| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"stoney" |
| Date: |
17 May 2004 05:45:24 PM |
| Object: |
The Roots of Torture |
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4989422/
Live Survey
Was the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison a case of low-ranking American
soldiers acting on their own or was it authorized by higher-ups? *
32502 responses
Soldiers acting on their own 9%
Authorized by higher-ups 84%
I don't know 7%
The Roots of Torture
The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules
to fight a new kind of war. A NEWSWEEK investigation
Tough tactics: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pushed for a Gitmo
style approach to prisoner interrogations in Iraq
By John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
May 24 issue - It's not easy to get a member of Congress to stop
talking. Much less a room full of them. But as a small group of
legislators watched the images flash by in a small, darkened hearing
room in the Rayburn Building last week, a sickened silence descended.
There were 1,800 slides and several videos, and the show went on for
three hours. The nightmarish images showed American soldiers at Abu
Ghraib Prison forcing Iraqis to masturbate. American soldiers sexually
assaulting Iraqis with chemical light sticks. American soldiers laughing
over dead Iraqis whose bodies had been abused and mutilated. There was
simply nothing to say. "It was a very subdued walk back to the House
floor," said Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House
Intelligence Committee. "People were ashen."
advertisement
The White House put up three soldiers for court-martial, saying the
pictures were all the work of a few bad-apple MPs who were poorly
supervised. But evidence was mounting that the furor was only going to
grow and probably sink some prominent careers in the process. Senate
Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner declared the pictures were
the worst "military misconduct" he'd seen in 60 years, and he planned
more hearings. Republicans on Capitol Hill were notably reluctant to
back Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And NEWSWEEK has learned that
U.S. soldiers and CIA operatives could be accused of war crimes. Among
the possible charges: homicide involving deaths during interrogations.
"The photos clearly demonstrate to me the level of prisoner abuse and
mistreatment went far beyond what I expected, and certainly involved
more than six or seven MPs," said GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former
military prosecutor. He added: "It seems to have been planned."
Indeed, the single most iconic image to come out of the abuse
scandal—that of a hooded man standing naked on a box, arms outspread,
with wires dangling from his fingers, toes and penis—may do a lot to
undercut the administration's case that this was the work of a few
criminal MPs. That's because the practice shown in that photo is an
arcane torture method known only to veterans of the interrogation trade.
"Was that something that [an MP] dreamed up by herself? Think again,"
says Darius Rejali, an expert on the use of torture by democracies.
"That's a standard torture. It's called 'the Vietnam.' But it's not
common knowledge. Ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone
taught them."
Live Vote
Was the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison a case of low-ranking American
soldiers acting on their own or was it authorized by higher-ups? *
32502 responses
Soldiers acting on their own
9%
Authorized by higher-ups
84%
I don't know
7%
Not a scientifically valid survey. Click to learn more.
Who might have taught them? Almost certainly it was their superiors up
the line. Some of the images from Abu Ghraib, like those of naked
prisoners terrified by attack dogs or humiliated before grinning female
guards, actually portray "stress and duress" techniques officially
approved at the highest levels of the government for use against
terrorist suspects. It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or
senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques, and late last
week Defense spokesman Larry DiRita said that "no responsible official
of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably
have been intended to result in such abuses." But a NEWSWEEK
investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11,
Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John
Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation
that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they
adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions,
which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so,
they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and
America's top military lawyers—and they left underlings to sweat the
details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places.
While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques
entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation,
privations, insults, threats and humiliation—methods that the Red Cross
concluded were "tantamount to torture."
The Bush administration created a bold legal framework to justify this
system of interrogation, according to internal government memos obtained
by NEWSWEEK. What started as a carefully thought-out, if aggressive,
policy of interrogation in a covert war—designed mainly for use by a
handful of CIA professionals—evolved into ever-more ungoverned tactics
that ended up in the hands of untrained MPs in a big, hot war.
Originally, Geneva Conventions protections were stripped only from Qaeda
and Taliban prisoners. But later Rumsfeld himself, impressed by the
success of techniques used against Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay,
seemingly set in motion a process that led to their use in Iraq, even
though that war was supposed to have been governed by the Geneva
Conventions. Ultimately, reservist MPs, like those at Abu Ghraib, were
drawn into a system in which fear and humiliation were used to break
prisoners' resistance to interrogation.
"There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11," as Cofer Black, the onetime
director of the CIA's counterterrorist unit, put it in testimony to
Congress in early 2002. "After 9/11 the gloves came off." Many Americans
thrilled to the martial rhetoric at the time, and agreed that Al Qaeda
could not be fought according to traditional rules. But it is only now
that we are learning what, precisely, it meant to take the gloves off.
