Toture

[Troy Spiral (13)]

I think that there could be some rare situaitons that it might be acceptable, im not sure i trust any humans to make that call properly, especially not an entity that is likely to make decisions for >political

We need to realize we dont live in a risk-free society. Theres certian risks you have to take to maintain human rights.

[ssid67]

I have avoided posting on serious topics like this one for alot of reasons. But, PH you just pulled me in on this one.

Torture good old fashion torture like mid-evil pull your intestines out on a spindle kind of stuff, tearing off limbs. Chinese water torture.

The thoughts of what Mangela did to the jews while in the prison camps.

This guy pulled all the skin off people to see how long they would live. The pain and humiliation of countless of thousands of people over the centuries.

These methods will always be incorporated because we as humans can and will be driven to extremes for ones beliefs whatever they may be.

The extremes rage we can have when someone or something attacks our heart. Trying to hold a justification of torture for a cause is an excersize in futility. Its a sick sad world we live in when we have to destroy all our brothers and sisters in a manner such as this. The real sad part is don't think for a second they wouldn't do it to you.

The flip side of this coin is if you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen. These people that play this game need to have their big boy pants on. If they want to be Evil Inc. let the chips fall where they will. Do I condone torture for the victims of those towers your God damn right. If preventing all that destruction was possible. Saving all those lives children, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers. Why do I fell so strongly about that. Cause there my people and I identify with them. I’m sure the other side feels that way about their people. My hope for humanity is one day we could rise above all this and create a nurturing environment for all. As for innocents falling prey to circumstance like I said it’s a sick sad world.

Peace

www.miniature-earth.com

[Vampyro]

ok... torture those worthless shit stains... after what they did to jess lynch... it's apparent they don't follow the ROE... so why do we always gotta smile and just take the kick in the nuts? but the bigger point to all this.... WHY THE FUCK ARE WE STILL OVER THERE?!?! just turn the place into a parking lot already and be done with it all...

[Vater Araignee]

If you are a terrorist, prepared to sacrifice your life for your cause and believing that any physical harm you endure in the process only martyrs you, then coercion is useless. But you can be tricked into 'talking' if persuasion is the focus method of the interrogation. So, anything a detainee says under coercion is obviously something they would have disclosed under persuasion. The difference is that any admission a prisoner makes through coecion is not valid in a trial against them.

TRIAL!! You are kidding ,correct?

They claim to be fighting a war. That makes them soldiers and that means tribunal.

To make matters worse they are not wearing anything to identify them as soldiers so that classifies them as spies.

You know something? I'm actually appalled by what people are calling torture now.

At this rate people are going to cry torture because their captor farted.

One more thing and I'm just making an assumption on this but wouldn't it be correct to assume that if these interrogation tactics where documented then it was official policy, just not widely known official policy?

[Troy Spiral (13)]

TRIAL!! You are kidding ,correct?

They claim to be fighting a war. That makes them soldiers and that means tribunal.

To make matters worse they are not wearing anything to identify them as soldiers so that classifies them as spies.

You know something? I'm actually appalled by what people are calling torture now.

At this rate people are going to cry torture because their captor farted.

One more thing and I'm just making an assumption on this but wouldn't it be correct to assume that if these interrogation tactics where documented then it was official policy, just not widely known official policy?

Im not sure it nessisarly assumes any higher authority due to it being a recorded event. The fact that it was documented might lend some weight to that asumption but its far from being proof of higher authority.

[Paper Hearts]

All information available shows that the United States did not torture prior to George Bush's presidency. In fact, physical evidence has proven that the torture program was directed by and began with George Bush. The president, although he denied the program existed at first, when it went to the courts, only offered that he felt that the techniques used were not torture. I'm sure somewhere random Bush loving is appreciated, but the idea that torture was something we always had is not even one the President has taken in his own defense. Instead, he sought to redefine torture. -It is an Interesting conspiracy theory, but unfortunately, one given no foundation.

Secondly, not all people captured and tortured have been terrorists, some have been completely innocent, some private citizens of our country or our allies...so unless you're asserting that all Arabs or Muslims deserve to be punished for their heritage, it's not logical. Whether by tribunal or not, coerced admissions are not acceptable, on our soil, and 'our soil' is what's most relevant through all this.

Last note:

We're meant to be fighting this war for moral and ethical purposes...in fact, it was said to us by the President that we're in a war for "civilization itself". If we're not any different than our enemy morally and ethically, that is if we are uncivilized, then why are we in the war we are in?

[pharoh]

PH - Just because it was not documented does not mean it did not happen.

Second, When it comes to war, there is no ethics or morals, it's either you or them. You should talk to a few vets, it may open your eyes. My father was in Nam and the stories he told me were quite disturbing. Also if you ever get a chance, look up what tunnel rats were in Vietnam. When you do that kind of job there is no morals or ethics. The only thing that matters is the achievement of the Mission.

[Paper Hearts]

I disagree. If we're trying to force a cultural revolution in the Mideast, then our culture needs to be different, from an ethical standpoint, if we're to have any effect. It's difficult enough to have your own revolution let alone someone else's...and what many Arabs see, the one's that do not support "extremism", is that the United States really makes no argument as result of things like torture. I do understand that it's tempting if you're frightened, that one wants to resort to tactics similar to the enemy's inorder to win, but what I'm saying is that if the goal of this war is to rid the globe of radical Arab militants, then not keeping with ideals we claim as moral guidlines has hurt our very slim chances, forever.

[Liberal Larry]

All information available shows that the United States did not torture prior to George Bush's presidency. In fact, physical evidence has proven that the torture program was directed by and began with George Bush. The president, although he denied the program existed at first, when it went to the courts, only offered that he felt that the techniques used were not torture. I'm sure somewhere random Bush loving is appreciated, but the idea that torture was something we always had is not even one the President has taken in his own defense. Instead, he sought to redefine torture. -It is an Interesting conspiracy theory, but unfortunately, one given no foundation.

Secondly, not all people captured and tortured have been terrorists, some have been completely innocent, some private citizens of our country or our allies...so unless you're asserting that all Arabs or Muslims deserve to be punished for their heritage, it's not logical. Whether by tribunal or not, coerced admissions are not acceptable, on our soil, and 'our soil' is what's most relevant through all this.

Last note:

We're meant to be fighting this war for moral and ethical purposes...in fact, it was said to us by the President that we're in a war for "civilization itself". If we're not any different than our enemy morally and ethically, that is if we are uncivilized, then why are we in the war we are in?

FALSE

[Paper Hearts]

I also want to point out that by what seems to be a a fairly popular stretch in understanding on the part of the Bush Administration that the United States is an illegitimate country. -Because many of our troops in our revolution didn't have uniforms either. It's just wrong to twist the interpretation that way unless you have amnesia...and I wouldn't estimate he has.

And I want to add this note: no detainee may ever see a tribunal, it's still being reviewed. If trends mean anything, however, then we could point to an overwhelming trend in decisions of our courts against Bush administration 2 in detainee handling. We might also take into account the unanimous findings of international human rights groups, against such notions.

[Liberal Larry]

None of this is new to Bush, I think you should do some research before posting. Check into Central America and the CIA's role.

[Paper Hearts]

Oh really? Then what magazines have you been through Ted? Because it was shown to be initiated by the Bush adminstration in court...and that wasn't his defense, at all.

[Paper Hearts]

(From the reports in 'the New Yorker')

CHAIN OF COMMAND

How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib.

