War Without End

Alpha

Forwarded:

Pretty sickening. John Ashcroft REFUSED to give Congress the memos.

How do you like that? We can REFUSE the people now.

Religious GESTAPO is what we have at the Justice Dept.

Interrogation abuses were 'approved at highest levels'
By Julian Coman in Washington
(Filed: 13/06/2004)

New evidence that the physical abuse of detainees in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay was authorised at the top of the Bush administration will emerge in Washington this week, adding further to pressure on the White House.

The Telegraph understands that four confidential Red Cross documents implicating senior Pentagon civilians in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been passed to an American television network, which is preparing to make them public shortly.

According to lawyers familiar with the Red Cross reports, they will contradict previous testimony by senior Pentagon officials who have claimed that the abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison was an isolated incident.

"There are some extremely damaging documents around, which link senior figures to the abuses," said Scott Horton, the former chairman of the New York Bar Association, who has been advising Pentagon lawyers unhappy at the administration's approach. "The biggest bombs in this case have yet to be dropped."

A string of leaked government memos over the past few days has revealed that President George W Bush was advised by Justice Department officials and the White House lawyer, Alberto Gonzalez, that Geneva Conventions on torture did not apply to "unlawful combatants", captured during the war on terror.

Members of Congress are now demanding access to all White House memos on interrogation techniques, a request so far refused by the United States attorney-general, John Ashcroft.

As the growing scandal threatens to undermine President Bush's re-election campaign, senior aides have acknowledged for the first time that the abuse of detainees can no longer be presented as the isolated acts of a handful of soldiers at the Abu Ghraib.

"It's now clear to everyone that there was a debate in the administration about how far interrogators could go," said a legal adviser to the Pentagon. "And the answer they came up with was 'pretty far'. Now that it's in the open, the administration is having to change that answer somewhat."

In the latest revelation, yesterday's Washington Post published leaked documents revealing that Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US officer in Iraq, approved the use of dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns and sensory deprivation for prisoners whenever senior officials at the Abu Ghraib jail wished. A memo dated October 9, 2003 on "Interrogation Rules of Engagement", which each military intelligence officer was obliged to sign, set out in detail the wide range of pressure tactics they could use - including stress positions and solitary confinement for more than 30 days.

The White House has ordered a damage-limitation exercise to try to prevent the abuse row undermining President Bush's re-election campaign. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, has ordered that all deaths of detainees held in US military custody are to be reported immediately to criminal investigators. Deaths in custody will also be reported to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, and to Mr Rumsfeld himself.

The Pentagon has also announced an investigation into the condition of inmates at Guantanamo Bay, where more than 600 prisoners suspected of links with al-Qaeda are being held. The inquiry will be led by Vice-Adml Albert Church, who has been ordered to investigate reports that extreme interrogation techniques "migrated" from Guantanamo to Iraq. "This is not going to be a whitewash," said the Pentagon adviser. "The administration is finally realising how damaging this scandal could become."

A new investigator has also been appointed to lead the inquiry into abuse at Abu Ghraib. Gen George Fay, a two-star general, will be replaced by a more senior officer. Gen Fay, according to US military convention, did not have the authority to question his superiors. His replacement indicates that the Abu Ghraib inquiry will now go far beyond the activities of the seven military police personnel accused of mistreating Iraqi detainees.

Legal and constitutional experts have expressed astonishment at the judgments made by administration lawyers on interrogation techniques. In one memo, written in January 2002, Mr Gonzalez told President Bush that the nature of the war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions".

Scott Silliman, a former US air force lawyer and the director of the Centre for Law Ethics and National Security at Duke University, said: "What you have is a culture of avoidance of law rather than compliance with it."

A separate memo, written by Pentagon lawyers in March 2003, stated that "the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental is insufficient to amount to torture. [The pain] must be of such a high level of intensity that it is difficult for the subject to endure".

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Intel Firm Responds to Signal Coverage:

http://www.scvhistory.com/scvhistory/signal/iraq/

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More apparent setting up Sanchez to take the fall for the neocons at the Pentagon (and perhaps for President Bush as well based on at least one memo involved White House Counsel Al Gonzales).

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biz/e_friend.php3?goto=%2Fusnews%2Fissue%2F040621%2Fusnews%2F21abughraib.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55703-2004May25?language=printer

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Secret documents show that US interrogators are above the law
Richard Norton-Taylor
Saturday June 12, 2004
The Guardian

On the stage of a London theater on Thursday night, a lawyer held up an official US document, classified by Donald Rumsfeld as "secret" and "not for foreign eyes". Considering its contents, the document has attracted remarkably little attention here since it was leaked this week to the US media. Its significance was raised by Clive Stafford-Smith, director of the US-based group Justice in Exile, at the end of a performance of Guantanamo, the Tricycle Theater's moving indictment of how the US rounded up detainees -- or "unlawful combatants", as it calls them -- and sent them to the US base in Cuba.

Stafford-Smith is acting for some of the Guantanamo prisoners, challenging the conditions in which they are being held. The US Supreme Court is expected to give its ruling before the end of this month. Rumsfeld's classified document, drawn up by US government lawyers, bears directly on the case. It argues that American interrogators can ignore US domestic law banning torture, because it would restrict the president's powers in his "war on terror".

The document, drawn up last year, says that "criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president's ultimate authority" over "the conduct of war". It adds: "In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign, [the prohibition of torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogators undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority".

Constitutionally, America's founding fathers entrusted the president with the primary responsibility, and therefore the power, to ensure the security of the US in situations of "grave and unforeseen emergencies". It goes on: "Numerous presidents have ordered the capture, detention, and questioning of enemy combatants during virtually every major conflict in the nation's history, including recent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf". And it continues: "Congress can no more interfere with the president's conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategy or tactical decisions on the battlefield."

The lengths to which Rumsfeld's lawyers are prepared to go to protect the freedom of the president's agents and place them above the law are reflected in other passages.

The document states that US interrogators can use harsh measures as long as they were not "specifically intended" to inflict "severe mental pain or suffering". In another passage, it says that even if an interrogator "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent."

Interrogators can appeal to the defense of "necessity" -- in other words, they can argue that torturing individuals is needed to prevent greater harm or evil such as threats to the safety of the nation. And the concept of "self-defense" is given the widest possible interpretation, referring to the nation rather than any individual.

The document, on the face of it, is a charter allowing the US president to abuse human rights and ignore domestic as well as international law.

Stafford-Smith yesterday pointed to what he called its most outrageous argument -- namely, that domestic law does not apply to actions inside the US. Torture can be committed inside the US.

The Pentagon's lawyers describe Guantanamo Bay as "included within the definition of the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the US and accordingly is within the US". They add: "Thus, the torture statute does not apply to the conduct of US personnel" at Guantanamo Bay.

The apparent non sequitur is based on the argument that the statute is confined to actions outside the US - in other words, that torture is not banned within the US. Yet this directly contradicts claims made by other US government lawyers who insist Guantanamo Bay detainees have no rights under US law. The naval base, they insist, is not US sovereign territory so the detainees do not have such basic rights as access to a fair trial.

The issue is now before the US Supreme Court. If the detainees win this argument, it could lead the way to at least some kind of judicial process, including the testing of evidence. But whatever Guantanamo Bay's territorial status, according to the Rumsfeld document, detainees there and anywhere else can be tortured at will in Bush's global "war" on terrorism.

"The authorization I issued was that anything we did would conform to US laws and would be consistent with international treaty obligations," Bush said this week. Little comfort there.

T Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian's security affairs editor

richard.norton-taylor@guardian.co.uk

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

General Granted Latitude At Prison
Abu Ghraib Used Aggressive Tactics
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, June 12, 2004; Page A01

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq,
borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used
at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved
letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature
extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of
bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly
obtained documents.

The U.S. policy, details of which have not been previously disclosed, was
approved in early September, shortly after an Army general sent from
Washington completed his inspection of the Abu Ghraib jail and then
returned to brief Pentagon officials on his ideas for using military
police there to help implement the new high-pressure methods.

The documents obtained by The Washington Post spell out in greater detail
than previously known the interrogation tactics Sanchez authorized, and
make clear for the first time that, before last October, they could be
imposed without first seeking the approval of anyone outside the prison.
That gave officers at Abu Ghraib wide latitude in handling detainees.

Unnamed officials at the Florida headquarters of the U.S. Central
Command, which has overall military responsibility for Iraq, objected to
some of the 32 interrogation tactics approved by Sanchez in September,
including the more severe methods that he had said could be used at any
time in Abu Ghraib with the consent of the interrogation officer in charge.

As a result, Sanchez decided on Oct. 12 to remove several items on the
list and to require that prison officials obtain his direct approval for
the remaining high-pressure methods. Among the tactics apparently dropped
were those that would take away prisoners' religious items; control their
exposure to light; inflict "pride and ego down," which means attacking
detainees' sense of pride or worth; and allow interrogators to pretend
falsely to be from a country that deals severely with detainees,
according to the documents.

The high-pressure options that remained included taking someone to a less
hospitable location for interrogation; manipulating his or her diet;
imposing isolation for more than 30 days; using military dogs to provoke
fear; and requiring someone to maintain a "stress position" for as long
as 45 minutes. These were not dropped by Sanchez until a scandal erupted
in May over photographs depicting abuse at the prison.

The Army has never said whether any of the particularly tough tactics
that were authorized were used on detainees at Abu Ghraib or the other
U.S.-run detention camps in Iraq before October, in the five-month period
after the end of major combat operations in May 2003.

Officials have said that Sanchez approved the use of only one of the more
severe techniques -- long-term isolation -- on 25 occasions after Oct. 12
and before the third set of rules was issued this May. The officials have
described the abusive acts committed by Army personnel at Abu Ghraib
before and during this time as aberrant activities conducted outside the
rules.

One of the documents, an Oct. 9 memorandum on "Interrogation Rules of
Engagement," which each military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib was
asked to sign, sets out in detail the wide range of pressure tactics
approved in September and available before the rules were changed on Oct.
12. They included methods that were close to some of the behavior
criticized this March by the Army's own investigator, who said he found
evidence of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuse" at the prison.

