By Seymour M. Hersh.
June 17, 2004
Comment: Hersh's report is the most confusing bit of writing I have ever read by a "noted" journalist. I have re-written Hersh's article/commentary so you can understand it. I have summarized it somewhat as well, because Hersh is writing to other journalist more then writing to the general reader.
That is, he includes comments from sources, that speak in defense or spin these matters to support or protect the Bush administration. I have not included this BS. Hersh has had to write these comments to retain his image of impartiality.
I am not afraid of taking a point of view, because in my opinion the facts below speak for themselves, speak the truth. I have also added my past Newsletter material about his subject.
Dick
A RE-WRITE of the article by Hersh, THE GENERAL'S REPORT the follows a time line:
Taguba learned that in August 2003, the Pentagon had ordered Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander at Guantánamo, to Iraq. His mission was to survey the prison system there and to find ways to improve the flow of intelligence. The core of Miller's recommendations, as summarized in the Taguba report, was that the military police at Abu Ghraib should become part of the interrogation process: they should work closely with interrogators and intelligence officers in "setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees."
"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.
On January 13, 2004, a military policeman named Joseph Darby gave the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D.) a CD full of images of abuse. Two days later, General Craddock and Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, the director of the Joint Staff of the J.C.S., were e-mailed a summary of
the abuses depicted on the CD.
(On 31 January 2004, U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba was appointed by a Lt. General.) His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. "From what I knew, troops just don't take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups," Taguba told (Hersh). "These M.P. troops were not that creative," he said. "Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box."
Taguba decided to keep the photographs from most of the interrogators and researchers on his staff of twenty-three officers. "I didn't want them to prejudge the soldiers they were investigating, so I put the photos in a safe," he told Hersh). "Anyone who wanted to see them had to have a need-to-know and go through me."
Taguba told Hersh, "early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that
the abused detainees were "only Iraqis."
"I kept on asking these questions of the officers I interviewed: 'You knew what was going on. Why didn't you do something to stop it?' "
Taguba came to believe that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq, and some of the generals assigned to the military headquarters in Baghdad had extensive knowledge of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib even before Joseph Darby came forward with the CD. Taguba was aware that in the fall of 2003 -- when much of the abuse took place -- Sanchez routinely visited the prison, and witnessed at least one interrogation. According to Taguba, "Sanchez knew exactly what was going on."
Taguba's assignment was limited to investigating the 800th M.P.s, but he quickly found signs of the involvement of military intelligence -- both the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, commanded by Colonel Thomas Pappas, which worked closely with the M.P.s, and what were called "other government agencies," or O.G.A.s, a euphemism for the
C.I.A. and special-operations units operating undercover in Iraq. Some of the earliest evidence involved Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan, whose name was mentioned in interviews with several M.P.s. For the first three weeks of the investigation, Jordan was nowhere to be found, despite repeated requests. When the investigators finally located him, he asked whether he needed to shave his beard before being interviewed -- Taguba suspected that he had been dressing as a civilian. "When I asked him about his assignment, he says, 'I'm a liaison officer for intelligence from Army headquarters in Iraq.'" But in the course of three or four interviews with Jordan, Taguba said, he began to suspect that the lieutenant colonel had been more intimately involved in the interrogation process -- some of it brutal -- for "high value" detainees.
Taguba said that Jordan's "record reflected an extensive intelligence background." He also had reason to believe that Jordan was not reporting through the chain of command. But Taguba's narrowly focussed mission constrained the questions he could ask. "I suspected that somebody was giving them guidance, but I could not print that," (in his final report) Taguba said.
"After all Jordan's evasiveness and misleading responses, his rights were read to him," Taguba went on. Jordan subsequently became the only officer facing trial on criminal charges in connection with Abu Ghraib and is scheduled to be court-martialled in late August (2007) ...for failure to obey an order or regulation; cruelty, and maltreatment; and false swearing and obstruction of justice.
At the time he filed his report, in March of 2004, Taguba said, "I knew there was C.I.A. involvement, but I was oblivious of what else was happening" in terms of covert military-intelligen
Their essential tactic was seizing and interrogating terrorists and suspected terrorists; they also had authority from the President to kill certain high-value targets on sight. The most secret task-force operations were categorized as Special Access Programs, or S.A.P.s.