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

Issue of 2004-05-17

Posted 2004-05-09

In his devastating report on conditions at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, Major General Antonio M. Taguba singled out only three military men for praise. One of them, Master-at-Arms William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, should be commended, Taguba wrote, because he “knew his duties and refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI”—military intelligence—“personnel at Abu Ghraib.” Elsewhere in the report it became clear what Kimbro would not do: American soldiers, Taguba said, used “military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.”

Taguba’s report was triggered by a soldier’s decision to give Army investigators photographs of the sexual humiliation and abuse of prisoners. These images were first broadcast on “60 Minutes II” on April 28th. Seven enlisted members of the 372nd Military Police Company of the 320th Military Police Battalion, an Army reserve unit, are now facing prosecution, and six officers have been reprimanded. Last week, I was given another set of digital photographs, which had been in the possession of a member of the 320th. According to a time sequence embedded in the digital files, the photographs were taken by two different cameras over a twelve-minute period on the evening of December 12, 2003, two months after the military-police unit was assigned to Abu Ghraib.

An Iraqi prisoner and American military dog handlers. Other photographs show the Iraqi on the ground, bleeding.

One of the new photographs shows a young soldier, wearing a dark jacket over his uniform and smiling into the camera, in the corridor of the jail. In the background are two Army dog handlers, in full camouflage combat gear, restraining two German shepherds. The dogs are barking at a man who is partly obscured from the camera’s view by the smiling soldier. Another image shows that the man, an Iraqi prisoner, is naked. His hands are clasped behind his neck and he is leaning against the door to a cell, contorted with terror, as the dogs bark a few feet away. Other photographs show the dogs straining at their leashes and snarling at the prisoner. In another, taken a few minutes later, the Iraqi is lying on the ground, writhing in pain, with a soldier sitting on top of him, knee pressed to his back. Blood is streaming from the inmate’s leg. Another photograph is a closeup of the naked prisoner, from his waist to his ankles, lying on the floor. On his right thigh is what appears to be a bite or a deep scratch. There is another, larger wound on his left leg, covered in blood.

There is at least one other report of violence involving American soldiers, an Army dog, and Iraqi citizens, but it was not in Abu Ghraib. Cliff Kindy, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a church-supported group that has been monitoring the situation in Iraq, told me that last November G.I.s unleashed a military dog on a group of civilians during a sweep in Ramadi, about thirty miles west of Fallujah. At first, Kindy told me, “the soldiers went house to house, and arrested thirty people.” (One of them was Saad al-Khashab, an attorney with the Organization for Human Rights in Iraq, who told Kindy about the incident.) While the thirty detainees were being handcuffed and laid on the ground, a firefight broke out nearby; when it ended, the Iraqis were shoved into a house. Khashab told Kindy that the American soldiers then “turned the dog loose inside the house, and several people were bitten.” (The Defense Department said that it was unable to comment about the incident before The New Yorker went to press.)

When I asked retired Major General Charles Hines, who was commandant of the Army’s military-police school during a twenty-eight-year career in military law enforcement, about these reports, he reacted with dismay. “Turning a dog loose in a room of people? Loosing dogs on prisoners of war? I’ve never heard of it, and it would never have been tolerated,” Hines said. He added that trained police dogs have long been a presence in Army prisons, where they are used for sniffing out narcotics and other contraband among the prisoners, and, occasionally, for riot control. But, he said, “I would never have authorized it for interrogating or coercing prisoners. If I had, I’d have been put in jail or kicked out of the Army.”

The International Red Cross and human-rights groups have repeatedly complained during the past year about the American military’s treatment of Iraqi prisoners, with little success. In one case, disclosed last month by the Denver Post, three Army soldiers from a military-intelligence battalion were accused of assaulting a female Iraqi inmate at Abu Ghraib. After an administrative review, the three were fined “at least five hundred dollars and demoted in rank,” the newspaper said.

Army commanders had a different response when, on January 13th, a military policeman presented Army investigators with a computer disk containing graphic photographs. The images were being swapped from computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion. The Army’s senior commanders immediately understood they had a problem—a looming political and public-relations disaster that would taint America and damage the war effort.

One of the first soldiers to be questioned was Ivan Frederick, the M.P. sergeant who was in charge of a night shift at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, who has been ordered to face a court-martial in Iraq for his role in the abuse, kept a running diary that began with a knock on his door by agents of the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division (C.I.D.) at two-thirty in the morning on January 14th. “I was escorted . . . to the front door of our building, out of sight from my room,” Frederick wrote, “while . . . two unidentified males stayed in my room. ‘Are they searching my room?’ ” He was told yes. Frederick later formally agreed to permit the agents to search for cameras, computers, and storage devices.

On January 16th, three days after the Army received the pictures, Central Command issued a blandly worded, five-sentence press release about an investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that it was then that he learned of the allegations. At some point soon afterward, Rumsfeld informed President Bush. On January 19th, Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the officer in charge of American forces in Iraq, ordered a secret investigation into Abu Ghraib. Two weeks later, General Taguba was ordered to conduct his inquiry. He submitted his report on February 26th. By then, according to testimony before the Senate last week by General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, people “inside our building” had discussed the photographs. Myers, by his own account, had still not read the Taguba report or seen the photographs, yet he knew enough about the abuses to persuade “60 Minutes II” to delay its story.

At a Pentagon news conference last week, Rumsfeld and Marine General Peter Pace, the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the investigation into Abu Ghraib had moved routinely through the chain of command. If the Army had been slow, it was because of built-in safeguards. Pace told the journalists, “It’s important to know that as investigations are completed they come up the chain of command in a very systematic way. So that the individual who reports in writing [sends it] up to the next level commander. But he or she takes time, a week or two weeks, three weeks, whatever it takes, to read all of the documentation, get legal advice [and] make the decisions that are appropriate at his or her level. . . . That way everyone’s rights are protected and we have the opportunity systematically to take a look at the entire process.”

In interviews, however, retired and active-duty officers and Pentagon officials said that the system had not worked. Knowledge of the nature of the abuses—and especially the politically toxic photographs—had been severely, and unusually, restricted. “Everybody I’ve talked to said, ‘We just didn’t know’—not even in the J.C.S.,” one well-informed former intelligence official told me, emphasizing that he was referring to senior officials with whom such allegations would normally be shared. “I haven’t talked to anybody on the inside who knew—nowhere. It’s got them scratching their heads.” A senior Pentagon official said that many of the senior generals in the Army were similarly out of the loop on the Abu Ghraib allegations.

Within the Pentagon, there was a spate of fingerpointing last week. One top general complained to a colleague that the commanders in Iraq should have taken C4, a powerful explosive, and blown up Abu Ghraib last spring, with all of its “emotional baggage”—the prison was known for its brutality under Saddam Hussein—instead of turning it into an American facility. “This is beyond the pale in terms of lack of command attention,” a retired major general told me, speaking of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. “Where were the flag officers? And I’m not just talking about a one-star,” he added, referring to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander at Abu Ghraib who was relieved of duty. “This was a huge leadership failure.”

The Pentagon official told me that many senior generals believe that, along with the civilians in Rumsfeld’s office, General Sanchez and General John Abizaid, who is in charge of the Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, had done their best to keep the issue quiet in the first months of the year. The official chain of command flows from General Sanchez, in Iraq, to Abizaid, and on to Rumsfeld and President Bush. “You’ve got to match action, or nonaction, with interests,” the Pentagon official said. “What is the motive for not being forthcoming? They foresaw major diplomatic problems.”

