| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Sep 09, 2004 5:11 pm Post subject: Not Scared Yet? Try Connecting These Dots |
| Forwarded:
September 2, 2004
Friends,
After the last hurrah in New York City this evening, the bloom is likely to slip off the GOP rose quite quickly.
What seems already clear is that at least two things will come back to haunt the president big time: his decision to follow the advice of hack lawyers and violate the Geneva Conventions and the US War Crimes Act (Alberto Gonzales' memo to the president of Jan. 25, 02 is worth a re-read); and the fact that the president cut into the front of the line for the Texas National Guard and -- more important -- that he is, arguably, a deserter in time of war. Two of these can be capital offenses -- not the cutting into line, which is sort of expected of many people of privilege, but resented nonetheless.
One need not be a crackerjack analyst to realize that Ashcroft, Ridge, et al. are holding open the possibility of postponing the election as an option. I believe they have been preparing the American people for just such an eventuality, and that they cannot but be gratified by the phlegmatic reaction so far.
I paste in below a longer, updated version of a piece on these matters that appeared in the Miami Herald on August 13 (and was posted on several websites)...
...Also a piece posted more recently in an attempt to help readers navigate the bewildering array of proposals for reform in intelligence.
My VIPS colleagues and I will be doing a lot of speaking around the country this month and next. So if you see little writing from us, you'll know why. I will be staying in touch via this email address and encourage you to do the same.
Ray
___________________________
September 2, 2004
Not Scared Yet? Try Connecting These Dots
By Ray McGovern
"Pre-election period...pre-election plot...pre-election threats:" These rolled off National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's lips no less than seven times on CNN's Late Edition on August 8, as she discussed the likely timing of a terrorist attack. She stayed on message.
Dr. Rice said the government had actually "picked up discussion" relating to "trying to do something in the pre-election period," and added that information on the threat came from "active multiple sources."
I found myself wondering if those sources are any better than those cited by Attorney General John Ashcroft on May 26, when he launched this campaign, citing "credible intelligence from multiple sources that al-Qaeda plans an attack on the United States" before the November election. Ashcroft's warning came out of the blue, without the customary involvement of the directors of the C.I.A. and Department of Homeland Security (although the latter quickly fell in line).
In support of his warning, Ashcroft cited "an al-Qaeda spokesman," who the FBI later was embarrassed to admit is "The Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades." Sinister sounding though the name may be, this "group" is thought to consist of no more than one person with a fax machine, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official. That fax is notorious for claiming credit for all manner of death and destruction.
Are the recent warnings and heightened alerts legitimate or contrived? Is this yet another case of "intelligence" being conjured up to serve the political purposes of President Bush and his top advisers? The record of the past three years gives rise to the suspicion that this is precisely what is afoot.
Running Scared
While Iraq generally has moved off the front page, those paying attention to developments there have watched a transition from mayhem to bedlam in recent weeks. Worse still, the U.S. economy is again faltering as the election draws near.
Perhaps most worrisome of all from the administration's point of view are the fresh photos, film footage, and other reporting of torture in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and elsewhere that will surface in the coming weeks. This round is said to include details of the rape and other abuse of some of the Iraqi women and the hundred or so children -- some as young as 10 years old -- held in jails like Abu Graib. U.S. Army Sergeant Samuel Provance, who was stationed there, has blown the whistle on the abuse of children as well as other prisoners. He recounted, for example, how interrogators soaked a 16-year-old, covered him in mud, and then used his suffering to break the youth's father, also a prisoner, during interrogation.
I suspect it is the further revelations of torture that worry the White House most. Adding to its woes, over a hundred lawyers, including seven past presidents of the American Bar Association and former FBI Director William Sessions, last month issued a statement strongly condemning the legal opinions of government attorneys holding that torture might be legally defensible. The lawyers called for an investigation regarding whether there is a connection between those legal opinions and the abuses at Abu Graib and elsewhere. That this is a no-brainer has since become even clearer in the light of reports from inquiries sponsored by the Pentagon itself.
Not surprisingly, Pentagon and White House officials have tried to distance the president and themselves from the torture that has taken place in Abu Graib and other prisons, but the photos show what went on. And neo-conservative William Kristol's bragging on Sunday talk shows that this administration's interrogation techniques have been successful because they are "rougher than what John Kerry would approve of" does not help the administration's case.
With each new revelation of torture, the "few-bad-apples" explanation strains credulity closer to the breaking point. Nor can it be denied that the abuse took place on this administration's watch. Thus, there are likely to be increasing demands that the commander-in-chief -- or at least his defense secretary -- take responsibility. Where is it that the buck is supposed to stop?
Connecting Dots
What has all this to do with Condoleezza Rice's multiple mention of "pre-election threats?" Can these two dots be connected? I fear they can.
When John Ashcroft fired the opening shot in this campaign to raise the specter of a "pre-election" terrorist event, it seemed to me that the administration might be beginning to prepare the American people to accept postponement or cancellation of the November election as a reasonable option.
Tom Ridge's warning in early July that Osama bin Laden is "planning to disrupt the November elections" added to my concern, as did;
-- Word that Ridge has asked the Department of Justice to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit postponement of the election;
-- The request by the Director of the Election Assistance Commission for Ridge to provide "guidelines" for canceling or rescheduling the election in the event of a terror attack;
-- The matter-of-fact tone of a recent vote on CNN's website: "Should the United States postpone the election in the event of a terrorist attack?" That vote seems to have been greeted more by yawns than by any _expression of outrage.
That the House of Representatives on July 22 passed a non-binding resolution by a 419-2 vote denying any agency or individual the authority to postpone a national election suggests that many in Congress are taking the various trial balloons and other hints seriously.
The Emperor's New Suit of Clothes
It seems a safe bet that President Bush is not sleeping as soundly as he did before the abuse of prisoners came to light. He may feel thoroughly exposed in the magic suit sold him by Ashcroft's tailor/lawyers together with those working for White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, and may wish he had paid more attention to the strong cautions of Secretary of State Colin Powell against playing fast and loose with the Geneva Conventions on Prisoners of War.