COMMENT: Extra-judical murders just like Opertation Phenix in Vietnam.
Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in MarchBush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, (April 28, 2004) or to reëvaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President's failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career. (when Taguba filed his report),
April 28, 2004: 60 Minutes II Has Exclusive Report On Alleged Mistreatment, 28 Apr 04: CBS shows images from 2003 of inmates being subjected to abuses by US soldiers
News reports. "George Bush is shocked" May 1, 2004
On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week, revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in the *NewYorker*.
Lt. Gen. Taguba was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in (to speak to Rumsfeld and his boys).
"Here . . . comes . . . that *famous* General Taguba -- of the Taguba report!" Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter
Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials.
Taguba, said, sadly, "I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to
know. I was ignorant of the setting."
In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. "Could you tell us what happened?" Wolfowitz asked. At that point, Taguba recalled, "I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and (Taguba) said 'That's not abuse. That's torture.' There was quiet."
Rumsfeld was particularly concerned about how the classified report had become public. "General," he asked, "who do you think leaked the report?" ...Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. "Here I am," Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, "just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs.
COMMENT: Why did Rumsfefl fake ignorance. He and Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners.
Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, By the time he walked into Rumsfeld's conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders
on the report...When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, "I don't want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?"
Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld's office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint back in January 2004.
Taguba told Hersh) that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Taguba said that he saw "a
video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee."
Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7, 2004, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse.
Rumsfeld told the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees: "There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime afterJanuary 13th . . . I don't remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn't proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn't know, and you didn't know, and I didn't
know.
Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld's testimony was simply not true. Taguba said. "He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they've dragged a lot of officers with them."
What happened to Lt. Gen. Taguba:
A few weeks after his report (into the torture at Abu Ghraib) became public, Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in the back seat of a Mercedes sedan with General John Abizaid. Abizaid's driver and his interpreter, who also served as a bodyguard, were in front. Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet warning: "You and your report will be investigated.
Taguba said. "I'd been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia."
One of Rumsfeld's his senior press aides, Lawrence Di Rita, stated to Taguba. Di Rita, who was standing beside Rumsfeld, said sarcastically, "See what you started, General? See what you started?"
Taguba had been scheduled to rotate to the Third Army's headquarters, at Fort McPherson, Georgia, in June of 2004 A retired four-star Army general later told Taguba that he had been sent (instead) to the job in the Pentagon so that he could "be watched." Taguba realized that his career was at a dead end.
In January of 2006, Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the Army's Vice-Chief of Staff. "This is your Vice," he told Taguba. "I need you to retire by January of 2007." No pleasantries were exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for years, and, Taguba said, "He offered no reason."
Taguba went on, "There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this."
"From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service," Taguba said. "And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that mypeers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.
Hersh article continues:
Later that summer of 2004 after he submitted his report, Taguba learned that the C.I.A. had serious concerns about the abusive interrogation techniques that military-intelligen
Hell, even if we reopened it we wouldn't get any more information than we already have."
The Army also protected General Miller. Since 2002, F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo had been telling their superiors that their military counterparts were abusing detainees. The F.B.I. complaints were ignored until after Abu Ghraib. When an investigation was opened, in December 2004, and Air Force Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, ordered to investigate the charges, which included alleged abuses during Miller's tenure at Guantánamo..
Schmidt, who retired last year, told Hersh, . "I found some things that didn't seem right. For lack of a camera, you could have seen in Guantánamo what was seen at Abu Ghraib."
At Guantánamo, Schmidt told the investigators, Miller "was responsible for the conduct of interrogations that I found to be abusive and degrading. The intent of those might have been to be abusive and degrading to get the information they needed. . . . Did the means justify the ends? That's fine. . . . He was responsible.
According to a Dec. 20, 2005 Army inspector general's report on Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former commanding general in charge of Gitmo, Rumsfeld approved an interrogation plan for Mohammed al-Kahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker:In a sworn statement to the inspector general, [Lt. Gen. Randall] Schmidt described Rumsfeld as "personally involved" in the interrogation and said that the defense secretary was "talking weekly" with Miller.
