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Wash.D.C.   DefSec Rumsfeld approved a plan that brought unconventional interrogation methods to Iraq to gain intelligence about the growing insurgency, ultimately leading to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, New Yorker magazine reported Saturday. Rumsfeld, under fire for the prisoner abuse scandal, gave the green light to methods previously used in Afghanistan for gathering intelligence on members of al Qaeda, which U.S. blames for 9.11.01 attacks, the magazine reported on its Web site.

Pentagon spokesman Jim Turner said he had not seen the story and could not comment. The article hits newsstands on Monday. U.S. interrogation techniques have come under scrutiny amid revelations that prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad were kept naked, stacked on top of one another, forced to engage in sex acts and photographed in humiliating poses. Rumsfeld, who rejected calls by some Democrats and a number of major newspapers to resign, returned on Friday from a surprise trip to Iraq & Abu Ghraib prison, calling the scandal a "body blow." 7 soldiers have been charged. The abuse prompted worldwide outrage and has shaken U.S. global prestige as President Bush seeks re- election in November. Bush has backed Rumsfeld and said the abuse was abhorrent but the wrongful actions of only a few soldiers. U.S. military has now prohibited several interrogation methods from being used in Iraq, including sleep & sensory deprivation and body "stress positions," defense officials said on Friday. New Yorker said the interrogation plan was a highly classified "special access program," or SAP, that gave advance approval to kill, capture or interrogate so-called high-value targets in the battle against terror. Such secret methods were used extensively in Afghanistan but more sparingly in Iraq, only in the search for former President Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. As the Iraqi insurgency grew and more U.S. soldiers died, Rumsfeld & Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone expanded the scope to bring the interrogation tactics to Abu Ghraib, the article said. The magazine, which based its article on interviews with several past & present American intelligence officials, reported the plan was approved & carried out last year after deadly bombings in August at the U.N. HQ nd Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad. A former intelligence official quoted in the article said Rumsfeld & Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Richard Myers approved the program but may not have known about the abuse. Rules governing secret operation were "grab whom you must. Do what you want," the unidentified former intelligence official told New Yorker. Rumsfeld left the details of the interrogations to Cambone, the article quoted a Pentagon consultant as saying. "This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld & Myers approved the program," said the Pentagon consultant in the article. U.S. officials have admitted the abuse may have violated the Geneva Convention, which governs treatment of prisoners of war. New Yorker said the CIA, which approved using high-pressure interrogation tactics against senior al Qaeda leaders after the 2001 attacks, balked at extending them to Iraq and refused to participate. After initiating the secret techniques, U.S. military began learning useful intelligence about the insurgency, the former intelligence official was quoted as saying. Pentagon denies Rumsfeld OK'd interrogation plan   5.16.04   Reuters … The Pentagon, however, called the assertions, "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with anonymous conjecture," and strongly denied that Rumsfeld, who has been under fire for the prisoner abuse scandal, or any Pentagon official had sanctioned the interrogation program. Defense Dept spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said the abuses of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison depicted in photos and videos had "no basis in any sanctioned program, training manual, instruction, or order of the Dept of Defense," … Rumsfeld denies prisoner torture as U.S. policy 6.17.04   AP Wash.D.C.   Divided U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee 6.17.04 refused to subpoena Justice Dept memos on U.S. torture policy toward enemy combatants. On a party-line vote of 10-9, the committee rejected a Democratic proposal that would have given U.S. Atty General Ashcroft until 6.24.04 to turn over the materials or make an acceptable claim of privilege not to do so. "It's a dumb-ass thing to do," said chair Orrin Hatch R-UT, urging all sides to try to reach a voluntary accord. Ashcroft refused last week to release the memos, telling a Judiciary Committee hearing they were part of his private advice to President Bush in the war on terror. Democrats demanded the documents, saying they should be part of an open examination into the abuse of U.S.- held prisoners in Iraq that has drawn worldwide condemnation. Hatch said he had talked with the White House and it was amenable to trying to reach a compromise. Hatch said that if this did not happen, he and other GOP may favor a limited subpoena. "You might have a complete unanimous vote down the line," Hatch told Democrats, many of whom were unconvinced. "The committee had an opportunity to stop the cover-up, but GOP refused to do it," said Sen. Patrick Leahy D-VT. At last week's hearing, Ashcroft said it was not Justice Dept's policy to define torture. He said intl rules governing treatment of detainees apply to countries, not groups like al Qaeda.   [ Dubious logic when they are accorded sufficient sovereignty as to be deemed combatants for the sake of their incarceration rather than as criminals, which they are in fact ] Senate Armed Services committee chair John Warner R-VA held hearings on the prisoner abuse scandal (and) said later on Thursday he would work with Hatch on the issue. "The Judiciary Committee will work with the Armed Services Committee on the aspects of the prisoner abuse matter that touch on Justice Dept, incl on Justice Dept documents that may be relevant to our work," Warner said. Warner spokesman said it had not been determined if or when the senator, who has obtained Defense Dept documents in his probe, would request Justice Dept documents. Parts of some Justice Dept memos have already been made public in leaks to the news media, some of them even posted on the Internet. One memo, dated 8.1.02, explains how to avoid violating intl terror statutes during interrogations. The memo states that in order for an act to constitute terror, as defined in U.S. law, it must inflict pain that is extremely difficult to endure. "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," according to the memo. Democrats cited the memo in pushing for a subpoena. Rumsfeld aknowledges hiding Iraqi prisoner from Red Cross   6.17.04   Reuters Wash.D.C.   DefSec Rumsfeld acknowledged 6.17.04 he ordered secret detention of an Iraqi terrorism suspect held for more than 7 months near Baghdad without notifying the Red Cross. Rumsfeld told reporters CIA dir. George Tenet asked him Nov. 2003 "to take custody of an Iraqi national who was believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam," which the U.S. has called a terrorist group. "And we did so. We were asked to not immediately register the individual (w/ Intl Committee of the Red Cross). And we did that," Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing hours after President Bush again voiced support for the beleaguered Pentagon chief. The Iraqi man remains in custody, and Rumsfeld said he has been treated humanely. Rumsfeld did not explain the reasons for his actions, but added that "we are in the processing of registering" the man, whom he did not identify, with the Geneva-based ICRC. Assigning a prisoner number and notifying the Red Cross are required under the Geneva Conventions and other intl humanitarian laws. Rumsfeld's comments came as U.S. is conducting a major investigation into abuse, incl sexual humiliation, of prisoners by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We should have registered him (the prisoner) much sooner than we did," Pentagon Deputy General Counsel Daniel Dellorto told the briefing. "That's something that we'll just have to examine, as to whether there was a breakdown in the quickness with which we registered him," he said. Rumsfeld said the man's case was unique, but he was vague when reporters asked whether U.S. was holding other "ghost" prisoners without Red Cross knowledge in Iraq. "He has been treated humanely. There's no implication of any problem. He was not at Abu Ghraib. He is not there now. He has never been there to my knowledge," Rumsfeld added, referring to the prison on the outskirts of Baghdad where U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners. In March, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who investigated abuses at Abu Ghraib, criticized the holding of "ghost" detainees as "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of intl law." Rumsfeld was asked how this case differed from the practice Taguba criticized. "It is just different, that's all," he said. Washington has linked Ansar al-Islam to al Qaeda and blames it for some attacks in Iraq. Defense officials said the man was believed to be a sr official in the group and actively organizing attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq. The prisoner has been held at high-security facility Camp Cropper near Baghdad Intl Airport, and has apparently been lost in the system in recent months, according to other U.S. officials, who asked not to be identified. A report on Thursday by rights group Human Rights First said U.S. is holding terrorism suspects in more than 2 dozen detention centers worldwide, and about half operate in total secrecy. At the White House meeting, Bush voiced support for Rumsfeld when reporters asked whether he was disappointed in the decision to hide the suspect from the Red Cross. "I'm never disappointed in my secretary of defense. He's doing a fabulous job and America's lucky to have him in the position he's in," Bush said. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry told reporters in Detroit that Rumsfeld's order was a sign mishandling of prisoners reached high into the Bush administration. Abu Ghraib report faults top officials 8.24.04   Robert Burns AP Wash.D.C.   Most senior civilian & military Pentagon officials share a portion of blame for creating conditions that led to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, according to new report. by a commission appointed by DefSec Rumsfeld. It briefed Rumsfeld on its findings & recommendations Tuesday in advance of a Pentagon news conference to release the details. The commission was headed by former DefSec James Schlesinger. A person familiar with the report said it implicitly faulted Rumsfeld & Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Richard Myers by finding those responsible for the military prison system in Iraq were operating under confusing policies on allowable interrogation techniques. The person discussed some aspects of the report on condition of anonymity. Also faulted is Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was the top field commander in Iraq at the time of the reported abuses last fall. Sanchez also takes a portion of the blame in a separate Army investigation which looked specifically at the role of military intelligence soldiers. That probe has been completed and is expected to be publicly released as early as Wednesday. White House spokesman Scott McClellan, w/ Pres. GWBush at the president's ranch in Crawford TX had no immediate comment on the Schlesinger report. "I think we'll wait until we see the full report," McClellan said. "I fully expect the president will be briefed on any and all reports from these investigations." The Army report, initially headed by Maj. Gen. George Fay, says at least two dozen lower-ranking military intelligence soldiers, as well as civilian contractors, were responsible for the abuses, which were depicted in photographs and videos taken by U.S. soldiers. NY Times said in Tuesday editions the report also blames Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade at Abu Ghraib, for faulty leadership. She has been faulted in other investigation reports but has denied knowing about any abuses until they become public. The Schlesinger commission interviewed Rumsfeld twice during its investigation, which began in May. The 3 other commission members are former DefSec Brown, former Rep. Tillie Fowler R-FL, and retired USAF Gen. Charles Horner. When he chartered the commission, Rumsfeld told its members that he wanted independent advice on a wide range of issues related to the abuse allegations. "I am especially interested in your views on the cause of the problems and what should be done to fix them," he wrote at the time. Fay's investigation concluded that Sanchez failed to deal with rising problems at the prison as he tried to manage 150,000 troops countering an unexpected insurgency. But Sanchez will not be recommended for any punitive action or even a letter of reprimand, a Pentagon official told the Wash. Post. The Army report also says soldiers used police dogs to intimidate Iraqi detainees as young as 15, the Post said. Handlers have told investigators that the use of unmuzzled military police dogs was sanctioned by top military intelligence officers. But the new report will show that MPs were using their animals to threaten detainees as part of an unusual competition among themselves, not in accordance with intelligence officers, the Post reported, citing a Pentagon source. Both reports will be reviewed by the Senate Armed Services Committee in hearings scheduled for 9.9.04. England convicted in Abu Graib abuse case 9.27.05   T.A. Badger AP   ¹ ² Ft Hood TX   Army Pfc. Lyndie England, whose smiling poses in photos of detainee abuse at Baghdad's Abu Graib prison made her the face of the scandal, was convicted Monday by a military jury on six of seven counts. England, 22, was found guilty of one count of conspiracy, 4 counts of maltreating detainees and one count of committing an indecent act. She was acquitted on a second conspiracy count. The jury of 5 male Army officers took about 2 hours to reach its verdict. Her case now moves to the sentencing phase which will be heard by the same jury beginning Tuesday.   [ rcvd 3 yr sentence ] England tried to plead guilty May 2005 to the same counts she faced this month in exchange for an undisclosed sentencing cap, but a judge threw out the plea deal.   [ i.e. show trial ]   She now faces a maximum of 9 years in prison. England, wearing her dark green dress uniform, stood at attention Monday as the verdict was read by the jury foreman. She showed no obvious emotion afterward. Asked for comment after the verdict, defense lawyer Capt. Jonathan Crisp said, "The only reaction I can say is, "I understand". England's trial is the last for a group of 9 Army reservists charged with mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, a scandal that badly damaged the U.S. image in the Muslim world despite quick condemnation of the abuse by President GW Bush. @ other troops were convicted in the trials and the remaining 6 made plea deals. Several of those soldiers testified at England's trial. Prosecutors used graphic photos of England to support their contention that she was a key figure in the abuse conspiracy. One photo shows England holding a naked detainee on a leash. In others, she smiles and points to prisoners in humiliating poses. The conspiracy acquittal came on a count pertaining to the leash incident; she was found guilty of a maltreatment count stemming from the same incident. Beyond the sordid photos, prosecutors pointed to England's statement to Army investigators in January 2004 that the mistreatment was done to amuse the U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib. "The accused knew what she was doing," said lead prosecutor Capt. Chris Graveline. "She was laughing and joking … She is enjoying, she is participating, all for her own sick humor." Crisp countered that England was only trying to please her soldier boyfriendm then Cpl. Charles Graner Jr., labeled the abuse ringleader by prosecutors. "She was a follower; she was an individual who was smitten with Graner", Crisp said. "She just did whatever he wanted her to do." England, from Ft. Ashby WV, has said that Graner, now serving a 10 year sentence, fathered her young son. The defense argued that England suffered from depression and that she has an overly compliant personality, making her a heedless participant in the abuse. England's earlier attempt to plead guilty under a deal with prosecutors was rejected by presiding judge Col. James Pohl. Pohl declared a mistrial during the sentencing phase when testimony by Graner contradicted England's guilty plea. A defense witness at the sentencing, Graner said pictures he took of England holding a prisoner on a leash were meant to be used as a training aid. In her guilty plea, England had said the pictures were being taken purely for the amusement of Abu Ghraib's guards Late Monday, Pohl rejected a request by Crisp to allow testimony during the sentencing phase by an Army captain who has reported similar prisoner abuse by other U.S. soldiers at a camp near Fallujah around the same time as the Abu Ghraib incidents. Crisp said testimony by Capt Ian Fishback would provide evidence of a command breakdown in Iraq that might have led England and other soldiers to think detainee mistreatment was condoned by military leaders. But the judge ruled that he saw no proof that the 2 abuse situations were related, or that abuse elsewhere would in any way lessen the blame of England might deserve for Abu Ghraib. Pohl also ruled that prosecutors could use part of a deposition by Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a sr officer in Iraq when the Abu Ghraib abuse took place, in which Kimmitt said England's conduct threatened the U.S. military mission in Iraq. Pfc. England says she was used by Graner 9.27.05   T.A. BADGER Army Pfc. Lynndie England apologized Tuesday for posing for the notorious photos of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, saying she did so at the behest of the soldier boyfriend she loved and trusted. England, convicted Monday of prisoner mistreatment, directed blame for her conduct toward Pvt. Charles Graner Jr. during her unsworn statement to the 5 military jurors who began deliberating her punishment late Tuesday. "I was used by Pvt. Graner," England said. "I didn't realize it at the time." England, the most recognizable of the 9 enlisted soldiers charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal after photos of the abuse became public, was convicted on 6 of 7 counts against her. The charges against the 22-year-old reservist from rural West Virginia carry up to nine years, but prosecutor Capt. Chris Graveline asked the jury to imprison her for 4 to 6 years. The defense asked for no time behind bars. At the end of her half-hour statement, made by responding to questions from defense lawyer Capt. Katherine Krul, England said she was embarrassed by the photos. She appeared in several of the best-known images taken by U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in late 2003. In one photo, she held a naked prisoner on a leash, while in others she posed with a pyramid of naked detainees and pointed at the genitals of a prisoner while a cigarette hung from a corner of her mouth. England also apologized to the detainees and their families, as well as to American soldiers who may have suffered in Iraq for her misguided actions. "I heard attacks were made on coalition forces because of the photos," she said. "I apologize to coalition forces and their families that lost their life or were injured because of the photos." England's defense has contended that she is a weak, compliant person who took part in the detainee maltreatment to please Graner, who prosecutors said was the domineering ringleader of the abuse by a group of U.S. troops. In a calm, deliberate voice, England recounted how her relationship with Graner, 14 years her senior, developed as they prepared for deployment to Iraq with the 372nd Military Police Company in 2003. … He made me feel good about myself," she said. "I trusted him and I loved him. … Now I know it was just an act to lure me in." England's court-martial was the final trial for low-level soldiers charged with abuse at Abu Ghraib. Graner and another former guard were also convicted at trial, while 6 other soldiers struck plea bargains. No officers have gone to trial, though several received administrative punishment. Earlier Tuesday, Graner supported testimony from a defense witness that officers in charge failed to control the guards at the Baghdad prison, creating stressful conditions that disoriented England and led her to take part in the mistreatment. Graner testified that he, England and others who worked the overnight shift in a high-security section of Abu Ghraib had scant supervision. "It seems like the junior soldiers were on their own," said Graner, who England has said is the father of her infant son. "We had little leadership." Graner said he told officers about detainee maltreatment, which he claimed was done by order of military intelligence personnel. At times, he said, military intelligence officers actually were present for the abuse. "I nearly beat an MI detainee to death with MI there," he said before Col. James Pohl, the judge, interrupted his testimony. Texas A&M Univ. sociology prof. Stjepan Mestrovic, testifying as an expert defense witness, had said England should be punished lightly because of the "poisonous environment" that existed at Abu Ghraib. "She was caught up in this chaotic situation like everyone else," said Mestrovic, who also testified that officers at Abu Ghraib "knew or should have known what was going on." A psychologist said England came from an emotionally abusive family, was prone to depression and that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder even before deploying to Iraq. Xavier Amador said England also had a deviant sexual relationship with Graner that affected her ability to know her actions were wrong. The warden of Fallouja   Taking charge of a detention center in Iraq? Here's what you need to remember.   3.4.07   Mike Carlson, Camp Fallouja Regional Detention Facility officer in charge March-Oct. '06, now Univ. of Central FL creative writing grad student   L.A. Times 1)   They're not prisoners, they're "detainees." It sounds better, as if they're merely inconvenienced rather than shoehorned into cinderblock cells, thumbing their military-issued Korans and waiting to be interrogated. One-third are innocents caught up in sweeps; one-third are jihadists who will slit your throat, and one-third are opportunists who will rat out their neighbors. You will hold them for 14 days, no more, while the interrogators try to figure out who is what. Each gets a CF, for Camp Fallouja, and a four-digit number. No names will be used, mainly because numbers fit more easily onto spreadsheets. They will be forever known as entas. "Enta" means "you" in Arabic, and that's what you call them day after day, meal after meal, port-a-potty call after port-a-potty call. "Enta, ishra mai," you say, and the enta drinks his water, and if you say, "Enta, ishra mai kulak," he drinks all of his water, every drop, and holds the bottle upside down to prove it. 2)   It's not personal. The enta who screams "meesta!" every 10 seconds for 48 hours straight isn't doing it to infuriate you, his captor. What it boils down to is that he can't pronounce "mister," and he was carrying that 155-millimeter round in the back of his pickup, and he was going to try to blow you up, and the reason he was picked by the insurgent leaders to haul the shell is that he's soft in the head, which is why he cannot stop screaming "meesta!" The major who watches NASCAR races on satellite TV in his air-conditioned office at the battalion headquarters while you and your Marines march entas to and from the latrines in 120-degree heat isn't doing it to antagonize you, his subordinate. Frankly, he's just over here for the retirement money, and he didn't want to be in charge of 4 regional detention facilities in Al Anbar province any more than you wanted to end up as the warden in Fallouja. He wants to keep his head down and forget about the fact that if one, just one, of your Marines snaps and goes Abu Ghraib on a detainee, his pension is out the window. 3)   You won't fire your weapon in anger. You'll fire plenty of training rounds. You'll be awakened nightly by outgoing artillery shells being blasted into the ether a mere 400 meters from your tin-can hooch, where you fall asleep to the drone of your air-conditioning unit and the faint yelps from the sergeant-next-door's porn videos. Your fingers will ache from absently squeezing the grip of your M16A4 during endless nighttime convoys, transporting detainees from Fallouja to Abu Ghraib or Camp Cropper. The only illumination in the back of the truck will come from the red-lens flashlight you pan across the entas to make sure none of them have wormed loose from their flex cuffs and hatched a plot to kill you. Your truck will stop one night outside Abu Ghraib. You will wait for explosive ordnance techs to clear a suspicious burlap bag. Because there are so many bombs, you never know how long you'll sit exposed on the road. During the second hour, CF-4562 will ask you in perfect English if he can pee. You will escort him to the edge of the road. When he thinks you aren't looking, 4562 will slink away from you and your rifle. You will immediately see through such a feeble escape attempt, and here, outside the site of America's shame, this enta will be one sandal step away from giving you an absolutely justifiable reason to finally click your weapon's selector off of "safe." You will raise the muzzle slowly with muscles that ache from humping 60 pounds of body armor and ammo and water and Quick-Clot coagulant, but before your thumb moves over the safety, you will automatically say "kiff," Arabic for "stop," because it's been drilled into you as part of the rules of engagement. You will want to shoot, and 4562 will hear that in your voice. He will stop. He will manage a feeble stream of urine before you shoo him back aboard the truck. 4)   You will be a constant target outside the wire. A green beam of light will dazzle you through the Cyclops lens of your night-vision goggles as it streaks toward the armored sides of your truck. You will grit your teeth, and the rocket-propelled grenade will hit, and then, by the grace of some malfunction, it will only gouge out a divot from the big green plates, an errant golf swing's worth of metal. You will pan your rifle barrel across the garbage-strewn fields and pockmarked buildings, but you will see nothing, just a stray dog scurrying away from the tiny blast. A feeling of anticlimax will wash over you, of one beer short of the perfect buzz and a throw just wide of the catcher's mitt. You are a Marine and trained to kill, but you can never find any insurgents to shoot. 5)   You will tell yourself lies about how being shot at will change you. You won't be able to tell your wife about the near-miss when you call home because you know she'll be worried, and when she worries, she cries, and you cannot, absolutely cannot, have her cry, mainly because it will make you cry, and you're a captain in a crowded phone center surrounded by junior Marines. Your neck will cramp up for two weeks, as if all your fears have been concentrated into a small kernel of misery somewhere north of your shoulder blade. Then, one day, the pain will be gone, and you will walk up to the side of the truck and place your fist inside the divot to remind yourself that it really happened. 6)   You will screw up. A sergeant will push one of your female Marines too hard during physical training, and she will turn on the waterworks and accuse him of sexual harassment. You will chew out the sergeant, but later discover that she is simply angry with him for forbidding her to visit her boyfriend in another unit. You will apologize to the sergeant, but the incident will have cost you some of the platoon's trust, and you will find yourself hating her. She will hate you too, until she goes home early, knocked up by the very same boyfriend she was forbidden to see. You will feel a quick self-righteous high, followed by a prolonged low; your neglect of your own rule of "don't take it personally" means you failed her as a leader. 7)   You will drink water until your urine is clear. You will drink and drink and keep drinking until you've drained more than 800 bottles of water during your stay in the Iraqi desert. 8)   Your interpreter will be your greatest hidden ally. Ali is rotund, aged and bearded, a prototypical Islamic authority figure. He reads the facility rules to all new detainees, his face hidden behind dark glasses and a ball cap. Your understanding of Arabic progresses to the point where you know he's adding regulations. You take him aside, and he explains that he tells the new arrivals that there are snipers in every tower, that trapdoors lurk beyond the borders of each gravel path and that attacking a Marine in the facility would result in a coward's death, voiding the promise of 72 virgins. You allow him to continue. 9)   You won't abuse any detainees. Your property room will hold a sniper rifle that killed a Marine and bears the fingerprints of the man inside Cell 4A. Evidence photos will show a bomb crater and bloody boots with shinbones still laced inside, and wires that lead from the crater to the home of CF-7634. As you perform your daily cell checks, you will occasionally want to smash and kick and eye gouge and palm-heel strike. But you won't. You will need to look in the mirror tomorrow when you shave. 10)   You will get by with 20 words of Arabic. When your prisoner-release convoy is waved into a field strewn with basketball-sized boulders by an Army lieutenant too new to speak Arabic, that will be just enough to get the entas to stop washing their feet and shouting blessings to Allah and to herd them into the civil affairs compound. Later, an 18-year-old lance corporal will fall asleep at the wheel and swerve off the Fallouja cloverleaf. As the 7-ton rumbles down the embankment, the entas will fling themselves off the truck. One enta will break his arm, and, again, your 20 words will coax him into medical treatment. Through it all, the bungled release, the accident, the medevac, you will not be attacked. Two days later, a similar convoy traveling the exact same route will be blown up by an IED, and the ache in your neck will return for another two weeks. 11)   After seven months, you will fly home. On the way back to the U.S., your Marines will be told by Maj. NASCAR that they can drink, and they will, to excess. You will resign yourself to breaking up the inevitable fights, and as you step between two Marines about to swing, you will realize that this has been your purpose. You set limits. 12)   You will return to civilian life. You will be jumpy and vaguely unsatisfied, disconnected from the civilians around you who care only about text messages and gas prices and catty e-mails. Navy doctors will find Iraqi sand trapped in the innermost pathways of your ear canals. Your wife now snores, and all her unfamiliar noises combine to drive you from your bed. On one such night, you will turn on the television news and see that Anna Nicole Smith's death has trumped the coverage of America's 3,118th fatality, 31-year-old Petty Officer 1st Class Gilbert Minjares Jr. You will note that, at 39, Smith was younger than most of the helicopters flying in Iraq. You will turn off the TV and sit in the dark and feel your eyes water as you think about how you took 55 Marines and sailors into a combat zone and brought all 55 back home, and that no one in America besides you and those 55 really cares or understands what you went through. You processed 1,230 detainees, without a single incident of abuse, while America sat on the couch and watched girls go wild. As far as you know, you killed no one. This used to bother you, because killing is what Marines are trained to do. But now, after viewing documentaries and reports that paint American forces as Redcoat invaders, you take some comfort in the fact that you never pulled the trigger. Those numbers. 55, 1230 & 0, will allow you to sleep tonight, and the next night, and the next. But each night you will insert a mouth guard made of silicone before you go to sleep, because your dentist informs you that you are always, always, always unconsciously grinding your teeth.

