May 2004: Week Two: This Far and No Further

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May 8: In a puzzling and horrifying development, the decapitated body of American civilian Nicholas Berg is discovered on a roadside in Baghdad. Berg was in Baghdad as a private citizen, hoping to help the Iraqis rebuild their communications infrastructure and offering the services of his small business, Prometheus Methods Tower Service, which builds and maintains communications towers. Berg, a Jew, was captured by Islamic terrorists and apparently beheaded in retribution for the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers. Berg's last few months in Iraq were quite murky. In March, he was detained by Iraqi police in Mosul and interrogated by FBI agents who did not understand his presence in Iraq. He was not allowed to make phone calls or retain a lawyer. His parents, unable to contact him personally, filed a lawsuit on April 5 asserting that he was being held by US authorities in violation of his civil rights. He was freed on April 6, and disappeared shortly thereafter. "His parents contacted our office, the FBI, the State Department," says state representative Jim Gerlach, a Republican. "They got very insufficient information," he says. "They felt that they were not getting full answers." US authorities deny ever keeping Berg in custody, saying that he was detained by Iraqi police because he did not have proper identification and authorization papers. "To our knowledge, he was detained by the Iraqi police in Mosul," says coalition spokesman Dan Senor. "He was in Iraqi police custody. He was met by US officials, he was visited three times by the FBI, but at all times, he was in Iraqi custody." Iraqi authorities say they held Berg only briefly before handing him over to US troops, police sources in Mosul have said.
Attorney General John Ashcroft says that Berg was in the custody of Iraqi police when he was questioned by the FBI. Ashcroft also says FBI agents and officials with the Coalition Provisional Authority "emphasized to him the dangerous environment that existed at the time in Iraq. And they encouraged him to accept the CPA's offer to arrange his safe passage out of Iraq." In a claim that Berg's family and friends both inside and outside of Iraq find hard to believe, Ashcroft also says that Berg turned down offers to advise his family of his status. Berg's family thinks that his ethnicity may have clinched his captors' decision to murder him. "There's a better chance than not that they knew he was Jewish. If there was any doubt that they were going to kill him, that probably clinched it, I'm guessing." His father Michael says that he himself is fervently anti-war, but that his son disagreed. "He was a Bush supporter," Berg says. "He looked at it as bringing democracy to a country that didn't have it." His mother Suzanne says that US officials were never helpful in assisting her in finding her son. "I went through this with them for weeks," she says. "I basically ended up doing most of the investigating myself." (New York Times/Truthout, AP/PhillyBurbs, CNN)
May 8: Early accounts of prisoner abuse in Iraq, from as far back as October 2003, were met with silence from the Army. The situation is summed up by former prisoner Rahad Naif, who said then, "I wish somebody could go take a picture of Camp Bucca," a statement made ironic by hindsight. These early accounts by freed prisoners, reported by The Associated Press last fall, told of detainees punished by hours lying bound in the sun; being attacked by dogs; being deprived of sufficient water; spending days with hoods over their heads. One told the AP of seeing an elderly Iraqi woman tied up and lying in the dust; others told of ill men dying in crowded tents. They spoke repeatedly of being humiliated by American guards. None mentioned the sexual humiliation seen in recently released photos, but Arab culture might keep an Iraqi from describing such mistreatment. In contrast to suggestions that the photos indicate isolated abuse by a few, these Iraqis told of widespread practices in several camps that would violate the Geneva Conventions and other human rights standards. The Red Cross agrees, disclosing that its inspectors last year found a "broad pattern" of abuse. On Oct. 18, the AP posed specific questions about the reported abuses to the US military command in Baghdad and the 800th Military Police Brigade, which was in charge of detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and other facilities. The MP unit drafted responses, the AP later learned, but the Baghdad command did not release them. No explanation was given. The AP report, published Nov. 1, cited a statement to Arab television by the MP commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, that prisoners were treated humanely.
Meantime, "between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees," according to a Pentagon report. That report said the photos from Abu Ghraib dated from this period, both before and after the AP article appeared. The Army's report, which found that soldiers also committed "egregious acts and grave breaches" at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, did not come to light until they were disclosed in the May 10 issue of the New Yorker magazine. It had been classified "secret." That investigation was prompted by a soldier's complaint to superiors in January about fellow guards' actions. The half-dozen ex-prisoners interviewed by AP in October were freed without charges after spending months in Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and the Baghdad airport's Camp Cropper. Some Americans were humane, they said, but many were not. "They don't have morals. They don't respect old or young. They humiliate everybody," said Naif, a Baghdad resident like the others and one of three brothers confined. Women guards especially were verbally abusive, with obscene invective, "insulting our sisters and parents. It was very hard to accept," he said. "some are like children, showing off their muscle," his brother Hassan says of the MPs.
Last summer, when temperatures topped 120, guards struck one man at Camp Cropper with an "electric stick" because he was slow carrying water, and then "tied his hands and put him in the sun for three hours," said Ziad Tarik. This punishment in "The Garden" also was recounted by others: being made to lie bound in the sun for hours on a patch of sand enclosed by razor-wire, even for such lesser infractions as shouting to the next tent or stealing food. They also told of beatings by guards -- for example, of an Abu Ghraib prisoner who refused to eat. "He was stubborn, so they hit him, and he spent three days in the hospital," Tarik said. "They used to hit people and turn dogs loose on them," said Saad, the third Naif brother, who spent 2 1/2 months in Abu Ghraib. "They used to humble people by putting nylon bags over their heads, for three days, with their hands tied up. I know one who died because he couldn't breathe." The US military and CIA now say at least 14 detainee deaths have been or are being investigated. The camps held not only men captured in the anti-US insurgency, but many others picked up by US troops in broad neighborhood sweeps, on slight suspicions or unverified tips, or as curfew-breakers, checkpoint-dodgers or common criminals. Up to 8,000 are believed still held. The Naif brothers said they and neighbor Tarik were seized by American soldiers after a nasty quarrel with another neighbor, who had links with the US occupation and apparently denounced them as resistance supporters. The brothers were thrown into three separate camps. Prisoners regularly rose up in protest or riots to demand they be charged or freed, and sometimes to seek better treatment for ill comrades, the men said.
"They'd turn dogs on us to put down the demonstrations," said Ra'id Mohammed Hassan. He said he was taken to Camp Bucca after Americans searching his car found a weapon, a common item for Iraqis. The ex-detainees complained they were never given enough water for drinking and washing and at times were denied food as punishment. "Once we were saying prayers for the death of a prisoner, and we were chanting, so they kept food from us for a day and a half," Saad Naif said. The Iraqis said the Americans' treatment of women detainees and the sick most appalled them. Hassan Ali Muslim, detained for alleged carjacking but never charged, remembered one man being brought into their stifling, overcrowded tent at Camp Cropper in a sickbed. He said another died beside him. "He was an old man. We had to line up for food, and it was very hot and it took a very long time, and wasn't good for sick people," Muslim said. "After the meal he began breathing heavily, and he just died." The men told of detainees in wheelchairs and poorly treated diabetics, of epileptic seizures and nervous breakdowns. "I saw four die in our camp," Tarik said of Abu Ghraib. Even when fellow prisoners warned of one man's worsening condition, he said, "they said they wouldn't take him [to a hospital] until it's serious and he's about to die."
Saad Naif said the "worst thing" was the treatment of women. "Innocent women were kept for months in the same clothes. I saw a woman about 80 years old -- her hands were tied up and she was lying in the dust." Hassan Naif recalled a day at Camp Cropper when a man saw his sister being punished by being stretched out bound in the sun. He angrily tried to cross the razor wire ringing his tent, "and they shot him in the shoulder," he said. Saad Naif said he saw another prisoner shot dead when he approached the wire at Abu Ghraib. Muslim, whose father was jailed under the ousted Baathists, said the US system hardly compared with the old regime's bloody political prisons, and he said living conditions improved at times under the Americans. Camp Cropper, whose overcrowded conditions had grown notorious, was closed Oct. 1. The secret Army investigation, nevertheless, found that the worst abuses continued at least into December at Abu Ghraib. Much of what the ex-detainees told AP meshed with what delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outsiders allowed into the camps, were said to have found on visits last year. Those findings were confidential, but the human rights group Amnesty International said last summer it learned that the ICRC inspectors were finding serious abuses, and it charged that "torture and gross abuse of human rights" were occurring. The Red Cross recently disclosed that it had repeatedly demanded last year that US authorities correct problems in the detention centers. The Americans took action on some issues but not others, it said. "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," Pierre Kraehenbuel, the Red Cross operations director, said in Geneva. Inside the camps, too, appeals were made. Saad Naif said one prominent detainee, a former Iraqi provincial governor, urged US military officers to halt the abuses. "He told them, 'What you are doing to the Iraqi people will turn against you,' and that they must win the support of the people, not the opposite," Naif said. "They told him to mind his own business." (AP/NewsMax)
May 8: Al-Jazeera cameraman Suhaib Badr al Baz gives further details about his imprisonment and torture at the hands of US soldiers. Al Baz was held for 74 days without charges or legal representation at a camp outside the Baghdad airport. As a civilian, al Baz was entitled to the protections afforded him under the Geneva Conventions, but instead was victimized by soldiers who ignored the fourth Convention's Article 147: "Willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment.... Unlawful confinement of a protected person...willfully depriving protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial." Al Baz may have been targeted for his connections to al-Jazeera, the Arab TV network recently excoriated by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he said, "I can definitively say that what Al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable." The US military has hit al-Jazeera buildings in both Baghdad and Kabul, strikes that the network believes were intentional, though the military denies it. As Baghdad fell to American forces on April 8 last year, a bomb struck the office of the network and killed Tariq Ayoub, an al-Jazeera cameraman. Many journalists who have covered the war for the past year believe there is a clear pattern of intimidation toward the network by the coalition. Al Baz himself believes he was singled out because of his employer. "They knew me, they had stopped me before," he says of the soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division, who arrested him. "We believe that Suhaib was not treated in accordance with his status as a journalist in a war zone. He was released from Abu Ghraib from a period of confinement without being charged," says Jihad Ballout, a spokesman for the network in Qatar. Though the military refuses to confirm his detention, al Baz was able to describe his abusers and in several cases provide names of the most brutal. These names matched the independent accounts of other prisoners who had also spent time in the prison. It also appears that some of the military personnel involved in the torture used aliases to conceal their identities from the Iraqis.