The president can take little consolation in Gonzales' reassurance that there is a "reasonable basis in law" that could provide a "solid defense," should an independent counsel at some point in the future attempt to prosecute him under the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 for exempting the Taliban and perhaps others from the protections of the Geneva Conventions, to which the War Crimes Act is inextricably tied.
Meaning? Meaning that if the president's numbers look no better in October than they do after the convention bounce dissipates, there will be particularly strong personal incentive -- imperative may be a better word -- on the part of the president, Rumsfeld, and Vice President Cheney to pull out all the stops in order to make four more years a sure thing. What seems increasingly clear is that putting off the election is under active consideration -- a course more likely to be chosen to the extent it achieves status as, yawn, just another option.
How Would Americans React?
Recently I listened to a reporter asking a tourist in Washington, DC, whether he felt inconvenienced by all the blockages and barriers occasioned by the heightened alert. While the tourist acknowledged that the various barriers and inspections made it difficult to get from one place to another, he made his overall reaction quite clear: "Safety first! I don't want to see another 9/11. Whatever it takes!" I was struck a few hours later as I tuned into President Bush speaking at a campaign rally in Michigan: "I will never relent in defending America. Whatever it takes."
How prevalent this sentiment has become was brought home to me as Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) quizzed 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey (a former Democrat Senator from Nebraska) at a House hearing on August 3 on the commission's sweeping recommendation to centralize foreign and domestic intelligence under a new National Intelligence Director in the White House. Kerrey grew quite angry as Kucinich kept insisting on an answer to his question: "How do you protect civil liberties?" Kerrey:
"The enemy has no concerns for civil liberty. The enemy has no concern for the Geneva Convention...we got to come with that hard-headed attitude or we're not going to get this thing balanced right.
"I don't think you protect civil liberties absolutely. I don't have an absolute civil liberty to speak freely, to operate freely...So I can't balance it in general, unfortunately. I have to get to the specific things we're talking about in order to be able to do that balancing.
"At the same time, we're fighting a war against individuals that don't feel that way."
Commissioner Kerrey seems to be suggesting that, since terrorists give no priority to civil liberties, we too should put such considerations on the back burner, while priority is given to combating terrorism. Whatever it takes.
Does this not speak volumes? Would former Senator Kerrey suggest that Americans act like the "good Germans" of the 1930s, and acquiesce in draconian steps like postponement or cancellation of the November election? Indeed, how would most of our fellow citizens react?
These are no small matters. It is high time to think them through.
Ray McGovern worked as a CIA analyst from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He is author of "A Compromised CIA: What Can Be Done" in Patriotism, Democracy and Common Sense: Restoring America's Promise At Home and Abroad, published this month by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation.
September 2, 2004
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence; Turning Liability Into Asset
By Ray McGovern
What do the president's nomination of Rep. Porter Goss (R, FL) to head the CIA, the proposal of Republican loyalist Senator Pat Roberts (R, KS) to dismember the CIA, and last week's Executive Order to strengthening the authorities of the CIA director have in common with tales of swift boats once in Vietnam? Answer: The proven potential of all four to grab the headlines and draw attention away from President George W. Bush's most serious vulnerabilities in this key pre-election period.
One can be forgiven for being confused at the administration's recent moves on the intelligence front. Early last month, when the Senate Intelligence Committee published its multi-count indictment of CIA's performance on Iraq and former CIA Director George Tenet left the scene of the crime, the pundits expressed confidence that the president would ask Tenet's deputy to fill in over the ensuing months rather than risk calling further attention to the intelligence fiasco.
Leading Democrats were rubbing their hands in glee at the president's dilemma. Failing to appoint a new take-charge CIA director would look inept amid all the warnings of a pre-election terrorist attack, but appointing one would bring still more embarrassment for the administration. And some voters, the Democrats were hoping, might even remember where the buck is supposed to stop.
Not a problem, decided Karl Rove, who continues to outsmart many Democrats of higher IQ. The situation is made to order. The president is particularly vulnerable on two counts: what he did in Iraq, and what he didn't do before 9/11. The 9/11 commission performed yeoman's service in diffusing responsibility such that no one -- and especially not the one sitting where the buck used to stop -- could be held accountable. And it is turning out to be almost as easy on Iraq–despite the continuing mayhem there and the inexorable culpability-creep up the chain of command regarding the torture of Iraqi and other prisoners.
Porter Goss Front and Center
It was in this context that the White House decided to stoke the fires of political controversy still higher by nominating Porter Goss to replace Tenet. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee for the last eight years, Goss is as responsible as anyone for the intelligence failures that facilitated the attacks of 9/11.
He bears even more responsibility for turning a blind eye toward the corruption of intelligence -- including the conjured-up-out-of-thin-air mushroom cloud that in October 2002 frightened Congress into surrendering to the president its constitutional prerogative to wage war. No one has accused Goss of being dumb. If we "out-of-the-loop" veteran intelligence professionals could readily see what was going on, surely Goss could.
And so, as Goss comes before the Senate for confirmation, controversy is assured -- and welcomed by the White House. The Democrats will not pass up the opportunity to ask the nominee how all this could have escaped Goss' attention during the eight years he chaired the powerful House Intelligence Committee. They will want to know, specifically, why he failed to stem the erosion of CIA's human source reporting capability -- a problem Goss himself highlighted after his first year as chairman. And they are bound to ask him why he sponsored legislation with deeper cuts in intelligence funding than those advocated by Sen. John Kerry -- for which Republicans have roundly criticized Kerry.
But while the Democratic leadership continues to lick its chops at the prospect of raking Goss over the coals at his nomination hearings next month, Karl Rove is smirking from ear to ear. Another situation made to order. Attention will be riveted on this controversial "team player" nominated to assume the mantle of Tenet, who in a leap of faith-based intelligence aimed at keeping himself on the starting cheerleader team, famously described the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a "slam dunk."
Too bad the press, and even the Democrats, play along in accepting the failure of intelligence as the reason we invaded Iraq. In doing so they let the White House off the hook and deny the public the honest debate it deserves about the real reasons for war.
