Early Iraq Abuse Accounts Met With Silence

May 8, 1:52 PM (ET)
By CHARLES J. HANLEY

Detailed allegations of psychological abuse, deprivation, beatings and deaths at
U.S.-run prisons in Iraq were met by public silence from the U.S. Army last
October - six months before shocking photographs stirred world outrage and
demands for action.

At the time, one ex-prisoner sensed that words might count for little. Instead,
Rahad Naif told a reporter, "I wish somebody could go take a picture of Camp
Bucca."

These early accounts by freed prisoners, reported by The Associated Press last
fall, told of detainees punished by hours lying bound in the sun; being attacked
by dogs; being deprived of sufficient water; spending days with hoods over their
heads.

One told AP of seeing an elderly Iraqi woman tied up and lying in the dust;
others told of ill men dying in crowded tents.

They spoke repeatedly of being humiliated by American guards. None mentioned the
sexual humiliation seen in recently released photos, but Arab culture might keep
an Iraqi from describing such mistreatment.

In contrast to suggestions that the photos indicate isolated abuse by a few,
these Iraqis told of widespread practices in several camps that would violate
the Geneva Conventions and other human rights standards. On Friday, in an
unusual public statement, the international Red Cross agreed, disclosing that
its inspectors last year found a "broad pattern" of abuse.

On Oct. 18, AP posed specific questions about the reported abuses to the
U.S. military command in Baghdad and the 800th Military Police Brigade, which
was in charge of detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and other facilities.

The MP unit drafted responses, AP later learned, but the Baghdad command did not
release them. No explanation was given. The AP report, published Nov. 1, cited a
statement to Arab television by the MP commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski,
that prisoners were treated humanely.

Meantime, "between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement
Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal
abuses were inflicted on several detainees," according to the report of a later
Army investigation.

That Army report said the photos from Abu Ghraib dated from this period - both
before and after the AP article appeared.

The Army's report, which found that soldiers also committed "egregious acts and
grave breaches" at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, did not come to light until they
were disclosed in the May 10 issue of The New Yorker magazine. It had been
classified "secret."

That investigation was prompted by a soldier's complaint to superiors in January
about fellow guards' actions.

The half-dozen ex-prisoners interviewed by AP in October were freed without
charges after spending months in Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and the Baghdad
airport's Camp Cropper.

Some Americans were humane, they said, but many were not.

"They don't have morals. They don't respect old or young. They humiliate
everybody," said Naif, 31, a Baghdad resident like the others and one of three
brothers confined.

Women guards especially were verbally abusive, with obscene invective,
"insulting our sisters and parents. It was very hard to accept," he said.

"Some are like children, showing off their muscle," his brother Hassan, 32, said
of the MPs.

Last summer, when temperatures topped 120, guards struck one man at Camp Cropper
with an "electric stick" because he was slow carrying water, and then "tied his
hands and put him in the sun for three hours," said Ziad Tarik, 24.

This punishment in "The Garden" also was recounted by others: being made to lie
bound in the sun for hours on a patch of sand enclosed by razor-wire, even for
such lesser infractions as shouting to the next tent or stealing food.

They also told of beatings by guards - for example, of an Abu Ghraib prisoner
who refused to eat.

"He was stubborn, so they hit him, and he spent three days in the hospital,"
Tarik said.

"They used to hit people and turn dogs loose on them," said Saad, 36, the third
Naif brother, who spent 2 1/2 months in Abu Ghraib.

"They used to humble people by putting nylon bags over their heads, for three
days, with their hands tied up. I know one who died because he couldn't
breathe."

The U.S. military and CIA now say at least 14 detainee deaths have been or are
being investigated.

The camps held not only men captured in the anti-U.S. insurgency, but many
others picked up by U.S. troops in broad neighborhood sweeps, on slight
suspicions or unverified tips, or as curfew-breakers, checkpoint-dodgers or
common criminals. Up to 8,000 are believed still held.

The Naif brothers said they and neighbor Tarik were seized by American soldiers
after a nasty quarrel with another neighbor, who had links with the
U.S. occupation and apparently denounced them as resistance supporters. The
brothers were thrown into three separate camps.

Prisoners regularly rose up in protest or riots to demand they be charged or
freed, and sometimes to seek better treatment for ill comrades, the men said.

"They'd turn dogs on us to put down the demonstrations," said Ra'id Mohammed
Hassan, 42.

He said he was taken to Camp Bucca after Americans searching his car found a
weapon, a common item for Iraqis.

The ex-detainees complained they were never given enough water for drinking and
washing and at times were denied food as punishment.

"Once we were saying prayers for the death of a prisoner, and we were chanting,
so they kept food from us for a day and a half," Saad Naif said.

In hours of AP interviews, the Iraqis said the Americans' treatment of women
detainees and the sick most appalled them.

Hassan Ali Muslim, 28, detained for alleged carjacking but never charged,
remembered one man being brought into their stifling, overcrowded tent at Camp
Cropper in a sickbed. He said another died beside him.

"He was an old man. We had to line up for food, and it was very hot and it took
a very long time, and wasn't good for sick people," Muslim said. "After the meal
he began breathing heavily, and he just died."

The men told of detainees in wheelchairs and poorly treated diabetics, of
epileptic seizures and nervous breakdowns.

"I saw four die in our camp," Tarik said of Abu Ghraib. Even when fellow
prisoners warned of one man's worsening condition, he said, "they said they
wouldn't take him (to a hospital) until it's serious and he's about to die."

Saad Naif said the "worst thing" was the treatment of women.

"Innocent women were kept for months in the same clothes. I saw a woman about 80
years old - her hands were tied up and she was lying in the dust," he said.

Hassan Naif recalled a day at Camp Cropper when a man saw his sister being
punished by being stretched out bound in the sun. He angrily tried to cross the
razor wire ringing his tent, "and they shot him in the shoulder," he said.

Saad Naif said he saw another prisoner shot dead when he approached the wire at
Abu Ghraib.

Muslim, whose father was jailed under the ousted Baathists, said the U.S. system
hardly compared with the old regime's bloody political prisons, and he said
living conditions improved at times under the Americans.

Camp Cropper, whose overcrowded conditions had grown notorious, was closed
Oct. 1. The secret Army investigation, nevertheless, found that the worst abuses
continued at least into December at Abu Ghraib.

Much of what the ex-detainees told AP meshed with what delegates of the
International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outsiders allowed into the
camps, were said to have found on visits last year.

Those findings were confidential, but the human rights group Amnesty
International said last summer it learned that the ICRC inspectors were finding
serious abuses, and it charged that "torture and gross abuse of human rights"
were occurring.

On Friday, the Red Cross disclosed it had repeatedly demanded last year that
U.S. authorities correct problems in the detention centers. The Americans took
action on some issues but not others, it said.

"We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a
pattern and a system," Pierre Kraehenbuel, the Red Cross operations director,
said in Geneva.

Inside the camps, too, appeals were made.

Saad Naif said one prominent detainee, a former Iraqi provincial governor, urged
U.S. military officers to halt the abuses.

"He told them, 'What you are doing to the Iraqi people will turn against you,'
and that they must win the support of the people, not the opposite," Naif
said. "They told him to mind his own business."

---

Associated Press Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley has covered the Iraq
crisis since mid-2002 and most recently reported from Iraq in the fall of 2003. 

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A Look Prisoners' Deaths in U.S Custody

May 8, 1:29 PM (ET)
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN

WASHINGTON (AP) - They were shot during riots and while trying to escape. One
passed out during an interrogation and died.

Some of the deaths of prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan have
been ruled homicides. Others were attributed to natural causes. Many of the case
are unexplained.

Army officials say they are looking into at least 25 prisoner deaths since
December 2002.

Army Provost Marshal Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder said last week that 12 deaths were
the result of natural or undetermined causes, 10 were under investigation and
three were classified as homicides.

One of those homicides was considered a justified shooting of an escaping
prisoner. A second was a case of excessive force; the soldier was demoted and
discharged.

The third, involving civilians, has been referred to the Justice Department.

The military has not provided details of the cases it is investigating.

The CIA's inspector general is conducting inquiries into the deaths of three
prisoners that may have involved agency officers or contractors. At least one
case also is under review by the Army.

It is unclear whether officials are investigating the deaths of more prisoners
in those two countries.

The Associated Press compiled the following review of prisoner deaths reported
in both countries, based on information from military and intelligence
officials, and the Teguba report, which is classified, internal Army
investigation into conditions at the Abu Ghraib prison in the Baghdad area.

Details about many of the cases are sketchy.

_Qaim, Iraq, Nov. 26, 2003: Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, a former commander of
Saddam Hussein's air defenses, loses consciousness and dies during interrogation
after complaining he does not feel well. He was captured Oct. 5 during a
raid. Military officials said he was believed to be playing a financial role in
the resistance to the U.S. occupation. The cause of death and interrogation
techniques are under investigation. Mowhoush's head was not hooded during
questioning, the Army's 82nd Airborne Division said.

Mowhoush's death may have involved a CIA officer who is an interrogator. The
CIA's inspector general is investigating.

_Abu Ghraib, Nov. 24, 2003: Several prisoners rioted and guards opened fire,
killing three detainees. Nine U.S. soldiers and nine prisoners were hurt.

_Abu Ghraib, November 2003: A prisoner's death may have involved CIA
personnel. The Army's Criminal Investigation Division has determined this death
was a homicide and referred the matter to the Justice Department. Also
investigating is the CIA's inspector general.

_Undisclosed location, Iraq, September 2003: A soldier shoots and kills a
prisoner who was throwing rocks at him. The soldier is charged for using
excessive force, reduced in rank and dismissed from the military.

_Kunar province, Afghanistan, June 21, 2003: An Afghan at a U.S. holding
facility near Asadabad dies. He was captured on June 18; his death was announced
on June 23. The military has said the cause of death is under
investigation. This death may have involved a contractor working for the
CIA. Intelligence officials say the case also is under investigation by the
agency's inspector general.

_Abu Ghraib, June 13, 2003: About 30 or 40 detainees riot and throw rocks at
some guards, injuring one. Tower guards shoot at the rioters, killing one and
injuring seven. Amnesty International identified the dead man as Ala'Jassem
Sa'ad, a 22-year-old Iraqi, and quoted eyewitnesses as saying he was inside his
tent when he was shot.

At this point, this appears to be a separate incident from the September 2003
shooting of a rock-throwing prisoner listed above, which was described by
separate sources.

_Camp Whitehorse, near Nasiriyah, Iraq, June 2003: Marine Corps Lance
Cpl. Christian Hernandez, a reservist, grabs detainee Nagem Sadoon Hatab, a
52-year-old former Baath Party official, by the neck, snapping a bone and
killing him.

Hernandez was trying to move Hatab. Investigators believed the death was
accidental. Hatab was left lying naked, covered in his own feces, for hours when
he was found dead at the detention facility near Nasiriyah.

Hernandez and his superior officer, Maj. Clark A. Paulus, also a reservist, were
charged with negligent homicide. Their commanding general dismissed those
charges in April.

Paulus, the detention camp's commanding officer, instead faces general
court-martial on a single charge of dereliction of duty, a charge of assault and
two charges of cruelty and maltreatment.

Sgt. Gary Pittman, who was accused of karate-kicking Hatab in the chest, faces
two charges of dereliction of duty and four of assault. Several other reservists
faced lesser charges in connection with the mistreatment of detainees.

_Iraq, March 29, 2003: A Marine shoots and kills an Iraqi prisoner who tried to
take the Marine's gun. Officials determine the Marine acted in self-defense and
the shooting was not investigated as a crime.

_Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, Dec. 10, 2002: Dilawar, 22, an Afghan taxi
driver, dies of "blunt force injuries" while in U.S. custody. This death -
classified as a homicide - remains under investigation.

_Bagram, Dec. 3, 2002: Mullah Habibullah, about 30, dies of "blunt force
injuries" while in U.S. custody. This death - classified as a homicide - remains
under investigation.

_Unknown location and time within U.S. Central Command region: A soldier shoots
and kills a fleeing prisoner. This is ruled as justified. This case was related
by Ryder, but details were unavailable. The lack of specifics mean it could be
the same death as one of the above cases.

Ryder also said 10 prisoner abuse investigations that did not result in deaths
are moving ahead. The Army's acting secretary, Les Brownlee, said Friday that an
additional 42 potential cases of misconduct against civilians occurred outside
detention facilities and are being investigated.

They did not detail any of the cases.

Among the abuse investigations previously made public are:

_Abu Ghraib, October-December 2003: Six enlisted soldiers with the 800th
Military Police Brigade face possible courts-martial over allegations of abuse
and sexual humiliation of prisoners. Several other soldiers, including some
senior officers, have been reprimanded or received administrative
punishment. Other investigations are under way, including one into the 205th
Military Intelligence Brigade, which oversaw the interrogation of many of the
prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

_Al-Taji, Iraq, Aug. 20, 2003: Army Lt. Col. Allen B. West, a battalion
commander in the 4th Infantry Division, strikes prisoner Yahya Jhodri Hamoodi
and threatens to kill him. He also fires a pistol near his head to scare him.

West is fined $5,000 and allowed to retire from the Army after pleading guilty
to three counts of aggravated assault and one count of communicating a threat.

_Camp Bucca, Iraq, May 12, 2003: Three Army reservists kicked prisoners and
encouraged others to do so, according to a finding by Brig. Gen. Ennis Whitehead
III. In January, the three reservists were discharged.

---

On the Net:

Taguba report: http://wid.ap.org/documents/iraq/taguba.pdf


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In Abuse, a Picture of G.I.'s Ill Prepared and Overwhelmed

May 9, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, May 8   The orders that sent most of the 320th Military Police
Battalion to Iraq came on Feb. 5, 2003, as part of the tide of two-week-a-year
soldiers being called up from the National Guard and the Army Reserve in
preparation for war.

In theory, the battalion's specialty was guarding enemy prisoners of war, a task
that was expected to be a major logistical problem. In fact, few of the 1,000
reservists of the 320th had been trained to do that, and fewer still knew how to
run a prison. They were deployed so quickly from the mid-Atlantic region that
there was no time to get new lessons.

"You're a person who works at McDonald's one day; the next day you're standing
in front of hundreds of prisoners, and half are saying they're sick and half are
saying they're hungry," remembered Sgt. First Class Paul Shaffer, 35, a
metalworker from Pennsylvania. "We were hit with so much so fast, I don't think
we were prepared."

The battalion --- including insurance agents, checkout clerks, sales people and
others --- ultimately would follow a grim trajectory into the episodes of
prisoner abuse that have shocked the nation. The soldiers found themselves in
charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq at a time when the increasing rage of the
anti-American insurgency, along with the desperation of American commanders to
glean intelligence, magnified the pressures on the unit. This account of the
troubled battalion is based on interviews with soldiers, their relatives,
military commanders and Army reports.

Within days of the American invasion of Iraq, the 320th was in Kuwait, and the
unit moved swiftly into southern Iraq, first to a prisoner of war camp overseen
by British troops and then to a sprawling barbed-wire American camp in the
desert. Known as Camp Bucca, the American camp was home to a legion of Iraqi
prisoners.

"We were supposed to be the experts on this, but all we knew is what we learned
in our summer camp," said Scott McKenzie, 38, of Clearwater, Pa., a sergeant
first class who has since been discharged from the service. "We never learned
how to deal with a riot, what to do when we were being assaulted."

On May 12, Mr. McKenzie, who worked in civilian life as a guard in a boot-camp
style detention center, was escorting some Iraqi prisoners at Camp Bucca when
just such a riot broke out, in what became the first incident of prisoner abuse
involving the unit. At least one detainee was held down while Mr. McKenzie and
two other soldiers badly beat and kicked him, according to testimony presented
in a court-martial. This was done at the urging of a superior, Master Sgt. Lisa
Girman, according to the testimony.

"We called it just another night in the desert," Mr. McKenzie recalled last
week. He insisted that he had used no more than "the minimum force necessary to
regain control of the prisoners" and that the event was "no big deal."

Mr. McKenzie, Ms. Girman and another soldier were found guilty of mistreating
Iraqi detainees, and they accepted a less-than-honorable discharge in a plea
bargain. A fourth soldier in the unit also was granted a less-than-honorable
discharge separately.

But the incident prompted no effort by the soldiers' commanders to make sure the
abuse was not repeated, according to an Army investigation by Maj. Gen. Antonio
M. Taguba into the maltreatment of prisoners. The inaction was a lapse in
leadership that reflected the eventual near total-breakdown of discipline in the
unit.

Many members of the 320th had expected their mission to wind down once Iraqi
prisoners were freed, after the declaration on May 1, 2003, that major combat
operations had ended. Instead, to their considerable disappointment, the
soldiers learned that they would be sent on to longer missions.

Some elements of the battalion were still coming in, including the 372nd
Military Police Company, based in Cresaptown, Md., which arrived in May 2003. At
first the 180-member company was assigned to work with marines in the southern
town of Hilla. With a specialty in law enforcement, the company was ordered to
help train a reconstituted Iraqi police force in Hilla.

Under Lt. Col. Jerry L. Phillabaum, most of the battalion was directed to a
different destination.

With the P.O.W. facilities at Camp Bucca, the Baghdad airport and other sites
still crowded, and the processing of prisoners taking time, the Army was looking
for more permanent detention quarters.

Just as the occupation authorities turned to Saddam Hussein's old palaces to
house the new Coalition Provisional Authority and other American headquarters
around the country, they chose as the new American prison Mr. Hussein's old one
at Abu Ghraib, even though it had a history of executions and torture that made
the prison one of the most feared symbols of the old government.

Mr. Hussein had emptied Abu Ghraib of its occupants in October 2002, in a
gesture aimed at winning popular support and possibly at stirring trouble for
any American occupation. As late as June 2003, its gates were still adorned with
his portrait.

Once the Army decided to reopen the 280-acre site, it did so swiftly, renovating
cells, painting the walls and sweeping up broken glass and other debris left
from months of looting.

In July, much of the 320th Battalion was sent to Abu Ghraib. The reservists were
turned into wardens of what was to become the world's largest prison run by the
United States Army.

The New Wardens: A Rebellion Begins, And a Prison Reopens

At the outset of the American occupation, Abu Ghraib held only about 2,000 Iraqi
prisoners, most housed in tents erected under the scorching summer sun outside
the prison itself.

The inmate population grew quickly, as prisoners arrested after the war emerged
as a far bigger challenge than those taken in the war.

"We were real short-handed," said Sergeant Shaffer, the metal worker from
Pennsylvania, who described cases in which no more than six guards on a single
shift would be in charge of 700 Iraqi prisoners. "On my compound, we were doing
16-hour days. It was a very high-stress environment."

There were also clear clashes of culture, as soldiers who had little knowledge
of the Middle East found themselves frustrated by the poor conditions, the
prospect of a yearlong deployment and a lack of compliance among the Iraqi
prisoners.

"They don't want to listen," Sergeant Shaffer said. "We'd say we want you to
line up at 9 o'clock; they'd say, `If you want us to line up at 9 o'clock, we
want something in return.' It doesn't work that way."

Among the prison's new inmates, many were criminals, some of the same ones freed
by Mr. Hussein. When they joined in the looting, lawlessness and other crimes,
the Americans rearrested them.

But a more worrisome category of prisoners emerged from the widening insurgency
in Iraq, as played out in the shootings, bombings and other attacks against
American soldiers. More and more of those prisoners were filling the makeshift
jails.

In addition to Abu Ghraib, they included Camp Bucca in the south; Camp Cropper,
a high-value prisoner center near the Baghdad airport; and Camp Ashraf, a former
camp for the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen Khalq, which was being used to
detain its members. The facilities were overseen by the 800th Military Police
Brigade, with headquarters in Uniondale, N.Y., the 320th Battalion and the much
smaller 372nd Military Police Company from Maryland.

Various Army divisions and other military units also maintained detention
facilities around the country where they could hold prisoners for as long as 14
days before transferring them to other sites.

At Abu Ghraib, the prison was divided into three main subcamps. One, Camp Ganci,
consisted of eight blocks of tents, each sealed off with razor wire and
containing about 400 inmates in rows and rows of Army-issue canvas tents. Each
tent held 25 inmates or more.

Camp Vigilant, another tent camp, was divided into four units with about 100
inmates each and was set aside for prisoners believed to have the most
intelligence value.

Finally, there was the "hard site," the old prison itself, divided into seven
blocks. Eventually, six were run by the Coalition Provisional Authority, for the
detention of Iraqi prisoners to be tried in Iraqi courts. The seventh cellblock
under American control, was divided into two parts, 1-A, set aside for "high
risk" prisoners, and 1-B, on the second floor, for female prisoners.

Together, the two parts had 103 cells, running down each wall, with a long
corridor down the middle. Each cell --- about 6 by 10 feet --- had a bunk bed
and a hole in the floor for a toilet. The cells were designed to hold 206
people.

From the initial 2,000 prisoners, the population skyrocketed toward 7,000
prisoners by September as thousands more "security detainees" were rounded up by
soldiers on suspicion of involvement in attacks on American troops.

In Baghdad, a three-person team headed by Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top
American intelligence officer in Iraq, was in charge of reviewing the status of
the security detainees as a prelude to their release. But far more Iraqis were
being arrested than freed; the average stay in the prison was approaching four
to six months. The 320th Battalion was stretched thin; working in temperatures
that regularly exceeded 120 degrees only added to the strain.

Meanwhile, security conditions around the prison were worsening, with small-arms
fire, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar fire coming into the compound almost
every night. Colonel Phillabaum, the battalion commander, said that he and other
officers dubbed the neighborhood around the prison "Little Mogadishu," after the
Somali capital that in 1993 become a death trap for American soldiers. "The
people just hated us," he said.

A Troubled Unit: Overcrowding And Prison Riots

By late in the summer of 2003, concerns about overcrowding, disciplinary
problems and disturbances at American-run prisons in Iraq had reached the
highest level of the military's headquarters in Baghdad. At Abu Ghraib in June,
a riot broke out and eight detainees were shot, leaving one dead. Similar
incidents occurred elsewhere.

But even more concern was focused on the mounting insurgency, and how little
American intelligence had been gathered about it, even though thousands of
Iraqis had been taken into custody.

Mr. Hussein's two sons, Uday and Qusay, were dead, killed by American soldiers
in July, but the former Iraqi leader was still on the run. Major bombings in
August of the United Nations headquarters and at other sites added to the level
of anxiety.

While military police were in charge of American prisons in Iraq, military
intelligence units were in charge of interrogations. But changes were in the
works.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, a business consultant and longtime reservist who had
arrived in Iraq in late June to take over the 800th Military Police
Brigade. "The numbers were increasing at rapid rates," she recalled in one of
several television interviews this week.

"They were tagged as security detainees and they could not simply be released,"
she said. "They had to be interrogated, held, reviewed, and then ultimately
released. I know that the interrogation, the interrogators, were under
tremendous pressure."

In mid-August, a team of civilian interrogators led by Steven Stefanowicz, a
former Navy petty officer and an employee of a Virginia company called CACI,
began work at Abu Ghraib under a classified one-year military contract. The
contract was part of a broader effort by the military to enlist Arabic linguists
and other civilians in the work of questioning Iraqi detainees. CACI sent 27
interrogators to Abu Ghraib, Pentagon officials have said. Their job was to
conduct interrogations in conjunction with military police and military
intelligence units, according to a company memorandum.

Later that month, at the behest of senior Pentagon officials, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey
D. Miller, the two-star Army general overseeing the American detention center at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was dispatched to Iraq. He was to review the American-led
effort "to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence," according to
the Army report by General Taguba.

Among General Miller's classified recommendations, submitted after a tour that
ended Sept. 9, were that the guards at Abu Ghraib and other facilities "be
actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the
internees," according to General Taguba's report.

At the end of September, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top American officer
in Iraq, sent his inspector general to Abu Ghraib. According to Colonel
Phillabaum, the visiting officer told him, "You guys are the forgotten."

Isolated and without amenities like gyms and barbershops that were available to
other troops in Iraq, morale in the 320th plummeted. Many reservists who had
been sent home when their tours were complete had not been replaced, adding to
the burden of the remaining guards even as the number of prisoners continued to
rise.

