Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (Article 17)

Every prisoner of war, when questioned on the subject, is bound to give only his surname, first names and rank, date of birth, and army, regimental, personal or serial number, or failing this, equivalent information. If he willfully infringes this rule, he may render himself liable to a restriction of the privileges accorded to his rank or status.

Each Party to a conflict is required to furnish the persons under its jurisdiction who are liable to become prisoners of war, with an identity card showing the owner's surname, first names, rank, army, regimental, personal or serial number or equivalent information, and date of birth. The identity card may, furthermore, bear the signature or the fingerprints, or both, of the owner, and may bear, as well, any other information the Party to the conflict may wish to add concerning persons belonging to its armed forces. As far as possible the card shall measure 6.5 x 10 cm. and shall be issued in duplicate. The identity card shall be shown by the prisoner of war upon demand, but may in no case be taken away from him.

No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

Prisoners of war who, owing to their physical or mental condition, are unable to state their identity, shall be handed over to the medical service. The identity of such prisoners shall be established by all possible means, subject to the provisions of the preceding paragraph.
The questioning of prisoners of war shall be carried out in a language which they understand.

Interrogation rules of engagement (IROE

Interrogation guidelines: The Pentagon this week released to the Senate Armed Services Committee interrogation rules of engagement given to soldiers and commanders on policies for interrogating war prisoners in Iraq. The committee is trying to determine if those techniques comply with the Geneva Conventions. An excerpt from the Geneva Conventions provides a comparison.

Interrogation rules of engagement (IROE)

Approved approaches for all detainees
Direct
Incentive
Incentive removal
Emotional love/hate
Fear up harsh
Fear up mild
Reduced fear
Pride & ego up
Futility
We know all
Establish your identity
Repetition
File & dossier
Rapid fire
Silence

Safeguards
* Techniques must be annotated in questioning strategy
* Approaches must always be humane and lawful
* Detainees will NEVER be touched in a malicious or unwanted manner
* Wounded or medically burdened detainees must be medically cleared prior to interrogation
* The Geneva Conventions apply within CJTF-7 (Combined Joint Task Force).

Require Commanding General's (CG) approval
(Requests must be submitted in writing)

* Change of scenery down
* Dietary Manip (monitored by med)
* Environmental manipulation
* Sleep adjustment (reverse sched)
* Isolation for longer than 30 days
* Presence of mil working dogs
* Sleep management (72 hrs max)
* Sensory deprivation (72 hrs max)
* Stress positions (no longer than 45 min)

Everyone is responsible for ensuring compliance to the IROE.
Violations must be reported immediately to the officer in charge (OIC).
Sources: Department of Defense

Secret world of US interrogation
Long history of tactics in overseas prisons is coming to light
washingtonpost.com By Dana Priest and Joe Stephens May  11, 2004

In Afghanistan, the CIA's secret US interrogation center in Kabul is known as "The Pit," named for its despairing conditions. In Iraq, the most important prisoners are kept in a huge hangar near the runway at Baghdad International Airport, say US government officials, counterterrorism experts and others. In Qatar, US forces have been ferrying some Iraqi prisoners to a remote jail on the gigantic US air base in the desert.

The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of US soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers — many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny — that the US military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

These prisons and jails are sometimes as small as shipping containers and as large as the sprawling Guantanamo Bay complex in Cuba. They are part of an elaborate CIA and military infrastructure whose purpose is to hold suspected terrorists or insurgents for interrogation and safe-keeping while avoiding US or international court systems, where proceedings and evidence against the accused would be aired in public. Some are even held by foreign governments at the informal request of the United States.

As insurgency grew, so did prison abuse"The number of people who have been detained in the Arab world for the sake of America is much more than in Guantanamo Bay. Really, thousands," said Najeeb Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who is representing the families of dozens of prisoners.

The largely hidden array includes three systems that only rarely overlap: the Pentagon-run network of prisons, jails and holding facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere; small and secret CIA-run facilities where top al Qaeda and other figures are kept; and interrogation rooms of foreign intelligence services — some with documented records of torture — to which the US government delivers or "renders" mid- or low-level terrorism suspects for questioning.

All told, more than 9,000 people are held by US authorities overseas, according to Pentagon figures and estimates by intelligence experts, the vast majority under military control. The detainees have no conventional legal rights: no access to a lawyer; no chance for an impartial hearing; and at least in the case of prisoners held in cellblock 1A at Abu Ghraib, no apparent guarantee of humane treatment accorded prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions or civilians in US jails.

Although some of those held by the military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo have had visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, some of the CIA's detainees have, in effect, disappeared, according to interviews with former and current national security officials and to the Army's report of abuses at Abu Ghraib.

The CIA's "ghost detainees," as they were called by members of the 800th MP Brigade, were routinely held by the soldier-guards at Abu Ghraib "without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention," the report says. These phantom captives were "moved around within the facility to hide them" from Red Cross teams, a tactic that was "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law."

CIA employees are under investigation by the Justice Department and the CIA inspector general's office in connection with the death of three captives in the past six months, two who died while under interrogation in Iraq, and a third who was being questioned by a CIA contract interrogator in Afghanistan. A CIA spokesman said the hiding of detainees was inappropriate. He declined to comment further.
None of the arrangements that permit US personnel to kidnap, transport, interrogate and hold foreigners are ad hoc or unauthorized, including the so-called renditions.

"People tend to regard it as an extra-judicial kidnapping; it's not," former CIA officer Peter Probst said. "There is a long history of this. It has been done for decades. It's absolutely legal."

In fact, every aspect of this new universe — including maintenance of covert airlines to fly prisoners from place to place, interrogation rules and the legal justification for holding foreigners without due process afforded most US citizens — has been developed by military or CIA lawyers, vetted by Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and, depending on the particular issue, approved by White House General Counsel's Office or the president himself.

In some cases, such as determining whether a US citizen should be designated an enemy combatant who can be held without charges, the president makes the final decision, said Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to the president, in a Feb. 24 speech to the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Law and National Security.

Critics of this kind of detention and treatment, Gonzales said, "assumed that there was little or no analysis — legal or otherwise — behind the decision to detain a particular person as enemy combatant."

On the contrary, the administration has applied the law of war, he said. "Under these rules, captured enemy combatants, whether soldiers or saboteurs, may be detained for the duration of hostilities."

Because most of the directives and guidelines on these issues are classified, former and current military and intelligence officials who described them to The Washington Post would do so only on the condition that they not be named.

Along with other CIA and military efforts to disrupt terrorist plots and break up al Qaeda's financial networks, administration officials argue that the interrogations are a key component of their global counterterrorism strategy and counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. As the CIA's deputy director, John McLaughlin, recently told the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks: "The country, with all its capabilities, is now much more orchestrated into an offensive mix that is relentless."

Military jails and prisons

Abu Ghraib prison — where photographs were taken that have enraged the Arab world and rocked US political and military leadership — held 6,000 to 7,000 detainees at the time of the documented abuse. Today, it and other sites in Iraq hold more than 8,000 prisoners, US and coalition officials said. They range from those believed to have played key roles in the insurgency to some who are held on suspicion of petty crimes.

Until the current scandal cast some hazy light, little has been publicly known about the Iraqi detention sites, their locations and who was being held there. That has been a source of continuing frustration for international monitoring groups such as New York-based Human Rights Watch, which has repeatedly sought to visit the facilities. Even the military's investigative report on abuses at Abu Ghraib remains classified, despite having become public through leaks.

Far better known has been the Defense Department's facility at Guantanamo Bay. The open-air camps there house about 600 detainees, flown in from around the world over the past two years. Secrecy there remains tight, with detainees and most of the facilities off-limits to visitors.

The US Supreme Court is deciding whether detainees held there, whom the Pentagon has declared "enemy combatants" in the war against terrorism, should have access to US courts.

Last week, the US military acknowledged that two Guantanamo Bay guards had been disciplined in connection with use of excessive force against detainees. And US defense officials confirmed the existence of a list of approved interrogation techniques, dating to April 2003, that included reversing sleep patterns, exposing prisoners to hot and cold, and "sensory assault," including use of bright lights and loud music.

The treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan has received less public attention.

The US military holds 300 or so people at Bagram, north of the capital of Kabul, and in Kandahar, Jalalabad and Asadabad. Human Rights Watch estimates that at least 700 people had been released from those sites, most of them held a few weeks or less. Special Forces units also have holding centers at their firebases, including at Gardez and Khost.

In December 2002, two Afghans died in US custody in Afghanistan. The US military classified both as homicides. Another Afghan died in June 2003 at a detention site near Asadabad.

"Afghans detained at Bagram airbase in 2002 have described being held in detention for weeks, continuously shackled, intentionally kept awake for extended periods of time, and forced to kneel or stand in painful positions for extended periods," according to a report in March by Human Rights Watch. "Some say they were kicked and beaten when arrested, or later as part of efforts to keep them awake. Some say they were doused with freezing water in the winter."