The focus on Goss and intelligence reforms allows the White House to push its message: The president was misled. It was a terrible performance, but now Tenet is gone. Subtext to Senate Democrats: Here's Goss: take him, or leave him (and open yourselves to charges of foot-dragging at a time when our PR machine has ratcheted up the likelihood of a terrorist attack before the election).
The performance of intelligence was, indeed, terrible -- as inept as it was politicized. But intelligence failings regarding weapons of mass destruction and putative ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda had very little to do with the president's decision to make war on Iraq.
The Real Reasons
With the false WMD threat exposed and tales of significant ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda thoroughly discredited, the American people need an open discussion about the White House's motivations for invading Iraq. Rove's tactics aside, the Democrats are none too eager to engage this question, either, as is clear from John Kerry's recent statements on justification for the war.
And the general consensus contrives to silence those of us who dare to speak on the Iraq debacle. As has become increasingly clear, the neo-conservatives' vision that the US has a strategic imperative to gain more assured control over oil from the Middle East, together with their overweening zeal to eliminate any conceivable threat to the security of Israel, are what sunk us into the quicksand of Iraq. More important at this juncture, these twin aims render it virtually impossible for these policy makers to find a way out.
Quite aside from the political opprobrium that would attach to a decision to "cut and run," the neo-cons probably reckon that, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, Israel is only more secure as long as the US keeps a sizable military presence there. The Bush administration is, on the one hand, unwilling to send the "several hundred thousand" troops that former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki at the outset warned would be needed. On the other hand, it seems convinced that it cannot withdraw without leaving Israel in the lurch.
The neo-cons have considerable difficulty distinguishing between the strategic requirements of Israel and those of the US. There are not enough US troops in Iraq to quell the resistance, but there are enough to prevent any strategic threat to Israel. And so, the Bush administration shows no intention of drawing down US forces from Iraq anytime soon.
This, needless to say, has serious implications for us all -- including my grandson Matthew who is fast approaching draft age. But such awkward realities are not supposed to be spoken in polite political discourse. On PBS' Charlie Rose Show on August 20, I broke that taboo and was immediately branded "goofy" and "anti-Semitic" by arch-neo-conservative James Woolsey, a former CIA director.
It is a volatile, but important, point. Most Americans would be loath to support sending our young men and women into Iraq to make the world safer for an Israel that is armed to the teeth and led by the likes of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
In justifying the war, the administration deemed it far better to home in on things like "weapons of mass destruction" and to count on our somnolent press to miss a glaring inconsistency. On February 24, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated publicly, "Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction." And in July 2001 Condoleezza Rice said, "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."
But, as we are repeatedly reminded, after September 11 "everything changed." Are we being asked to believe, then, that weapons of mass destruction suddenly descended softly on Iraq -- like manna from heaven?
Intelligence Complicity
Intelligence? No intelligence estimate on Iraq was wanted by the White House, or needed, until the fall of 2002 when Congress was asked to authorize war on Iraq -- long after the decision to attack. At that point the ever-vigilant Senate intelligence oversight (overlook?) committee woke up to the fact that it had seen no intelligence to justify war. So the White House ordered the obedient Tenet to have his chefs cook up the "evidence" needed to muddle congressional minds with mushroom clouds. And the worst National Intelligence Estimate in US history was conjured up to help convince Congress to surrender to the president its power to make war.
Just as the swift boats of August have been spreading thick spray, the upcoming Goss hearings and debate on Roberts' cockamamie proposal on restructuring -- so outlandish as to have zero chance of passing -- can be counted upon to spread enough fog to keep the mayhem in Iraq off the front pages and distract attention from the president's most serious vulnerabilities. Karl Rove is counting on it, and he's cleverer by half.
Iraq? The CIA made us do it.
Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran CIA analyst, is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
[ENDS] | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2004 4:12 am Post subject: No Accountability on Abu Ghraib |
| http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/10/opinion/10fri1.html?pagewanted=print&position=
September 10, 2004
No Accountability on Abu Ghraib
After months of Senate hearings and eight Pentagon investigations, it is obvious that the administration does not intend to hold any high-ranking official accountable for the nightmare at Abu Ghraib. It was pretty clear yesterday that Senator John Warner's well-intentioned hearings of the Armed Services Committee are not going to do it either.
James Schlesinger, who was picked by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to head a civilian investigation of Abu Ghraib and seems determined to repay the favor, gave unhelpful testimony that included an incredible statement that there was no policy "that encourages abuse." He told that to the same senators who had heard earlier from a panel of generals that the Central Intelligence Agency was still refusing to account for its practice of hiding dozens of prisoners from the Red Cross. Mr. Rumsfeld personally approved that violation of the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties on at least one occasion.
At the hearing, Mr. Warner asked Mr. Schlesinger and Harold Brown, another former secretary of defense, to be specific about their report's talk of "institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels." Neither man had any intention of doing that.
Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war in the Vietnam era, asked Mr. Schlesinger with evident exasperation: "Isn't there some accountability? Isn't there some responsibility?" Mr. Schlesinger managed to come up with the colonel who read the first Red Cross report on the abuse of prisoners in late 2003 and decided that it was not credible. As for high-ranking officers and civilians, he intoned, "careers will be negatively affected."
Senator Edward Kennedy tried again. He read a list of naval officers fired for minor infractions committed by those under their command and asked why the same high standards of responsibility should not apply to, say, Mr. Rumsfeld. Mr. Schlesinger, who had earlier offered the bizarre theory that "what constitutes 'humane treatment' lies in the eye of the beholder," replied that "it's more complicated" when it came to holding a high-ranking politician accountable. He said a man like Mr. Rumsfeld must be judged on his "full performance."
We agree, enthusiastically. And with due respect to Mr. Warner - who has bravely continued his hearings and seems willing to keep going for months more - the answers are in.