The document states that the list of tactics in the memorandum is derived
from a Sept. 10, 2003, "Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy"
approved by Combined Joint Task Force-7, which Sanchez directs. While the
document states that "at no time will detainees be treated inhumanely nor
maliciously humiliated," it permits the use of yelling, loud music, a
reduction of heat in winter and air conditioning in summer, and "stress
positions" for as long as 45 minutes every four hours -- all without
first gaining the permission of anyone more senior than the
"interrogation officer in charge" at Abu Ghraib.

Although the October document calls attention to the strictures of the
Uniform Code of Military Justice, it neither quotes from that statute nor
makes any reference to the Geneva Conventions' rules against cruelty and
torture involving detainees.

Wendy Patten, a lawyer and U.S. advocacy director for Human Rights Watch,
said two provisions in the Oct. 9 document are particularly troubling.
First, she noted its reference to "dietary manipulation -- minimum bread
and water, monitored by medics" as a technique permitted with the
approval of the interrogation officer in charge. "This seems a clear
violation of the Geneva Conventions, which require daily food rations to
have enough quantity, quality and variety to maintain good health,
prevent weight loss and prevent nutritional deficiencies," Patten said.

She also expressed concern about the policy's blanket approval of
"incentive item removal -- regarding religious items" as a tactic that
may be used on civilian detainees, which she said appears to conflict
with a Geneva Conventions requirement that detainees enjoy "complete
latitude in the exercise of their religious duties."

Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman did not defend these tactics.
He said "there are a number of investigations that are looking not only
into interrogation procedures and processes, but how they were
implemented. The baseline standard for all interrogation as well as the
security procedures for holding detainees has always been humane treatment."

The list of interrogation options in the document closely matches a menu
of options developed for use on detainees held by the U.S. military at
Guantanamo Bay and approved in a series of memos signed by top Pentagon
officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. In January
2002, for example, Rumsfeld approved the use of dogs to intimidate
prisoners there; although officials have said dogs were never used at
Guantanamo, they were used at Abu Ghraib.

Then, in April 2003, Rumsfeld approved the use in Guantanamo of at least
five other high-pressure techniques also listed on the Oct. 9 Abu Ghraib
memo, none of which was among the Army's standard interrogation methods.
This overlap existed even though detainees in Iraq were covered,
according to the administration's policy, by Geneva Convention
protections that did not apply to the detainees in Cuba.

The documents obtained by The Post, which include memos from Abu Ghraib
and statements made by prison officials for the Army's investigation,
make clear that this overlap was no accident. No formalized rules for
interrogation existed in Iraq before the policy imposed on Sept. 10, one
day after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller -- who was then in charge of the
Guantanamo site -- departed from Iraq. He was accompanied on the Iraq
visit by at least 11 senior aides from Guantanamo, including officials
from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency.

While that list of options was subsequently truncated on Oct. 12, some
military personnel at the jail told Army investigators that they lacked
awareness or understanding of the changes.

For example, Spec. Luciana Spencer, a member of the 66th Military
Intelligence Group who was removed from interrogations because she had
ordered a detainee to walk naked to his cell after an interview, told
investigators that the military police did not know their boundaries.
"When I began working the night shift I discussed with the MPs what their
SOP [standard operating procedure] was for detainee treatment," Spencer
said in a statement. "They informed me they had no SOP. I informed them
of my IROE [interrogation rules of engagement] and made clear to them
what I was and wasn't allowed to do or see."

A civilian contractor, Adel Nakhla, an interpreter for military
intelligence, told investigators he was briefed on interrogation rules
only after being implicated in an abusive event.

Yelling at detainees, a technique approved in September that appears to
have been dropped in October, was nonetheless used throughout the last
quarter of 2003, Army investigators were told. "It's not common but it
happens sometimes," Roman Krol, a military intelligence interrogator,
told investigators on Jan. 31. "We asked them [military police] if they
could come in and randomly yell at the detainee."

Moreover, when intelligence officers arranged for military police to help
impose some of the more severe tactics, they often failed to specify how
to do so, leaving wide latitude for potentially abusive behavior. Steven
Anthony Stefanowicz, a civilian interrogator at Abu Ghraib, said, for
example, that "the MPs are allowed to do what is necessary to keep the
detainee awake in the allotted period of time. . . . I've referred to the
MPs to give the detainee his special treatment . . . hence the MPs are
not directed when and how this is to be administered."

Capt. Donald J. Reese, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company who
assigned MPs to work in the isolation tiers, told investigators "it
appeared that the MI [military intelligence] tactics were very aggressive
and then appeared to taper in intensity as time went along."

But the atmosphere at Abu Ghraib was hardly one of strict adherence to
the rules, other officials said. A photograph of the pyramid of naked
Iraqi detainees -- one of the most notorious portraits of abuse -- was
used as a screen saver on a computer in the isolation area where
intelligence officers worked, according to Spencer's statement.

Some of the rules for U.S. military personnel at the prison made it easy
for people to duck responsibility for their actions, a factor that may
also have opened the door to abuse.

The acronym MI "will not be used in the area," according to an undated
prison memo titled "Operational Guidelines," which covered the
high-security cellblock. "Additionally, it is recommended that all
military personnel in the segregation area reduce knowledge of their true
identities to these specialized detainees. The use of sterilized uniforms
is highly suggested and personnel should NOT address each other by true
name and rank in the segregation area."

Other articles appear at the following URLs:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/05/26/fisk-israeli-mossad-shin-bet-associated-with-prison-torture.php

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/06/11/torture-neocons.php

Alpha · Posted: Sun Jun 13, 2004 9:46 pm Post subject: Gen. Sanchez OKed torture

Subj: Gen. Sanchez OKed torture
Date: 6/13/04 2:15:47 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: LAdams

Subj: N&V Lt. Gen. Sanchez Granted ordered permission to torture
Date: 6/13/04 1:21:41 PM Central Daylight Time
From: dick_mcmanus@msn.com (Dick McManus)

News and Views you don't have to lose:

Lt. Gen. Sanchez Granted ordered permission to torture

The documents obtained by The Washington Post spell out in greater detail interrogation tactics Sanchez authorized, and make clear for the first time that, that interrogators (or MPs) could be imposed (torture EPOWs) without first seeking the approval of anyone outside the prison. That gave officers at Abu Ghraib wide latitude in handling detainees. Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, is the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq.

These interrogation tactics, listed as Interrogation Rules of Engagement, were the use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents.

The list of interrogation options in the document closely matches a menu of options developed for use on detainees held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay and approved in a series of memos signed by top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

In January 2002, for example, Rumsfeld approved the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners at Guantanamo; although officials have said dogs were never used. Dogs were used at Abu Ghraib.
Then, in April 2003, Rumsfeld approved the use in Guantanamo of at least five other high-pressure techniques also listed on the Oct. 9 Abu Ghraib memo, none of which was among the Army's standard interrogation methods. This overlap existed even though detainees in Iraq were covered, according to the administration's policy, by Geneva Convention protections that did not apply to the detainees in Cuba.
No formalized rules for interrogation existed in Iraq before the policy imposed on Sept. 10, one day after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller - who was then in charge of the Guantanamo site - departed from Iraq. He was accompanied on the Iraq visit by at least 11 senior aides from Guantanamo, including officials from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency
Unnamed officials at the Florida headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, which has overall military responsibility for Iraq, objected to some of the 32 interrogation tactics approved by Sanchez in September (2003), including the more severe methods that he had said could be used at any time in Abu Ghraib with the consent of the interrogation officer in charge.
As a result, Sanchez decided on Oct. 12 to remove several items on the list and to require that prison officials obtain his direct approval for the remaining high-pressure methods. Among the tactics apparently dropped were those that would take away prisoners' religious items; and control their exposure to light according to the documents.
The high-pressure options that remained included taking someone to a less hospitable location for interrogation; manipulating his or her diet; imposing isolation for more than 30 days; using military dogs to provoke fear; and requiring someone to maintain a "stress position" for as long as 45 minutes. These were not dropped by Sanchez until a scandal erupted in May (2004) over photographs depicting abuse at the prison.
Geneva Conventions requirement that detainees enjoy "complete latitude in the exercise of their religious duties."
The Oct. 9 document are particularly troubling. First, she noted its reference to "dietary manipulation - minimum bread and water, monitored by medics" as a technique permitted with the approval of the interrogation officer in charge. "This seems a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, which require daily food rations to have enough quantity, quality and variety to maintain good health, prevent weight loss and prevent nutritional deficiencies,"
Comment: I bet these documents noted above were leaked by Major Gen. Fay. Maj. Gen. George Fay, the No. 2 in Army Military Intelligence, is in charge of the probe into whether his own intel officers directed the MPs to abuse prisoners. Because Fay was appointed by Iraq commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, he is also effectively limited from taking his probe beyond Sanchez's command, says Scott Silliman, a former Air Force lawyer who is now a law professor at Duke. "It would be difficult for Fay even to question Sanchez," says Silliman. (A two star can not interview a three star).
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/061304A.shtml

U.S. Wrongly Reported Drop in World Terrorism
By The Associated Press
Friday 11 June 2004 Washington - The State Department acknowledged Thursday that it was wrong in reporting that terrorism declined worldwide last year, a finding the Bush administration had pointed to as evidence of its success in countering terror. Instead, the number of incidents and the toll in victims increased sharply, the department said.
Comments: More lies from Bush and the boys. What else is new?
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/061304I.shtml
Book review:
Big Bush Lies edited by Jerry "Politex" Barrett is a compilation of 20
essays identifying the lies (fib is too mild a term) told directly by
George Bush about current issues that impact our nation and the world.
This book is now at Barnes & Noble stores.
Source: Sara DeHart dehart.ss@verizon.net

Alpha · Last edited by Alpha on Tue Jun 15, 2004 10:32 pm; edited 1 time in total

Subj: Seymour Hersh is Frightened According to this Email
Date: 6/15/04 2:31:20 PM Pacific Daylight Time

From: shniad@sfu.ca

Sent: Monday, June 14, 2004 4:48 PM

Subject: Seymour Hersh's comments at the University of Chicago

From Shniad: Torture and rumors of torture. In my email inbox this morning...

If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush

administration is worse than I had imagined--even though I thought

I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always

worse than one imagines. Either Seymour Hersh is insane, or we have

an administration that needs to be removed from office not later than

the close of business today. The scariest part: "[Hersh] said he had seen

all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...'

then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women

prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened.