A man some of the former Abu Ghraib prisoners called "Joiner" was identified in one of the published photographs as Spc. Charles Graner. Al Baz also mentioned a man called "Joiner" when talking about the worst abuses he saw at Abu Ghraib. His ordeal began November 13 last year, when al Baz arrived at the site of a convoy attack in Samarra with his camera. US soldiers stopped him and began to search his car. Al Baz said that when they found his al-Jazeera ID badge, the soldiers asked him how he knew about the attack in advance, and then tied his hands behind his back. Al Baz says he arrived at the site four hours after the attack, and by that time, the entire city knew about it. Following his arrest, al Baz says that soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division took him to a US military base in Samarra and interrogated him for two days. "At the base I first saw a tall heavy man who put a black hood over my head," he recalls. "Then he forced me to stand in front of a wall for three or four hours. I was treated very roughly, then taken to a room and interrogated. When the tall man was not satisfied with my answers, he hit me in the face. They asked questions in a way that showed they were not interested in the truth."
Al Baz says at first he was not given food or water, or allowed to pray. On the second day, he was given foul-smelling food. Immediately after his arrest, colleagues from the network and friends began to pressure the coalition for information but were told by General Mark Kimmit's staff that there was no information available. This is a common reply for people seeking information about recently detained people. Al Baz says it took a week for the military to issue him a prison ID number. "I asked them if I could contact my family because they would be worried about me. The tall man told me to forget it, that my destiny was in Guantánamo Bay." Al Baz said that during his time at the base, soldiers came into his cell spitting on him and screaming in his ear to keep him awake. "I didn't know if it was day or night. They tied my hands so tightly my wrists started bleeding, but at this stage I was still allowed to keep my clothes. This was a wonderful period compared to my time in Abu Ghraib." Al Baz says that he was taken from the base in Samarra to the airport in Baghdad, where his treatment worsened: "In there I heard some horrible noises, many people screaming. They told me to sit on the floor and I went numb from the cold. If I moved my head even a little bit, a soldier would grab my hood and slam my head into the wall. Sometimes they pretended to kill me by pulling the trigger of their rifles. I found out later that they were punishing other people there." Al Baz says that he heard screams, men shouting "Good Bush, bad Saddam!" and crying out to God for help. "But it didn't do anything to decrease the punishment they were going through."
When al Baz moved to Abu Ghraib in late November, he said he was asked to strip naked at one point but was never forced to take part in staged scenes like the others. "It didn't happen like that to me," he says. He witnessed a disturbing episode involving a father and son. From his cell, al Baz says he watched through the small window and saw two men stripped naked. "The boy was only about 16 years old, and then a soldier poured cold water over them. Their cell was directly across from mine." Al Baz says that the father and son were made to stand naked in front of other prisoners for days. The Abu Ghraib prisoners were well aware that they were being photographed. "I first knew that they were taking pictures when I saw that one of the computers had a picture of some prisoners as its desktop background," he says. "One of the prisoners had a black hood over his head and he was covered in cold water. I personally witnessed this event take place. The man was screaming, 'I'm innocent!' until he got sick and his body got swollen from all the punishment." Cold water, solitary confinement, swollen bodies and constant psychological abuse are recurring images for the Al-Jazeera cameraman, who also credits his tormentors with ingenuity. "They had all different kinds of punishments and they changed them all the time. I begged them to interrogate me again so they would know that I was innocent, but they said no, that's it. All we know is that you're staying here." The cameraman was released from Abu Ghraib in late January 2004. Since then he has returned to work for Al-Jazeera. He tells Salon, "I have one request, please don't concentrate so much on my story. There are still many people left in Abu Ghraib." (Salon)
May 8: The US military says it will investigate claims by a former inmate of Abu Ghraib prison that a girl as young as 12 was stripped and beaten by military personnel. Suhaib Badr al-Baz, a journalist for the al-Jazeera television network, says he was tortured at the prison, based west of Baghdad, while held there for 54 days. He was arrested when reporting clashes between insurgents and coalition forces in November. al Baz says, "They [soldiers] brought a 12-year-old girl into our cellblock late at night. Her brother was a prisoner in the other cells. She was naked and screaming and calling out to him as they beat her. Her brother was helpless and could only hear her cries. This affected all of us because she was just a child." He also claims that a father and his 15-year-old son were tortured in front of his cell. He says, "They made the son carry two jerry cans full of water. An American soldier had a stick and when he stopped, he would beat him. He collapsed so they stripped him and poured cold water over him. They brought a man who was wearing a hood. They pulled it off. The son was shocked to see it was his father and collapsed. When he recovered, he now saw his father dressed in women's underwear and the Americans laughing at him." al-Baz claims the guards at the prison were keen to take photographs of the abuse and turned it into a competition. "They were enjoying taking photographs of the torture. There was a daily competition to see who could take the most gruesome picture. The winner's photo would be stuck on a wall and also put on their laptop computers as a screensaver. I had a good opinion of the Americans but since my time in prison, I've changed my mind. In Iraq we still have no freedom or democracy. They are so cruel to us." The International Committee of the Red Cross has said Iraqis held by US forces have been subjected to systematic degrading treatment, sometimes close to torture, that may have been officially condoned. The ICRC said visits to detention centers in Iraq between March and November 2003 had turned up violations of international treaties on prisoners of war. (ITV/USLAW)

Further prisoner abuse photos and videos, including ones showing rape and murder, coming out

May 8: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirms that thousands more photographs and videos of Iraqi prisoner abuse exist, in some cases showing far worse incidents than have been previously reported. Rumsfeld says the additional photos show "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman." "There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist," Rumsfeld testifies before Congress. "If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse. That's just a fact." The unreleased images show American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and videotapes of Iraqi guards raping young boys. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham says the scandal is "going to get worse" and warns that the most "disturbing" revelations haven't yet been made public. "The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here," he says. "We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience; we're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges." In daylong sworn testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services committees, Rumsfeld offers his "deepest apologies" for the prisoner abuses. "These events occurred on my watch," he says. "I take full responsibility." Under questioning, Rumsfeld admits that "it's possible" his resignation would undo some of the damage inflicted by the scandal. "If I felt I could not be effective I would resign in a minute," he says. "I would not resign simply because people try to make a political issue out of it." Bush is so far standing by Rumsfeld. In comments made public yesterday, Bush gave an interview to a third Arab television station in which he said six times that he was "sorry" about the prisoner abuse. Testifying alongside Rumsfeld, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defends the military response to the abuses. He said officials acted quickly to investigate the incidents after a soldier reported them. "Our commanders did exactly the right thing in a timely manner," Myers says.
Senator Carl Levin, the top-ranking committee Democrat, says the incidents were not isolated but rather "part of an organized and conscious process to extract information." Levin says military intelligence officers told the soldiers guarding Iraqis to treat them harshly to soften them up for interrogations. But Rumsfeld denies that, insisted they were individual instances of misconduct. Army Secretary Les Brownlee says military probes of 25 prisoner deaths found that a dozen were due to natural causes, one was justifiable homicide, two were homicides and the others were still under investigation. Senator John McCain warns that the scandal, if not dealt with quickly, could turn Iraq into another Vietnam. "We risk losing public support for this conflict," McCain, a Republican, says. "As Americans turned away from the Vietnam War, they may turn away from this one." After the hearing, McCain says Rumsfeld's testimony failed to answer basic questions, such as how high up the chain of command the fault reaches. Lawmakers promise to pursue a series of hearings into the matter. Democratic senator Edward Kennedy calls called the scandal a "catastrophic crisis of credibility for our nation." "In the Middle East and too often today, the symbol of America is not the Statue of Liberty," he says. "It's the prisoner standing on a box wearing a dark cape and a dark hood on his head, wires attached to his body, afraid that he's going to be electrocuted." (Boston Herald, Seymour Hersh)
May 8: A picture proving the veracity of photos of British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners surfaces. The photo shows a British soldier taking his own photos of a bloodied and bound Iraqi prisoner in the back of an armored personnel carrier. "There are no rules out there," says the soldier who provided the picture to the British Daily Mirror. "I saw the man dragged into the vehicle beaten up, kicked and punched. It lasted about a minute. I took the picture as I opened the doors of the vehicle and could see dirt on his shirt and blood on his teeth." The soldier says that he and his fellow soldiers took the photos to look tough and prove to friends what had happened, because "You'd come back from Iraq and people wouldn't know what you've been through. If you had pictures you could show them. While we were out there we were told to get rid of all of them. But if they'd done a proper search they'd have found CDs and all sorts of things. There was one CD going round our room with about 500 shots on it. Some were before and after pictures of beatings." The soldier photographed the battered prisoner while serving in Basra in the second half of last year. "He was caught red-handed smuggling fuel," he recalls. "I saw beatings like this every day. We'd pull a guy from the back of the wagon with his hands still tied, then up to 12 of us would give him a kicking and leave him on the floor. I saw one guy knocked out. People could be brought in for any reason. They'd be taken back to camp and sometimes dragged around by the scruff of the neck. Officers would be trying to interview one prisoner while another was being kicked behind him. Sometimes the officer would say 'Don't rough him up too much -- I've got to interview him in a minute.'"
The soldier, who is still stationed in Iraq, admits he had "been no angel" and had taken part in brutality. He puts it down to fear of being seen to be a wimp. He says: "If you tried to step in and said 'Chill out!' you'd be called a 'fuc*ing pu**y' and everyone would hear about it. If anyone said 'Why are you kicking him?' they'd say 'Saddam used to chop their fingers off, this is nothing.'" He adds, "I was shocked and ashamed at what was going on. Now I wish I'd said 'no' and taken the consequences. I don't know how you can ever stop this treatment. But it's only right that people in Britain know the truth." The soldier says he is convinced photos published last week of a hooded Iraqi suspect being beaten and urinated on by a British trooper were genuine. It has been suggested details in the pictures -- such as parts of the soldier's uniform, his rifle, hat and boot lacing -- were not authentic, but the soldier says, "I think the pictures are real. I totally believe them. Before last summer it was very common to wear floppy hats. As for how boots are laced, you lace them however you want. Those who say the boots and uniforms are too clean don't realise there are launderettes there. We kept everything spotless. The fact that the soldier in the pictures didn't have a flash on his uniform isn't unusual either. We have to buy our own, so most people have just a couple of shirts with flashes for when the CO comes round. The soldier's pouch being open is also easily explained. He'd have taken the sandbag out of it to put over the prisoner's head. I know there's no sling on the man's weapon. But slings often get in the way and it's up to you whether you use them or not." Critics have said the pictures appear to have been taken in a Bedford truck which never deployed in Iraq, but the soldier responds, "It's rubbish to say there are no Bedford trucks in Iraq. I travelled in one from the airport and from the camp back to the airport." (Daily Mirror)
May 8: The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison is not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources. The techniques devised in the system, called R2I -- resistance to interrogation -- match the torture and abuse techniques used on prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad. One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq says: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing." He says British and US military intelligence soldiers were trained in these techniques, which were taught at the joint services interrogation centre in Ashford, Kent, now transferred to the former US base at Chicksands. "There is a reservoir of knowledge about these interrogation techniques which is retained by former special forces soldiers who are being rehired as private contractors in Iraq. Contractors are bringing in their old friends." Using sexual jibes and degradation, along with stripping naked, is one of the methods taught on both sides of the Atlantic under the slogan "prolong the shock of capture," he says. Female guards were used to taunt male prisoners sexually and at British training sessions when female candidates were undergoing resistance training they would be subject to lesbian jibes.