Rumsfeld developed an interrogation plan that required the Gitmo detainee to "stand naked in front of a female interrogator, was accused of being a homosexual, and was forced to wear women's underwear and to perform `dog tricks' on a leash." Schmidt said that the open-ended policies Rumsfeld approved, and that the apparent lack of supervision of day-to-day interrogations permitted the wide-scale abuse to take place. http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/ 2006/04/14/ 18154701. php
Schmidt formally recommended that Miller be "held accountable" and "admonished.
LT. Gen. Craddock rejected this recommendation and absolved Miller of any responsibility for the mistreatment of the prisoners. The Inspector General inquiry endorsed Craddock's action. (Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, was promoted about serving as Rumsfeld's senior military assistant)
"I was open with them," Schmidt told (Hersh), referring to the I.G. investigators. "I told them, 'I'll do anything to help you get the truth.'" But when he read their final report (Dec. 20, 2005), he said, "I didn't recognize the five hours of interviews (by IG) with me (Schmidt, in the IG report)."
Rumsfeld was in frequent contact with Miller about the progress of Qahtani's interrogation, and personally approved the most severe interrogation tactics. ("This wasn't just daily business, when the Secretary of Defense is personally involved," Schmidt told the Army investigators.
Military investigators were precluded from looking into the role of Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders in the Pentagon; the result was that none found any high-level intelligence involvement in the abuse.
In an April, 2005, memorandum, a C.I.D. officer -- his name was redacted -- complained to C.I.D. headquarters, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, about the impossibility of investigating military members of a Special Access Program suspected of prisoner abuse: "[C.I.D.] has been unable to thoroughly investigate . . . due to the suspects and witnesses involvement in Special Access Programs (SAP) and/or the security classification of the unit they were assigned to during the offense under investigation. Attempts by Special Agents . . . to be "read on" to these programs has [sic] been unsuccessful.
The C.I.D. officer wrote that "fake names were used" by members of the task force; he also told investigators that the unit had a "major computer malfunction which resulted in them losing 70 per cent of their files; therefore, they can't find the cases we need to review."
The military task forces were under the control of the Joint Special Operations Command, the branch of the Special Operations Command that is responsible for counterterrorism. One of Miller's unacknowledged missions had been to bring the J.S.O.C.'s "strategic interrogation" techniques to Abu Ghraib. In special cases, the task forces could bypass the chain of command and deal directly with Rumsfeld's office. A former senior intelligence official told me that the White House was also briefed on task-force operations.
The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who "didn't think the photographs were that bad" -- in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, "Guys on the inside ask me, 'What's the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?'" A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the "basic strategy was 'prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.'"
A recently retired C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen years in the clandestine service, told me that the task-force teams "had full authority to whack -- to go in and conduct 'executive action,'" the phrase for political assassination. "It was surrealistic what these guys were doing," the retired operative added. "They were running around the world without clearing their operations with the ambassador or the (CIA) chief of station" (the CIA's chain of command).
COMMENT: Here we learn why a SAP was needed, without telling Congress. A program where only those with the need to know were read onto it. This is done to limit the risk of compromise or leak to the press. If you don't have a record of enemy combatants (ghost detainees) in Abu Ghraib or in secret prisons, you can kill them and nobody can prove the U.S. killed them, extra-judicial murders.
J.S.O.C.'s special status undermined military discipline. Richard Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, told me that, on his visits to Iraq, he increasingly found that "the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the field would say, 'I don't care what he says. I'm going to do what I want.' We've sacrificed the chain of command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT" -- the global war on terrorism. "You're painting on a canvas so big that it's hard to comprehend," Armitage said.
A former high-level Defense Department official said that, when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Senator John Warner, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was warned "to back off" on the investigation, because "it would spill over to more important things." A spokesman for Warner acknowledged that there had been pressure on the Senator, but said that Warner had stood up to it -- insisting on putting Rumsfeld under oath for his May 7th testimony, for example, to the Secretary's great displeasure.
An aggressive congressional inquiry into Abu Ghraib could have provoked unwanted questions about what the Pentagon was doing, in Iraq and elsewhere, and under what authority. By law, the President must make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and inform the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush Administration unilaterally determined after 9/11 that intelligence operations conducted by the military -- including the Pentagon's covert task forces -- for the purposes of "preparing the battlefield" could be authorized by the President, as Commander-in-
There was coördination between the C.I.A. and the task forces, but also tension. The C.I.A. officers, who were under pressure to produce better intelligence in the field, wanted explicit legal authority before aggressively interrogating high-value targets. A finding would give operatives some legal protection for questionable actions, but the White House was reluctant to put what it wanted in writing.