CIA detention

Before the US military was imprisoning and interrogating people in Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA was scooping up suspected al Qaeda leaders in such far-off places as Pakistan, Yemen and Sudan. Today, the CIA probably holds two to three dozen captives around the world, according to knowledgeable current and former officials. Among them are al Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh in Pakistan and Abu Zubaida. The CIA is also in charge of interrogating Saddam Hussein, who is believed to be in Baghdad.
The location of CIA interrogation centers is so sensitive that even the four leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who are briefed on all covert operations, do not know them, congressional sources said. These members are given periodic reports about the captives, but several members said they do not receive information about conditions under which prisoners are held, and members have not insisted on this information. The CIA has told Congress that it does not engage in torture as a tactic of interrogation.

"There's a black hole on certain information such as location, condition under which they are held," said one congressional official who asked not to be named. "They are told it's too sensitive."

In Afghanistan, the CIA used to conduct some interrogations in a cluster of metal shipping containers on Bagram air base protected by three layers of concertina wire. It is unclear whether that center is still open, but the CIA's main interrogation center now appears to be in Kabul, at a location nicknamed "The Pit" by agency and Special Forces operators.

"Prisoner abuse is nothing new," said one military officer who has been working closely with CIA interrogators in Afghanistan. A dozen former and current national security officials interviewed by The Washington Post in 2002, including several who had witnessed interrogations, defended the use of stressful interrogation tactics and the use of violence against detainees as just and necessary.

The CIA general counsel's office developed a new set of interrogation rules of engagement in after the Sept. 11 attacks. It was vetted by the Justice Department and approved by the National Security Council's general counsel, according to US intelligence officials and other US officials familiar with the process. "There are very specific guidelines that are thoroughly vetted," said one US official who helps oversee the process. "Everyone is on board. It's legal."

The rules call for field operators to seek approval from Washington to use "enhanced measures," methods that could cause temporary physical or mental pain.

US intelligence officials say the CIA, contrary to the glamorized view from movies and novels, had no real interrogation specialists on hand to deal with the number of valuable suspects it captured after Sept. 11. The agency relied on analysts, psychologists and profilers. "Two and a half years later," one CIA veteran said, "we have put together a very professional, controlled, deliberate and legally rationalized approach to dealing with the Abu Zubaidas of the world."

US intelligence officials say their strongest suit is not harsh interrogation techniques, but time and patience.

'Renditions'

Much larger than the group of prisoners held by the CIA are those who have been captured and transported around the world by the CIA and other agencies of the US government for interrogation by foreign intelligence services. This transnational transfer of people is a key tactic in US counterterrorism operations on five continents, one that often raises the ire of foreign publics when individual cases come to light.

For example, on Jan. 17, 2000, a few hours before Bosnia's Human Rights Chamber was to order the release of five Algerians and a Yemeni for lack of evidence, Bosnian police handed them over to US authorities who flew them to Guantanamo Bay.

The Bosnian government, faced with public outcry, said it would compensate the families of the men, who were suspected of having made threats to the US and British embassies in Bosnia.

The same month, in Indonesia, Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, suspected of helping Richard C. Reid, the Briton charged with trying to detonate explosives in his shoe on an American Airlines flight, was detained by Indonesian intelligence agents based on information the CIA provided them. On Jan. 11, without a court hearing or a lawyer, he was hustled aboard an unmarked U.S.-registered Gulfstream V jet parked at a military airport in Jakarta and flown to Egypt.

It was no coincidence Madni ended up in Egypt. Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are well-known destinations for suspected terrorists.

"A lot of people they [the US] are taking to Jordan, third-country nationals," a senior Saudi official said. "They can do anything they want with them, and the US can say, 'We don't have them.' "

In the past year, an unusual country joined that list of destinations: Syria.

Last year US immigration authorities, with the approval of then-Acting Attorney General Larry Thompson, authorized the expedited removal of Maher Arar to Syria, a country the US government has long condemned as a chronic human-rights abuser. Maher, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, was detained at JFK International Airport in New York as he was transferring to the final leg of his flight home to Canada.

US authorities say Arar has links to al Qaeda. Not wanting to return him to Canada for fear he would not be adequately followed, immigration officials took him, in chains and shackles, to a New Jersey airfield, where he was "placed on a small private jet, and flown to Washington DC," according to a lawsuit filed recently against the US government. He was flown to Jordan, interrogated and beaten by Jordanian authorities who then turned him over to Syria, according to the lawsuit.

Arar said that for the 10 months he was in prison, he was beaten, tortured and kept in a shallow grave. After much pressure from the Canadian government and human rights activists, he was freed and has returned to Canada.

CIA Director George J. Tenet, testifying earlier this year before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, said the agency participated in more than 70 renditions in the years before the attacks. In 1999 and 2000 alone, congressional testimony shows, the CIA and FBI participated in two dozen renditions.

Christopher Kojm, a former State Department intelligence official and a staff member of the commission, explained the rendition procedure at a recent hearing: "If a terrorist suspect is outside of the United States, the CIA helps to catch and send him to the United States or a third country," he testified. "Though the FBI is often part of the process, the CIA is usually the main player, building and defining the relationships with the foreign government intelligence agencies and internal security services."

The Saudis currently are detaining and interrogating about 800 terrorism suspects, said a senior Saudi official. Their fate is largely controlled by Saudi-based joint intelligence task forces, whose members include officers from the CIA, FBI and other US law-enforcement agencies.

The Saudi official said his country does not participate in renditions and today holds no more than one or two people at the request of the United States. Yet much can hinge on terminology.

In some interrogations, for example, specialists from the United States and Saudi Arabia develop questions and an interrogation strategy before questioning begins, according to one person knowledgeable about the process. During interrogation, US task force members watch through a two-way mirror, he said.

"Technically, the questioning is done by a Saudi citizen. But, for all practical purposes, it is done live," he said. The United States and Saudis "are not 'cooperating' anymore; we're doing it together."

He said the CIA sometimes prefers Saudi interrogation sites and other places in the Arab world because their interrogators speak a detainee's language and can exploit his religion and customs.

"As hard as it is to believe, you can't physically abuse prisoners in Saudi Arabia," the Saudi official said. "You can't beat them; you can't electrocute them."

Instead, he said, the Saudis bring radical imams to the sessions to build a rapport with detainees, who are later passed on to more moderate imams. Working in tandem with relatives of the detainees, the clerics try to convince the subjects over days or weeks that terrorism violates tenets of the Koran and could bar them from heaven.

"According to our guys, almost all of them turn," the Saudi official said. "It's like deprogramming them. There is absolutely no need to put them through stress. It's more of a therapy."

The Saudis don't want or need to be directed by American intelligence specialists, who have difficulty understanding Arab culture and tribal relations, he said. "We know where they grew up," he said of the detainees. "We know their families. We know the furniture in their home."


 © 2004 The Washington Post Company | Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report. -- Top

Witness Faults Actions of Prison Interrogators
An intelligence member at a hearing in Iraq says some went too far to try to get information.
By Richard A. Serrano and Patrick J. McDonnell Los AngelesTimes May 13, 2004

WASHINGTON — A member of the military intelligence battalion operating at the Abu Ghraib prison testified at a secret hearing in Baghdad this month that interrogators at the prison sometimes went too far in trying to extract information from detainees.

It was the first known instance of a member of an intelligence unit testifying about misconduct by interrogators at the notorious prison outside Baghdad that is at the center of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal involving military prison guards.

In testimony described in military documents obtained by The Times, Sgt. Samuel Jefferson Provance III said a military interrogator he identified as Spc. Armin John Cruz often played rough with detainees when they were taken to special booths to be interviewed.

"Spc. Cruz was known to bang on the table, yell, scream and maybe assaulted detainees during interrogations in the booth," Provance testified. "This was not to be discussed. It was kept 'hush-hush' by the individual interrogators." It was unclear whether Cruz was disciplined.

In the same documents, which were recorded at a hearing into the conduct of one of the seven military police under investigation for abuses at Abu Ghraib, the Army's lead investigator said the guards were a rogue band "just having some fun with the prisoners" and not carrying out orders to "soften up" detainees for interrogation.

The investigator said his team had found "absolutely no evidence" that the abuses had been authorized by officers in the Army chain of command.

The new information came as officials in Baghdad announced that two more of the seven Abu Ghraib guards would stand trial at courts-martial. One of them, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, was accused of taking some of the photographs of mistreatment that have drawn outrage worldwide.

He also was charged with directing prisoners to commit sexual acts, which were photographed, documents outlining the charges said.
And Sgt. Javal S. Davis was charged with taking part in an incident in which a group of detainees was forced into a pile on the prison floor and then physically assaulted by guards.

Frederick and Davis became the second and third military policemen to face courts-martial in connection with the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. The first soldier charged, Spc. Jeremy Sivits, could be sentenced to a maximum of one year in jail if convicted.

Frederick and Davis may face much heavier sentences in so-called general court-martial proceedings. Sivits' court-martial is scheduled to begin May 19 in Baghdad. No date was given for proceedings involving Frederick and Davis.

Several of the military police have told investigators that they were directed by military intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib to soften up detainees before they were scheduled to be questioned by military and civilian interrogators. Some lawmakers and military brass have questioned whether the practice may have led directly to some of the abuses.