"Most people just laugh that off during mock training exercises, but the whole experience is horrible. Two of my colleagues couldn't cope with the training at the time. One walked out saying 'I've had enough', and the other had a breakdown. It's exceedingly disturbing," says the former Special Boat Squadron officer. Many British and US special forces soldiers learn about the degradation techniques because they are subjected to them to help them resist if captured. They include soldiers from the SAS, SBS, most air pilots, paratroopers and members of pathfinder platoons. A number of commercial firms which have been supplying interrogators to the US army in Iraq boast of hiring former US special forces soldiers, such as Navy Seals. "The crucial difference from Iraq is that frontline soldiers who are made to experience R2I techniques themselves develop empathy. They realize the suffering they are causing. But people who haven't undergone this don't realize what they are doing to people. It's a shambles in Iraq." The British former officer says the dissemination of R2I techniques inside Iraq was all the more dangerous because of the general mood among American troops. "The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11." When the interrogation techniques are used on British soldiers for training purposes, they are subject to a strict 48-hour time limit, and a supervisor and a psychologist are always present. It is recognized that in inexperienced hands, prisoners can be plunged into psychosis. The spectrum of R2I techniques also includes keeping prisoners naked most of the time. This is what the Abu Ghraib photographs show, along with inmates being forced to crawl on a leash; forced to masturbate in front of a female soldier; mimic oral sex with other male prisoners; and form piles of naked, hooded men. The full battery of methods includes hooding, sleep deprivation, time disorientation and depriving prisoners not only of dignity, but of fundamental human needs, such as warmth, water and food.
The US commander in charge of military jails in Iraq, Major General Geoffrey Miller, has confirmed that a battery of 50-odd special "coercive techniques" can be used against enemy detainees. The general, who previously ran the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, said his main role was to extract as much intelligence as possible. Interrogation experts at Abu Ghraib prison were there to help make the prison staff "more able to garner intelligence as rapidly as possible." Sleep deprivation and stripping naked were techniques that could now only be authorized at general officer level, Miller says. (Guardian)
May 8: A Canadian businessman sues the US government, claiming that he was tortured by US soldiers after being arrested in Baghdad. Hossam Shaltout, an Egyptian-born Canadian who lives in Los Angeles, is demanding damages of $350,000 dollars in a complaint filed with the US Army. He says his five-week ordeal which ended when he was deported to Egypt, left him suffering from depression, flashbacks, and an obsessive desire for death. Shaltout says he was arrested by US soldiers outside his hotel in Baghdad during a riot in April 2003, and taken to the Bucca detention facility in Umm Qasr, southern Iraq. He had traveled to Iraq on behalf of his peace group "Rights and Freedom International" in a bid to convince Iraqi leaders to step down to avoid a war with the United States. After he was taken to Bucca in an armored personnel carrier, Shaltout claims he was subjected to a daily diet of interrogation and torture. "Mr. Shaltout was accused of being both a speechwriter for Saddam Hussein as well as his 'right-hand man'," said Shaltout's lawyer Thomas Nelson in the complaint lodged with the US Army last week. "When Mr. Shaltout refused to confess, he was beaten in a variety of ways -- he was hit with open hands, fists, shoes, and gun butts. The most alarming form of torture was when the interrogators put gun muzzles at his head or body, which put Mr. Shaltout in great fear of imminent death."
Shaltout claims that he was kneed in the groin and hit about the face while in leg irons and handcuffs after he launched a hunger strike. He says he now suffers depression, post traumatic stress disorder and other physical and mental ailments. Shaltout is also claiming compensation for loss of property and the damage to his business while he was in detention. He has also complained that the government in Ottawa did little to get him freed from Iraq, leaving the possibility open that he may seek legal redress against Canada. Dan McTeague, parliamentary secretary to the Canadian foreign ministry says that Shaltout should first exhaust means of complaint already open to him before taking legal action. Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin, meanwhile, weighs into the controversy over pictures of abuse by US soldiers of Iraqi prisoners, which have sparked a political firestorm in the United States and hammered American credibility in the Arab world. "This is an issue which has horrified civilized people around the world," Martin tells Parliament. "It is absolutely ghastly and is totally unacceptable. There is no doubt that in the fight against terrorism, we've got to remember that our values are why we're fighting terrorism, and that this kind of thing just must not happen." (Hi Pakistan)
May 8: The Taguba report reveals that Major General Geoffrey Miller recommended in August 2003 that Army prison guards in Iraq become more involved in "softening up" prisoners for interrogations shortly before abuses occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison last fall. Miller, the former head of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, is now in charge of Iraq's prisons. The role is one that military police are not trained to perform and are prohibited from doing, the Army says; that led members of Congress to press Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday for details on what role MPs played at the troubled prison. Rumsfeld was less than forthcoming. Republican senator John McCain asked Rumsfeld whether military intelligence or the MPs' direct commanders had authority over the military police prison guards at Abu Ghraib and what the MPs' instructions were. Rumsfeld said authority over the guards had "shifted over a period of time." US military and civilian leaders have said repeatedly that the shocking acts depicted in widely circulated photographs of prisoners being sexually humiliated at the Abu Ghraib detention compound are gross violations of military regulations about the handling of prisoners. They also say that even if MPs were led poorly and trained inadequately for the jobs they were assigned at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq, as an Army probe revealed as early as last fall, they should have known that inflicting physical and sexual abuse was wrong. What remains to be explained is whether the abusive behavior was linked to pressure from military intelligence units responsible for prisoner interrogations to push the bounds of civilized behavior to make captives more compliant under questioning. Full answers may not come until the Army completes an investigation into the culpability of military intelligence personnel. The probe began April 23.
Taguba's report cites "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" inflicted on Iraqis held at Abu Ghraib between October and December 2003. Taguba writes that he found credible evidence that military police guards were improperly drawn into the role of setting "physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation" of prisoners. Taguba's report says the practice of using MPs to help break down prisoners may have been imported from the Guantanamo Bay prison complex and possibly others in Afghanistan used to hold terrorist suspects. The Guantanamo Bay prison complex was run by Major General Geoffrey Miller. In late August 2003, Miller conducted an inquiry on interrogation and detention procedures in Iraq and suggested that prison guards could help set conditions for the interrogation of prisoners, according to the Taguba report. Most of the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib took place from October to December 2003. A November 2003 report by Major General Donald Ryder, the Army's provost marshal, concluded that the Army Reserve's 800th Military Police Brigade, which was running Abu Ghraib, was not given official orders to get involved in setting conditions for interrogations. Taguba, however, disputes that claim, "It is obvious," he wrote, that at least some at lower levels of the 800th did get involved. Interrogators from military intelligence and other government agencies, believed to include the CIA, actively requested that MPs guarding prisoners at Abu Ghraib set the conditions for interrogations, Taguba reported. This is in violation of Army Regulation 190-8, he said. That regulation states: "All persons captured, detained, interned or otherwise held in US armed forces custody during the course of conflict will be given humanitarian care and treatment from the moment they fall into the hands of U.S. forces until final release or repatriation." It also runs counter to the MPs' intended mission of maintaining a safe and orderly prison, he said.
The Army's top officer, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, confirmed that on May 6. "It's a misstatement to say that the military police are trained to soften everybody up," he said. "Their job is to provide a safe and secure environment for those that we detain." Taguba, however, received sworn statements from MPs who said they were involved in such activities. Specialist Sabrina Harman of the 372nd Military Police Company said a detainee was placed on a box and had wires attached to his fingers, toes and other extremities, and her task was to keep the detainee awake. Military intelligence, she said, "wanted to get them to talk." Harman says she was assigned to break down prisoners for interrogation, although she and other members of her MP unit had never been trained to perform such a job. "They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time already hooded and cuffed," she told the Washington Post. "The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk." She said the "person who brought them in would set the standards on whether or not to 'be nice.'" (AP/Guardian)
May 8: The new commander of US detention facilities in Iraq says the military will continue to operate the Abu Ghraib prison despite calls from some lawmakers to close it because of a scandal over the abuse of Iraqi inmates. However, Major General Geoffrey Miller says the United States plans to reduce the prison population. He says 300 inmates had been released last week and about 350 will be released next week. "Currently we will continue to operate at the Abu Ghraib facility," Miller says, adding that interrogations at the prison will also continue. He says that if orders are received to close Abu Ghraib, the military would probably shift the mission to another facility, Camp Bucca, located south of Basra. Miller insists that Iraqis were now being held in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and that the abuses recorded in photos distributed around the world were due to the acts of a few individuals. "The alleged abuses and abuses we have discovered from the investigations appear to be due to leaders and soldiers not following the authorized policy and lack of leadership and supervision," Miller says. "We will ensure that we follow our procedures," he adds. "It is a matter of honor. We were ashamed and embarrassed by the conduct of a very, very small number of our soldiers.... On my honor I will ensure that it will not happen again." Miller, the former commander of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, says that he led a 30-member team to Iraq in August and September to make recommendations on how to improve the efficiency of Abu Ghraib. "As a part of those recommendation we made we used the models we had made at Guantanamo for the use of military police to assist in the success of interrogations," he says. He says his team recommended that military police who run the facility "should be involved in passive intelligence collection" so that interrogators "can better understand the mental state of the detainee." He says that meant observing the prisoners "on a 24-hour basis" to understand "what their mental attitude was." He says the 215-page operating manual stated that "the military police are never involved in active interrogation." "We outlined our procedures specifically," he adds. "There was no doubt in my mind they fully understood those recommendations." Miller says earlier this week that he would reduce the number of inmates at Abu Ghraib from 3,800 to fewer than 2,000. The US-led coalition has a dozen prisons in Iraq holding about 8,000 inmates. He also says he will halt or restrict some interrogation methods, especially eight to 10 "very aggressive techniques," including using hoods on prisoners, putting them in stressful positions and depriving them of sleep. He says those methods are now banned without specific approval. (AP/Houston Chronicle)
May 8: Physical and sexual abuse of US prisoners similar to that revealed to have taken place in Iraq is almost routine in American prisons, with little public knowledge or concern. Forcing prisoners to go naked, forcing prisoners to wear women's underwear on their heads, hooding prisoners, and beatings are reported in prisons throughout the US. Corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time George W. Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Lane McCotter, the official who directed the reopening of Abu Ghraib in Iraq in 2003, and who trained the guards, was forced to resign as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.
McCotter later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system. McCotter is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a private prison company operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. McCotter denies any involvement with Abu Ghraib after its reopening in September 2003. When Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including McCotter, he said, "Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."
