Abu Ghraib abuse firms are rewarded
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1391431,00.html
As prison ringleader awaits sentence,
defence contractors win multi-million
Pentagon contracts
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday January 16, 2005
The Observer
Two US defence contractors being sued
over allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib
prison have been awarded valuable new
contracts by the Pentagon,
despite demands that they should
be barred from any new government work.
Three employees of CACI International and Titan -
working at Abu Ghraib as civilian contractors -
were separately accused of abusive behaviour.
The report on the Abu Ghraib scandal
implicated three civilian contractors
in the abuses:
Steven Stefanowicz from CACI International
and John Israel and Adel Nakhla from Titan.
Stefanowicz was charged with giving orders
that 'equated to physical abuse',
Israel of lying under oath and
Naklha of raping an Iraqi boy.
It was also alleged that CACI
interrogators used dogs to
scare prisoners,
placed detainees in unauthorised
'stress positions' and encouraged
soldiers to abuse prisoners.
Titan employees,
it has been alleged,
hit detainees and stood by
while soldiers physically
abused prisoners.
Investigators also discovered systemic
problems of management and training -
including the fact that a third of CACI
International's staff at Abu Ghraib had
never received formal military interrogation
training.
Despite demands by human rights groups
in the US that the two companies be barred
from further contracts in Iraq -
where CACI alone employed almost
half of all interrogators and analysts
at Abu Ghraib -
CACI International has been awarded
a $16 million renewal of its contract.
Titan, meanwhile,
has been awarded a new contract worth $164m.
Despite the allegations in
the internal US army report,
the two companies have described
the claims against them 'baseless'
and as 'a malicious recitation of
false statements and intentional distortions'.
The disclosure of the new contracts
comes as Specialist Charles Graner -
described as the ringleader in the
group of soldiers leading the abuse
of Iraqi prisoners -
was found guilty on Friday after a
court martial rejected his claim that
he was only following orders.
Some of the most graphic evidence
against Graner came from Hussein Mutar,
an Iraqi who arrived at Abu Ghraib
accused of car theft.
He testified how, after jumping on him,
Graner and other guards ordered him to
strip, masturbate and simulate oral sex,
and then photographed him and led him
back to a cell,
which they had soaked with water,
where he had to sleep naked.
Graner is now awaiting a sentence
of up to 15 years in jail.
The jury of 10 soldiers deliberated
for five hours before convicting the
reser-vist of assault, conspiracy,
maltreatment of detainees,
committing indecent acts and
dereliction of duty,
as well as one battery count.
However the controversy over abuse
of detainees at Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo Bay is likely to be
reignited later this month with
the publication of The Torture Papers:
The Legal Road to Abu Ghraib
by Cambridge University Press,
the first compendium of the
so called 'torture memos' of
the Bush administration.
Compiled from material already in
the public domain and other material
acquired under the US Freedom of
Information Act,
it documents the chilling progress
in the Bush administration's legal
advice that allowed it to redefine
the meaning of torture so much that
it felt able to use interrogation
techniques that amounted to the
most serious physical abuse.
In one memo,
Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee
advises the legal counsel to the president,
Alberto Gonza les,
that 'physical pain amounting
to torture must be equivalent in
intensity to the pain accompanying
serious physical injury such as
organ failure,
impairment of bodily function or even death'.
He adds that actions by interrogators
'may be cruel, inhuman or degrading,
but still not produce the pain and
suffering of requisite intensity
[to be torture]'.
In a new development,
the New York Times revealed last
week that Congressional leaders
have scrapped fresh legal measures
that would have imposed strict new
restrictions on the use of extreme
interrogation techniques by US
intelligence interrogators.
The proposal -
which emerged in the fall-out of
the Abu Ghraib scandal and complaints
over the treatment of internees at
Guantanamo Bay -
had been approved by
the Senate by almost
a unanimous vote.
It would have explicitly ensured
that US intelligence officers were
covered by the same prohibitions on
the use of torture, and required the
CIA and Pentagon to report to Congress
on the techniques that they were using.
The issue of the CIA's treat ment of
detainees first arose after agency
officials sought legal guidance on
how far its employees and contractors
could go in interrogating suspects and
whether the law barred the CIA from
using extreme methods,
including feigned drowning,
in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah,
the first of the al-Qaeda leaders
captured by the US.
He was apprehended in Pakistan in early 2002.
It was in response to this reply that
Bybee gave his ruling defining the
scope of torture,
which was later swiftly
revoked when it became public.
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