Secrecy and wishful thinking, the Pentagon official said, are defining characteristics of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, and shaped its response to the reports from Abu Ghraib. “They always want to delay the release of bad news—in the hope that something good will break,” he said. The habit of procrastination in the face of bad news led to disconnects between Rumsfeld and the Army staff officers who were assigned to planning for troop requirements in Iraq. A year ago, the Pentagon official told me, when it became clear that the Army would have to call up more reserve units to deal with the insurgency, “we had call-up orders that languished for thirty or forty days in the office of the Secretary of Defense.” Rumsfeld’s staff always seemed to be waiting for something to turn up—for the problem to take care of itself, without any additional troops. The official explained, “They were hoping that they wouldn’t have to make a decision.” The delay meant that soldiers in some units about to be deployed had only a few days to prepare wills and deal with other family and financial issues.

The same deliberate indifference to bad news was evident in the past year, the Pentagon official said, when the Army conducted a series of elaborate war games. Planners would present best-case, moderate-case, and worst-case scenarios, in an effort to assess where the Iraq war was headed and to estimate future troop needs. In every case, the number of troops actually required exceeded the worst-case analysis. Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and civilian officials in the Pentagon continued to insist that future planning be based on the most optimistic scenario. “The optimistic estimate was that at this point in time”—mid-2004—“the U.S. Army would need only a handful of combat brigades in Iraq,” the Pentagon official said. “There are nearly twenty now, with the international coalition drying up. They were wildly off the mark.” The official added, “From the beginning, the Army community was saying that the projections and estimates were unrealistic.” Now, he said, “we’re struggling to maintain a hundred and thirty-five thousand troops while allowing soldiers enough time back home.”

In his news conference last Tuesday, Rumsfeld, when asked whether he thought the photographs and stories from Abu Ghraib were a setback for American policy in Iraq, still seemed to be in denial. “Oh, I’m not one for instant history,” he responded. By Friday, however, with some members of Congress and with editorials calling for his resignation, Rumsfeld testified at length before House and Senate committees and apologized for what he said was “fundamentally un-American” wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. He also warned that more, and even uglier, disclosures were to come. Rumsfeld said that he had not actually looked at any of the Abu Ghraib photographs until some of them appeared in press accounts, and hadn’t reviewed the Army’s copies until the day before. When he did, they were “hard to believe,” he said. “There are other photos that depict . . . acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman.” Later, he said, “It’s going to get still more terrible, I’m afraid.” Rumsfeld added, “I failed to recognize how important it was.”

NBC News later quoted U.S. military officials as saying that the unreleased photographs showed American soldiers “severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and ‘acting inappropriately with a dead body.’ The officials said there also was a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.”

No amount of apologetic testimony or political spin last week could mask the fact that, since the attacks of September 11th, President Bush and his top aides have seen themselves as engaged in a war against terrorism in which the old rules did not apply. In the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of senior Pentagon generals and admirals to act aggressively. By mid-2002, he and his senior aides were exchanging secret memorandums on modifying the culture of the military leaders and finding ways to encourage them “to take greater risks.” One memo spoke derisively of the generals in the Pentagon, and said, “Our prerequisite of perfection for ‘actionable intelligence’ has paralyzed us. We must accept that we may have to take action before every question can be answered.” The Defense Secretary was told that he should “break the ‘belt-and-suspenders’ mindset within today’s military . . . we ‘over-plan’ for every contingency. . . . We must be willing to accept the risks.” With operations involving the death of foreign enemies, the memo went on, the planning should not be carried out in the Pentagon: “The result will be decision by committee.”

The Pentagon’s impatience with military protocol extended to questions about the treatment of prisoners caught in the course of its military operations. Soon after 9/11, as the war on terror got under way, Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly made public his disdain for the Geneva conventions. Complaints about America’s treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said in early 2002, amounted to “isolated pockets of international hyperventilation.”

The effort to determine what happened at Abu Ghraib has evolved into a sprawling set of related investigations, some of them hastily put together, including inquiries into twenty-five suspicious deaths. Investigators have become increasingly concerned with the role played not only by military and intelligence officials but also by C.I.A. agents and private-contract employees. In a statement, the C.I.A. acknowledged that its Inspector General had an investigation under way into abuses at Abu Ghraib, which extended to the death of a prisoner. A source familiar with one of the investigations told me that the victim was the man whose photograph, which shows his battered body packed in ice, has circulated around the world. A Justice Department prosecutor has been assigned to the case. The source also told me that an Army intelligence operative and a judge advocate general were seeking, through their lawyers, to negotiate immunity from prosecution in return for testimony.

The relationship between military policing and intelligence forces inside the Army prison system reached a turning point last fall in response to the insurgency against the Coalition Provisional Authority. “This is a fight for intelligence,” Brigadier General Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, told a reporter at a Baghdad press briefing in November. “Do I have enough soldiers? The answer is absolutely yes. The larger issue is, how do I use them and on what basis? And the answer to that is intelligence . . . to try to figure out how to take all this human intelligence as it comes in to us [and] turn it into something that’s actionable.” The Army prison system would now be asked to play its part.

Two months earlier, Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the task force in charge of the prison at Guantánamo, had brought a team of experts to Iraq to review the Army program. His recommendation was radical: that Army prisons be geared, first and foremost, to interrogations and the gathering of information needed for the war effort. “Detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation . . . to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence,” Miller wrote. The military police on guard duty at the prisons should make support of military intelligence a priority.

General Sanchez agreed, and on November 19th his headquarters issued an order formally giving the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade tactical control over the prison. General Taguba fearlessly took issue with the Sanchez orders, which, he wrote in his report, “effectively made an MI Officer, rather than an MP officer, responsible for the MP units conducting detainee operations at that facility. This is not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agenda assigned to each of these respective specialties.”

Taguba also criticized Miller’s report, noting that “the intelligence value of detainees held at . . . Guantánamo is different than that of the detainees/internees held at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq. . . . There are a large number of Iraqi criminals held at Abu Ghraib. These are not believed to be international terrorists or members of Al Qaeda.” Taguba noted that Miller’s recommendations “appear to be in conflict” with other studies and with Army regulations that call for military-police units to have control of the prison system. By placing military-intelligence operatives in control instead, Miller’s recommendations and Sanchez’s change in policy undoubtedly played a role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Taguba concluded that certain military-intelligence officers and civilian contractors at Abu Ghraib were “either directly or indirectly responsible” for the abuses, and urged that they be subjected to disciplinary action.

In late March, before the Abu Ghraib scandal became publicly known, Geoffrey Miller was transferred from Guantánamo and named head of prison operations in Iraq. “We have changed this—trust us,” Miller told reporters in early May. “There were errors made. We have corrected those. We will make sure that they do not happen again.”

Military-intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib repeatedly wore “sterile,” or unmarked, uniforms or civilian clothes while on duty. “You couldn’t tell them apart,” the source familiar with the investigation said. The blurring of identities and organizations meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly, the military policemen on duty, to know who was doing what to whom, and who had the authority to give orders. Civilian employees at the prison were not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but they were bound by civilian law—though it is unclear whether American or Iraqi law would apply.