Army doctrine calls for a military police brigade to handle about 4,000
prisoners. But a single battalion --- about a third the size of a brigade ---
was handling 6,000 to 7,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib. When battalion commanders
sought to release hundreds of detainees deemed to be no threat to allied forces,
they were blocked from doing so by officers in Baghdad, they have complained.

At the end of October, Colonel Phillabaum briefed General Sanchez on the
deteriorating, dysfunctional conditions at Abu Ghraib. "It was a real
heart-to-heart," Colonel Phillabaum said in an interview. "I told it the way it
was."

Rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire were "a constant threat," General
Karpinski said.

"Abu Ghraib was in the middle of a hostile fire zone," she said, adding that the
unit was "mortared every night, practically." Within days of the briefing to
General Sanchez, General Karpinski sent Colonel Phillabaum to Kuwait for two
weeks "to give him some relief from the pressure" at the camp, General Taguba's
inquiry found.

Colonel Phillabaum contends that General Karpinski was angry because his
briefing reflected poorly on her command, so she began a process to reassign him
to her headquarters. Colonel Phillabaum, however, returned to his post.

According to General Taguba, Colonel Phillabaum and his chain of command were
part of the problem, rarely supervising their troops and failing to set basic
soldiering standards for them or make them aware of the protections afforded to
prisoners under the Geneva Conventions.

"Despite his proven deficiencies, as both a commander and leader," General
Taguba concluded, General Karpinski allowed Colonel Phillabaum "to remain in
command of her most troubled battalion guarding, by far, the largest number of
detainees in the 800th M.P. Brigade."

In October 2003, the 372nd Military Police Company joined Colonel Phillabaum's
battalion at Abu Ghraib.

In Hilla, they had seen little combat; in Abu Ghraib the soldiers suddenly found
themselves under attack virtually every night from insurgents outside the
prison.

In Hilla, the 372nd had been focusing on law enforcement. Staff Sgt. Ivan
L. Frederick, one of the soldiers from western Maryland, for one, had spent six
months working in operations, "manning radio's, mission board etc.," according
to a journal entry he made on Jan. 24.

In Abu Ghraib, however, unit members were assigned as prison guards, with
responsibilities that included the so-called Tier 1 cellblock of the prison.

A few weeks later, on Nov. 19, 2003, General Sanchez made a surprising decision:
he transferred formal command of Abu Ghraib to the 205th Military Intelligence
Brigade under Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, a 32-year military veteran whose unit,
based in Wiesbaden, Germany, had been assigned to the prison as the chief
interrogators since it opened.

Working with Colonel Pappas was Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, who headed the Joint
Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the prison.

General Karpinski, Colonel Phillabaum and the military police in the battalion
contend that the military intelligence officers had, even before Nov. 19,
essentially taken control of the prisoners in the Tier 1 cellblock and had
encouraged their mistreatment. General Taguba concluded that the 372nd "was
directed to change facility procedures to `set the conditions' " for
interrogations.

"It was like they were in charge now; it's a military intelligence unit now,"
said a member of the 32Oth Battalion, Sgt. John Lamela, of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

The intelligence officers' practice of wearing uniforms without insignia made it
difficult for soldiers to identify the officers or even to determine which of
them were military and which belonged to other agencies, including the C.I.A.,
whose officers periodically visited Abu Ghraib prison to participate in
interrogations.

"They were in charge; it was almost like whatever his battalion wanted, his
battalion got," Sergeant Lamela said of one senior intelligence officer at the
prison. "He moved people out of their units so his personnel could live in their
units. His personnel could walk around without proper uniforms; we as M.P.'s
were not to correct them; he would say, `Let it slide.' "

Sgt. First Class Joseph Mood of Benton, Pa., had a similar view of the
intelligence officers' influence. "They took over the whole base; it was their
show," he said. "That was their wording. `This is our show now.' They would try
to get us to keep prisoners up all night, make them stand outside, have them
stand up all the time --- sometimes they asked the guards to do something that
was totally against what you believed in doing."

An Open Secret: Reports of Abuse Trickle Out

During the summer and fall human rights groups in Iraq say they heard repeated
complaints of prisoners being roughed up or abused by their American
jailers. Those were not the only breakdowns of discipline in that period.

On three days, Nov. 5, 7 and 8, detainees escaped from the prison and Camp
Ganci, according to the results of military investigations that have been made
public. Then, in what appears to have been the worst of the incidents, a riot
broke out on Nov. 24 in Camp Ganci in which 12 detainees were shot, and 3 of
them killed, after members of the military police battalion opened fire. For
reasons that have not been explained, nonlethal and lethal rounds were mixed in
their chambers, according to the investigation.

Also at Abu Ghraib that month, an Iraqi detainee died as he was being questioned
by a C.I.A. officer and a linguist who was working as a contract employee with
the agency, in an investigation still under review by the agency's inspector
general. Through December and January, there were more shootings, riots and
escapes.

The worst abuses at Abu Ghraib took place on or around Nov. 8, according to the
details of the military investigation made public so far, and principally in
Cellblock 1-A, the group of cells set aside for high risk prisoners.

It was largely in that cellblock that some guards from the 372nd are accused of
committing abuses that General Taguba called "sadistic, blatant and wanton"
criminal acts. Prisoners were punched, slapped and kicked and forced to strip
naked and form human pyramids. Some were ordered to simulate sexual acts. In
some of the photographs of the abuse that have surfaced in recent days, the
M.P.'s are grinning.

Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. is shown with his arms folded as he stands
behind a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners; an unidentified Iraqi prisoner is seen
hooded and standing on a small box, with wires attached to his body; and
Pfc. Lynndie England is seen glaring down at a naked Iraqi prisoner, whom she is
holding by a leash.

So far, seven enlisted soldiers from the western Maryland company face criminal
charges, all from the incidents in Tier 1. But several inquiries are still under
way, and the question of who was primarily responsible has still not been
answered.

The report by General Taguba, though limited to the conduct of the military
police, said that the general suspected much of the fault, either directly or
indirectly, should be attributed to military intelligence units under Colonel
Pappas and Colonel Jordan. Through a spokesman, Colonel Pappas declined to
comment, and Army officials would not even say which unit Colonel Jordan is
currently assigned to. General Tabuga also blamed Mr. Stefanowicz and another
contractor, John Israel, neither of whom could be reached for comment.

General Taguba's inquiry also criticized commanders, including Colonel
Phillabaum, for failing to supervise his troops and allowing a climate of abuse
to take hold.

Colonel Phillabaum said he felt he was being made a scapegoat for the Army. "I
have suffered shame and humiliation for doing the best job that anyone could
have done given the resources I had to work with," he said.

Colonel Phillabaum pinned the bulk of the blame on two of of the 372nd's
soldiers, Sergeant Frederick and Specialist Graner, who are both corrections
officers in civilian life. Neither of the two have spoken publicly about the
episode.

"These two people were really the ringleaders of this whole thing," Colonel
Phillabaum said. "Everybody else followed."

They were the natural leaders in the military police company, he said, since
they spoke of their work experiences.

"Taking these prisoners out of their cells and staging bizarre acts were the
thoughts of a couple of demented M.P.'s who in civilian life are prison
correction officers who well know such acts are prohibited," Colonel Phillabaum
said.

He said the abuses that were photographed only occurred between 2 a.m. and 4
a.m., times that Sergeant Frederick and Specialist Graner knew no commissioned
officers would be checking in. He said the digital photos are all time-coded,
and they are all taken over a couple of weeks in this brief window.

"If they thought these acts were condoned, then why were they only done a few
nights between 0200 and 0400 instead of during any time between 0600 and 2400
when there were many others around?" Colonel Phillabaum asked.

Sergeant Frederick's uncle, William Lawson, said his nephew had told him the
soldiers were photographing the Iraqi prisoners at the direction of military
intelligence officers as an interrogation tool.

"Somebody photographed the Iraqis with the intent of using those photographs to
show new prisoners that came in, `This is what can happen to you,' to loosen
them up psychologically," Mr. Lawson said.

In a letter to his family last year, Sergeant Frederick wrote that military
intelligence officers encouraged mistreatment like confining naked inmates for
three consecutive days without toilets in damp, unventilated cells with floors 3
feet by 3 feet. Inmates were also handcuffed to cell doors and forced to wear
female underpants.

"We have a very high rate with our style of getting them to break," Sergeant
Frederick wrote to a relative, Mimi Frederick, in an e-mail message on Dec. 18,
2003, according to a copy of the communication. "They usually end up breaking
within hours."

General Karpinski has also said that she believed the military police were
"coached" in their abusive actions by military intelligence officers. Neal
Puckett, General Karpinski's lawyer, said the military police "took all their
instructions from military intelligence interrogators, who instructed them to
bring the prisoners to and away from these interrogation facilities, and
sometimes perhaps to soften them up."

He suggested that the interrogators had instructed the guards to "bring them
back naked this time, leave them naked tonight, don't give them any clothes. We
think that escalated over a period of time until it ended up in what we see in
the pictures."

General Karpinski has complained that the initial investigation ordered by
General Sanchez was limited to the conduct of her military police brigade and
did not examine in any detail the role played by military intelligence and
private contractors.

Not until General Sanchez received a preliminary briefing on General Taguba's
findings on March 12, which identified the intelligence officers and contractors
as having possibly been primarily to blame, did he order a similar review of any
wrongdoing by military intelligence officers at the prison. For reasons that
remain unclear, that inquiry did not begin until April 23.

"I'd like to know who was the one that was giving instructions to the military
intelligence personnel to turn up the heat?" General Karpinski asked.

Nearly a year ago, when her troops assumed their prison duty at Abu Ghraib, the
Army made a promise. When it reopened Abu Ghraib last June, soldiers hung a sign
at the gate that proclaimed: "America is a friend of all the Iraqi people."

Thom Shanker in Washington, Kate Zernike and Michael Moss in New York, Dexter
Filkins and Ian Fisher in Baghdad and Patrick E. Tyler in Wiesbaden, Germany,
contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


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Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S.

May 8, 2004
By FOX BUTTERFIELD

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in
Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern,
according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front
of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their
prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made
to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation.

At Virginia's Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have reported
being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on
guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to
crawl.

The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in
Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time
President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against
inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the
decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and
sell other inmates as slaves for sex.

The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu
Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under
pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an
inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who
suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison
company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department
when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges,
prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to
rebuild the country's criminal justice system.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training
Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison
company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe
jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of
Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No
further action was taken.

In response to a request for an interview on Friday, Mr. McCotter said in a
written statement that he had left Iraq last September, just after a
ribbon-cutting ceremony to open Abu Ghraib.

"I was not involved in any aspect of the facility's operation after that time,"
he said.

Nationwide, during the last quarter century, over 40 state prison systems were
under some form of court order, for brutality, crowding, poor food or lack of
medical care, said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a
research and advocacy group in Washington that calls for alternatives to
incarceration.

In a 1999 opinion, Judge Justice wrote of the situation in Texas, "Many inmates
credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the
prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions."

In a case that began in 2000, a prisoner at the Allred Unit in Wichita Falls,
Tex., said he was repeatedly raped by other inmates, even after he appealed to
guards for help, and was allowed by prison staff to be treated like a slave,
being bought and sold by various prison gangs in different parts of the
prison. The inmate, Roderick Johnson, has filed suit against the Texas
Department of Criminal Justice and the case is now before the United States
Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said Kara Gotsch, public
policy coordinator for the National Prison Project of the American Civil
Liberties Union, which is representing Mr. Johnson.

Asked what Mr. Bush knew about abuse in Texas prisons while he was governor,
Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said the problems in American prisons were
not comparable to the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib.

The corrections experts are careful to say they do not know to what extent the
brutality and humiliation at Abu Ghraib were intended to break the prisoners for
interrogation or were just random acts.

But Chase Riveland, a former secretary of corrections in Washington State and
Colorado and now a prison consultant based near Seattle, said, "In some
jurisdictions in the United States there is a prison culture that tolerates
violence, and it's been there a long time."

This culture has been made worse by the quadrupling of the number of prison and
jail inmates to 2.1 million over the last 25 years, which has often resulted in
crowding, he said. The problems have been compounded by the need to hire large
numbers of inexperienced and often undertrained guards, Mr. Riveland said.

Some states have a hard time recruiting enough guards, Mr. Riveland said,
particularly Arizona, where the pay is very low. "Retention in these states is a
big problem and so unqualified people get promoted to be lieutenants or captains
in a few months," he said.

Something like this process may have happened in Iraq, where the Americans tried
to start a new prison system with undertrained military police officers from
Army reserve units, Mr. Riveland suggested.

When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to restore Iraq's
criminal justice system last year, including Mr. McCotter, he said, "Now all
Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that
freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice
system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Monica Goodling, did not return phone calls on
Friday asking why Mr. Ashcroft had chosen Mr. McCotter even though his firm's
operation of the Santa Fe jail had been criticized by the Justice Department.

Mr. McCotter has a long background in prisons. He had been a military police
officer in Vietnam and had risen to be a colonel in the Army. His last post was
as warden of the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth.

After retiring from the Army, Mr. Cotter was head of the corrections departments
in New Mexico and Texas before taking the job in Utah.

In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally ill inmate, Mr. McCotter also
came under criticism for hiring a prison psychiatrist whose medical license was
on probation and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and writing prescriptions for
drug addicts.

In an interview with an online magazine, Corrections.com, last January,
Mr. McCotter recalled that of all the prisons in Iraq, Abu Ghraib "is the only
place we agreed as a team was truly closest to an American prison. They had cell
housing and segregation."

But 80 to 90 percent of the prison had been destroyed, so Mr. McCotter set about
rebuilding it, everything from walls and toilets to handcuffs and soap. He
employed 100 Iraqis who had worked in the prison under Saddam Hussein, and paid
for everything with wads of cash, up to $3 million, that he carried with him.

Another problem, Mr. McCotter quickly discovered, was that the Iraqi staff,
despite some American training, quickly reverted to their old ways, "shaking
down families, shaking down inmates, letting prisoners buy their way out of
prison."

So the American team fired the guards and went with former Iraqi military
personnel. "They didn't have any bad habits and did things exactly the way we
trained them."

Mr. McCotter said he worked closely with American military police officers at
the prison, but he did not give any names.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


------------------------------------------------------------------


Harsh questioning methods were OK'd for Cuba prison

By and Joe Stephens, Washington Post  |  May 9, 2004

WASHINGTON -- In April 2003, the Defense Department approved a list of
interrogation techniques for use at the Guantanamo Bay prison that permits
making a detainee disrobe entirely for questioning, reversing normal sleep
patterns, and exposing them to heat, cold, and ''sensory assault," including
loud music and bright lights, according to defense officials.

The classified list of about 20 techniques was approved at the highest levels of
the Pentagon and Justice Department and represents the first known documentation
of an official US policy permitting interrogators to use physically and
psychologically stressful methods during questioning.

Use of these techniques requires approval from senior Pentagon officials, and in
some cases, the defense secretary. Interrogators must justify that the harshest
treatment is ''militarily necessary," according to the document, parts of which
were cited by an official who possessed the document. Once approved, harsher
treatment must be accompanied by ''appropriate medical monitoring."

''We wanted to find a legal way to jack up the pressure," said one lawyer who
helped write the guidelines. ''We wanted a little more freedom than in a US
prison, but not torture."

Defense and intelligence officials said similiar guidelines have been approved
for use on ''high-value detainees" in Iraq, those suspected of terrorism or of
having knowledge of insurgency operations, and for prisoners detained in CIA-run
detention centers.

It could not be learned whether similar guidelines were in effect at the Abu
Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, which has been the focus of controversy in recent
days. Lawmakers have said they want to know whether the misconduct reported at
Abu Ghraib, which included sexual humiliation, was an aberration or whether it
reflected an aggressive policy taken to inhumane extremes.

A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment for the record. Several officials
interviewed for this article, including two lawyers who helped form the
guidelines, declined to be identified because the subject matter is sensitive.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the US military and CIA have detained
thousands of foreign nationals at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, facilities in
Iraq, and elsewhere as part of an effort to crack down on suspected terrorists
and quell the insurgency in Iraq. The Pentagon guidelines for Guantanamo Bay
were designed to give interrogators the authority to get uncooperative detainees
to provide information, though information gained under such conditions is often
unreliable.

The United States has stated publicly that it does not engage in torture or
cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. Defense officials said yesterday that
the techniques on the list were consistent with international law and contained
appropriate safeguards, such as legal and medical monitoring.

''The high-level approval is done with forethought by people in responsibility,
and layers removed from the people actually doing these things, so you can have
an objective approach," said one senior defense official familiar with the
guidelines.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said the tactics
outlined in the US document amount to cruel and imhumane treatment. ''The courts
have ruled most of these techniques illegal," he said. ''If it's illegal here
under the US Constitution, it's illegal abroad. . . . This isn't even close."

Some prisoners could be made to stand for four hours at a time. Questioning a
prisoner without clothes was permitted if he were alone in his cell. Ruled out
were such techniques as physical contact -- even poking a finger in the chest --
and the ''washboard technique" of smothering a detainee with towels to threaten
suffocation. Placing electrodes on detainees' body ''wasn't even evaluated, it
was such a no-go," said one of the officials involved in the drawing up the
list.

During the Pentagon debates, one participant drew on his memory of a scene from
the movie, ''The Untouchables," in which a police officer played by actor Sean
Connery bent the rules to persuade mobsters that they should provide evidence
against Mafia kingpin Al Capone. Much like the officer, the participant
suggested, interrogators could shoot a corpse in front of a detainee and suggest
to him that's what they did to people who refused to talk.

Pentagon lawyers declared the technique out of bounds, and it was discarded.


------------------------------------------------------------------


Power turns good soldiers into 'bad apples'

By Philip G. Zimbardo  |  May 9, 2004

THE HORRIFYING PHOTOS of young Iraqis abused by American soldiers have shocked
the world with their depictions of human degradation, forcing us to acknowledge
that some of our beloved soldiers have committed barbarous acts of cruelty and
sadism. Now there is a rush to analyze human behavior, blaming flawed or
pathological individuals for evil and ignoring other important factors. Unless
we learn the dynamics of "why," we will never be able to counteract the powerful
forces that can transform ordinary people into evil perpetrators.

Those responsible should suffer severe sanctions if found guilty. However, we
must separate guilt from blame. Should these few Army reservists be blamed as
the "bad apples" in a good barrel of American soldiers, as our leaders have
characterized them? Or are they the once-good apples soured and corrupted by an
evil barrel? I argue for the latter perspective after having studied the
psychology of evil for many decades. In fact, I have been responsible for
constructing evil barrels that produced many bad apples.

Like Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the Iraqi prison at
Abu Ghraib, I was once a prison superintendent with no experience or training in
corrections. In 1971 I was in charge of the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which
randomly assigned student volunteers in a simulated prison role-played prisoners
and guards. Although everyone knew it was just an experiment, the line between
simulation and reality was breached as it became a psychological prison of
incredible intensity.

The planned two-week study was terminated after only six days because it was out
of control. Good boys chosen for their normalcy were having emotional breakdowns
as powerless prisoners. Other young men chosen for their mental health and
positive values eased into the character of sadistic guards inflicting suffering
on their fellow students without moral compunction. And those "good guards" who
did not personally debase the prisoners failed to confront the worst of their
comrades, allowing evil to ripen without challenge.

The terrible things my guards did to their prisoners were comparable to the
horrors inflicted on the Iraqi detainees. My guards repeatedly stripped their
prisoners naked, hooded them, chained them, denied them food or bedding
privileges, put them into solitary confinement, and made them clean toilet bowls
with their bare hands.

As the boredom of their job increased, they began using the prisoners as their
playthings, devising ever more humiliating and degrading games for them to
play. Over time, these amusements took a sexual turn, such as having the
prisoners simulate sodomy on each other. Once aware of such deviant behavior, I
closed down the Stanford prison.

Human behavior is much more under the control of situational forces than most of
us recognize or want to acknowledge. In a situation that implicitly gives
permission for suspending moral values, many of us can be morphed into creatures
alien to our usual natures. My research and that of my colleagues has catalogued
the conditions for stirring the crucible of human nature in negative
directions. Some of the necessary ingredients are: diffusion of responsibility,
anonymity, dehumanization, peers who model harmful behavior, bystanders who do
not intervene, and a setting of power differentials.

Those factors were apparently also operating in Iraq. But in addition there was
secrecy, no accountability, no visible chain of command, conflicting demands on
the guards from the CIA and civilian interrogators, no rules enforced for
prohibited acts, encouragement for breaking the will of the detainees, and no
challenges by many bystanders who observed the evil but did not blow the
whistle.

We must learn from this tragic event so it is never repeated. And we must not
permit the authorities to deflect the blame and responsibility from themselves
by pointing fingers at those soldiers who went into the administration's
preemptive war as proud Americans and return now as disgraced prison guards.

The arrogance of power that spawned the "shock and awe" of military might one
short year ago has been humbled by the dismay and disgust over these revelations
of abuse. It is time for all Americans to reflect on the justification for
continuing the war in Iraq that is killing, maiming, and demeaning our young men
and women who have been put in harm's way for spurious reasons. Before more of
our youth are corrupted, perhaps the time has come to empty out the vinegar of
needless war that has filled that evil barrel.

Philip G. Zimbardo is emeritus professor of psychology at Stanford University.


----------------------------------------------------------------


Red Cross Report Describes Abuse in Iraq

May 10, 1:02 PM (ET)
By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS

GENEVA (AP) - A Red Cross report disclosed Monday said coalition intelligence
officers estimated that 70-90 percent of Iraqi detainees were arrested by
mistake and said Red Cross observers witnessed U.S. officers mistreating Abu
Ghraib prisoners by keeping them naked in total darkness in empty cells.

The report by the International Committee of the Red Cross supports its
allegations that abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers was broad and
"not individual acts" - contrary to President Bush's contention that the
mistreatment "was the wrongdoing of a few."

The report said "high-value detainees" were singled out for special
mistreatment. The report did not specify them, but The Associated Press has
learned they included some of the 55 top officials in Saddam Hussein's regime
who were named in a deck of cards given to troops.

"Since June 2003, over 100 'high-value detainees' have been held for nearly 23
hours a day in strict solitary confinement in small concrete cells devoid of
daylight," the report said.

"ICRC delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to
secure the cooperation of the persons deprived of their liberty with their
interrogators," according to the confidential report.

The delegates saw in October how detainees at Abu Ghraib were kept "completely
naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness," the report said.

"Upon witnessing such cases, the ICRC interrupted its visits and requested an
explanation from the authorities," the report said. "The military intelligence
officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was 'part of
the process.'"

This apparently meant that detainees were progressively given clothing, bedding,
lighting and other items in exchange for cooperation, it said.

It said it found evidence supporting prisoners' allegations of other forms of
abuse during arrest, initial detention and interrogation.

Among the evidence were burns, bruises and other injuries consistent with the
abuse that prisoners alleged, it said.

The 24-page document, confirmed by the ICRC as authentic after it was published
Monday by the Wall Street Journal, said the abuses were primarily during the
interrogation stage by military intelligence.

Once the detainees were moved to regular prison facilities, the abuses typically
stopped, it said.

The report cites abuses - some "tantamount to torture" - including brutality,
hooding, humiliation and threats of "imminent execution."

"These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military
intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information and
other forms of cooperation from person who had been arrested in connection with
suspected security offenses or deemed to have an 'intelligence value.'"

The agency said arrests allegedly tended to follow a pattern.

"Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors,
waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one
room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further
breaking doors, cabinets and other property," the report said.

"Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly,
handicapped or sick people," it said. "Treatment often included pushing people
around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking
with rifles."

It said some coalition military intelligence officers estimated "between 70
percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been
arrested by mistake. They also attributed the brutality of some arrests to the
lack of proper supervision of battle group units."

Pierre Kraehenbuehl, ICRC director of operations, said Friday the report had
been given to U.S. officials in February, but it only summarized what the agency
had been telling U.S. officials in detail between March and November 2003
"either in direct face-to-face conversations or in written interventions."

Kraehenbuehl said the abuse of prisoners represented more than isolated acts,
and that the problems were not limited to Abu Ghraib.