Moore stayed quiet about prisoner footage 6.14.04   AP Filmmaker Michael Moore had footage of prisoner abuse in Iraq long before the atrocities captured international attention, but decided to stay quiet until his new movie came out. Now he's questioning that decision. "I had it months before the story broke on '60 Minutes,' and I really struggled with what to do with it," Moore told the San Francisco Chronicle. "I wanted to come out with it sooner, but I thought I'd be accused of just putting this out for publicity for my movie. That prevented me from making maybe the right decision." Moore captured the footage for his documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11 ," which debuts in theaters nationwide 6.25.04. It shows an American soldier fondling a prisoner's genitals through a blanket. Soldiers also laugh and pose for photos while putting hoods over Iraqi detainees. "The stuff with the detainees in my movie is even more shocking than what we saw in that prison because it happens outdoors and is more commonplace," Moore said. "Fahrenheit 9/11" won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May. It is critical of President Bush's response to 9.11.01 and ties him to Osama bin Laden's family. The film created controversy, and intense interest, when Disney Chairman Michael Eisner said he wouldn't let the film be distributed. Lions Gate Films, IFC Films and the Fellowship Adventure Group are now handling its distribution. It will be in 700 theaters, the largest opening for a Moore film. U.S. torture in Abu Ghraib prison 5.9.04   Revolutionary Worker … Sept. 2003, as these tortures were going on, the prison was personally visited by DefSec; on the tour, reporters were told that the growing reports of torture were simply a lie. … Reporters described how outside this prison there are always crowds of hundreds of Iraqi people, relatives of the prisoners, worried about what the U.S. invaders are doing to their loved ones. … As news of these events leaked out, U.S. govt swung into full "damage control" mode. First it was announced, last month, that 17 soldiers were being removed from duty. 6 low-level MP reservists are facing trial. But the details were kept secret. Once the photos surfaced, even Bush claimed, "That's not the way we do things in America. I don't like it one bit." In fact, it is the way U.S. military has been doing things. Deputy dir. of coalition operations in Iraq Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt admitted: "I'd like to sit here and say that these are the only prisoner abuse cases that we're aware of, but we know that there have been some other ones since we've been here in Iraq." … In "sub-contracted" arrangements, U.S. also turns over prisoners to be tortured by the secret police in Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Lawyers for 6 arrested soldiers explained the MPs involved in this brutalization were following orders; they had been told to "soften up" the prisoners for the interrogations to come. Atty Gary Myers said these acts were done on the orders of the CIA, "The elixir of power, the elixir of believing that you're helping the CIA, for God's sake, when you're from a small town in Virginia, that's intoxicating. helping people they view as important." "The brazenness with which these soldiers conducted themselves, snapping photographs and flashing the 'thumbs-up' sign as they abused prisoners, suggests they felt they had nothing to hide from their superiors," said Human Rights Watch exec. dir. Kenneth Roth. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded MP reservists in this prison, confirmed this. She pointed out that the interrogations in the prison were run by Military Intelligence (MI) & the CIA. One photo showed the legs of 16 different Americans, far more than the number of low-level MPs assigned as guards. In addition, photos have also surfaced documenting torture by British forces in southern Iraq, including hours of beatings that shattered teeth and battering with rifle butts. One photo shows a uniformed British soldier urinating on a hooded prisoner. One of the soldiers now facing court martial is Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick, former prison guard from Virginia state prison, He explained 4.29.04 to 60 Minutes II that his treatment of prisoners was closely connected with the plans for ongoing interrogation: "We had military intelligence, we had all kinds of other govt agencies, FBI, CIA." In a letter home he wrote: "Military intelligence has encouraged and told us 'Great job.'.They usually don't allow others to watch them interrogate. But since they like the way I run the prison, they have made an exception. We help getting them to talk with the way we handle them. … We've had a very high rate with our style of getting them to break. They usually end up breaking within hours." None of the higher-level interrogators are facing criminal charges. Some torturers-in-charge are "civilian contractors," therefore military law doesn't apply to them. One of the "contractors" was originally accused along with soldiers of atrocities. The contractor had raped a teenage boy during interrogations. The central command spokesman Col. Jill Morgenthaler said: "We had no jurisdiction over him. It was left up to the contractor on how to deal with him." Privatization of CIA operations has gone so far that torturers in U.S. military prisons are "above any law" and are merely turned over to their employers, often a CIA front). 2 firms named in his privatized torture system are VA based CACI Intl Inc and Titan Corporation of San Diego CA. The gray zone How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib. 5.15.04   Seymour M. Hersh New Yorker 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 DefSec 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 & present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, incl Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion & sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A sr CIA official, confirming details of this account last week, said the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine & paramilitary operations from the CIA. 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 sr CIA official, asked about Rumsfeld's testimony and that of Under-Secretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, said, "Some people think you can bullshit anyone." The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, weeks after 9.11.01 attacks w/ American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone and worldwide search for terrorists came up against major command & control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. 10.7.01, night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. A lawyer on duty at US Central Command HQ in Tampa FL 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 & breaking doors." Nov. 2003, Wash.Post reported that, as many as ten times since early Oct. 2003, USAF pilots believed they'd had sr Al Qaeda & 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 U.S. Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local U.S. 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 Bush admin war on terror. A special-access program, or SAP, subject to the Defense Dept'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 equipt, incl aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America's most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been SAPs, incl USN submarine penetration of underwater cables used by Soviet high command and construction of USAF stealth bomber. All so- called "black" programs had one element in common: Secretary of Defense or his deputy had to conclude 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, CIA & NSA, to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word & go." The operation had across the board approval from Rumsfeld & from national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. 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 & operatives from America's élite forces, Navy seals, the Army's Delta Force, and the CIA'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 & no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress." In theory, the operation enabled Bush admin 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 CIA detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to 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 200 operatives & officials, incl Rumsfeld & Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Richard Myers 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 deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence March 2003. The office was new, created as part of Rumsfeld's Pentagon reorganization. Cambone was unpopular among military & 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 U.S. He was instead known for his closeness to Rumsfeld. "Remember Henry II, 'Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?'" the sr CIA official said to me, with a laugh, last week. "Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much." Cambone was strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld's disdain for the analysis & assessments proffered by the CIA, viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the CIA's inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone's military asst Army Lt Gen. 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 bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all SAPs relevant to war on terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth deGraffenreid, experienced 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 3.7.03, 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. We can remove existing threat with real capability to hit U.S., 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. SAP involved some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. CIA & other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and, w/o success, for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. They weren't able to stop the evolving insurgency. In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld & 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. Bush admin measured its success in the war by how many of those on its list of the 55 most wanted members of the old regime, reproduced on playing cards, had been captured. Aug. 2003 terror bombings in Baghdad hit the Jordanian Embassy, killing 19 people, and UN HQ, killing 23 people, incl U.N. mission head Sergio Vieira de Mello. 8.25.03, 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 & after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany." A few weeks later, 5 months after fall of Baghdad, DefSec Rumsfeld declared,"It is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in Iraq than in U.S." Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that the war was going badly. Increasingly beleaguered & baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that insurgents consisted of 5000 thousand Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. "When you understand that they're organized in a cellular structure," Central Command head Gen. John Abizaid declared, "that . . . they have access to a lot of money & a lot of ammunition, you'll understand how dangerous they are." U.S. military & 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 insurgents' "strategic & 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 & 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 govt, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council", Iraqi body appointed by the CPA, as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA." By fall 2003, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon's political & military misjudgments was clear. Donald Rumsfeld's "dead-enders" now included not only Baathists but many marginal figures as well, thugs & criminals among 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 & captured guys who had been given two or three hundred dollars to 'pray & spray'", shoot randomly and hope for the best. "They weren't really insurgents but down-&-outers who were paid by wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency." In many cases, paymasters were Sunnis who'd been members of the Baath Party. The analyst said that the insurgents "spent 3 or 4 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, American & Coalition forces knew little about the insurgency: "Human intelligence is poor or lacking … due to the dearth of competence & 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." 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 Guantánamo detention & interrogation center commander Major Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who'd been summoned to Baghdad late August 2003 to review prison interrogation procedures. Internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major Gen. Antonio Taguba Feb. 2004, revealed that Miller urged Baghdad commanders 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, incl sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold & heat, and placing prisoners in "stress positions" for agonizing lengths of time. Bush admin unilaterally declared Al Qaeda & other captured members of intl terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld & Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded SAP scope, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. Commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. 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, black special-access program, and I'm going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. 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 SAP rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside Iraqi prisons under SAP 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. "As far as they're concerned, this is a covert operation, and it's to be kept within Defense Dept channels." Military-police prison guards, the former official said, included "recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, MD." He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. 7 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, CIA officers, and the men from the special-access program, wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier Gen. Janis Karpinski, then commander of 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, sr CIA leadership had enough. "They said, 'No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan, pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets; 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. "CIA's legal people objected," and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said. CIA's complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of secret SAP, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. "This was stupidity," a govt 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 & moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a 135 thousand soldiers." Former sr 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 & 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 & balances. The issue is that, since 9.11.01, 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 7 accused M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he claimed sr 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 March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab culture & psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia & Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a 25 page chapter on Arabs & sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame & repression. "Segregation of the sexes, veiling of the women … and all the other minute rules that govern & restrict contact between men & 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, 2 themes emerged, "one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame & humiliation." The govt consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind sexual humiliation and posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything, incl spying on their associates, to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family & friends. The govt consultant said, "I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population." The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn't effective; the insurgency continued to grow. "This shit has been brewing for months," the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with SAPs told me. "You don't keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick." The consultant explained that he & 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 sr military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps to pay 2 surprise visits within 5 months to Scott Horton, then NYC Bar Assn's Committee on International Human Rights chair. "They wanted us to challenge Bush admin about its standards for detentions & 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. JAG officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process." They told him that, with war on terror, a 50 year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end. Abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed 1.13.04, 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 3 days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush. The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. CID 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 SAP? 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 & Cambone struggled to convince 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 & top U.S. commander in Iraq Lt Gen. Ricardo Sanchez 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 & 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. Sen. Hillary Clinton D-NY posed the essential question facing the senators: If, indeed, Gen. 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 & the Defense Dept 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", briefed, on the SAP. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring headlines, Gen. Sanchez presented him to U.S. & intl media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. "His job is to save what he can," the former official said. "He's there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability." As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence official added, "He goes into it not knowing shit. And then: 'Holy cow! What's going on?'" If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld & 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 & the Intl 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 & other sr 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 Gen. 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 "U.S. 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, poor kids at the end of the food chain." The most vulnerable sr 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 govt consultant, who has close ties to many conservatives, defended continued admin secrecy about the Abu Ghraib SAP. "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 & Arab world to know. Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the MidEast. 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 & 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 & 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", 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Sen. Frank Church ID which investigated CIA abuses during the previous 2 decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. "When the shit hits the fan, as it did 9.11.01, how do you push the pedal?" the consultant asked. "You do it selectively & with intelligence." "Congress is going to get to the bottom of this," the Pentagon consultant said. "You have to demonstrate that there are checks & balances in the system." He added, "When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines." Sen. John McCain R-AZ 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," Human Rights Watch exec. dir. Kenneth Roth 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 9.11.01, 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".