The Justice Department refused to answer questions about Ashcroft's decision to hire McCotter even though his firm's operation of the Santa Fe jail had been criticized by the Justice Department. McCotter has a long background in prisons. He had been a military police officer in Vietnam and had risen to be a colonel in the Army. His last post was as warden of the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth. After retiring from the Army, McCotter was head of the corrections departments in New Mexico and Texas before taking the job in Utah. In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally ill inmate, McCotter also came under criticism for hiring a prison psychiatrist whose medical license was on probation and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and writing prescriptions for drug addicts. McCotter said in January 2004 that of all the prisons in Iraq, Abu Ghraib "is the only place we agreed as a team was truly closest to an American prison. They had cell housing and segregation." Since 80 to 90 percent of the prison had been destroyed, McCotter set about rebuilding it, everything from walls and toilets to handcuffs and soap. He employed 100 Iraqis who had worked in the prison under Saddam Hussein, and paid for everything with cash, up to $3 million, that he carried with him. McCotter says he worked closely with American military police officers at the prison, but he gives no names. (New York Times/Global Exchange)
May 8: The shortage of ammunition for US forces in Iraq is so critical that the US Army is turning to foreign sources to make up for the lack. The Army's biggest ammunition supplier, Alliant Techsystems Inc., can't keep up with demand. "The hope is to get it from the US, but worldwide suppliers are out there that provide this and it might not be totally available in the U.S.," says Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Butler, Army product manager for small- and medium-caliber ammunition. Alliant says the demand for ammunition has reached a level it has not seen since the Vietnam War. Companies in Israel and Canada are being approached to fill the gap, according to the Army. "It's a surprise they are using so much ordnance over there," says Philip Finnegan, an analyst for the Teal Group consultancy in Fairfax, Virginia. "No one would have expected this a few months ago." (Bloomberg/Arizona Daily Star)
May 8: Sources close to Michael Moore say that executives at Walt Disney had refused even to see his new documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, before deciding not to distribute it, and accuse them of caving to political pressure from the Bushes and the Saudi royal family. The sources say Michael Eisner, Disney's chairman, had referred the Fahrenheit 9/11 decision to the full company board last weekend because of concerns the film might upset Saudi Prince al-Walid bin Talal, a major Disney investor, or jeopardize the company's privileged tax and legal status in Florida, where Jeb Bush, the President's brother, is governor. Disney spokeswoman Zenia Muchia dismisses the charges as "ludicrous and ridiculous." Another Disney source describes Moore and Miramax as "a**holes." The sources close to Moore, meanwhile, accuse Disney of "the ultimate hypocrisy" because the company still owned a piece of the film and will still make money from it. (Independent)
May 8: Columnist Anthony Lewis says that the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal epitomizes the total lack of regard for the law demonstrated by George W. Bush. He says the Bush administration "respect[s] the law only when it is convenient." He continues, "Again and again, over these last years, President George W. Bush has made clear his view that law must bend to what he regards as necessity. National security as he defines it trumps American commitments to international law. The Constitution must yield to novel infringements on American freedom." He says the treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp is a prime example: "The Third Geneva Convention requires that any dispute about a prisoner's status be decided by a 'competent tribunal.' American forces provided many such tribunals for prisoners taken in the Gulf war in 1991. But Bush has refused to comply with the Third Geneva Convention. He decided that all the Guantanamo prisoners were 'unlawful combatants' -- that is, not regular soldiers but spies, terrorists or the like. The Supreme Court is now considering whether the prisoners can use American courts to challenge their designation as unlawful. The Bush administration's brief could not be blunter in its argument that the president is the law on this issue: 'The president, in his capacity as commander in chief, has conclusively determined that the Guantanamo detainees' are 'not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva convention.' The violation of the Geneva convention and that refusal to let the courts consider the issue have cost the United States dearly in the world legal community -- the judges and lawyers in societies that, historically, have looked to the United States as the exemplar of a country committed to law. ...[Last year,] the idea of torture at Guantanamo seemed far-fetched to me. After the disclosures of the last 10 days, can we be sure?"
Lewis decries the US's refusal to join the International Criminal Court: "Instead of a country committed to law, the United States is now seen as a country that proclaims high legal ideals and then says that they should apply to all others but not to itself. That view has been worsened by the Bush administration's determination that Americans not be subject to the new International Criminal Court, which is supposed to punish genocide and war crimes. Fear of terrorism -- a quite understandable fear after the Sept. 11 attacks -- has led to harsh departures from normal legal practice within the United States. Aliens swept off the streets by the Justice Department as possible terrorists after Sept. 11, 2001, were subjected to physical abuse and humiliation by prison guards, the department's inspector general found. Attorney General John Ashcroft did not apologize -- a posture that sent a message. Inside the United States, the most radical departure from law as we have known it is Bush's claim that he can designate any American citizen an 'enemy combatant' -- and thereupon detain that person in solitary confinement indefinitely, without charges, without a trial, without a right to counsel. Again, the president's lawyers have argued determinedly that he must have the last word, with little or no scrutiny from lawyers and judges. There was a stunning moment in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address when he said that more than 3,000 suspected terrorists 'have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States.' In all these matters, there is a pervasive attitude: that to follow the law is to be weak in the face of terrorism. But commitment to law is not a weakness. It has been the great strength of the United States from the beginning. America's leaders depart from that commitment at their peril, and the peril of all Americans, for a reason that Justice Louis Brandeis memorably expressed 75 years ago. 'Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher,' he wrote. 'For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.'" (New York Times/International Herald Tribune)

May 9: Top officials in the US military are deeply split over the course of the Iraqi occupation, with many senior officers asserting that the United States faces the prospect of casualties for years without achieving its goal of establishing a free and democratic Iraq. Their major worry is that the United States is prevailing militarily but failing to win the support of the Iraqi people. That view is far from universal, but it is spreading and being voiced publicly for the first time. Army Major General Charles Swannack, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, says he believes that at the tactical level at which fighting occurs, the US military is still winning. But when asked whether he believes the United States is losing, he says, "I think strategically, we are." Army Colonel Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the US occupation authority in Baghdad, says he agrees with Swannick, and notes that a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the US failure in Vietnam. "Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically," he says. I lost my brother in Vietnam," he adds. "I promised myself, when I came on active duty, that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again. Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don't understand the war we're in."
The emergence of sharp differences over US strategy has set off a debate, a year after the United States ostensibly won a war in Iraq, about how to preserve that victory. The core question is how to end a festering insurrection that has stymied some reconstruction efforts, made many Iraqis feel less safe and created uncertainty about who actually will run the country after the scheduled turnover of sovereignty June 30. Inside and outside the armed forces, experts generally argue that the US military should remain there but should change its approach. Some argue for more troops, others for less, but they generally agree on revising the stated US goals to make them less ambitious. They are worried by evidence that the United States is losing ground with the Iraqi public. Some officers say the place to begin restructuring US policy is by ousting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom they see as responsible for a series of strategic and tactical blunders over the past year. Several of those interviewed say a profound anger is building within the Army at Rumsfeld and those around him. A senior general at the Pentagon says he believes the United States is already on the road to defeat: "It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this. The American people may not stand for it -- and they should not." Asked who was to blame, this general points directly at Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. "I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion," he says. "Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] refused to listen or adhere to military advice."
Like several other officers, this general spoke only on the condition that his name not be used. One reason for this is that some of these officers deal frequently with the senior Pentagon civilian officials they are criticizing, and some remain dependent on top officials to approve their current efforts and future promotions. Also, they are very aware that Rumsfeld and other top civilians punish public dissent. Senior officers frequently cite what they believe was the vindictive treatment of then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki after he said early in 2003 that the administration was underestimating the number of US troops that would be required to occupy postwar Iraq. Wolfowitz, the Pentagon's No. 2 official, says he does not think the United States is losing in Iraq, and said no senior officer has expressed that thought to him, either. "I am sure that there are some out there" who think that, he acknowledges. "There's no question that we're facing some difficulties," Wolfowitz adds. "I don't mean to sound Pollyannaish -- we all know that we're facing a tough problem." But, he says, "I think the course we've set is the right one, which is moving as rapidly as possible to Iraqi self-government and Iraqi self-defense." Wolfowitz, who is widely seen as the intellectual architect of the Bush administration's desire to create a free and democratic Iraq that will begin the transformation of the politics of the Middle East, also strongly rejects the idea of scaling back on that aim. "The goal has never been to win the Olympic high jump in democracy," he says. Moving toward democratization in Iraq will take time, he says, but continues, "I don't think the answer is to find some old Republican Guard generals and have them impose yet another dictatorship in an Arab country." The top US commander in the war also said he strongly disagrees with the view that the United States is heading toward defeat in Iraq.
"We are not losing, militarily," Army General John Abizaid says. He says that the US military is winning tactically, but stops short of being as positive about the overall trend. Rather, he said, "strategically, I think there are opportunities." The prisoner abuse scandal and the continuing car bombings and US casualties "create the image of a military that's not being effective in the counterinsurgency," he says. But in reality, "the truth of the matter is...there are some good signals out there." Abizaid cites the resumption of economic reconstruction and the political progress made with Sunni Muslims in resolving the standoff around Fallujah, and increasing cooperation from Shi'ite Muslims in isolating radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. "I'm looking at the situation, and I told the secretary of defense the other day I feel pretty comfortable with where we are," he says. Even so, he warns, "There's liable to be a lot of fighting in May and June," as the June 30 date for turning over sovereignty to an Iraqi government approaches. Commanders on the ground in Iraq seconded that cautiously optimistic view. "I am sure that the view from Washington is much worse than it appears on the ground here in Baqubah," says Army Colonel Dana Pittard, commander of a 1st Infantry Division brigade based in that city about 40 miles north of Baghdad. "I do not think that we are losing, but we will lose if we are not careful." He says he is especially worried about maintaining political and economic progress in the provinces after the turnover of power.
Army Lieutenant Colonel John Kem, a battalion commander in Baghdad, says that the events of the past two months, particularly the Shi'ite insurgency and the abuse scandal, "certainly made things harder," but he says he doubts they would have much effect on the long-term future of Iraq. However, some say that behind those official positions lies deep concern. One Pentagon consultant said that officials with whom he works on Iraq policy continue to put on a happy face publicly, but privately are grim about the situation in Baghdad. When it comes to discussions of the administration's Iraq policy, he said, "It's 'Dead Man Walking.'" The worried generals and colonels are simply beginning to say what experts outside the military have been saying for weeks. In mid-April, even before the prison detainee scandal, Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, wrote that "patience with foreign occupation is running out, and violent opposition is spreading. Civil war and the breakup of Iraq are more likely outcomes than a successful transition to a pluralistic Western-style democracy." Representative John Murtha, a former Marine who is one of most hawkish Democrats in Congress, said last week: "We cannot prevail in this war as it is going today," and said that the Bush administration should either boost its troop numbers or withdraw.