"We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a
pattern and a system," he said, declining to give further details.

The report described how male prisoners were forced to parade around in women's
underwear.

It said that information obtained "suggested the use of ill-treatment against
persons deprived of their liberty went beyond exceptional cases and might be
considered a practice tolerated by" coalition forces.

Kraehenbuehl said the ICRC regretted the publication and said it would have
preferred sticking to its policy of confidential discussions with coalition
authorities because the United States had been making progress toward meeting
its demands.

ICRC chief spokeswoman Antonella Notari declined to discuss the full report.


--------------------------------------------------------------


Torture at Abu Ghraib followed CIA's manual

By Alfred W. McCoy  |  May 14, 2004

THE PHOTOS from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are snapshots not of simple brutality
or a breakdown in discipline but of CIA torture techniques that have
metastasized over the past 50 years like an undetected cancer inside the US
intelligence community. From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led secret research into
coercion and consciousness that reached a billion dollars at peak. After
experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shocks, and sensory deprivation,
this CIA research produced a new method of torture that was psychological, not
physical -- best described as "no touch" torture.

The CIA's discovery of psychological torture was a counterintuitive breakthrough
-- indeed, the first real revolution in this cruel science since the 17th
century. The old physical approach required interrogators to inflict pain,
usually by crude beatings that often produced heightened resistance or
unreliable information. Under the CIA's new psychological paradigm, however,
interrogators used two essential methods to achieve their goals.

In the first stage, interrogators employ the simple, nonviolent techniques of
hooding or sleep deprivation to disorient the subject; sometimes sexual
humiliation is used as well.

Once the subject is disoriented, interrogators move on to a second stage with
simple, self-inflicted discomfort such as standing for hours with arms
extended. In this phase, the idea is to make victims feel responsible for their
own pain and thus induce them to alleviate it by capitulating to the
interrogator's power. In his statement on reforms at Abu Ghraib last week,
General Geoffrey Miller, former chief of the Guantanamo detention center and now
prison commander in Iraq, offered an unwitting summary of this two-phase
torture. "We will no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the detainees,"
the general said. "We will no longer use stress positions in any of our
interrogations. And we will no longer use sleep deprivation in any of our
interrogations."

Although seemingly less brutal, no-touch torture leaves deep psychological
scars. The victims often need long treatment to recover from trauma far more
crippling than physical pain. The perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion
of ego, leading to cruelty and lasting emotional problems.

After codification in the CIA's "Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation"
manual in 1963, the new method was disseminated globally to police in Asia and
Latin America through USAID's Office of Public Safety. Following allegations of
torture by USAID's police trainees in Brazil, the US Senate closed down the
office in 1975.

After it was abolished, the agency continued to disseminate its torture methods
through the US Army's Mobile Training Teams, which were active in Central
America during the 1980s. In 1997, the Baltimore Sun published chilling extracts
of the "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual" that had been distributed
to allied militaries for 20 years. In the 10 years between the last known use of
these manuals in the early 1990s and the arrest of Al Qaeda suspects since
September 2001, torture was maintained as a US intelligence practice by
delivering suspects to foreign agencies, including the Philippine National
Police, who broke a bomb plot in 1995.

Once the war on terror started, however, the US use of no-touch torture resumed,
first surfacing at Bagram Air Base near Kabul in early 2002, where Pentagon
investigators found two Afghans had died during interrogation. In reports from
Iraq, the methods are strikingly similar to those detailed in the Kubark manual.

Following the CIA's two-part technique, last September General Miller instructed
US military police at Abu Ghraib to soften up high-priority detainees in the
initial disorientation phase for later "successful interrogation and
exploitation" by CIA and military intelligence. As often happens in no-touch
torture sessions, this process soon moved beyond sleep and sensory deprivation
to sexual humiliation. The question, in the second, still unexamined phase, is
whether US Army intelligence and CIA operatives administered the prescribed mix
of interrogation and self-inflicted pain -- but outside the frame of these
photographs. If so, the soldiers now facing courts-martial would have been
following standard interrogation procedure.

For more than 50 years, the CIA's no-touch methods have become so widely
accepted that US interrogators seem unaware that they are, in fact, engaged in
systematic torture. But now, through these photographs from Abu Ghraib, we can
see the reality of these techniques. We have a chance to join fully with the
international community in repudiating a practice that, more than any other,
represents a denial of democracy.

Alfred W. McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is
the author of "Closer Than Brothers," a study of the impact of torture upon the
Philippine armed forces.

Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.


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Abuse Scandal Focuses on Bush Foundation

May 16, 5:00 PM (ET)
By PETE YOST

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Iraq prisoner abuse scandal shifted Sunday to the question
of whether the Bush administration set up a legal foundation that opened the
door for the mistreatment.

Within months of the Sept. 11 attacks, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales
reportedly wrote President Bush a memo about the terrorism fight and prisoners'
rights under the Geneva Conventions.

"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations
on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions,"
Gonzales wrote, according to the report in Newsweek magazine. Secretary of State
Colin Powell "hit the roof" when he read the memo, according to the account.

The White House did not immediately comment Sunday.

The roots of the scandal lay in a decision, approved last year by Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a classified operation for aggressive
interrogations to Iraqi prisoners, a program that had been focused on the hunt
for al-Qaida, The New Yorker magazine reported.

The Pentagon said that story was "filled with error and anonymous conjecture"
and called it "outlandish, conspiratorial." National security adviser
Condoleezza Rice, in a German television interview, said of The New Yorker
report, "As far as we can tell, there's really nothing to the story."

Powell said Sunday that there were discussions at high levels inside the Bush
administration last fall about information from the International Committee of
the Red Cross alleging prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the focal point of
the scandal.

"We knew that the ICRC had concerns, and in accordance with the matter in which
the ICRC does its work, it presented those concerns directly to the command in
Baghdad," Powell said on "Fox News Sunday.""And I know that some corrective
action was taken with respect to those concerns."

Powell added, "All of the reports we received from ICRC having to do with the
situation in Guantanamo, the situation in Afghanistan or the situation in Iraq
was the subject of discussion within the administration, at our principals'
committee meetings" and at National Security Council meetings.

Congressional critics suggested the administration may have unwisely imported to
Iraq techniques from the war on al-Qaida.

"There is a sort of morphing of the rules of treatment," said Sen. Joe Biden,
D-Del. "We can treat al-Qaida this way, and we can't treat prisoners captured
this way, but where do insurgents fit? This is a dangerous slope."

The abuse scandal goes "much higher" than the young American guards watching
over Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Biden said on NBC's "Meet
the Press."

In early 2002, the White House announced that Taliban and al-Qaida detainees
would not be afforded prisoner-of-war status, but that the United States would
apply the Geneva Conventions to the war in Afghanistan.

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services
Committee, said the reports that Rumsfeld approved a secret program on
interrogation for use in Iraq raise "this issue to a whole new level."

Asked about the Gonzales memo, Powell said: "I wouldn't comment on the specific
memo without rereading it again. But ... the Geneva Accord is an important
standard in international law and we have to comply with it."

Powell, interviewed from Jordan by NBC, left open the possibility of problems up
the line from the prison guards who engaged in abuse. "I don't see yet any
indication that there was a command-climate problem higher up," the secretary
said.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., expressed concern over the shift in responsibility
for the scandal at the prison, where military intelligence personnel were given
authority over the military police.

"We need to take this as far up as it goes," said McCain.

Former CIA counterterrorism official Vincent Cannistraro said it was a major
miscalculation to apply interrogation methods that were specifically designed to
extract information from al-Qaida prisoners to Abu Ghraib and other holding
centers inside Iraq.

"It was probably the most counterproductive move that the policy-makers could
have made and it showed the complete misunderstanding of the Iraq culture," said
Cannistraro.

The reasons for importing the techniques, Cannistraro said, were the
frustrations at the policy level in Washington that not enough information was
being obtained about weapons of mass destruction and the frustration over the
lack of information about the resistance in Iraq.

---

On the Net:

Taguba report: http://wid.ap.org/documents/iraq/taguba.pdf 


------------------------------------------------------------

Army general is said to urge use of dogs to scare prisoners

By R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post  |  May 26, 2004

WASHINGTON -- A US Army general dispatched by senior Pentagon officials to
bolster the collection of intelligence from prisoners in Iraq last fall inspired
and promoted the use of guard dogs there to frighten the Iraqis, according to
sworn testimony by the top US intelligence officer at the Abu Ghraib prison.

According to the officer, Colonel Thomas Pappas, the idea came from Major
General Geoffrey Miller, who at the time commanded the US detention center at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and was implemented under a policy approved by Lieutenant
General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top US military official in Iraq.

''It was a technique I had personally discussed with General Miller, when he was
here" visiting the prison, testified Pappas, head of the 205th Military
Intelligence Brigade and the officer placed in charge of the cellblocks at Abu
Ghraib prison where abuses occurred in the wake of Miller's visit to Baghdad
between Aug. 30 and Sept. 9, 2003.

''He said that they used military working dogs at Gitmo [Guantanamo Bay], and
that they were effective in setting the atmosphere for which, you know, you
could get information" from the prisoners, Pappas told the Army investigator,
Major General Antonio M. Taguba, said a transcript provided to the Post.

Pappas, who was under pressure from Taguba to justify the legality and
appropriateness of using guard dogs to frighten detainees, said at two separate
points in the Feb. 9 interview that Miller gave him the idea.

Miller, appointed as the new head of Abu Ghraib this month, denied through a
spokesman that the conversation took place. ''Further, military dogs were never
used in interrogations at Guantanamo," said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt,
spokesman for US forces in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports today that a US Army summary of deaths and
mistreatment of prisoners in military custody in Iraq and Afghanistan reveals a
widespread pattern of abuse that began earlier and continued longer than
previously known.

One of the oldest cases involved the death of a prisoner in Afghanistan in
December 2002 when enlisted active-duty Army personnel and members of an Ohio
reserve unit were involved in ''assaulting and mistreating the detainee." The
most recent was last month, when a prisoner detained by Navy commandos in Iraq
died in a suspected case of homicide attributed to ''blunt force trauma to the
torso and positional asphyxia," according the Army summary, dated May 5.

Pappas's statements provide the fullest public account to date of how he viewed
the interrogation mission at Abu Ghraib and Miller's impact on operations
there. Pappas said, among other things, that interrogation plans involving the
use of dogs, shackling, ''making detainees strip down," or similar aggressive
measures followed Sanchez's policy, but were often approved by Sanchez's deputy,
Major General Walter Wodjakowski, or by himself.

The claims and counterclaims between Pappas and Miller concern one of the most
notorious aspects of US actions at Abu Ghraib, as revealed in pictures taken by
military personnel that became public late last month. The pictures show
unmuzzled dogs being used to intimidate Abu Ghraib detainees, while the
prisoners are cowering, naked, against a wall.


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Prison Interrogations in Iraq Seen as Yielding Little Data on Rebels

By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
May 27, 2004

WASHINGTON, May 26  The questioning of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners last fall in
the newly established interrogation center at Abu Ghraib prison yielded very
little valuable intelligence, according to civilian and military officials.

The interrogation center was set up in September to obtain better information
about an insurgency in Iraq that was killing American soldiers almost every day
by last fall. The insurgency was better organized and more vigorous than the
United States had expected, prompting concern among generals and Pentagon
officials who were unhappy with the flow of intelligence to combat units and to
higher headquarters.

But civilian and military intelligence officials, as well as top commanders with
access to intelligence reports, now say they learned little about the insurgency
from questioning inmates at the prison. Most of the prisoners held in the
special cellblock that became the setting for the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib
apparently were not linked to the insurgency, they said.

All of the prisoners sent to Abu Ghraib had already been questioned by the
troops who captured them for urgent information about roadside bombs, imminent
attacks and the like.

The officials could not say whether the harsh interrogation methods used at Abu
Ghraib were counterproductive. But they said few if any prisoners there had been
able to shed light on questions to which Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American
commander for the Middle East, and his deputies had assigned highest priority,
including the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein and the nature of the insurgency's
leadership.

"Most of our useful intelligence came from battlefield interrogations, and at
the battalion, brigade and division-level interrogation facilities," said a
senior military intelligence officer who served in Iraq. Once prisoners were
sent on to Abu Ghraib, the officer said, "we got very little feedback."

One American general who recently returned from Iraq put the concerns of many
senior officers about what happened to the detainees this way: "There was a
sense when someone was sent down there, they went into a black hole and never
came out."

In Senate testimony last week, General Abizaid defended interrogation practices
used in Iraq, saying the information obtained served to save American lives. But
he made no specific mention of Abu Ghraib, and military officers said the kind
of intelligence he was referring to, about the location of hidden explosives or
the details of planned attacks, had been obtained more often by soldiers in the
field.

General Abizaid made clear in his testimony that the intelligence-gathering
effort that he and Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top American commander in
Baghdad, set in motion late last summer had fallen short of its intended goal of
getting a clear picture of the insurgency.

"We were dealing with a systemic problem, and we still don't have as good a view
as we'd like to have about the nature of the insurgency and who's in charge and
where the cells move and how they operate," he said.

The Tier 1 cellblock at Abu Ghraib was set aside from the rest of the prison to
house as many as 600 prisoners designated as "security detainees" because of
their suspected involvement in or knowledge about attacks on American
troops. This designation set them apart from the thousands of Iraqis imprisoned
as criminals, who were held in less-secure sections of Abu Ghraib, and the 100
or so former top Iraqi officials designated as "high-value detainees" because of
their suspected knowledge about Iraq's weapons programs or other such issues,
and who were held in a special facility on the outskirts of the Baghdad airport.

In practice, however, many of the "security detainees" fell into a vague middle
ground, between what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld described this month
as "high-value targets," who were "much more interesting from the standpoint of
the interrogation process," and "a simple low-level person" who is "simply being
kept off the street for a period."

In general, said a senior Army officer who served in Iraq, many of the prisoners
held in the isolation wing at Abu Ghraib were kept there long beyond any period
of usefulness because "no one wanted to be responsible for releasing the next
Osama bin Laden."

According to two senior officers, in high-level meetings in Baghdad in December
some top American commanders, including Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of
the Fourth Infantry Division, were openly unhappy about the quality of
intelligence provided during a briefing by Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, who as the
intelligence deputy to General Sanchez oversaw the interrogation center at Abu
Ghraib. "We weren't getting the feedback we wanted," one of the officers said.

The capture of Mr. Hussein later in December by soldiers from General Odierno's
division and a team of military commandos was carried out on the basis of
intelligence from sources interrogated outside the prison, senior Army officers
said.

The Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib was established in
September under the command of Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, and quickly established
effective control over the cellblock set aside for the "security prisoners."

Many of the prisoners in that cellblock spent months in Abu Ghraib, and some
became victims of horrific abuse at the hands of the military police. Army
investigators are reviewing evidence that the guards were encouraged in their
tactics by interrogators, who adopted harsh tactics used earlier in Afghanistan
and were instructed to work closely with the guards to break down prisoners'
resistance to questioning.

Interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times depict the interrogation
center as a home to intimidating practices, including the use of dogs in
interrogation rooms, some of which were constructed from shipping containers.

People who served there described a range of interrogation tactics, including
interrogators' breaking tables as a show of force. One interrogation area, known
as "Steel," was assembled in November from the shipping containers. Another,
called "Wood," was built from that material in October, according to a former
officer at the prison.

In some ways, the cellblock was much more tightly controlled than the rest of
the prison.

An undated list of "operational guidelines" for the cellblock directs, among
other things, that the officers overseeing the interrogation center "will
provide Segregation M.P.'s with an access roster of persons allowed to access
the cells and walkways in Areas 1A and 1B."

"Additionally," the document says, "it is recommended that all military
personnel in the segregation area reduce knowledge of their true identities to
those specialized detainees. The use of sterilized uniforms" ? uniforms without
insignia ? "is highly suggested and personnel should NOT address each other by
true name and rank in the segregation area."

No one from the interrogation center has been charged with crimes in connection
with the abuses, several weeks after an initial Army inquiry suggested that
Colonel Jordan, among three other senior officers and civilian contractors, was
"directly or indirectly" culpable in the abuses.

General Sanchez and other Army officials have said broader control of Abu Ghraib
was not transferred from a military police unit, under Brig. Gen. Janis
Karpinski, to an Army intelligence unit, under Col. Thomas M. Pappas, until
Nov. 19, when the intelligence unit was put in charge of protecting the prison
against attack and of the inmates' safety. By then, abusive practices had been
photographed in the prison for about a month, and the International Committee of
the Red Cross had already filed an official complaint about the practices.

But the documents and interviews suggest that de facto control of the isolation
cellblock had been given to the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center by
mid-October.

A classified memorandum issued by General Sanchez on Oct. 12, outlining a new
"interrogation and counter-resistance policy," directs that "the interrogator
should appear to be the one who controls all aspects of the interrogation
. . . as well as food, clothing, and shelter given to the security internee,"
according to a briefing provided to Senate staff members last week by two senior
Army officers.

The Oct. 12 memorandum advocated an "interrogation approach designed to
manipulate internees' emotions and weaknesses to gain his willing cooperation,"
the Army officers said in the briefing.

At the opposite end of the cellblock compound from the "Steel" interrogation
site were the "Wood" interrogation rooms, according to Army officers who served
at the prison.

The rooms in both sites included two-way mirrors, chairs and a table, but
interrogations were also sometimes conducted in the showers, stairwells and
other sections of the cellblock's isolation area, according to statements given
to military investigators and included in the documents obtained by The Times.

The interrogation center also included an operations headquarters as well as
what was known as Interrogation Coordination Element, or ICE, headed by
Capt. Carolyn A. Wood of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, whose
members had conducted interrogations at an American detention center at Bagram
Air Base in Afghanistan.

On occasion, according to some statements collected in the investigations so
far, members of the 372nd Military Police Company assigned to guard the
isolation cellblock were invited into interrogation rooms and sometimes
instructed to yell at or otherwise intimidate Iraqi prisoners being
questioned. This is a violation of standard Army rules on the role of the
military police.

One civilian interrogator, identified as Daniel E. Johnson, an employee of the
Virginia-based CACI Premier Technology, is described in a Jan. 23 statement to
an investigator as acknowledging that "he is aggressive in an interview, he
generally yells in their face, and throws the table in the room."

Another civilian interrogator from the same company, whose employees were
working in the interrogation center, was described as being known for breaking
tables during interrogations.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the top military spokesman in Baghdad, has declined to
respond to questions about the interrogation center or Colonel Jordan, saying
that to do so could compromise an investigation being conducted by
Maj. Gen. George Fay, the Army's No. 2 intelligence official.

But Col. Jill Morgenthaler, chief of public affairs at the military headquarters
in Baghdad, acknowledged in an e-mail message that while Colonel Jordan had been
"assigned to" Colonel Pappas's brigade, he was not under its operational
control.

In interviews, several Army officers, including General Karpinski, said Colonel
Jordan had received broad direction from General Fast, director of intelligence
for occupation forces in Baghdad, who had been responsible for setting up the
interrogation center.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


-----------------------------------------------------------------

How Colonel Risked His Career by Menacing Detainee and Lost

By DEBORAH SONTAG
May 27, 2004

PLANTATION, Fla.  In western Broward County, where Lt. Col. Allen B. West, 43,
is preparing to start life over as a high school social studies teacher, the
grass is green, the air is moist and the pressure is barometric. Iraq seems very
far away, as does the night last August when Colonel West used his gun to coerce
an Iraqi police officer during an interrogation.

Intent on foiling a reported plot to ambush him and his men, Colonel West, a
battalion commander, made a calculated decision to intimidate the Iraqi officer
with a show of force. An interrogation under way was going nowhere, Colonel West
said in an interview, and he chose to take the matter into his own hands.

"This could get ugly," he told his soldiers. But, he said, he imposed limits:
"This man will not be injured and he will not have to be repaired. There will be
no blood and no breakage of bones."

Still, Colonel West wanted the Iraqi policeman, Yehiya Kadoori Hamoodi, to think
"this was going to be the end" if he did not divulge what he knew. So Colonel
West presided over what he considered a time-sensitive interrogation that grew
steadily more abusive until he himself fired a pistol beside Mr. Hamoodi's head.

A strait-laced, by-the-book senior officer, Colonel West deliberately
disregarded Army rules and regulations, gambling ? and eventually losing ? a
successful 22-year military career that seemed destined for further advancement.

"There are rules and regulations, and there's protecting your soldiers," Colonel
West said, sitting by a man-made waterway behind his family's new home in a
Florida subdivision. "I just felt I'd never have to write a letter of condolence
home to a `rule and regulation.' "

"The fact is, I made a choice, the choice had consequences and I accept that,"
he continued.

But, he added, the events of that hot, dusty night still disturb him: "I'm not
some bully who goes around threatening men's lives. Certain things we have to do
in war are outside our character."

Many months before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal raised questions about whether
the military was permitting or tolerating the mistreatment of detainees, the
Army pointedly rejected Colonel West's aggressive tactics during that single
interrogation.

Expressing concern that his behavior could send the signal that abuse was
acceptable as a means to an end, the Army relieved Colonel West of his command
and contemplated court-martialing him on assault charges.

When Colonel West's case became public last fall, it, too, provoked a debate
about appropriate conduct during wartime. But that debate had a far different
tenor than the much larger one raging now.

No one is suggesting now that the abuse of the Abu Ghraib detainees was
justified or that the military is being overzealous in policing itself. Then,
however, Colonel West's many defenders argued that the military should have
viewed Colonel West as a hero who did not disobey rules so much as rise above
them.

The conservative media personalities and Web sites that raised money for his
legal defense portrayed a military hamstrung by concern for the human rights of
Iraqi detainees. The more than 2,300 letters and e-mail messages that he
received were mostly "thank you" notes for putting his men first and resisting
the pressure to treat suspects with kid gloves.

Ninety-five members of Congress signed a letter to the secretary of the Army
supporting the colonel.

Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, a Republican and chairman of the Armed
Services Committee, who has pressed for accountability in the Abu Ghraib affair,
expressed empathy for the colonel in a letter to constituents. "As a former
Marine Corps officer, I support Colonel West's judgment," he wrote. "I
understand the colonel was well-intentioned and his efforts appear solely
intended to protect the lives of troops under his command."

In his letter, Senator Warner stated that one potential attacker was apprehended
and potential ambush sites were identified and avoided as a result of
Mr. Hamoodi's interrogation. Colonel West notes that there were no further
attacks on him or his men after the interrogation.

But the record of his case is unclear on whether the Iraqi officer provided
valuable information, and Mr. Hamoodi said in an interview that he did not,
because he knew nothing.

Neal A. Puckett, a lawyer who represented Colonel West and now represents
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who oversaw Abu Ghraib and other prisons, said the
intelligence officers he interviewed in Iraq last fall were highly frustrated
with their inability to extract information.

"The detainees would regularly treat interrogators with contempt, spit on them,
laugh at them and say, `We don't have to answer your questions,' " he
said. "They would turn our humanity and our following of the Geneva Conventions
against us."

The information-gathering system was not running efficiently, either,
Mr. Puckett said. The interrogation specialist at Colonel West's base was a
"nice young gal oblivious to all things Arab," like the common phrase
"inshallah," or "God willing," Mr. Puckett said. Information collected was not
systematically compiled, he added.

"Problems like that, I've got to believe, put pressure to bear on folks tasked
with gathering information," he said.

Colonel West was not tasked with that duty. Before that August night he had
never conducted or witnessed an interrogation. He was a commander, overseeing an
artillery battalion of some 650 soldiers and officers.

He had started in such a role early in life, as an R.O.T.C. battalion commander
at an Atlanta high school. His father, a World War II veteran, encouraged him to
pursue a career in the military "because he felt that it was a good place to be
for a young black man," Colonel West said.

Commissioned as an officer even before he graduated from the University of
Tennessee, he steadily climbed the ladder, serving in Italy, South Korea and the
Middle East, during the 1991 gulf war, while winning medals and gaining
parachuting proficiency and master's degrees. He is married to a financial
planner, and they have two young daughters.

