Abu Ghraib

Extracts from Mark Danner’s article on “Abu Ghraib”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17430 in the NYRB.

More important, the reports suggest how procedures that “violated established interrogation procedures and applicable laws” in fact had their genesis not in Iraq but in interrogation rooms in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—and ultimately in decisions made by high officials in Washington. … the Americans arrested thousands of Iraqis—or, as Schlesinger puts it, “they reverted to rounding up any and all suspicious-looking persons —all too often including women and children. The flood of incoming detainees contrasted sharply with the trickle of released individuals.” … having filled Abu Ghraib largely with Iraqis of “no intelligence value”—whose families in most cases had no way to confirm where they were—the overwhelmed American command could not devise a way to get them out again, especially when faced with the strong opposition of those who had arrested them in the first place:

bq. Combat Commanders desired that no security detainee be released for fear that any and all detainees could be threats to co-alition forces…. The [chief of intelligence, Fourth Infantry Division] informed [Major General] Fast that the Division Commander did not concur with the release of any detainees for fear that a bad one may be released along with the good ones.

The system was self-defeating and, not surprisingly, “interrogation operations in Abu Ghraib suffered from the effects of a broken detention operations system.” Indeed, these reports are full of “broken systems” and “under-resourced” commands, from Abu Ghraib itself, a besieged, sweltering, stinking hell-hole under daily mortar attack that lacked interpreters, interrogators, guards, detainee uniforms, and just about everything else, including edible food, and that, at its height, was staggering under an impossible prisoner-to-guard ratio of seventy-five to one, all the way up to the command staff of Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, which lacked, among other vital resources, two thirds of its assigned officers. … And though they don’t say so explicitly, it is clear that the writers of these reports put much of the blame for this not on the commanders on the ground but on the political leadership in Washington, who, rather than pay the political cost of admitting the need for more troops—admitting, that is, that they had made mistakes in planning for the war and in selling it to the public—decided to “tough it out,” at the expense of the men and women in the field and, ultimately, the Iraqis they had been sent to “liberate.” …

In mid-August, a captain in military intelligence (MI) sent his colleagues an e-mail—recently shown to me—in which, clearly responding to an earlier request from interrogators, he sought to define “unlawful combatants,” distinguishing them from “lawful combatants [who] receive protections of the Geneva Convention and gain combat immunity for their warlike acts.” After promising to provide “an ROE”— rules of engagement—”that addresses the treatment of enemy combatants, specifically, unprivileged belligerents,” the captain asks the interrogators for “input…concerning what their special interrogation knowledge base is and more importantly, what techniques would they feel would be effective techniques.” Then, reminding the intelligence people to “provide Interrogation techniques ‘wish list’ by 17 AUG 03,” the captain signs off this way:

bq. The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken. Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks. I thank you for your hard work and your dedication.

bq. MI ALWAYS OUT FRONT!

… As early as October 2001, after the capture of John Walker Lindh in Afghanistan, a Navy admiral told the intelligence officer interrogating Lindh that “the secretary of defense’s counsel has authorized him to ‘take the gloves off’ and ask whatever he wanted.” …

During a period of about two months, military police beat the detainee savagely into unconsciousness, ripped his ear, urinated on him, “high-cuffed” him to the bars of his cell for hours so that the skin of his hand split and oozed pus, and sodomized him with a police baton—to give only a brief summary of what, in the detainee’s statement, is an exhaustive and exhausting catalog of imaginative and extremely disgusting tortures carried out over many days. Now during this time, as General Fay meticulously confirms, military intelligence soldiers interrogated Detainee-07 on at least six occasions, as befits a prisoner judged of “potentially high value.” General Fay, however, finds here only a “circumstantial connection to MI,” concluding that the intelligence officers “should have been aware of what was being done to this detainee.”