Mr. Rumsfeld gave President Bush the legal advice that led to the president's famous memo declaring that the United States could, at his discretion, suspend the Geneva Conventions in the "global war on terror," and that prisoners with the newly minted designation of "unlawful combatants" were not entitled to the conventions' protections. Mr. Rumsfeld authorized the use of brutal interrogation techniques at the prison in Guantánamo Bay, some of which he later rescinded. His war plans left the Army without enough forces to face the uprising that followed Mr. Bush's ludicrously premature "mission accomplished" photo-op. Those policies - which commanders were afraid to challenge - left 97 untrained military police guarding some 7,000 Iraqis at Abu Ghraib who were not considered prisoners of war.
Mr. Rumsfeld's staff sent the chief Guantánamo Bay jailer to Iraq. There, he gave Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was under immense pressure from Washington to get intelligence on the Iraqi insurgency, a rundown on how the military forced information out of prisoners at Guantánamo. General Sanchez used that briefing, and the logic of the president's memo on unlawful combatants, to authorize the use of dogs and other illegal interrogation methods. He later tried to rescind the order, but every investigation has shown that the notion that the rules had changed was already widespread in Iraq, as well as at American military prisons in Afghanistan.
Most broadly, Mr. Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General John Ashcroft, has led the administration's efforts to justify the use of brutal interrogation techniques in the name of fighting terrorism.
Late in the day of hearings, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, offered a wry observation on how Mr. Rumsfeld's future had become wrapped up in Mr. Bush's campaign. "I guess we'll get the real answer to that after the election," he said.
Perhaps so, but that will be a year after the Red Cross first told the Army that prisoners were being brutalized at military detention centers all over Iraq, especially at Abu Ghraib. The American public, and the rest of the world, should not have to wait that long.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 10:45 am Post subject: Rumsfeld's dirty war on terror |
| http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1303078,00.html
Rumsfeld's dirty war on terror
In an explosive extract from his new book, Seymour Hersh reveals how, in a fateful decision that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the US defence secretary gave the green light to a secret unit authorised to torture terrorist suspects
Monday September 13, 2004
The Guardian
In the late summer of 2002, a CIA analyst made a quiet visit to the detention centre at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where an estimated 600 prisoners were being held, many, at first, in steel-mesh cages that provided little protection from the brutally hot sun. Most had been captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan during the campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaida.
The Bush administration had determined, however, that they were not prisoners of war but "enemy combatants", and that their stay at Guantánamo could be indefinite, as teams of CIA, FBI, and military interrogators sought to prise intelligence from them.
In a series of secret memorandums written earlier in the year, lawyers for the White House, the Pentagon and the justice department had agreed that the prisoners had no rights under federal law or the Geneva convention.
President Bush endorsed the finding, while declaring that the al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were nevertheless to be treated in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva convention - as long as such treatment was also "consistent with military necessity".
But the interrogations at Guantánamo were a bust.
Very little useful intelligence had been gathered, while prisoners from around the world continued to flow into the base, and the facility constantly expanded.
The CIA analyst had been sent there to find out what was going wrong.
He was fluent in Arabic and familiar with the Islamic world.
He was held in high respect within the agency, and was capable of reporting directly, if he chose, to George Tenet, the CIA director.
The analyst did more than just visit and inspect.
He interviewed at least 30 prisoners to find out who they were and how they ended up in Guantánamo.
Some of his findings, he later confided to a former CIA colleague, were devastating.
"He came back convinced that we were committing war crimes in Guantánamo," the colleague told me.
"Based on his sample, more than half the people there didn't belong there.
He found people lying in their own faeces," including two captives, perhaps in their 80s, who were clearly suffering from dementia.
"He thought what was going on was an outrage," the CIA colleague added.
There was no rational system for determining who was important.
Two former administration officials who read the analyst's highly classified report told me that its message was grim. According to a former White House official, the analyst's disturbing conclusion was that "if we captured some people who weren't terrorists when we got them, they are now".
That autumn, the document rattled aimlessly around the upper reaches of the Bush administration until it got into the hands of General John A Gordon, the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, who reported directly to Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser and the president's confidante.
Gordon, who had retired from the military as a four-star general in 2000 had served as a deputy director of the CIA for three years.
He was deeply troubled and distressed by the report, and by its implications for the treatment, in retaliation, of captured American soldiers.
Gordon, according to a former administration official, told colleagues that he thought "it was totally out of character with the American value system", and "that if the actions at Guantánamo ever became public, it'd be damaging to the president".
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, there had been much debate inside the administration about what was permissible in the treatment of prisoners and what was not. The most suggestive document, in terms of what was really going on inside military prisons and detention centres, was written in early August 2002 by Jay S Bybee, head of the justice department's office of legal counsel. "Certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within [a legal] proscription against torture," Bybee wrote to Alberto R Gonzales, the White House counsel.
"We conclude that for an act to constitute torture, it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure.
Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." (Bush later nominated Bybee to be a federal judge.)
"We face an enemy that targets innocent civilians," Gonzales, in turn, would tell journalists two years later, at the height of the furore over the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"We face an enemy that lies in the shadows, an enemy that doesn't sign treaties."
Gonzales added that Bush bore no responsibility for the wrongdoing.
"The president has not authorised, ordered or directed in any way any activity that would transgress the standards of the torture conventions or the torture statute, or other applicable laws," Gonzales said.
In fact, a secret statement of the president's views, which he signed on February 7, 2002 contained a loophole that applied worldwide:
"I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world," the president asserted.
John Gordon had to know what he was up against in seeking a high-level review of prison policies at Guantánamo, but he persevered.
Finally, the former White House official recalled, "We got it up to Condi."
As the CIA analyst's report was making its way to Rice, in late 2002 there were a series of heated complaints about the interrogation tactics at Guantánamo from within the FBI, whose agents had been questioning detainees in Cuba since the prison opened.
A few of the agents began telling their superiors what they had witnessed, which, they believed, had little to do with getting good information.
"I was told," a senior intelligence official recalled, "that the military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them, and making them stand until they got hypothermia.
The agents were outraged.
It was wrong and also dysfunctional."
The agents put their specific complaints in writing, the official told me, and they were relayed, in emails and phone calls, to officials at the department of defence, including William J Haynes II, the general counsel of the Pentagon.