Colonel West said he could remember one time before last summer that he
committed an infraction: he got a traffic ticket in 1990 in Kansas "right after
they changed a sign."

He is the very picture of clean cut. In the interview, he wore wire-rim glasses,
pressed jeans, a neat yellow shirt and tassled loafers without socks. His Army
dog tag and a Christian shield hung on a chain around his neck. Several times he
exclaimed, "Aw, jeepers!"

It was in April 2003 that Colonel West's Second Battalion, part of the Fourth
Infantry Division, arrived in Iraq and set up camp at Taji, a former Iraqi air
force base north of Baghdad. "We experienced contact from hostile forces from
the time we got there," he said in a hearing last November.

Colonel West said he spent much time searching for weapons caches and trying to
disrupt the arms market in the area. He would advise his soldiers to keep alert
at all times. "You ride along and say to yourself, `Is that dead sheep a dead
sheep, or is it a dead sheep stuffed with a bomb?' " he said.

He also tried to kick-start some projects, engaging Iraqis in repaving roads,
restoring drinking-water supplies and rebuilding the police station, he
said. Twice a week, he traveled to the nearest big town, Saba al-Boor, for
community meetings.

"There I'd be, an inner-city kid from Atlanta sitting on the floor like Lawrence
of Arabia, with 30 Arab sheiks," he said.

The first time, the sheiks challenged him about America's intentions in Iraq
and, he said, he pulled out a family photograph and told them that the only land
he wanted to occupy was the plot his house sat on in the United
States. Eventually, platters of lamb and rice came out and he ate with his
fingers like everybody else, he said. (He also ended up so ill from the meal
that he had to be hooked up to an intravenous drip, his wife, Angela,
interjected.)

In August, Colonel West learned from an intelligence specialist of a supposed
plot to assassinate him, which would endanger the soldiers who traveled with
him, too. The plot reportedly involved Mr. Hamoodi, a police officer who
occasionally worked for the Americans. Although Mr. Hamoodi is a Shiite Muslim,
and most attacks against Americans were carried out by Sunnis loyal to Saddam
Hussein, some police officers do cooperate with the insurgents and several have
been accused of attacking foreigners.

Colonel West said he initially thought "the information was a joke." But a week
later several of his officers were ambushed when he was supposed to be traveling
with them. A roadside bomb sheared off the back panel of a Humvee, and a
firefight ensued. None of his men were seriously hurt, but Colonel West began
taking the risk of an assassination seriously.

On Aug. 20, he asked his men to pick up Mr. Hamoodi and bring him to the
base. "There was a sense of urgency because I felt in the next couple of days,
something was going to happen," Colonel West testified at his hearing.

In an interview in Baghdad, Mr. Hamoodi, a thin, bespectacled 31-year-old, said
aides to Colonel West stopped by his police station and asked him to join them
on patrol. Mr. Hamoodi climbed into the back of their open Humvee, he said, and
the vehicle soon jerked off the road.

Soldiers testified later that Mr. Hamoodi appeared to go for his weapon and
needed to be subdued. Mr. Hamoodi said that one soldier punched him several
times, and that he was handcuffed, shackled and blindfolded.

At the base, he said, they threw him, still bound, off the Humvee, then led him
into the jail and eventually into an interrogation room. They pressed him for
the details of an assassination plan, about which he knew nothing, he
said. During the interrogation, he said, the translator kicked him in the shin
and told him he needed to confess before Colonel West showed up to kill him.

Mr. Hamoodi said he felt relieved to hear the colonel was expected. He
considered Colonel West to be "calm, quiet, clever and sociable." When the
colonel first entered the interrogation room, Mr. Hamoodi said, he thought,
"Here is the man who will treat me fairly."

Then, he said, Colonel West cocked his gun.

Colonel West said that he did not then put a round in the gun's chamber but that
he did place the pistol in his lap. He asked Mr. Hamoodi why he wanted to kill
him. Mr. Hamoodi said that he protested, "I've worked with you, I like you," but
that Colonel West silenced his protest. Colonel West pressed for the names and
locations of those involved in the supposed plot, and he got no answers.

Soon, the soldiers began striking and shoving Mr. Hamoodi. They were not
instructed to do so by Colonel West but they were not stopped, either, they
said. "I didn't know it was wrong to hit a detainee," a 20-year-old soldier from
Daytona Beach said at the hearing. Colonel West testified that he would have
stopped the beating "had it become too excessive."

Eventually, the colonel and his soldiers moved Mr. Hamoodi outside, and
threatened him with death. Colonel West said he fired a warning shot in the air
and began counting down from five. He asked his soldiers to put Mr. Hamoodi's
head in a sand-filled barrel usually used for clearing weapons. At the end of
his count, Colonel West fired a shot into the barrel, angling his gun away from
the Iraqi's head, he testified.

According to the interpreter, Mr. Hamoodi finally "admitted there would be
attacks, and called out names." Mr. Hamoodi said that he was not sure what he
told the Americans, but that it was meaningless information induced by fear and
pain.

At least one man named by Mr. Hamoodi was taken into custody, according to
testimony, and his home was searched. No plans for attacks on Americans or
weapons were found. Colonel West testified that he did not know whether "any
corroboration" of a plot was ever found, adding: "At the time I had to base my
decision on the intelligence I received. It's possible that I was wrong about
Mr. Hamoodi."

When the interrogation was over, a physician's assistant checked Mr. Hamoodi and
found "swelling but no bruises," according to a hearing transcript. He was
detained another 45 days and released without being charged, he said.

Mr. Hamoodi said he did not really blame the Americans for "arresting and
torturing me." Obviously, someone had informed on him, he said, and they had to
act on the information they obtained. Still, he trembles now when he sees a
Humvee and he no longer trusts or works with the Americans.

After the interrogation, Colonel West woke up his superior officer to recount
what had occurred. The superior officer testified that he did not remember
Colonel West's offering specifics, beyond saying that he had discharged his
weapon during an interrogation and that no one was hurt.

Indeed, it is possible that the abusive interrogation might never have come to
light if a sergeant in another battalion had not subsequently written a letter
of complaint about the "command climate" under Colonel West's superior
officer. In that letter, the sergeant mentioned almost as an aside, according to
Mr. Puckett, that Colonel West had interrogated a detainee using a pistol. An
investigation was set in motion.

In the fall, a helicopter arrived at the Taji base to ferry Colonel West to
Tikrit for the duration of the investigation. As he looked down at the soldiers
gathered to see him off, he said, he knew his career was over.

The hearing in November was meant to determine whether Colonel West would be
court-martialed. News accounts described a highly emotional scene in which the
colonel fought back tears as he testified, saying he would "go to hell with a
gasoline can in his hand" to protect his troops. His soldiers filled the hearing
room and greeted him with hugs and words of support during breaks.

Soldiers testified that they felt safer when Colonel West was in charge. The
interpreter, who works for a private contractor, said that "the American
soldiers were protected by the tribes" in the area because of Colonel West's
good relationship with the community, and that the situation became more
dangerous and chaotic after he left.

The military decided against court-martialing Colonel West. He was fined $5,000,
and he submitted his resignation, which becomes effective this summer, when he
will retire with full benefits.

Colonel West said he had spent many months grappling with disorientation,
wondering, "What is my purpose now, my reason for being?" Shortly after he
arrived back in the United States, he got a lucrative job offer from a private
contractor to return to Iraq, he said, but he was not interested. Instead, he
decided to start again in the world of education.

He is awaiting placement in a high school in Broward County and, he said, he
prays that God will see to it that he gets a spot in one of the low-performing,
predominantly black schools, where he can try to make a difference. Ever the
striver, he plans to begin studying for a master's in education so he can
advance into administration "within five years." he said.

In an e-mail message, Colonel West described a recent motorcycle trip through
affluent Palm Beach County, with its smells of "fresh air, green grass, ocean
salt air and suntan oils," and then back through a depressed, poor strip where
the air reeked of "garbage, smoke and alcohol."

"Sorry for the pontification," he added, "but you must understand. I lived in a
sort of `Matrix' world for 22 years and now I have been unplugged."

Ian Fisher contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


-----------------------------------------------------------


Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush
By NEIL A. LEWIS and ERIC SCHMITT
June 8, 2004

WASHINGTON, June 7 -- A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003
legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international
treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the
authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the
nation's security.

The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any
executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune
from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of
reasons.

One reason, the lawyers said, would be if military personnel believed that they
were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to
be patently unlawful."

"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage
a military campaign," the lawyers wrote in the 56-page confidential memorandum,
the prohibition against torture "must be construed as inapplicable to
interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority."

Senior Pentagon officials on Monday sought to minimize the significance of the
March memo, one of several obtained by The New York Times, as an interim legal
analysis that had no effect on revised interrogation procedures that
Mr. Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 for the American military prison at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

"The April document was about interrogation techniques and procedures," said
Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman. "It was not a legal analysis."

Mr. Di Rita said the 24 interrogation procedures permitted at Guantánamo, four
of which required Mr. Rumsfeld's explicit approval, did not constitute torture
and were consistent with international treaties.

The March memorandum, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on
Monday, is the latest internal legal study to be disclosed that shows that after
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks the administration's lawyers were set to work to
find legal arguments to avoid restrictions imposed by international and American
law.

A Jan. 22, 2002, memorandum from the Justice Department that provided arguments
to keep American officials from being charged with war crimes for the way
prisoners were detained and interrogated was used extensively as a basis for the
March memorandum on avoiding proscriptions against torture.

The previously disclosed Justice Department memorandum concluded that
administration officials were justified in asserting that the Geneva Conventions
did not apply to detainees from the Afghanistan war.

Another memorandum obtained by The Times indicates that most of the
administration's top lawyers, with the exception of those at the State
Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved of the Justice Department's
position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war in Afghanistan. In
addition, that memorandum, dated Feb. 2, 2002, noted that lawyers for the
Central Intelligence Agency had asked for an explicit understanding that the
administration's public pledge to abide by the spirit of the conventions did not
apply to its operatives.

The March memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, was prepared as part
of a review of interrogation techniques by a working group appointed by the
Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes. The group itself was
led by the Air Force general counsel, Mary Walker, and included military and
civilian lawyers from all branches of the armed services.

The review stemmed from concerns raised by Pentagon lawyers and interrogators at
Guantánamo after Mr. Rumsfeld approved a set of harsher interrogation techniques
in December 2002 to use on a Saudi detainee, Mohamed al-Kahtani, who was
believed to be the planned 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 terror plot.

Mr. Rumsfeld suspended the harsher techniques, including serving the detainee
cold, prepackaged food instead of hot rations and shaving off his facial hair,
on Jan. 12, pending the outcome of the working group's review. Gen. James
T. Hill, head of the military's Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo,
told reporters last Friday that the working group "wanted to do what is humane
and what is legal and consistent not only with" the Geneva Conventions, but also
"what is right for our soldiers."

Mr. Di Rita said that the Pentagon officials were focused primarily on the
interrogation techniques, and that the legal rationale included in the March
memo was mostly prepared by the Justice Department and White House counsel's
office.

The memo showed that not only lawyers from the Defense and Justice departments
and the White House approved of the policy but also that David S. Addington, the
counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, also was involved in the
deliberations. The State Department lawyer, William H. Taft IV, dissented,
warning that such a position would weaken the protections of the Geneva
Conventions for American troops.

The March 6 document about torture provides tightly constructed definitions of
torture. For example, if an interrogator "knows that severe pain will result
from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the
requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith,"
the report said. "Instead, a defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with
the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within
his control."

The adjective "severe," the report said, "makes plain that the infliction of
pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to
amount to torture. Instead, the text provides that pain or suffering must be
`severe.' " The report also advised that if an interrogator "has a good faith
belief his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental
state necessary for his actions to constitute torture."

The report also said that interrogators could justify breaching laws or treaties
by invoking the doctrine of necessity. An interrogator using techniques that
cause harm might be immune from liability if he "believed at the moment that his
act is necessary and designed to avoid greater harm."

Scott Horton, the former head of the human rights committee of the Association
of the Bar of the City of New York, said Monday that he believed that the March
memorandum on avoiding responsibility for torture was what caused a delegation
of military lawyers to visit him and complain privately about the
administration's confidential legal arguments. That visit, he said, resulted in
the association undertaking a study and issuing of a report criticizing the
administration. He added that the lawyers who drafted the torture memo in March
could face professional sanctions.

Jamie Fellner, the director of United States programs for Human Rights Watch,
said Monday, "We believe that this memo shows that at the highest levels of the
Pentagon there was an interest in using torture as well as a desire to evade the
criminal consequences of doing so."

The March memorandum also contains a curious section in which the lawyers argued
that any torture committed at Guantánamo would not be a violation of the
anti-torture statute because the base was under American legal jurisdiction and
the statute concerns only torture committed overseas. That view is in direct
conflict with the position the administration has taken in the Supreme Court,
where it has argued that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are not entitled to
constitutional protections because the base is outside American jurisdiction.

Kate Zernike contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


--------------------------------


Memo: torture 'may be justified'

By Dana Priest and R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post  |  June 8, 2004

WASHINGTON -- In August 2002, the Justice Department advised the White House that torturing Al Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad ''may be justified," and that international laws against torture ''may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted in President Bush's war on terrorism, according to a newly obtained memo.

If a government employee were to torture a suspect in captivity, ''he would be
doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the Al
Qaeda terrorist network," said the memo, from the Justice Department's office of
legal counsel, written in response to a CIA request for legal guidance.

The memo was offered after the CIA began detaining and interrogating suspected
Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the Sept. 11, 2002, attacks,
according to government officials familiar with the document.

The legal reasoning in the 2002 memo, which covered treatment of Al Qaeda
detainees in CIA custody, was later used in a March 2003 report by Pentagon
lawyers assessing interrogation rules governing the Defense Department's
detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At that time, Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld had asked the lawyers to examine the logistical, policy, and legal
issues associated with interrogation techniques.

Bush administration officials say flatly that, despite the discussion of legal
issues in the two memos, it has abided by international conventions barring
torture, and that detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere have been treated
humanely, except in the cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for which
seven military police soldiers have been charged.

Still, the 2002 and 2003 memos reflect the Bush administration's desire to
explore the limits on how far it could legally go in aggressively interrogating
foreigners suspected of terrorism or of having information that could thwart
future attacks.

In the 2002 memo, written for the CIA and addressed to White House Counsel
Alberto R. Gonzales, the Justice Department defined torture in a much narrower
way than does the US Army, which has historically carried out most wartime
interrogations.

In the Justice Department's view -- contained in a 50-page document signed by
Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee and obtained by The Washington Post --
inflicting moderate or fleeting pain does not necessarily constitute
torture. Torture, the memo says, ''must be equivalent in intensity to the pain
accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of
bodily function, or even death."

By contrast, the Army's Field Manual 34-52, titled ''Intelligence
Interrogations," sets more restrictive rules. For example, the Army prohibits
pain induced by chemicals or bondage; forcing an individual to stand, sit or
kneel in abnormal positions for prolonged periods of time; and food
deprivation. Under mental torture, the Army prohibits mock executions, sleep
deprivation, and chemically induced psychosis.

Human rights groups expressed dismay at the Justice Department's legal reasoning.

''It is by leaps and bounds the worst thing I've seen since this whole Abu
Ghraib scandal broke," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. ''It appears
that what they were contemplating was the commission of war crimes and looking
for ways to avoid legal accountability. The effect is to throw out years of
military doctrine and standards on interrogations."

But a spokesman for the White House counsel's office said, ''The president
directed the military to treat Al Qaeda and Taliban humanely and consistent with
the Geneva Conventions."


---------------------------------------------------------------


Forced Nudity of Iraqi Prisoners Is Seen as a Pervasive Pattern, Not Isolated Incidents

By KATE ZERNIKE and DAVID ROHDE
June 8, 2004

In the weeks since photographs of naked detainees set off the abuse scandal at
Abu Ghraib, military officials have portrayed the sexual humiliation captured in
the images as the isolated acts of a rogue night shift.

But forced nudity of prisoners was pervasive in the military intelligence unit
of Abu Ghraib, so much so that soldiers later said they had not seen "the whole
nudity thing," as one captain called it, as abusive or out of the ordinary.

While there have been reports of forced nakedness at detention facilities in
Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the practice was apparently far more
aggressive at Abu Ghraib, according to interviews, reports from human rights
groups and sworn statements from detainees and soldiers. The detainees said
leaving prisoners naked started as far back as last July, three months before
the seven soldiers now charged and their military police company arrived at the
prison. It bred a culture, some soldiers say, where the abuse captured on film
could happen.

Detainees were paraded naked past other prisoners and guards; some were ordered
to do jumping jacks and sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the nude, according
to a several witnesses. Also, a father and his grown son were stripped, then
forced to stand and stare at each other. The International Committee of the Red
Cross, visiting in October, found prisoners left naked in their cells for days,
modestly trying to shield themselves behind cardboard from meals-ready-to-eat
boxes.

It is not clear how the practice emerged and, if it was official policy, exactly
who authorized it. Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the military intelligence officer in
charge of interrogations at the prison, told Army investigators that detainees
might be stripped and shackled for questioning, but not without "good reason."
When Red Cross monitors expressed alarm about prisoners being left in their
cells or forced to move about naked, they said military intelligence officials
"confirmed that it was part of the military intelligence process."

"It was not uncommon to see people without clothing," Capt. Donald J. Reese, the
warden of the tier where the worst abuses occurred, told investigators in a
sworn statement in January. "I only saw males. I was told the `whole nudity
thing' was an interrogation procedure used by military intelligence, and never
thought much of it."

An analyst from the 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, who asked not to be
identified for fear of being punished for speaking out, said: "If you walked
down through the wing of the prison where they were being held, they would have
them strip down naked. Sometimes they would stand on boxes and would hold their
arms out. That happened almost every night --- having them naked. I wouldn't say
it's abuse. It's definitely degrading to them."

Soldiers said at least one civilian interrogator, Steven Stefanowicz, had been
so alarmed by the use of nudity that he reported a military intelligence
interrogator after she made a detainee walk naked down a cellblock to humiliate
him. His lawyer said Mr. Stefanowicz, who an Army report said might have been
"directly or indirectly" responsible for abuses, had not thought stripping
detainees was an appropriate interrogation technique, and had worried that doing
so would incite more unrest at a time when guards were fending off rioters with
live bullets.

Nudity is considered particularly shameful in Muslim culture, a violation of
religious principles. While nudity as a disciplinary or coercive tool may be
especially objectionable to Muslims, they are hardly the only victims of the
practice. Soldiers in Nazi Germany paraded naked prisoners in daylight, and
human rights groups have documented the use of nudity during conflicts in Egypt,
Chile and Turkey, and in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Central
Intelligence Agency training manuals from the 1960's and 1980's taught the
stripping of prisoners as an interrogation tool. Nudity and sexual humiliation
have also been reported in American prisons where a number of guards at Abu
Ghraib worked in their civilian lives.

Complaints about sexual humiliation have also emerged in Afghanistan. Seven
Afghan men who had been held at the main detention center in Bagram, where the
deaths of two detainees and accusations of abuse are now under investigation,
said in recent interviews that during various periods from December 2002 to
April 2004, they had been subjected to repeated rectal exams, and forced to
change clothes, shower and go to the bathroom in front of female soldiers.

"I'm 50 years old, and no one has ever taken my clothes," said Abdullah Khan
Sahak, who was released from American custody on April 19 and complained that he
was photographed nude in Afghanistan. "It was a very hard moment for me. It was
death for me."

Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old farmer, and Parkhudin, a 26-year-old farmer and former
soldier who, like many Afghans, has only one name, said female soldiers had
watched groups of male prisoners take showers at Bagram and undergo rectal
exams.

"We don't know if it's medical or if they were very proud of themselves,"
Mr. Shah said. "But if it was medical, why were they taking our clothes off in
front of the women? We are Afghans, not Americans."

On two or three occasions, the two men said, the women commented to one another
about the size of prisoners' penises. "They were laughing a lot," Parkhudin
said, adding that the women taunted prisoners during showers, saying, "You're my
dog."

Three other prisoners reported being questioned while naked at an American
firebase in the city of Gardez in 2003. And at Camp Rhino, John Walker Lindh,
the American now serving a 20-year sentence for aiding the Taliban, was stripped
and bound with duct tape to a stretcher for two days, according to the statement
of fact in his plea-bargain agreement.

At Guantánamo Bay, where some prisoners from Afghanistan were taken, a few
British detainees said forced nudity had occurred. One of them, Tarek Dergoul,
said after his release that some detainees had been stripped of their clothing,
which would then be returned piece by piece in exchange for good behavior.

But Lt. Col. Leon H. Sumpter, a spokesman for the military joint task force that
runs the detention center, said in a recent interview that nudity had never
occurred in connection with interrogation or discipline and had not been
approved.

A military official who served at Guantánamo said that after a wave of suicide
attempts by prisoners in late 2002 and early 2003, the military police guards
did take away clothing from some detainees who were considered suicide risks,
out of concern that they might rip up their garments to make nooses.

In its visits to detention centers and prisons in Iraq, the Red Cross singled
out the military intelligence section at Abu Ghraib for using public nudity in a
"systematic" pattern of maltreatment. By contrast, the committee said it had
heard no complaints of "physical ill treatment" at Camp Bucca, another large
detention center.

A list of interrogation techniques posted at Abu Ghraib in September, indicating
which were acceptable and which needed special authorization, makes no mention
of leaving detainees naked. A senior military officer said, "There was no
interrogation authority that authorized the removal of all clothing from a
detainee."

But detainees who made sworn statements after the prison abuse scandal broke all
mentioned having been left naked, some for days. The practice goes back at least
as far as July 10, when, according to his statement, a detainee named Amjed
Isail Waleed was left unclothed in a dark room for five days. Another detainee,
Ameen Saeed al-Sheik, said he was stripped on Oct. 7, a week before the arrival
of the 372nd Military Police Company, the unit where soldiers are now charged
with abuse.

By Oct. 20, forced nudity was such accepted practice that an incident report
written by two of the soldiers now charged said an inmate in the cell where
prisoners were held for interrogation had been ordered "stripped in his cell for
six (6) days" for apparently whittling a toothbrush into what a soldier believed
was a knife.

In late October, Red Cross monitors were so alarmed by the number of nude
detainees that they halted their visit and demanded an immediate explanation.

"The military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that
this practice was `part of the process,' " the Red Cross wrote in a report in
February.

In November, Specialist Luciana Spencer of the 66th Military Intelligence Group
ordered a detainee stripped and handcuffed behind his back during his
interrogation, then paraded him outdoors in the cold past other detainees to his
cell.

"I remember we said, `Do you really have to walk him out naked?' " said the
intelligence analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "And they said,
`Yeah, yeah, we have to embarrass him.' "

Mr. Stefanowicz reported the incident, and Specialist Spencer was moved out of
the interrogation unit. Sometime around December, the nudity seemed to stop,
according to several soldiers. Captain Reese, the tier warden, credited the Red
Cross.

"They were concerned with the amount of nudity, and the area was cold and damp,"
he said in his statement to investigators on Jan. 18. "The detainees did not
have appropriate clothing and bedding. The second visit occurred two weeks ago,
and things were much better. The nudity has stopped, and they seemed happy with
what they saw."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


---------------------------------------------------------------

Samarra detainees said to be abused
Unit chief denies Iraqis were hurt by Guardsmen

By Terence Chea, Associated Press  |  June 10, 2004

SAN FRANCISCO -- A California National Guardsman says three fellow soldiers
brazenly abused detainees during interrogation sessions in an Iraqi police
station, threatening them with guns, sticking lighted cigarettes in their ears,
and choking them until they collapsed.

Sergeant Greg Ford said he repeatedly had to revive prisoners who had passed out
and once saw a soldier stand on the back of a handcuffed detainee's neck and
pull his arms until they popped out of their sockets.

''I had to intervene, because they couldn't keep their hands off of them," said
Ford, part of a four-member team from the 223d Military Intelligence Battalion
that questioned detainees last year in Samarra, north of Baghdad. He said the
abuse took place from April to June.

Ford's commanding officers deny any abuse occurred and say investigations within
their battalion and by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division determined the
four-member team had done nothing wrong.