A recently retired high-level C.I.A. official, who served during this period and was involved in the drafting of findings, described to me the bitter disagreements between the White House and the agency over the issue. "The problem is what constituted approval," the retired C.I.A. official said. "My people fought about this all the time. Why should we put our people on the firing line somewhere down the road? If you want me to kill Joe Smith, just *tell* me to kill Joe Smith. If I was the Vice-President or the President, I'd say, 'This guy Smith is a bad guy and it's in the interest of the United States for this guy to be killed.' They don't say that. Instead, George" -- George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A. until mid-2004 -- "goes to the White House and is told, 'You guys are professionals. You know how important it is. We know you'll get the intelligence.
The Pentagon consultant said in an interview late last year that "the C.I.A. never got the exact language it wanted." The findings, when promulgated by the White House, were "very calibrated" to minimize political risk, and limited to a few countries; later, they were expanded, turning several nations in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia into free-fire zones with regard to high-value targets. I was told by the former senior intelligence official and a government consultant that after the existence of secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe was revealed, in the *Washington Post*, in late 2005, the Administration responded with a new detainee center in Mauritania. After a new government friendly to the U.S. took power, in a bloodless coup d'état in August 2005, they said, it was much easier for the intelligence community to mask secret flights there.
End of Harsh article:
http://www.newyorke
============
What is JTF-121?
IT is a highly classified field Army/AirForce/
The very secretiveness of special operations makes it hard for the public, or even members of Congress charged with oversight, to keep informed about the new tactics or to measure their effectiveness.
Only about 1,500 "black" special operators are assigned to clandestine units at any one time, including JTF 121 and the so-called Gray Fox intelligence unit.
http://fairuse.
The "buzz" on the Internet is that Task Force 121 is a new elite assassination death squad trained by the Israelis at Fort Bragg. First, Task Force 121 is not a brand new Special Operations unit....More likely, the Israelis were sharing intelligence or maybe some of their vast experience in operating in Arab countries. (translated: their vast experience in torture methods).
http://students.
What is SOG?
Six years ago when he took charge of the CIA, George Tenet began rebuilding the supersecret Special Operations Group (SOG). Hundreds of millions of additional dollars have been pumped into the CIA budget by President George W. Bush. He has ordered SOG operatives to join forces with foreign intelligence services. He has even authorized the CIA to kidnap "terrorists" in order to break their cells or kill them.
Comment: When was torture authorized? Because there existed a "JTF-121 interrogation policy".
The CIA had about 100 officers and SOG troops roaming in Afghanistan during the U.S. invasion.
Intelligence sources tell Time that the CIA had requested that commandos from the U.S. Army's elite Delta Force join its first team going into Afghanistan but that the Pentagon refused to send them.
The part of the (CIA) SOG air force that has received the most publicity lately is the fleet of remote-controlled Predator drones, armed with 5-ft.-long Hellfire missiles, that the agency bought from the Air Force.
In November 2001 the CIA deployed the drone to eliminate bin Laden's lieutenant, Mohammed Atef. Last November's Predator hit in Yemen killed an al-Qaeda commander and his entourage of five, though the strike was controversial: one of the dead men turned out to be a U.S. citizen. .Administration officials say Bush did not specifically order the Predator attack in Yemen. But after Sept. 11 he gave the CIA the green light to use lethal force against al-Qaeda.
"http://www.time.
My related research:
Is the torture methods used at Abu Ghraib the product of CIA research?
Forced standing: has a long proven history of use by torturers because it leaves few mark
This torture is well known to intelligence agencies worldwide. The
CIA documented the effects of forced standing 40 years ago. And the
technique is valued because it leaves few marks, and so no evidence.
Forced standing was a prescribed field punishment in West European
armies in the early 20th century. The British Army called it Field
Punishment No. 1, though the soldiers referred to it as "the
crucifixion.
By the 1920s, forced standing was a routine police torture in
America. In 1931, the National Commission on Lawless Enforcement of
the Law found numerous American police departments using forced
standing to coerce confessions.