As far as day-to-day life for prisoners at Guantánamo was concerned, nothing came of it.
The unifying issue for General Gordon and his supporters inside the administration was not the abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo, the former White House official told me:
"It was about how many more people are being held there that shouldn't be. Have we really got the right people?"
The briefing for Condoleezza Rice about problems at Guantánamo took place in the autumn of 2002.
It did not dwell on the question of torture or mistreatment.
The main issue, the former White House official told me, was simply, "Are we getting any intelligence? What is the process for sorting these people?"
Rice agreed to call a high-level meeting in the White House situation room.
Most significantly, she asked Secretary Rumsfeld to attend. Rumsfeld, who was by then publicly and privately encouraging his soldiers in the field to get tough with captured prisoners, duly showed up, but he had surprisingly little to say.
One participant in the meeting recalled that at one point Rice asked Rumsfeld "what the issues were, and he said he hadn't looked into it".
Rice urged Rumsfeld to do so, and added, "Let's get the story right."
Rumsfeld seemed to be in agreement, and Gordon and his supporters left the meeting convinced, the former administration official told me, that the Pentagon was going to deal with the issue.
Nothing changed. "The Pentagon went into a full-court stall," the former White House official recalled.
"I trusted in the goodness of man and thought we got something to happen.
I was naive enough to believe that when a cabinet member" - he was referring to Rumsfeld - "says he's going to take action, he will."
Over the next few months, as the White House began planning for the coming war in Iraq, there were many more discussions about the continuing problems at Guantánamo and the lack of useful intelligence.
No one in the Bush administration would get far, however, if he was viewed as soft on suspected al-Qaida terrorism.
"Why didn't Condi do more?" the official asked. "She made the same mistake I made. She got the secretary of defence to say he's going to take care of it."
There was, obviously, a difference between the reality of prison life in Guantánamo and how it was depicted to the public in carefully stage-managed news conferences and statements released by the administration.
American prison authorities have repeatedly assured the press and the public, for example, that the al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were provided with a minimum of three hours of recreation every week.
For the tough cases, however, according to a Pentagon adviser familiar with detainee conditions in mid-2002, at recreation time some prisoners would be strapped into heavy jackets, similar to straitjackets, with their arms locked behind them and their legs straddled by straps.
Goggles were placed over their eyes, and their heads were covered with a hood.
The prisoner was then led at midday into what looked like a narrow fenced-in dog run - the adviser told me that there were photographs of the procedure - and given his hour of recreation.
The restraints forced him to move, if he chose to move, on his knees, bent over at a 45-degree angle.
Most prisoners just sat and suffered in the heat.
One of the marines assigned to guard duty at Guantánamo in 2003, who has since left the military, told me, after being promised anonymity, that he and his enlisted colleagues at the base were encouraged by their squad leaders to "give the prisoners a visit" once or twice a month, when there were no television crews, journalists, or other outside visitors at the prison.
"We tried to fuck with them as much as we could - inflict a little bit of pain. We couldn't do much,"
for fear of exposure, the former marine, who also served in Afghanistan, told me.
"There were always newspeople there," he said. "That's why you couldn't send them back with a broken leg or so.
And if somebody died, I'd get court-martialled."
The roughing up of prisoners was sometimes spur-of-the-moment, the former marine said:
"A squad leader would say, 'Let's go - all the cameras on lunch break.'" One pastime was to put hoods on the prisoners and "drive them around the camp in a Humvee, making turns so they didn't know where they were. [...]
I wasn't trying to get information. I was just having a little fun - playing mind control."
When I asked a senior FBI official about the former marine's account, he told me that agents assigned to interrogation duties at Guantánamo had described similar activities to their superiors.
In November 2002, army Major General Geoffrey Miller had relieved Generals Dunlavey and Baccus, unifying the command at Guantánamo.
Baccus was seen by the Pentagon as soft - too worried about the prisoners' well-being.
In Senate hearings after Abu Ghraib, it became known that Miller was permitted to use legally questionable interrogation techniques at Guantánamo, which could include, with approval, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in "stress positions" for agonising lengths of time.
In May 2004, the New York Times reported that the FBI had instructed its agents to avoid being present at interrogation sessions with suspected al-Qaida members.
The newspaper said the severe methods used to extract information would be prohibited in criminal cases, and therefore could compromise the agents in future legal proceedings against the suspects.
"We don't believe in coercion," a senior FBI official subsequently told me.
"Our goal is to get information and we try to gain the prisoners' trust. We have strong feelings about it."
The FBI official added, "I thought Rumsfeld should have been fired long ago."
"They did it the wrong way," a Pentagon adviser on the war on terror told me, "and took a heavy-handed approach based on coercion, instead of persuasion - which actually has a much better track record.
It's about rage and the need to strike back.
It's evil, but it's also stupid.
It's not torture but acts of kindness that lead to concessions. The persuasive approach takes longer but gets far better results."
There was, we now know, a fantastical quality to the earnest discussions inside the White House in 2002 about the good and bad of the interrogation process at Guantánamo.
Rice and Rumsfeld knew what many others involved in the prisoner discussions did not - that sometime in late 2001 or early 2002, the president had signed a top-secret finding, as required by law, authorising the defence department to set up a specially recruited clandestine team of special forces operatives and others who would defy diplomatic niceties and international law and snatch - or assassinate, if necessary - identified "high-value" al-Qaida operatives anywhere in the world.
Equally secret interrogation centres would be set up in allied countries where harsh treatments were meted out, unconstrained by legal limits or public disclosure.
The programme was hidden inside the defence department as an "unacknowledged" special-access programme (SAP), whose operational details were known only to a few in the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House.
The SAP owed its existence to Rumsfeld's desire to get the US special forces community into the business of what he called, in public and internal communications, "manhunts", and to his disdain for the Pentagon's senior generals.
In the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of the generals and admirals to act aggressively.
Soon after September 11, he repeatedly made public his disdain for the Geneva convention.
Complaints about the United States' treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said, in early 2002, amounted to "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation".