''All the allegations were found to be untrue, totally unfounded, and in a
number of cases completely fabricated," said the battalion commander, Lieutenant
Colonel Drew Ryan.

Ford's allegations are being further investigated by the Criminal Investigation
Division, which would not comment on the probe.

Ford said that when he reported the problems last June to his commanding
officers, they pressured him to drop his claims.

''Immediately, within the same conversation, the command said, 'Nope, you're
delusional, you're crazy, it never happened.' They gave me 30 seconds to
withdraw my request for an investigation," Ford said. ''I stood my ground."

When he insisted on an official investigation, they ordered him to see combat
stress counselors, who sent him out of Iraq, he said.

Ford said he did not hear from investigators until the release of photographs of
mistreatment inside the Abu Ghraib prison provoked worldwide outrage and
prompted a review of other allegations of abuse.

Ford, 49, said has worked for 18 years as a state prison guard and has more than
30 years of military experience. He was sent from Iraq last June and, after
about six months in Fort Lewis, Wash., returned home to the Sacramento suburb of
Fair Oaks, Calif.

He said his three fellow team members were not properly trained to do
interrogations and got carried away with their power.

''You weren't supposed to stand on their neck or put lit cigarettes in their
ears. Twice I had to pull burning cigarettes out of detainees' ears," Ford
said. ''I said, 'Look, this is not going to go over well with the community of
Samarra.' Our people basically ignored all the warnings."

Ford said the soldiers routinely brought guns into the interrogation room, and
he once saw his team leader pointing a pistol at a detainee's head.

The three accused soldiers were not available for comment, a California National
Guard spokesman said.

Ford was one of about 100 members of the San Francisco-based 223d who arrived in
Iraq last spring and spread out in teams of three to six interrogators, Arabic
linguists, and counterintelligence officers. The battalion returned home in
March.

Whenever a prisoner collapsed, his team's leader would emerge and say, ''Greg, I
think we've got another accident," said Ford, who has medical training. ''Then
I'd have to bring them out and revive them."

Ford said he told the team leader that if one of the Iraqis died, he would
testify against him in a court-martial. ''He basically laughed it off. At that
point, I was persona non grata," the sergeant said.

So Ford asked to be relieved from his position, prompting a visit by his
commander, Captain Vic Artiga, and Ryan, who ''were too busy threatening me to
do any proper investigation," Ford said.

Ryan and Artiga would not discuss the details of Ford's allegations but denied
pressuring Ford to drop his claims.

They said they did an immediate investigation, which cleared all the soldiers.

Ford said no one interviewed him while he was in Iraq, and he does not think
anyone has interviewed the Iraqi detainees. Artiga also said he does not believe
Iraqis were interviewed for the battalion's investigation.


---------------------------------------------------------------

Guantanamo detainees' medical files shared
Ethicists say use for interrogation a serious breach

By Peter Slevin and Joe Stephens, Washington Post  |  June 10, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Military interrogators at the US detention facility at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, have been given access to the medical records of individual
prisoners, a breach of patient confidentiality that ethicists describe as a
violation of international medical standards designed to protect captives from
inhumane treatment.

The files, which contain individual medical histories and other personal
information about prisoners, have been made available to interrogators despite
continued objections from the International Committee of the Red Cross,
according to interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post. After
discovering the practice in mid-2003, the Red Cross refused to send medical
monitoring teams to the facility for more than six months, sources said.

There is no universally established international law governing medical
confidentiality. But ethics specialists said international medical standards bar
sharing such information with interrogators to ensure it is not used to pressure
prisoners to talk by withholding medicine or by using personal information to
torment a detainee.

"I don't think any American medical worker, doctor, nurse should go along with
this," said Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the
University of Pennsylvania. "The role of health care workers in any facility
should be solely looking after the health of patients; anybody who is not
involved in that should not have access to medical records."

How military interrogators used the information is unknown. But a previously
undisclosed Defense Department memo dated Oct. 9 cites Red Cross complaints that
the medical files "are being used by interrogators to gain information in
developing an interrogation plan." Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander
of the facility at the time, denied the allegations, according to the memo.

Military officers have reported a continuous search for defensible ways to
pressure Guantanamo's 600 prisoners to reveal details about terrorist operations
and organizations. Early last year, the Defense Department formally authorized
interrogators to use "stress and duress" techniques designed to disorient
detainees and weaken resistance. With proper permission, the guidelines allow
some prisoners to be subjected to techniques designed to "invoke feelings of
futility."

A Defense Department spokesman declined to comment on the use of medical files
that are generated by medical personnel at Guantanamo Bay or other detention
facilities around the world. A Pentagon official, who refused to be named, said
public discussion about the files could violate a Defense Department policy of
not commenting on interrogation techniques.

But specialists in international humanitarian law said that by making the files
available to nonmedical personnel, US authorities crossed a line that separates
the medical needs of prisoners from the government's interest in interrogating
them.

"That is a violation of ethical standards that are quite old and accepted," said
Leonard S. Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, a
Boston-based advocacy organization. "I don't think you would find any medical
person who would say this is OK."

Steven H. Miles, a professor of bioethics at the University of Minnesota, said
that using the information in interrogations of detainees would be a "clear-cut
violation" of the Geneva Conventions.

"This is an enormously serious breach," said Miles, past president of the
American Association of Bioethics. "You just can't do that."


----------------------------------------------------------------

State Dept. Warned White House on Torture

By LARA JAKES JORDAN
Jun 11, 2:53 AM (ET)

WASHINGTON (AP) - The State Department warned the White House two years ago that
rejecting international standards against torture when dealing with detainees
could put U.S. troops at risk.

A department memo from Feb. 2, 2002, surfaced Thursday as President Bush said he
ordered U.S. officials to follow the law while interrogating suspected
terrorists. Bush sidestepped an opportunity to denounce the use of torture.

"What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law," Bush told reporters at
the close of the G-8 summit in Georgia.

Asked whether torture is ever justified, Bush replied, "Look, I'm going to say
it one more time. ... The instructions went out to our people to adhere to
law. That ought to comfort you."

The memo followed recommendations from the Justice Department advising the
president he could suspend international treaties prohibiting torture. It warned
that failing to apply the Geneva Conventions to detainees from the war in
Afghanistan - whether al-Qaida or Taliban - would put U.S. troops at risk.

"A decision that the conventions do not apply to the conflict in Afghanistan in
which our armed forces are engaged deprives our troops there of any claim to the
protection of the convention in the event they are captured," State Department
legal adviser William H. Taft IV wrote in the 2002 memo to presidential counsel.

Furthermore, refusing Geneva standards to detainees "weakens protections
afforded by the conventions to our troops in future conflicts," Taft wrote. The
Associated Press obtained a copy of the memo.

The Justice Department also told the White House that U.S. laws against torture
do not apply to the fight against terrorism. The department memos say torture
"may be justified" against al-Qaida detainees in U.S. custody abroad and laws
and treaties barring torture could be trumped by the president's supreme
authority to act as necessary in wartime.

Bush said Thursday he does not recall seeing any of the Justice Department
advice.

Democrats say that by suggesting that Bush could legally authorize torture, the
memos would have lain the legal foundation for Iraqi prisoner abuses at Abu
Ghraib prison.

In its memo, the State Department also advised that following Geneva standards
"demonstrates that the United States bases its conduct not just on its policy
preferences, but on its international legal obligations."

Five days after the State Department memo was written, Bush decided the Geneva
Conventions apply to Taliban prisoners but not to captured al-Qaida terrorists.

The Bush administration has said that even though it does not believe the Geneva
Conventions apply to prisoners in the war on terror, it has complied with the
treaty's guidelines.


----------------------------------------------------------

Handlers say use of dogs approved

By Josh White and Scott Higham, Washington Post  |  June 11, 2004

WASHINGTON -- US intelligence personnel ordered military dog handlers at the Abu
Ghraib prison in Iraq to use unmuzzled dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees
during interrogations late last year, a plan approved by the highest-ranking
military intelligence officer at the facility, according to sworn statements the
handlers provided to military investigators.

A military intelligence interrogator also told investigators that two dog
handlers at Abu Ghraib were "having a contest" to see how many detainees they
could make involuntarily urinate out of fear of the dogs, according to the
previously undisclosed statements obtained by The Washington Post.

The statements by the dog handlers provide the clearest indication yet that
military intelligence personnel were deeply involved in tactics later deemed by
a US Army general to be "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses."

President Bush and top Pentagon officials have said the criminal abuse at Abu
Ghraib was confined to a small group of rogue military police soldiers who
stripped detainees naked, beat them, and photographed them in humiliating sexual
poses. An Army investigation into the abuse condemned the MPs for those
practices, but included the use of unmuzzled dogs to frighten detainees among
the "intentional abuse."

So far, the only charges to emerge have been against seven MPs and do not
include dog incidents, even though such use of dogs is an apparent violation of
the Geneva Conventions and the Army's field manual. The military intelligence
officer in charge of Abu Ghraib later told investigators that the use of
unmuzzled dogs in interrogation sessions was recommended by a two-star general
and that it was "OK."

Sergeant Michael J. Smith and Sergeant Santos A. Cardona, Army dog handlers
assigned to Abu Ghraib, told investigators that military intelligence personnel
requested that they bring their dogs to prison interrogation sites multiple
times to assist in questioning detainees in December and January. Colonel Thomas
Pappas, who was in charge of military intelligence at the prison, told both
soldiers that the use of dogs in interrogations had been approved, according to
the statements.

Neither Smith nor Cardona have been charged in connection with the abuse at Abu
Ghraib.

In Army memos regarding interrogation techniques at the prison, the use of
military working dogs was specifically allowed, as long as higher-ranking
officers approved the measures. The Army previously has said that the commanding
general of US troops in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, would have had
to approve the use of dogs.


-----------------------------------------------------------

Long history of interrogation practices detailed

By Walter Pincus, Washington Post  |  June 14, 2004

WASHINGTON -- A CIA handbook on coercive interrogation methods, produced 40
years ago during the Vietnam War, shows that techniques such as those used in
Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a long history with US
intelligence and were based on research and field experience.

Declassified 10 years ago, the training manual carries in its title the code
word used for the CIA in Vietnam, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation --
July 1963." Used to train new interrogators, the handbook presents "basic
information about coercive techniques available for use in the interrogation
situation."

The specific coercive methods it describes echo today's news stories about
Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At Abu Ghraib, photographs and
documents have shown that detainees were hooded, blindfolded, dressed in sloppy
garb, and forced to go naked. The KUBARK manual suggests that, for "resistant"
prisoners, the "circumstances of detention are arranged to enhance within the
subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring and of
being plunged into the strange."

The 1963 handbook describes the benefits and disadvantages of techniques similar
to those authorized for use at Abu Ghraib, such as forcing detainees to stand or
sit in "stress positions," cutting off sources of light, disrupting their sleep,
and manipulating their diet.

Among the manual's conclusions: The threat of pain is a far more effective
interrogation tool than actually inflicting pain, but threats of death do not
help.

Like the lists of interrogation methods approved for Iraq and Guantanamo, the
KUBARK manual offers a menu of options for rendering detainees confused and
weak. A neat or proud individual was to be given an outfit one or two sizes too
large without a belt "so that he must hold his pants up," the manual
said. Forced changes in diet and sleep patterns should be done "so that the
subject becomes disorientated [and] is very likely to create feelings of fear
and helplessness."

Tactics involving deprivation of accustomed sights, sounds, taste, smells, and
tactile sensations were presented as primary methods for producing stress, and
mirror the techniques seen at Abu Ghraib. Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez,
the top US military officer in Iraq, approved in September a list of methods
that included "sensory deprivation," "minimum bread and water," "light control,"
enforced silence, and yelling at prisoners. Those methods have since been barred
in Iraq.

The KUBARK manual cited research supporting the effectiveness of the
deprivations. "Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an
ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light or
weak artificial light which never varies, which is soundproofed, and in which
odors are eliminated," the manual said.

An experiment referred to in the handbook was done in the 1950s and involved
conditions designed to produce stress before an interrogation -- similar to
those applied to John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban soldier, after his
capture in Afghanistan. Lindh was tied to a stretcher naked and later held for
long periods in a large metal container.

In the experiment done about 50 years earlier, volunteers were "placed in a
tank-type respirator" with vents open so that the subjects could breathe but
their arms and legs were enclosed in "rigid cylinders to inhibit movement and
tactile contact."

Six of the 17 volunteers completed the 36 hours of the experiment; the other 11
asked for early release -- four because of anxiety and panic, and the others
because of physical discomfort.

The conclusion reached, the handbook said, was that "the early effect of such an
environment is anxiety" and that "the stress becomes unbearable for most
subjects," some of whom "lose touch with reality [and] focus inwardly."

The payoff of such techniques, the manual said, is that when the interrogator
appears, he or she appears as a "reward of lessened anxiety . . . providing
relief for growing discomfort," and that sometimes, as a result, "the questioner
assumes a benevolent role."


--------------------------------------------------------

Interrogator says he told prison guards to use sleep deprivation

By Matt Kelley, Associated Press  |  June 15, 2004

WASHINGTON -- In testimony that conflicts with some generals' accounts, a
private interrogator accused of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison told
investigators that he and military intelligence operatives directed prison
guards to keep Iraqi prisoners awake for as much as 20 hours a day.

Steven A. Stefanowicz also said he may have heard, but did not see, some
military police physically abusing a prisoner. Otherwise, he said, he did not
see any abuses inside Abu Ghraib like those documented in photos that became
public this spring.

Stefanowicz, whose own credibility has been questioned in the official prison
investigation, told Army investigators in a sworn statement that Colonel Thomas
Pappas, the military intelligence chief at Abu Ghraib, personally approved of
the sleep deprivation tactics.

Prison guards were given copies of written interrogation plans for each inmate,
which were prepared by three-person teams comprising contractors or military
intelligence soldiers, Stefanowicz said in the sworn statement obtained by the
Associated Press.

Those plans specifically placed one detainee on a "sleep/meal management
program" that involved letting the prisoner sleep only in small blocks of time
totaling no more than four hours out of every 24, up to a total of three
days. The prisoner then would be allowed 12 hours' sleep, Stefanowicz told
investigators.

"The MPs are allowed to do what is necessary to keep the detainee awake in the
allotted period of time as long as it adheres to approved rules of engagement
and proper treatment of the detainee," Stefanowicz said, adding he never ordered
MPs to assault a prisoner.

Stefanowicz's statement conflicts with congressional testimony by some top
generals and statements by Stefanowicz's employer, CACI International Inc., that
private contractors and military intelligence operatives never gave guards
orders to take actions that would assist interrogations.

Major General Geoffrey Miller, now in charge of US prisons in Iraq, and former
Iraq commander Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, have said their orders
allowed military police to offer information to help interrogators, but they
were forbidden to take active roles, such as denying sleep.

CACI president and chief executive J.P. "Jack" London has said CACI's contract
did not allow its workers to tell MPs or any other soldiers what to do. London
has said Army officials have praised Stefanowicz's work and never complained
about him.

"In connection with inquiries into our operations in Iraq, we have been assured
that our employees had no involvement in any inappropriate activity," CACI said
in a news release Sunday.

A Pentagon spokesman did not immediately return a telephone message seeking
comment last night.

Major General Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the investigation that documented the
abuses at Abu Ghraib, had access to Stefanowicz's statement before writing his
report. Taguba agreed with the assertion that military intelligence officials
directed the prison guards on activities but disputed Stefanowicz on the issue
of whether he saw, engaged in, or encouraged abuses. "He clearly knew his
instructions equated to physical abuse," Taguba said of Stefanowicz.

Stefanowicz's lawyer, Henry Hockeimer Jr., said yesterday that his client is
innocent of wrongdoing and that he has had no indication his client will face
criminal charges.

Six enlisted military police soldiers are facing charges for abusing prisoners
at Abu Ghraib. Another has pleaded guilty. Photos from the prison show prisoners
being beaten, stripped naked, sexually humiliated, and intimidated by dogs.


------------------------------------------------------------

Rationalizing torture

June 13, 2004

THE WORST thing about a recently disclosed March 2003 "Working Group Report on
Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism" is not any tenuous
connection to the humiliation and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The
report was produced in response to a request from the Central Command general in
charge of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and was meant to delineate
exactly which harsh interrogation techniques would be permissible for inmates
there.

The truly repellent and un-American elements of the draft report -- since
classified as secret by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- are the legal
justifications it offers for the use of torture. These twisted arguments amount
to a demonstration of the difference between legalistic sophistry and respect
for lawfulness. No wonder Defense Department spokesmen have been trying to spin
the significance of the leaked report by claiming its intent was to clarify what
harsh treatment may not be inflicted on detainees rather than to provide a legal
basis for the use of torture.

Perhaps the most pernicious doctrine cited in the report to justify torture is
"the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military
campaign." Under this doctrine, legal prohibitions against torture "must be
construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander
in chief authority."

In other words, if President Bush approves extreme sleep deprivation, beating
the soles of a prisoner's feet, or threats to a captive's family, Americans
carrying out Bush's orders need not worry about their obligations under the
Geneva Conventions, the Convention on Torture ratified by the United States in
1994, or US legal prohibitions against torture. This is a doctrine that Saddam
Hussein's torturers would appreciate.

The report also argues that torture may be justified by "necessity." This means
that if an American interrogator thinks it is necessary to torture a prisoner,
that subjective judgment may nullify international and US law. The Convention
Against Torture explicitly rejects any such claim, however. It says: "No
exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war,
internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as
a justification of torture." Indeed, the reason for having international or
constitutional prohibitions against torture is precisely to protect against a
torturer's claim of necessity.

Most shameful of all is the report's invocation of the so-called Nuremberg
defense -- the gambit that allows a US soldier or official to deny guilt for
torture by saying he was just following orders. Americans deserve a government
that can fight terrorism without holding up Adolf Eichmann as a model.


-------------------------------------------------------------

Report Says U.S. Has 'Secret' Detention Centers
Jun 17, 3:43 pm ET

By Sue Pleming

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is holding terrorism suspects in more
than two dozen detention centers worldwide and about half of these operate in
total secrecy, said a human rights report released on Thursday.

Human Rights First, formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights,
said in a report that secrecy surrounding these facilities made "inappropriate
detention and abuse not only likely but inevitable."

"The abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib cannot be addressed in isolation,"
said Deborah Pearlstein, director of the group's U.S. Law and Security program,
referring to the U.S. Naval base prison in Cuba and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq
where abuses are being investigated.

"This is all about secrecy, accountability and the law," Pearlstein told a news
conference.

The report coincided with news that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered
military officials to hold a suspect in a prison near Baghdad without telling
the Red Cross. Pearlstein said this would be a violation of the Geneva
Conventions and Defense Department directives.

She said thousands of security detainees were being held by the United States in
Iraq and Afghanistan as well as locations elsewhere which the military refused
to disclose.

"The U.S. government is holding prisoners in a secret system of off-shore
prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability of law," said
the report.

LIST OF DETENTION CENTERS

Pearlstein said multiple sources reported U.S. detention centers in, among other
places, Kohat in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, on the Indian Ocean
island of Diego Garcia and at Al Jafr prison in Jordan, where the group said the
CIA had an interrogation facility.

Prisoners are also being held at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston,
South Carolina, and others were suspected of being held on U.S. warships.

A defense department spokesman told Reuters he would comment when he had more
information about the report.

Pearlstein called for the U.S. authorities to end "secret detentions," provide a
list of prisoners, investigate abuses and allow the International Committee of
the Red Cross unfettered access to detainees.

U.S. treatment of detainees came under the spotlight after disturbing photos
were leaked to the media showing U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners.

The United States is conducting several investigations into these abuses but
Pearlstein said these were not enough and a full court of inquiry should be
ordered.

Families of suspects detained by U.S. authorities have complained strongly about
the lack of information about detainees held by U.S. authorities since the
Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against the United States.

Pakistani Farhat Paracha said via a telephone link-up at the news conference
that she tried for weeks to find her husband, Saifullah Paracha, who disappeared
last June when he took a business trip from Pakistan to Thailand.

Paracha said she asked the U.S. and Pakistani governments to track him down and
only learned about his whereabouts when the Red Cross contacted her six weeks
later to say her husband was being held at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.

"I feel disgusted. It makes my heart sink. I feel so powerless and so helpless,"
said Paracha.


-----------------------------------------------------

Rumsfeld Defends Secretly Holding Suspect

Jun 17, 4:27 PM (ET)

By MATT KELLEY


WASHINGTON (AP) - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended his decision to
hold a prisoner captured in Iraq without notifying international authorities,
saying it was at the request of CIA Director George J. Tenet and the detainee
was treated humanely.

"He wasn't lost in the system," Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon. "There
is no question at all ... that he received humane treatment."

The terror suspect has been held since October without being given an
identification number and without the International Committee of the Red Cross
being notified, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. Both conditions violate
the Geneva Accords on treatment of prisoners of war.

Rumsfeld described him as an Iraqi who was a high-ranking member of Ansar
al-Islam, a militant Islamic group believed to have orchestrated some of the
bombings and guerrilla warfare in Iraq.

Rumsfeld ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to have the prisoner secretly
detained on the day last year when Tenet made the request, Whitman said.

"The director of central intelligence requested he not be assigned an internment
serial number while the CIA worked to determine his precise disposition,"
Whitman said.

Rumsfeld said Tenet had the authority to make the request. The defense secretary
said such a call would be to prevent the prisoner's interrogation from being
interrupted.

The Bush administration has argued that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to
suspected terrorists who do not follow the conventions themselves. But Rumsfeld
and other administration officials have said the Geneva Conventions applied to
all U.S. military activities in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.

The prisoner will be given a number and the Red Cross will be formally notified
soon, Whitman said.

"The ICRC should have been notified about the detainee earlier," Whitman
said. "We should have taken steps, and we have taken the necessary steps to
rectify the situation."

The Pentagon's admission came a day before a human rights group released a
report accusing the United States of keeping an unknown number of terrorist
suspects in secret lockups around the world.

A report from New York-based Human Rights First said the Bush administration was
violating U.S. and international law by refusing to notify all detainees'
families or give names, numbers and locations of all terror war prisoners to the
Red Cross.

None of that was done in the Iraqi detainee's case, Whitman said.

Keeping secret prisoners creates conditions for abuses such as the humiliations
and beatings suffered by some Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the group argues.

"The official secrecy surrounding U.S. practices has made conditions ripe for
illegality and abuse," said the report from Human Rights First, formerly called
the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

The group said the United States should immediately allow Red Cross access to
all terror war detainees, notify the prisoners' families and announce the number
and location of such prisoners.

The Iraqi prisoner is so far the only individual Defense Department officials
have acknowledged shielding from the Red Cross. Before Wednesday's admission,
Pentagon spokesmen would not confirm or deny if anyone was being held in secret.

"We've not talked about the location of specific detainees other than Iraq,
Afghanistan and Cuba simply because it gets into the classified realm," Air
Force Maj. Michael Shavers said in an e-mail response to questions from The
Associated Press on Wednesday, before the Iraq admission.

President Bush and members of his administration have said repeatedly that all
detainees are treated humanely. Pentagon officials have argued that announcing
the numbers or locations of all detainees would indicate the scope of
U.S. anti-terrorism efforts to terrorist groups and give them ideas of sites to
attack.

The secret prisoner in Iraq is believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar
al-Islam, a radical group which had been based in northern Iraq before the
U.S. invasion last year. U.S. officials believe the man was involved in attacks
on coalition troops, Whitman said.

Deborah Pearlstein, a co-author of the Human Rights First report, said the
United States needs to stop keeping secret prisoners altogether.

"There's a lot of unnecessary mystery surrounding U.S. detention practices,"
Pearlstein said Wednesday, before the Pentagon's admission.


----------------------------------------------------

Rules on Prisoners Seen as Sending Mixed Messages to G.I.'s

By DOUGLAS JEHL
June 22, 2004

The following article was reported by Douglas Jehl, Eric Schmitt and Kate
Zernike and was written by Mr. Jehl.

WASHINGTON, June 21 ? Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration's new
rules governing treatment of foreign prisoners have been contradictory and have
sent mixed messages to American soldiers, according to military personnel and
documents.