Military officials emphasized that the investigation of the Abu Ghraib incidents were continuing, along with investigations of what may be dozens of other instances of prisoner abuse there and elsewhere in Iraq. Additional charges were likely to be filed, officials indicated.
And, although officers in the chain of command may not have known about the abuses, military investigators have said it was their responsibility to know what was going on.

At the closed military hearing in Baghdad this month, Sgt. Provance described an incident in which Spc. Luciana Spencer, another military interrogator, "made a detainee walk to his cell naked in front of other detainees." He said she was later relieved from her assignment.
Provance also said that Spc. Hanna Slagel told him that guards "made [male detainees] wear women's panties, and if they cooperated, some would get an extra blanket."

He said she also told him that because two detainees were accused of raping a child, the guards "punished them by making them get into all sorts of sexual positions."

Provance said intelligence officers were guilty of at least not reporting cases of abuse.

He added that a colleague from a Nevada National Guard unit, whom he described as an older female soldier, told him of "some stuff that she saw going on." He said she documented the abuse, but that her chain of command admonished her for reporting it.

"She was afraid of the chain of command," Provance said.

At the same hearing on the seven Abu Ghraib guards, Special Agent Tyler Pieron of the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, a key detective in the growing scandal, identified ringleaders as Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr. and Frederick and Davis.

He said the three, along with four others, abused prisoners in the middle of the night "after the chain-of-command shifts had gone home." They were caught only after another guard saw photographs of the abuse and turned them in because he "wanted the abuse to stop," Pieron is quoted in the court-martial documents as saying.

The hearing was held May 1 into charges against Spc. Megan M. Ambuhl, one of seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company who have been implicated in the prison incidents. She has been accused of four offenses: conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment of prisoners, and indecent acts.

But on May 8, the hearing officer in her case recommended that the latter two charges be dismissed. Maj. Charles W. Ransome said he found several weaknesses in the case against her. He ruled that, while Ambuhl was "present" when naked detainees were stacked into a pyramid and when they were forced to masturbate, she had not "carried out any act of cruelty or maltreatment" against them.

But Ransome invited military prosecutors to provide fresh evidence if they wanted to keep all four charges intact against Ambuhl for a future court-martial.

Ambuhl and the six others who have been charged have pleaded not guilty.

Pieron, the army criminal investigator, said the seven guards operated on their own without any of their superiors aware that they were abusing detainees.

Many of the abused prisoners were never supposed to have been interrogated, Pieron said. Rather, he said, the guards were upset because the prisoners had been in a fight. "This appeared to me to be just retaliation against the rioters," Pieron said.

He added, "Taking pictures of sexual positions, the assaults, and things along that nature were done simply because they could. It all happened after hours.

"These individuals wanted to do this for fun," he said.

Pieron said some guards had complained to Frederick about prisoner mistreatment. Apparently, Pieron added, when those complaints to him were made, "it did not go anywhere."

Pieron also said Davis was interviewed twice by investigators and that he "lied in his first statement, and told the truth in his second statement, admitting to stepping, stomping, and jumping on the detainees."

Pieron said his unit interviewed all of the military interrogators and found no proof that they encouraged the abuse.Dan Senor, chief spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, told Iraqi journalists Wednesday: "We share your outrage. What occurred at Abu Ghraib offends the sensibilities of all Americans. It offends the sensibilities of all Iraqis."

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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

U.S. Officials Defend Interrogation Tactics
Rumsfeld and others tell a Senate panel that the approved techniques
in questioning Iraqi prisoners conform to the Geneva Convention.
By Esther Schrader and Greg Miller Los Angeles Times | May 13, 2004

WASHINGTON — Top U.S. defense officials said Wednesday that military interrogation techniques approved for use in Iraq, such as depriving detainees of sleep, having military dogs present and placing prisoners in humiliating poses did not violate international law.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told a Senate committee that the misconduct shown in photos and videos from the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison was inhumane and would be punished. However, he said, other interrogation procedures involving "physical and psychological manipulation" are permissible.

The testimony by Rumsfeld and others before the Senate defense appropriations subcommittee focused on what techniques the military had deemed appropriate in interrogating prisoners and how those related to the Geneva Convention. It came on a day when members of Congress viewed new videos and photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse.

Questions about the approved procedures come as lawmakers investigating the abuses reach into the Pentagon's chain of command to seek contributing factors. They have asked about the climate in which soldiers worked at Abu Ghraib, orders given by top commanders in Iraq and intelligence-gathering policies at the highest levels of the Defense Department. Many lawmakers blame an unchecked drive to gather usable intelligence for creating the conditions that led to some of the abuses.

Rumsfeld rejected that argument, saying that while the "abuses that took place are terrible, they're inhumane, they're inexcusable," they are not the result of Pentagon policies.

He told the committee that the Geneva Convention applied to all prisoners held in Iraq, but not to those at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, whom he deemed "terrorists" and therefore not subject to international norms.

Rumsfeld said Pentagon lawyers had decided that practices such as dietary changes and isolation for longer than 30 days complied with the Geneva Convention, the international rules on war. A list of U.S. interrogation practices was released this week by the Pentagon.

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) told Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the techniques approved by the Pentagon "go far beyond the standard which says there will be no physical or mental torture nor any other form of coercion." Durbin pointed to international rules that prohibited the use of "unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind."
Myers replied that the practices were legal. "Every time we have an interrogation, we have an interrogation plan," he told senators. "Those are appropriate. And that's what we're told by legal authorities and by anybody that believes in humane behavior."

Noting that an American soldier was missing in Iraq, Durbin said: "I don't believe what you have issued is consistent with the Geneva Convention. And I think now, more than ever, in light of what happened in that prison, in light of the fact that an American serviceman is being held, we should be clear and unequivocal."

The Geneva Convention, a series of international agreements on war adopted in 1949, protects civilians in occupied territories as well as prisoners of war.

The list of interrogation techniques approved by the Pentagon showed that U.S. military leaders believed that the Convention and international law provided wide latitude to employ an array of aggressive methods to get prisoners to talk, a review of the procedures and interviews with interrogators show.

The so-called "Interrogation Rules of Engagement" that were posted at the Abu Ghraib prison and other facilities in Iraq required interrogators to obtain their commanders' approval before using the more severe methods. The rules stipulated that detainees "NEVER be touched in a malicious or unwanted manner," and interrogators stressed that they had nothing to do with the sadistic abuses meted out by MPs working the night shift at one of Abu Ghraib's high-security cell blocks.

The sheet listing the rules of engagement is divided into two sections. Approaches that can be used without prior approval include "incentive," in which some reward is dangled for cooperation and "fear up harsh," which involves trying to frighten the prisoner with table-pounding outbursts.

Methods that require approval include the use of humiliating poses, called "stress positions"; "presence of mil working dogs"; isolation for longer than 30 days; and the manipulation of prisoners' diets.

"Sensory deprivation" refers to the use of hoods on prisoners to keep them disoriented, interrogators said. "Environmental manipulation" could mean anything from providing extra blankets to subjecting prisoners to light or dark environments to confuse them.

In interviews with The Times, interrogators who had worked at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan described how the guidelines were implemented.

One interrogator at Abu Ghraib said even the settings where interrogations took place were changed to reward or punish prisoners. "We would move them to a nice place, a couch, with end tables and a lamp" if they were offering good information, the interrogator said. If cooperation waned, they might be questioned in dirty tents.

Several interrogators said that direct approaches — in which interrogators asked straightforward questions and were honest about detainees' circumstances — were generally most effective. But so-called high-value detainees often have been trained to resist.

"The harder cases were more susceptible to harder approaches — adjusted sleep schedules, sleep deprivation," said one U.S. Army interrogator who served at the Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan. "Guys who are higher up are usually fairly intelligent and they're going to be able to play mind games with you."

Prisoners were sometimes kept awake or forced to wear hoods for up to three days, the interrogators said. They said they would seek to unnerve prisoners with snarling dogs as they arrived at facilities, and placed them in cells that were blacked out or bombarded with light — all in an effort to preserve the "shock of capture" and heighten detainees' anxieties.

Several interrogators who spoke with The Times said they worried that the controversy surrounding Abu Ghraib would lead to restrictions that would inhibit their ability to gather intelligence.

"There are few tools interrogators have to use," said a Bagram interrogator. "If they're taken away to the point that interrogators can only use them in extreme circumstances, how are we ever to get the information that we're required to get."

The interrogator added that his unit "had information come out almost on a daily basis that led to another capture or some kind of terrorist alert somewhere else in the world."

Experts said that at least some of the Pentagon's approved interrogation rules may fall into murky legal areas.

"It appears they were written to avoid torture, but without regard to the peril of violating prohibitions against cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

"If you bring working dogs to intimidate someone, that crosses the line. But something like sleep deprivation, it obviously depends on how severely it's done."

Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, said many of the harsher techniques were "clearly inconsistent" with international rules.
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Military Lawyers Sought Outside Help on Interrogation Rules
By Ken Silverstein Los Angeles Times | May 13, 2004

WASHINGTON -- A group of senior military lawyers were so concerned about changes in the rules designed to safeguard prisoners during interrogation that they sought help outside the Defense Department, according to a New York lawyer who headed a recent study of how prisoners have been treated in the war on terrorism.