One of Rumsfeld's goals was bureaucratic: to give the civilian leadership in the Pentagon, and not the CIA, the lead in fighting terrorism.
Throughout the existence of the SAP, which eventually came to Abu Ghraib prison, a former senior intelligence official told me, "There was a periodic briefing to the National Security Council [NSC] giving updates on results, but not on the methods."
Did the White House ask about the process? The former officer said that he believed that they did, and that "they got the answers".
By the time of Rumsfeld's meeting with Rice, his SAP was in its third year of snatching or strong-arming suspected terrorists and questioning them in secret prison facilities in Singapore, Thailand and Pakistan, among other sites.
The White House was fighting terror with terror.
On December 18 2001, American operatives participated in what amounted to the kidnapping of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who had sought asylum in Sweden.
The Egyptians, believed by American intelligence to be linked to Islamic militant groups, were abruptly seized in the late afternoon and flown out of Sweden a few hours later on a US government-leased Gulfstream private jet to Cairo, where they underwent extensive and brutal interrogation. "Both were dirty," a former senior intelligence official, who has extensive knowledge of special-access programmes, told me, "but it was pretty blatant."
The seizure of Agiza and Zery attracted little attention outside of Sweden, despite repeated complaints by human-rights groups, until May 2004 when a Swedish television news magazine revealed that the Swedish government had cooperated after being assured that the exiles would not be tortured or otherwise harmed once they were sent to Egypt.
Instead, according to a television report, entitled The Broken Promise, Agiza and Zery, in handcuffs and shackles, were driven to the airport by Swedish and, according to one witness, American agents and turned over at plane-side to a group of Americans wearing plain clothes whose faces were concealed.
Once in Egypt, Agiza and Zery have reported through Swedish diplomats, family members and attorneys, that they were subjected to repeated torture by electrical shocks distributed by electrodes that were attached to the most sensitive parts of their bodies.
Egyptian authorities eventually concluded, according to the documentary, that Zery had few ties to ongoing terrorism, and he was released from jail in October 2003, although he is still under surveillance.
Agiza was acknowledged by his attorneys to have been a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group outlawed in Egypt, and also was once close to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is outranked in al-Qaida only by Osama bin Laden.
In April 2004, he was sentenced to 25 years in an Egyptian prison.
Fredrik Laurin, a Swedish journalist who worked on The Broken Promise, extensively researched the leased Gulfstream jet that was used to take Zery and Agiza to Cairo.
Laurin told me that he was able to track the aircraft to landings in Pakistan, Kuwait, Egypt, Germany, England, Ireland Morocco, as well as the Washington DC area.
It also made visits to Guantánamo.
The company told Laurin that the plane was leased almost exclusively to the US government.
Significantly, the records obtained by Laurin indicate that the Gulfstream apparently halted its overseas trips from May 5 2004 - the week after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke - until July 7, when it flew from Dulles Airport in suburban Washington to Cairo.
After the Abu Ghraib abuses were revealed, a former senior intelligence official with direct information about the SAP gave me an account of how and why the top-secret programme had begun.
As the American-led hunt for al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden began to stall, he said, it was clear that the American intelligence operatives in the field were failing to get useful intelligence in a timely manner.
With the pressure mounting, some information was being delivered via the CIA by friendly liaison intelligence services - allies of the United States in the Middle East and south-east Asia - who were not afraid to get rough with prisoners.
The tough tactics appealed to Rumsfeld and his senior civilian aides.
Rumsfeld then authorised the establishment of the highly secret programme, which was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate high-value targets.
The SAP - subject to the defence department's most stringent level of security - was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon.
The people assigned to the programme recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from US elite forces - navy seals, the army's delta force, and the CIA's paramilitary experts.
"Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target - a stand-up group to hit quickly," the former senior intelligence official told me.
The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice.
Fewer than 200 operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Myers [Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff], were "completely read into the programme", the former intelligence official said. "The rules are 'Grab whom you must. Do what you want.'"
One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the programme was Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defence for intelligence.
Cambone had worked closely with Rumsfeld in a number of Pentagon jobs since the beginning of the administration, but this office, to which he was named in March 2003, was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld's reorganisation of the Pentagon.
Known for his closeness to Rumsfeld, Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq.
He chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the CIA's inability before the Iraq war to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harboured weapons of mass destruction.
Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programmes that were relevant to the war on terror.
In mid-2003, the SAP was regarded, at least in the Pentagon, as one of the success stories of the war on terror.
"It was an active programme," the former senior intelligence official told me.
"As this monster begins to take life, there's joy in the world. The monster is doing well - real well" - at least from the perspective of those involved who, according to the former officer, began to see themselves as "masters of the universe in terms of intelligence".
I was initially told of the SAP's existence by members of the intelligence community who were troubled by the programme's prima facie violation of the Geneva convention; their concern was that such activities, if exposed, would eviscerate the moral standing of the United States and expose American soldiers to retaliation. In May 2004, a ranking member of Congress confirmed its existence and further told me that President Bush had signed the mandated finding officially notifying Congress of the SAP.
The legislator added that he had none the less been told very little about the programme.
Only a few members of the House and Senate leadership were authorised by statute to be informed of it, and, even then, the legislators were provided with little more than basic budget information.
It's not clear that the Senate and House members understood that the United States was poised to enter the business of "disappearing" people.
The Pentagon may have judged the SAP a success, but by August 2003, the war in Iraq was going badly and there was, once again, little significant intelligence being generated in the many prisons in Iraq.
The president and his national security team turned for guidance to General Miller, the "Gitmo" [Guantánamo] commander.
Recounting that decision, one of the White House officials who had supported General Gordon's ill-fated effort to change prisoner policy asked me, rhetorically,
"Why do I take a failed approach at Guantánamo and move it to Iraq?"
By the autumn of 2003, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon's political and military misjudgments in Iraq was clear.
The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Cambone, was to get tough with the Iraqi men and women in detention - to treat them behind prison walls as if they had been captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan.
General Miller was summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures.
Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step beyond "Gitmoizing", however:
they expanded the scope of the SAP, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib.
