As threats to US changed, so did prison tacticsWASHINGTON -- The road to the Abu Ghraib prison abuses began with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the threat of Al Qaeda spurred the Bush administration to radically overhaul the way it questioned prisoners.
In this "new kind of war," as President Bush called it, information would be critical to finding hidden operatives and disrupting attacks. Moreover, an organization of religious zealots would be difficult to penetrate with informers, so the successful interrogations of captured Al Qaeda members would be essential. There was one problem: the Geneva Conventions forbid using physical and psychological coercion to obtain information from captured prisoners of war. Inside the Pentagon, where one wall was still burning from the impact of a hijacked jetliner, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith had already come up with the solution. He had made his name during the Reagan administration by arguing that Geneva Convention protections should not be extended to terrorists who mingled with civilians. The issue was abstract then, but on Sept. 11 it had immediate consequences. William Haynes, the general counsel of the Defense Department, and John Yoo, then the deputy assistant attorney general, signed off on the legality of withholding Geneva protections from both Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. As the war on terrorism began, all detainees would be called enemy combatants, not prisoners of war, and could be questioned aggressively. But in abandoning the old structure, the administration created a vacuum that filled up with ad hoc regulations -- with one interrogation process at tropical Guantanamo, different rules in the mountains of Afghanistan, and a third set of limits in the deserts of Iraq. Moreover, military interrogators had one set of rules, while the CIA had another. Meanwhile, the intelligence community never developed clear standards for who is qualified to do strategic interrogation. Training in techniques that actually work versus those that are counterproductive varied widely, according to Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Steve Kleinman, who conducted interrogations in the Panama invasion, the 1991 Gulf War, and Iraq. The Pentagon announced that the Geneva Conventions would not apply for prisoners in the Afghanistan war, though they would apply for fighters taken prisoner in Iraq. But having the same small number of interrogators shuttling between both theaters set up the potential for even greater confusion, Kleinman said. "What seemed to be abhorrent yesteday is acceptable today, and tomorrow it's recommended," warned the veteran interrogation instructor. "If they picked up bad habits -- and that's a big if -- working in a situation where physical pressure was acceptable, and then moved into a new setting," the dynamic would spread. As the Geneva Convention limits eroded, the sense of what was allowable expanded. And those familiar with the policies told the Globe there were few clear rules left by October 2003, when the Pentagon extended the tour of duty of the 372d Military Police company -- reservists trained for general combat support, not corrections -- and put them in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison. Inside the prison walls, few knew whether the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which oversaw interrogations, were in charge of the MPs or if they should answer to their own brigade commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who rarely visited Abu Ghraib, according to a report about the abuses by Major General Antonio Taguba. Outside, the insurgency was raging. Enemy combatants The notion that terrorists should be treated differently from armies did not originate with the fight against Al Qaeda. In the early 1980s, Feith was a young lawyer in the Reagan administration who gained fame in conservative national security circles for arguing against ratification of a proposed amendment to the Geneva Conventions that would treat members of national liberation movements, irregulars who wore no uniforms and sometimes used terrorist tactics, as prisoners of war. Feith said that this policy would endanger civilians by removing the incentive for fighters to obey traditional laws of war: staying in the open so the opposing party will not target noncombatants. It would also grant terrorist groups the same status as armies, something Feith, a harsh critic of the Palestine Liberation Organization, rejected. Two decades later, he returned to the Pentagon in the second Bush administration as its leading defense policy thinker. Shortly after the Al Qaeda attacks, the Bush adminstration made a crucial decision exactly in line with Feith's doctrine: An Al Qaeda or Taliban fighter who was captured would be called an "enemy combatant" and would not enjoy POW protections. That decision was controversial inside the Pentagon, recalls Mark Jacobson, who worked in the detainee policy group in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and is now a visiting scholar at Ohio State University. Uniformed military lawyers agreed that Al Qaeda terrorists were not entitled to POW status, but objected to saying that Taliban fighters did not qualify as POWs because they were the armed forces of the Afghan regime, even if they did not look like a Western army. But they lost the debate to the civilian leadership, he said. The White House announced this decision to the world in a Feb. 7, 2002, "fact sheet" about Guantanamo Bay prisoners. It promised that "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity . . . the detainees will receive much of the treatment normally