The military lawyers were part of the Army Judge Advocate General's office, which in the past has played a role in ensuring that interrogators did not violate prisoners' rights.

"They were extremely upset. They said they were being shut out of the process, and that the civilian political lawyers, not the military lawyers, were writing these new rules of engagement," said Scott Horton, who was chairman of the New York City Bar Association committee that filed its report this month on the interrogation of detainees by the United States.

The report was released just days before the first photos were broadcast showing naked Iraqi detainees being abused at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

The Pentagon's "interrogation rules of engagement" became a focus of controversy in the Senate this week because they permitted the use of techniques such as "stress positions" and "sensory deprivation" and the presence of military dogs.

Some international law experts, as well as some Senate Democrats, said the loosened rules violated the Geneva Convention, which forbids soldiers from using physical force of any sort to obtain information from detainees.

But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the rules had been examined and approved by lawyers for the administration.
On Tuesday, Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, said Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, "issued any number of statements and directives to the effect that detainees in Iraq, civilian or military, were to be treated under the provisions of the Geneva Convention."

Cambone said he had been aware of Feith's efforts on the rules "and endorsed it, of course."

The military lawyers complained that the Pentagon was creating "an atmosphere of legal ambiguity," Horton said. "What's happened is not an accident. It is exactly what they were warning about a year ago," he said.

None of the military lawyers would agree to speak publicly, he said, because to do so would threaten their careers.

All sides agree that the abusive treatment of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib violates international law and is far out of bounds. They disagree, however, on whether the Bush administration's legal policy toward interrogating prisoners caused or contributed to the abuses.

Administration officials say that a small group of reservists committed crimes by abusing Iraqis, and that they will be swiftly punished for their actions.

Critics, including Horton, say the administration itself bears part of the blame for having approved more aggressive interrogation techniques.

The Geneva Convention of 1949 extended protections to civilians in occupied territories as well as prisoners of war. The international standards came in response to the brutal treatment of civilians in Asia by the Japanese military and the German abuses of civilians in occupied Europe.

The fourth segment of the Convention says former fighters and detained civilians must be treated humanely.

"Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment shall remain prohibited at any time," it says.
Also forbidden is the use of force to obtain information. "No physical or mental coercion shall be exercised against protected persons, in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties," says Article 31 of the 1949 treaty.

The United States has been the occupying power in Iraq since American troops took control in Baghdad last April. By last fall, when violent attacks against U.S. troops were increasing, American commanders sought to learn who was behind the insurgency. And they stepped up efforts to question the thousands of Iraqis who were being held at Abu Ghraib.

The Pentagon's interrogation rules say the Geneva Convention must be followed, and that "approaches [to detainees] must always be humane and lawful. ... Detainees will NEVER be touched in a malicious or unwanted manner."

But they also permit, with the commander's approval, the use of "sleep management," military dogs and "stress positions no longer than 45 minutes."

"The most problematic in my opinion is the presence of military dogs," said University of Houston law professor Jordan Paust, a former Army lawyer. "Even if the dogs are muzzled, they are there to strike terror or intense fear. That is intimidation," he said.

Sidney Rosdeitcher, a New York lawyer who also worked on the interrogation study, said he was surprised the Pentagon had authorized sleep deprivation and the use of painful stress positions.

"That is plainly coercive. If you are deprived of sleep for 72 hours and questioned with a military dog there, that is degrading and coercive treatment," he said.

"We are appalled that the secretary of Defense said these rules were approved by the lawyers."

Horton said the JAG lawyers told him that Feith pressed for the loosening of the interrogation rules and won approval for them from the administration's civilian lawyers earlier in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism.

Horton said that the administration was following rules that had been approved for suspected Taliban and al-Qaida detainees at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who are considered "enemy combatants," not prisoners of war. A report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba on the abuse at Abu Ghraib referred to the intention of Lt. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who formerly commanded the Guantanamo detention facility, to "Gitmo-ize" the prisons in Iraq when he took command there.

But the situation in Iraq is different and the higher Geneva standards apply, he said.

"It's one thing when violations occur in the heat of battle, the fog of war. It's something else when violations of Geneva occur when it is a deliberate policy cast at the highest levels of the Pentagon -- and I think it's at the highest levels of the administration," Horton said.
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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

War historian Philip Knightley (The First Casualty) writes, in May 2003: The images released this week on an Islamic website of the beheading of American Nick Berg by Iraqi militants and leaked pictures of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners are a "landmark in the whole history of the way wars are covered", he said.

For Iraqi women, Abu Ghraib's taint
Photos - even if fake - spark rumors that hit family honor
By Annia Ciezadlo | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor | May 28, 2004

BAGHDAD – The pictures would horrify anyone: hooded US soldiers raping and torturing naked Iraqi women at gunpoint. But for Farah al-Azzawi, these blurry photos burn with agony and shame.

Ms. Azzawi is part of a secret sisterhood: her mother is one of three women inside Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison where US soldiers took smiling snapshots of themselves sadistically humiliating Iraqis.

That's why some anonymous ill-wisher slipped a newspaper with the rape photos on the front page under her front door.

The pictures in the paper are fakes, bad copies lifted from a porn website and now ricocheting around the Internet. But in Iraq, where the photos circulate on floppy discs and CDs and splash across newspapers and TV screens, most people believe them.

"I know they're not real, but people won't believe it," says Azzawi, a pretty 20-year-old, holding up the paper with a shaking hand. "Who's going to marry their daughters after they see a thing like that?"

It's not just the shame that makes Azzawi's hands shake with rage. What makes the counterfeit photos so searing, for her, is the fear that they might hold some truth. Among the 1,800 or so pictures taken by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, there are others, viewed by Congress but not released to the public, of at least one Iraqi woman forced to bare her breasts. And a US military investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, cited at least one case of a military police guard "having sex with" a female prisoner.

A spokesman denies that any of the five women now in coalition custody - three at Abu Ghraib, two more at other locations - have been abused. "All of these women being detained have been treated humanely," says Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the general in charge of detention operations. "None of their families need to be concerned that their dignity has been tarnished during their detention."

But in Iraq, where rumors alone can destroy a woman's reputation, the consequences of US detention are much more severe for women than for men. In a way, it scarcely matters if Azzawi's mother was raped or not: If she denies being raped, nobody will believe her, because Iraqi women rarely admit to being raped, a charge that can ruin a woman's life.

Now that there are real pictures of US troops sexually humiliating Iraqi women, reality and rumors have tangled inseparably. "With the pictures and the CDs, it becomes almost irrelevant if they're raped or not," says Manal Omar, the Iraq coordinator of Women for Women, which helps women in former war zones. "Even before the torture, the rumor was out that they were raping women in the prison. With or without the pictures from the porn site, the real pictures made people believe that. It made that rumor fact."

Rumors of prison rape have been eddying for months. They started with a letter, allegedly smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a female prisoner. Passed from one person to another, the letter and the photos are being used by anti-US clerics and militants to stir up outrage against the occupation.

"Please, bomb us with bombs, and even with nuclear weapons, because we are all pregnant by American soldiers," reads one version of the letter. "Every day they walk us naked in front of soldiers and other prisoners. We want you to know that if you have a daughter in here, or a mother, or a sister, that she has been raped and is pregnant by these American soldiers."

The letter might be fabricated - different versions of it crop up, and no one has been able to find the girl who wrote it. But to most Iraqis, it doesn't really matter: the real photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib gave all rumors, both true and false, instant credibility.

Even before the scandal at Abu Ghraib, many Iraqis viewed imprisonment of women as tantamount to rape. "In our culture, if a woman has been to prison, it's as though she has been violated," says Yanar Mohammed, a woman's rights activist and editor of the newspaper Equality. "It is assumed that men have put their hands on her, that she has been touched in improper ways."

In Iraq, even a whisper of rape is enough to dishonor a woman - and her family. Sometimes families will even kill women who have been raped to "wash" the stain from the family name.

That may be what happened to one girl, rumored to have been pregnant when she was released. "Her father and brother wanted to kill her," says Huda al-Nuaimi, a professor at Baghdad University who is interviewing female prisoners as a volunteer for Amnesty International. "The sheikh of the mosque and the neighbors stopped them, because she was raped, and it wasn't her fault."

But when Dr. Nuaimi went to visit the girl, her family had moved away. The neighbors told her they didn't know where they went - unusual in Aadhimiyah, the girl's tight-knit Baghdad neighborhood. "I wonder whether this girl is still alive," says Ms. Nuaimi, a professor who wears a tiny silver outline of Iraq around her neck. "I think, given this local custom, it would be very difficult for her to stay alive."

Azzawi hasn't seen her mother since Dec. 24th, the day she was arrested with her sister, Azzawi's aunt. She goes to Abu Ghraib and spends hours standing in the dusty parking lot, hoping to be allowed to see her mother. But the guards on duty, she says, tell her, "there are no women here."
In fact, there are three women at Abu Ghraib. Kept separately from the men, with female guards, the women are inside cellblock 1A, the infamous ward where most of the military pictures were taken. "They are living together," says Colonel Johnson, "separated from the male detainees, for their own well being and to ensure their privacy is fully respected."

