant.
Mr. Arar, who is married and also has an 8-year-old daughter, said the pain from some of the beatings he endured lasted for six months.
"It was so scary," he said. "After a while I became like an animal."
A lawsuit on Mr. Arar's behalf has been filed against the United States by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer with the center, noted yesterday that the government is arguing that none of Mr. Arar's claims can even be adjudicated because they "would involve the revelation of state secrets."
This is a government that feels it is answerable to no one.
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/25/opinion/...print&position=
QUOTE(lazyboy @ Feb 23 2005, 06:06 AM)
I think liar, liar pants on fire is the likely scenario.
Nothing is what it seems. Remember this thread when it was below the radar:
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...topic=14341&hl=
CNN: more documents have surfaces suggesting the CIA ran secret charter flights
Then ran an interview with one of the authors.
Google search turned up these:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6999272/site/newsweek/
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/commo...5E23109,00.html
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...topic=14341&hl=
CNN: more documents have surfaces suggesting the CIA ran secret charter flights
Then ran an interview with one of the authors.
Google search turned up these:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6999272/site/newsweek/
QUOTE
Aboard Air CIA
The agency ran a secret charter service, shuttling detainees to interrogation facilities worldwide. Was it legal? What's next? A NEWSWEEK investigation
By Michael Hirsh, Mark Hosenball and John Barry
Newsweek
Feb. 28 issue - Like many detainees with tales of abuse, Khaled el-Masri had a hard time getting people to believe him. Even his wife didn't know what to make of his abrupt, five-month disappearance last year. Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says he was taken off a bus in Macedonia in south-central Europe while on holiday on Dec. 31, 2003, then whisked in handcuffs to a motel outside the capital city of Skopje. Three weeks later, on the evening of Jan. 23, 2004, he was brought blindfolded aboard a jet with engines noisily revving, according to his lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic. Masri says he climbed high stairs "like onto a regular passenger airplane" and was chained to clamps on the bare metal floor and wall of the jet.
Masri says he was then flown to Afghanistan, where at a U.S. prison facility he was shackled, repeatedly punched and questioned about extremists at his mosque in Ulm, Germany. Finally released months later, the still-mystified Masri was deposited on a deserted road leading into Macedonia, where he brokenly tried to describe his nightmarish odyssey to a border guard. "The man was laughing at me," Masri told The New York Times, which disclosed his story last month. "He said: 'Don't tell that story to anyone because no one will believe it. Everyone will laugh'."
No one's laughing these days, least of all the CIA. NEWSWEEK has obtained previously unpublished flight plans indicating the agency has been operating a Boeing 737 as part of a top-secret global charter servicing clandestine interrogation facilities used in the war on terror. And the Boeing's flight information, detailed to the day, seems to confirm Masri's tale of abduction. Gnjidic, Masri's lawyer, called the information "very, very important" to his case, which is being investigated as a kidnapping by a Munich prosecutor. In what could prove embarrassing to President Bush, Gnjidic added that a German TV station was planning to feature Masri's tale ahead of Bush's much-touted trip to Germany this week. German Interior Minister Otto Schily recently visited CIA Director Porter Goss to discuss the case, and German sources tell NEWSWEEK that Schily was seeking an apology. CIA officials declined to comment on that meeting or any aspect of Masri's story.
The evidence backing up Masri's account of being "snatched" by American operatives is only the latest blow to the CIA in the ongoing detention-abuse scandal. Together with previously disclosed flight plans of a smaller Gulfstream V jet, the Boeing 737's travels are further evidence that a global "ghost" prison system, where terror suspects are secretly interrogated, is being operated by the CIA. Several of the Gulfstream flights allegedly correlate with other "renditions," the controversial practice of secretly spiriting suspects to other countries without due process. "The more evidence that comes out, the clearer it is that there's been a stunning failure of accountability," says lawyer John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.
CIA officials are increasingly fretful about being saddled with this secret prison network at a time of intense pressure from lawyers and human-rights activists. The CIA's anxiety only deepened last week when President Bush named John Negroponte, his ambassador to Iraq, as the country's first director of national intelligence. Negroponte, a demanding career diplomat, will take over the coveted president's daily brief, or PDB, from Goss. Bush sought to reassure the CIA that it would still be welcome in the Oval Office. But Bush also signaled that Negroponte would preside over a major shift in power in intelligence gathering. "John and I will work to determine how much exposure the CIA will have to the Oval Office," the president told reporters.
While it battles for influence in Washington, the agency is also fighting a rear-guard action against critics at home and abroad. Some CIA officials fear the White House is now exposing them to legal peril. New Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, under pressure while he awaited his confirmation hearings late last year, repudiated a controversial August 2002 memo that CIA officials carefully solicited from the Justice Department for legal authorization on renditions and the agency's treatment of Qaeda prisoners. Today the CIA has dozens of detainees it doesn't know how to dispose of without legal procedures. "Where's the off button?" says one retired CIA official. "They asked the White House for direction on how to dispose of these detainees back when they asked for [interrogation] guidance. The answer was, 'We'll worry about that later.' Now we don't know what to do with these guys. People keep saying, 'We're not going to shoot them'."