afforded to POWs." The announcement then gave some examples of POW privileges detainees would not receive, listing some of the most utopian provisions of the 1949 convention: monthly pay, scientific equipment, and musical instruments. It made no mention of the key POW privilege that was being withheld, however: "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," the Third Geneva Convention says. "Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind." In the Afghanistan war, detainees suspected of having what is called "tactical" intelligence -- the location of enemy forces, specific plans for upcoming attacks -- were kept at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan or were taken to Navy ships for intensive questioning. Much remains unclear about the techniques the military and CIA are using in Afghanistan, but there have been reports of harsh measures and abuses. In December 2002, two detainees died at Bagram under circumstances the military called homicide. The New York Times has reported that the CIA is interrogating Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader believed to have planned the 2001 attacks, using a technique called "water-boarding," strapping him down and holding him under water to simulate drowning. "Even I, frankly, am concerned that we need to find out exactly what has been going on at Bagram," Jacobson said. Meanwhile, detainees who were thought to pose a continuing danger or have strategic intelligence, information about how the terrorist network operates, were sent to Guantanamo Bay, the Navy base on the southern coast of Cuba. Changes at GuantanamoGuantanamo's Camp X-Ray, a crude prison of chain-link fencing and barbed wire exposed to the tropical weather, opened in January 2002. By April 2002, the military had finished building the first wing of its new Camp Delta, a much more sophisticated prison with individual wire mesh cells cut from shipping containers. In keeping with military rules that separated the actions of guards and interrogators, there were two commanders at first, one for the intelligence operation, and one for detention. Jacobson said the two often conflicted over how to treat detainees. "With the detention operation, your goal is to keep everybody calm and compliant with camp rules, so there's no riots and everyone is quiet," he said "Interrogators want a broader range of emotions: happiness or uncertainty and nervousness. They may want to keep people unsettled." By the summer, the US Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo, decided that the arrangement wasn't working and unified the command of both operations. They chose Major General Geoffrey Miller, a Texas-born former paratrooper then serving in South Korea, to take over in October 2002. Within a few months of arriving, Miller sent a request up to his superiors for official guidance in what was and was not an approved interrogation technique, Jacobson recalled. For years, the military had based its interrogation rules on the official Army Field Manual. The manual dealt exclusively with emotional techniques, ranging from a variant of "good cop, bad cop" to pretending to know everything already or manipulating a detainee's ego. It insisted that no physical coercion be used. But many interrogators had been through resistance training in which they learned about harsher techniques, on the theory that they could be subjected to them by an enemy. Trainees were put in painful "stress positions" to simulate torture, said Kleinman, the interrogation specialist. In late 2002, the interrogators asked Miller if it would ever be acceptable to use the harsher techniques or stress positions on Guantanamo prisoners, Jacobson said. After two months of legal review, the Pentagon approved a list that included disrupting sleep patterns, exposing a detainee to fluctuating temperatures, or changing his dietary schedule. Harsh methods were to be approved by the Defense Department on a case-by-case basis. "Their inability to control and predict what will happen next puts them into a state we call 'dislocation of expectations,' " Kleinman said of the detainees. "Then, every time that individual is in the presence of an interrogator, a certain degree of stability returns." Jacobson said these techniques were used at Guantanamo only rarely, in fewer than 5 percent of the 800 or so detainees who were sent to Guantanamo. Miller has said that sleep deprivation or hooding was never used as a technique in the 22,000 interrogations he oversaw. Instead, the primary technique used by interrogators under Miller was a positive-rewards system. In August 2003, Miller told a visiting reporter of his pride in how the system he had established at Guantanamo was persuading Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners to talk. While all detainees got humane basic living conditions, he said, MPs gave comfort items to those who cooperated with interrogators: baklava with meals, permission to keep books and letters from home in cells, or even transfer to a medium-security wing where, separated from hard-core holdouts, they lived communally, wore white instead of orange, and played badminton. Miller also instituted a system of Tiger Teams to do interrogations. The questioner and one or two translators would be in the interrogation room with the detainee, while an analyst would watch from behind a partition. The partition also allowed supervisors to monitor what was happening in interrogations, and Miller said he frequently stopped by. But even as interrogation techniques were evolving in Cuba, Iraq war planners were making no plans for mass interrogations of their own. They thought the war would end quickly, Jacobson said. The