Gitmo interrogator describes tactics 2.16.08   Andrew O. Selsky AP Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba   Interrogators got intelligence from detainees that helped U.S. troops in Afghanistan attack Taliban fighters last summer, and they did it through casual questioning and not torture, the military's chief interrogator here said. In a rare interview with AP, veteran interrogator Paul Rester complained that his profession has gotten a bad reputation due to accounts of waterboarding and other rough interrogation tactics used by the CIA at "black sites". Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees, however, allege their clients have been subjected to temperature extremes, sleep deprivation and threats at this U.S. military base in southeast Cuba. Wearing a blue-striped business shirt without a tie and looking more like a harried executive than a top interrogator, Rester groused that his line of work is "a business that is fundamentally thankless". He sat hunched over a table in a snack room inside the building where the top commanders keep their offices. In an attempt to keep personnel from blabbing about intelligence-gathering, a poster showed a picture of a hooded gunman and the words: "Keep talking. We're listening", today's version of the World War II-era admonishment that "Loose lips sink ships". "Everybody in the world believes that they know how we do what we do, and I have to endure it every time I turn around and somebody is making reference to waterboarding", Rester said. He insisted that Guantanamo interrogators have had many successes using rapport-building and said that technique was the norm here. For security reasons, he would only discuss one of the successes, and that was only because his boss, Rear Adm. Mark Buzby, already had described it in a speech last month. Buzby said several detainees, using poster board paper and crayons, drew detailed maps of the Tora Bora area in eastern Afghanistan that enabled coalition forces to wipe out safe houses, trenches and supplies last summer as Taliban forces were returning to the stronghold they had abandoned more than 5 years ago. Buzby, in a separate interview with the AP, said a U.S. commander in Afghanistan had requested the information on a Friday and it was obtained and sent to Afghanistan by the end of the weekend. Rester indicated the interrogators casually asked the detainees about their knowledge of Tora Bora, not letting on that it was tactically important for a pending military strike. "And it may in fact, since it was 5 years old, have seemed totally innocuous to the persons we were talking to," Rester said. Buzby, the top commander of detention operations at Guantanamo, said the intelligence "had a very positive effect … for us and a very negative effect on the enemy operating in that area." He declined to be more specific. In the interview, Rester said only 2 detainees were given rougher treatment in Guantanamo, and that was during the earlier days: Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker who was turned away from the U.S. by immigration officials just before 9.11, and an unidentified man Rester said recruited lead hijacker Mohamed Atta. "Most of the stories (of detainee abuse) that have propagated all stem from those two," said Rester, who began his career in the Vietnam War. "The constant attention on that takes away from the fact that the productive, consistent direct approach … has enabled us to possess the vast body of knowledge that we actually have".