The new evidence supporting Masri's case will only inflame the debate. According to data filed with European aviation authorities, the Boeing 737 landed in Skopje on Jan. 23, 2004, after a flight from the island of Majorca off Spain (a U.S.-friendly government), and left that night. Masri's passport has a Macedonian exit stamp for Jan. 23. The flight plan shows that the plane landed the next day in Baghdad and then went onto Kabul, Afghanistan, on Jan. 25, which also conforms to Masri's account. According to Federal Aviation Administration records, the jet was owned at the time by Premier Executive Transport Services, a now-defunct Massachusetts-based company that U.S. intelligence sources acknowledge to NEWSWEEK fits the profile of a suspected CIA front.
The Boeing flights are part of a detailed two-year itinerary for the 737 obtained by NEWSWEEK. The jet's record dates to December 2002 and shows flights up until Feb. 7 of this year. The Boeing 737 may have served as a general CIA transport plane for equipment and supplies as well. Among the stops recorded are Libya, where the U.S. government has been dismantling Muammar Kaddafi's clandestine nuclear program, and Jordan, where the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that high-level Qaeda detainees, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were being held. (A Jordanian spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.) The Boeing also landed at Guantanamo.
Ironically, many U.S. officials say, the CIA secret facilities have proven very effective for quietly interrogating a handful of known Qaeda suspects. But when such rough practices "migrated" to Iraqi war detainees and bigger facilities like Abu Ghraib prison—under the direction of the Defense Department—the public backlash compromised the CIA's intel-gathering efforts. Today the agency's cover has been blown and critics are questioning why no full-time CIA employees have been prosecuted despite several cases of serious abuse linked to the agency.
Among these cases is that of Manadel al-Jamadi, the Iraqi whose corpse was notoriously photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib last year. An Associated Press report last week said that documents show Jamadi died under CIA interrogation while suspended by his wrists at the prison. But only the Navy SEALs who delivered him to Abu Ghraib are currently being investigated, officials say.
U.S. officials insist the CIA has stopped rendering suspects to countries where they believe torture occurs. NEWSWEEK has learned that shortly after a Canadian jihadi suspect of Syrian origin, Maher Arar, was shipped back to Syria in September 2002, officials began having grave second thoughts about rendering suspects to that nation. As a result, the administration made a secret decision to stop sending suspects to Syria. But officials acknowledge that such scruples are being ignored when it comes to rendering suspects to allies like Egypt and Jordan, even though some officials do not believe "assurances" from these nations that they were not mistreating prisoners. Now the CIA may have to supply many more assurances—and Khaled el-Masri, among others, is waiting for them.
With Stephen Grey in London and Stefan Theil in Berlin
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
The agency ran a secret charter service, shuttling detainees to interrogation facilities worldwide. Was it legal? What's next? A NEWSWEEK investigation
By Michael Hirsh, Mark Hosenball and John Barry
Newsweek
Feb. 28 issue - Like many detainees with tales of abuse, Khaled el-Masri had a hard time getting people to believe him. Even his wife didn't know what to make of his abrupt, five-month disappearance last year. Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, says he was taken off a bus in Macedonia in south-central Europe while on holiday on Dec. 31, 2003, then whisked in handcuffs to a motel outside the capital city of Skopje. Three weeks later, on the evening of Jan. 23, 2004, he was brought blindfolded aboard a jet with engines noisily revving, according to his lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic. Masri says he climbed high stairs "like onto a regular passenger airplane" and was chained to clamps on the bare metal floor and wall of the jet.
Masri says he was then flown to Afghanistan, where at a U.S. prison facility he was shackled, repeatedly punched and questioned about extremists at his mosque in Ulm, Germany. Finally released months later, the still-mystified Masri was deposited on a deserted road leading into Macedonia, where he brokenly tried to describe his nightmarish odyssey to a border guard. "The man was laughing at me," Masri told The New York Times, which disclosed his story last month. "He said: 'Don't tell that story to anyone because no one will believe it. Everyone will laugh'."
No one's laughing these days, least of all the CIA. NEWSWEEK has obtained previously unpublished flight plans indicating the agency has been operating a Boeing 737 as part of a top-secret global charter servicing clandestine interrogation facilities used in the war on terror. And the Boeing's flight information, detailed to the day, seems to confirm Masri's tale of abduction. Gnjidic, Masri's lawyer, called the information "very, very important" to his case, which is being investigated as a kidnapping by a Munich prosecutor. In what could prove embarrassing to President Bush, Gnjidic added that a German TV station was planning to feature Masri's tale ahead of Bush's much-touted trip to Germany this week. German Interior Minister Otto Schily recently visited CIA Director Porter Goss to discuss the case, and German sources tell NEWSWEEK that Schily was seeking an apology. CIA officials declined to comment on that meeting or any aspect of Masri's story.