One of the employees involved in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, according to the Taguba report, was Steven Stefanowicz, a civilian working for CACI International, a Virginia-based company. Private companies like CACI and Titan Corp. could pay salaries of well over a hundred thousand dollars for the dangerous work in Iraq, far more than the Army pays, and were permitted, as never before in U.S. military history, to handle sensitive jobs. (In a briefing last week, General Miller confirmed that Stefanowicz had been reassigned to administrative duties. A CACI spokeswoman declined to comment on any employee in Iraq, citing safety concerns, but said that the company still had not heard anything directly from the government about Stefanowicz.)

Stefanowicz and his colleagues conducted most, if not all, of their interrogations in the Abu Ghraib facilities known to the soldiers as the Wood Building and the Steel Building. The interrogation centers were rarely visited by the M.P.s, a source familiar with the investigation said. The most important prisoners—the suspected insurgency members deemed to be High Value Detainees—were housed at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, but the pressure on soldiers to accede to requests from military intelligence was felt throughout the system.

Not everybody went along. A company captain in a military-police unit in Baghdad told me last week that he was approached by a junior intelligence officer who requested that his M.P.s keep a group of detainees awake around the clock until they began talking. “I said, ‘No, we will not do that,’ ” the captain said. “The M.I. commander comes to me and says, ‘What is the problem? We’re stressed, and all we are asking you to do is to keep them awake.’ I ask, ‘How? You’ve received training on that, but my soldiers don’t know how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn’t know how to do it, he’s going to get creative.’ ” The M.I. officer took the request to the captain’s commander, but, the captain said, “he backed me up.

“It’s all about people. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were failed by their commanders—both low-ranking and high,” the captain said. “The system is broken—no doubt about it. But the Army is made up of people, and we’ve got to depend on them to do the right thing.”

In his report, Taguba strongly suggested that there was a link between the interrogation process in Afghanistan and the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A few months after General Miller’s report, Taguba wrote, General Sanchez, apparently troubled by reports of wrongdoing in Army jails in Iraq, asked Army Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general, to carry out a study of military prisons. In the resulting study, which is still classified, Ryder identified a conflict between military policing and military intelligence dating back to the Afghan war. He wrote, “Recent intelligence collection in support of Operation Enduring Freedom posited a template whereby military police actively set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews.”

One of the most prominent prisoners of the Afghan war was John Walker Lindh, the twenty-one-year-old Californian who was captured in December, 2001. Lindh was accused of training with Al Qaeda terrorists and conspiring to kill Americans. A few days after his arrest, according to a federal-court affidavit filed by his attorney, James Brosnahan, a group of armed American soldiers “blindfolded Mr. Lindh, and took several pictures of Mr. Lindh and themselves with Mr. Lindh. In one, the soldiers scrawled ‘shithead’ across Mr. Lindh’s blindfold and posed with him. . . . Another told Mr. Lindh that he was ‘going to hang’ for his actions and that after he was dead, the soldiers would sell the photographs and give the money to a Christian organization.” Some of the photographs later made their way to the American media. Lindh was later stripped naked, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, and placed in a windowless shipping container. Once again, the affidavit said, “military personnel photographed Mr. Lindh as he lay on the stretcher.” On July 15, 2002, Lindh agreed to plead guilty to carrying a gun while serving in the Taliban and received a twenty-year jail term. During that process, Brosnahan told me, “the Department of Defense insisted that we state that there was ‘no deliberate’ mistreatment of John.” His client agreed to do so, but, the attorney noted, “Against that, you have that photograph of a naked John on that stretcher.”

The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process. The Times published an interview last week with Hayder Sabbar Abd, who claimed, convincingly, to be one of the mistreated Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib photographs. Abd told Ian Fisher, the Times reporter, that his ordeal had been recorded, almost constantly, by cameras, which added to his humiliation. He remembered how the camera flashed repeatedly as soldiers told to him to masturbate and beat him when he refused.

One lingering mystery is how Ryder could have conducted his review last fall, in the midst of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, without managing to catch it. (Ryder told a Pentagon press briefing last week that his trip to Iraq “was not an inspection or an investigation. . . . It was an assessment.”) In his report to Sanchez, Ryder flatly declared that “there were no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices.” Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as an agent of the C.I.D., told me that Ryder was in a bureaucratic bind. The Army had revised its command structure last fall, and Ryder, as provost marshal, was now the commanding general of all military-police units as well as of the C.I.D. He was, in essence, being asked to investigate himself. “What Ryder should have done was set up a C.I.D. task force headed by an 0-6”—full colonel—“with fifteen agents, and begin interviewing everybody and taking sworn statements,” Rowell said. “He had to answer questions about the prisons in September, when Sanchez asked for an assessment.” At the time, Rowell added, the Army prison system was unprepared for the demands the insurgency placed on it. “Ryder was a man in a no-win situation,” Rowell said. “As provost marshal, if he’d turned a C.I.D. task force loose, he could be in harm’s way—because he’s also boss of the military police. He was being eaten alive.”

Ryder may have protected himself, but Taguba did not. “He’s not regarded as a hero in some circles in the Pentagon,” a retired Army major general said of Taguba. “He’s the guy who blew the whistle, and the Army will pay the price for his integrity. The leadership does not like to have people make bad news public.”

[Paper Hearts]

Seymour Hersh's reports are sort of the definitive reports from when the story first broke, however, here are some related links for the issue ongoing:

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/st...24644-1098r.htm

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/internation...,866235,00.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ress.tribunals/

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060227fa_fact

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/18769prs20041220.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2004Jun22.html

http://euobserver.com/9/22355?rss_rk=1

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/sto...1406987,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3833073.stm

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washingt...amp;oref=slogin

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/washingt...artner=homepage

I suppose these are just typical reports you could find in any news source. And of course, these aren't meant to cover the full history.

[Paper Hearts]

By Seymour Hersh

The Guardian___ In the late summer of 2002, a CIA analyst

made a quiet visit to the detention centre at the US

Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where an estimated

600 prisoners were being held, many, at first, in

steel-mesh cages that provided little protection from

the brutally hot sun. Most had been captured on the

battlefield in Afghanistan during the campaign against

the Taliban and al-Qaida.

The Bush administration had determined, however, that

they were not prisoners of war but "enemy combatants",

and that their stay at Guantanamo could be indefinite,

as teams of CIA, FBI, and military interrogators sought

to prise intelligence from them. In a series of secret

memorandums written earlier in the year, lawyers for

the White House, the Pentagon and the justice

department had agreed that the prisoners had no rights

under federal law or the Geneva convention. President

Bush endorsed the finding, while declaring that the al-

Qaida and Taliban detainees were nevertheless to be

treated in a manner consistent with the principles of

the Geneva convention - as long as such treatment was

also "consistent with military necessity".

But the interrogations at Guantanamo were a bust. Very

little useful intelligence had been gathered, while

prisoners from around the world continued to flow into

the base, and the facility constantly expanded. The CIA

analyst had been sent there to find out what was going

wrong. He was fluent in Arabic and familiar with the

Islamic world. He was held in high respect within the

agency, and was capable of reporting directly, if he

chose, to George Tenet, the CIA director. The analyst

did more than just visit and inspect. He interviewed at

least 30 prisoners to find out who they were and how

they ended up in Guantanamo. Some of his findings, he

later confided to a former CIA colleague, were

devastating.

"He came back convinced that we were committing war

crimes in Guantanamo," the colleague told me. "Based on

his sample, more than half the people there didn't

belong there. He found people lying in their own

faeces," including two captives, perhaps in their 80s,

who were clearly suffering from dementia. "He thought

what was going on was an outrage," the CIA colleague

added. There was no rational system for determining who

was important.