From a student who attended:
Seymour Hersh spoke... at the University of Chicago.... I took some

scattered notes. The remarks will be disjointed--as will be the notes-

but chilling. He asserted several things that he says he didn't have

nailed down enough to write, but that he was confident of....

He then turned to the 40th president, referring obliquely to 138 names,

then began to list them, saying those with long memories will catch on:

they were the Reagan administration figures accused, indicted, or

convicted of wrongdoing....

He talked about Carl Levin (though he didn't use his name) telling him

about high officials lying to him in closed hearings, and how frustrating

to be lied to, in classified settings, when the liars know the senators know

they are lying. Levin said he'd never seen such brazenness in Washington....

He waits after the My Lai story broke mid November 1969, one week, two

weeks- then, by Thanksgiving 1969, other correspondents finally write about

the atrocities THEY had seen in Vietnam: an outpouring that made him feel

strange that it took little old him, the police reporter who had flunked out

of law school, 11 years after winning his B.A. in English, to unleash this

outpouring of truth....

From My Lai, the transition to the current scandals was seemless. He

connected the dots, and spoke of the CIA secret prisons we haven't heard

about yet: "We're basically in the disappearing business." He made the first

of several criticisms of our humble profession: "there's no learning curve

in America. There's no learning curve in the press corps."...

Unsurprisingly, he flagged the extraordinary importance of the WSJ memo

revealing the government's plans to torture, including its assertion that

it's not against the law if the president approves it, and mocked the New

York Times headline "9 Militias Are Said to Approve a Deal to Disband,"

suggesting in its stead, "Bush Administration Offers Hoax in Hopes of

Convincing U.S. There's Some Peace." His assessment of the postwar

settlement: "It's going to come down to who has the biggest militia will

win."...

Then a story from one of his intelligence sources, whom Hersh says

didn't find it an unflattering story: some time in 1986 or 1987, Reagan

was given a long chart presentation of what actually happened with Iran/

Contra and began sleeping five minutes in to it, then snoring on Nancy's

shoulder. After twenty minutes it was over, the helicopter was fired up for

the Friday trip to Camp David, Nancy aroused him, he awoke with a start,

glanced at the charts, and asked, "What's that." Sy said something like

"That's MY Ronald Reagan."...

"NATO's falling apart in Afghanistan now."

And this was one of the most stunning parts. He had just returned from

Europe, and he said high officials, even foreign ministers, who used to

only talk to him off the record or give him backchannel messages, were

speaking on the record that the next time the U.S. comes to them with

intelligence, they'll simply have no reason to believe it.... He lamented

of his journalistic colleagues, "I don't know whey they don't just tell it

like it is."...

He said the people most horrified by the way the war was planned were

The military commanders responsible for protecting their troops.... He

talked about the horror of the 1000 civilian deaths in Fallujah (but was

careful to note the Marines were doing their job, placing the blame with

their superiors)....

He talked about how hard it is to get the truth out in Republican

Washington: "If you agree with the neocons you're a genius. If you

disagree you're a traitor." Bush, he said, was closing ranks, purging

anyone who wasn't 100% with him. Said Tenet has a child in bad health,

has heart problems, and seemed to find him generally a decent guy under

unimaginable pressure, and that people told him that Tenet feared a heart

attack if he had to take one more grilling from Cheney. "When these guys

memoirs come out, it will shock all of us."...

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the

woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib

pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said,

"horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

He looked frightened.

Alpha

Justice Dept. Memo Says Torture 'May Be Justified'

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 13, 2004; 6:30 PM

Today washingtonpost.com is posting a copy of the Aug. 1, 2002, memorandum
(PDF) "Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C.
2340-2340A," from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for
Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to President Bush.

The memo was the focus of a recent article in The Washington Post.

The memo was written at the request of the CIA. The CIA wanted authority to
conduct more aggressive interrogations than were permitted prior to the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The interrogations were of suspected
al Qaeda members whom the CIA had apprehended outside the United States.
The CIA asked the White House for legal guidance. The White House asked the
Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for its legal opinion on the
standards of conduct under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
Inhumane and Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

The Office of Legal Counsel is the federal government's ultimate legal
adviser. The most significant and sensitive topics that the federal
government considers are often given to the OLC for review. In this case,
the memorandum was signed by Jay S. Bybee, the head of the office at the
time. Bybee's signature gives the document additional authority, making it
akin to a binding legal opinion on government policy on interrogations.
Bybee has since become a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Another memorandum, dated March 6, 2003, from a Defense Department working
group convened by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to come up with new
interrogation guidelines for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
incorporated much, but not all, of the legal thinking from the OLC memo.
The Wall Street Journal first published the March memo.

At a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, senators asked Attorney
General John D. Ashcroft to release both memos. Ashcroft said he would not
discuss the contents of the Justice and Pentagon memos or turn them over to
the committees. A transcript of that hearing is also available.

President Bush spoke on the issue of torture Thursday, saying he expected
U.S. authorities to abide by the law. He declined to say whether he
believes U.S. law prohibits torture. Here is a link to the transcript of
the president's press conference, which included questions and answers on
torture.

The Post deleted several lines from the memo that are not germane to the
legal arguments being made in it and that are the subject of further
reporting by The Post.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Alpha

Paul Bergrin (who is the attorney for MP Javal Davis) will be on '60 Minutes 2' this coming Wednesday (at 8 PM in most cities, by check your local listing to confirm) as he had an excellent interview with Dan Rather earlier today (Monday).

New Articles added to the following URL:

http://www.scvhistory.com/scvhistory/signal/iraq/

AP gets Stefanowicz testimony

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0614prisonabuse-contractor14-ON.html

t r u t h o u t - Another Eyewitness to Torture Comes Forward

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/061104B.shtml

Go to Original Calif. Guardsman Alleges Abuse in Iraq
The Associated Press Wednesday 09 June 2004 Click to view Leaked Torture Memo: Full Text San Francisco - A California National Guardsman says three fellow soldiers brazenly abused detainees during interrogation sessions in an Iraqi police station, threatening them with guns, sticking lit cigarettes in their ears and choking them until they collapsed. Sgt. Greg Ford said he repeatedly had to revive prisoners who had passed out, and once saw a soldier stand on the back of a handcuffed detainee's neck and pull his arms until they popped out of their sockets. "I had to intervene because they couldn't keep their hands off of them," said Ford, part of a four-member team from the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion that questioned detainees last year in Samarra, north of Baghdad. He said the abuse took place from April to June. Ford's commanding officers deny any abuse occurred, and say investigations within their battalion and by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division determined they had done nothing wrong. "All the allegations were found to be untrue, totally unfounded and in a number of cases completely fabricated," said the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Drew Ryan. Ford's allegations are being further investigated by the CID, which would not comment on the probe. Ford told The Associated Press that when he reported the problems last June to his commanding officers, they pressured him to drop his claims. "Immediately, within the same conversation, the command said, 'Nope, you're delusional, you're crazy, it never happened.' They gave me 30 seconds to withdraw my request for an investigation," Ford said. "I stood my ground." When he insisted on an official investigation, they ordered him to see combat stress counselors, who sent him out of Iraq, he said. Ford said he did not hear from investigators until the release of photographs of mistreatment inside the Abu Ghraib prison provoked worldwide outrage and prompted a review of other allegations of abuse. Ford, 49, said has worked for 18 years as a state prison guard and has more than 30 years of military experience. He was sent out of Iraq last June and, after about six months in Fort Lewis, Wash., returned home to the Sacramento suburb of Fair Oaks. He said his three fellow team members were not properly trained to do interrogations and got carried away with their power. "You weren't supposed to stand on their neck or put lit cigarettes in their ears. Twice I had to pull burning cigarettes out of detainees' ears," Ford said. "I said, 'Look, this is not going to go over well with the community of Samarra.' Our people basically ignored all the warnings." Ford said the soldiers routinely brought guns into the interrogation room, and he once saw his team leader pointing a pistol at a detainee's head. The three accused soldiers were not available for comment, a California National Guard spokesman said. Ford was one of about 100 members of the San Francisco-based 223rd who arrived in Iraq last spring and spread out in teams of three to six interrogators, Arabic linguists and counterintelligence officers. The battalion returned home in March. Whenever a prisoner collapsed, his team's leader would emerge and say, "Greg, I think we've got another accident," said Ford, who has medical training. "Then I'd have to bring them out and revive them." Ford said he told the team leader that if one of the Iraqis died, he would testify against him in a court-martial. "He basically laughed it off. At that point, I was persona non-grata," the sergeant said. So Ford asked to be relieved from his position, prompting a visit by his commander, Capt. Vic Artiga, and Lt. Col. Ryan, who "were too busy threatening me to do any proper investigation," Ford said. Ryan and Artiga would not discuss the details of Ford's allegations but denied pressuring Ford to drop his claims. They said they did an immediate investigation, which cleared all the soldiers. "I'm very confident that my soldiers acted professionally, ethically and within the law, as did I," Artiga said. But Ford said nobody interviewed him while he was in Iraq and he does not think anyone has interviewed the Iraqi detainees. Artiga also said he does not believe Iraqis were interviewed for the battalion's investigation. After leaving Iraq, Ford underwent psychiatric evaluations at military installations in Germany and San Antonio, and said those evaluations found nothing wrong with him.