The story begins in the months after September 11, when a small band of
conservative lawyers within the Bush administration staked out a
forward-leaning legal position. The attacks by Al Qaeda on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, these lawyers said, had plunged the
country into a new kind of war. It was a conflict against a vast,
outlaw, international enemy in which the rules of war, international
treaties and even the Geneva Conventions did not apply. These positions
were laid out in secret legal opinions drafted by lawyers from the
Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and then endorsed by the
Department of Defense and ultimately by White House counsel Alberto
Gonzales, according to copies of the opinions and other internal legal
memos obtained by NEWSWEEK.
Officials in Colin Powell's State Department were 'horrified' by the
Bush administration's apparent willingness to ignore Geneva protocols
By John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
May 24 issue - The Bush administration's emerging approach was that
America's enemies in this war were "unlawful" combatants without rights.
One Justice Department memo, written for the CIA late in the fall of
2001, put an extremely narrow interpretation on the international
anti-torture convention, allowing the agency to use a whole range of
techniques—including sleep deprivation, the use of phobias and the
deployment of "stress factors"—in interrogating Qaeda suspects. The only
clear prohibition was "causing severe physical or mental pain"—a
subjective judgment that allowed for "a whole range of things in
between," said one former administration official familiar with the
opinion. On Dec. 28, 2001, the Justice Department Office of Legal
Counsel weighed in with another opinion, arguing that U.S. courts had no
jurisdiction to review the treatment of foreign prisoners at Guantanamo
Bay. The appeal of Gitmo from the start was that, in the view of
administration lawyers, the base existed in a legal twilight zone—or
"the legal equivalent of outer space," as one former administration
lawyer described it. And on Jan. 9, 2002, John Yoo of Justice's Office
of Legal Counsel coauthored a sweeping 42-page memo concluding that
neither the Geneva Conventions nor any of the laws of war applied to the
conflict in Afghanistan.
Cut out of the process, as usual, was Colin Powell's State Department.
So were military lawyers for the uniformed services. When State
Department lawyers first saw the Yoo memo, "we were horrified," said
one. As State saw it, the Justice position would place the United States
outside the orbit of international treaties it had championed for years.
Two days after the Yoo memo circulated, the State Department's chief
legal adviser, William Howard Taft IV, fired a memo to Yoo calling his
analysis "seriously flawed." State's most immediate concern was the
unilateral conclusion that all captured Taliban were not covered by the
Geneva Conventions. "In previous conflicts, the United States has dealt
with tens of thousands of detainees without repudiating its obligations
under the Conventions," Taft wrote. "I have no doubt we can do so here,
where a relative handful of persons is involved."
The White House was undeterred. By Jan. 25, 2002, according to a memo
obtained by NEWSWEEK, it was clear that Bush had already decided that
the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all, either to the Taliban or Al
Qaeda. In the memo, which was written to Bush by Gonzales, the White
House legal counsel told the president that Powell had "requested that
you reconsider that decision." Gonzales then laid out startlingly broad
arguments that anticipated any objections to the conduct of U.S.
soldiers or CIA interrogators in the future. "As you have said, the war
against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote to Bush. "The
nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as
the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and
their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American
civilians." Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new
paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of
enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
Gonzales also argued that dropping Geneva would allow the president to
"preserve his flexibility" in the war on terror. His reasoning? That
U.S. officials might otherwise be subject to war-crimes prosecutions
under the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales said he feared "prosecutors and
independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted
charges" based on a 1996 U.S. law that bars "war crimes," which were
defined to include "any grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. As to
arguments that U.S. soldiers might suffer abuses themselves if
Washington did not observe the conventions, Gonzales argued wishfully to
Bush that "your policy of providing humane treatment to enemy detainees
gives us the credibility to insist on like treatment for our soldiers."
When Powell read the Gonzales memo, he "hit the roof," says a State
source. Desperately seeking to change Bush's mind, Powell fired off his
own blistering response the next day, Jan. 26, and sought an immediate
meeting with the president. The proposed anti-Geneva Convention
declaration, he warned, "will reverse over a century of U.S. policy and
practice" and have "a high cost in terms of negative international
reaction." Powell won a partial victory: On Feb. 7, 2002, the White
House announced that the United States would indeed apply the Geneva
Conventions to the Afghan war—but that Taliban and Qaeda detainees would
still not be afforded prisoner-of-war status. The White House's halfway
retreat was, in the eyes of State Department lawyers, a "hollow" victory
for Powell that did not fundamentally change the administration's
position. It also set the stage for the new interrogation procedures
ungoverned by international law.