Declining to discuss specific cases, Johnson could not confirm whether Azzawi's mother and aunt were among those three women. But Azzawi got a letter two months ago from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors prison conditions, telling her that her mother was being held at Abu Ghraib. Like most families of detainees, she still doesn't know whether her mother has been charged with any crime.

On May 14, Azzawi was allowed to visit her uncle, also being held at Abu Ghraib. She took her cousin Raghada Qusay, a 14-year-old with large, sad eyes. Raghada's mother - sister of Azzawi's mother - is in Abu Ghraib, too.

The girls were horrified to see that their uncle's nose had been broken. He told them it didn't matter. "What's important are my sisters," he told them tearfully through a glass window. "They were humiliated. I'm desperate."

They listened in horror as he told them what he said he'd seen: Raghada's mother forced to take off her head scarf. "My mother wears a hijab, and my uncle told us they were dragging her by her hair," says Raghada, her eyes red from crying.

In a torrent of words, she speaks of other tortures: her mother forced to eat from a dirty toilet. Urinated on. As the stories rush out, it's hard to tell what she heard from her uncle and what is prison scuttlebutt.

As Raghada speaks, her 21-year-old sister Hiba breaks in and demands that she stop. Bursting into tears, Hiba runs from the room."I'm not afraid any more," says Azzawi, angrily. "I'll keep talking, even if they take me!"

These days, the girls spend their time taking care of Raghada's 3-year-old sister, and crying over the phone with other girls whose mothers are in jail. They visited another girl they knew, who had just been released from prison. She couldn't speak; they are sure she was raped.

"It's been five months," says Hiba, who has returned. "We haven't seen our mothers for five months. Azzawi is sure they are being tortured. "One day, they'll be released," she says grimly, "and they'll tell everything."

Copyright © 2004 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

Lull in Iraq Prison Probe Won't Last, Senator Says
Republican Warner has plans for a series of hearings on the abuse scandal.
He promises politics won't stop him, even in an election year.
By John Hendren Los Angeles Times Staff Writer July 6, 2004

WASHINGTON — Just a few weeks ago, Congress was pushing hard to get to the bottom of the prison abuse scandal in Iraq. Top military officials and witnesses were being hauled up to Capitol Hill, where senators took the rare step of swearing them in amid a lineup that a senior Pentagon official said "made them look like criminals."

Now, with a delayed military investigation eating into the calendar, momentum has distinctly slowed at a time when the political calendar — with two major party conventions and a fall election — is growing more complicated.

The prospect of bombshells and damaging investigative reports coming out during the height of the political campaign or around the conventions is a concern for both the Bush administration and the Republicans who control both houses of Congress. But complicating it all is the contentious case of documents allegedly missing from an investigative report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba on abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

If one Republican senator has his way, the lull in the prison investigation won't last.

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been holding off on further grilling of Pentagon managers and field generals until his committee gets a report overseen by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay on the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American troops.

But Capitol Hill sources say Warner doesn't plan to wait much longer. Over the next three weeks, he is expected to hold a series of hearings — just before the Democratic and Republican conventions kick off the political season and the usual August congressional recess.

If the Fay report — delayed perhaps until August while a higher-ranking general appointed to finish it has a chance to complete his work — comes out in the heat of a political campaign, the hearings will go on despite the potential impact on the presidential election campaign, Warner said in a brief interview.

"I will not let politics deter me," he said.

It remains uncertain whether Warner's will alone can keep the detainee abuse scandal in the spotlight during the height of a close presidential election. But with the scandal marking a defining issue of his tenure as chairman and with the backing of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Warner has expressed his determination to forge ahead.

Democrats want to go beyond committee hearings, creating either an independent commission to investigate detainee abuse or a special board of inquiry with subpoena powers, the latter of which could act during the fall campaign season.

Warner warned Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a letter last month that he planned to call as many as a dozen administration and military officials to testify, in what Senate sources said then would be as many as seven hearings. Among those on alert for a possible appearance, Warner wrote: L. Paul Bremer III, until recently the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith; Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes Jr.; Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, director of intelligence for U.S. operations in Iraq; and Fay.

Among the other topics considered likely to come up is a Sept. 14 memo signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the top ground commander in Iraq, authorizing as many as 30 interrogation tactics for detainees at Abu Ghraib — some later rescinded — that included the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners.

Feith, a conservative lightning rod, is likely to face scrutiny about his role as a result of a recently released memo on interrogation techniques by Rumsfeld. In the memo, Rumsfeld wrote to Haynes that he had discussed the techniques with Feith.

Before the release of the memo, senators were unsure they had cause to call Feith to testify.

"Now we do have a reason, because he was involved in the policy," a Senate source said on condition of anonymity.

Pentagon officials insisted that they had not delayed the investigations. Asked about a timetable for the Fay report, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita told reporters last week that it depended on the scope of work.
"The timetable is: When it's complete, we'll provide it," Di Rita said.

Relations have soured between the Pentagon and senators who insist that they have been denied key documents in the investigation promised since May.

Among the missing documents, according to a Senate source, are two of 12 enclosures attached to a transcript of an interview of Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade at Abu Ghraib. One of them, Enclosure 9, addresses how the unit handled reports by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The other, Enclosure 11, outlines at least three investigations for possible nonjudicial punishment after the alleged abuse of two girls, ages 13 and 14, taken to the prison in the middle of the night by CIA agents, the Senate source said.

However, Pentagon managers insist there are no missing documents. They said there was a perception that documents were missing because some items were not provided to the committee when they were publicly accessible — such as the Army's field manual, later provided on a computer disk at the committee's request, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

References to some annexes in the main report were simply mislabeled, making it look as if they weren't there, he added.

To prove the Pentagon's point, defense officials went so far as to have Lt. Col. Michael Kluka, special assistant to the staff judge advocate, certify in a letter that the Pentagon had sent a complete copy of the master disk of the Taguba report, including all 106 annexes.

"We've provided them everything we had," Whitman said. "They've always had them."

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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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Disgraced by Silence
When will the president respond to the cascading allegations of prisoner abuse by the military?
Editorial -- Los Angeles Times December 19, 2004

A Marine guard in Iraq sprayed an alcohol-based liquid on a detainee, struck a match and ignited the prisoner, burning and blistering the man's hands. Another Marine held wires from an electric transformer to a detainee's shoulders, so that the man "danced as he was shocked," according to military documents made public this month.

In photographs now under investigation, Navy SEALs appeared to sit on a hooded and handcuffed Iraqi prisoner and to point a gun at another, bleeding detainee. Army troops repeatedly beat Afghan prisoners in their custody, ripped off their toenails, shocked them and dunked them in cold water, according to recent reports from a U.N. group. Most incidents occurred in 2002 and 2003.

The cascading allegations of prisoner abuse, of which these are but a few examples, long ago demolished the president's claim that only a few bad apples were responsible. So did reports that soldiers and officers who complained to their superiors about this mistreatment were threatened with reprisals and even physical harm. Yet as reports of unexplained deaths, humiliations and depravity across the services multiply, President Bush has recently remained silent.

Soldiers on the battlefield deserve a fair amount of leeway for their conduct under the heat of fire, when adrenaline and the need to kill or be killed prompt people to do things they'd never consider under normal conditions. But many pictures continuing to come to light look a lot more like coldblooded sadism than acceptable combat actions. It's impossible to know what other abuse, past or present, might await discovery.

In May, soon after photographs from Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad became public, Bush said he was "sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi detainees … and their families." But "the cruelty of a few," he said a week later, "cannot diminish the honor and achievement" of the thousands who have served honorably in Iraq.

It is now clear that "the few" are in fact many. So many that either U.S. troops are not under their commanding officers' control or they are beating, burning and sodomizing suspects with the blessing — or worse, at the direction — of their commanders and Washington policymakers.

Either explanation is inexcusable, and as commander in chief, Bush has an obligation to say so.

The president should directly and forthrightly state what he neglected to say last spring: Torture and humiliation of prisoners disgraces every American; such conduct is always unacceptable; and any officer who learns of such behavior and, instead of stopping it, encourages or ignores it, will be court-martialed.
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“These are not allegations made by antiwar journalists. They are incidents reported within the confines of the United States government.”
Atrocities in Plain Sight
January 13, 2005 New York Times BOOK REVIEW By ANDREW SULLIVAN

THE ABU GHRAIB INVESTIGATIONS
The Official Report of the Independent Panel and Pentagon
on the Shocking Prisoner Abuse in Iraq.
Edited by Steven Strasser.
Illustrated. 175 pp. PublicAffairs. Paper, $14.

TORTURE AND TRUTH
America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror.
By Mark Danner.
Illustrated. 580 pp. New York Review Books. Paper, $19.95.