Go to Original Higher-Ranking Officer Is Sought
to Lead the Abu Ghraib Inquiry
By Eric Schmitt
The New York Times Thursday 10 June 2004 Washington - The commander of American forces in the Middle East asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this week to replace the general investigating suspected abuses by military intelligence soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison with a more senior officer, a step that would allow the inquiry to reach into the military's highest ranks in Iraq, Pentagon officials said Wednesday. The request by the commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, comes amid increasing criticism from lawmakers and some military officers that the half dozen investigations into detainee abuse at the prison may end up scapegoating a handful of enlisted soldiers and leaving many senior officers unaccountable. General Abizaid's request, which defense officials said Mr. Rumsfeld would most likely approve, was set in motion in the last week when the current investigating officer, Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, told his superiors that he could not complete his inquiry without interviewing more senior-ranking officers, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq. But Army regulations prevent General Fay, a two-star general, from interviewing higher-ranking officers. So General Sanchez took the unusual step of asking to be removed as the reviewing authority for General Fay's report, and requesting that higher-ranking officers be appointed to conduct and review the investigation. "General Sanchez did this to ensure that there was a complete, thorough and transparent investigation that leaves no doubt as to the veracity of its findings," said Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman. Mr. Rumsfeld was expected to act on General Abizaid's request soon, Mr. Whitman said. It was unclear Wednesday night who would replace General Fay, who would almost certainly remain an important part of the inquiry that he has headed since his appointment on April 15. One possible candidate is Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the vice chief of staff of the Army, who is expected to replace General Sanchez in Iraq soon after the transfer of authority on June 30 to the new interim Iraqi government. It was unclear whether how this change might delay the delivery of the final report, which had been expected in early July. Some lawmakers have said they would delay their calls for an independent congressional investigation or one modeled after the inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, until General Fay's report was completed. The sudden turn of events in the investigation came as new details emerged about why General Fay in the last week or so requested and received a 30-day extension to complete his report. Within the last several days, an important figure in the inquiry who had previously refused to cooperate with Army investigators suddenly reversed his position and agreed to work much more closely with investigators, a senior Senate aide and a senior Pentagon official said. That important development prompted General Fay to send some of his 29-person team back into the field to conduct more interviews, the officials said. "A key witness, a key person who'd pled the military equivalent of the Fifth has changed his attitude, and Fay is reopening the investigation," the Senate official said. The officials said they did not know the identity of the witness. Mr. Rumsfeld's anticipated approval of General Abizaid's request would open the way for a new, senior Army investigator to question General Sanchez and other senior generals as part of a broad inquiry into questionable intelligence-gathering practices and procedures at the prison that may have contributed to the prisoner abuses. Senior Army officials insisted Wednesday night that General Sanchez was not a target of the investigation, and that he decided to recuse himself to dispel any perceptions of a conflict of interest. General Sanchez ordered the investigation that General Fay was eventually appointed to conduct. Among the biggest questions for General Sanchez will no doubt be his order last Nov. 19 that, according to another senior Army investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, put the military police at the prison effectively under the control of the military intelligence soldiers. As a result, military police officers have said they were encouraged by military intelligence soldiers to soften up detainees before the interrogations to elicit more information from them during the formal questioning. General Sanchez has said he only intended for his order to put the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade in charge of the physical security of the prison, and other logistical responsibilities. It was not his intent, he said, to put the military police inside the prison under the operational control of military intelligence soldiers, a practice General Taguba said would violate Army rules. General Sanchez has acknowledged that he visited Abu Ghraib several times last fall, but said he did not witness any prisoner abuses. A spokesman for General Sanchez has said the general "stands by his testimony before Congressional committees" that he did not learn of the abuses until January, months after they began. Army investigators will also likely question General Sanchez on how he and his staff incorporated recommendations to improve detention and interrogation procedures at Abu Ghraib that were offered last fall by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who at the time headed detention operations at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In addition, General Sanchez will likely be asked about interrogation policies that he issued last year. U.S. to Permit Red Cross Visit
Kabul, Afghanistan - American military officials said Thursday that they would allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to resume visits to a prisoner detention facility on the Kandahar air base in southern Afghanistan. Since 2002, the military has allowed the Red Cross to visit only the main detention center in Bagram, just north of Kabul, and said the Kandahar center was a prisoner transit point. The change comes after complaints from Afghan detainees of sleep deprivation, beatings and sexual abuse prompted the military to launch a countrywide review of its detention system last month.

Go to Original Guantanamo Detainees' Medical Files
Shared With Interrogators
By Peter Slevin and Joe Stephens
Washington Post Thursday 10 June 2004

...medical files "are being used by interrogators to gain information in developing an interrogation plan."

Military interrogators at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been given access to the medical records of individual prisoners, a breach of patient confidentiality that ethicists describe as a violation of international medical standards designed to protect captives from inhumane treatment.
The files, which contain individual medical histories and other personal information about prisoners, have been made available to interrogators despite continued objections from the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post. After discovering the practice in mid-2003, the Red Cross refused to send medical monitoring teams to the facility for more than six months, sources said.
There is no universally established international law governing medical confidentiality. But ethics experts said international medical standards bar sharing such information with interrogators to ensure it is not used to pressure prisoners to talk by withholding medicine or by using personal information to torment a detainee.
"I don't think any American medical worker, doctor, nurse should go along with this," said Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "The role of health care workers in any facility should be solely looking after the health of patients; anybody who is not involved in that should not have access to medical records."
How military interrogators used the information is unknown. But a previously undisclosed Defense Department memo dated Oct. 9 cites Red Cross complaints that the medical files "are being used by interrogators to gain information in developing an interrogation plan." Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the facility at the time, denied the allegations, according to the memo.
Military officers have reported a continuous search for defensible ways to pressure Guantanamo's 600 prisoners to reveal details about terrorist operations and organizations. Early last year, the Defense Department formally authorized interrogators to use "stress and duress" techniques designed to disorient detainees and weaken resistance. With proper permission, the guidelines allow some prisoners to be subjected to techniques designed to "invoke feelings of futility."
A Defense Department spokesman declined to comment on the use of medical files that are generated by medical personnel at Guantanamo Bay or other detention facilities around the world. A Pentagon official, who refused to be named, said public discussion about the files could violate a Defense Department policy of not commenting on interrogation techniques.
But specialists in international humanitarian law said that by making the files available to nonmedical personnel, U.S. authorities crossed a line that separates the medical needs of prisoners from the government's interest in interrogating them.
"That is a violation of ethical standards that are quite old and accepted," said Leonard S. Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, a Boston-based advocacy organization. "I don't think you would find any medical person who would say this is okay."
Steven H. Miles, a professor of bioethics at the University of Minnesota, said that using the information in interrogations of detainees would be a "clear-cut violation" of the Geneva Conventions.
"This is an enormously serious breach," said Miles, past president of the American Association of Bioethics. "You just can't do that."
Miles said use of information in the prisoners' medical records also would violate the ethics code of the World Medical Association, which prohibits doctors from providing information that could aid "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" or "diminish the ability of the victim to resist such treatment."
A separate code developed by the International Council of Prison Medical Services requires that medical personnel who work in prisons "respect the confidentiality of any information obtained in the course of our professional relationship with incarcerated patients."
The previously unreported use of the medical records comes as Congress is questioning the Bush administration's treatment of foreign prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba. Criminal investigations are underway into unexplained deaths of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, and into practices condemned by human rights groups. The harassment and sexual humiliation of prisoners inside Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison was described last fall in a Red Cross report as "tantamount to torture."
Extraordinary secrecy surrounds the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which primarily houses prisoners captured in Afghanistan. Except for the six captives facing military tribunals, detainees - some of whom have been there two years or more - are not allowed to meet with lawyers or relatives. Red Cross monitors are the only outsiders many are permitted to see.
Red Cross officials would not comment on the issue of medical records. But last October, the head of the organization's Washington office, Christophe Girod, made a rare public complaint that the Guantanamo Bay facility was "an investigation center, not a detention center." Girod said he was frustrated by the indefinite confinement of prisoners at the facility.
Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus, who commanded the Guantanamo Bay facility from March 2002 to October 2002, said that after new detainees were processed and given a medical review, their records were routinely shared with military intelligence personnel. Military doctors and medics were available to advise interrogators about the new detainees' health, Baccus said, in an effort to determine whether the prisoners were strong enough to withstand questioning.
Baccus said he knew of no prohibition on interrogators reviewing the files over time, but he added that he was unsure how often that occurred or how the information might have been used. He said no one, including the Red Cross, raised concerns about use of the records during his time at the facility. If he had determined the practice violated rules or international codes, Baccus said, "I would have stopped the process."
Baccus was succeeded by Miller, who worked to improve intelligence gathering. U.S. authorities considered Miller's work such a success that in late August they dispatched him to Iraq with orders to improve interrogation efforts at Abu Ghraib.
An account pieced together from confidential documents and sources familiar with the matter shows that a Red Cross team discovered the sharing of the medical records in a visit to the Guantanamo Bay medical facility in mid-2003, during Miller's tenure there.
The Red Cross team's task, repeated at prisons throughout the world, was to assess how the complex's medical facility functioned. The medical team studied equipment and treatment options, speaking with detainees and U.S. military medical staff. Other Red Cross experts monitored other aspects of prison life.
The team's mission was not to treat detainees, but to ensure that they received adequate care. If a prisoner had persistent headaches, was he able to see a doctor? If he suffered from psychological problems - 21 captives have tried to kill themselves at Guantanamo Bay - was he receiving treatment?
U.S. military doctors told Red Cross medics that interrogators had access to prisoners' medical records, according to two people knowledgeable about the issue who demanded anonymity because details of the interrogations and Red Cross monitoring are kept secret. As one source said, the doctors "were very honest about that" and "some people expressed concern."
Daryl Matthews, a civilian psychiatrist who visited Guantanamo Bay in May 2003 at the invitation of the Pentagon as part of a medical review team, described the prisoners' records generated by military physicians as similar to those kept by civilian physicians. Matthews said they contain names, nationalities, and histories of physical and psychological problems, as well as notes about current complaints and prescriptions.
Matthews said an individual's records would routinely list psychologists' comments about conditions such as phobias, as well as family details, including the names and ages of a spouse or children.
Such information, he said, would give interrogators "tremendous power" over prisoners. Matthews said he was disturbed that his team, which issued a generally favorable report on the base's medical facility, was not told patient records were shared with interrogators.
Asked what use nonmedical personnel could make of the files, he replied: "Nothing good."
The practice made some military medical workers at Guantanamo Bay uncomfortable. "Not everyone was unified on this," said one person aware of the situation. "It creates a tension. You have people with many different opinions."
The Red Cross team considered the breach of patient confidentiality a grave problem and protested. "Doctors in the ICRC did not want to play this game," said the source. When U.S. authorities made clear that the policy would continue, the Red Cross responded with a decision that no medical team would return to Guantanamo Bay.
The Oct. 9 Defense Department memo recounts a meeting between Red Cross monitors and military officials. It quotes Vincent Cassard, a Red Cross team leader, as saying that "there is a link between the [military] interrogation team and the medical team. This is a breach of confidentiality between a physician and a patient. Only medical personnel are supposed to have access to these files."
The memo says Miller, the commander, disputed the claim and asked the Red Cross to recheck its facts. In response, Cassard complained that Miller "was not taking the discussion seriously."
After the dispute, the Red Cross continued to monitor other activities at the prison. But with the issue still unresolved, the organization has only recently agreed to send a medical specialist to the detention facility. The medical visit is the first since last summer, and officials intend to keep confidential any prisoner information they learn to prevent further personal details from being recorded in military files.
Red Cross officials, bound by confidentiality rules that call for findings to be delivered only to host governments, would not discuss when or where they lodged complaints about the issue of medical records. When the Red Cross has discovered problems at Guantanamo Bay in the past, it has reported them to the prison commander and, if necessary, to a Pentagon committee that oversees detainee policy.