The problem here is that it is quite obvious from the report that military intelligence officers were “aware of what was being done to the detainee” —indeed, that they ordered it. Throughout the general’s patient recounting of his forty-four “serious incidents”— his careful sifting of them into categories (“Nudity/Humiliation,” “Assault,” “Sexual Assault,” “Use of Dogs,” “The ‘Hole,'” and “Other”), his determination to classify them according to responsibility (“MI,” “MP,” “MI/MP,” or “UNK,” for unknown), and his dogged effort to separate what he calls “violent/sexual abuse incidents” (which is to say those, generally speaking, committed by military police, which were not a matter of policy) from “misinterpretation/confusion incidents” (those committed by military intelligence soldiers, who, however, were “confused” about what was permitted at Abu Ghraib as a matter of policy)—throughout all this runs a tone of faintly hysterical absurdity. Throughout we see distinctions that are not distinctions at all, and that recall nothing so much as the darkest passages of Catch-22 …

With no fear of a full, top-to-bottom investigation from a Congress that is firmly in Republican hands, administration officials, and particularly those at the Department of Defense, have managed to orchestrate a slowly unfolding series of inquiries, almost all of them carried out within the military by officers who by definition can only direct their gaze down the chain of command, not up it, and who are each empowered to examine only a limited and precisely defined number of links in the chain that connects the highest levels of the government to what happened on the ground in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in the war on terror. …

The delicate bureaucratic construction now holding the Abu Ghraib scandal firmly in check rests ultimately on President Bush’s controversial decision, on February 7, 2002, to withhold protection of the Geneva Convention both from al-Qaeda and from Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The decision rested on the argument, in the words of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez, that “the war against terrorism is a new kind of war,” in fact, a “new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions….” In a prefiguring of later bureaucratic wars, lawyers in the State Department and many in the military services fought against this decision, arguing, prophetically, that it “would undermine the United States military culture, which is based on a strict adherence to the law of war.”

For torture, this decision was Original Sin: it made legally possible the adoption of the various “enhanced interrogation techniques” that have been used at CIA secret prisons and at the US military’s prison at Guantánamo Bay. As it turns out, however, for the administration, Bush’s decision was also Amazing Grace, because, by implying that the US military must adhere to wholly different rules when interrogating, say, Taliban prisoners in Guantánamo, who do not enjoy Geneva Convention protection, and Iraqi insurgents at Abu Ghraib, who do, it makes it possible to argue that American interrogators, when applying the same techniques at Abu Ghraib that they had earlier used in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo, were in fact taking part not in “violent/sexual abuse incidents,” like their sadistic military police colleagues, but instead in “misinterpretation/confusion incidents.” …

General Miller’s report, which remains secret but was made available to me, recommends, among other things, that those in charge of Abu Ghraib should “dedicate and train a detention guard force subordinate to [the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center] that sets conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees. This action,” he adds, “is now in progress.” The MPs, in other words, should be working for the interrogators and spending significant time “softening up” prisoners, by keeping them awake, “making sure this one has a bad night,” etc.—doing, that is, precisely what the accused military police, no doubt self-servingly, claimed they were doing in at least some of those dreadful photographs. …

This confusion over doctrine supposedly allowed some of the more gruesome practices that are so patiently set out in General Fay’s report, including sensory deprivation, routine nudity and humiliation, “exploiting the Arab fear of dogs,” and prolonged isolation of a particularly revolting kind:

bq. DETAINEE-14 was detained in a totally darkened cell measuring about 2 meters long and less than a meter across, devoid of any window, latrine or water tap, or bedding. On the door the [Red Cross] delegates noticed the inscription “the Gollum,” and a picture of the said character from the film trilogy “Lord of the Rings.”

Detainee-14 was one of eight detainees to whom General Sanchez denied the Red Cross access. …

There simply was no clear dividing line, no point where sadistic abuses became instances of “misinterpretation/confusion”—where, that is, an interrogator simply erred in applying a technique that while permitted in Afghanistan or Guantánamo, constituted a violation in Iraq of the Geneva Conventions. How isolated could the so-called “Animal House on the night shift” abuses of the military police have been from military intelligence when, as we learn in the Fay report, one of the most notorious images, that of “several naked detainees stacked in a ‘pyramid,'” served as a “screen saver” on one of the computers in the military intelligence office?

via “Backword Dave”:http://backword.me.uk/2004/September/mutineers.html