Six investigations are under way into abuses of detainees; none are expected to
produce any conclusions soon. A close review of recently disclosed documents and
interviews with soldiers, officers and government officials find a broader
pattern of misconduct and knowledge about it stretching into the middle chain of
command. But there is no clear evidence to date that the highest military or
civilian leaders ordered or authorized the mistreatment of prisoners at
American-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Still, the ever-shifting rules, in which lists of accepted interrogation tactics
were widened drastically before being reined in over 17 crucial months, helped
foster a climate in which abuse could flourish.

Starting with the 17 interrogation techniques approved in a standard Army
manual, commanders at the Guantánamo prison doubled the permitted methods by
late 2002, before shrinking the list. In Iraq last fall, directives on treatment
of prisoners were changed at least three times in six weeks. Some of the
procedures authorized in Iraq had been banned as too harsh months earlier at
Guantánamo.

Some officers skirted international treaties governing prisoner treatment, some
soldiers have said, instructing subordinates to hide detainees from monitors
sent by the International Committee of the Red Cross. In one instance, Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved an order to hold a suspected Iraqi
terrorist but to keep his name off the prison rolls, effectively shielding the
"ghost detainee" from Red Cross inspectors.

Lacking clear guidance, soldiers at various jails were apparently confused about
the rules. In Iraq, some guards were such sticklers that they demanded paperwork
to take away detainees' blankets, while others did not understand that they
needed written authorization to intimidate prisoners with dogs.

Many guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said they had been told by
intelligence officers to "soften up" detainees, but some thought that meant
making them do calisthenics to tire them out, while others took it to mean
forcing them to crawl naked on leashes for hours.

Beatings were accepted enough at Abu Ghraib that some soldiers recorded the
number of stitches their victims required with tack marks on the wall. In the
worst cases in Afghanistan and Iraq, abuse resulted in deaths, including 10
cases now being investigated as homicides.

While President Bush has portrayed the events at Abu Ghraib as the actions of
just a few soldiers at one prison, the picture emerging from documents,
interviews and Congressional testimony points to a broader pattern of misconduct
and knowledge about it stretching up the chain of command.

While the mistreatment did not go entirely unnoticed, many soldiers who had
hints of the abuse did not report it. In a chaotic environment in the midst of a
war, some soldiers said later, they assumed it must have been authorized.

"It was confusing the way the place was run," Sgt. Samuel Jefferson Provance
III, who worked in interrogations at Abu Ghraib as part of the 302nd Military
Intelligence Battalion, testified at a military hearing last month. "It was a
shocking experience."

For military officials at the highest levels, the administration's fight against
terrorism was a new kind of war. As Gen. James T. Hill, head of the military's
Southern Command, said, describing the government's post-Sept. 11 effort to
rewrite longstanding practices about prisoner treatment, "we really were moving
into uncharted waters."

Geneva Rules Didn't Apply

Soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as planning began for the invasion of
Afghanistan, the Pentagon asked Justice Department lawyers to assess whether
detainees held in Afghanistan or in the new American-run prison at Guantánamo
Bay could claim they had been mistreated under the Geneva Conventions and
federal and international laws.

The lawyers concluded that the Geneva Conventions did not apply, because
Guantánamo was outside the territorial United States, and because Al Qaeda and
the Taliban were not legitimate states, so were not parties to the
agreements. One memorandum argued that the president could authorize even
"cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment to protect national security, as long
as it did not cause "great suffering or serious bodily injury" to detainees,
like "killing or torturing them."

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and State Department lawyers fired back
objections, but apparently lost. An August 2002 memo on interrogation standards
from the Justice Department to the White House counsel further whittled down the
definition of torture. To qualify, the document said, mistreatment had to
inflict pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical
injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

Military officials have described those legal arguments as theoretical and
removed from the decision making about rules for interrogation and treatment of
prisoners.

But first in Guantánamo and Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, commanders authorized
procedures harsher than those spelled out in the Army's interrogations field
manual. The 17 general techniques, like manipulating a prisoner's emotions or
persuading the prisoner that it was futile to resist, formed a boundary that the
American military had heeded in the recent past.

Like the legal memorandums, the decision to go beyond the field manual was based
on the ground that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. For prisoners in Iraq,
the reasoning was that the protections were not as restrictive as previously
interpreted by the United States.

Harsher Procedures Added

At Guantánamo, the first clear widening of authority came in December 2002, when
commanders asked the Pentagon for more latitude in interrogating a Saudi Arabian
prisoner believed to be the planned 20th hijacker of Sept. 11.

The authorities thought the man, Mohamed al-Kahtani, had information about
possible future attacks, but he had resisted standard interrogation techniques.

In response, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized at least 17 new procedures beyond those in
the field manual, a senior Pentagon official said. They applied to all
Guantánamo prisoners.

Those harsher techniques included hooding; exploiting a prisoner's phobias,
sometimes using muzzled dogs in interrogations; removing some of a detainee's
clothing; and the use of "minimum physical contact" like poking or grabbing.

Even though these harsher techniques were approved, senior military officials
said last week that those four specific practices were never used at
Guantánamo. Still, interrogators at the site and military lawyers in Washington
objected. Just over a month later, Mr. Rumsfeld ordered a group of military
lawyers, intelligence analysts and policy makers to review the rules.

On April 16, 2003, Mr. Rumsfeld narrowed the list of approved techniques. He
permitted 24 methods at Guantánamo, including 17 from the Army manual, but
stipulated that 4 of them required his explicit approval. They involved using
incentives to cooperate, like offering hot showers in the winter, segregation
for more than 30 days, good-cop-bad-cop interrogation and an approach called
"pride and ego down," which exploits a prisoner's loyalty, intelligence or
perceived weakness.

Defense officials said those more aggressive techniques had been used with only
two prisoners at Guantánamo and did not constitute torture.

In Iraq, there had been no formal interrogation rules in place beyond those in
the Army manual until late August 2003.

Then, officers at Abu Ghraib sought to give interrogators more freedom and
proposed a set of rules drafted by an Army unit that had recently arrived from
Afghanistan. The unit, the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, had a
questionable record. Two prisoners under its supervision at Bagram Collection
Point in Afghanistan died in December 2002, apparently in homicides that are
still being reviewed by criminal investigators.

The battalion's commander, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, proposed 30 interrogation
techniques, and two lawyers working for Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground
commander in Iraq, approved them. Defense officials have refused to say exactly
what procedures were authorized under the proposal or under later directives put
into effect in Iraq. A senior Pentagon official said last week that it was
unclear whether those additional techniques had ever been used in
interrogations.

Wider, Then Narrower Policy

Meanwhile, another crucial chain of events had already been set in
motion. Stephen A. Cambone, Mr. Rumsfeld's top intelligence official, encouraged
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the head of detention operations at
Guantánamo, to visit Iraq to find ways to improve the quality of intelligence
extracted from detainees about the growing anti-American insurgency.

On Sept. 9, General Miller completed a review of operations in Iraq and
recommended a detainee interrogation policy that borrowed heavily from the
procedures approved for Guantánamo. He proposed establishing a new interrogation
and debriefing center and ensuring that military police officers were assigned
to help set the conditions for questioning.

On Sept. 14, General Sanchez authorized variations on what General Miller had
recommended. Those rules allowed the use of harsh procedures banned from
Guantánamo, including using sleep deprivation, to as little as four hours' rest
each 24 hours, and making prisoners stand or crouch in positions for up to an
hour, according to Senate aides who have read the confidential document.

As in Guantánamo, the policy ignited a debate among military lawyers, with
particular objections coming from the Central Command.

So on Oct. 12, General Sanchez issued a much narrower policy. Most of the
harsher methods automatically authorized in the earlier directive, like
segregating a prisoner for more than 30 days, would not be permitted without the
general's approval.

According to General Sanchez's top lawyer, Col. Marc Warren, the new procedures
were consistent with the Geneva Conventions. But the policy still allowed
interrogators to improvise if they received approval, according to a senior
military official who briefed reporters at the Pentagon last month.

It remains unclear whether the changes were communicated through the ranks of
interrogators and guards, particularly those at Abu Ghraib. Rules posted on the
wall in the prison's Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, for example,
were apparently outdated.

Some troubling practices were clearly tolerated, soldiers said in interviews and
sworn statements. Forced nudity was common in the prison's highest-security
area, or "hard site," overseen by military intelligence officers. One
interrogator told investigators that he "generally" threw tables around a room
holding detainees, while another said she did not regard slapping a detainee as
abusive.

Several soldiers said in interviews that Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, who was in
charge of the interrogation center, had handcuffed and hooded detainees who had
been beaten and had hidden them in a cell during a Red Cross visit. Others said
Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the highest-ranking military intelligence officer at the
prison, had permitted them to intimidate detainees with dogs. None of the dog
handlers have been charged with wrongdoing, and two of them have said they were
following orders from Colonel Pappas.

By the accounts of the seven soldiers now charged, the abuses seen in the
notorious photographs from the prison began as an attempt to encourage prisoners
to talk.

Pfc. Lynndie R. England, telling investigators last month about what was going
on in prison photographs, said making prisoners crawl with leashes was intended
as a "humiliation tactic" to get them to tell more about the rape of an Iraqi
boy.

But several of the soldiers charged said later acts depicted in photographs,
like piling prisoners naked or forcing them to masturbate, had nothing to do
with interrogations. "We thought it looked funny, so pictures were taken,"
Private England told investigators.

Senior Army officers in Baghdad say they did not learn about those abuses until
a soldier came forward in January. But several senior Army officers knew by last
November that the Red Cross had complained about problems at the prison,
including forced nudity and physical and verbal abuse of prisoners.

Among those aware of the concerns were General Sanchez's top deputy,
Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski; his intelligence officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara
G. Fast; and his top lawyer, Colonel Warren. In addition, a small unit inside
the prison began reporting beatings and other abuses last fall in documents sent
to military lawyers in Baghdad and a review board of colonels, according to
military intelligence officers.

The role played by General Sanchez remains a particular focus of
investigators. He authorized interrogation procedures in September that he
banned 28 days later, and he visited Abu Ghraib at least three times in October,
when the worse of the abuses occurred. He has said he did not learn of the
incidents until January.

Last month, in response to growing concerns in Congress, General Sanchez
narrowed the interrogation rules in Iraq once again, barring virtually all
coercive tactics.

In early June, the general removed himself as the officer overseeing an inquiry
into the role of military intelligence soldiers in the prisoner abuse, clearing
the way for an Army general to interview him for the investigation.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

-----------------------------------------------------------

Freed Swede Says Was Tortured at Guantanamo
Jul 14, 5:20 am ET

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A Swede released from Guantanamo Bay last week said he had
been tortured by exposure to freezing cold, noise and bright lights and chained
during his 2-1/2-year imprisonment.

Mehdi Ghezali, the son of an Algerian-born immigrant, told Swedish media in
interviews published or aired Wednesday that he was interrogated almost every
day at the U.S. naval base on Cuban soil.

The 25-year-old man, who was arrested in Pakistan where he says he was studying
Islam, was released on July 8 after pressure from Sweden.

Ghezali told Dagens Nyheter daily and Swedish public radio he had cooperated for
the first six months but stopped talking when his interrogators kept asking the
same questions.

In April the military changed their tactics, he said.

"They put me in the interrogation room and used it as a refrigerator. They set
the temperature to minus degrees so it was terribly cold and one had to freeze
there for many hours -- 12 to 14 hours one had to sit there, chained," he said,
adding that he had partially lost the feeling in one foot since then.

Ghezali said he was also deprived of sleep, chained for long periods in painful
positions, and exposed to bright flashes of light in a darkened room and loud
music and noise.

"They forced me down with chained feet. Then they took away the chains from the
hands, pulled the arms under the legs and chained them hard again. I could not
move," he said.

After several hours his feet were swollen and his whole body was aching. "The
worst was in the back and the legs," he said.

Ghezali said he went Pakistan to study Islam in August 2001, before the
September 11 attacks which triggered President Bush's war on terrorism and the
U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan.

He said he was visiting a friend in the Afghan town of Jalalabad near the
Pakistani border when the U.S. invasion started. He decided to return to
Pakistan when he heard that villagers were selling foreigners to U.S. forces.

Pakistani villagers seized him as crossed the border from Afghanistan and sold
him to Pakistani police, who turned him over to the U.S. military. He was flown
from Pakistan to Afghanistan and arrived in Guantanamo in January 2002, he said.

He was released from Guantanamo on July 8 because he was no longer considered a
threat to the United States.


-----------------------------------------------------

Poll: Americans Against Using Torture

Jul 23, 10:16 AM (ET)

WASHINGTON (AP) - Two-thirds of Americans believe the United States should never
use physical torture of people it detains, according to a poll on attitudes
about prisoner abuse.

A majority, 55 percent, said this country should never use mental torture - such
as making someone think that they or their family will be killed, according to
the poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of
Maryland.

Four of five supported the rights of someone detained to have a hearing where
they can answer the charges against them. About that many said detainees should
have the right to contact a family member and nine in 10 said the Red Cross
should be able to visit people in detention to make sure they are treated
properly, according to the poll conducted by Knowledge Networks.

Six in 10 said that people captured who are not conventional soldiers should
still be accorded the rights provided by treaties. Such treaties spell out the
rights of prisoners of war.

Two-thirds believe the United States president should not have the right to
override constitutional requirements that all people in detention should be
given a hearing.

Three-fourths agreed with the statement that the United States is a moral leader
in the world and should not set a bad example by torturing or degrading people
in detention.

An overwhelming majority opposed the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners, making
prisoners stay naked, holding prisoners heads under water for extended periods
of time and sexually humiliating prisoners.

The poll of 892 adults was taken July 9-15 and has a margin of sampling error of
plus or minus 3 percentage points.

---

On the Net:

Program on International Policy Attitudes: http://www.pipa.org


------------------------------------------------------------

Probe sought of US memos on torture

By Frank Davies, Knight Ridder  |  August 5, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Twelve former judges, seven past presidents of the American Bar
Association, a former FBI director, and more than 100 other legal specialists
called yesterday for a thorough investigation of Bush administration memos that
explored ways to skirt the laws against torture.

The group also asked the administration to release all memos on the subject and
urged Congress to probe how Bush officials decided to treat detainees captured
in the war on terrorism.

''The most senior lawyers in the Department of Justice, the White House,
Department of Defense, and the vice president's office have sought to justify
actions that violate the most basic rights of all human beings," said the
group's statement, signed by 130 officials and lawyers, including former FBI
chief William Sessions.

A spokeswoman for President Bush, Jeanie Mamo, said yesterday that the White
House had not yet received the request from the group, adding that Bush ''has
not condoned torture and has never authorized the use of torture."

The statement cites a series of memos written between early 2002, when the
administration decided not to give detainees POW status, and April 2003, when
the CIA and military were trying to get more information from captives but were
concerned about the legal consequences of any mistreatment.

In a 46-page memo in 2002, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee -- who is now a
federal judge -- narrowly defined torture as ''only extreme acts" that could
lead to ''death or organ failure."

He also wrote that the president, as commander in chief in the war against
terrorism, was not constrained by antitorture laws.

Some of the memos were leaked to reporters in the spring, and others were
released by the White House. Bush officials say that they never countenanced
torture and that the memos were merely internal documents reflecting a vigorous
debate.

But retired federal appeals Judge John Gibbons of New Jersey said the memos were
''very shocking because they advised on how the executive branch can violate
statutes and treaties and avoid prosecution."

John Curtin, a former president of the ABA, added, ''They defined torture in
such a way that anything goes."

Administration officials have said that the memos did not pave the way for the
abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.


-----------------------------------------------

Soldier says officials ordered some detainees hidden from Red Cross

By Allen G. Breed, Associated Press  |  August 5, 2004

FORT BRAGG, N.C. -- Military intelligence officials at the Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq ordered military police soldiers to keep several detainees hidden from the
International Committee of the Red Cross, leaving a coded message on cell doors
to indicate which detainees the visitors were not allowed to see or interview,
according to court testimony here yesterday.

Staff Sergeant Christopher Ward, a member of the 372d Military Police Company
who was in charge of the day shift at Abu Ghraib's most secure cellblock, said
that during at least three official visits last fall and winter, he was ordered
to steer the Red Cross away from certain detainees whose cells were tagged with
signs bearing the words "Article 134." Some of them were kept in a part of the
prison's Tier 1A that was obscured by two separate doors.

"I didn't understand it, and I can't tell you what that meant," Ward testified,
saying he had no idea what Article 134 was. Military prosecutors here also could
not say what the term meant. Ward said military intelligence "put the signs on
the door."

The testimony at a preliminary court hearing for Private Frist Class Lynndie
R. England, 21 -- who is charged with abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib last fall
-- echoes findings of an Army investigation that severely criticized officials
there for keeping "ghost detainees," those who were hidden from international
humanitarian workers.

An Army investigation into abuses at Abu Ghraib by Major General Antonio
M. Taguba reported that some detainees were being kept secretly and strongly
condemned the practice as a violation of international law. A subsequent Army
Inspector General's report, issued to Congress last month, said the Inspector
General had no evidence that detainees were hidden from international officials
or that there was any systemic problem related to such practices.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said he authorized keeping one soldier
off the official rolls under unusual circumstances, but members of the Senate
Armed Services Committee have expressed concern that the practice was more
widespread.


-------------------------------------------------------------

Ex-detainees detail alleged abuse at US base

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  August 5, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Three British former ''enemy combatants" freed from the prison at
Guantanamo Bay released a 115-page statement yesterday claiming they were
beaten, sexually humiliated, and held in prolonged isolation during their two
years of detention.

They said harsh treatment and incessant interrogations at the US Navy base in
Cuba eventually led them to confess to being in a video with Al Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden. But British intelligence later determined that they had been in
England at the time the video was shot in Afghanistan, contributing to the
British government's decision to let them go free once they were transferred
from Guantanamo.

In one alleged incident, one of the three claimed he was assaulted while riding
a ferry from the airstrip to the prison.

''We had been told to keep our hands by our sides," he said. ''This was
uncomfortable as we were shackled, and after some time I moved my hands into my
lap. A soldier came up to me and said, 'Put your hand on your left knee,' which
I did. The soldier said, 'This [expletive deleted] speaks English,' and then
kicked me about 20 times to my left thigh and punched me as well. I had a large
bruise on my leg and couldn't walk for nearly one month."

The accounts -- if corroborated -- would call into question the Bush
administration's contention that prisoners at Guantanamo are treated humanely
even though the president decided not to apply the Geneva Conventions to
Afghanistan war detainees. The accounts were released by their US lawyers at the
Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

Last fall, Red Cross officials took the unusual step of issuing a report on
conditions at the Guantanamo prison. The rare public report focused on a
''worrying deterioration" of mental health due to detainees' uncertain fate and
the lack of a legal process. It did not mention physical abuse. In June, a
landmark Supreme Court ruling in a case brought by the Center for Constitutional
Rights -- the same group that released the accounts in New York yesterday --
opened the door to the US court system for the detainees to challenge their
imprisonment.

Major Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman, would not comment on the
allegations, but said US policy condemns abuse of detainees.

''The US operates a humane and professional detention operation at Guantanamo
that is providing valuable information on the war on terrorism," Shavers
said. ''All detainees are treated humanely and, to the extent appropriate and
consistent with military necessity, in accordance with the principles of the
Third Geneva Convention."

Mark Jacobson, a former Defense Department official who worked on detainee
issues in the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, called the report
''a wonderful piece of propaganda" that mixed some truth with lies and
misinterpretations to play on public outrage over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal
in Iraq.

For example, he said, detainees' heads and beards may have been shaved to rid
them of lice, not to insult their Muslim manhood, as the three detainees
claimed. Body cavity searches are a normal security precaution, he said, not a
way to sexually humiliate the detainees.

''[The Department of Defense] should be fighting back a lot harder on this, but
the problem is that we've got a credibility issue from all the perceived
sidesteps and playing around with the internationally accepted interpretation of
Geneva," he said. ''They are making stuff up based on what their lawyers feel
will play on the perceptions of Abu Ghraib and how to build a case."

But Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said he
interviewed the three former detainees this spring before the Abu Ghraib prison
scandal and they gave much the same account.

He said they told him about unconventional interrogation techniques, such as
playing loud music and manipulating room temperature, diet, and sleep patterns,
that matched permissible interrogation techniques for the Cuban prison outlined
in an April 2003 military policy memo that was made public after the scandal in
Iraq.

But the prisoners' account clearly seeks to draw parallels between Guantanamo
and Abu Ghraib, saying conditions worsened in the fall of 2002 after Major
General Geoffrey Miller took over the base.

Miller was sent to Iraq in August 2003 to recommended ways to make the
interrogations there run more like Guantanamo in order to obtain more
information about the insurgency. The physical and sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib
began shortly after Miller's visit, but the military says the abuses were the
acts of a few soldiers and not official policy.

The ex-Guantanamo detainees' account states: ''We were told by one Algerian
. . . that he had been taken to interrogation and been forced to stand naked. He
also told us he had been forced to watch a video supposedly showing two
detainees dressed in orange, one sodomizing the other, and was told that it
would happen to him if he didn't cooperate."

Jacobson, the former detainee-policy official, said, ''That is most
ridiculous. They're building on perceptions of abuse at Abu Ghraib. I'd stake my
career that nothing like that would ever have been permitted."

The accounts do not say why the men were in Afghanistan, but the narrative
indicates the most brutal acts occurred when the three were first captured by
the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and sealed inside a shipping container, in
which some detainees died, they said. The harsh conditions decreased as they
were handed over to US soldiers in Kandahar, then taken to Guantanamo's crude
original Camp X-Ray prison, then transferred to the maximum-confinement wing of
the newly built Camp Delta, and finally transferred to the medium-security wing
of Delta.

The account tells of a relentless push by interrogators to get the detainees to
confess to something that turned out not to be true.

''What happened to these individuals is Kafkaesque," Ratner said. ''This report
calls into question the reliability of any information or confession obtained
from any detainee."

Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the ranking member on the Justice
Committee, released a statement yesterday calling for an investigation to
determine what is true among the ''completely contradictory versions of what
occurred at Guantanamo."


-----------------------------------------------------

Rumsfeld Denies Abuses Occurred at Interrogations

By ERIC SCHMITT
August 28, 2004

WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 - In his first comments on the two major investigative
reports issued this week at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
on Thursday mischaracterized one of their central findings about the American
military's treatment of Iraqi prisoners by saying there was no evidence that
prisoners had been abused during interrogations.

The reports, one by a panel Mr. Rumsfeld had appointed and one by three Army
generals, made clear that some abuses occurred during interrogations, that
others were intended to soften up prisoners who were to be questioned, and that
many intelligence personnel involved in the interrogations were implicated in
the abuses. The reports were issued Tuesday and Wednesday.

But on Thursday, in an interview with a radio station in Phoenix, Mr. Rumsfeld,
who was traveling outside Washington this week, said, "I have not seen anything
thus far that says that the people abused were abused in the process of
interrogating them or for interrogation purposes." A transcript of the interview
was posted on the Pentagon's Web site on Friday. Mr. Rumsfeld repeated the
assertion a few hours later at a news conference in Phoenix, adding that "all of
the press, all of the television thus far that tried to link the abuse that took
place to interrogation techniques in Iraq has not yet been demonstrated." After
an aide slipped him a note during the news conference, however, Mr. Rumsfeld
corrected himself, noting that an inquiry by three Army generals had, in fact,
found "two or three" cases of abuse during interrogations or the interrogations
process. In fact, however, the Army inquiry found that 13 of 44 instances of
abuse involved interrogations or the interrogation process, an Army spokeswoman
said. The report itself explicitly describes the extent to which each abuse
involved interrogations.

On Friday, the chief Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, sought to play down
Mr. Rumsfeld's comments, saying: "He misspoke, pure and simple. But he corrected
himself."