Go to Original
Rumsfeld Told Officers to 'Take Gloves Off' With Lindh
By Andrew Buncombe
The Independent U.K.
Thursday 10 June 2004
John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, was stripped naked and tied to a stretcher during interrogation after the office of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered intelligence officers to "take the gloves off" when questioning him.
Mr Rumsfeld's legal counsel instructed the officers to push the limits when questioning Lindh, captured in Afghanistan with Taliban and al-Qa'ida forces in late 2001. The treatment of Lindh appears to foreshadow the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
The details of Lindh's interrogation confirm claims made by his lawyer, Tony West, that when he was captured by Northern Alliance forces and handed to CIA operatives near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, he asked for a lawyer. Not only was he refused a lawyer and not advised of his rights, but his interrogators were told to get tough to obtain "actionable" intelligence in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden.
Documents seen by the Los Angeles Times, show that when an US Army intelligence officer started to question Lindh he was given instructions that the "Secretary of Defence's counsel has authorised him to 'take the gloves off' and asked whatever he wanted". The documents show that in the early stages, Lindh's responses were cabled to Washington every hour.
Though Lindh initially pleaded not guilty, he later admitted reduced charges and was sentenced to 20 years. He and his lawyers also agreed to drop claims that he had been tortured by US personnel.
A Defence Department spokesperson said the Pentagon "refused to speculate on the exact intent of the statement" from Mr Rumsfeld's office. "Department officials stress that all interrogation policies and procedures demand humane treatment of personnel in their custody," said the spokesperson.
The documents are the latest evidence to emerge revealing the efforts of the Bush administration to sidestep international laws and treaties when dealing with prisoners after the 11 September attacks. Critics say they show the abuses at Abu Ghraib were part of a deliberately pursued and systematic approach for dealing with prisoners without affording them their rights contained within the Geneva Conventions.
A memo this week revealed that in March 2003, administration lawyers concluded that President George Bush had the authority under executive privilege to order any sort of torture or interrogation of prisoners.
Yesterday, Congresswoman Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the views the memo contained were "antithetical to American laws and values". She added: "This memo argues that the President is not bound by criminal laws in the context of his role as Commander-in-Chief during war; that the President may be above the law. This is a concept of executive authority that was discarded at Runnymede in the 13th century and has absolutely no place in our constitutional system."
The Attorney General, John Ashcroft, has refused to provide copies of the internal memos on the questioning of prisoners. "This administration rejects torture," Mr Ashcroft said. "I don't think it's productive, let alone justified."
And despite the international outcry over the prisoner abuse cases, US forces will continue to be responsible for running two Iraqi prisons where "security detainees" are held, after the handover to a "sovereign" Iraqi government.
A senior British official said in London that the US military would continue to be responsible for up to 2,000 "fairly hard-core" prisoners at Abu Ghraib and at another jail in southern Iraq. The exact number of such prisoners, deemed a threat to Iraqi safety and security, is not known because although the Americans let many inmates out of Abu Ghraib, many others have been arrested.
Britain is pressing for Iraqis to help run the top-security prisons, but details are still to be worked out. The US military is also holding Saddam Hussein, and other former regime members inside Iraq. They are to be tried by a special Iraqi tribunal starting in the autumn.
A Jordanian lawyer who claims that he is acting for Saddam says that the former Iraqi leader was also tortured during interrogation.
-------

Rumsfeld is the front man for the neocon cabal at the Pentagon which ordered for the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal to take place:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/06/14/iraq-war-for-israel-according-to-james-bamford-s-new-book.php

Alpha

So at least two Jews (John B. Israel and Steven Stefanowicz) were telling the guards how to torture the Arabs of Abu Ghraib - man, is this one going to go down in the neocon propaganda of 'liberating' Iraq (for Israel, of course!):

http://www.nowarforisrael.com

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0614prisonabuse-contractor14-ON.html

Accused contractor at Abu Ghraib says he told guards what to do

WASHINGTON - In testimony that conflicts with some generals' accounts, a private interrogator accused of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison told investigators that he and military intelligence operatives directed prison guards to keep Iraqi prisoners awake for as much as 20 hours a day.

Steven A. Stefanowicz also said he may have heard, but did not see, some military police physically abusing a prisoner. Otherwise, he said, he did not see any abuses inside Abu Ghraib like those documented in photos that became public this spring.

Stefanowicz, whose own veracity has been questioned in the official prison investigation, told Army investigators in a sworn statement that Col. Thomas Pappas, the military intelligence chief at Abu Ghraib, personally approved of the sleep deprivation tactics.

Prison guards were given copies of written interrogation plans for each inmate, which were prepared by three-person teams comprised of contractors or military intelligence soldiers, Stefanowicz said in the sworn statement obtained by The Associated Press.

Those plans specifically placed one detainee on a "sleep/meal management program" that involved letting the prisoner sleep only in small blocks of time totaling no more than four hours out of every 24, up to a total of three days. The prisoner then would be allowed 12 hours' sleep, Stefanowicz told investigators.

"The MPs are allowed to do what is necessary to keep the detainee awake in the allotted period of time as long as it adheres to approved rules of engagement and proper treatment of the detainee," Stefanowicz said, adding he never ordered MPs to assault a prisoner.

Stefanowicz' statement conflicts with congressional testimony by some top generals and statements by Stefanowicz' employer, CACI International Inc., that private contractors and military intelligence operatives never gave guards orders to take actions that would assist interrogations.

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, now in charge of U.S. prisons in Iraq, and former Iraq commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, have said their orders allowed military police to offer information to help interrogators, but they were forbidden to take active roles, such as denying sleep.

CACI president and CEO J.P. "Jack" London has said CACI's contract did not allow its workers to tell MPs or any other soldiers what to do. London has said Army officials have praised Stefanowicz' work and never complained about him.

"In connection with inquiries into our operations in Iraq, we have been assured that our employees had no involvement in any inappropriate activity," CACI said in a news release Sunday.

A Pentagon spokesman did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment Monday night.

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the investigation that documented the abuses at Abu Ghraib, had access to Stefanowicz's statement before writing his report. Taguba agreed with the assertion that military intelligence officials directed the prison guards on activities but disputed Stefanowicz on the issue of whether he saw, engaged in or encouraged abuses. "He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse," Taguba said of Stefanowicz.

Stefanowicz' lawyer, Henry Hockeimer Jr., said Monday that his client is innocent of wrongdoing and he has gotten no indication his client will face criminal charges.

Six enlisted military police soldiers are facing charges for abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Another has pleaded guilty. Photos from the prison show prisoners being beaten, stripped naked, sexually humiliated and intimidated by dogs.

A 2002 Justice Department memo from Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee told the White House that techniques such as sleep deprivation and isolation "may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" but don't meet the legal definition of torture.

In his sworn statement to Army investigators, Stefanowicz described one possible instance of abuse on Dec. 20, after he, a military intelligence sergeant and private interpreter John B. Israel interrogated a prisoner in a stairwell. The Taguba report also names Israel, an Iraqi native and naturalized U.S. citizen who worked for a subcontractor to Titan Corp., as possibly being involved in abuses.

Stefanowicz said he walked ahead of two MPs as they took the prisoner back to his isolation cell. When the guards put the prisoner in the "segregation hole," Stefanowicz said, "the sound of the detainee falling or possibly being struck was heard."

Stefanowicz said he and the other interrogation team members confronted the MPs when they returned to an office. One of the MPs was unhappy and agitated when questioned if abuse had occurred, he said.

---

On the Net:

Text of the interview with Stefanowicz is available at:

http://wid.ap.org/documents/iraq/stefanowicz.pdf

Alpha

Subj: article - Ollie North joins the Torture Party
Date: 6/14/04 6:17:43 AM Pacific Daylight Time

Torture Incorporated

Oliver North Joins the Party

By John Stanton and Wayne Madsen

The U.S. Army has employed as many as 27 contractors to run its interrogation operations, according to media reports. But while CACI and Titan are getting all the mainstream media play, it appears that far more than 27 contract employees were involved in recruiting and placing interrogators in various locations. Some of the firms involved in the Bush administration’s “TortureGate” include an odd assortment of telecommunications companies and executive placement firms that have jumped into the lucrative torture business in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq and at secret locations throughout Central Asia and North Africa.

Interrogators can earn up to $120,000 per year plying their trade and most are former military and law enforcement personnel. More ominously, these so-called “private military contractors” are nothing of the sort. They are paramilitary organizations that are funded by the US Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State, and assorted other agencies through contract vehicles known as Basic Ordering Agreements or “BOAs” hidden throughout the vast US government bureaucracy. It now is well known that CACI got its money through a BOA with the Department of the Interior.

Ollie -- He’s Baaack!

On January 12, 2004, United Placements ran an advertisement for Army Interrogators.

“Job State: IRAQ, Job Number: 8. Interrogators: 30 Positions. Compensation to $120,000. Individuals must be trained Interrogators with at least five years of experience in interrogation. Individuals must be knowledgeable of Army/Joint interrogation procedures, data processing systems such as CHIMs and SIPRNET search engines. Knowledge of the Arabic language and culture a plus…Candidates must have documented in their resumes five years of Humint collection and/or interrogation experience. This is a requirement of the client. Some locations require individuals to work and live in a field environment with minimum medical facilities. Must possess the ability to work extended work hours in difficult surroundings for up to one year.”

United Placements’ lists none other than Oliver North--a member of Ronald Reagan’s NSC and focal point of the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980’s—as one of its two “Industry Associates.” North is currently the host of Fox News Channel’s “War Stories.” United Placement’s second “Industry Associate” is Intelligencecareers.com run by former intelligence analyst Bill Goldman.