Larry Diamond, who until recently was a senior political adviser of the US occupation authority in Iraq, argues that the United States is not losing the war but is in danger of doing so: "I think that we have fallen into a period of real political difficulty where we are no longer clearly winning the peace, and where the prospect of a successful transition to democracy is in doubt. Basically, it's up in the air now. That's what is at stake.... We can't keep making tactical and strategic mistakes." He and others are recommending a series of related revisions to the US approach. Like many in the Special Forces, defense consultant Michael Vickers advocates radically trimming the US presence in Iraq, making it much more like the one in Afghanistan, where there are 20,000 troops and almost none in the capital, Kabul. The US military has a small presence in the daily life of Afghans. Basically, it ignores them and focuses its attention on fighting pockets of Taliban and al-Qaeda holdouts. Nor has it tried to disarm the militias that control much of the country. In addition to trimming the US troop presence, an Army general says, the United States also should curtail its ambitions in Iraq. "That strategic objective, of a free, democratic, de-Baathified Iraq, is grandiose and unattainable," he says. "It's just a matter of time before we revise downward...and abandon these ridiculous objectives." Instead, he predicts that if the Bush administration wins reelection, it simply will settle for a stable Iraq, probably run by former Iraqi generals. This is more or less, he said, what the Marines Corps did in Fallujah -- which he describes as a glimpse of future US policy.
Wolfowitz sharply rejects that conclusion about Fallujah. "Let's be clear, Fallujah has always been an outlier since the liberation of Baghdad," he says. "It's where the trouble began.... It really isn't a model for anything for the rest of the country." But a senior military intelligence officer experienced in Middle Eastern affairs said he thinks the administration needs to rethink its approach to Iraq and to the region. "The idea that Iraq can be miraculously and quickly turned into a shining example of democracy that will 'transform' the Middle East requires way too much fairy dust and cultural arrogance to believe," he says. Finally, some are calling for the United States to stop fighting separatist trends among Iraq's three major groups, the Shi'ites, the Sunnis and the Kurds, and instead embrace them. "The best hope for holding Iraq together -- and thereby avoiding civil war -- is to let each of its major constituent communities have, to the extent possible, the system each wants," Galbraith wrote last month. Even if adjustments in troop presence and goals help the United States prevail, it will not happen soon, several of those interviewed say. The United States is likely to be fighting in Iraq for at least another five years, says an Army officer who served there. "We'll be taking casualties," he warned, during that entire time. A long-term problem for any administration is that it may be difficult for the American public to tell whether the United States is winning or losing, and the prospect of continued casualties may prompt some to ask of how long the public will tolerate the fighting.
"Iraq might have been worth doing at some price," Vickers says, "but it isn't worth doing at any price. And the price has gone very high." The other key factor in the war is Iraqi public opinion. A recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll found that a majority of Iraqis want the United States to leave immediately. "In Iraq, we are rapidly losing the support of the middle, which will enable the insurgency to persist practically indefinitely until our national resolve is worn down," the senior US military intelligence officer says. Tolerance of the situation in Iraq also appears to be declining within the US military. Especially among career Army officers, an extraordinary anger is building at Rumsfeld and his top advisers. "Like a lot of senior Army guys, I'm quite angry" with Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration, says an Army general. He lists two reasons. "One is, I think they are going to break the Army." But what really incites him, he said, is, "I don't think they care." Jeff Smith, a former general counsel of the CIA who has close ties to many senior officers, says, "some of my friends in the military are exceedingly angry." In the Army, he says, "It's pretty bitter." Retired Army Colonel Robert Killebrew, a frequent Pentagon consultant, says, "The people in the military are mad as hell." He said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Richard Myers, should be fired. A Special Forces officer aims higher, saying that "Rumsfeld needs to go, as does Wolfowitz." Asked about such antagonism, Wolfowitz says, "I wish they'd have the -- whatever it takes -- to come tell me to my face." He says that by contrast, he has been "struck at how many fairly senior officers have come to me" to tell him that he and Rumsfeld have made the right decisions concerning the Army. (Washington Post)
May 9: The New Yorker publishes an article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that includes damning new information about the Iraqi prisoner abuse and another photo. The photo shows a naked Iraqi prisoner cowering and screaming while two leashed German Shepherd attack dogs menace him. Hersh says an unpublished photo shows the prisoner bleeding, obviously from an attack from one or both of the dogs. "We don't have a photo showing the actual bite," says Hersh's article. "We have a photo of the dogs right at him and then a moment later he's on the ground and there's a large gaping wound and a big pool of blood and it's not hard to draw the obvious inference. He was definitely attacked in that particular picture." The photos are from a batch of digital photos with time sequence indicators printed on the photos indicating exactly when they were taken. The prisoner has large, bloody bite wounds on both legs. Cliff Kindy, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a church-supported group that has been monitoring the situation in Iraq, says that last November he knows of an incident where G.I.s unleashed a military dog on a group of civilians during a sweep in Ramadi, about thirty miles west of Fallujah. At first, "the soldiers went house to house, and arrested thirty people," Kindy says, including Saad al-Khashab, an attorney with the Organization for Human Rights in Iraq, who told Kindy about the incident. While the thirty detainees were being handcuffed and laid on the ground, a firefight broke out nearby; when it ended, the Iraqis were shoved into a house. Khashab told Kindy that the American soldiers then "turned the dog loose inside the house, and several people were bitten."
Major General Charles Hines, who was commandant of the Army's military-police school during a twenty-eight-year career in military law enforcement, responds to the incident: "Turning a dog loose in a room of people? Loosing dogs on prisoners of war? I've never heard of it, and it would never have been tolerated," he says. He adds that trained police dogs have long been a presence in Army prisons, where they are used for sniffing out narcotics and other contraband among the prisoners, and, occasionally, for riot control. But, he says, "I would never have authorized it for interrogating or coercing prisoners. If I had, I'd have been put in jail or kicked out of the Army." The International Red Cross and human-rights groups have repeatedly complained during the past year about the American military's treatment of Iraqi prisoners, with little success. In one case, three Army soldiers from a military-intelligence battalion were accused of assaulting a female Iraqi inmate at Abu Ghraib. After an administrative review, the three were fined "at least five hundred dollars and demoted in rank." The incident was not made public for months. Instead of dealing with the raft of incidents quickly and transparently, the US military, on orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and top military officers, sought to keep the prison abuse scandal quiet. Knowledge of the nature of the abuses, and especially the photographs, had been severely, and unusually, restricted. "Everybody I've talked to said, 'We just didn't know' -— not even in the J.C.S.," one well-informed former intelligence official says, emphasizing that he was referring to senior officials with whom such allegations would normally be shared. "I haven't talked to anybody on the inside who knew —- nowhere. It's got them scratching their heads."
A senior Pentagon official said that many of the senior generals in the Army were similarly out of the loop on the Abu Ghraib allegations. Within the Pentagon, there was a spate of fingerpointing after the photos became public. One top general complained to a colleague that the commanders in Iraq should have taken C4, a powerful explosive, and blown up Abu Ghraib last spring, with all of its "emotional baggage" -— the prison was known for its brutality under Saddam Hussein -- instead of turning it into an American facility. "This is beyond the pale in terms of lack of command attention," says a retired major general, speaking of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. "Where were the flag officers? And I'm not just talking about a one-star," he adds, referring to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander at Abu Ghraib who was relieved of duty. "This was a huge leadership failure." The Pentagon official says that many senior generals believe that, along with the civilians in Rumsfeld's office, General Ricardo Sanchez and General John Abizaid, who is in charge of the Central Command, had done their best to keep the issue quiet in the first months of the year. The official chain of command flows from General Sanchez, in Iraq, to Abizaid, and on to Rumsfeld and President Bush. "You've got to match action, or nonaction, with interests," the Pentagon official says. "What is the motive for not being forthcoming? They foresaw major diplomatic problems."
Secrecy and wishful thinking, says the Pentagon official, are defining characteristics of Rumsfeld's Pentagon, and shaped its response to the reports from Abu Ghraib. "They always want to delay the release of bad news in the hope that something good will break," he says. The habit of procrastination in the face of bad news led to disconnects between Rumsfeld and the Army staff officers who were assigned to planning for troop requirements in Iraq. A year ago, the Pentagon official adds, when it became clear that the Army would have to call up more reserve units to deal with the insurgency, "we had call-up orders that languished for thirty or forty days in the office of the Secretary of Defense." Rumsfeld's staff always seemed to be waiting for something to turn up -- for the problem to take care of itself, without any additional troops. The official explains, "They were hoping that they wouldn't have to make a decision." The delay meant that soldiers in some units about to be deployed had only a few days to prepare wills and deal with other family and financial issues. The same deliberate indifference to bad news was evident in the past year, the Pentagon official continues, when the Army conducted a series of elaborate war games. Planners would present best-case, moderate-case, and worst-case scenarios, in an effort to assess where the Iraq war was headed and to estimate future troop needs. In every case, the number of troops actually required exceeded the worst-case analysis. Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and civilian officials in the Pentagon continued to insist that future planning be based on the most optimistic scenario. "The optimistic estimate was that at this point in time" -- mid-2004 -- "the US Army would need only a handful of combat brigades in Iraq," the Pentagon official says. "There are nearly twenty now, with the international coalition drying up. They were wildly off the mark." The official adds, "From the beginning, the Army community was saying that the projections and estimates were unrealistic." Now, he said, "we're struggling to maintain 135,000 troops while allowing soldiers enough time back home."
In his news conference last Tuesday, Rumsfeld, when asked whether he thought the photographs and stories from Abu Ghraib were a setback for American policy in Iraq, still seemed to be in denial. "Oh, I'm not one for instant history," he responded. By Friday, however, with some members of Congress and with editorials calling for his resignation, Rumsfeld testified at length before House and Senate committees and apologized for what he said was "fundamentally un-American" wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. He also warned that more, and even uglier, disclosures were to come. Rumsfeld said that he had not actually looked at any of the Abu Ghraib photographs until some of them appeared in press accounts, and hadn't reviewed the Army's copies until the day before. When he did, they were "hard to believe," he said. "There are other photos that depict...acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman." Later, he said, "It's going to get still more terrible, I'm afraid." He added, "I failed to recognize how important it was." US military officials say that the unreleased photographs show American soldiers "severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and 'acting inappropriately with a dead body.' The officials said there also was a videotape, apparently shot by US personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys."