Two former administration officials who read the

analyst's highly classified report told me that its

message was grim. According to a former White House

official, the analyst's disturbing conclusion was that

"if we captured some people who weren't terrorists when

we got them, they are now".

That autumn, the document rattled aimlessly around the

upper reaches of the Bush administration until it got

into the hands of General John A Gordon, the deputy

national security adviser for combating terrorism, who

reported directly to Condoleezza Rice, the national

security adviser and the president's confidante.

Gordon, who had retired from the military as a four-

star general in 2000 had served as a deputy director of

the CIA for three years. He was deeply troubled and

distressed by the report, and by its implications for

the treatment, in retaliation, of captured American

soldiers. Gordon, according to a former administration

official, told colleagues that he thought "it was

totally out of character with the American value

system", and "that if the actions at Guantanamo ever

became public, it'd be damaging to the president".

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, there had been

much debate inside the administration about what was

permissible in the treatment of prisoners and what was

not. The most suggestive document, in terms of what was

really going on inside military prisons and detention

centres, was written in early August 2002 by Jay S

Bybee, head of the justice department's office of legal

counsel. "Certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or

degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of

the requisite intensity to fall within [a legal]

proscription against torture," Bybee wrote to Alberto R

Gonzales, the White House counsel. "We conclude that

for an act to constitute torture, it must inflict pain

that is 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."

(Bush later nominated Bybee to be a federal judge.)

"We face an enemy that targets innocent civilians,"

Gonzales, in turn, would tell journalists two years

later, at the height of the furore over the abuse of

prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "We face an

enemy that lies in the shadows, an enemy that doesn't

sign treaties."

Gonzales added that Bush bore no responsibility for the

wrongdoing. "The president has not authorised, ordered

or directed in any way any activity that would

transgress the standards of the torture conventions or

the torture statute, or other applicable laws,"

Gonzales said. In fact, a secret statement of the

president's views, which he signed on February 7, 2002

contained a loophole that applied worldwide: "I

determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply

to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or

elsewhere throughout the world," the president

asserted.

John Gordon had to know what he was up against in

seeking a high-level review of prison policies at

Guantanamo, but he persevered. Finally, the former

White House official recalled, "We got it up to Condi."

As the CIA analyst's report was making its way to Rice,

in late 2002 there were a series of heated complaints

about the interrogation tactics at Guantanamo from

within the FBI, whose agents had been questioning

detainees in Cuba since the prison opened. A few of the

agents began telling their superiors what they had

witnessed, which, they believed, had little to do with

getting good information.

"I was told," a senior intelligence official recalled,

"that the military guards were slapping prisoners,

stripping them, pouring cold water over them, and

making them stand until they got hypothermia. The

agents were outraged. It was wrong and also

dysfunctional." The agents put their specific

complaints in writing, the official told me, and they

were relayed, in emails and phone calls, to officials

at the department of defence, including William J

Haynes II, the general counsel of the Pentagon. As far

as day-to-day life for prisoners at Guantanamo was

concerned, nothing came of it.

The unifying issue for General Gordon and his

supporters inside the administration was not the abuse

of prisoners at Guantanamo, the former White House

official told me: "It was about how many more people

are being held there that shouldn't be. Have we really

got the right people?" The briefing for Condoleezza

Rice about problems at Guantanamo took place in the

autumn of 2002. It did not dwell on the question of

torture or mistreatment. The main issue, the former

White House official told me, was simply, "Are we

getting any intelligence? What is the process for

sorting these people?"

Rice agreed to call a high-level meeting in the White

House situation room. Most significantly, she asked

Secretary Rumsfeld to attend. Rums feld, who was by

then publicly and privately encouraging his soldiers in

the field to get tough with captured prisoners, duly

showed up, but he had surprisingly little to say. One

participant in the meeting recalled that at one point

Rice asked Rumsfeld "what the issues were, and he said

he hadn't looked into it". Rice urged Rumsfeld to do

so, and added, "Let's get the story right." Rumsfeld

seemed to be in agreement, and Gordon and his

supporters left the meeting convinced, the former

administration official told me, that the Pentagon was

going to deal with the issue.

Nothing changed. "The Pentagon went into a full-court

stall," the former White House official recalled. "I

trusted in the goodness of man and thought we got

something to happen. I was naive enough to believe that

when a cabinet member" - he was referring to Rumsfeld -

"says he's going to take action, he will."

Over the next few months, as the White House began

planning for the coming war in Iraq, there were many

more discussions about the continuing problems at

Guantanamo and the lack of useful intelligence. No one

in the Bush administration would get far, however, if

he was viewed as soft on suspected al-Qaida terrorism.

"Why didn't Condi do more?" the official asked. "She

made the same mistake I made. She got the secretary of

defence to say he's going to take care of it."

There was, obviously, a difference between the reality

of prison life in Guantanamo and how it was depicted to

the public in carefully stage-managed news conferences

and statements released by the administration. American

prison authorities have repeatedly assured the press

and the public, for example, that the al-Qaida and

Taliban detainees were provided with a minimum of three

hours of recreation every week. For the tough cases,

however, according to a Pentagon adviser familiar with

detainee conditions in mid-2002, at recreation time

some prisoners would be strapped into heavy jackets,

similar to straitjackets, with their arms locked behind

them and their legs straddled by straps. Goggles were

placed over their eyes, and their heads were covered

with a hood. The prisoner was then led at midday into

what looked like a narrow fenced-in dog run - the

adviser told me that there were photographs of the

procedure - and given his hour of recreation. The

restraints forced him to move, if he chose to move, on

his knees, bent over at a 45-degree angle. Most

prisoners just sat and suffered in the heat.

One of the marines assigned to guard duty at Guantanamo

in 2003, who has since left the military, told me,

after being promised anonymity, that he and his

enlisted colleagues at the base were encouraged by

their squad leaders to "give the prisoners a visit"

once or twice a month, when there were no television

crews, journalists, or other outside visitors at the

prison.

"We tried to fuck with them as much as we could -

inflict a little bit of pain. We couldn't do much," for

fear of exposure, the former marine, who also served in

Afghanistan, told me.

"There were always newspeople there," he said. "That's

why you couldn't send them back with a broken leg or

so. And if somebody died, I'd get court-martialled."

The roughing up of prisoners was sometimes spur-of-the-

moment, the former marine said: "A squad leader would

say, 'Let's go - all the cameras on lunch break.'" One

pastime was to put hoods on the prisoners and "drive

them around the camp in a Humvee, making turns so they

didn't know where they were. [...] I wasn't trying to

get information. I was just having a little fun -

playing mind control." When I asked a senior FBI

official about the former marine's account, he told me

that agents assigned to interrogation duties at

Guantanamo had described similar activities to their

superiors.

In November 2002, army Major General Geoffrey Miller

had relieved Generals Dunlavey and Baccus, unifying the

command at Guantanamo. Baccus was seen by the Pentagon

as soft - too worried about the prisoners' well-being.

In Senate hearings after Abu Ghraib, it became known

that Miller was permitted to use legally questionable

interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, which could

include, with approval, sleep deprivation, exposure to

extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in

"stress positions" for agonising lengths of time.

In May 2004, the New York Times reported that the FBI

had instructed its agents to avoid being present at

interrogation sessions with suspected al-Qaida members.