While the abuses that first came to light - depicted in photographs taken in Abu
Ghraib prison - were not the ones involving interrogations, the subsequent
investigations have shown that, among other abuses, prisoners were kept in harsh
isolation, beaten, kept naked and threatened by dogs as part of the
interrogation process there. Mr. Rumsfeld has condemned the prisoner abuses, and
did so again in his public appearances on Thursday in Arizona. But he has also
hewed to the line that a small band of rogue military police were largely
responsible for the beatings, sexual humiliating poses and other abuses,
especially those depicted in a notorious set of photographs that became public
in April.

So his remarks on Thursday suggested to some lawmakers on Friday that
Mr. Rumsfeld was either out of touch with what had captured headlines and
evening news programs this week, or was reluctant to acknowledge the panels' new
findings.

"This is a very serious topic and before we comment on the findings, we need to
read them thoroughly," said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the
Armed Services Committee, who acknowledged that he has been on vacation, too,
and has not yet read the full report.

Mr. Rumsfeld also misstated an important finding of an independent panel he
appointed and is led by James R. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary, saying
in the interview with KTAR radio, "The interesting thing about the Schlesinger
panel is their conclusion that, in fact, the abuses seem not to have anything to
do with interrogation at all."

But the first paragraph of the Schlesinger panel report says, "We do know that
some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur
during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions
occurred elsewhere."

Mr. Rumsfeld has been on and off vacation this week, meeting with President Bush
and visiting troops in Texas earlier in the week, while also spending time at
his home in Taos, N.M. On Thursday, Mr. Rumsfeld visited a Marine Corps air base
in Yuma, Ariz., before speaking to a business group in Phoenix.

While away from Washington, Mr. Rumsfeld has access to all the classified
communications channels and documents he needs to perform his
duties. Mr. Rumsfeld was briefed on the findings of the independent panel, but
not the Army report. Mr. Di Rita said he did not know if the secretary had yet
received copies of the two lengthy reports and read them. "That The New York
Times would find the secretary's misstatement and the subsequent effort to set
the record straight is of interest is a shameless example of news that is sought
during the dog days of August in Washington," another Pentagon spokesman, Eric
Ruff, said.

Both the four-member independent panel and the Army inquiry, whose principal
investigator was Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, found that military intelligence
personnel committed many of the offenses, including some in interrogations.

The Fay report found, for example, that in 16 of the 44 abuse cases the inquiry
cited, military intelligence personnel encouraged, condoned or solicited
military police officers to commit abuses, from using dogs to terrorize
prisoners to placing detainees in dark, poorly ventilated cells that were
freezing cold or sweltering hot. In 11 other cases they committed abuses
themselves.

In Phoenix, Mr. Rumsfeld accepted some responsibility for the abuses at Abu
Ghraib, saying, "I testified before the Congress many, many weeks ago and said,
you know, the senior person has a responsibility," Mr. Rumsfeld said in the
radio interview. The Schlesinger panel said flaws in oversight extended up the
chain of command to Mr. Rumsfeld's office and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a
finding that prompted Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic
presidential nominee, and some other Democrats to renew their calls for
Mr. Rumsfeld to resign. Mr. Rumsfeld's Republican supporters have rejected those
calls, but many of them have referred to the naval analogy that the captain of
the ship is ultimately accountable for all that happens aboard the vessel.

Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who leads the Armed Services
Committee, told reporters this week that he was leaving it to Mr. Rumsfeld to
decide what to do. "He understands the concept of command, the commanding
officer ultimately has to take responsibility for those actions in his
subordinates that have proven to be unprofessional or downright wrong."

Mr. Schlesinger, speaking in an interview to be broadcast this weekend,
concurred. "The secretary of defense takes responsibility for whatever happens
below, even though he may have forbidden such action," Mr. Schlesinger told "One
on One," a weekly news interview program broadcast on both public and commercial
stations across the country.

While acknowledging his accountability, Mr. Rumsfeld said Thursday that he could
not watch over the millions of people who work in or for the Defense
Department. "Needless to say, if you are in Washington, D.C., you can't know
what's going on the midnight shift in one of those many prisons around the
world." He added, "What happened shouldn't have happened."

Mr. Rumsfeld insisted that while the abuses "were a terrible thing to have
happened," the military has responded quickly and thoroughly to the
allegations. So far, four major reports into aspects of the misconduct have been
released. Four more are pending. "We keep learning more all the time,"
Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It's a bit of a discovery process."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


----------------------------------------------------------

26 soldiers are cited in Afghanistan probe

By Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post  |  September 1, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Army investigators have recommended bringing abuse-related charges
against 26 soldiers stemming from a probe into the deaths of two detainees in
Afghanistan in December 2002, Pentagon officials said yesterday.

The cases, involving the two deaths and other incidents at the US base in
Bagram, Afghanistan, represent an attempt to assign criminal responsibility for
abuse of detainees that occurred well before the US invasion of Iraq in March
2003 and the subsequent scandal over the maltreatment of prisoners at the Abu
Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

The Afghanistan charges recommended by Army investigators and prosecutors, after
an investigation that took well over a year, range from negligent homicide to
less serious offenses such as dereliction of duty and failure to report an
offense, two Army officers familiar with the case said. One sergeant has already
been charged, officials said.

"The CID is about to wrap this up," said one officer, referring to the Army's
Criminal Investigation Division. The next step, officials said, is for Army
commanders to decide whether to follow the recommendations on charges. They are
expected to move quickly, the officials said.

The results of the investigation raise the possibility that the number of
soldiers facing charges for abuse in Afghanistan could approach that of soldiers
ultimately charged for maltreatment of prisoners in Iraq.

Seven military police soldiers have been charged in the scandal at Abu
Ghraib. Last week, Army investigators concluded that an additional 30 soldiers
and contractors had participated in the abuse there, and 11 others faced
possible charges or discipline for not reporting what they saw. Decisions on
charges for any of those people have not been made.

Most of the soldiers facing charges are from the Fort Bragg, N.C.-based 519th
Military Intelligence Battalion and the 377th Military Police Company, an Army
Reserve unit based in Cincinnati. It is possible that some Special Operations
troops might be charged, said one officer.

The 519th intelligence unit is rapidly becoming one of the more notorious units
in the Army. After serving at Bagram, the main US base in Afghanistan, in 2002,
some of its members were deployed to Iraq a year later and were posted to Abu
Ghraib. There, members of the unit were implicated in abuse of prisoners in the
fall and early winter of 2003.

Army investigators have found that soldiers in the unit brought to Iraq some
techniques they had employed in Afghanistan, such as the use of dogs to
intimidate prisoners. It is possible that some of the 519th soldiers will face
charges for alleged offenses in both countries, one Pentagon official said.

Last week, an Army report on Abu Ghraib said that military intelligence soldiers
at the prison bore significant responsibility for mistreatment of prisoners. It
found that MI soldiers "allegedly requested, encouraged, condoned, or solicited"
abuse by MPs in 16 of 44 incidents at Abu Ghraib that were investigated.

The Army expects to begin filing charges against soldiers in the Afghanistan
allegations in two to three weeks. Last month, officials quietly brought charges
against one member of the 377th, Sergeant James P. Boland, who was accused of
assault, maltreatment and dereliction of duty. It could not be determined why
that case was brought earlier. Boland could not be reached for comment, and a
person answering the telephone at his house said he was at Fort Knox, Ky.

The charges result from an unusually lengthy investigation into the two
previously publicized deaths at Bagram. Both cases were ruled homicides by a
military coroner.

------------------------------------------------------------

Prison Probe Raises Questions About CIA

By JOHN J. LUMPKIN
Sep 4, 12:08 PM (ET)

WASHINGTON (AP) - The latest Army investigation into the Abu Ghraib scandal is
raising new questions about whether the CIA, operating outside military rules,
contributed to the breakdown of military discipline at the prison.

The report cites the presence of unregistered "ghost detainees" who did not fall
under the military's usual system of registration, interrogation and medical
care.

But the CIA is rejecting much of the criticism. Spokesman Mark Mansfield said
recently that the report, released last week, "makes broad allegations about the
CIA that are not supported by the text."

The report by senior Army generals describes some of the CIA's detention
procedures, shining a rare light on those practices. Yet it does little to
describe the spy agency's actual interrogation methods at Abu Ghraib, beyond
saying they contributed to the discipline problems.

"The CIA's detention and interrogation practices contributed to a loss of
accountability and abuse at Abu Ghraib," says the investigation report.

Of 44 incidents of possible abuse cited in the Army's intelligence
investigation, the CIA was involved in only one - the only one to involve the
death of a detainee. In that case, a newly arrived CIA prisoner did not receive
the initial medical screening typical for incoming detainees, and then
died. That death remains under investigation.

To date, none of the abuses depicted in the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib
have been found to involve CIA personnel, Mansfield said.

The specific allegations of abuse at various U.S.-run detention and
interrogation centers in Iraq and Afghanistan are being investigated by the
CIA's Inspector General. In several cases, the Justice Department is also
investigating whether any CIA officers or contractors committed criminal acts.

The arrangements to hold "ghost detainees" were made between local CIA officers
and military officials at the prison, the investigation found. Army
investigators said they located information on eight "ghost detainees" held at
Abu Ghraib, but said there may have been more.

In one case, military guards at the prison moved a group of detainees around the
prison to hide them from a visiting Red Cross delegation, according to the
report of U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who conducted a separate
investigation into the prison's military police unit. He described the actions
as "deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international
law."

A U.S. intelligence official, discussing agency operations on the condition of
anonymity, said the CIA would keep detainees hidden to prevent insurgents both
inside and outside the prison from learning of their capture, suggesting the
agency believed that Red Cross knowledge of a given prisoner could ultimately
reach insurgents.

If the prisoners had been put in the general prison population, they might have
been able to confer with associates and plan their responses for an
interrogation, the official said. The official said there were only a "handful"
of such secret prisoners.

The Army investigation suggested that one prisoner who died did not receive a
proper medical screening because the CIA officers who brought him to the prison
ignored the usual registration procedures.

In that case on Nov. 4, 2003, a Navy SEAL team captured Manadel Al-Jamadi, who
was thought to have been connected to an attack on the International Committee
of the Red Cross. In detaining him, a SEAL subdued him by hitting him on the
side of the head with a gun butt. Two CIA personnel brought Al-Jamadi to Abu
Ghraib and put him in a shower room.

The prisoner was dead 45 minutes later. An autopsy determined Al-Jamadi died of
a blood clot in his head that was probably the result of being struck with the
gun.

A day later, U.S. personnel sneaked the body out on a stretcher, disguised so
the dead person would only look sick to other inmates.

"It is unclear how and under what authority the CIA could place prisoners like
(this detainee) in Abu Ghraib," because no formal agreement between the agency
and the military existed, the report says.

Had the prisoner been processed like a normal Army prisoner, he would have
received at a minimum a medical screening, the report says.

Mansfield said the CIA does not take issue with the Army report's conclusion
that there was confusion in the military regarding the CIA's role and authority
at the prison.

Agency officials agree that better coordination and written agreements between
the military and CIA would have clarified some matters, particularly for the
soldiers, he said.

The Army report describes Lt. Col. Stephen Jordan, the head of the interrogation
center at Abu Ghraib, as "fascinated" with the CIA, and says he gave agency
personnel leeway to operate without military involvement.

The CIA's freedom to operate influenced Army soldiers to ignore military
procedures, the report contends.

The Army generals said it is possible that still other agencies were involved in
handling prisoners, but that most of the information about non-military
operators in the report referred to the CIA.

Other groups could have included the FBI; the Task Force 121, the special
operations-CIA unit hunting senior Iraqi leaders; and the Iraqi Survey Group,
the CIA-Defense Intelligence Agency operation that hunted for weapons of mass
destruction.

------------------------------------------------------------

Gentler interrogation is working, US says

By Jim Krane, Associated Press  |  September 7, 2004

BAGHDAD -- The US military is reaping more high-quality intelligence tips from
Iraqi prisoners than ever, since it jettisoned several coercive interrogation
techniques after the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal in May, the American general
in charge of Iraqi prisons said yesterday.

The number of tips on insurgent operations or on the structure and financing of
anti-US guerrilla bands has increased 50 percent since January, Army Major
General Geoffrey Miller said in a briefing with reporters.

It is unclear what effect the intelligence has had on the insurgency. Between
July and August, when Miller cited an increase in actionable tips from 200 to
325, rebel ambushes on US forces grew 70 percent, from 1,600 to 2,700, according
to US military figures. Those attacks do not include sustained battles, such as
the three weeks of fighting in Najaf last month.

After the revelations of prisoner abuses by US soldiers in the spring, the
military brought in new teams of Army Military Intelligence interrogators at Abu
Ghraib and other US-run prisons. Interrogators were told to change their
methods, said Miller, who was in charge of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in
Cuba and now runs US detention facilities in Iraq.

Soldiers are no longer allowed to ''soften up" prisoners by forcing them into
so-called stress positions, standing or squatting in uncomfortable poses for
long periods. Exposing inmates to extreme temperatures, withholding food, and
denying sleep are also banned.

New interrogation teams switched to incentives-based interrogations taught by a
veteran Chicago Police homicide detective who is an Army Reservist, Miller said.

The new methods are supposed to instill trust in insurgent suspects questioned
for their knowledge on attack plans, locations of arms caches, and leaders, as
well as financing and recruiting methods, the general said.

''It's the development of rapport and treatment of detainees with respect and
dignity that allows this relationship to develop very quickly," he said.

US combat teams build operations on tips from interrogation transcripts within a
day or even hours of prisoner questioning, Miller said.

Intelligence analysts also painstakingly cross-check confession tips with
intelligence databases to verify them. Miller said inmates are also interrogated
using polygraph exams.

Ironically, military and US government reports documenting the causes of the Abu
Ghraib abuses assert that Miller urged tougher interrogation techniques be used
in Iraq last year.

The Pentagon sent Miller to inspect interrogation procedures last summer, and he
recommended using the same techniques on prisoners in Iraq that were employed on
Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo. Miller's intent was to boost the
quality of intelligence needed to halt the growing anti-US insurgency. His
recommendations were approved by former US land forces commander Lieutenant
General Ricardo Sanchez.

Investigators found that the November abuses documented in dozens of photos at
Abu Ghraib may have been encouraged by the more coercive interrogations.

Miller was sent back to Iraq after the abuse scandal broke and pictures emerged
of US soldiers stripping prisoners naked, threatening them with dogs, and
forcing them to simulate sexual acts. He was put in charge of detention
operations and oversaw the reversal of the harsh methods he had advocated only
months earlier.

The Army has since sped up the review and release of Iraqi prisoners, letting
some 5,000 go since April. About 500 more are to be released Sept. 15, a US
military official said on condition of anonymity.


------------------------------------------------------------------

New Charges Raise Questions on Abuse at Afghan Prisons

By CARLOTTA GALL and DAVID ROHDE
September 17, 2004

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 16 - Sgt. James P. Boland, a reserve military police
soldier from Cincinnati, watched as a subordinate beat an Afghan prisoner,
Mullah Habibullah, 30, the brother of a former Taliban commander, according to a
military charge sheet released recently.

The report also said that Sergeant Boland shackled an Afghan named Dilawar,
chaining his hands above his shoulders, and denied medical care to the man, a
22-year-old taxi driver, whose family said he had never spent a night away from
his mother and father before being taken to the American air base at Bagram, 40
miles north of Kabul. The two detainees died there within a week of each other
in December 2002.

Now, 21 months later, the Army has charged Sergeant Boland with assault and
other crimes and investigators are recommending that two dozen other American
soldiers face criminal charges, including negligent homicide, or other
punishments for abuses that occurred more than a year before the scandal at the
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Far from settling the cases, the charges raise new questions about who
authorized the harsh interrogation methods used in Afghanistan and about the
contradictory statements made by American military officials who, when
questioned shortly after the men's deaths, said they had died of natural causes.

The military's findings now support accounts by former Afghan prisoners who said
they were subjected to abuses that, while just as harrowing as any in Iraq, have
drawn far less attention or official scrutiny lacking the kinds of photographs
that so shocked the world from Abu Ghraib this spring.

Pentagon and other American officials have said the harsh interrogation methods
described by the Afghans and outlined in the Army's charges were not authorized
for use at Bagram.

A classified portion of an Army report into the Abu Ghraib scandal, recently
obtained by The New York Times, shows that on Dec. 2, 2002, Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld had approved such methods for use only at the American
detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

"Interrogation techniques intended only for Guantánamo came to be used in
Afghanistan and Iraq,'' a separate report by an independent panel, appointed by
Mr. Rumsfeld and headed by James R. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary,
found in August. "In Afghanistan, techniques included removal of clothing,
isolating people for long periods of time, use of stress positions, exploiting
fear of dogs, and sleep and light deprivation.''

Mr. Habibullah and Mr. Dilawar died at Bagram after enduring at least some of
those interrogation methods. A pending report by the naval inspector general,
due to be released in the next few weeks, is expected to examine how and why
those methods were being used here. Military and government officials have yet
to answer those questions.

In addition, recent revelations that the Central Intelligence Agency kept the
names of dozens of detainees at Abu Ghraib and other facilities in Iraq off
official rosters, to hide them from Red Cross inspectors, have raised fresh
concerns over the possibility of similar practices here.

Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan in
2002 and 2003, said in an e-mail response to questions this week that in
previous interviews he had always given the best information available to
him. Sergeant Boland could not be reached for comment.

In a February 2003 interview, General McNeill acknowledged an investigation into
Mr. Dilawar's death. But neither he nor other officials disclosed that military
pathologists had described both deaths as homicides caused by beatings.

At the time, General McNeill and other military officials said in interviews
that both Afghan prisoners had died of natural causes. "We haven't found
anything that requires us to take extraordinary action," General McNeill said at
the time. "We are going to let this investigation run its course."

He described Mr. Dilawar as having an advanced heart condition and said his
coronary arteries were 85 percent blocked.

When General McNeill was asked at the time whether either prisoner had suffered
injuries in custody, something described on both death certificates, he replied,
"Presently, I have no indication of that." In a later interview, he said the men
had suffered injuries before their arrival at Bagram.

Asked if prisoners' hands were being chained to ceilings, he denied it. "We are
not chaining people to the ceilings," he said. "I think you asked me that
question before."

A military pathologist's finding on Mr. Dilawar's death certificate was revealed
only when a journalist from The New York Times visited his family in their
isolated village in the province of Khost and read the form, which was written
in English, a language they could not understand.

The spokesman for the American-led force in Afghanistan, Col. Roger King, then
confirmed the authenticity of the death certificate, but played down the
pathologist's findings.

Afterward, the investigation moved slowly, and the troubled military
intelligence unit that ran the Bagram detention center was transferred to
Iraq. Members of that unit - the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, based at
Fort Bragg, N.C. - have now been implicated in the deaths of the two Afghans as
well as in the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

After the Abu Ghraib scandal, administration and military officials portrayed
the use of the harsh interrogation methods approved by Mr. Rumsfeld as
selective, limited only to prisoners considered to be of high-intelligence
value.

Those 17 methods also included yelling at detainees, hooding them, shaving their
heads and beards, the use of minimal physical contact like poking or grabbing,
and 20-hour interrogations, according to the classified portions of the Army
report provided by a senior military official who said full disclosure would
help explain the causes behind the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Though it is not clear whether Mr. Rumsfeld was informed of the deaths of the
two Afghan prisoners, a month later he rescinded his list of interrogation
methods. In April, he approved a revised list, authorizing seven more aggressive
interrogation techniques beyond the 17 listed in the Army's field manual.

Defense officials interviewed this year said that the more aggressive methods
had been used only on two prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

But in interviews in early 2003 and in May 2004, five former Afghan prisoners,
all of whom were later released after the military decided they posed no threat,
described detentions and interrogations under extremely harsh conditions.

Before being released, three of the men were sent from Afghanistan to Guantánamo
Bay. All said they were treated far worse in Afghanistan and that Guantánamo was
more orderly and had more rules. In all, they spent 14 months in American
detention.

Three of those interviewed said they were arrested with Mr. Dilawar after a
broken walkie-talkie and an electric stabilizer were found in his taxi several
hours after rockets were fired at an American base.

In interviews in May 2004, the three men said they were hooded and had their
arms raised and chained to the ceiling for hours and days at a time at Bagram.

All the prisoners said they were first held in second-floor isolation cells, for
periods ranging from 5 to 16 days. Later, they said, they and other prisoners
were moved to the ground floor where they were held in large chain-link cages
and barred from conversing.

One of the three men, Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old farmer, said he was kept awake
by soldiers blaring music and shouting at him. He said he grew so exhausted at
one point that he vomited.

Another, Parkhudin, a 26-year-old farmer and former soldier, said his hands were
chained to the ceiling for 8 of his 10 days in isolation and that he was hooded
for hours at a time.

"They were putting a mask over our heads, they were beating us in Bagram," he
said. "I think Dilawar died because he couldn't breathe. For me, it was very
difficult to breathe."

Mr. Parkhudin said he was forced to lie on his stomach and that a soldier then
jumped on his back. He said he believed that the Afghan in an adjoining
isolation cell was Mr. Dilawar because the prisoner cried out for his mother and
father.

The third man, Abdur Rahim, a 26-year-old baker, said that he was hooded and
that his hands were chained to the ceiling for "seven or eight days" and turned
black.

American interrogators forced him to crouch and hold his hands out in front of
him for long periods, causing intense pain in his shoulders. When he tried to
sit up, he said, "they were coming and hitting me and saying 'Don't move!' "

Two other men, interviewed in February 2003, Abdul Jabar, a 35-year-old taxi
driver, and Hakkim Shah, a 32-year-old farmer, were held at the same time as
Mr. Dilawar and described similar treatment.

Mr. Shah said he spent 16 days in upstairs rooms naked, hooded and shackled to
the ceiling for 10 days until his legs became so swollen that the shackles cut
off the blood flow and he could no longer stand. Doctors eventually removed the
shackles and allowed him to sit.

Beyond Bagram, the Central Intelligence Agency maintains a large compound, based
in the Ariana, a hotel in central Kabul, just 200 yards from the presidential
palace.

Privately, the C.I.A. has been much criticized by Red Cross officials for
providing no information about its detainees in Afghanistan. The street where
its compound stands is blocked. The walls are covered with barbed wire. The Red
Cross says it has been denied access to the detainees held there.

A detainee from the compound, a former Taliban commander named Mullah Rocketi,
who gave himself up to American officials, said in an interview after his
release last year that he had spent eight months there. He described the
compound as reasonably comfortable and said he was not mistreated. But he said
he never saw the Red Cross. He said he was released after making a deal with
American officials, but would not provide details.

Another former Afghan commander taken there was Jan Baz Khan, who worked for the
C.I.A. and then came under suspicion of being behind rocket attacks on an
American base, according to a United States military commander who did not want
to be named. He said the prisoner was taken there in January.

There has been no word of his release. No one knows how many other people are
held there still.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

----------------------------------------------------------------------

CIA Holds Top Al Qaeda Suspects in Jordan

Oct 13, 11:56 AM (ET)

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is holding top al
Qaeda suspects in a secret Jordanian jail where they are subjected to
interrogation methods banned in the United States, an Israeli newspaper said on
Wednesday.

But a Jordanian security official dismissed as "totally baseless" the story in
the Haaretz daily, which attributed its information to international
intelligence sources. A CIA official in Washington declined to comment.

The newspaper said at least 11 men held incommunicado in Jordan include Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the hijacked airliner attacks on New
York and Washington, and Hambali, accused of being al Qaeda's ally in southeast
Asia.

"Their detention outside the U.S. enables CIA interrogators to apply
interrogation methods banned by U.S. law and to do so in a country where
cooperation with Americans is particularly close, thereby reducing the danger of
leaks," Haaretz said.

But the Jordanian official, who declined to be named, said: "The allegations
that surface every now and then that the U.S. runs secret detention centers in
the kingdom are totally baseless and seek to undermine the country's favorable
human rights image abroad."

International human rights groups have accused the United States of
circumventing guidelines on interrogation by shipping al Qaeda suspects to
allied states where such legal scrutiny is lacking.

Washington insists its interrogators operate within the law. U.S. officials say
incommunicado detentions in secret locations are essential for security and that
many suspects held have provided valuable intelligence that has foiled planned
attacks.

Jordan is seen as a key ally in the U.S.-led war on terror.