IN scandals, chronology can be everything. The facts you find out first, the images that are initially imprinted on your consciousness, the details that then follow: these make the difference between a culture-changing tipping point and a weatherable media flurry. With the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the photographs, which have become iconic, created the context and the meaning of what took place. We think we know the contours of that story: a few soldiers on the night shift violated established military rules and subjected prisoners to humiliating abuse and terror. Chaos in the line of command, an overstretched military, a bewildering insurgency: all contributed to incidents that were alien to the values of the United States and its military. The scandal was an aberration. It was appalling. Responsibility was taken. Reports were issued. Hearings continue.

But the photographs lied. They told us a shard of the truth. In retrospect, they deflected us away from what was really going on, and what is still going on. The problem is not a co-ordinated cover-up. Nor is it a lack of information. The official government and Red Cross reports on prisoner torture and abuse, compiled in two separate volumes, ''The Abu Ghraib Investigations,'' by a former Newsweek editor, Steven Strasser, and ''Torture and Terror,'' by a New York Review of Books contributor, Mark Danner, are almost numbingly exhaustive in their cataloging of specific mistakes, incidents and responsibilities. Danner's document-dump runs to almost 600 pages of print, the bulk of it in small type. The American Civil Liberties Union has also successfully engineered the release of what may eventually amount to hundreds of thousands of internal government documents detailing the events.

That tells you something important at the start. Whatever happened was exposed in a free society; the military itself began the first inquiries. You can now read, in these pages, previously secret memorandums from sources as high as the attorney general all the way down to prisoner testimony to the International Committee of the Red Cross. I confess to finding this transparency both comforting and chilling, like the photographs that kick-started the public's awareness of the affair. Comforting because only a country that is still free would allow such airing of blood-soaked laundry. Chilling because the crimes committed strike so deeply at the core of what a free country is supposed to mean. The scandal of Abu Ghraib is therefore a sign of both freedom's endurance in America and also, in certain dark corners, its demise.

The documents themselves tell the story. In this, Danner's book is by far the better of the two. He begins with passionate essays that originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, but very soon leaves the stage and lets the documents speak for themselves. His book contains the two reports Strasser publishes, but many more as well. If you read it in the order Danner provides, you can see exactly how this horror came about - and why it's still going on. As Danner observes, this is a scandal with almost everything in plain sight.

The critical enabling decision was the president's insistence that prisoners in the war on terror be deemed ''unlawful combatants'' rather than prisoners of war. The arguments are theoretically sound ones - members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not party to the Geneva Convention and their own conduct violates many of its basic demands. But even at the beginning, President Bush clearly feared the consequences of so broad an exemption for cruel and inhumane treatment. So he also insisted that although prisoners were not legally eligible for humane treatment, they should be granted it anyway. The message sent was: these prisoners are beneath decent treatment, but we should still provide it. That's a strangely nuanced signal to be giving the military during wartime.

You can see the same strange ambivalence in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's decision to approve expanded interrogation techniques in December 2002 for Guantánamo inmates - and then to revoke the order six weeks later. The documents show that the president was clearly warned of the dangers of the policy he decided upon - Colin Powell's January 2002 memo is almost heart-breakingly prescient and sane in this regard - but he pressed on anyway. Rumsfeld's own revocation of the order suggests his own moral qualms about what he had unleashed.
But Bush clearly leaned toward toughness. Here's the precise formulation he used: ''As a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.'' (My italics.)

Notice the qualifications. The president wants to stay not within the letter of the law, but within its broad principles, and in the last resort, ''military necessity'' can overrule all of it. According to his legal counsel at the time, Alberto R. Gonzales, the president's warmaking powers gave him ultimate constitutional authority to ignore any relevant laws in the conduct of the conflict. Sticking to the Geneva Convention was the exclusive prerogative of one man, George W. Bush; and he could, if he wished, make exceptions. As Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee argues in another memo: ''Any effort to apply Section 2340A in a manner that interferes with the president's direction of such core war matters as the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants thus would be unconstitutional.'' (Section 2340A refers to the United States law that incorporates the international Convention Against Torture.)

The president's underlings got the mixed message. Bybee analyzed the relevant statutes against torture to see exactly how far the military could go in mistreating prisoners without blatant illegality. His answer was surprisingly expansive. He argued that all the applicable statutes and treaty obligations can be read in such a way as to define torture very narrowly. Bybee asserted that the president was within his legal rights to permit his military surrogates to inflict ''cruel, inhuman or degrading'' treatment on prisoners without violating strictures against torture. For an act of abuse to be considered torture, the abuser must be inflicting pain ''of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure.'' If the abuser is doing this to get information and not merely for sadistic enjoyment, then ''even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions,'' he's not guilty of torture. Threatening to kill a prisoner is not torture; ''the threat must indicate that death is 'imminent.' '' Beating prisoners is not torture either. Bybee argues that a case of kicking an inmate in the stomach with military boots while the prisoner is in a kneeling position does not by itself rise to the level of torture.

Bybee even suggests that full-fledged torture of inmates might be legal because it could be construed as ''self-defense,'' on the grounds that ''the threat of an impending terrorist attack threatens the lives of hundreds if not thousands of American citizens.'' By that reasoning, torture could be justified almost anywhere on the battlefield of the war on terror. Only the president's discretion forbade it. These guidelines were formally repudiated by the administration the week before Gonzales's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation as attorney general.

In this context, Rumsfeld's decision to take the gloves off in Guantánamo for six weeks makes more sense. The use of dogs to intimidate prisoners and the use of nudity for humiliation were now allowed. Although abuse was specifically employed in only two cases before Rumsfeld rescinded the order, practical precedents had been set; and the broader mixed message sent from the White House clearly reached commanders in the field. Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, in charge of the Iraq counterinsurgency, also sent out several conflicting memos with regard to the treatment of prisoners - memos that only added to the confusion as to what was permitted and what wasn't. When the general in charge of Guantánamo was sent to Abu Ghraib to help intelligence gathering, the ''migration'' of techniques (the term used in the Pentagon's Schlesinger Report) from those reserved for extreme cases in the leadership of Al Qaeda to thousands of Iraqi civilians, most of whom, according to intelligence sources, were innocent of any crime at all, was complete. Again, there is no evidence of anyone at a high level directly mandating torture or abuse, except in two cases in Gitmo. But there is growing evidence recently uncovered by the A.C.L.U. - not provided in Danner's compilation - that authorities in the F.B.I. and elsewhere were aware of abuses and did little to prevent or stop them. Then there were the vast loopholes placed in the White House torture memos, the precedents at Guantánamo, the winks and nods from Washington and the pressure of an Iraqi insurgency that few knew how to restrain. It was a combustible mix.

What's notable about the incidents of torture and abuse is first, their common features, and second, their geographical reach. No one has any reason to believe any longer that these incidents were restricted to one prison near Baghdad. They were everywhere: from Guantánamo Bay to Afghanistan, Baghdad, Basra, Ramadi and Tikrit and, for all we know, in any number of hidden jails affecting ''ghost detainees'' kept from the purview of the Red Cross. They were committed by the Marines, the Army, the Military Police, Navy Seals, reservists, Special Forces and on and on. The use of hooding was ubiquitous; the same goes for forced nudity, sexual humiliation and brutal beatings; there are examples of rape and electric shocks. Many of the abuses seem specifically tailored to humiliate Arabs and Muslims, where horror at being exposed in public is a deep cultural artifact.

Whether random bad apples had picked up these techniques from hearsay or whether these practices represented methods authorized by commanders grappling with ambiguous directions from Washington is hard to pin down from the official reports. But it is surely significant that very few abuses occurred in what the Red Cross calls ''regular internment facilities.'' Almost all took place within prisons designed to collect intelligence, including, of course, Saddam Hussein's previous torture palace at Abu Ghraib and even the former Baathist secret police office in Basra. (Who authorized the use of these particular places for a war of liberation is another mystery.) This tells us two things: that the vast majority of soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere had nothing to do with these incidents; and that the violence had a purpose. The report of the International Committee of the Red Cross says: ''Several military intelligence officers confirmed to the I.C.R.C. that it was part of the military intelligence process to hold a person deprived of his liberty naked in a completely dark and empty cell for a prolonged period to use inhumane and degrading treatment, including physical and psychological coercion.''

An e-mail message recovered by Danner from a captain in military intelligence in August 2003 reveals the officer's desire to distinguish between genuine prisoners of war and ''unlawful combatants.'' The president, of course, had endorsed that distinction in theory, although not in practice - even in Guantánamo, let alone Iraq. Somehow Bush's nuances never made it down the chain to this captain. In the message, he asked for advice from other intelligence officers on which illegal techniques work best: a ''wish list'' for interrogators. Then he wrote: ''The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.''