In the 1930s, Stalin's NKVD also famously used forced standing to
coerce seemingly voluntary confessions for show trials. The Gestapo
used forced standing as a routine punishment in many concentration
camps. It even created small narrow "standing cells," Stehzelle,
where prisoners had to stand all night.
In 1956, the CIA commissioned two experts, Harold Wolff and Lawrence
Hinkle, who described the effects of forced standing. The ankles and
feet swell to twice their normal size within 24 hours. Moving becomes
agony. Large blisters develop. The heart rate increases, and some
faint. The kidneys eventually shut down. ("A Long-Standing Trick of
the Torturer's Art," The Seattle Times, May 14, 2004)
In the mid-20th century, torturers learned how to use the swelling and blistering to cause more pain. The South African and Brazilian police made prisoners stand on cans or bricks, the edges causing excruciating pain to the sensitive feet. In 1999, the South African Truth Commission determined that forced standing was the third-most-common torture during apartheid, after beating and applying electricity.
Hooding was a common feature of Brazilian and South African torture. In the 1970s, the Brazilians added the electrical supplement. They threatened victims with electroshock if they began to give up and collapse in exhaustion. The jolts of electricity would make the hooded victims' feet stick to the cans and force them to stand up straight.
Source: The Seattle Times, 14 May 2004, by Darius Rejali. He is the author of "Torture and Democracy" (forthcoming, Princeton University Press) and a 2003 Carnegie Scholar. He is an associate professor of political science at Reed College in Portland.
"http://montages.
Torture at Abu Ghraib Followed CIA's Manual (Stress and Duress Techniques)
by Alfred W. McCoy
CIA torture techniques noted in the phonographs from the Abu Ghraib prison are snapshots not of simple brutality or a breakdown in discipline, but have been developed by the US intelligence community.
From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led secret research into coercion and consciousness that reached a billion dollars at peak. After experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shocks, and sensory deprivation, this CIA research produced a new method of torture that was psychological, not physical -- best described as "no touch" torture.
The CIA's discovery of psychological torture was a counterintuitive breakthrough. Under the CIA's new psychological paradigm, however, interrogators used two essential methods to achieve their goals.
In the first stage, interrogators employ the simple, nonviolent techniques of hooding or sleep deprivation to disorient the subject; sometimes sexual humiliation is used as well.
Once the subject is disoriented, interrogators move on to a second stage with simple, self-inflicted discomfort such as forced standing for hours with arms extended. In this phase, the idea is to make victims feel responsible for their own pain and thus induce them to alleviate it by capitulating to the
interrogator'
------------
o.. Men ordered to masturbate in front of each other and in front of female American soldiers, a humiliating experience which offends their religion (see: "The application of procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality"
o.. Men ordered to simulate homosexual sex with one another, a humiliating experience condemned by their religion (see: "The application of procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality"
o.. A man, hooded, standing on a box with electrodes attached to his fingers and penis, who was told that if he stepped off the box, he would be electrocuted to death
o.. A naked man menaced by, and then attacked by, a vicious dog
Comment: I think these sexual tortures, etc. were the result of years of experimentation by the CIA.
In the below article you will see some of these torture methods spelled out in a formerly classified CIA torture manual dated 1963. This manual was produced based on a whole lot of classified CIA research projects in years proceeding its publication.
Iraq Tactics Have Long History With U.S. Interrogators
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post
13 June 2004
A CIA handbook on coercive interrogation methods, produced 40 years ago during the Vietnam War, shows that techniques such as those used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a long history with U.S. intelligence and were based on research and field experience.
Declassified 10 years ago, the training manual carries in its title the code word used for the CIA in Vietnam, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation - July 1963." Used to train new interrogators, the handbook presents "basic information about coercive techniques available for use in the interrogation situation."
Note The CIA was never to be mentioned by name in any documents or in oral communications; instead the Agency was referred as KUBARK .
The specific coercive methods it describes echo today's news stories about Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At Abu Ghraib, for example, photographs and documents have shown that detainees were hooded, blindfolded, dressed in sloppy garb and forced to go naked.
The KUBARK manual suggests that, for "resistant" prisoners, the "circumstances of detention are arranged to enhance within the subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring and of being plunged into the strange."