The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan.
The male prisoners could be treated roughly and exposed to sexual humiliation.
"They weren't getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq," the former intelligence official told me.
"No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and I'm tired of working through the normal chain of command.
I've got this apparatus set up - the black special-access programme - and I'm going in hot.
"So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer.
And it's working.
We're getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We're getting good stuff."
Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the SAP's rules into the prisons, he would bring some of the army military intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the SAP's auspices.
"So here are fundamentally good soldiers - military intelligence guys - being told that no rules apply," the former official said.
In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programmes, spread the blame.
"The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone," he said. "This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the programme."
When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone.
Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, "but he's responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11 we've changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism and created conditions where the ends justify the means."
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation - aspects of which were known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green - encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the insurgency.
A senior CIA official confirmed the details of this account and said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA.
Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib - whether military police or military intelligence - was no longer the only question that mattered.
Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison.
The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others - military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, CIA officers, and the men from the SAP - wore civilian clothes.
It was not clear who was who, even to General Karpinski, then the commander of the 800 military police brigade.
"I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn't know," Karpinski told me. "I called them the disappearing ghosts. I'd seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I'd see them months later."
The mysterious civilians, she said, were "always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out". Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system.
Military intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib repeatedly wore "sterile", or unmarked, uniforms or civilian clothes while on duty. "You couldn't tell them apart," a source familiar with the investigation said.
The blurring of identities and organisations meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly, the military policemen on duty, to know who was doing what to whom and who had the authority to give orders.
By last autumn, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the CIA had had enough.
"They said, 'No way. We signed up for the core programme in Afghanistan - pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets.
And now you want to use it for cab drivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets.'"
The CIA balked, the former intelligence official said: "The agency checks with their lawyers and pulls out," ending those of its activities in Abu Ghraib that related to the SAP. (In a later conversation, a senior CIA official confirmed this account.)
The CIA's complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community.
There was fear the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret SAP, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valued covert operation.
"This was stupidity," a government consultant told me. "You're taking a programme that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against al-Qaida, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone.
Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an army of 135,000 soldiers."
In mid 2003, Rumsfeld's apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva convention while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on International Human Rights.
"They wanted us to challenge the Bush administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation," Horton told me in May 2004.
"They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. [ ... ]
The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it's going to occur."
The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled.
The JAG officers told him that, with the war on terror, a 50-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva convention had come to an end.
In July 2004, I again spoke to Scott Horton, who has maintained contact with a network of JAG lawyers.
He told me that Rumsfeld and his civilian deputies had pressured the army to conclude the pending investigations by late August, before the Republican convention in New York. Horton added that the politics were blatant.
Pentagon investigations, he said, "have a reputation for tending to whitewash, but even taking this into account, the current investigations seem to be setting new standards".
Rumsfeld's office had circumscribed the investigators' charge and also placed tight controls on the documents to be made available.
In other words, Horton said, "Rumsfeld has completely rigged the investigations. My friends say we should expect something much akin to the army inspector general's report - 'just a few rotten apples'."
But General Taguba's highly critical internal investigation into military prisons in Iraq - which, together with the shocking photographs of prisoner abuse, sparked the Abu Ghraib scandal in April - amounted to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of army leadership at the highest levels.
The picture Taguba drew of Abu Ghraib was one in which army regulations and the Geneva convention were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to army military intelligence units and civilian contract employees.
Rumsfeld's most fateful decision, endorsed by the White House, came at a time of crisis in August 2003 when the defence secretary expanded the highly secret SAP into the prisons of Iraq.
The roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal therefore lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few army reservists, but in the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion - and eye-for-an-eye retribution - in fighting terrorism.
· This is an edited extract from Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, by Seymour M Hersh, published today by Penguin Press.
Seymour Hersh discusses the above in the segment linked at:
http://www.democracynow.org | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Sep 17, 2004 4:38 am Post subject: New Charges Raise Questions on Abuse at Afghan Prisons |
| http://www.nytimes.com
September 17, 2004
THE PRISONS
New Charges Raise Questions on Abuse at Afghan Prisons
By CARLOTTA GALL and DAVID ROHDE
ABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 16 - Sgt. James P. Boland, a reserve military police soldier from Cincinnati, watched as a subordinate beat an Afghan prisoner, Mullah Habibullah, 30, the brother of a former Taliban commander, according to a military charge sheet released recently.
The report also said that Sergeant Boland shackled an Afghan named Dilawar, chaining his hands above his shoulders, and denied medical care to the man, a 22-year-old taxi driver, whose family said he had never spent a night away from his mother and father before being taken to the American air base at Bagram, 40 miles north of Kabul. The two detainees died there within a week of each other in December 2002.
Now, 21 months later, the Army has charged Sergeant Boland with assault and other crimes and investigators are recommending that two dozen other American soldiers face criminal charges, including negligent homicide, or other punishments for abuses that occurred more than a year before the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Far from settling the cases, the charges raise new questions about who authorized the harsh interrogation methods used in Afghanistan and about the contradictory statements made by American military officials who, when questioned shortly after the men's deaths, said they had died of natural causes.
The military's findings now support accounts by former Afghan prisoners who said they were subjected to abuses that, while just as harrowing as any in Iraq, have drawn far less attention or official scrutiny lacking the kinds of photographs that so shocked the world from Abu Ghraib this spring.
Pentagon and other American officials have said the harsh interrogation methods described by the Afghans and outlined in the Army's charges were not authorized for use at Bagram.
A classified portion of an Army report into the Abu Ghraib scandal, recently obtained by The New York Times, shows that on Dec. 2, 2002, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had approved such methods for use only at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"Interrogation techniques intended only for Guantánamo came to be used in Afghanistan and Iraq,'' a separate report by an independent panel, appointed by Mr. Rumsfeld and headed by James R. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary, found in August. "In Afghanistan, techniques included removal of clothing, isolating people for long periods of time, use of stress positions, exploiting fear of dogs, and sleep and light deprivation.''