While TortureGate festers, it is noteworthy that as late as May 7, 2004 the same posting for interrogators was listed through Design Staffing LLC. Evidently, a new batch of interrogators is needed to replace those now under criminal investigation. “Job

Nr 85832--Conduct interrogations. Conduct pre-brief and debrief preparation which includes researching, compiling, and preparing supporting material; prepare all-source target overview/summaries to include cultural, religious, and sociological factors; and identify information required for immediate processing and dissemination including support to ongoing and planned operations and force protection. This listing opened 07-May-04 and is valid for 90 days.” The listing goes on to say that the openings will be available “until filled.” It was listed under the categories “Analyst (Intelligence) & Knowledge Specialists.

Another company, ZKD, Inc. ran advertisements for interrogators on February 4, 2004. “This listing opened 10-Feb-04 and is valid for 180 days. The company's closing date comments for this listing are: "Open Till Filled. Category: Military Arts, Operations and Science. Send resume to careers@zkdinc.com.€ It seems interrogators are not only knowledge specialists but artists too.

Who Are Those Guys?

Just who are these people? It shouldn’t be a surprise that Oliver North is back in the war crimes business, but some of the organizations getting into the act seemingly don’t belong in the murky field of recruitment for the US military’s shadow paramilitary force. But, then again, some of these groups have some of the trademarks of CIA or other intelligence agency cut-out operations. Flush with seed money from existing government contracts, small and medium-sized government contractors and recruiting firms were able to launch major drives to draft language-capable interrogators from the ranks of America’s ex-military, law enforcement, and intelligence cadres and the immigrant community.

ZKD, Inc., located in Fairfax, Virginia, bills itself as a veteran-owned, minority owned and women owned firm that provides “Staffing Solutions, Security and Language Services.” It’s President and CEO is Zachary K. Duck. The May 2004 issue of Black Enterprise states that ZKD, “as a staffing agency, analyzes current labor market trends and matches qualified applicants with employment opportunities. After 9-11, the company doubled its efforts to provide security services to meet increased demand. ZKD also offers a comprehensive communications service.” ZKD has seen a meteoric rise in profits thanks mostly to the Pentagon and Transportation Security Administration. Black Enterprise states that ZKD was founded in 2001 with only two employees but now has more than 250 people with revenues totaling more than $ 10 million in 2003.

ZKD has a growing roster of clients, including the Transportation Security Administration and McNeil Technologies. In January of this year, ZKD was awarded a five-year, $ 53.7 million contract from the Department of Defense. The company now enjoys a solid

$34.5 million in contracts for 2004 with another $13 million in the contracting queue.

It is noteworthy that according to The Washington Post, CACI and McNeil Technologies are the recipients of Federal contracts to process Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Federal agencies, including the Pentagon and Homeland Security and Justice Departments. In what could be a major conflict of interest, any FOIA request from the public or the media for information on Pentagon or intelligence agency contracts with CACI or ZKD on their interrogation/translation work abroad could be handled by employees of CACI, an interrogation contractor, or McNeil, a client of ZKD, another interrogation contractor.

Design Staffing, LLC is located in Boyds, Maryland has all the trademarks of an operation run by an ex-military or intelligence agency veteran. The language is classic military gangland style “Beyond [the] core categories, we also assist companies with those hard-to-fill positions that do not fit in the traditional molds. Our method, which we call the Design Staffing Approach, DSA, is critical to the success of our business â€‘- and yours. The DSA model is an innovative systematic, seven-tier approach…”

A search of the U.S. Business Directory reveals Design Staffing, LLC is an “employment agency & opportunities firm” and has one employee, an unknown credit status, and a business address at 14024 Clopper Road, Boyds, Maryland. Its principal--listed by email as mpoage@designstaffing.com --is very particular about what he/she is looking for in an interrogator.

“For interrogators I look for experience conducting interrogations, conduct of personnel screenings of local nationals and conduct of tactical debriefings.” He/she goes on to imply that embellishment of experience may not be a bad idea to make the resume look stronger to the customer.

If North is There, the Carlyle Group Can’t be Far Behind

Then there’s CalNet, a Vienna, Virginia-based company that says it provides “Agile Solutions for the New Customer Economy.” It is run by President and CEO Kaleem Shah. The U.S. Business Directory provides the following sketchy information on CalNet: its description is “Computer-Systems Designers and Consultants,” and it has four employees. A CalNet Ltd., also listed as a “computer related” company and located in West Yorkshire, England, was dissolved on March 20, 2001.

According to its website, “Since 1989, CalNet has used its business and technology consultancy to help many of the largest telecom, financial, public sector, high-tech and services organizations remain agile by obtaining explicit business results through the rapid application and delivery of advanced information and telecom solutions.” That may be so, but CalNet posted the same interrogators-wanted ad that United Placements ran in January of 2004. Interested parties are encouraged to apply for a position with the Iraq Survey Group. “…please send resume to bcoleman@CALNET.com. Reference job number DISG2.”

USIS, or U.S. Investigations Services, bills itself as “one of the largest Intelligence and Security Services companies in North America.” Hoover’s Company Capsules has a very unusual descriptive background for the firm. “Formally a US government agency, USIS was spun off as a private company in 1996.” A recent job fair it hosted in Falls Church, Virginia, sought “Interrogators, Strategic Debriefers and Protection
Specialists for Overseas Assignments.”

One of the USIS investors is the omnipresent Carlyle Group, a multibillion-dollar venture capital firm with close ties to George H. W. Bush, former British Prime Minister John Major, and former Secretary of State James Baker, and past ties to the Saudi Bin Laden Companies, which has its tentacles into many of the Bush administration’s major foreign adventures. USIS also owns a subsidiary, Total Information Services, Inc., of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which ironically is similar to the name of the defunct Pentagon program to glean personal information from databases on U.S. and foreign citizens. That program, called the Total Information Awareness (TIA) system was headed by Iran-contra felon retired Admiral John Poindexter before he resigned. TIA, according to media reports, is alive and well in the offices of DARPA in Northern Virginia.

Since the US Congress, the Pentagon, the White House and US Department of Justice seem determined to sweep the entire TortureGate disaster under the rug before the November 2004 elections, the only check on their power appears to be the financial markets. As was recently reported by the Washington Post, directors of one of CACI’s pension funds, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, or Calpers, planned to meet with CACI in early July “…to discuss concerns about [CACI] management controls, training and legal procedures at the Arlington-based government contractor… What the management of this company owes [shareholders] is a full explanation of exactly what has occurred, exactly who was responsible and a full accounting of what will be done to reform its practices."

Maybe if the money talks, Bush--and the Gordon Gecko’s of the defense contracting world--will walk.

John Stanton is a Virginia-based writer specializing in national security and political matters. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “A Power, But Not Super.” Reach John at cioran123@yahoo.com. Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. His forthcoming book is titled: "Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops, and Brass Plates." Reach Wayne at wmadsen777@aol.com. Stanton and Madsen authored America’s Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II released in May 2003.

Alpha

Another article on John B. Israel appears at the following URL:

http://www.scvhistory.com/scvhistory/signal/iraq/

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Rumsfeld Issued an Order to Hide Detainee in Iraq

By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER, The New York Times

WASHINGTON, June 16 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, acting at the request of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, ordered military officials in Iraq last November to hold a man suspected of being a senior Iraqi terrorist at a high-level detention center there but not list him on the prison's rolls, senior Pentagon and intelligence officials said Wednesday.This prisoner and other "ghost detainees" were hidden largely to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their treatment, and to avoid disclosing their location to an enemy, officials said.Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, the Army officer who in February investigated abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, criticized the practice of allowing ghost detainees there and at other detention centers as "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law."

This prisoner, who has not been named, is believed to be the first to have been kept off the books at the orders of Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Tenet. He was not held at Abu Ghraib, but at another prison, Camp Cropper, on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport, officials said.Pentagon and intelligence officials said the decision to hold the detainee without registering him - at least initially - was in keeping with the administration's legal opinion about the status of those viewed as an active threat in wartime.Seven months later, however, the detainee - a reputed senior officer of Ansar al-Islam, a group the United States has linked to Al Qaeda and blames for some attacks in Iraq - is still languishing at the prison but has only been questioned once while in detention, in what government officials acknowledged was an extraordinary lapse."Once he was placed in military custody, people lost track of him," a senior intelligence official conceded Wednesday night. "The normal review processes that would keep track of him didn't."The detainee was described by the official as someone "who was actively planning operations specifically targeting U.S. forces and interests both inside and outside of Iraq."But once he was placed into custody at Camp Cropper, where about 100 detainees deemed to have the highest intelligence value are held, he received only one cursory arrival interrogation from military officers and was never again questioned by any other military or intelligence officers, according to Pentagon and intelligence officials.The Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Wednesday that officials at Camp Cropper questioned their superiors several times in recent months about what to do with the suspect.But only in the last two weeks has Mr. Rumsfeld's top aide for intelligence policy, Stephen A. Cambone, called C.I.A. senior officials to request that the agency deal with the suspect or else have him go into the prison's regular reporting system.Mr. Di Rita referred questions about the prisoner's fate to the C.I.A.A senior intelligence official said late Wednesday that "the matter is currently under discussion."In July 2003, the man suspected of being an Ansar al-Islam official was captured in Iraq and turned over to C.I.A. officials, who took him to an undisclosed location outside of Iraq for interrogation. By that fall, however, a C.I.A. legal analysis determined that because the detainee was deemed to be an Iraqi unlawful combatant - outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions - he should be transferred back to Iraq.Mr. Tenet made his request to Mr. Rumsfeld - that the suspect be held but not listed - in October. The request was passed down the chain of command: to Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then to Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, and finally to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq. At each stage, lawyers reviewed the request and their bosses approved it.A senior intelligence official said late Wednesday that the C.I.A. inquired about the detainee's status in January, but was told that American jailers in Iraq could not find him, perhaps as a result of the chaos and confusion of the November and December spike in insurgent violence.The detention was first reported in this week's U.S. News & World Report. But the role played by senior officials in deciding the detainee's status was not known publicly before Wednesday. Pentagon and intelligence officials gave new details on Wednesday about the prisoner and the circumstances that brought him to Camp Cropper, including the fact that his status was decided by Mr. Tenet and Mr. Rumsfeld, and approved by senior officers.While acknowledging mistakes in the prisoner's detention, the senior intelligence official said the detainee posed a significant threat to American forces in Iraq and elsewhere. "He also possessed significant information about Ansar al Islam's leadership structure, training and locations," the official said.At Camp Cropper, some prisoners had been held since June 2003 for nearly 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in small cells without sunlight, according to a report by the international Red Cross.The suspected Ansar official was segregated from the other detainees and was not listed on the rolls. Under the order that had filtered down to General Sanchez, military police were not to disclose the detainee's whereabouts to the Red Cross pending further directives.The prisoner fell into legal limbo as the military police pressed their superiors for guidance, which has still not formally come."Over the course of the next several weeks, the custodians at the prison asked for additional guidance, but there were no interrogations," Mr. Di Rita said.Before this case surfaced, the C.I.A. has said it had discontinued the ghost detainee practice, but said that the Geneva Conventions allowed a delay in the identification of prisoners to avoid disclosing their whereabouts to an enemy.In Washington, the Army announced that Gen. Paul J. Kern, the head of the Army Mat?el Command, would oversee an Army inquiry into the role military intelligence soldiers played in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Kern replaces General Sanchez as the senior officer reviewing the findings. General Sanchez removed himself from that role so he could be interviewed by investigators.Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company.