Al-Qahtani told a military panel at Guantanamo that he was beaten, restrained for long periods in uncomfortable positions, threatened with dogs, exposed to loud music and freezing temperatures and stripped nude in front of female personnel at Guantanamo. He said he admitted meeting Osama bin Laden and agreeing to participate in a "martyr mission" for al-Qaida only because he was tortured, and told the panel that he was innocent.
A 2005 military investigation concluded that al-Qahtani had been subjected to harsh treatment approved by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld because he would not crack under interrogation. He is one of 6 Guantanamo detainees who were charged Monday in connection with 9.11.

The Pentagon said it was seeking the death penalty for all six. Under the Military Commissions Act, statements obtained through torture are not admissible. But some statements obtained through "coercion" may be admitted at the discretion of a military judge.
Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a lawyer who represents several detainees, scoffed at Rester's contention that rough treatment at Guantanamo was restricted to just two men.
"There are so many accounts by FBI agents … and others who personally saw non-rapport-building techniques that Rester's statement is just not credible," he said.

The 2005 military investigation stemmed from FBI agents' allegations that detainees were being mistreated, and determined that interrogators used unauthorized techniques when two detainees were short-shackled to an eyebolt on a floor, when duct tape was used to "quiet" a detainee and when interrogators threatened the family of a detainee.
"It distracts from the efforts of every other individual who has been in contact with (military) intelligence," Rester said. "Nothing is a substitute for really knowing the subject matter, having the knowledge of the language and culture and being able to sit down with someone and speak as grown-ups".

US fears backlash over terror flights
2.22.08   P.Hess, Matthew Lee AP

Wash.D.C.   The Bush administration is bracing for a diplomatic backlash after conceding it used British territory to transport suspected terrorists on secret rendition flights despite repeated earlier assurances the U.S. had not. U.S. officials have sought to quell the fallout by apologizing to Britain for what they said was an "administrative error." The admission, however, may reopen a bitter debate between the United States and its allies over how the fight against terrorism should be conducted and compromise future cooperation.
"Mistakes were made in the reporting of the information," said Gordon Johndroe, National Security Council spokesman for President Bush. Johndroe insisted that cooperation between the U.S. and Britain would not be affected.