The newspaper said the severe methods used to extract

information would be prohibited in criminal cases, and

therefore could compromise the agents in future legal

proceedings against the suspects. "We don't believe in

coercion," a senior FBI official subsequently told me.

"Our goal is to get information and we try to gain the

prisoners' trust. We have strong feelings about it."

The FBI official added, "I thought Rumsfeld should have

been fired long ago."

"They did it the wrong way," a Pentagon adviser on the

war on terror told me, "and took a heavy-handed

approach based on coercion, instead of persuasion -

which actually has a much better track record. It's

about rage and the need to strike back. It's evil, but

it's also stupid. It's not torture but acts of kindness

that lead to concessions. The persuasive approach takes

longer but gets far better results."

There was, we now know, a fantastical quality to the

earnest discussions inside the White House in 2002

about the good and bad of the interrogation process at

Guantanamo. Rice and Rumsfeld knew what many others

involved in the prisoner discussions did not - that

sometime in late 2001 or early 2002, the president had

signed a top-secret finding, as required by law,

authorising the defence department to set up a

specially recruited clandestine team of special forces

operatives and others who would defy diplomatic

niceties and international law and snatch - or

assassinate, if necessary - identified "high-value" al-

Qaida operatives anywhere in the world.

Equally secret interrogation centres would be set up in

allied countries where harsh treatments were meted out,

unconstrained by legal limits or public disclosure. The

programme was hidden inside the defence department as

an "unacknowledged" special-access programme (SAP),

whose operational details were known only to a few in

the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House.

The SAP owed its existence to Rumsfeld's desire to get

the US special forces community into the business of

what he called, in public and internal communications,

"manhunts", and to his disdain for the Pentagon's

senior generals. In the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld

chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of the

generals and admirals to act aggressively. Soon after

September 11, he repeatedly made public his disdain for

the Geneva convention. Complaints about the United

States' treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said, in early

2002, amounted to "isolated pockets of international

hyperventilation".

One of Rumsfeld's goals was bureaucratic: to give the

civilian leadership in the Pentagon, and not the CIA,

the lead in fighting terrorism. Throughout the

existence of the SAP, which eventually came to Abu

Ghraib prison, a former senior intelligence official

told me, "There was a periodic briefing to the National

Security Council [NSC] giving updates on results, but

not on the methods." Did the White House ask about the

process? The former officer said that he believed that

they did, and that "they got the answers".

By the time of Rumsfeld's meeting with Rice, his SAP

was in its third year of snatching or strong-arming

suspected terrorists and questioning them in secret

prison facilities in Singapore, Thailand and Pakistan,

among other sites. The White House was fighting terror

with terror.

On December 18 2001, American operatives participated

in what amounted to the kidnapping of two Egyptians,

Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who had sought asylum

in Sweden. The Egyptians, believed by American

intelligence to be linked to Islamic militant groups,

were abruptly seized in the late afternoon and flown

out of Sweden a few hours later on a US government-

leased Gulfstream private jet to Cairo, where they

underwent extensive and brutal interrogation. "Both

were dirty," a former senior intelligence official, who

has extensive knowledge of special-access programmes,

told me, "but it was pretty blatant."

The seizure of Agiza and Zery attracted little

attention outside of Sweden, despite repeated

complaints by human-rights groups, until May 2004 when

a Swedish television news magazine revealed that the

Swedish government had cooperated after being assured

that the exiles would not be tortured or otherwise

harmed once they were sent to Egypt. Instead, according

to a television report, entitled The Broken Promise,

Agiza and Zery, in handcuffs and shackles, were driven

to the airport by Swedish and, according to one

witness, American agents and turned over at plane-side

to a group of Americans wearing plain clothes whose

faces were concealed. Once in Egypt, Agiza and Zery

have reported through Swedish diplomats, family members

and attorneys, that they were subjected to repeated

torture by electrical shocks distributed by electrodes

that were attached to the most sensitive parts of their

bodies. Egyptian authorities eventually concluded,

according to the documentary, that Zery had few ties to

ongoing terrorism, and he was released from jail in

October 2003, although he is still under surveillance.

Agiza was acknowledged by his attorneys to have been a

member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group

outlawed in Egypt, and also was once close to Ayman al-

Zawahiri, who is outranked in al-Qaida only by Osama

bin Laden. In April 2004, he was sentenced to 25 years

in an Egyptian prison.

Rumsfeld's dirty war on terror (Part II)

Fredrik Laurin, a Swedish journalist who worked on The

Broken Promise, extensively researched the leased

Gulfstream jet that was used to take Zery and Agiza to

Cairo. Laurin told me that he was able to track the

aircraft to landings in Pakistan, Kuwait, Egypt,

Germany, England, Ireland Morocco, as well as the

Washington DC area. It also made visits to Guantanamo.

The company told Laurin that the plane was leased

almost exclusively to the US government. Significantly,

the records obtained by Laurin indicate that the

Gulfstream apparently halted its overseas trips from

May 5 2004 - the week after the Abu Ghraib scandal

broke - until July 7, when it flew from Dulles Airport

in suburban Washington to Cairo.

After the Abu Ghraib abuses were revealed, a former

senior intelligence official with direct information

about the SAP gave me an account of how and why the

top-secret programme had begun. As the American-led

hunt for al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden began to stall,

he said, it was clear that the American intelligence

operatives in the field were failing to get useful

intelligence in a timely manner. With the pressure

mounting, some information was being delivered via the

CIA by friendly liaison intelligence services - allies

of the United States in the Middle East and south-east

Asia - who were not afraid to get rough with prisoners.

The tough tactics appealed to Rumsfeld and his senior

civilian aides.

Rumsfeld then authorised the establishment of the

highly secret programme, which was given blanket

advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible,

interrogate high-value targets. The SAP - subject to

the defence department's most stringent level of

security - was set up, with an office in a secure area

of the Pentagon. The people assigned to the programme

recruited, after careful screening, highly trained

commandos and operatives from US elite forces - navy

seals, the army's delta force, and the CIA's

paramilitary experts.

"Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to

take on a high-value target - a stand-up group to hit

quickly," the former senior intelligence official told

me. The operation had across-the-board approval from

Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice. Fewer than 200

operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and

General Myers [Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of

Staff], were "completely read into the programme", the

former intelligence official said. "The rules are 'Grab

whom you must. Do what you want.'"

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the

programme was Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of

defence for intelligence. Cambone had worked closely

with Rumsfeld in a number of Pentagon jobs since the

beginning of the administration, but this office, to

which he was named in March 2003, was new; it was

created as part of Rumsfeld's reorganisation of the

Pentagon. Known for his closeness to Rumsfeld, Cambone

was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He chafed,

as did Rumsfeld, at the CIA's inability before the Iraq

war to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harboured

weapons of mass destruction.

Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic

battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be

given control of all special-access programmes that

were relevant to the war on terror. In mid-2003, the

SAP was regarded, at least in the Pentagon, as one of

the success stories of the war on terror.

"It was an active programme," the former senior

intelligence official told me. "As this monster begins

to take life, there's joy in the world. The monster is

doing well - real well" - at least from the perspective

of those involved who, according to the former officer,

began to see themselves as "masters of the universe in

terms of intelligence".

I was initially told of the SAP's existence by members

of the intelligence community who were troubled by the

programme's prima facie violation of the Geneva

convention; their concern was that such activities, if

exposed, would eviscerate the moral standing of the

United States and expose American soldiers to

retaliation. In May 2004, a ranking member of Congress

confirmed its existence and further told me that

President Bush had signed the mandated finding

officially notifying Congress of the SAP.