The 1963 handbook describes the benefits and disadvantages of techniques similar to those authorized for use at Abu Ghraib, such as forcing detainees to stand or sit in "stress positions," cutting off sources of light, disrupting their sleep and manipulating their diet.
And among the manual's conclusions: The threat of pain is a far more effective interrogation tool than actually inflicting pain, but threats of death do not help.
Like the lists of interrogation methods approved for Iraq and Guantanamo, the KUBARK manual offers a menu of options for confusing and weakening detainees. A neat or proud individual was to be given an outfit one or two sizes too large without a belt "so that he must hold his pants up," the manual said. Forced changes in diet and sleep patterns should be done "so that the subject becomes disorientated [and] is very likely to create feelings of fear and helplessness.
Tactics involving deprivation of accustomed sights, sounds, taste, smells and tactile sensations were presented as primary methods for producing stress, and mirror the techniques seen at Abu Ghraib. Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top U.S. military officer in Iraq, approved in September a list of methods that included "sensory deprivation,
The KUBARK manual cited research supporting the effectiveness of the deprivations. "Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light or weak artificial light which never varies, which is sound-proofed, and in which odors are eliminated," the manual said.
An experiment referred to in the handbook was done in the 1950s and involved conditions designed to produce stress before an interrogation - similar to those applied to John Walker Lindh after his capture in Afghanistan. Lindh was tied to a stretcher naked and later held for long periods in a large metal container.
In the experiment done about 50 years earlier, volunteers were "placed in a tank-type respirator" with vents open so that the subjects could breathe but their arms and legs were enclosed in "rigid cylinders to inhibit movement and tactile contact." Lying on their backs in minimal artificial light, the subjects could not see their own bodies, and the respirator motor was the only sound.
Only six of the 17 volunteers completed the 36 hours of the experiment; the other 11 asked for early release - four because of anxiety and panic, and the others because of physical discomfort.
The conclusion reached, the handbook said, was that "the early effect of such an environment is anxiety" and that "the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects," some of whom "lose touch with reality [and] focus inwardly."
The payoff of such techniques, the manual said, is that when the interrogator appears, he or she appears as a "reward of lessened anxiety . . . providing relief for growing discomfort," and that sometimes, as a result, "the questioner assumes a benevolent role."
When it comes to torture, however, the handbook advised that "the threat to inflict pain . . . can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."
"In general, direct physical brutality creates only resentment, hostility and further defiance," the manual said.
Intense pain, interrogators were taught, "is quite likely to produce false confessions concocted as a means of escaping from distress."
While pain inflicted by others tends to create resistance in a subject, the manual said, "his resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself."
Reports from Iraq and Afghanistan indicate that detainees have been told to stand at attention for long periods or sit in "stress positions." In one of the photographs from Abu Ghraib, a hooded detainee is shown being forced to stand on a box with wires attached to his body. He was told he would get an electric shock if he moved. Seven military police soldiers have been charged in connection with the abuse shown in that and other photographs. Investigations continue into the role military interrogators played in those incidents.
In such situations, the manual said, the source of pain "is not the interrogator but the victim himself." And while the subject remains in that uncomfortable or painful position, he must be made to think that his captor could do something worse to him, creating in him the stress and anxiety the interrogator seeks.
Threats of death, however, were described as "worse than useless" because they can leave the prisoner thinking "that he is as likely to be condemned after compliance as before."
Experiments at that time also showed that creating physical weakness through prolonged exertion, extremes of heat, cold or moisture, or through drastic reduction of food or sleep do not work.
"The available evidence suggests that resistance is sapped principally by psychological rather than physical pressures," the handbook advised.
http://www.truthout
============
PEntagon leak confirms US tortured Iraqis illegally Aug 28 2004
WASHINGTON -- On (25 Aug 04), the Pentagon made public unclassified part of the 171-page report by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay on the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.
A senior Defense Department official" leaked "classified parts of the
Fay report to the *New York Times*, the paper reported in a front-page story Friday, Aug. 27.
Classified passages involving General Sanchez's orders were among several deleted from the unclassified version of the report.
Classified parts of the report say Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former top
commander in Iraq, approved the use in Iraq of some severe interrogation
practices intended to be limited to captives held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Afghanistan.