But as a sign of its concern, the State Dept sent its top lawyer John Bellinger to London on Thursday on a two-day mission. Bellinger will try to defuse what many expect will be widespread anger that the U.S., when asked in 2004, incorrectly assured its closest ally that neither British soil nor airspace had been used in moving suspected terrorists, officials said.
The CIA used a U.S. military airstrip on the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to refuel planes carrying two suspects in 2002. That fact was not uncovered until a "self-generated" review by the CIA in late 2007 after persistent media reports, the department said.
"We regret that there was an error in initially providing inaccurate information to a good friend and ally," State Dept spokesman Sean McCormack said. "Unfortunately, even with the best intentions, unfortunately, even with the most rigorous searches and unfortunately with good technology, sometimes administrative errors occur and this was the case."

He took pains to note that the United States had not violated any obligation it had toward Britain in using Diego Garcia for the flights at the time they occurred. Not until 2003 did the two countries start to work out a "final mutual understanding" that now requires the U.S. to seek and get British permission to use the base for renditions, he said.
Still, the disclosure risks replaying the debate over tactics that came to light in 2005 with the revelation that the CIA had operated secret prisons to interrogate prisoners. Until Thursday, the administration had managed to diminish down the furor through intensive diplomacy.

British govt appears to have accepted the "administrative error" explanation. But London has made it clear that it wanted to review logs related to U.S. operations at Diego Garcia. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he "shared the disappointment that everybody has" about the use of Diego Garcia for the refueling stops and that it was important to ensure it would not happen again.
McCormack said he was not aware of any other countries seeking explanations through diplomatic channels. But State Dept officials said U.S. diplomats are prepared to answer questions from foreign governments about the situation.
Governments that ask will be told roughly what CIA Director Michael Hayden acknowledged Thursday: that two rendition flights carrying suspected terrorists did refuel at a U.S. naval base on Diego Garcia, despite what the agency had earlier maintained. Hayden said in a message to CIA staff that the information previously given to the British "turned out to be wrong."

"The refueling, conducted more than five years ago, lasted just a short time," he said. "But it happened. That we found this mistake ourselves, and that we brought it to the attention of the British govt, in no way changes or excuses the reality that we were in the wrong."
Hayden said neither man was tortured. He denied there has ever been a holding facility for CIA prisoners on Diego Garcia. Both men remained on their respective planes during the brief stops, according to a U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

One of the two prisoners is now jailed at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and the other was released to his home country, where he has since been freed, the official said. Neither man was part of the CIA's interrogation and detention program, according to the official, who said the CIA only moved them from one country to another through Diego Garcia.
Rights groups demanded a full accounting of the CIA's rendition program, under which suspects are transported from one country to another, usually in secrecy, without the benefit of open legal proceedings.
"It's high time the agency is held accountable," said Julia Hall of Human Rights Watch. She also sought an investigation into the British role in the program. "The U.S. flew hundreds of flights across Europe so the only way to have full accountability is for (Britain) to launch a thorough, national investigation."

Hayden delivered the news to the British government last weekend on a previously scheduled trip to London. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on Wednesday and was told he would announce the discovery in Parliament. Amid the uproar over the detention program, Rice told reporters in December 2005 that the United States respects the sovereignty of foreign countries when conducting intelligence operations within their borders, suggesting the CIA conducts rendition flights with the permission of the governments involved.
But Rice sidestepped a specific question about the role of Britain in such flights in an interview on Dec. 6, 2005, with British television.
"We have obligations under our international conventions and we are respecting the sovereignty of our allies," she told Sky News. "We are not using the airspace or the airports of any of our partners for activities that would lead renditions to torture. We don't send people to be tortured."

U.S. intelligence troops to face charges 8.24.04   AP Mannheim, Germany   2 U.S. military intelligence soldiers will be charged soon in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, a prosecutor said Tuesday. The charges would be the first against members of military intelligence over alleged abuses at the prison outside Baghdad. Military police at the prison, 7 of whom were charged with abuses, have said that military intelligence ran the prison. During pretrial hearings in Mannheim in the Abu Ghraib case, military prosecutor Maj. Michael Holly said he expects Spc. Armin J. Cruz & Spc. Roman Krol to be charged after he returns to Baghdad, presumably in a few days. Both were at the prison with the 325th Military Intelligence Battalion. Holly, speaking in court, gave no details of the expected charges. Former sergeant in 372nd Military Police Company, charged soldiers' unit, has named Cruz & Krol as men who directed incidents of abuse and humiliation at Abu Ghraib. Kenneth A. Davis made the allegations in a May statement to U.S. Army investigators and in recent interviews with AP. He said Cruz & Krol forced prisoners to crawl across the prison floor while demanding that they confess to raping a boy in prison. Davis said Cruz & Krol also handcuffed the naked men together face-to-face, forcing them to embrace.