The legislator added that he had none the less been

told very little about the programme. Only a few

members of the House and Senate leadership were

authorised by statute to be informed of it, and, even

then, the legislators were provided with little more

than basic budget information. It's not clear that the

Senate and House members understood that the United

States was poised to enter the business of

"disappearing" people.

The Pentagon may have judged the SAP a success, but by

August 2003, the war in Iraq was going badly and there

was, once again, little significant intelligence being

generated in the many prisons in Iraq. The president

and his national security team turned for guidance to

General Miller, the "Gitmo" [Guantanamo] commander.

Recounting that decision, one of the White House

officials who had supported General Gordon's ill-fated

effort to change prisoner policy asked me,

rhetorically, "Why do I take a failed approach at

Guantanamo and move it to Iraq?"

By the autumn of 2003, a military analyst told me, the

extent of the Pentagon's political and military

misjudgments in Iraq was clear. The solution, endorsed

by Rumsfeld and carried out by Cambone, was to get

tough with the Iraqi men and women in detention - to

treat them behind prison walls as if they had been

captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan. General

Miller was summoned to Baghdad in late August to review

prison interrogation procedures.

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step beyond "Gitmoizing",

however: they expanded the scope of the SAP, bringing

its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos

were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The

male prisoners could be treated roughly and exposed to

sexual humiliation.

"They weren't getting anything substantive from the

detainees in Iraq," the former intelligence official

told me. "No names. Nothing that they could hang their

hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and

I'm tired of working through the normal chain of

command. I've got this apparatus set up - the black

special-access programme - and I'm going in hot.

"So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins

flowing last summer. And it's working. We're getting a

picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence

is flowing into the white world. We're getting good

stuff."

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former

intelligence official told me: not only would he bring

the SAP's rules into the prisons, he would bring some

of the army military intelligence officers working

inside the Iraqi prisons under the SAP's auspices.

"So here are fundamentally good soldiers - military

intelligence guys - being told that no rules apply,"

the former official said.

In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who

spent much of his career directly involved with

special-access programmes, spread the blame. "The White

House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the

Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone," he said. "This

is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the

programme." When it came to the interrogation operation

at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to

Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the

consultant added, "but he's responsible for the checks

and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11 we've

changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism and

created conditions where the ends justify the means."

According to interviews with several past and present

American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's

operation - aspects of which were known inside the

intelligence community by several code words, including

Copper Green - encouraged physical coercion and sexual

humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate

more intelligence about the insurgency. A senior CIA

official confirmed the details of this account and said

that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-

standing desire to wrest control of clandestine and

paramilitary operations from the CIA.

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 SAP - wore civilian

clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to General

Karpinski, then the commander of the 800 military

police brigade. "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." 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.

Military intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib

repeatedly wore "sterile", or unmarked, uniforms or

civilian clothes while on duty. "You couldn't tell them

apart," a source familiar with the investigation said.

The blurring of identities and organisations meant that

it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly,

the military policemen on duty, to know who was doing

what to whom and who had the authority to give orders.

By last autumn, according to the former intelligence

official, the senior leadership of the CIA had had

enough. "They said, 'No way. We signed up for the core

programme in Afghanistan - pre-approved for operations

against high-value terrorist targets. And now you want

to use it for cab drivers, brothers-in-law, and people

pulled off the streets.'" The CIA balked, the former

intelligence official said: "The agency checks with

their lawyers and pulls out," ending those of its

activities in Abu Ghraib that related to the SAP. (In a

later conversation, a senior CIA official confirmed

this account.)

The CIA's complaints were echoed throughout the

intelligence community. There was fear the situation at

Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret

SAP, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before

Iraq, a valued covert operation. "This was stupidity,"

a government consultant told me. "You're taking a

programme that was operating in the chaos of

Afghanistan against al-Qaida, a stateless terror group,

and bringing it into a structured, traditional war

zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into

the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war

with an army of 135,000 soldiers."

In mid 2003, Rumsfeld's apparent disregard for the

requirements of the Geneva convention while carrying

out the war on terror had led a group of senior

military legal officers from the Judge Advocate

General's (JAG) Corps to pay two surprise visits within

five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of

the New York City Bar Association's Committee on

International Human Rights. "They wanted us to

challenge the Bush administration about its standards

for detentions and interrogation," Horton told me in

May 2004. "They were urging us to get involved and

speak in a very loud voice. [ ... ] 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. The JAG

officers told him that, with the war on terror, a 50-

year history of exemplary application of the Geneva

convention had come to an end.

In July 2004, I again spoke to Scott Horton, who has

maintained contact with a network of JAG lawyers. He

told me that Rumsfeld and his civilian deputies had

pressured the army to conclude the pending

investigations by late August, before the Republican

convention in New York. Horton added that the politics

were blatant.

Pentagon investigations, he said, "have a reputation

for tending to whitewash, but even taking this into

account, the current investigations seem to be setting

new standards". Rumsfeld's office had circumscribed the

investigators' charge and also placed tight controls on

the documents to be made available. In other words,

Horton said, "Rumsfeld has completely rigged the

investigations. My friends say we should expect

something much akin to the army inspector general's

report - 'just a few rotten apples'."

But General Taguba's highly critical internal

investigation into military prisons in Iraq - which,

together with the shocking photographs of prisoner

abuse, sparked the Abu Ghraib scandal in April -

amounted to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing

and the failure of army leadership at the highest

levels. The picture Taguba drew of Abu Ghraib was one

in which army regulations and the Geneva convention

were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-

to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to

army military intelligence units and civilian contract

employees.

Rumsfeld's most fateful decision, endorsed by the White

House, came at a time of crisis in August 2003 when the

defence secretary expanded the highly secret SAP into

the prisons of Iraq. The roots of the Abu Ghraib

scandal therefore lie not in the criminal inclinations

of a few army reservists, but in the reliance of George

Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the

use of coercion - and eye-for-an-eye retribution - in

fighting terrorism. ____

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

. This is an edited extract from Chain of Command: The

Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, by Seymour M Hersh,

published today by Penguin Press.

[torn asunder]

dood, any chance you could just link all these articles!? those are some of the longest damn posts i think i've ever seen on here!!

[Steven]

PH - Just because it was not documented does not mean it did not happen.

Second, When it comes to war, there is no ethics or morals, it's either you or them. You should talk to a few vets, it may open your eyes. My father was in Nam and the stories he told me were quite disturbing. Also if you ever get a chance, look up what tunnel rats were in Vietnam. When you do that kind of job there is no morals or ethics. The only thing that matters is the achievement of the Mission.

there is alot of truth to this post right here.

[Steven]

All information available shows that the United States did not torture prior to George Bush's presidency. In fact, physical evidence has proven that the torture program was directed by and began with George Bush. The president, although he denied the program existed at first, when it went to the courts, only offered that he felt that the techniques used were not torture. I'm sure somewhere random Bush loving is appreciated, but the idea that torture was something we always had is not even one the President has taken in his own defense. Instead, he sought to redefine torture. -It is an Interesting conspiracy theory, but unfortunately, one given no foundation.

Secondly, not all people captured and tortured have been terrorists, some have been completely innocent, some private citizens of our country or our allies...so unless you're asserting that all Arabs or Muslims deserve to be punished for their heritage, it's not logical. Whether by tribunal or not, coerced admissions are not acceptable, on our soil, and 'our soil' is what's most relevant through all this.