It is becoming increasingly clear that Rumsfeld, very possibly with the blessing of President Bush, allowed or even encouraged the prisoner abuses and tortures in order to gather intelligence. Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of senior Pentagon generals and admirals to act aggressively. By mid-2002, he and his senior aides were exchanging secret memorandums on modifying the culture of the military leaders and finding ways to encourage them "to take greater risks." One memo spoke derisively of the generals in the Pentagon, and said, "Our prerequisite of perfection for 'actionable intelligence' has paralyzed us. We must accept that we may have to take action before every question can be answered." The Defense Secretary was told that he should "break the 'belt-and-suspenders' mindset within today's military...we 'over-plan' for every contingency.... We must be willing to accept the risks." With operations involving the death of foreign enemies, the memo went on, the planning should not be carried out in the Pentagon: "The result will be decision by committee." The Pentagon's impatience with military protocol extended to questions about the treatment of prisoners caught in the course of its military operations. Soon after 9/11, as the war on terror got under way, Rumsfeld repeatedly made public his disdain for the Geneva conventions. Complaints about America's treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said in early 2002, amounted to "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation."
The effort to determine what happened at Abu Ghraib has evolved into a sprawling set of related investigations, some of them hastily put together, including inquiries into 25 suspicious deaths. Investigators have become increasingly concerned with the role played not only by military and intelligence officials but also by CIA agents and private-contract employees, or mercenaries. The CIA acknowledges that its Inspector General has an investigation under way into abuses at Abu Ghraib, which extended to the death of a prisoner. The victim was the man whose photograph, which shows his battered body packed in ice, has circulated around the world. A Justice Department prosecutor has been assigned to the case. An Army intelligence operative and a judge advocate general are seeking, through their lawyers, to negotiate immunity from prosecution in return for testimony. The relationship between military policing and intelligence forces inside the Army prison system reached a turning point last fall in response to the insurgency against the Coalition Provisional Authority. "This is a fight for intelligence," Brigadier General Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, said in November. "Do I have enough soldiers? The answer is absolutely yes. The larger issue is, how do I use them and on what basis? And the answer to that is intelligence...to try to figure out how to take all this human intelligence as it comes in to us [and] turn it into something that's actionable." The Army prison system would now be asked to play its part.
Two months earlier, Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the task force in charge of the prison at Guantanamo, had brought a team of experts to Iraq to review the Army program. His recommendation was radical: that Army prisons be geared, first and foremost, to interrogations and the gathering of information needed for the war effort. "Detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation...to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence," Miller wrote. The military police on guard duty at the prisons should make support of military intelligence a priority. General Sanchez agreed, and on November 19th his headquarters issued an order formally giving the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade tactical control over the prison. General Taguba took issue with the Sanchez orders, which, he wrote in his report, "effectively made an MI Officer, rather than an MP officer, responsible for the MP units conducting detainee operations at that facility. This is not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agenda assigned to each of these respective specialties." Taguba also criticized Miller's report, noting that "the intelligence value of detainees held at...Guantanamo is different than that of the detainees/internees held at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq.... There are a large number of Iraqi criminals held at Abu Ghraib. These are not believed to be international terrorists or members of al-Qaeda." Taguba noted that Miller's recommendations "appear to be in conflict" with other studies and with Army regulations that call for military-police units to have control of the prison system. By placing military-intelligence operatives in control instead, Miller's recommendations and Sanchez's change in policy undoubtedly played a role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
General Taguba concluded that certain military-intelligence officers and civilian contractors at Abu Ghraib were "either directly or indirectly responsible" for the abuses, and urged that they be subjected to disciplinary action. In late March, before the Abu Ghraib scandal became publicly known, Miller was transferred from Guantanamo and named head of prison operations in Iraq. "We have changed this -- trust us," Miller told reporters in early May. "There were errors made. We have corrected those. We will make sure that they do not happen again." Military-intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib repeatedly wore "sterile," or unmarked, uniforms or civilian clothes while on duty. "You couldn't tell them apart," says the source familiar with the investigation. The blurring of identities and organizations meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly, the military policemen on duty, to know who was doing what to whom, and who had the authority to give orders. Civilian employees at the prison were not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but they were bound by civilian law, though it is unclear whether American or Iraqi law would apply. One of the employees involved in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, according to the Taguba report, was Steven Stefanowicz, a civilian working for CACI International, a Virginia-based company. Private companies like CACI and Titan Corp. could pay salaries of well over $100,000 for the dangerous work in Iraq, far more than the Army pays, and were permitted, as never before in US military history, to handle sensitive jobs. (In a briefing last week, General Miller confirmed that Stefanowicz had been reassigned to administrative duties. A CACI spokeswoman declined to comment on any employee in Iraq, citing safety concerns, but said that the company still had not heard anything directly from the government about Stefanowicz.) Stefanowicz and his colleagues conducted most, if not all, of their interrogations in the Abu Ghraib facilities known to the soldiers as the Wood Building and the Steel Building. The interrogation centers were rarely visited by the MPs, a source familiar with the investigation said. The most important prisoners -- the suspected insurgency members deemed to be High Value Detainees -- were housed at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, but the pressure on soldiers to accede to requests from military intelligence was felt throughout the system.
Not everybody went along. A company captain in a military-police unit in Baghdad says that he was approached by a junior intelligence officer who requested that his MPs keep a group of detainees awake around the clock until they began talking. "I said, 'No, we will not do that,'" the captain says. "The MI commander comes to me and says, 'What is the problem? We're stressed, and all we are asking you to do is to keep them awake.' I ask, 'How? You've received training on that, but my soldiers don't know how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn't know how to do it, he's going to get creative.'" The MI officer took the request to the captain's commander, but, the captain says, "he backed me up. It's all about people. The MPs at Abu Ghraib were failed by their commanders -- both low-ranking and high," the captain says. "The system is broken -- no doubt about it. But the Army is made up of people, and we've got to depend on them to do the right thing." In his report, Taguba strongly suggested that there was a link between the interrogation process in Afghanistan and the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A few months after Miller's report, Taguba wrote, General Sanchez, apparently troubled by reports of wrongdoing in Army jails in Iraq, asked Army Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general, to carry out a study of military prisons. In the resulting study, which is still classified, Ryder identified a conflict between military policing and military intelligence dating back to the Afghan war. He wrote, "Recent intelligence collection in support of Operation Enduring Freedom posited a template whereby military police actively set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews."
One of the most prominent prisoners of the Afghan war was John Walker Lindh, the twenty-one-year-old Californian who was captured in December, 2001. Lindh was accused of training with al-Qaeda terrorists and conspiring to kill Americans. A few days after his arrest, according to a federal-court affidavit filed by his attorney, James Brosnahan, a group of armed American soldiers "blindfolded Mr. Lindh, and took several pictures of Mr. Lindh and themselves with Mr. Lindh. In one, the soldiers scrawled 'sh*thead' across Mr. Lindh's blindfold and posed with him.... Another told Mr. Lindh that he was 'going to hang' for his actions and that after he was dead, the soldiers would sell the photographs and give the money to a Christian organization." Some of the photographs later made their way to the American media. Lindh was later stripped naked, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, and placed in a windowless shipping container. Once again, the affidavit said, "military personnel photographed Mr. Lindh as he lay on the stretcher." On July 15, 2002, Lindh agreed to plead guilty to carrying a gun while serving in the Taliban and received a twenty-year jail term. During that process, Brosnahan says, "the Department of Defense insisted that we state that there was 'no deliberate' mistreatment of John." His client agreed to do so, but, the attorney noted, "Against that, you have that photograph of a naked John on that stretcher."
The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process. One former prisoner, Hayder Sabbar Abd, says that his ordeal had been recorded, almost constantly, by cameras, which added to his humiliation. He remembered how the camera flashed repeatedly as soldiers told to him to masturbate and beat him when he refused. One lingering mystery is how Ryder could have conducted his review last fall, in the midst of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, without managing to catch it. (Ryder told a Pentagon press briefing last week that his trip to Iraq "was not an inspection or an investigation.... It was an assessment.") In his report to Sanchez, Ryder flatly declared that "there were no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices." Willie Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as an agent of the CID, says that Ryder was in a bureaucratic bind. The Army had revised its command structure last fall, and Ryder, as provost marshal, was now the commanding general of all military-police units as well as of the CID. He was, in essence, being asked to investigate himself. "What Ryder should have done was set up a C.I.D. task force headed by a [full colonel] with fifteen agents, and begin interviewing everybody and taking sworn statements," Rowell says. "He had to answer questions about the prisons in September, when Sanchez asked for an assessment." At the time, Rowell adds, the Army prison system was unprepared for the demands the insurgency placed on it. "Ryder was a man in a no-win situation," Rowell says. "As provost marshal, if he'd turned a CID task force loose, he could be in harm's way -- because he's also boss of the military police. He was being eaten alive." Ryder may have protected himself, but Taguba did not. "He's not regarded as a hero in some circles in the Pentagon," a retired Army major general says of Taguba. "He's the guy who blew the whistle, and the Army will pay the price for his integrity. The leadership does not like to have people make bad news public." (New Yorker, ABC News)

Blair administration admits knowing about abuses in February

May 9: The Blair administration admits it knew of the abuses perpetuated by US and British soldiers in Iraqi prisons as early as February 2004, prompting demands for an explanation from Blair of exactly what he and his administration knew and what, if any, steps they had taken to stop the abuses. The Ministry of Defense also admits that British soldiers had been stationed at Abu Ghraib prison for several months in late 2003 and early 2004, prompting questions about whether they were involved in the abuses at that prison. New allegations of torture and sexual abuse of prisoners by British soldiers have further shaken the government, as is the admission that British soldiers may have provided some of the worst of the "interrogation tactics" used by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib. Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon is working on a deal to transfer the vast majority of Iraqi prisoners in Basra to Iraqi control. One ministerial source says, "We have prisoners of war, security detainees and criminal detainees, but there is no reason why the vast majority of these cannot be guarded by local officials. I would expect that within a month of the handover we would only have a handful of the most hardened detainees still in our custody." (Scotsman)
May 9: Congressional members will be allowed to view unreleased photos of more Iraqi prison abuse by US soldiers, says the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner. The photos are to be withheld from public view for the time being. "When it may get into the public domain, I'm not able to answer that question," Warner says. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican member of the committee that heard Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's recent testimony, says the Bush administration needs to make public the additional photos as soon as possible. "If there's more to come, let's get it out," he says. "For God's sake, let's talk about it because [U.S. military] men and women's lives are at stake given how we handle this." Both Warner and Graham say they want Rumsfeld to stay on the job. Leading Democrats, including Senator Edward Kennedy and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have said Rumsfeld should step down. Warner calls Rumsfeld "a man of conscience. He's strong, he's effective and I can continue to work with him." The committee's top Democrat, Carl Levin, says the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad indicated the failure of the administration's Iraq policy: "This is not just a few guards in some kind of an aberrant conduct. This is a much more systemic problem here. And the military intelligence, including I believe the CIA...have got to be held accountable, right up the chain." Democratic senator Evan Bayh says the scandal has tainted America's reputation and setback efforts to safeguard the country: "The tragedy of this is, it goes directly to the heart of how we hope to win the war against terror and what we're hoping to accomplish in Iraq. And that is that we are morally superior to our adversaries. We don't kill women and children. We don't torture people. We stand for freedom." (AP/USA Today)
May 9: Specialist Sabrina Harman, a US military policeman, is emerging as a key figure in the story behind the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Harman is one of the two MPs who posed beside a decaying corpse giving a thumbs-up and a grin to the camera; she is one of the two soldiers who posed for the now-infamous photograph of the pyramid of naked Iraqis in the jail. She is charged with photographing and videotaping detainees ordered to strip and masturbate. And it is Harman who stands accused of attaching wires to a hooded prisoner -- stood on a box -- and telling him he would be electrocuted if he fell off. Harman's family claims that she was taking the photos as evidence of improper treatment within the jail compound. Harman's mother says that when her daughter told her what she was doing during her two weeks' leave at home last November, she told her to stop. "We got into an argument about it at 4 am," says Robin Harman. "sabrina said she had to prove this. I told her to bring the pictures home, hide them and stay out of it." It is not an explanation accepted by military investigators probing Harman's role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib, nor does it explain how Harman got into photos taken before her unit arrived at Abu Ghraib in October 2003. Her explanation is also in contradiction with the charges she faces; even her witness statement to investigators fails to stand up the claim by her family and lawyer that she was one of the good guys amid the bad. She makes clear that she was a participant in institutionalised torture. "The person who brought them in would set the standards on whether or not to 'be nice,'" she testified. "If the prisoner was co-operating, then he was able to keep his jumpsuit, mattress, and was allowed cigarettes on request or even hot food. But if the prisoner didn't give what they wanted, it was all taken away until [military intelligence] decided. Sleep, food, clothes, mattresses, cigarettes were all privileges and were granted with information received."