"Interrogators at Abu Ghraib used both dogs and isolation as interrogation
practices," a classified part of the report said. "The manner in which they
were used on some occasions clearly violated the Geneva Conventions.
The classified parts of the do not appear to contain sensitive material about interrogations or other intelligence-
Military officials and others in the Bush administration have repeatedly said
the Geneva Conventions applied to all prisoners in Iraq.
The classified sections of the Fay report reinforce criticisms made by the independent panel headed by James R. Schlesinger. That panel argued that General Sanchez's actions effectively amounted to an unauthorized suspension of the Geneva Conventions in Iraq by categorizing prisoners there as unlawful combatants.
In an interview on Thursday with reporters and editors of the *Times*, Gen.
Paul J. Kern, the senior officer who supervised General Fay's work, said the
Fay inquiry had not addressed whether General Sanchez was authorized to
designate detainees in Iraq as unlawful combatants, as the administration has
treated prisoners in Afghanistan.
The classified section of the Fay report also sheds new light on the role
played by a secretive Special Operations (Group) /Central Intelligence Agency task force that operated in Iraq and Afghanistan as a source of interrogation procedures that were put into effect at Abu Ghraib. It says that a July 15, 2003, "Battlefield Interrogation Team and Facility Policy," drafted by use by Joint Task Force 121, which was given the task of locating former government members in Iraq, was adopted "almost verbatim" by the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, which played a leading role in interrogations at Abu Ghraib.
That task force policy endorsed the use of stress positions during harsh
interrogation procedures, the use of dogs, yelling, loud music, light control,
isolation and other procedures used previously in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The techniques approved by General Sanchez were among those previously approved by the Pentagon for use in Afghanistan and Cuba, and were recommended Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and his Team, a commander at Guantánamo who had been sent to Iraq by senior Pentagon officials, and by a military intelligence unit (JTF-121) that had served in Afghanistan and was taking charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib.
The Schlesinger panel described that reasoning as "understandable,
General Sanchez and his staff should have recognized that they were "lacking specific authorization to operate beyond the confines of the Geneva
Convention.'
Comment: Translated:.
The role played by members of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, from Fort Bragg, N.C., some of whom were identified as having taken part in the abuses, is given particular attention in the classified parts of the report.
Members of the 519th MI BN had earlier served in Afghanistan, where some were implicated in the deaths of two detainees that are still under investigation, and the report says commanders should have heeded more carefully the danger that members of the unit might again be involved in abusive behavior.
The 519th MI Bn had worked closely with Special Operations Forces (JTF-121) in Afghanistan, and "at same point" it "came to possess the JTF-121 interrogation policy" used by the joint Special Operations (Group)/C.I.
Source: via Mark Jensen, Professor, PLU
http://www.nytimes.
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation or top secret special-access program, (SAP), known inside the intelligence community by code words, Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official in confirmed the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Note: That during the Clinton admininstration, the CIA started built a secret paramilitary (aka Special Forces) Army estimated in size to be 200 to 500 men.
Rumsfeld authorized the establishment of the SAP that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate "high value" targets in the Bush Administration'
"Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target-a standup group to hit quickly," a former high-level intelligence official told me. "He got all the agencies together-the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.-to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go." The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.
The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They ...recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America's élite forces-Navy seals, the Army's Delta Force, and the C.I.A.'s paramilitary experts.
In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military's facilities at Guantánamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations-
One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror.
In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. "It was an active program," the former intelligence official told me. "It's been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States-and do so without visibility." Some of its methods were troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however.
By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said.
Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.
"They weren't getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq," the former intelligence official told me. "No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and I'm tired of working through the normal chain of command. I've got this apparatus set up-the black special-access program-and I'm going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it's working. We're getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We're getting good stuff. But we've got more targets"-prisoners in Iraqi jails-"than people who can handle them."
Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap's rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligen
By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. "They said, 'No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan-
Comment: Was CIA Director Trent fired because he blow the whisle on Bush and Rumsfeld's secret SAP to HERSH?
The C.I.A.'s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. "This was stupidity," a government consultant told me. "You're taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers."
In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame. "The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone," he said. "This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program." When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, "but he's responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we've changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means."
The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything-including spying on their associates-to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, "I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population." The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said.
. One book that was frequently cited was "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-
In 2003, a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General's (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association'
http://newyorker.
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