only prisoners the military was preparing to interrogate were the blacklist of Baathist officials who might know about weapons of mass destruction, the group of 55 immortalized on a deck of playing cards. "This was the 'they're going to greet us as liberators' scenario," Jacobson said. The thinking was: "We should process them and get them home unless they were on the blacklist." A surprise insurgencyThe Bush administration's announcement that the Geneva Conventions would apply in the conflict in Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, reflected the expectation that they would be fighting a regular army, not an insurgency. Instead, the administration found itself in the midst of a guerrilla war with thousands of suspected insurgents being captured and no plans for how to hold them. In the spring of 2003, after Baghdad fell and members of the blacklist were being captured, the Pentagon asked Miller to go from Cuba to Iraq to evaluate the situation based on Guantanamo's best practices for interrogating high-value detainees. But it took several months for him to go, Jacobson said, during which time the violent insurgency swelled. Thousands of suspected fighters were crammed into prisons such as Abu Ghraib, along with ordinary criminals. The prison was taking mortar fire. There were riots and escape attempts. And the problem would only grow: there were 5,800 prisoners at Abu Ghraib in September 2003, according to published reports, but as many as 8,000 just five months later. Miller spent 10 days in early September assessing the military's chaotic detention and interrogation operation and making recommendations to the top US commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, about how to improve the flow of intelligence from detainees using as a model the Guantanamo camp, which was deliberately developed outside the strictures of the Geneva Conventions. His full recommendations have not been released, but he provided Sanchez with a copy of his 200-page standard operating practices for Guantanamo, including the matrix of harsher techniques that could be used on a case-by-case basis. The Taguba report said he also cautioned Sanchez to do a legal review of which techniques would be lawful in Iraq, where the Geneva Conventions applied. On Friday, a Pentagon briefing disclosed that on Sept. 14, Sanchez put in place an interim policy for interrogations based on Miller's Guantanamo policy, spelling out both preapproved approaches and the possible case-by-case use of harsher tactics. He revised that policy on Oct. 13, dropping the list of harsher approaches that needed special approval, but the Army intelligence brigade that conducted the interrogations apparently posted a chart that kept the old listings as a guide. A month after Miller left, in mid-October, Red Cross inspectors visited Abu Ghraib and discovered a new incentive system in place, one based on punishing uncooperative detainees by subtracting from their basic living conditions rather than rewarding those who talked with enhancements: Miller's Guantanamo system, but inverted. For example, they witnessed a practice of keeping uncooperative detainees naked in empty, dark cells for days at a time. "The military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was 'part of the process,' " a once-secret Red Cross report says. "The process appeared to be a give-and-take policy whereby [detainees] were 'drip-fed' with new items (clothing, bedding, hygiene articles, etc.) in exchange for their 'cooperation.' " The human rights situation at Abu Ghraib continued to deteriorate until January, when a whistleblower turned in photographs depictingthe sexual humiliation and physical abuse of prisoners. Naked men cower before barking military dogs, lie stacked on top of each other like cordwood, are being forced to masturbate, or are on a leash held by a female MP. All administration and military officials, from Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on down, have expressed outrage and the treatment depicted in the photos. Six soldiers have been reprimanded and seven more are facing the possibility of court-martial. A new inquiry into whether interrogators with the CIA and military intelligence orchestrated the sexual humiliation as a way to break down detainees is ongoing. Harold Koh, a Clinton-era assistant secretary of state for human rights, said the administration's policy of setting aside the Geneva Conventions early in the war on terrorism pushed interrogation standards down a slippery slope, culminating in the Abu Ghraib controversy. "I think the Defense Department is reaping the whirlwind of its strategy of condoning wide-scale departures from traditional POW protections," Koh said. "They're there for a reason. Some of these officials have treated the legal regimes as a nuisance to be disgarded in the war against terrorism, when it turns out they're playing a very important role in protecting our troops from violations and protecting our country against needless humiliation by conduct that most Americans find abhorrent." Kleinman, the veteran interrogator, said the breakdown also stemmed from poor training: Abusing prisoners to get information out of them yields bad information and stirs up resentments that can outlive the war. "We need to think strategically about this," he said. "Unless we intend to keep these people in custody for the rest of their lives and are absolutely certain the revelations of this abuse will never get out, we'd better not do it. There's more at stake here."
Bryan Bender of the Globe staff contributed to this report. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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