The statement confirms what the International Committee for the Red Cross had been saying for months. In visits to Iraq's US-administered prison, it has been documenting abuse that was not the "exception" but was close to the norm -- abuse that was "tantamount" to a policy of torture, and tolerated by coalition forces. According to Harman, prisoners were stripped, searched and then "made to stand or kneel for hours." At other times they were forced to stand on boxes or hold boxes or to exercise ceaselessly. And what has become increasingly clear in the past few days, in interviews with returning special forces soldiers from Iraq, was that the techniques employed at Abu Ghraib were not simply for the cruel entertainment of military policemen and private contractors running the prison, but an application of abusive interrogation techniques taught to both US and British special forces. That it has been a catastrophe for US foreign policy is asserted by senior Pentagon officials who claim privately that Iraq policy is now "97 per cent disaster" and the war is no longer being planned but crisis-managed from day-to-day. And "catastrophe" was the word used by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during his appearance before Congress. Last summer, a few days before the Red Cross evacuated its staff from Baghdad, Nada Doumani, the Lebanese spokeswoman for the ICRC's delegation to Iraq, was sitting in her sandbagged office complaining of the huge difficulties in tracking detainees within the US-administered prison system in Iraq. Already, as is now clear, her officials were privately concerned over what they were hearing was happening inside the prisons that they were visiting. These days Doumani and the Iraq delegation is based in neighboring Jordan, the security situation meaning it still too dangerous for the ICRC to have a permanent, large-scale presence in Iraq. And with the leaking of her organization's confidential report into the conditions of detainees, she can say a little more. It is a report that paints the most damning picture of conditions in US-run facilities, and that challenges the assertions of the White House and Pentagon that the torture cases in Abu Ghraib were "exceptional."
According to other Red Cross officials, concern had been mounting throughout the year over persistent allegations of abuse. "Between 31 March and 24 October we made 29 separate visits," says Doumani. These culminated in a visit to Abu Ghraib in October, during which the most egregious abuses were uncovered. "Right after that visit we gave a findings presentation to the director of the prison, Janis Karpinski." That critical presentation was followed by the production of a working paper for discussion, also to Karpinski. At the same time, Red Cross officials were also concerned about allegations of alleged beatings meted out to Iraqis by British soldiers in their sector which was also raised with senior British officers at around the same time, in October and November. As conversations continued between Red Cross officials and officers on the ground, a summary report on treatment of detainees was forwarded by the Iraq delegation to the organization's headquarters in Geneva. By early January 2004, it had landed on the desk of the Red Cross's president, Jakob Kellenberger. A former Swiss diplomat, largely to European missions, it would present of the greatest challenges of his career. For Kellenberger and other senior officials in Geneva, that summary report confirmed worrying reports that were coming from across the US-administered prison system set up to deal with suspects detained in the war in terror. From Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay to Iraq and to friendly third-party countries with poor human rights records which were willing to open up their facilities to the US, a picture was emerging of routine and arbitrary ill treatment. Determined to raise the organisation's concerns, Kellenberger had scheduled a trip to Washington to talk to the most senior US officials in the Bush administration. On January 13 and 14 he attended a series of meetings in Washington. Two days later he met with Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. In each meeting, Kellenberger delivered the same message: his organization's belief that coalition soldiers were torturing and mistreating Iraqi detainees. Within hours that message would be on the desks of Donald Rumsfeld and the most senior officers in the US military. But if Rumsfeld is to be believed, even as a discreet inquiry was launched into the allegations, none of the President's most senior officials thought to tell George Bush.
Army investigators had also been tipped about the abuses and, after months of inaction, were taking the issue seriously. Joseph Darby, a 24-year-old reservist at Abu Ghraib, had slipped an anonymous note underneath the door of one of his superior officers. It described brutal incidents of abuse of Iraqi prisoners and the existence of graphic photographs taken by Darby's own colleagues. That move triggered the crisis which has emerged from Abu Ghraib. Darby eventually turned over a computer disk of pictures to a sergeant in his unit on January 13. A few hours later, army investigators seized other computers and disks from members of the unit. By January 14, General John Abizaid was on the phone to Rumsfeld, as Kellenberger was also raising his concern. On January 16, the US army curtly announced it had ordered an investigation into abuses at the prison -- a five-sentence press release said that an inquiry into "reported" incidents of detainee abuse had begun. It did not even name the prison. In early May, it became evident that Bush was deeply upset at the storm of bad publicity swirling out from the Abu Ghraib scandal, if not so much upset over the abuses himself. If the story that has been carefully leaked from the White House is true, the first time the President saw the pictures that have dominated the world's media was when they were broadcast on CBS's Sixty Minutes, hard as that is to believe. According to that account, Bush was also unaware of a detailed secret military report into the Abu Ghraib abuses that had also leaked to the press, and the Red Cross's devastating presentation. "I should have known about the pictures and the report," Bush said in his dressing-down of Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld agreed that what had happened was "not satisfactory." At least three senior White House officials, with the President's authority, then leaked the scolding to the media.
Karl Rove, Bush's political guru, took the lead in spinning the story. Rove had been furious to see Bush "blindsided" due to Rumsfeld's failure to alert the White House to the crisis, according to the White House explanation of events. By then the White House was in full crisis mode. Shortly after the Wednesday morning meeting with Rumsfeld, crews from two Arab networks arrived and began setting up equipment in the Map Room. Bush had scooped a hole in his schedule to speak directly to the Arab world. The interviews began at 10 am, each lasting 10 minutes. Several senior aides had advised Bush to apologize, as Rice had done the day before. But when the interviews ended, stunned officials were still left waiting for the magic "I'm sorry." Onlookers from the State Department were horrified. They had included a strong recommendation Bush apologise for the Abu Ghraib abuses in a so-called "talking points" memo to Bush. Apparently Bush, true to form, could not bring himself to actually make an apology. As the day wore on and the scandal continued to swirl around the world, advisers kept pressing him to change his mind. He was initially reluctant, believing enough had been done. It was a position that was not to last.
Rumors of brutality had been circulating for most of last year. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had both raised concerns about Abu Ghraib and other prisons. Among Iraqis, the rumours of sexual abuse found greater credence than with the international media, and among US soldiers the prison was even dubbed "Abu Grope." Among those waiting outside yesterday for news from inside was Zacaria Falah, from the northern city of Mosul, who himself spent 70 days in Abu Ghraib this year. His older brother is still imprisoned. Both were accused of helping "the resistance" -- a charge they deny. Falah tells a similar story to many detainees. He was taken from his home, which was ransacked during the raid, in the middle of the night and transported to a base in Mosul known as "Camp Disco" to Iraqis because of the habit of the guards of putting on loud music and making the detainees "dance" for hours on end. From there he was taken to Abu Ghraib, where he was housed in a tent, sleeping on the floor with 34 other men. But last January few were listening to those like Falah. The story, on a low simmer, needed graphic pictures to boil over -- pictures that would detonate a political crisis when they emerged. Instead, the hundreds of photos, CD discs and videotapes seized from the military police in Abu Ghraib after Darby's complaint were locked in a safe in Baghdad belonging to the army's Criminal Investigation Division. Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, the US military spokesman in Iraq, called the Pentagon. He reportedly called the evidence "damaging and horrific."
Secretly, Major-General Antonio Taguba was appointed to investigate the problem. Official silence in the Pentagon was still the pattern. Although top officials, including Rumsfeld and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, were kept abreast of the probe, it was in the form of conversations, not a passing on of the detailed reports or photographs. Taguba's report wrapped up in March and six soldiers were charged. But while many officials would have hoped a line had been drawn under the issue, the story was far from over. By the second week of April it began to leak. That was when CBS reporters rang the Pentagon revealing they had the pictures and planned to broadcast them. The Pentagon launched an effort to keep the story off the airwaves. Myers called CBS and persuaded the network to hold off on the 60 Minutesbroadcast. He argued the pictures would be so damaging to US forces in Iraq that deaths could directly result, especially with some US hostages still in Iraqi hands. In the meantime Pentagon planners drafted an 11-page media response to the story, including some three dozen expected questions and prepared answers. The plan was to focus on Darby's role as an honest whistleblower and the army's swift -- if largely secret -- investigation.
As the week has worn on, the Pentagon's strategy to concentrate the story on a few "bad apples," including Sabrina Harman, has begun to seriously unravel, not only because of Harman's own evidence but because of the leaked Red Cross report and evidence of returning special forces soldiers to the UK. According to one officer recently returned from Iraq, sexual humiliation of prisoners in Abu Ghraib was not an invention of "maverick guards" but part of a system of degradation developed for use by British and US troops called R2I -- resistance to interrogation -- which uses sexual jibes and stripping prisoners to prolong "the shock of capture" when detainees are at their most vulnerable. The officer says, "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing." What has also emerged is the role that US military intelligence officers and private intelligence contractors have played in directing the abuse with most of the reservists involved alleging that they thought their duty was to "soften up" the prisoners for questioning. Taguba's leaked confidential report identifies at least three contractors as being potentially to blame for the problems, contractors who are neither subject to Iraqi law, military discipline or the Geneva Conventions. Yet even as the scandal has boiled over, according to at least one of the companies named in Taguba's report, CACI International, the Pentagon has yet to contact it. By this weekend the disturbing ramifications of what went on in Abu Ghraib had spread to Britain.