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Updated: 05:52 AM EDT
U.S. Admits Holding Prisoner in Secret
By MATT KELLEY, AP

WASHINGTON (June 17) - In a rare admission of violating the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war, the Pentagon has acknowledged it improperly held an Iraqi prisoner in secret for more than seven months.

The military has held the man in Iraq since October without assigning him a prisoner number or notifying the International Committee of the Red Cross that he is a prisoner, Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Wednesday night.

Both assigning a prisoner number and notifying the Red Cross are required under the Geneva Conventions, which the Bush administration acknowledges apply to the conflict in Iraq.

The prisoner will be given a number and the Red Cross will be formally notified soon, Whitman said.

"The ICRC should have been notified about the detainee earlier," Whitman said. "We should have taken steps, and we have taken the necessary steps to rectify the situation."

The Iraqi prisoner is so far the only individual Defense Department officials have acknowledged shielding from the Red Cross. Before Wednesday's admission, Pentagon spokesmen would not confirm or deny if anyone was being held in secret.

"We've not talked about the location of specific detainees other than Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba simply because it gets into the classified realm," Air Force Maj. Michael Shavers said in an e-mail response to questions from The Associated Press on Wednesday, before the Iraq admission.

President Bush and members of his administration have said repeatedly that all detainees are treated humanely. Pentagon officials have argued that announcing the numbers or locations of all detainees would indicate the scope of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts to terrorist groups and give them ideas of sites to attack.

The military says detainees at the prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not mistreated, despite the Bush administration's argument that Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war do not apply to them.

Maj. David Kolarik, a spokesman for the military's Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, said all prisoners are treated "in accordance with the principles" of the Geneva Conventions "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity."

The secret prisoner in Iraq is believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam, a radical group which had been based in northern Iraq before the U.S. invasion last year. U.S. officials believe the man was involved in attacks on coalition troops, Whitman said.

The CIA asked the military to take custody of the man in October and asked that he not be given a prisoner number or disclosed to the Red Cross while officials determined his status, Whitman said.

The Bush administration contends that terrorist suspects are "enemy combatants" who do not have any protection under the Geneva Conventions. Military officials questioned the arrangement but those objections did not reach the highest levels in the Pentagon until last month, Whitman said.

"Certainly the people that had responsibility for maintaining him in custody knew that they had him, knew their instructions, knew that a disposition hadn't been determined for him and raised concern about it on a couple of occasions," Whitman said.

06/17/04 02:49 EDT

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. The

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040614-646366,00.html

Monday, Jun. 14, 2004

One Expert's Verdict: The CIA Caved Under Pressure

By MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON

The CIA that George Tenet leaves behind next month is a shadow of its imaginary self, a butt of jokes rather than the envy of the world. It is an agency that has become self-protective and bureaucratic; it is too reliant on gadgets rather than spies to steal secrets. Sometimes the CIA has simply been too blind to see what is hiding in plain sight. Tenet restored the agency's morale, but he leaves behind a string of spectacular intelligence failures. And that may not be the worst of it. In his new book A Pretext for War, intelligence expert James Bamford alleges that the CIA not only failed to detect and deter the secret army of Muslim extremists gathering over the horizon in the late 1990s but also failed to take action when a group of Administration hard-liners, backed by the Pentagon chief and Vice President Dick Cheney, began to advance the case for war with Iraq in secret using data the CIA widely believed weren't supportable or were just plain false. Instead of fighting back, Bamford argues, the CIA for the most part rolled over and went along. The result was a war sold largely on a fiction, confected from unchecked rumor and biased informants.A Pretext for War is probably the best one-volume companion to the harrowing events in the war on terrorism since 1996, chiefly because it focuses on the most difficult to pierce subject: the hidden machinery of U.S. intelligence. Bamford is a veteran chronicler of the spy world whose The Puzzle Palace, published in 1982, is still considered the classic account of the mysterious National Security Agency (NSA), which electronically snoops on friends and enemies overseas. His account of 9/11 and its aftermath is studded with new details, including some about the undisclosed location known as Site R, an underground bunker on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border where the Vice President spent much of his time in 2001. Deep under Raven Rock Mountain, Site R "is a secret world of five buildings, each three stories tall, computer filled caverns and a subterranean water reservoir." It is just 7 miles from Camp David. Bamford maintains that before 9/11, the U.S.'s entire spook network was pretty much out to lunch. It was a community that had done its job well in the cold war and was looking for a reason to exist. By the late 1990s the NSA was becoming obsolete, unable to keep up with the pace of technological change. The NSA netted millions more conversations at its worldwide listening posts than it could translate or interpret. The agency spent billions to eavesdrop on chatter overseas that moved by satellite — only to see the world move to harder-to-steal digitized cellular, e-mail and instant-messaging communications. Meanwhile, at the NSA's sprawling Fort Meade, Md., campus, the agency's director could not send an email to all the NSA's 38,000 employees. Why? The NSA had 68 separate e-mail systems. Things were not much better at the CIA. In a devastating chronology, Bamford reports that even as late as 2000, the agency was stuck in an old cold war way of doing things — training its agents, recruiting spies overseas and keeping headquarters happy. One agent explains that CIA recruiting overseas was about as rigorous as going to an opening-night mixer at a Las Vegas convention: American agents overseas sometimes competed with one another to see who could collect the most business cards at official receptions in foreign capitals. Then they would return to their embassy to determine the night's winner. Each card, the agents told themselves, represented a potential spy for the U.S. In fact, the agent said, "none of these people had anything useful ... It was just numbers. It's all quantity."With tradecraft like that, it is little wonder the CIA "never once even tried to infiltrate" al-Qaeda, according to Bamford. He says agents working at the CIA's vaunted Alec station, the shop inside the agency responsible for tracking and killing Osama bin Laden, seemed more interested in flying to Afghanistan and Paris to meet with various Afghan warlords who promised to provide details of bin Laden's whereabouts in exchange for bags full of cash. Bamford asserts that the CIA's Afghan assets never came through with very much on the Saudi terrorist, but the CIA kept them on the dole anyway. About the only thing going well was the 50-year war between the CIA and the FBI. Alec station's chiefs were so turf conscious about which agency had "the lead" in the hunt for bin Laden that they routinely left their FBI counterparts in the dark about what they were learning from overseas — a habit that turned out to be a fatal error. Sloppy surveillance permitted two of the hijackers to elude the CIA as early as January 2000, but then the agency repeatedly failed to inform the FBI or half a dozen other government officers who could have assisted in the hunt. Indeed, at the CIA, keister covering was in full swing long before the attacks of 9/11. In January 2000 the head of Alec station told his bosses he still had the two men under surveillance when in fact he had lost them in Bangkok. That bureaucratic chore completed, Alec station then dropped its chase altogether. It would be more than a year before a conscientious FBI agent assigned to the CIA re-examined the evidence and realized how badly the agency had blundered. The two names were finally given to the State Department on Aug. 23, 2001.But the intelligence community's shaky performance also made the agency vulnerable to another kind of attack: the one mounted by a group of hard-line neoconservatives who took over at the Pentagon and in the Vice President's office when Bush became President. Long suspicious of the CIA if not openly hostile to it, the neocons came into power asserting internally that the agency couldn't shoot straight and therefore its judgments couldn't be trusted. The Bush hard-liners had long believed that stability could come to the Middle Eastand Israel — only if Saddam Hussein was overthrown and Iraq converted into a stable democracy. Led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year. The result was a war built on sand — and a CIA that lacked the will to take on its masters. Douglas Feith, a senior Pentagon official, set up several secret offices in the Pentagon that received data from Israel's own intelligence teams and coordinated its findings with them, partly as a way to get around CIA caution in the region. Bamford reveals that the original source of the spurious allegation that Saddam harbored "mobile biological-weapons labs" did not come from the brother of a top aide to Ahmad Chalabi whose code name was Curveball, but from an Israeli tip going back to 1994. Bamford quotes anonymous CIA agents who say that they suspected that much of the hard-liners' intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was bogus but there was pressure from within and without to shut up about it. Bamford implies that Tenet, the ultimate staff guy, is partly to blame for this failure of nerve. When Secretary of State Colin Powell was putting together his now discredited speech to the U.N. last year about Saddam's WMD program, he stood virtually alone against the hard-liners, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, all of whom seemed keen to pump up the Secretary's talking points. Cheney's staff handed Powell a 50-page draft of allegations; the Secretary rejected most of them as unsupportable, with the hard-liners, Rice and even Tenet fighting him every step of the way during run-through sessions at CIA headquarters. And as it turned out, Powell didn't fight hard enough. Could Tenet have stopped the rush to war? Bamford suggests he could have. "Off on the sidelines, George Tenet was one of the few who knew the truth," he writes, adding that Tenet preferred to work behind the scenes on minor disagreements about the data "instead of speaking out" against the grand scheme. That's a harsh indictment of the man who kept America's secrets under two Presidents. But one of Tenet's colleagues was even less generous, saying simply, "We caved."