What Bush seemed to have in mind was applying his broad doctrine of
pre-emption to interrogations: to get information that could help stop
terrorist acts before they could be carried out. This was justified by
what is known in counterterror circles as the "ticking time bomb"
theory—the idea that when faced with an imminent threat by a terrorist,
almost any method is justified, even torture.
With the legal groundwork laid, Bush began to act. First, he signed a
secret order granting new powers to the CIA. According to knowledgeable
sources, the president's directive authorized the CIA to set up a series
of secret detention facilities outside the United States, and to
question those held in them with unprecedented harshness. Washington
then negotiated novel "status of forces agreements" with foreign
governments for the secret sites. These agreements gave immunity not
merely to U.S. government personnel but also to private contractors.
(Asked about the directive last week, a senior administration official
said, "We cannot comment on purported intelligence activities.")
The administration also began "rendering"—or delivering terror suspects
to foreign governments for interrogation. Why? At a classified briefing
for senators not long after 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet was asked
whether Washington was going to get governments known for their
brutality to turn over Qaeda suspects to the United States.
Congressional sources told NEWSWEEK that Tenet suggested it might be
better sometimes for such suspects to remain in the hands of foreign
authorities, who might be able to use more aggressive interrogation
methods. By 2004, the United States was running a covert charter airline
moving CIA prisoners from one secret facility to another, sources say.
The reason? It was judged impolitic (and too traceable) to use the U.S.
Air Force.
May 24 issue - At first—in the autumn of 2001—the Pentagon was less
inclined than the CIA to jump into the business of handling terror
suspects. Rumsfeld himself was initially opposed to having detainees
sent into DOD custody at Guantanamo, according to a DOD source
intimately involved in the Gitmo issue. "I don't want to be jailer to
the goddammed world," said Rumsfeld. But he was finally persuaded. Those
sent to Gitmo would be hard-core Qaeda or other terrorists who might be
liable for war-crimes prosecutions, and who would likely, if freed, "go
back and hit us again," as the source put it.
In mid-January 2002 the first plane-load of prisoners landed at Gitmo's
Camp X-Ray. Still, not everyone was getting the message that this was a
new kind of war. The first commander of the MPs at Gitmo was a one-star
from the Rhode Island National Guard, Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus, who, a
Defense source recalled, mainly "wanted to keep the prisoners happy."
Baccus began giving copies of the Qur'an to detainees, and he organized
a special meal schedule for Ramadan. "He was even handing out printed
'rights cards'," the Defense source recalled. The upshot was that the
prisoners were soon telling the interrogators, "Go f--- yourself, I know
my rights." Baccus was relieved in October 2002, and Rumsfeld gave
military intelligence control of all aspects of the Gitmo camp,
including the MPs.
Pentagon officials now insist that they flatly ruled out using some of
the harsher interrogation techniques authorized for the CIA. That
included one practice—reported last week by The New York Times—whereby a
suspect is pushed underwater and made to think he will be drowned. While
the CIA could do pretty much what it liked in its own secret centers,
the Pentagon was bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Military
officers were routinely trained to observe the Geneva Conventions.
According to one source, both military and civilian officials at the
Pentagon ultimately determined that such CIA techniques were "not
something we believed the military should be involved in."
But in practical terms those distinctions began to matter less. The
Pentagon's resistance to rougher techniques eroded month by month. In
part this was because CIA interrogators were increasingly in the same
room as their military-intelligence counterparts. But there was also a
deliberate effort by top Pentagon officials to loosen the rules binding
the military.
Toward the end of 2002, orders came down the political chain at DOD that
the Geneva Conventions were to be reinterpreted to allow tougher methods
of interrogation. "There was almost a revolt" by the service judge
advocates general, or JAGs, the top military lawyers who had originally
allied with Powell against the new rules, says a knowledgeable source.
The JAGs, including the lawyers in the office of the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs, Gen. Richard Myers, fought their civilian bosses for
months—but finally lost. In April 2003, new and tougher interrogation
techniques were approved. Covertly, though, the JAGs made a final
effort. They went to see Scott Horton, a specialist in international
human-rights law and a major player in the New York City Bar
Association's human-rights work. The JAGs told Horton they could only
talk obliquely about practices that were classified. But they said the
U.S. military's 50-year history of observing the demands of the Geneva
Conventions was now being overturned. "There is a calculated effort to
create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity" about how the conventions
should be interpreted and applied, they told Horton. And the prime
movers in this effort, they told him, were DOD Under Secretary for
Policy Douglas Feith and DOD general counsel William Haynes. There was,
they warned, "a real risk of a disaster" for U.S. interests.