How do you break these people? According to the I.C.R.C., one prisoner ''alleged that he had been hooded and cuffed with flexicuffs, threatened to be tortured and killed, urinated on, kicked in the head, lower back and groin, force-fed a baseball which was tied into the mouth using a scarf and deprived of sleep for four consecutive days. Interrogators would allegedly take turns ill-treating him. When he said he would complain to the I.C.R.C. he was allegedly beaten more. An I.C.R.C. medical examination revealed hematoma in the lower back, blood in urine, sensory loss in the right hand due to tight handcuffing with flexicuffs, and a broken rib.''Even Bybee's very narrow definition of torture would apply in this case. Here's another - not from Abu Ghraib:

A detainee ''had been hooded, handcuffed in the back, and made to lie face down, on a hot surface during transportation. This had caused severe skin burns that required three months' hospitalization. . . . He had to undergo several skin grafts, the amputation of his right index finger, and suffered . . . extensive burns over the abdomen, anterior aspects of the outer extremities, the palm of his right hand and the sole of his left foot.''
And another, in a detainee's own words: ''They threw pepper on my face and the beating started. This went on for a half hour. And then he started beating me with the chair until the chair was broken. After that they started choking me. At that time I thought I was going to die, but it's a miracle I lived. And then they started beating me again. They concentrated on beating me in my heart until they got tired from beating me. They took a little break and then they started kicking me very hard with their feet until I passed out.''

An incident uncovered by the A.C.L.U. and others was described in The Washington Post on Dec. 22. A young soldier with no training in interrogation techniques ''acknowledged forcing two men to their knees, placing bullets in their mouths, ordering them to close their eyes, and telling them they would be shot unless they answered questions about a grenade incident. He then took the bullets, and a colleague pretended to load them in the chamber of his M-16 rifle.''

These are not allegations made by antiwar journalists. They are incidents reported within the confines of the United States government. The Schlesinger panel has officially conceded, although the president has never publicly acknowledged, that American soldiers have tortured five inmates to death. Twenty-three other deaths that occurred during American custody had not been fully investigated by the time the panel issued its report in August. Some of the techniques were simply brutal, like persistent vicious beatings to unconsciousness. Others were more inventive. In April 2004, according to internal Defense Department documents recently procured by the A.C.L.U., three marines in Mahmudiya used an electric transformer, forcing a detainee to ''dance'' as the electricity coursed through him. We also now know that in Guantánamo, burning cigarettes were placed in the ears of detainees.

Here's another case from the Army's investigation into Abu Ghraib, led by Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones and Maj. Gen. George R. Fay:
''On another occasion DETAINEE-07 was forced to lie down while M.P.'s jumped onto his back and legs. He was beaten with a broom and a chemical light was broken and poured over his body. . . . During this abuse a police stick was used to sodomize DETAINEE-07 and two female M.P.'s were hitting him, throwing a ball at his penis, and taking photographs.''

Last December, documents obtained by the A.C.L.U. also cited an F.B.I. agent at Guantánamo Bay who observed that ''on a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.'' In one case, he added, ''the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.''

This kind of scene can also be found at Abu Ghraib: ''An 18 November 2003 photograph depicts a detainee dressed in a shirt or blanket lying on the floor with a banana inserted into his anus. This as well as several others show the same detainee covered in feces, with his hands encased in sandbags, or tied in foam and between two stretchers.'' This, apparently, was a result of self-inflicted mania, although where the mentally ill man procured a banana is not elaborated upon.

Also notable in Abu Ghraib was the despicable use of religion to humiliate. One Muslim inmate was allegedly forced to eat pork, had liquor forced down his throat and told to thank Jesus that he was alive. He recounted in broken English:

''They stripped me naked, they asked me, 'Do you pray to Allah?' I said, 'Yes.' They said 'F - - - you' and 'F - - - him.' '' Later, this inmate recounts: ''Someone else asked me, 'Do you believe in anything?' I said to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, 'But I believe in torture and I will torture you.' ''

Whether we decide to call this kind of treatment ''abuse'' or some other euphemism, there is no doubt what it was in the minds of the American soldiers who perpetrated it. They believed in torture. And many believed it was sanctioned from above. According to The Washington Post, one sergeant who witnessed the torture thought Military Intelligence approved of all of it: ''The M.I. staffs, to my understanding, have been giving Graner'' - one of the chief torturers at Abu Ghraib - ''compliments on the way he has been handling the M.I. holds [prisoners held by military intelligence]. Example being statements like 'Good job, they're breaking down real fast'; 'They answer every question'; 'They're giving out good information, finally'; and 'Keep up the good work' - stuff like that.'' At Guantánamo Bay, newly released documents show that some of the torturers felt they were acting on the basis of memos sent from Washington.

Was the torture effective? The only evidence in the documents Danner has compiled that it was even the slightest bit helpful comes from the Schlesinger report. It says ''much of the information in the recently released 9/11 Commission's report, on the planning and execution of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, came from interrogation of detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere.'' But the context makes plain that this was intelligence procured without torture. It also claims that good intelligence was received from the two sanctioned cases of expanded interrogation techniques at Guantánamo. But everything else points to the futility of the kind of brutal techniques used in Iraq and elsewhere.

Worse, there's plenty of evidence that this kind of treatment makes gathering intelligence harder. In Abu Ghraib, according to the official documents, up to 90 percent of the inmates were victims of random and crude nighttime sweeps. If these thousands of Iraqis did not sympathize with the insurgency before they came into American custody, they had good reason to thereafter. Stories of torture, of sexual humiliation, of religious mockery have become widespread in Iraq, and have been amplified by the enemy. If the best intelligence comes from persuading the indigenous population to give up information on insurgents, then the atrocities perpetrated by a tiny minority of American troops actually help the insurgency, rather than curtail it.

Who was responsible? There are various levels of accountability. But it seems unmistakable from these documents that decisions made by the president himself and the secretary of defense contributed to confusion, vagueness and disarray, which, in turn, led directly to abuse and torture. The president bears sole responsibility for ignoring Colin Powell's noble warnings. The esoteric differences between legal ''abuse'' and illegal ''torture'' and the distinction between ''prisoners of war'' and ''unlawful combatants'' were and are so vague as to make the abuse of innocents almost inevitable. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the majority of the Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that ''the government has never provided any court with the full criteria that it uses in classifying individuals'' as enemy combatants. It is one thing to make a distinction in theory between Geneva-protected combatants and unprotected Qaeda operatives. But in the chaos of a situation like Iraq, how can you practically know the difference? When one group is designated as unworthy of humane treatment, and that group is impossible to distinguish from others, it is unsurprising that exceptions quickly become rules. The best you can say is that in an administration with a reputation for clear lines of command and clear rules of engagement, the vagueness and incompetence are the most striking features.

Worse, the president has never acknowledged the scope or the real gravity of what has taken place. His first instinct was to minimize the issue; later, his main references to it were a couple of sentences claiming that the abuses were the work of a handful of miscreants, rather than a consequence of his own decisions. But the impact of these events on domestic morale, on the morale of the vast majority of honorable soldiers in a very tough place and on the reputation of the United States in the Middle East is incalculable. The war on terror is both military and political. The president's great contribution has been to recognize that a solution is impossible without political reform in the Middle East. And yet the prevalence of brutality and inhumanity among American interrogators has robbed the United States of the high ground it desperately needs to maintain in order to win. What better weapon for Al Qaeda than the news that an inmate at Guantánamo was wrapped in the Israeli flag or that prisoners at Abu Ghraib were raped? There is no escaping the fact that, whether he intended to or not, this president handed Al Qaeda that weapon. Sometimes a brazen declaration of toughness is actually a form of weakness. In a propaganda war for the hearts and minds of Muslims everywhere, it's simply self-defeating.

And the damage done was intensified by President Bush's refusal to discipline those who helped make this happen. A president who truly recognized the moral and strategic calamity of this failure would have fired everyone responsible. But the vice president's response to criticism of the defense secretary in the wake of Abu Ghraib was to say, ''Get off his back.'' In fact, those with real responsibility for the disaster were rewarded. Rumsfeld was kept on for the second term, while the man who warned against ignoring the Geneva Conventions, Colin Powell, was seemingly nudged out. The man who wrote a legal opinion maximizing the kind of brutal treatment that the United States could legally defend, Jay S. Bybee, was subsequently rewarded with a nomination to a federal Court of Appeals. General Sanchez and Gen. John P. Abizaid remain in their posts. Alberto R. Gonzales, who wrote memos that validated the decision to grant Geneva status to inmates solely at the president's discretion, is now nominated to the highest law enforcement job in the country: attorney general. The man who paved the way for the torture of prisoners is to be entrusted with safeguarding the civil rights of Americans. It is astonishing he has been nominated, and even more astonishing that he will almost certainly be confirmed.

But in a democracy, the responsibility is also wider. Did those of us who fought so passionately for a ruthless war against terrorists give an unwitting green light to these abuses? Were we naïve in believing that characterizing complex conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq as a single simple war against ''evil'' might not filter down and lead to decisions that could dehumanize the enemy and lead to abuse? Did our conviction of our own rightness in this struggle make it hard for us to acknowledge when that good cause had become endangered? I fear the answer to each of these questions is yes.

American political polarization also contributed. Most of those who made the most fuss about these incidents - like Mark Danner or Seymour Hersh - were dedicated opponents of the war in the first place, and were eager to use this scandal to promote their agendas. Advocates of the war, especially those allied with the administration, kept relatively quiet, or attempted to belittle what had gone on, or made facile arguments that such things always occur in wartime. But it seems to me that those of us who are most committed to the Iraq intervention should be the most vociferous in highlighting these excrescences. Getting rid of this cancer within the system is essential to winning this war.