[ reverse exploitation ] Charges & countercharges as soldier alleges abuse   California guardsman says he was hustled out of Iraq for speaking up. The Army says he has mental problems. The case has been reopened. 6.5.04   Rone Tempest L.A.Times Folsom CA   A California National Guard sergeant claims members of his military intelligence team in Iraq systematically beat & traumatized prisoners last summer in Samarra, north of Baghdad. When he reported the alleged abuses to a superior, said 30-year military reservist Sgt. Greg Ford, who works as California state prison guard, he was hustled out of the country for psychological evaluations at military hospitals in Germany & U.S. In an interview, Ford, 49, described the tests as part of an Army "cover-up" of abuses. Commander of Ford's unit, 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion based in San Francisco, Lt. Col. Timothy J. Ryan said all allegations of prisoner abuse in Samarra "were investigated immediately, and no wrongdoing was ever found." Ford's company commander, Capt. Vic Artiga, said the soldier was evacuated for "combat stress" behavioral problems. The inquiry into Ford's allegations was reopened this spring as part of an overall reinvestigation of all prisoner abuse allegations from Iraq. The Pentagon ordered the review after the treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad became a scandal. Ryan declined to discuss specifics of the case. He said 70 to 100 soldiers, incl intelligence & civil affairs personnel, military police and special forces, were usually assigned to the police station in Samarra. "I can tell you that only one person has filed any kind of complaint. I stand behind my soldiers 100%. I'm sure that when the review of this investigation is completed, they will find nothing wrong." California National Guard public affairs chief Lt. Col. Doug Hart said the investigation into Ford's allegations, by the Army Criminal Investigation Division, was continuing. Several fellow soldiers, incl some who spoke on condition of anonymity, characterized Ford as an inveterate braggart who at various times had introduced himself as a medical doctor, a former Navy SEAL and a nobleman with a family castle in Europe. A doctor who examined Ford in Germany reported that Ford had been sent from Iraq because of "possible delusions of grandiosity about his background," according to a medical report provided by Ford. The allegations of abuse, Ford's comrades said, came after Ford had been recommended for a Silver Star but had seen the recommendation withdrawn after questions were raised about his actions. The recommendation for the medal came after a mortar attack on the Samarra position in June 2003. Ford claims he saved at least one comrade's life by using his scarf to tie a tourniquet on the bleeding soldier while holding an IV bag in his teeth. According to the soldiers, subsequent interviews with medics and military police who were on the scene revealed that Ford might have exaggerated his role in helping the man. Artiga said in an interview that he was "unable to find any witness that saw him doing anything that would have saved a soldier's life." After the recommendation for the medal was withdrawn, Ford was ordered to undergo a series of psychological and psychiatric examinations. Ford said the evaluations came after he reported the abuse of prisoners. He said he had seen an Army intelligence agent standing on the neck of an Iraqi youth and another agent using a rolled-up newspaper to beat an elderly detainee. On 4 occasions, Ford said, he was called into an interrogation room to revive prisoners who had suffered "respiratory arrest" and were unconscious. "I had to salvage them," said Ford, a former Coast Guard medical corpsman. He is studying to become a medical doctor through the Oceania University of Medicine, a correspondence school based in Western Samoa, he said. "After the fourth child collapsed, I barely brought him back to life, and I could see the writing on the wall. My sources in the community told me Samarra was about to blow up and become another Fallouja. I requested to be relieved of my position," he said. Ford, who does not speak Arabic, said he had extensive sources and contacts in the Samarra community, which were gained by riding along with military police on patrols and by "monitoring" the community from the roof of the 3 story police station. For the interview, Ford wore a polo shirt embroidered with the Oceania school crest. He said many friends in the military and law enforcement called him "Doc." His conversation was peppered with medical terms, and he referred repeatedly to his "long experience in medicine." Artiga said Ford regularly introduced himself as a medical doctor. Ford denied that. "I'm an N.D., not an M.D.," Ford said, producing a diploma from an Alabama institution, the Clayton School of Natural Healing (now the Clayton College of Natural Health), declaring him a "Doctor of Naturopathy." From a tall stack of papers, Ford also presented military documents showing that he had been temporarily assigned in 1982 to work as a medical assistant with a Navy SEAL team at a training facility in Niland, a desert town east of the Salton Sea, as well as a document showing that he had successfully completed a military "counterintelligence agent" course at Ft. Huachuca AZ in July 2000. Ford also produced a paper declaring him to be an honorary member of the MacRae Clan. "They have a castle in Scotland," he said. Upon returning to his home in Sacramento after his psychiatric evaluations, Ford filed a complaint with the Army inspector general 7.3.2003. But, he said, "I didn't hear anything until the day before CBS broadcast the photos from Abu Ghraib." Since then, he said, he has been in almost daily contact with military investigators & attorneys. Ford said that when he reported the abuse, Artiga accused him of being "delusional" and told him he had "30 seconds to retract or face psychiatric referral." Artiga, who in civilian life is a police officer in Redwood City CA denied that he ever gave Ford a deadline to retract. "That's just laughable," he said. Artiga said he took Ford's allegation of abuse seriously and immediately informed Ryan, who ordered a battalion- level investigation. "In my years as a policeman, I've done hundreds of investigations," Artiga said. "I can tell you that the investigation we did was as thorough as they come." Two GIs charged in alleged Afghan assault 10.30.06 & Daniel Cooney AP 2 U.S. soldiers have been charged with assault for allegedly punching two detainees in the chest, shoulders and stomach at a military base in Afghanistan, the military said Sunday. The announcement came just 10 days after the military launched an investigation into television footage purportedly showing a group of U.S. soldiers burning the bodies of two dead Taliban rebels. The charges against the two soldiers include conspiracy to maltreat, assault and dereliction of duty. The allegations, if substantiated, could lead to disciplinary action, the statement said, adding that neither detainee required medical attention. The military did not say when the soldiers were charged. Military spokesman Lt. Col. Jerry O'Hara said the two soldiers were still in Afghanistan "performing their primary duties, but they have nothing to do with detained individuals." The alleged assault occurred at a base in southern Uruzgan province in early July, O'Hara said. One of the two detainees has since been released, while the other is being held at Bagram, the U.S. military's headquarters in Afghanistan, about 20 miles north of the capital, Kabul, he said. O'Hara said military regulations prevented him from identifying the two detainees or elaborating on why they were detained. It was not clear if the latest abuse allegation would cause an outcry here. Mistreatment of detainees by Afghan police and Afghan prison guards is not unusual, according to human rights advocates. "The command remains committed to investigate all allegations of misconduct and will hold individuals responsible for their actions consistent with U.S. military law," Brig. Gen. Jack Sterling, a deputy coalition commander, was quoted as saying in the statement announcing the charges. Attempts to reach Afghan govt officials Sunday for comment were not successful. The last allegation of military abuse here, the alleged burning of the two Taliban bodies on Oct. 1, was condemned by President Hamid Karzai. The government ordered an independent inquiry and called for the perpetrators to be severely punished if found guilty. Cremation of corpses is banned in Islam. Some Muslim clerics warned of a possible violent anti-American backlash after news of the alleged desecration broke, but so far no demonstrations have occurred. That may be partially because the video of the alleged act has not been broadcast in Afghanistan and because the burned bodies were purported to be those of two members of the Taliban, a rebel group accused of committing widespread abuses itself. Sunday's allegations were not the first of alleged abuse of military detainees in Afghanistan. In 2002, two Afghans held at Bagram died after being beaten. Fifteen soldiers have faced charges for those deaths. A year later, another Afghan died while being held at a base in southern Helmand province, according to an autopsy report provided by the Defense Dept. Documents show Gitmo inmates defy U.S. 7.1.05   Ben Fox AP editor's note: story based on information contained in 278 pages of U.S. military documents dealing with investigations of alleged abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Associated Press obtained the documents under a Freedom of Information lawsuit. Military authorities have previously disclosed some incidents of guard retaliation at Guantanamo Bay, which resulted in mostly minor disciplinary proceedings. What emerges from 278 pages of documents obtained by The Associated Press is the degree of defiance by the terrorism suspects at Guantanamo. The prisoners banged on their cells to protest the heat. They doused guards with whatever liquid was handy, from spit to urine. Sometimes they struck their jailers, one swinging a steel chair at a military police officer. American MPs at times retaliated with force, punches, pepper spray and a splash of cleaning fluid in the face, according to the newly released documents that detail military investigations and eyewitness accounts of alleged abuse. Some prisoners at the U.S. base in eastern Cuba have gone on the attack, as in April 2003 when a detainee got out of his cell during a search for contraband food and knocked out a guard's tooth with a punch to the mouth and bit him before he was subdued by MPs. One soldier delivered two blows to the inmate's head with a handheld radio, the documents show. "Several guards were trying to hold down the detainee who was putting up heavy resistance," recounted a translator who saw the incident. "The detainee was covered in blood as were some of the guards." The soldier who struck the inmate, and was dropped in rank to private first class as a result, described it as a close call. "The detainee was fighting as if he really wanted to hurt us. ... We all saved each other's lives in my opinion," he wrote. The documents, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by AP, are far from a comprehensive look at Guantanamo and do not provide full details about each incident. Names and some other identifying details have been blacked out by military censors. Handwriting at times isn't legible and pages appear to be missing or out of sequence. In some cases, it is not possible to decipher who did what to whom. Disciplinary measures against the troops were either relatively minor or unclear in some reports. The internal investigative reports do, however, provide a snapshot of life behind the wire at Guantanamo, depicting a tense, hostile and sometimes chaotic place. In one of the more serious incidents described in the documents, detainees told guards that an MP threw the cleaning liquid Pine-Sol in the eyes of a prisoner in the middle of one night in January 2004. In a written statement, another soldier said he came in immediately afterward to find what smelled like cleaning liquid dripping from the cell. "The detainee could be seen rubbing his eyes intensely and moaning in pain," he said. Documents show that the guard, from the 661st Military Police Company, did not admit throwing the cleaning fluid when questioned about it that night but did say the detainee had spit on him, and may have thrown urine. A medic on the cell block flushed the detainee's eyes with water, a witness said. A Defense Dept investigative memo written 6 months later concluded the soldier had mistreated detainees twice, the second offense involved cursing at inmates, and that his superiors failed to report either episode. Investigators recommended disciplinary action against the soldier and a probe into why the incident wasn't reported up the chain of command, but the outcome is unclear from the papers. In a statement to investigators, one service member said he hadn't seen the Pine-Sol incident but noted that U.S. personnel have been taught to use restraint with detainees: "The training we have received here at Guantanamo Bay has always stressed ... that no matter what happens on the block do not retaliate ... it will just get you into trouble." Still, tensions between prisoners and guards have been high since the first suspects arrived in early 2002, hooded and shackled, mostly from the battlefields of Afghanistan. The detainees' defiance discussed in the documents ranged from mild, prisoners getting matching haircuts in a show of solidarity or refusing orders to stop practicing martial arts in the exercise yard, to hostile acts like spitting or throwing unknown liquids at the MPs. One soldier used pepper spray on prisoners because, he said in a report to superiors, he feared that the unknown liquids hurled could pose a health danger. One soldier told military investigators he punched a detainee's face because the man spit at him and hit him as he tried to put him in restraints at the prison hospital in October 2004. "My instincts took over after the hitting and spitting," said the soldier. Documents show authorities recommended that the punishment include reduction in rank to E-4, loss of a month's pay and extra duty for 45 days, though the outcome is unclear. In the prison camp's early days, inmates showed their anger over the heat and the practice of leaving lights on in their cells at night by banging on the bars throughout one guard shift in September 2002, the documents say. One detainee who was believed to be leading the protest threw what an MP said smelled like water from the toilet on him. The MP tried to spray water from a hose in response, but the detainee blocked it with a mat. The guard who tried to spray the detainee was charged with assault, given a reduction in rank to private first class, which was suspended, and reassigned to other duties at Guantanamo. In another case, an inmate threw a partially full urine bottle at an MP in May 2002, apparently because he believed the soldier had intentionally kicked his hospital bed. When the soldier threw the urinal back, the detainee grabbed a steel chair and swung it at guards before they subdued him. A military witness defended the MP, writing: "I believe (name deleted) to be a good and honest soldier ... and just influenced by negative elements among us." The documents don't make clear what punishment, if any, the MP got. Military officials at Guantanamo did not respond this week to questions about relations between guards and detainees at the camp, which has held some 700 prisoners from 45 countries since it opened. There are about 540 detainees there now.