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/06/14/iraq-war-for-israel-according-to-james-bamford-s-new-book.php

Abu Ghraib Prison Torture Scandal Goes to the Highest Level:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2004/06/13/interrogation-abuses-were-approved-at-highest-levels.php

Alpha

Report: officer felt pressure at Abu Ghraib

Washington-AP -- The top military intelligence officer at the Abu Ghraib prison says he was under intense pressure to get better information from detainees.
U-S-A Today obtained a sworn statement from Army Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, who says the pressure came from the White House, Pentagon and C-I-A.

Jordan says he was reminded of the need to improve intelligence "many, many, many times." An aide to White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice even visited the prison as a reminder.

Jordan also says he had worked out a procedure with C-I-A interrogators to hide five or six inmates from Red Cross inspectors last October.

Rice's aide told The Associated Press that she never discussed interrogation during her visit to the prison at the center of the prisoner abuse scandal She says she went to find out how the information was being used to improve effectiveness.

Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Alpha

http://www.scvhistory.com/scvhistory/signal/iraq/

http://www.absitinvidia.com/mt/archives/000110.html

Like a Sieve: Prisoner Abuse Documents Keep Leaking
• Intelligence personnel swear they carried out the wishes of senior military and administration officials. By Leon Worden
Signal City Editor Saturday, June 19, 2004

One by one, sworn statements from all four military intelligence officers and contractors identified as "responsible" parties in the Taguba report have now been leaked to the press — and each to a different news organization.
Army officials don't know the sources of the leaks but say they must be springing in several places.
"I wish I knew, so I could have a private talk with them," Lt. Col. Pamela Hart told The Signal.
The signed statements are among the estimated 6,000 pages that comprise Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's investigation of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.
Technically, the Army still considers the entire report classified — even the widely disseminated 53-page summary that was leaked in late April, around the time CBS broke the initial story on "60 Minutes."
One of the first signed statements from intelligence personnel to be reported was that of John B. Israel, a 48-year-old Iraqi-American translator from Canyon Country.
The New York Times obtained his testimony around May 26. In it, Israel, a private contractor, simply answered, "No I have not," when asked by an Army investigator if he had witnessed any abuses, the newspaper said.
Among the latest to leak was the statement of Lt. Col. Steve L. Jordan, the No. 2 intelligence officer at the prison. USA Today said Thursday it had received a copy.
According to USA Today, Jordan told of "instances where I feel that there was additional pressure" to extract information from detainees.
Jordan named nearly everyone above him as a source of that pressure, and he even described a visit in November from an aide to National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice. Jordan said Rice's aide told him "many, many, many times" to make interrogators work harder to "pull the intelligence out" of prisoners.
The aide, Fran Townsend, told USA Today this week that she had gone to Iraq to learn more about the increasing attacks by insurgents, and to make sure intelligence units were sharing information effectively. She said she spent about 15 minutes in the cell blocks at Abu Ghraib and saw no abuse. She termed it "ridiculous" to think she hounded Jordan to squeeze more from detainees.
In his statement, Jordan discussed the intelligence value of a female detainee with ties to Saddam Hussein, who was then at large. Jordan claimed the woman told one of his interrogators that Saddam "had a big white beard, that he was basically living in a hole, that he was driving a taxi." Indeed, when Saddam was found in a hole Dec. 13 he had a long beard, and a taxi was parked nearby.
* * *
Jordan testified that he worked out a "joint venture" with CIA operatives to hide "ghost detainees" from Red Cross inspectors when they visited in October. (Some Arab news organizations have faulted the International Committee of the Red Cross for hiding its findings from the public until they, too, were leaked in early May.)
In his report, Taguba determined that MP guards, acting on behalf of "OGAs" — a common euphemism for the CIA — had indeed shuffled six or eight "ghost detainees" around the facility so Red Cross officials wouldn't find out about them. "This maneuver was deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law," Taguba wrote.
He may not have checked with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld before he denounced the practice.
In a press conference Thursday, Rumsfeld said he made good on a request from former CIA Director George Tenet to hide one such "ghost detainee" last fall. Rumsfeld acknowledged that the detainee, a suspected leader of a Kurdish militant group, was hidden from Red Cross inspectors at a detention center for high-value prisoners near Baghdad International Airport.
"I was requested by the director of Central Intelligence to take custody of an Iraqi national who was believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam, and we did so," Rumsfeld said.
The detainee was held in secret for more than seven months before he was released into the regular prison population. Rumsfeld wouldn't say why Tenet wanted him hidden.
The remaining statements from accused intelligence personnel are those of Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the military intelligence brigade, and Steven A. Stefanowicz, a hired interrogator.
Pappas' statement was "provided to" the Washington Post in late May, the newspaper said, and The Associated Press came up with a copy of Stefanowicz's testimony on Monday. Only The Associated Press has shared its prize on the Internet.
In his testimony, Pappas told Taguba that the peculiar interrogation protocols at Abu Ghraib, including the use of military working dogs as an intimidation tactic, "were enacted as a specific result of a visit" in early September from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then-commander of the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Miller, who now heads all U.S. prisons in Iraq, denied through a spokesman that he gave Pappas any such notions.
Pappas further testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, approved the protocols once they were drawn up. Sanchez said last month that he never even saw them.
Meanwhile, Stefanowicz described routines where interrogators would supply MP guards with written and verbal instructions that contravened Army policy, and he outlined sleep and meal deprivation regimens that likely violated Geneva conventions.
* * *
Taguba incorporated some of the men's testimony into his final report but felt they understated their own culpability. Now all four — Pappas, Jordan, Stefanowicz and Israel — are presumed targets of a second Army inquiry that is designed to delve deeper and higher.
Army officials worry that the leaking of the sworn statements, collected by Taguba's people in January, could impinge on the new inquiry.
"Any time you have the investigation being tried in the press, it does have some bearing on the outcome," the Army spokeswoman said. "It can't help but have an influence on the investigators or on the people who may eventually sit on a jury."
Hart said there are "any number of places (the leaks) could come from," but she wouldn't speculate on how many government hands have legitimately passed over the documents.
Unlike the seven MP guards who have been charged with crimes, the four members of the intelligence brigade haven't been charged — so they don't have defense attorneys who could rightfully obtain or distribute their classified testimony.
Nor are the four men themselves the likely source, because they wouldn't have received copies, Hart said.
All the leaks make it "harder and harder to maintain the purity of the case," she said.

HISTORY IN PICTURES] Army Adds Stars to Intelligence Inquiry
• Four-star general to decide who will lead investigation of intelligence personnel at Abu Ghraib prison. By Leon Worden
Signal City Editor Friday, June 18, 2004
Gen. Paul J. Kern will review Maj. Gen. George R. Fay's inquiry into questionable intelligence practices at Abu Ghraib prison and possibly replace him with a higher-ranking officer. US Army photo
O
ut with a three-star general whose veracity has been questioned, in with a four-star general who has stayed away from the fray.
Heeding calls to turn up the heat, the Army has made a mid-course adjustment to its investigation of intelligence practices at Abu Ghraib prison.
Acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee announced Wednesday that he has appointed Gen. Paul J. Kern, head of the Army's procurement system, to oversee the ongoing inquiry of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Kern, in turn, is expected to name a new chief investigator.
Two senior officers and two civilian contractors assigned to the 205th, including John B. Israel, an Iraqi-American translator from Canyon Country, are suspected of sharing responsibility for the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib last fall.
The investigation of the 205th is the Army's second full-blown inquiry into the abuse scandal.
The first, conducted by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, focused on the lowest echelon at the prison — the military police brigade that was supposed to secure and protect the prisoners. The inquiry led to criminal charges against seven MP guards, and Taguba recommended a second inquiry to determine the degree to which Israel and other intelligence personnel were culpable.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the three-star general who appointed Taguba, put another two-star general, George R. Fay, in charge of the intelligence investigation.
Fay's appointment drew fire both inside and outside the government when fingers started pointing at Sanchez. Fay, an Army reservist who sits on the board of an insurance company in civilian life, was perceived to lack sufficient authority to follow the trail of responsibility up the chain of command.
Last week, Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to approve Sanchez's request to be recused from his duties as the "appointing officer" — the person who appoints the chief investigator.
Kern is Sanchez's replacement. Head of the Army Materiel Command at Ft. Belvoir, Va., Kern will likely remove Fay from the hot seat, although it isn't a certainty.
"Gen. Kern may retain Maj. Gen. George R. Fay as the investigating officer or may appoint another officer after reviewing the current status of the initial investigation," the statement said.
As for Sanchez, the Army is in full retreat from him. On Tuesday the Pentagon announced that Sanchez will be replaced as the commander of coalition forces in Iraq following the June 30 transfer of power to the new Iraqi government. As recently as one month ago, Sanchez was expected to keep his command when Coalition Joint Task Force-7 becomes Multinational Force-Iraq (MNFI) in July.
Sanchez, who put the 205th in charge of operations at Abu Ghraib in November, has come under increasing scrutiny. In Senate testimony May 19 he denied ever seeing, much less authorizing, special interrogation rules for Abu Ghraib. The rules, posted on the prison walls, called for Sanchez's personal approval whenever interrogators wanted to use military dogs, keep prisoners in isolation longer than 30 days, or deprive them of food or sleep.
Sanchez's removal from the investigation clears the way for him to be questioned without a direct conflict of interest.
Pentagon officials anticipate the naming of a new chief investigator who out-ranks Sanchez — possibly another three-star general with higher seniority.
Kern will still lead Army procurement. Reviewing the intelligence investigation is an additional duty, a Pentagon spokesman said.
Kern is a 1967 West Point graduate with a master's degree in engineering from the University of Michigan. He served two combat tours in Vietnam, led a brigade in the 1991 Gulf War, commanded the 4th Infantry Division and was the senior military assistant to former Defense Secretary William Perry

Excellent Documentary on PNAC (Project for the New American Century):

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/27/154222&mode=thread&tid=25

James Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book on the Neoconservative warmongers:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/06/14/iraq-war-for-israel-according-to-james-bamford-s-new-book.php

Abu Ghraib Prison Torture Scandal Goes to the Highest Level:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2004/06/13/interrogation-abuses-were-approved-at-highest-levels.php

War Without End

The global war against terror, news about the illegal invasion of Iraq, the corporate puppet presidents, the war criminal Tony Blair, September 11th 2001, the USS Liberty and New World Order crimes against humanity.

Interrogation Abuses were 'Approved at Highest Levels'