The evidence backing up Masri's account of being "snatched" by American operatives is only the latest blow to the CIA in the ongoing detention-abuse scandal. Together with previously disclosed flight plans of a smaller Gulfstream V jet, the Boeing 737's travels are further evidence that a global "ghost" prison system, where terror suspects are secretly interrogated, is being operated by the CIA. Several of the Gulfstream flights allegedly correlate with other "renditions," the controversial practice of secretly spiriting suspects to other countries without due process. "The more evidence that comes out, the clearer it is that there's been a stunning failure of accountability," says lawyer John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.
CIA officials are increasingly fretful about being saddled with this secret prison network at a time of intense pressure from lawyers and human-rights activists. The CIA's anxiety only deepened last week when President Bush named John Negroponte, his ambassador to Iraq, as the country's first director of national intelligence. Negroponte, a demanding career diplomat, will take over the coveted president's daily brief, or PDB, from Goss. Bush sought to reassure the CIA that it would still be welcome in the Oval Office. But Bush also signaled that Negroponte would preside over a major shift in power in intelligence gathering. "John and I will work to determine how much exposure the CIA will have to the Oval Office," the president told reporters.
While it battles for influence in Washington, the agency is also fighting a rear-guard action against critics at home and abroad. Some CIA officials fear the White House is now exposing them to legal peril. New Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, under pressure while he awaited his confirmation hearings late last year, repudiated a controversial August 2002 memo that CIA officials carefully solicited from the Justice Department for legal authorization on renditions and the agency's treatment of Qaeda prisoners. Today the CIA has dozens of detainees it doesn't know how to dispose of without legal procedures. "Where's the off button?" says one retired CIA official. "They asked the White House for direction on how to dispose of these detainees back when they asked for [interrogation] guidance. The answer was, 'We'll worry about that later.' Now we don't know what to do with these guys. People keep saying, 'We're not going to shoot them'."
The new evidence supporting Masri's case will only inflame the debate. According to data filed with European aviation authorities, the Boeing 737 landed in Skopje on Jan. 23, 2004, after a flight from the island of Majorca off Spain (a U.S.-friendly government), and left that night. Masri's passport has a Macedonian exit stamp for Jan. 23. The flight plan shows that the plane landed the next day in Baghdad and then went onto Kabul, Afghanistan, on Jan. 25, which also conforms to Masri's account. According to Federal Aviation Administration records, the jet was owned at the time by Premier Executive Transport Services, a now-defunct Massachusetts-based company that U.S. intelligence sources acknowledge to NEWSWEEK fits the profile of a suspected CIA front.
The Boeing flights are part of a detailed two-year itinerary for the 737 obtained by NEWSWEEK. The jet's record dates to December 2002 and shows flights up until Feb. 7 of this year. The Boeing 737 may have served as a general CIA transport plane for equipment and supplies as well. Among the stops recorded are Libya, where the U.S. government has been dismantling Muammar Kaddafi's clandestine nuclear program, and Jordan, where the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that high-level Qaeda detainees, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were being held. (A Jordanian spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.) The Boeing also landed at Guantanamo.
Ironically, many U.S. officials say, the CIA secret facilities have proven very effective for quietly interrogating a handful of known Qaeda suspects. But when such rough practices "migrated" to Iraqi war detainees and bigger facilities like Abu Ghraib prison—under the direction of the Defense Department—the public backlash compromised the CIA's intel-gathering efforts. Today the agency's cover has been blown and critics are questioning why no full-time CIA employees have been prosecuted despite several cases of serious abuse linked to the agency.
Among these cases is that of Manadel al-Jamadi, the Iraqi whose corpse was notoriously photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib last year. An Associated Press report last week said that documents show Jamadi died under CIA interrogation while suspended by his wrists at the prison. But only the Navy SEALs who delivered him to Abu Ghraib are currently being investigated, officials say.
U.S. officials insist the CIA has stopped rendering suspects to countries where they believe torture occurs. NEWSWEEK has learned that shortly after a Canadian jihadi suspect of Syrian origin, Maher Arar, was shipped back to Syria in September 2002, officials began having grave second thoughts about rendering suspects to that nation. As a result, the administration made a secret decision to stop sending suspects to Syria. But officials acknowledge that such scruples are being ignored when it comes to rendering suspects to allies like Egypt and Jordan, even though some officials do not believe "assurances" from these nations that they were not mistreating prisoners. Now the CIA may have to supply many more assurances—and Khaled el-Masri, among others, is waiting for them.