CIA holds terror suspects in secret prisons   Debate is growing within agency about legality and morality of overseas system set up after 9/11 11.2.05   Dana Priest, Julie Tate Wash. Post The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement. The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly 4 years ago that at various times has included sites in 8 countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents. The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions. Existence and locations of the facilities, referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Dept and congressional documents, are known to only a handful of U.S. officials and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country. The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long. While the Defense Dept has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. govt to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad. Revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military, which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress, have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign govts and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when VP Cheney and CIA Dir. Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody. Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency's approach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation. The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after 9.11.01 attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent. Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing 2 years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission. "We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy," said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What are we going to do with them afterwards?' " It is illegal for the govt to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the U.S., which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. govt officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing. Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning. Some detainees apprehended by the CIA and transferred to foreign intelligence agencies have alleged after their release that they were tortured, although it is unclear whether CIA personnel played a role in the alleged abuse. Given the secrecy surrounding CIA detentions, such accusations have heightened concerns among foreign govts and human rights groups about CIA detention and interrogation practices. The contours of the CIA's detention program have emerged in bits and pieces over the past 2 years. Parliaments in Canada, Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands have opened inquiries into alleged CIA operations that secretly captured their citizens or legal residents and transferred them to the agency's prisons. More than 100 suspected terrorists have been sent by the CIA into the covert system, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials and foreign sources. This figure, a rough estimate based on information from sources who said their knowledge of the numbers was incomplete, does not include prisoners picked up in Iraq. The detainees break down roughly into two classes, the sources said. About 30 are considered major terrorism suspects and have been held under the highest level of secrecy at black sites financed by the CIA and managed by agency personnel, including those in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, according to current and former intelligence officers and two other U.S. govt officials. Two locations in this category, in Thailand and on the grounds of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, were closed in 2003 and 2004, respectively. A second tier, which these sources believe includes more than 70 detainees, is a group considered less important, with less direct involvement in terrorism and having limited intelligence value. These prisoners, some of whom were originally taken to black sites, are delivered to intelligence services in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Afghanistan and other countries, a process sometimes known as "rendition." While the first-tier black sites are run by CIA officers, the jails in these countries are operated by the host nations, with CIA financial assistance and, sometimes, direction. Morocco, Egypt and Jordan have said that they do not torture detainees, although years of State Dept human rights reports accuse all three of chronic prisoner abuse. The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being, said current and former and U.S. and foreign govt and intelligence officials. Most of the facilities were built and are maintained with congressionally appropriated funds, but the White House has refused to allow the CIA to brief anyone except the House and Senate intelligence committees' chairmen and vice chairmen on the program's generalities. The Eastern European countries that the CIA has persuaded to hide al Qaeda captives are democracies that have embraced the rule of law and individual rights after decades of Soviet domination. Each has been trying to cleanse its intelligence services of operatives who have worked on behalf of others, mainly Russia and organized crime. The idea of holding terrorists outside the U.S. legal system was not under consideration before Sept. 11, 2001, not even for Osama bin Laden, according to former govt officials. The plan was to bring bin Laden and his top associates into the U.S. justice system for trial or to send them to foreign countries where they would be tried. "The issue of detaining and interrogating people was never, ever discussed," said a former senior intelligence officer who worked in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, during that period. "It was against the culture and they believed information was best gleaned by other means." On the day of the attacks, the CIA already had a list of what it called High-Value Targets from the al Qaeda structure, and as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attack plots were unraveled, more names were added to the list. The question of what to do with these people surfaced quickly. The CTC's chief of operations argued for creating hit teams of case officers and CIA paramilitaries that would covertly infiltrate countries in the Middle East, Africa and even Europe to assassinate people on the list, one by one. But many CIA officers believed that the al Qaeda leaders would be worth keeping alive to interrogate about their network and other plots. Some officers worried that the CIA would not be very adept at assassination. "We'd probably shoot ourselves," another former senior CIA official said. The agency set up prisons under its covert action authority. Under U.S. law, only the president can authorize a covert action, by signing a document called a presidential finding. Findings must not break U.S. law and are reviewed and approved by CIA, Justice Department and White House legal advisers. 6 days after 9.11, President Bush signed a sweeping finding that gave the CIA broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world. It could not be determined whether Bush approved a separate finding for the black-sites program, but the consensus among current and former intelligence and other government officials interviewed for this article is that he did not have to. Rather, they believe that the CIA general counsel's office acted within the parameters of the Sept. 17 finding. The black-site program was approved by a small circle of White House and Justice Dept lawyers and officials, according to several former and current U.S. government and intelligence officials. Among the first steps was to figure out where the CIA could secretly hold the captives. One early idea was to keep them on ships in international waters, but that was discarded for security and logistics reasons. CIA officers also searched for a setting like Alcatraz Island. They considered the virtually unvisited islands in Lake Kariba in Zambia, which were edged with craggy cliffs and covered in woods. But poor sanitary conditions could easily lead to fatal diseases, they decided, and besides, they wondered, could the Zambians be trusted with such a secret? Still without a long-term solution, the CIA began sending suspects it captured in the first month or so after Sept. 11 to its longtime partners, the intelligence services of Egypt and Jordan. A month later, the CIA found itself with hundreds of prisoners who were captured on battlefields in Afghanistan. A short-term solution was improvised. The agency shoved its highest-value prisoners into metal shipping containers set up on a corner of the Bagram Air Base, which was surrounded with a triple perimeter of concertina-wire fencing. Most prisoners were left in the hands of the Northern Alliance, U.S.-supported opposition forces who were fighting the Taliban. "I remember asking: What are we going to do with these people?" said a senior CIA officer. "I kept saying, where's the help? We've got to bring in some help. We can't be jailers, our job is to find Osama." Then came grisly reports, in the winter of 2001, that prisoners kept by allied Afghan generals in cargo containers had died of asphyxiation. The CIA asked Congress for, and was quickly granted, tens of millions of dollars to establish a larger, long-term system in Afghanistan, parts of which would be used for CIA prisoners. The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was also the CIA's substation and was first housed in an old brick factory outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officer allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death, according to 4 U.S. govt officials. The CIA officer has not been charged in the death. The Salt Pit was protected by surveillance cameras and tough Afghan guards, but the road leading to it was not safe to travel and the jail was eventually moved inside Bagram Air Base. It has since been relocated off the base. By mid-2002, the CIA had worked out secret black-site deals with 2 countries, including Thailand and one Eastern European nation, current and former officials said. An estimated $100 million was tucked inside the classified annex of the first supplemental Afghanistan appropriation. Then the CIA captured its first big detainee, in 3.28.02. Pakistani forces took Abu Zubaida, al Qaeda's operations chief, into custody and the CIA whisked him to the new black site in Thailand, which included underground interrogation cells, said several former and current intelligence officials. Six months later, Sept. 11 planner Ramzi Binalshibh was also captured in Pakistan and flown to Thailand. But after published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down, and the two terrorists were moved elsewhere, according to former govt officials involved in the matter. Work between the two countries on counterterrorism has been lukewarm ever since. In late 2002 or early 2003, the CIA brokered deals with other countries to establish black-site prisons. One of these sites, which sources said they believed to be the CIA's biggest facility now, became particularly important when the agency realized it would have a growing number of prisoners and a shrinking number of prisons.

Thailand was closed, and sometime in 2004 the CIA decided it had to give up its small site at Guantanamo Bay. The CIA had planned to convert that into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of the military. The CIA pulled out when U.S. courts began to exercise greater control over the military detainees, and agency officials feared judges would soon extend the same type of supervision over their detainees.
In hindsight, say some former and current intelligence officials, the CIA's problems were exacerbated by another decision made within the Counterterrorist Center at Langley. The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network.

But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.
The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. "They've got many, many more who don't reach any threshold," one intelligence official said.
Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach.

Meanwhile, the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers, some of whom also argue that the secrecy surrounding the program is not sustainable. "It's just a horrible burden," said the intelligence official.

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