I'm not saying that those who unwittingly made this torture possible are as guilty as those who inflicted it. I am saying that when the results are this horrifying, it's worth a thorough reassessment of rhetoric and war methods. Perhaps the saddest evidence of our communal denial in this respect was the election campaign. The fact that American soldiers were guilty of torturing inmates to death barely came up. It went unmentioned in every one of the three presidential debates. John F. Kerry, the ''heroic'' protester of Vietnam, ducked the issue out of what? Fear? Ignorance? Or a belief that the American public ultimately did not care, that the consequences of seeming to criticize the conduct of troops would be more of an electoral liability than holding a president accountable for enabling the torture of innocents? I fear it was the last of these. Worse, I fear he may have been right.

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The Abu Ghraib Scandal You Don't Know
Medical care was at times so scarce and shabby that it became another kind of abuse. An inside look
TIME | Monday, Feb. 07, 2005 | By ADAM ZAGORIN

American soldiers often have a tough time with Arabic names, so to guards, he was just "Gus.'' To the world outside Abu Ghraib prison, he became an iconic figure, a naked, prostrate Iraqi prisoner crawling on the end of a leash held by Private Lynndie England, the pixyish Army Reserve clerk who posed in several of the infamous photographs that made the name Abu Ghraib synonymous with torture. Now, it emerges, there may be another dimension to Gus' story and certainly to the horrors of Abu Ghraib. In what amounted to a perversion of the traditional doctor's creed of "first, do no harm," the medical system at the prison became an instrument of abuse, by design and by neglect. As uncovered by legal scholars M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan Marks, who conducted an inquiry published by the New England Journal of Medicine, not only were some military doctors at Abu Ghraib enlisted to help inflict distress on the prisoners, but also the scarcity of basic medical care was at times so severe that it created another kind of torture.

Medical personnel and others who worked at the prison tell TIME that, with straitjackets unavailable, tethers--like the leash on Gus--were put to use at Abu Ghraib to control unruly or mentally disturbed detainees, sometimes with the concurrence of a doctor. That such a restraint-- which is supposed to be placed around legs, arms or torsos--ended up instead around a man's neck seems to be a case of a medically condoned practice degenerating into abuse. But there was also medical disarray at the prison: amputations performed by nondoctors, chest tubes recycled from the dead to the living, a medic ordered, by one account, to cover up a homicide. That in itself would have made Abu Ghraib a scandal even without the acts of torture inflicted on the inmates by their guards.

In most cases, U.S. frontline troops in Iraq have received top-quality medical care, producing the lowest death rate of any military conflict in history. But the care at Abu Ghraib has often been at the other end of the scale of humane treatment, at least until recently. Although the prison was at times crowded with as many as 7,000 detainees, no U.S. doctor was in residence for most of 2003. Military officials say a few Iraqi doctors saw to minor illnesses but not major traumas. In a statement obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, an Army medic based at Abu Ghraib spoke of examining from 800 to 900 detainees daily as they were admitted. If he worked a 12-hour day, that gave him less than a minute for each exam. Ken Davis, an MP who served at Abu Ghraib in late 2003, told TIME that he once escorted a prisoner who had broken his foot the day before and had still not received treatment. "He was in terrible pain," Davis recalled. "There was no doctor and really nothing we could do."

The medical understaffing and under-stocking of Abu Ghraib were felt most acutely after the prison came under shelling by insurgents. A doctor who served there recalled an attack last April when a mortar landed on an outdoor pen holding prisoners, killing at least 16 outright and wounding more than 60. Former prison personnel described how those attacks produced pandemonium, with panicked prisoners seeking treatment from what were at times very few, poorly equipped medical workers. "When somebody died, we just took out their chest tube and inserted it into another, living person," said National Guard Captain Kelly Parrson, a physician's assistant at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and 2004 who experienced three such attacks and was seriously injured by a mortar. "There was no other choice because we did not have enough."

Parrson cited a dearth of catheters, correctly sized breathing tubes and orthopedic supplies, including casts used to treat bone fractures caused by shrapnel from high explosives. Items had to be reused with minimal sterilization or done without, he said. Glucose strips, used to measure blood sugar, were chronically in short supply, leading to haphazard insulin dosing for diabetics. On occasion, said Parrson, internists and he and other nonphysicians carried out amputations and other procedures usually performed by surgeons. "I took off an ankle and a lower leg," he recalls. "There was no one else, and if it was death or amputation, you just had to do it."

By the estimate of an officer who frequently visited Abu Ghraib and is a psychologist, some 5% of the prisoners suffered from mental illness. Yet, according to Dr. David Auch, commander of the reserve company supporting medical operations at the prison in 2003, for long periods there was no one to treat mental-health problems among the inmates, no doctor qualified to prescribe antipsychotic drugs and other medications that could have calmed mentally ill detainees and perhaps diminished the guards' use of physical restraints. Often the only psychiatrists or psychologists on site were part of so-called behavioral-science consultation teams, or "biscuits," which monitored interrogations and custom-designed methods to make them more effective. Those specialists do not function as physicians, the Army says.

Among the most disturbed prisoners at Abu Ghraib was a man--probably psychotic, according to a medical staff member--who habitually coated his body in fecal matter and repeatedly tried to harm himself--for instance, by banging his head against cell walls. At one point, Auch says, medics asked his advice on restraining the prisoner, reporting that they had used a helmet to protect his head and improvised padded gloves and plastic handcuffs to secure his arms. The medics wanted to know whether using a tether would be appropriate, and Auch recalls that he gave his assent, saying, "The priority is to safeguard the prisoner." A military spokesman told TIME that U.S. military personnel in Iraq do employ tethers--sometimes loosely affixed around a leg or an arm--to restrain some detainees undergoing medical treatment.

Auch says neither he nor any members of his medical staff were consulted about an Iraqi, later dubbed "Ice Man," when he was first brought to the prison for interrogation by military intelligence. "They didn't check the detainee medically when he came in," says Auch. That may have been a mistake. The man expired under questioning in the middle of the night in an episode that has been officially ruled a homicide. According to statements made during an Army inquiry, military personnel ordered the body put on ice and then spirited it away after medics attached a fake IV to the dead man's arm in an apparent attempt to create the impression that he was still alive. Auch, who says he has not been questioned in the Army investigation, told TIME a medic confided in him that he was ordered by a military-intelligence officer to participate in the ruse and never to talk about it. The Pentagon refuses to comment while it continues to investigate the abuses.

While the deficiencies in medical care at Abu Ghraib have gone largely unreported, the glare of the prison-guard scandal has compelled the U.S. military to launch major reforms. In the past year, the military says it has established a 52-bed hospital at the prison, staffed by 200 highly trained medical personnel. The number of detainees in U.S. custody is currently about 3,000. (The interim Iraqi government also houses prisoners there.) No date has been set, but the military would like to close the facility altogether, officially to avoid more insurgent attacks but, what's more, to wipe out the blot that is Abu Ghraib.

Copyright © 2005 Time Inc. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1025139,00.html

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Torture, American Style
The New York Times | February 11, 2005
By BOB HERBERT | OP-ED COLUMNIST

Maher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes.

Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue of The New Yorker, he "was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet."

In an instant, Mr. Arar was swept into an increasingly common nightmare, courtesy of the United States of America. The plane that took off with him from Kennedy "flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan."

Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. At times during the trip, Mr. Arar heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." He was being taken, on the orders of the U.S. government, to Syria, where he would be tortured.

The title of Ms. Mayer's article is "Outsourcing Torture." It's a detailed account of the frightening and extremely secretive U.S. program known as "extraordinary rendition."

This is one of the great euphemisms of our time. Extraordinary rendition is the name that's been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side by side with contract killings.

Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation - the United States - that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in which gays' getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?

As Ms. Mayer pointed out: "Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar. ... Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish. Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed of their whereabouts."

Mr. Arar was seized because his name had turned up on a watch list of terror suspects. He was reported to have been a co-worker of a man in Canada whose brother was a suspected terrorist.

"Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say," Ms. Mayer wrote.
The confession under torture was worthless. Syrian officials reported back to the United States that they could find no links between Mr. Arar and terrorism. He was released in October 2003 without ever being charged and is now back in Canada.

Barbara Olshansky is the assistant legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing Mr. Arar in a lawsuit against the U.S. I asked her to describe Mr. Arar's physical and emotional state following his release from custody.

She sounded shaken by the memory. "He's not a big guy," she said. "He had lost more than 40 pounds. His pallor was terrible, and his eyes were sunken. He looked like someone who was kind of dead inside."

Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators.

There is a widespread but mistaken notion in the U.S. that everybody seized by the government in its so-called war on terror is in fact somehow connected to terrorist activity. That is just wildly wrong.

Tony Blair knows a little about that sort of thing. Just two days ago the British prime minister formally apologized to 11 people who were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for bombings in England by the Irish Republican Army three decades ago.

Jettisoning the rule of law to permit such acts of evil as kidnapping and torture is not a defensible policy for a civilized nation. It's wrong. And nothing good can come from it.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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