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| New Article by Seymour Hersh About the Interrogation Scandal |
| 2004-05-11 |
| .... 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 âat least five hundred dollars and demoted in rank,â the newspaper said. .... .... 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. .... 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 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. .... 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. .... ... many senior generals believe that, along with the civilians in Rumsfeldâs 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. ... Secrecy and wishful thinking, the Pentagon official said, are defining characteristics of Rumsfeldâs Pentagon, and shaped its response to the reports from Abu Ghraib. .... The Pentagonâs 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 Americaâs treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said in early 2002, amounted to âisolated pockets of international hyperventilation.â 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. âThis is a fight for intelligence,â Brigadier General Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, told a reporter at a Baghdad press briefing in November. ..... 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. âDetention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation . . . to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence,â 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, âeffectively 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.â .... Taguba noted that Millerâs recommendations âappear to be in conflictâ 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, Millerâs recommendations and Sanchezâs 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 âeither directly or indirectly responsibleâ 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. âWe have changed thisâtrust us,â Miller told reporters in early May. âThere were errors made. We have corrected those. We will make sure that they do not happen again.â Military-intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib repeatedly wore âsterile,â or unmarked, uniforms or civilian clothes while on duty. âYou couldnât tell them apart,â 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. .... 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. .... 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 prisonersâthe suspected insurgency members deemed to be High Value Detainees â 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. âI said, âNo, we will not do that,ââ the captain said. .... The M.I. officer took the request to the captainâs commander, but, the captain said, âhe backed me up. Itâs all about people. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were failed by their commandersâboth low-ranking and high,â the captain said. âThe system is brokenâno doubt about it. But the Army is made up of people, and weâve got to depend on them to do the right thing.â In his report, Taguba strongly suggested that there was a link between the interrogation process in Afghanistan and the abuses at Abu Ghraib. .... 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 âblindfolded Mr. Lindh, and took several pictures of Mr. Lindh and themselves with Mr. Lindh. In one, the soldiers scrawled âshitheadâ across Mr. Lindhâs blindfold and posed with him. . . . Another told Mr. Lindh that he was âgoing to hangâ for his actions and that after he was dead, the soldiers would sell the photographs and give the money to a Christian organization.â 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, âmilitary personnel photographed Mr. Lindh as he lay on the stretcher.â 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, âthe Department of Defense insisted that we state that there was âno deliberateâ mistreatment of John.â His client agreed to do so, but, the attorney noted, âAgainst that, you have that photograph of a naked John on that stretcher.â 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. .... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #5 Recently listened to some Ranger training stories involving long marches, no sleep and cold... having to "cuddle" with "Sgt. Rock" to make it through the night. When the question of "Did you think you were ready to quit?" came up, the response was "Hell NO... I thought they (instructors) might kill me with the cold, but quitting after all that effort was not even in my mind." I was pretty awed by that distinction and really glad, mostly proud, they are on our side. |
| Posted by: Capsu78 2004-05-11 11:07:39 AM |
| #4 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. Clearly Centcom should have issued a book-length, over-wrought press release! |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-05-11 7:08:43 AM |
| #3 I deplore those who would say that torture is tough love. Torture is not tough love. Tough love is not torture. I deplore torture even if it is done in the name of tough love. If the American people can't understand my thinking, they can all go to hell. And don't question my resolve to kiss Saudi butt every chance I get. |
| Posted by: George Wahabi Bush 2004-05-11 3:20:21 AM |
| #2 In all the hoopla, I have yet to see a clear statement from any of the brass concerning what is allowed in relation to deliberately depriving interrogation suspects of sleep, or warmth, or clothing, or food. Depriving someone of sleep for 24 hours will probably not permanently harm him. Depriving him of sleep for 10 days will undoubtedly kill him. So - where do you draw the line? 30 hours, 60 hours, 110 hours? Where does "professionally handled disorientation" turn into "abusive torture"? If you take a prisoner in shorts and a T-shirt, and lock him up in a holding cage, with no warmth - to "soften him up" - where does "prfessional pre-interogation stress" turn into "abusive neglect"? At 20 degrees C for six hours? At 15 degrees C for 20 hours? At -5 degrrees C for a week? At 20 degrees C soaking wet, with a fan blowing? I remember going through SERE training at Ranger School in 1976 - as a POW in a mock POW camp, run by Ranger Instructors (RI's). No permanent damage - but I'll tell you, that being beaten with a wet towel on the back and buttocks and legs - by a 250 lb Fijian RI - for about 30 strokes, with vigorous effort - that was about the worst beating I've ever received - and it was simply as part of training. Well, I wouldn't take money to go back to that again - but it was part of the training, to prepare for fighting. Navy SEAL trainees shivering in the cold, early- morning surf at Coronado aren't having much fun either - and it doesn't matter if you are SGT Rock, or how tough you are - when hypothermia is half killing you, only the grit in your soul keeps you going. I remember crawling back and forth through the Ranger School "worm pits" at 3:00 am - and 4:00 am and 5:00 am. 'Not something I'd do to a POW under my control. But I understand the purpose, in the Ranger School context. So - can prisoner detainees be exposed to the same conditions that we purposefully inflict upon our own elite trainees? I think that until someone comes out with a REALLY clean standard for what is acceptable, in terms of "softening up" detainees ahead of interrogation, the situation will never be corrected. It takes balls to simply be the top guy, set clear rules, and then demand compliance. It is cowardly leaders who simply mumble about it being the "repsonsibility of military intelligence" managers - or whatever. The last thing you do as a member of the chain-of-command is to simply delegate all authority down to the lowest joe (or jane) tentpeg, and let them decide how far to go in "softening up" prisoners. I don't have all that much sympathy for the "abused" detainees - my guess is that they ones we've seen in the photos weren't very nice people, and probably deserved worse than they got. But - I also understand that a leader can't maintain military discipline if he defers to "law of the jungle" between restrained prisoners and bullying guards. |
| Posted by: Lone Ranger 2004-05-11 2:54:50 AM |
| #1 "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 Americaâs treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said in early 2002, amounted to âisolated pockets of international hyperventilation.â " Really Seymour? Then why not include quotes of Rumsfeld publicly disdaining the Geneva Convention. Should be very easy. Do a Google. I did and I can't find squat. Please provide supporting quotes. "The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process." No kidding? The photograph of Johnny Taliban? That came from CNN! Jeezus. See Hersch can't confine himself to real incidents of abuse. Doing that wouldn't "widen" the story, which he MUST do to keep it alive. So he throws in an anecdote about how bad it was to keep prisoners up awake until they talked. The horror! |
| Posted by: RMcLeod 2004-05-11 2:20:39 AM |