The approach at Gitmo soon reflected these changes. Under the leadership
of an aggressive, self-assured major general named Geoffrey Miller, a
new set of interrogation rules became doctrine. Ultimately what was
developed at Gitmo was a "72-point matrix for stress and duress," which
laid out types of coercion and the escalating levels at which they could
be applied. These included the use of harsh heat or cold; withholding
food; hooding for days at a time; naked isolation in cold, dark cells
for more than 30 days, and threatening (but not biting) by dogs. It also
permitted limited use of "stress positions" designed to subject
detainees to rising levels of pain.
While the interrogators at Gitmo were refining their techniques, by the
summer of 2003 the "postwar" insurgency in Iraq was raging. And Rumsfeld
was getting impatient about the poor quality of the intelligence coming
out of there. He wanted to know: Where was Saddam? Where were the WMD?
Most immediately: Why weren't U.S. troops catching or forestalling the
gangs planting improvised explosive devices by the roads? Rumsfeld
pointed out that Gitmo was producing good intel. So he directed Steve
Cambone, his under secretary for intelligence, to send Gitmo commandant
Miller to Iraq to improve what they were doing out there. Cambone in
turn dispatched his deputy, Lt. Gen. William (Jerry) Boykin—later to
gain notoriety for his harsh comments about Islam—down to Gitmo to talk
with Miller and organize the trip. In Baghdad in September 2003, Miller
delivered a blunt message to Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was then in
charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade running Iraqi detentions.
According to Karpinski, Miller told her that the prison would
thenceforth be dedicated to gathering intel. (Miller says he simply
recommended that detention and intelligence commands be integrated.) On
Nov. 19, Abu Ghraib was formally handed over to tactical control of
military-intelligence units.
By the time Gitmo's techniques were exported to Abu Ghraib, the CIA was
already fully involved. On a daily basis at Abu Ghraib, says Paul Wayne
Bergrin, a lawyer for MP defendant Sgt. Javal Davis, the CIA and other
intel officials "would interrogate, interview prisoners exhaustively,
use the approved measures of food and sleep deprivation, solitary
confinement with no light coming into cell 24 hours a day. Consequently,
they set a poor example for young soldiers but it went even further than
that."
Today there is no telling where the scandal will bottom out. But it is
growing harder for top Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld himself,
to absolve themselves of all responsibility. Evidence is growing that
the Pentagon has not been forthright on exactly when it was first warned
of the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib. U.S. officials continued to say
they didn't know until mid-January. But Red Cross officials had alerted
the U.S. military command in Baghdad at the start of November. The Red
Cross warned explicitly of MPs' conducting "acts of humiliation such as
[detainees'] being made to stand naked ... with women's underwear over
the head, while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and
sometimes photographed in this position." Karpinski recounts that the
military-intel officials there regarded this criticism as funny. She
says: "The MI officers said, 'We warned the [commanding officer] about
giving those detainees the Victoria's Secret catalog, but he wouldn't
listen'." The Coalition commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and
his Iraq command didn't begin an investigation until two months later,
when it was clear the pictures were about to leak.
Now more charges are coming. Intelligence officials have confirmed that
the CIA inspector general is conducting an investigation into the death
of at least one person at Abu Ghraib who had been subject to questioning
by CIA interrogators. The Justice Department is likely to open
full-scale criminal investigations into this CIA-related death and two
other CIA interrogation-related fatalities.
As his other reasons for war have fallen away, President Bush has
justified his ouster of Saddam Hussein by saying he's a "torturer and
murderer." Now the American forces arrayed against the terrorists are
being tarred with the same epithet. That's unfair: what Saddam did at
Abu Ghraib during his regime was more horrible, and on a much vaster
scale, than anything seen in those images on Capitol Hill. But if
America is going to live up to its promise to bring justice and
democracy to Iraq, it needs to get to the bottom of what happened at Abu
Ghraib.
With Mark Hosenball and Roy Gutman in Washington, T. Trent Gegax and
Julie Scelfo in New York and Melinda Liu, Rod Nordland and Babak
Dehghanpisheh in Baghdad
(c) 2004 Newsweek
Stoney
"Designated Rascal and Rapscallion
and
SCAMPERMEISTER!"
When in doubt, SCAMPER about!
When things are fair, SCAMPER everywhere!
When things are rough, can't SCAMPER enough!
/end humour alert
alt.atheism military veteran #11
{so much for the 'no atheists in foxholes' rubbish}
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