Mr. Habibullah and Mr. Dilawar died at Bagram after enduring at least some of those interrogation methods. A pending report by the naval inspector general, due to be released in the next few weeks, is expected to examine how and why those methods were being used here. Military and government officials have yet to answer those questions.
In addition, recent revelations that the Central Intelligence Agency kept the names of dozens of detainees at Abu Ghraib and other facilities in Iraq off official rosters, to hide them from Red Cross inspectors, have raised fresh concerns over the possibility of similar practices here.
Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, said in an e-mail response to questions this week that in previous interviews he had always given the best information available to him. Sergeant Boland could not be reached for comment.
In a February 2003 interview, General McNeill acknowledged an investigation into Mr. Dilawar's death. But neither he nor other officials disclosed that military pathologists had described both deaths as homicides caused by beatings.
At the time, General McNeill and other military officials said in interviews that both Afghan prisoners had died of natural causes. "We haven't found anything that requires us to take extraordinary action," General McNeill said at the time. "We are going to let this investigation run its course."
He described Mr. Dilawar as having an advanced heart condition and said his coronary arteries were 85 percent blocked.
When General McNeill was asked at the time whether either prisoner had suffered injuries in custody, something described on both death certificates, he replied, "Presently, I have no indication of that." In a later interview, he said the men had suffered injuries before their arrival at Bagram.
Asked if prisoners' hands were being chained to ceilings, he denied it. "We are not chaining people to the ceilings," he said. "I think you asked me that question before."
A military pathologist's finding on Mr. Dilawar's death certificate was revealed only when a journalist from The New York Times visited his family in their isolated village in the province of Khost and read the form, which was written in English, a language they could not understand.
The spokesman for the American-led force in Afghanistan, Col. Roger King, then confirmed the authenticity of the death certificate, but played down the pathologist's findings.
Afterward, the investigation moved slowly, and the troubled military intelligence unit that ran the Bagram detention center was transferred to Iraq. Members of that unit - the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, based at Fort Bragg, N.C. - have now been implicated in the deaths of the two Afghans as well as in the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
After the Abu Ghraib scandal, administration and military officials portrayed the use of the harsh interrogation methods approved by Mr. Rumsfeld as selective, limited only to prisoners considered to be of high-intelligence value.
Those 17 methods also included yelling at detainees, hooding them, shaving their heads and beards, the use of minimal physical contact like poking or grabbing, and 20-hour interrogations, according to the classified portions of the Army report provided by a senior military official who said full disclosure would help explain the causes behind the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Though it is not clear whether Mr. Rumsfeld was informed of the deaths of the two Afghan prisoners, a month later he rescinded his list of interrogation methods. In April, he approved a revised list, authorizing seven more aggressive interrogation techniques beyond the 17 listed in the Army's field manual.
Defense officials interviewed this year said that the more aggressive methods had been used only on two prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
But in interviews in early 2003 and in May 2004, five former Afghan prisoners, all of whom were later released after the military decided they posed no threat, described detentions and interrogations under extremely harsh conditions.
Before being released, three of the men were sent from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay. All said they were treated far worse in Afghanistan and that Guantánamo was more orderly and had more rules. In all, they spent 14 months in American detention.
Three of those interviewed said they were arrested with Mr. Dilawar after a broken walkie-talkie and an electric stabilizer were found in his taxi several hours after rockets were fired at an American base.
In interviews in May 2004, the three men said they were hooded and had their arms raised and chained to the ceiling for hours and days at a time at Bagram.
All the prisoners said they were first held in second-floor isolation cells, for periods ranging from 5 to 16 days. Later, they said, they and other prisoners were moved to the ground floor where they were held in large chain-link cages and barred from conversing.
One of the three men, Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old farmer, said he was kept awake by soldiers blaring music and shouting at him. He said he grew so exhausted at one point that he vomited.
Another, Parkhudin, a 26-year-old farmer and former soldier, said his hands were chained to the ceiling for 8 of his 10 days in isolation and that he was hooded for hours at a time.
"They were putting a mask over our heads, they were beating us in Bagram," he said. "I think Dilawar died because he couldn't breathe. For me, it was very difficult to breathe."
Mr. Parkhudin said he was forced to lie on his stomach and that a soldier then jumped on his back. He said he believed that the Afghan in an adjoining isolation cell was Mr. Dilawar because the prisoner cried out for his mother and father.
The third man, Abdur Rahim, a 26-year-old baker, said that he was hooded and that his hands were chained to the ceiling for "seven or eight days" and turned black.
American interrogators forced him to crouch and hold his hands out in front of him for long periods, causing intense pain in his shoulders. When he tried to sit up, he said, "they were coming and hitting me and saying 'Don't move!' "
Two other men, interviewed in February 2003, Abdul Jabar, a 35-year-old taxi driver, and Hakkim Shah, a 32-year-old farmer, were held at the same time as Mr. Dilawar and described similar treatment.
Mr. Shah said he spent 16 days in upstairs rooms naked, hooded and shackled to the ceiling for 10 days until his legs became so swollen that the shackles cut off the blood flow and he could no longer stand. Doctors eventually removed the shackles and allowed him to sit.
Beyond Bagram, the Central Intelligence Agency maintains a large compound, based in the Ariana, a hotel in central Kabul, just 200 yards from the presidential palace.
Privately, the C.I.A. has been much criticized by Red Cross officials for providing no information about its detainees in Afghanistan. The street where its compound stands is blocked. The walls are covered with barbed wire. The Red Cross says it has been denied access to the detainees held there.
A detainee from the compound, a former Taliban commander named Mullah Rocketi, who gave himself up to American officials, said in an interview after his release last year that he had spent eight months there. He described the compound as reasonably comfortable and said he was not mistreated. But he said he never saw the Red Cross. He said he was released after making a deal with American officials, but would not provide details.
Another former Afghan commander taken there was Jan Baz Khan, who worked for the C.I.A. and then came under suspicion of being behind rocket attacks on an American base, according to a United States military commander who did not want to be named. He said the prisoner was taken there in January.
There has been no word of his release. No one knows how many other people are held there still. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