Last note:

We're meant to be fighting this war for moral and ethical purposes...in fact, it was said to us by the President that we're in a war for "civilization itself". If we're not any different than our enemy morally and ethically, that is if we are uncivilized, then why are we in the war we are in?

this is really, amazing - that you would buy into this.

But - you cite all "available" information. So I suppose there is a deggree of safety in your argument.

It does however fly in the face of veterans who have worked in places such as Laos, Vietnam, Central America, etc. I'm a vet. No, I've neve been in a situation where torture took place. But I do beleive, absolutely, what I've been told by other Vets about their tours. I trust that a lot more than I trust what the press has allegedly revealed.

I understand and can appreciate yrou points about torture. I dont neccesarily agree with all of them, but I can appreciate them. But I do think that what seems to be your adherence to "fact" that torture by military and other government agencies did not take place until the Bush Adminsitration (either bush) came to power is difficult to accept.

[Paper Hearts]

Are you attempting to debunk General Taguba?

Because many vets disagree with you, several of them in our goverment. I understand what you are saying, but state sanctioned needless torture did not exist before George W Bush in the US. It's illegal both nationally and internationally and has been for decades.

Of course all this is based on real information rather than hazy emotions, so it may not be true...

[Steven]

Are you attempting to debunk General Taguba?

Because many vets disagree with you, several of them in our goverment. I understand what you are saying, but state sanctioned needless torture did not exist before George W Bush in the US. It's illegal both nationally and internationally and has been for decades.

Of course all this is based on real information rather than hazy emotions, so it may not be true...

a couple of things:

First: I'll concede your argument on "sanctioned".

But I'd like to suggest to you that at least to me - it does not remain clear that this is what your specifically alluding to. After reading thru your posts (some of which are just way tooooooooooo long Bud) I come away with the feeling that you are talking about the practice in and of itself - of torture - manifesting as a trend per se - only within the Bush administration. I feel like were (meaning everyone) arguing potatoe poTAHtoe on the definitions of sanctions and absolute policy when it comes to this administration.

and Next: I dont like the way you flippantly disregard other experiences. You have a tendency to deliver your opposing points of view with a great deal of sarcasm in how you reduce the opposing argument as not being real or havng any TRUE merit. Not only is that innacurate, it makes you sound demanding and almost pouty. Check your closing line for an example. Many vets also disagree with YOU Paperhearts. But its not cool for me to try to dismiss you as irrelevant. I would agree that many vets disagree with me. That's ok. Vet's should, respect other vets. People should as well.

[pharoh]

well said steven, sorry been out of the loop for abit

[Paper Hearts]

a couple of things:

First: I'll concede your argument on "sanctioned".

But I'd like to suggest to you that at least to me - it does not remain clear that this is what your specifically alluding to. After reading thru your posts (some of which are just way tooooooooooo long Bud) I come away with the feeling that you are talking about the practice in and of itself - of torture - manifesting as a trend per se - only within the Bush administration. I feel like were (meaning everyone) arguing potatoe poTAHtoe on the definitions of sanctions and absolute policy when it comes to this administration.

and Next: I dont like the way you flippantly disregard other experiences. You have a tendency to deliver your opposing points of view with a great deal of sarcasm in how you reduce the opposing argument as not being real or havng any TRUE merit. Not only is that innacurate, it makes you sound demanding and almost pouty. Check your closing line for an example. Many vets also disagree with YOU Paperhearts. But its not cool for me to try to dismiss you as irrelevant. I would agree that many vets disagree with me. That's ok. Vet's should, respect other vets. People should as well.

In fairness, I've cited the president's defense without assumptions or speculations as to their validity and done so without second guessing his motivations. I've cited official investigations on Bush's torture program. I've cited text from secret administration memos that clearly show that such a program was not a part of anything previous. I've cited FBI, CIA and MI testimony. I've shown fairly common articles on the matter, some of which come from sources labeled conservative media. And I've also posted two pieces by Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the MiLai massacre story, perhaps the best regarded American investigative journalist, internationally. I've even listed republican government members who oppose the president's handling of detainees.

If I sounded sarcastic, it's because at the start of all this I was being talked to like I was just some crazy hippy who had some wild conspiracy theory about the government because it was cool to do so. As it turns out, it's not my perspective that comes from some vague feeling, and it's not me who holds inexplicable opinions on the president for the sake of opinion, but you. It's like at first you say to give you something factual because what I think doesn't matter...and then when I do, you seem to say to me give me something fabricated because facts mean nothing.

~Which is fine. But please realize that for the integrity of the debate I have a responsibility to neglect what is emotion. And I've been doing that from the start. I’ve ignored my own at least on par with everyone else’s, if not more.

[cptdeath]

i have some experience in this feild. i had some bad experiences right.

i don't condone tourture in any way. i don't aprove of any sadistic behavior. in fact when i witness such behavior i feel a sense of rage consume my mind. i either grow instantly cold or out of my mind pissed off. i couldn't tell you wich is more dangerous. i don't like to talk about it.

don't tourture anybody or anything. i don't even like animals that are unaturaly cruel i hate lions when they eat they start at the crotch an genatilia of the live animal. it makes me want to shoot them all when i see it.

tourture is something you never want to experience on either side. i oppose it

[Paper Hearts]

More:

It's difficult to tolerate, especially when talking about an issue so serious, people who only have 'feelings' yet offer a take, none the less. It's just beneath me to debate with "Bush good--everyone else bad". Probably, you'll stick with your feelings in the face of facts...but here's a few more 'in additions':

What international treaties govern torture?

The United States is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. Geneva Convention III, adopted Aug. 12, 1949, prohibits mistreatment of prisoners of war, and Geneva Convention IV, also adopted Aug. 12, 1949, protects civilian populations in times of war.

In 1994, the U.S. also adopted the U.N. Convention against Torture, which defines torture as "any act by which severe pain, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted" to gain information, extract a confession, or as punishment. In addition, it requires state signatories to prevent acts of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/06/...in1976599.shtml

http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/07/19/usint13767.htm

http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/09/09/usint14163.htm

[Vater Araignee]

I also want to point out that by what seems to be a a fairly popular stretch in understanding on the part of the Bush Administration that the United States is an illegitimate country. -Because many of our troops in our revolution didn't have uniforms either. It's just wrong to twist the interpretation that way unless you have amnesia...and I wouldn't estimate he has.

PART I

GENERAL PROVISIONS

Article 2

In addition to the provisions which shall be implemented in peace time, the present Convention shall apply to all cases of declared war or of any other armed conflict which may arise between two or more of the Parties, even if the state of war is not recognized by one of them.

Article 4

A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:

1. Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.

2. Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:

(a) That of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;

(b) That of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;

© That of carrying arms openly;

(d) That of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

If my memory serves me then our revolutionaries did follow a, b and c and then when you consider that the ununiformed where mixed with the uniformed it served it's purpose but oh wait hold on the laws that we are talking about didn't exist back then, I guess that means that they where visionaries.

Main Entry: uniform

Function: noun

: dress of a distinctive design or fashion worn by members of a particular group and serving as a means of identification; broadly : distinctive or characteristic clothing.

This can be as simple as an arm band.

Oh btw please stop calling Middle Easterners, Arabs I'm positive that an Arabian wouldn't like it if you called a Iranian, Iraqi, Pakistani etc. etc. that. plus it is just racist and rude.