It was not only US military intelligence, CIA and private contractors who conducted interrogations with prisoners softened up by Harman and her colleagues, it was British officials as well. Not only were three military intelligence officers based at Abu Ghraib since January as the crisis was unfolding in Washington, but MI6 officers had been visiting the prison on a regular basis to carry out their own interrogations. On top of concerns over British mistreatment of Iraqi detainees in the Red Cross report, on top of allegations of abuse by the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, allegations that British officers were in Abu Ghraib, and were unaware of the abuse, has deepened the sense of crisis in London as well as Washington. As the allegations of abuse continue to build up, UK officials both in London and Baghdad have been at pains to try to distance themselves from what some in the US military have been up to, describing stand-up rows between civilian officials and the US military officers over the treatment of detainees. Rahman al-Dulaimy, a former Baath party official whose brothers were in Saddam's secret police and who was arrested in June last year and held in different detention centers for four months, contrasts his treatment by US and British soldiers. "The soldiers took me to their base at the civil defense headquarters in the al-Shaab district of Baghdad. They kept me alone in a room with my hands zip-tied behind my back for two days, feeding me only one spoonful of army rations a day and giving me a total of two glasses of water. During these two days some interrogators beat me frequently, flung me around, pried off one of my toenails and stood on my back."
He went down to al-Basra, to Umm Qasr, to al-Nasariya, then finally to Basra. "In Basra I was put in a warehouse under the guard of British soldiers. They treated me well, with dignity and asked many questions, but not in a violent way. The food was much better there -- three meals each day and good Iraqi food -- and when I felt ill they took me to hospital. The prison was more clean and tidy too, and for that I don't want to criticise or accuse the people in Basra. I made a kind of friendship with one of the [British] soldiers who used to listen to me and help me. I got blankets and slept and sat with no problems. People did not bother us and were good to us. There were a few Americans there and they did not mix with the British but lived in an isolated area close to the camps and relations were not good. The Americans accused the British of being too soft with prisoners."
It is clear from the Red Cross's report that, while treatment by British soldiers is not of the order of the organized abuse in some US facilities, the British army has no reason to be complacent amid repeated reports of beatings. "We know that bad things have gone on," says one official. "But we believe it is of a different order. We know a few people may have stepped over the line and they will be dealt with appropriately." The question that remains is what is appropriate for the official who has presided over the whole sorry mess, Donald Rumsfeld. On May 7, almost five months after he was first told of the scandal, he appeared before Congress to tell them what he knew, his second career-threatening interview in a week. "I offer my deepest apology," he said of the soldiers' behavior: "It was un-American." In more than six hours of testimony Rumsfeld was contrite and apologetic, while still defending his corner. One after another Rumsfeld, Myers and two other senior Pentagon aides expressed their sorrow for what had happened. But if the administration was uniform in expressing regret, behind the scenes it is a different scene. Though many do not expect Rumsfeld to resign, his future is uncertain. Even Republican congressmen are furious that he did not inform them of the pictures of the abuse. But sacrificing Rumsfeld is likely to be seen as too high a political price to pay in an election year. With Rumsfeld warning, however, that the "worst images" are yet to come, and respect for the US across the world at an all-time low, many are happy to bet he will not make it to the elections in November. (Guardian)

Sabrina Harman with leashed Iraqi prisoner

May 9: Specialist Jeremy Sivits is the first US soldier to face a court-martial over the charges of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The US military has resolved to schedule courts-martials quickly and publicly in order to defuse public criticism that it has not done enough to address the situation. The abuse scandal also looms over Bush's re-election efforts. Bush promises that "we will learn all the facts and determine the full extent of these abuses. Those involved will be identified. They will answer for their actions." Sivits is one of seven soldiers facing charges but appears to be a lesser figure in the case. Some of the others will likely face a general court martial, which can give more severe punishments than the "special" court martial that will try Sivits. His trial could produce evidence for prosecuting others believed more culpable. Sivits is believed to have taken some of the photos that triggered the scandal. His father, Daniel Sivits, said last month his son "was told to take a picture, and he did what he was told." He said his son trained as a mechanic but found himself performing military police work for which he was unqualified. Sivits has been charged with conspiracy to mistreat detainees, dereliction of duty for failing to protect prisoners and maltreatment of detainees. If convicted, Sivits could face one year in prison, reduction in rank to private, forfeiture of two-thirds of his pay for a year, a fine or a bad conduct discharge. Penalties could include only one, all or any combination of those punishments. Seven officers have already received career-ending reprimands. Sivits will be able to chose between trial before a single military judge or a three-member panel of senior officers. He has the right to a civilian attorney and will have access to military counsel. Officials hope the trial will convince Iraqis that the United States does not tolerate torture reminiscent of the darkest days of Saddam Hussein and will act swiftly to punish those responsible. Saddam's regime used the Abu Ghraib facility, located on the western edge of Baghdad, to torture and murder thousands of his critics. The trials could determine whether abuse at Abu Ghraib was an aberration, as the US command insists, or stemmed from pressure from military intelligence units to make detainees more compliant under questioning. Another soldier facing charges, Specialist Sabrina Harman, says she and others with the 372nd Military Police Company took direction from Army military intelligence officers, CIA operatives and civilian contractors who conducted interrogations.
American officials have insisted the abuses at Abu Ghraib were carried out by a handful of soldiers who failed to follow procedures and were not part of a systematic program of brutality, though evidence is emerging almost daily that such is not the case. "Please don't paint with such a wide brush that it indicts the other 135,000 American soldiers and Marines out there doing the right thing," says Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, failing to address the real charges of complicity and direction from the civilian leadership in the Bush administration. Kimmitt says investigators believe that only a "very small number of guards" were involved. The International Red Cross says differently. "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," says Pierre Kraehenbuel, the Red Cross operations director. US lawmakers have warned that the most repulsive photos have yet to be released and have insisted that the Army investigation should have repercussions for higher-ups, not just the military police accused of abusing detainees. "I think command responsibility has to be looked at just as seriously as the abusers," says Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. Harman says it was made clear to her that her mission was to break down the prisoners. "They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time already hooded and cuffed," Harman says. "The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk." She emphasizes that her duties were made clear to her by military intelligence agents and OGA (other governmental agency) officials. (AP/Charlotte Observer, Seymour Hersh)
May 9: Four private military contractors have been named as suspects in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, with the possibility that others will be named later. All four civilian contractors were assigned to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Two of those civilians, Steven Stephanowicz and John Israel, were "either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses" at Abu Ghraib, the Taguba report says. A third contractor, Adel Nakhla, is named as a translator and a suspect. A fourth, Torin Nelson, is said to be a witness. Both Nakhla and Nelson are listed as employees of Titan Corp., a security contractor based in San Diego. The report identifies Stephanowicz as an interrogator working for CACI; Israel, an interpreter, was also said to be working for CACI, although the company has denied that. Some news reports have identified Israel as an employee of Titan, which in turn has said he works for one of its subcontractors. The public has no way of knowing how many private contractors are working at Iraqi detention facilities, what their functions are, or who they are. (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress on May 7 that "about 40" contractors are currently assigned at Abu Ghraib, but other sources give different figures.) There are no standard procedures for deploying private security workers under military contracts, which makes it far more difficult to gather information about who they are, what they're doing and for whom. They are not part of the military command; they are not covered by the code of military justice. At present, it is estimated that one out of 10 Americans in Iraq are private contractors and/or mercenaries employed by various "security companies" and private outfits. Months after Taguba issued his report to the Pentagon's central command, we still don't know what legal action, if any, the civilian contractors may face. CACI claims that it has not been contacted formally by the Army on this matter, and its employees are still working in Iraq. The Pentagon now says that it began an investigation of the Military Intelligence Brigade, civilian contractors and the Iraqi Survey Group, but not until April 24. It can be presumed that, being virtually immune from accountability and lacking any oversight except from their corporate superiors, these contractors are still working with, and possibly still abusing, Iraqi prisoners. (Washington Post)
May 9: There are "many, many" criminal investigations going on of deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, well beyond Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, says Republican senator Chuck Hagel. "This is deeper and wider than I think most in this administration understand," Hagel says. US officials have insisted the abuses at Abu Ghraib were carried out by a handful of soldiers and not part of a systematic program of brutality. Hagel says he cannot not discuss matters presented to him as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee but they extend beyond the ongoing controversy over Iraqi prisoners of war at the prison. The panel was briefed by top intelligence and Army officials. "There are many, many investigations ongoing now as a result of deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, deaths that came at the hands of United States officials," Hagel says. He says some of the probes have been referred to the US Justice Department. "It's probably in the range of 30, maybe more than that, of investigations, not all are homicide," he says. The Army acknowledges it is investigating possible abuse by US soldiers of 42 Iraqi civilians in addition to 35 investigations of abuse of prisoners. The Army said previously it was looking into the deaths of 25 prisoners held in Iraq or Afghanistan, determining there were two homicides by Americans against Iraqi prisoners, one case of justifiable homicide and 12 cases in which the cause of death was natural or undetermined. Ten other deaths and 10 cases of nonlethal assault remain under investigation. (Reuters/Free Republic)
May 9: Although both Bush and Blair claim to be "shocked" by allegations and photos of tortured Iraqi prisoners, it is confirmed that both knew about the allegations as far back as two years ago, when similar allegations were made concerning Afghani detainees. Since April 2003, the International Red Cross has been submitting monthly reports of torture and abuse at Iraqi prisons, reports which were widely ignored by the Bush administration until the photos were made public in late April 2004. A senior Red Cross official says, "It doesn't matter which report it was, we had been telling the US and UK authorities in Baghdad for over a year about the scale of this [abuse and torture] problem. They had been given 10 or more reports. All detailed the same findings. They knew this had been going on for a year." Paul Bremer, the US governor heading the coalition's provisional authority in Iraq, was also handed a report by Amnesty International which described prisoner abuse and Geneva violations throughout US-run camps in Iraq last July. As a result, Bush called defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld to the White House for briefings on January 16. Rumsfeld is said to have told Bush the extent of the concern over abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. The meeting was attended by White House chief of staff Andrew Card. Yet just yesterday, Bush promised that he would "learn all the facts and determine the full extent of the abuses." Rumsfeld admitted to Congress yesterday that the Pentagon and a US general had tried to block CBS, the US TV network, from broadcasting abuse pictures taken inside Abu Ghraib. He also said "more photographs and videos exist," adding: "It's going to make

THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

May 2004:

Week Two

Further prisoner abuse photos and videos, including ones showing rape and murder, coming out

Blair administration admits knowing about abuses in February

Sabrina Harman with leashed Iraqi prisoner