With Stephen Grey in London and Stefan Theil in Berlin
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/commo...5E23109,00.html
QUOTE
New claims on CIA terror flights
From correspondents in Washington
21feb05
THE CIA allegedly whisked foreign terror suspects to clandestine interrogation facilities using a Boeing 737 plane specially dedicated for that purpose, according to Newsweek magazine.
The allegation, if proven true, was "further evidence that a global 'ghost' prison system, where terror suspects are secretly interrogated, is being operated by the CIA", the magazine said.
It said it had obtained the aircraft's flight plans, indicating that the US Central Intelligence Agency used the plane "as part of a top-secret global charter, servicing clandestine interrogation facilities used in the war on terror".
Newsweek said US Federal Aviation Administration records showed the plane was owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, a now-defunct company based in Massachusetts.
US intelligence sources told the magazine the company fitted the profile of a suspected CIA front.
The plane's record dated to December 2002 and showed flights up until February 7, the magazine said.
Newsweek also noted previously disclosed flight plans of a smaller Gulfstream V jet used for similar purposes.
The magazine quoted Khaled el-Masri, a German national of Lebanese descent, who claimed to have been abducted by US operatives while on holiday in Macedonia on December 31, 2003.
Three weeks later, Mr Masri said, he was put on a plane to Afghanistan, where he was shackled, punched and interrogated about extremists at his mosque in Ulm, Germany, Newsweek said.
Mr Masri said he climbed high stairs "like onto a regular passenger airplane," according to Newsweek. He was released months later and dropped off on a deserted road leading into Macedonia, he said.
German Interior Minister Otto Schily sought an apology from CIA chief Porter Goss in a recent meeting to discuss the case, Newsweek said, citing German sources.
The case was being investigated by a Munich prosecutor as a possible kidnapping, the weekly said.
From correspondents in Washington
21feb05
THE CIA allegedly whisked foreign terror suspects to clandestine interrogation facilities using a Boeing 737 plane specially dedicated for that purpose, according to Newsweek magazine.
The allegation, if proven true, was "further evidence that a global 'ghost' prison system, where terror suspects are secretly interrogated, is being operated by the CIA", the magazine said.
It said it had obtained the aircraft's flight plans, indicating that the US Central Intelligence Agency used the plane "as part of a top-secret global charter, servicing clandestine interrogation facilities used in the war on terror".
Newsweek said US Federal Aviation Administration records showed the plane was owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, a now-defunct company based in Massachusetts.
US intelligence sources told the magazine the company fitted the profile of a suspected CIA front.
The plane's record dated to December 2002 and showed flights up until February 7, the magazine said.
Newsweek also noted previously disclosed flight plans of a smaller Gulfstream V jet used for similar purposes.
The magazine quoted Khaled el-Masri, a German national of Lebanese descent, who claimed to have been abducted by US operatives while on holiday in Macedonia on December 31, 2003.
Three weeks later, Mr Masri said, he was put on a plane to Afghanistan, where he was shackled, punched and interrogated about extremists at his mosque in Ulm, Germany, Newsweek said.
Mr Masri said he climbed high stairs "like onto a regular passenger airplane," according to Newsweek. He was released months later and dropped off on a deserted road leading into Macedonia, he said.
German Interior Minister Otto Schily sought an apology from CIA chief Porter Goss in a recent meeting to discuss the case, Newsweek said, citing German sources.
The case was being investigated by a Munich prosecutor as a possible kidnapping, the weekly said.
I would suggest perusal of the OWNERS of air carrier/transports services and LEASE MANAGEMENT of private airports/airlines might show how insidious the Mayberry Mafia's hold is on a worldwide scale. It is a main tool.
George HW Bush learned the value of "quality time" in the 1960s as he used the then very new concept of private airlines to lead a double life between a paramour in New York City (he even put his name on her brownstone's address) and sweet Miss Barb languishing away in that lovely state of Texas with kids in tow.
"It's all in the Timing"
~god~
George HW Bush learned the value of "quality time" in the 1960s as he used the then very new concept of private airlines to lead a double life between a paramour in New York City (he even put his name on her brownstone's address) and sweet Miss Barb languishing away in that lovely state of Texas with kids in tow.
"It's all in the Timing"
~god~
Looks like the chickens may come home to roost... soon...
I just wish the chickens would come home to roost for Bush.
I just wish the chickens would come home to roost for Bush.
QUOTE
Within C.I.A., Growing Worry of Prosecution for Conduct
By Douglas Jehl and David Johnston
The New York Times
Sunday 27 February 2005
Washington - There is widening unease within the Central Intelligence Agency over the possibility that career officers
By Douglas Jehl and David Johnston
The New York Times
Sunday 27 February 2005
Washington - There is widening unease within the Central Intelligence Agency over the possibility that career officers