In "Rumsfeld's War," a book drawing on declassified Pentagon documents,
Washington Times correspondent Rowan Scarborough said Jordanian interrogators
had helped U.S. counterparts in handling al Qaeda suspects held at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba.

"U.S. interrogators are known to threaten some detainees with shipping them off
to Jordan if they don't cooperate," Scarborough said. "Like other Middle Eastern
countries, Jordan uses physical means to coerce confessions and vital
intelligence information." (Additional reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in
Amman)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Broad Use Cited of Harsh Tactics at Base in Cuba

By NEIL A. LEWIS
October 17, 2004

WASHINGTON, Oct. 16 - Many detainees at Guantánamo Bay were regularly subjected
to harsh and coercive treatment, several people who worked in the prison said in
recent interviews, despite longstanding assertions by military officials that
such treatment had not occurred except in some isolated cases.

The people, military guards, intelligence agents and others, described in
interviews with The New York Times a range of procedures that included treatment
they said was highly abusive occurring over a long period of time, as well as
rewards for prisoners who cooperated with interrogators.

One regular procedure that was described by people who worked at Camp Delta, the
main prison facility at the naval base in Cuba, was making uncooperative
prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled
hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights
and screamingly loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers,
while the air- conditioning was turned up to maximum levels, said one military
official who witnessed the procedure. The official said that was designed to
make the detainees uncomfortable as they were accustomed to high temperatures
both in their native countries and their cells.

Such sessions could last up to 14 hours with breaks, said the official, who
described the treatment after being contacted by The Times.

"It fried them,'' the official said, explaining that anger over the treatment
the prisoners endured was the reason for speaking with a reporter. Another
person familiar with the procedure who was contacted by The Times said: "They
were very wobbly. They came back to their cells and were just completely out of
it.''

The new information comes from a number of people, some of whom witnessed or
participated in the techniques and others who were in a position to know the
details of the operation and corroborate their accounts.

Those who spoke of the interrogation practices at the naval base did so under
the condition that their identities not be revealed. While some said it was
because they remained on active duty with the military, they all said that being
publicly identified would endanger their futures. Although some former prisoners
have said they saw and experienced mistreatment at Guantánamo, this is the first
time that people who worked there have provided detailed accounts of some
interrogation procedures.

One intelligence official said most of the intense interrogation was focused on
a group of detainees known as the "Dirty 30,'' believed to be the best potential
sources of information.

In August, a report commissioned by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld found
that tough techniques approved by the government were rarely used, but the
sources described a broader pattern that went beyond even the aggressive
techniques that were permissible.

The issue of what were permissible interrogation techniques has produced a
vigorous debate within the government that burst into the open with reports of
abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and is now the subject of several
independent investigations.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan, the administration has
wrestled with the issue of what techniques are permissible in interrogations,
with many arguing that the campaign against terrorism should entitle them to
greater leeway.

David Sheffer, a senior State Department human rights official in the Clinton
administration who teaches law at George Washington University, said the
procedure of shackling prisoners to the floor in a state of undress while
enduring loud music and lights clearly constituted torture. "I don't think
there's any question that treatment of that character satisfies the severe pain
and suffering requirement, be it physical or mental, that is provided for in the
Convention Against Torture,'' Mr. Sheffer said.

Pentagon officials would not comment on the details of the
allegations. Lt. Cmdr. Alvin Plexico issued a Defense Department statement in
response to questions about the new accounts, saying that the military was
providing a "safe, humane and professional detention operation at Guantánamo
that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism.''

The statement said: "Guantánamo guards provide an environment that is stable,
secure, safe and humane. And it is that environment that sets the conditions for
interrogators to work successfully and to gain valuable information from
detainees because they have built a relationship of trust, not fear.''

The sources portrayed a system of punishment and reward, with prisoners who were
favored for their cooperation with interrogators given the privilege of spending
time in a large room nicknamed "the love shack'' by the guards. In that room,
they were free to relax and had access to magazines, books, a television and a
video player and some R-rated movies, along with the use of a water pipe to
smoke aromatic tobaccos. Those prisoners were also occasionally given milkshakes
and hamburgers from the McDonald's on the base.

The Pentagon said the information gathered from the detainees "has undoubtedly
saved the lives of our soldiers in the field. And that information also saves
the lives of innocent civilians at home and abroad. At Guantánamo we are holding
and interrogating people that are a clear danger to the U.S. and our allies and
they are providing valuable information in the war on terrorism.''

Although many critics of the detentions at Guantánamo have said that the
majority of the roughly 590 inmates are low-level fighters who have little
intelligence to impart, Pentagon and intelligence officials have insisted that
the facility houses many dangerous veteran terrorists and officials of Al Qaeda.

The intelligence official said that many of those imprisoned at Guantánamo had
valuable information but that it was not always clear what their standing in Al
Qaeda was. The official said the first four detainees now facing war crimes
charges before a military tribunal at the base were specifically chosen because
they had not been harshly treated and therefore would be less likely to make any
embarrassing allegations.

The people who worked at the prison also described as common another procedure
in which an inmate was awakened, subjected to an interrogation in a facility
known as the Gold Building, then returned to a different cell. As soon as the
guards determined the inmate had fallen into a deep sleep, he was awakened again
for interrogation after which he would be returned to yet a different cell. This
could happen five or six times during a night, they said. This procedure was
described by those who participated as part of something called "Operation
Sandman."

Much of the harsh treatment described by the sources was said to have occurred
as recently as the early months of this year. After the scandal about
mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became public in
April, all harsh techniques were abruptly suspended, they said.

The new accounts of mistreatment at Guantánamo provide fresh evidence about how
practices there may have contributed to the abuses later uncovered at Abu
Ghraib. One independent military panel said in a report that the approach that
was being used at Guantánamo "migrated to Abu Ghraib,'' where abuses grew
sharply. The vigorous debate within the administration about what techniques
were permissible in interrogations was set off when the Justice Department
provided a series of memorandums to the White House and Defense Department
providing narrow definitions of torture. In February 2002, Mr. Bush ordered that
the prisoners at Guantánamo were to be treated "humanely and, to the extent
appropriate with military necessity, in a manner consistent with'' the Geneva
Conventions.

In March 2002, a team of administration lawyers accepted the Justice
Department's view, concluding in a memorandum that President Bush was not bound
by either the Convention Against Torture or a federal antitorture statute
because he had the authority to protect the nation from terrorism. When some of
the memorandums were disclosed, the administration tried to distance itself from
the rationale for the harsher treatment.

At the request of military intelligence officials who complained of tenacious
resistance by some subjects, Mr. Rumsfeld approved a list of 16 techniques for
use at Guantánamo in addition to the 17 methods in the Army Field Manual in
December 2002. But he suspended those approvals in January 2003 after some
military lawyers complained they were excessive and possibly unlawful.

In April 2003, after a review, Mr. Rumsfeld issued a final policy approving of
24 techniques, some of which needed his permission to be used.

But the approved techniques did not explicitly cover some that were used,
according to the new accounts. The only time that using loud music and lights
seems to appear in the documents, for example, is as a proposal that seems never
to have been adopted. The April 16 memorandum allows interrogators to place a
detainee "in a setting that may be less comfortable'' but should not "constitute
a substantial change in environmental quality.''

Another approved technique is "sleep adjustment,'' which is defined as distinct
from "sleep deprivation.''

Officials said the guards' patience was often stretched, especially when inmates
threw human waste at the military police officers, a frequent occurrence. The
guards, for their part, had their own tricks, including replacing the prayer oil
in little bottles given to the inmates with a caustic pine-smelling floor
cleaner.

An August 2004 report by a panel headed by James R. Schlesinger, a former
defense secretary, said the harsher approved techniques on Mr. Rumsfeld's list
were used on only two occasions. In addition, the report said, there were about
eight abuses by guards at Guantánamo that occurred and were investigated.

In guided tours of Guantánamo provided to the news media and members of
Congress, the military authorities contended that the system of rewards and
punishments affected only issues like whether the inmates could be deprived of
books, blankets and toilet articles. The interrogation sessions themselves, the
officials consistently said, did not employ any harsh treatment but were devised
only to build a trusting relationship between the interrogator and the detainee.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Further abuse at Abu Ghraib detailed
ACLU forces US to disclose records

By Richard A. Serrano and Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times  |  October 23, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Government documents made public Thursday provide fresh details
about allegations of abuse by guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and other
detention facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They include incidents in which a female prisoner was sexually humiliated by US
military intelligence officers and a male inmate was shot at to force
cooperation.

Meanwhile, a military judge has ordered two US Army reservists to stand trial in
Baghdad for allegedly abusing Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib. Specialist Charles
Graner Jr., 36, of Uniontown, Pa., will face a court-martial Jan. 7, while
Sergeant Javal Davis, 26, of Maryland, is set to be tried Feb. 1.

The US documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under court
order, include an internal FBI memo from last May that shows bureau employees
based at Abu Ghraib witnessed a number of troubling incidents, but ''did not
believe [that what they saw] rose to the level of misconduct or mistreatment."

The materials also describe the deaths of three Abu Ghraib prisoners, all
reportedly of heart attacks, within days of each other in August 2003, weeks
before the now-infamous episodes of photographed abuse began occurring at the
prison.

Eight US soldiers have been charged with crimes in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Three
have pleaded guilty, and one, Staff Sergeant Ivan L. ''Chip" Frederick II, was
sentenced Thursday to eight years in prison.

The latest documents were released after a federal court directed the Defense
Department and other government agencies to comply with the ACLU's request under
the Freedom of Information Act for more details about alleged prisoner torture
and abuse.

''After more than a year of stonewalling, the government has finally released
some documents, though many are heavily redacted," said Amrit Singh, an ACLU
staff lawyer. ''Unfortunately, the government continues to withhold records that
would show who was ultimately responsible for the systemic abuse of detainees."

A preliminary review of some of the newly released material showed one case in
which three US soldiers were each ordered detained for a month, fined up to
$750, and reduced in rank for an incident in October 2003 in which a female
Iraqi prisoner was partially stripped, abused, and threatened with more physical
harm.

The woman told army investigators that she was in her cell at Baghdad's
Al-Salhyat Prison when three military interrogators escorted her to an abandoned
cell. While one soldier ''acted as a lookout," the woman said, another held her
hands behind her back while the third soldier ''forcefully kissed" her. She said
she then was taken downstairs and shown a naked Iraqi man.

------------------------------------------------------------------

A prisoner's tale

The saga of a hapless New Zealander who ended up behind bars after seeking work
in Iraq reveals the darker side of the U.S.-led coalition's operations.


By Graeme Wood


Oct. 31, 2004  |  When Andreas Schafer was released from a prison in Iraq earlier
this year, the Iraqi police apologized abjectly for having inconvenienced him
for three months. They made sure he knew that if ever he wanted to get back at
the arresting officer by, say, slaying the man's brother, it would be all right
by them. And he could expect not to be prosecuted for the crime.

It says something about Iraqi justice and the American-led occupation that
Iraq's finest viewed an invitation to murder as a triumph of decency and due
process. Schafer, a hapless, idealistic 26-year-old New Zealander who had gone
to Iraq in search of a job with a nongovernmental organization, ended up
languishing in a prison in southern Iraq as an unacknowledged prisoner of the
U.S.-led coalition. By keeping Schafer in an Iraqi-run prison, rather than in a
prison monitored by Americans or international observers, the United States
avoided putting him on the books and having to account for his treatment, even
to his own government.

It took nearly three months of diplomatic wangling to get him released, and in
those three months he observed startling ineptitude on the part of coalition
soldiers. He also observed the private life of a segment of Iraqi society that
has gone mostly unreported on during the occupation.

The coalition's stalling and prevarication about Schafer's status reveal at best
a state of utter bureaucratic disarray, in which prisoners can disappear or
appear without the slightest official record. At worst it suggests that the
secrecy and abandon with which the United States treats prisoners in Iraq are
every bit as dark and uncontrolled as critics fear.

I met Schafer in Iran in January 2004, just weeks before he entered Iraq. He had
spent months living meagerly in grubby Iranian and Afghan hotels as one of the
many unwashed backpackers whom every country but the United States seems to
dispatch to the ends of the earth. His half-baked plan in Iraq was to do what he
had done in Kabul, Afghanistan, four months earlier -- show up, knock on doors
and get a job with an NGO. Afterward, he hoped (in a plan doughier in the center
than his Iraq plan) to head from Baghdad to South Africa by land, learn to fly a
microlight aircraft and chase elephants around the savanna until his cash ran
out.

Schafer entered Iraq in late January 2004, at the end of that vanishingly brief
moment of post-invasion safety, when visiting Baghdad was merely an act of
stupidity and not yet one of stark-raving lunacy. Nick Berg hadn't yet been
decapitated, and reporters felt free to travel major roads, even if they donned
flak vests to do so.

Schafer had no flak vest, and with his body type it would be awfully difficult
to buy one off the rack anyway. He is of ridiculous proportions, with an
elongated physique that looks like Abe Lincoln stretched lengthwise in a
funhouse mirror. Sharp features and ultra-skinny limbs give him the profile of a
malevolent tree. In an Iraqi crowd, Schafer would have stood at least a head
above everyone else, a distracting sideshow on any street corner and perhaps,
given his Western looks, a bit of a bomb magnet.

After a couple of days at a cheap Baghdad hotel, Schafer decided on a trip south
to Karbala, the spiritual omphalos of the Shiite faith and the site of the most
intense observances of the martyrdom of the Shiite Imam Hussein. It was Ashura,
the anniversary of Hussein's death, and tens of thousands of pilgrims had
gathered in Karbala, wearing black and self-flagellating in grief over Hussein's
death. Amid the scourging and wailing, bombers attacked the Kadhimiya mosque in
Baghdad and the streets of Karbala. Both attacks left scenes of horrific
carnage, with splattered human remains smearing the streets. In Baghdad, taxi
drivers usually eager to earn a buck told me my money was no good that day, and
that they would just as soon stay home than drive into a mob of blood-soaked,
enraged religious zealots. That seemed sensible to me.

Schafer was not so circumspect. On the day of Asura, he ventured south from
Baghdad to Diwaniya, where after depositing his luggage at a hotel, he met three
Iraqi policemen on a city street, and did not leave their custody for almost
three months.

The patrolmen said they regretted having to arrest him. The bombings that
morning had put them on high alert, they said, so anyone who looked out of place
needed to be checked out. (Police later told Schafer that his arrest was the
work of overzealous police excited to meet the first tourist in Diwaniya, then
arrest him and practice their English.)

By evening he heard that someone in the stationhouse had alerted nearby
U.S. forces, who commanded the Iraqis to hold Schafer indefinitely for
interrogation. The Iraqis again apologized and told Schafer he would have to
sleep that night at the jail. "I was still sure it would be definitely no more
than one night," Schafer says.

The holding area was small, with three cells of 30-40 criminals each. "I was
mostly scared of the other people -- the freaks of the freaks of Iraq." Their
offenses ranged from prostitution to murder. Many had been caught with the
amphetamine pills that Iraqis started popping eagerly soon after Saddam fell.

Almost a week later, American troops showed up for the first of four
interrogations that ranged from crisply professional to ridiculously
inept. Cuffed, Schafer was led to a room with eight U.S. soldiers decked out in
desert fatigues and carrying automatic weapons. Schafer explained who he was,
then was politely told that he would have to stay in jail a few days more.

Several weeks later, a completely different set of Americans showed up, this
time with a Lebanese-American interpreter. This second group showed no evidence
of having read the first team's report. Moreover, they were ignorant of the most
basic facts about the Middle East. At one point, Schafer says, the officer
leading the interrogation asked him, "Do you mean to tell me that you were in
Iran and Afghanistan four months and you don't speak a word of Arabic?" (The
translator pulled the officer aside and gave him a lesson on Middle Eastern
languages. Iranians and Afghans don't generally speak Arabic.)

And even the translator exhibited some staggeringly incompetent interrogation
tactics. "He said to me, 'I'm going to write something here in Arabic, and
you're going to tell me what it says.'" Schafer replied that he did not speak
Arabic. The translator belted out a triumphant "Aha!" and asked how Schafer knew
the word was Arabic, rather than Persian or Urdu, both of which use a similar
script. "You told me it was Arabic," Schafer said. Later the translator yelled a
word in Arabic and looked for traces of comprehension on Schafer's face. Schafer
again told him that he did not speak Arabic. One more triumphant gotcha later,
he asked again how Schafer knew the shout was Arabic. Schafer pointed out that
they were, after all, in Iraq.

"They didn't know the languages. They didn't know the culture at all, and you
could see it just from the way they presented themselves around Iraqis," Schafer
says. The failing most relevant to Schafer was the Americans' failing of
imagination. "They cannot imagine that someone would come to a country less
pleasant than their own, unless they're invading it or have got a really good
job."

Every three to four weeks, a different group of Americans showed up, asked the
same superficial or stupid questions and left. Then the Abu Ghraib prison
scandal broke, and at the end of one session an interrogator threatened Schafer
with a transfer. "What's probably going to happen now," he said, "is you're
probably going to Abu Ghraib. You know what happens there, don't you?" Schafer
says the interrogator followed the threat with a suppressed grin and a sheepish
laugh.

Schafer was, it must be said, a suspicious or at least implausible figure. You
don't wander around war zones without a reasonable story about who you are and
where you're going. Schafer acknowledges that his presence in the combat zone
was odd and that the U.S. coalition would have been negligent not to have
demanded more than his own word that he was no threat. "I can understand that
they would want to keep me for a couple days," he says. Mere weeks after he had
been picked up, the police raided his former hotel and captured two Saudis
bearing a kilo of heroin and a picture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

But less explicable was the lack of any serious effort to discover Schafer's
history or real reasons for being in the country. In New Zealand, Schafer's
mother, Ursula, worried about her son -- she had not heard from him since
receiving a brief e-mail from Baghdad -- and contacted authorities to track him
down. New Zealand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded information from
officials in Washington, but they denied that any U.S. personnel in Iraq had
ever met Schafer, much less kept him in custody and interrogated him
repeatedly. Schafer was, in essence, a ghost detainee, a prisoner in legal limbo
whose identity was kept secret from even as harmless and friendly an ally as New
Zealand.

From prison, Schafer persuaded an Iraqi to e-mail a second message to his mother
to inform her that he was fine (and that he needed her to deposit money into his
bank account to cover his credit card payments). The messenger's shaky English
mangled the message, which New Zealand diplomats interpreted as a demand for
ransom. New Zealand reaffirmed its policy of not negotiating with
terrorists. Ursula Schafer fretted, the Kiwi press carried stories about its
kidnapped citizen, the prime minister and foreign minister commented ruefully
and, presumably, some antipodean credit card company billed Schafer for a missed
payment.

Schafer remained optimistic about his release. "The Americans said, 'Hold on to
him until tomorrow.' I never stopped thinking that they were going to release me
in just a day or two."

Meanwhile, Schafer's incarceration made him a rarity among foreigners in the
country -- a Westerner who had spent time living with southern Iraqi
Shiites. Journalists tended to live in or near the smaller of the two Green
Zones in Baghdad, safe in the knowledge that they could pass their evenings with
a chess game and chicken kebab at the Palestine Hotel. Their Iraqi employees
tended to be educated Sunni professionals, not the Shiite illiterates and thugs
who were Schafer's intimates for his months in jail. And this is to say nothing
of the political planners of the occupation, whose primary Iraqi informants
appear to have been urbane, nonsmoking, secularist polyglots -- people as
different from the average Iraqi Shiite as one could possibly find.

Prisoners shared food and opinions, and they even offered to place their own
lives at risk for Schafer's sake. At the time, Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army was
rallying to take control of southern Iraq. In the prison, Sadr's support was
enormous, not least because he vowed to release all prisoners after overrunning
Diwaniya. Fighting grew intense around the jail, and before long it appeared
inevitable that Sadr's Shiite guerrillas would spring all the criminals, placing
Schafer at the guerrillas' mercy.

Cellmates advised him to flee with them to a house and lie low. "They kept
asking me, 'Can you run?'" Schafer says. Once Sadr's militia was outside, close
enough to have conversations with the inmates over the walls, the police
prepared him for chaos. "The cops came by and told everyone to put their clothes
on, because you're getting out tonight. Everyone wanted to help me. They said,
'If somebody sees you, they're going to kill you.'" At the last minute,
U.S. forces arrived and pushed back the militia.

Schafer reports that the prisoners' attitudes toward the Americans were less
resentment than disappointment that their promises had come to nothing. The
Iraqis harbored weird and pitiful notions of what those promises were. They knew
Bush had vowed to make Iraq a democracy, but their understanding of democracy
was childishly optimistic. For example, the looters who plundered Iraq after the
invasion are reviled in Baghdad and other more educated areas. But to the
prisoners, the looting was not just licit -- it was a right and duty granted to
Iraqis by George W. Bush himself. "They all confused democracy with anarchy,"
Schafer says. "They thought democracy was lawlessness. They thought it was
anarchy where everything works properly, where you can walk into shops and just
take things."

With few exceptions, Schafer says, his cellmates treated him and one another
with respect and civility. They were men of God -- 99 percent of them every bit
as fundamentalist and strict in their observance as the unspeakably pious
Muslims of Afghanistan. Schafer's descriptions of prison life feature none of
the rape and savagery found in Western prisons.

Most of all, Schafer says, the Iraqis he met were simply weary -- drained of
energy after too many years of a life only barely worth living. "A guy would get
20 years for visiting a prostitute, or for small quantities of drugs," Schafer
says. "After they were sentenced, they'd cry for an hour. And that's it. They're
just used to suffering. They're used to their life being really crap."

It did not help that the justice system that determined their fates was corrupt
and capricious in the extreme and meted out decades behind bars for a pocketful
of amphetamines. But the same court would let a Mahdi Army foot soldier walk
after he slaughtered two sons of a rival. "The level of justice was pretty much
terrible," Schafer says.

Many of his cellmates -- Schafer estimated at least a third of the jail's
population -- consisted of new Iraqi police. "A policeman hijacked a water truck
and sold it for $15,000. And he got two weeks." Other police were in jail in for
sundry crimes, such as murder. "They're all new recruits, guys who suddenly have
a gun in their hand," Schafer said. "They don't know what they're doing." And
since they were viewed as employees of the coalition, the American image
suffered from their criminal incompetence.

Other agents of the Americans were more clandestine, which is not to say more
competent. One of Schafer's cellmates, an Iraqi named Ahmed who had lived in a
Western country for years, confided to Schafer that he had responded to a TV ad
in his adopted homeland soliciting Iraqi exiles to return home and "help with
the reconstruction." The sponsor of the ads, Ahmed said, was the U.S. Embassy,
which flew respondents to Kuwait and gave them a two-week crash course in
espionage -- basic training in how to copy overheard cafe gossip and report back
on who was planting bombs and where.

Schafer reports that the operation was botched from the first moment. Ahmed
"said the Americans let him out of a Humvee in a crowded market square," in full
view of the very Iraqis on whom he was meant to spy. "And so on his first time
out there, he just freaked out, ran off to Baghdad and never came back." Iraqi
police picked him up in Diwaniya the same day they picked up Schafer.

Even if Ahmed had managed to slip undetected into Iraqi society, he was too
boorish to blend in and too lacking in basic sense to provide useful
information. In Schafer's presence, Ahmed committed atrocious breaches of
courtesy and tact by bragging of his sexual conquests and consumption of drugs
and alcohol, so that the pious Iraqis on whom he was intended to inform
considered him repugnant, immoral and untrustworthy. His claims about having
been recruited as a spy by the U.S. are credible, Schafer says, because Ahmed
himself was patently too dim to have come up with stories so detailed and
plausible.

After living with Ahmed for several months, Schafer concluded that his roommate
from hell was not just a fool but "'beyond your wildest dreams' incompetent, the
kind of guy who would not have been able to function even in New Zealand."
Schafer says he has no idea how many more village idiots the Americans trained
and unleashed to be the coalition's eyes and ears in southern Iraq.

Schafer says that Iraqi police under coalition authority tortured suspects
regularly. He claims to have seen beatings by police and, after he was
transferred to a more brutal prison in Kut, at least one instance of an Iraqi
electrocuted to the point of unconsciousness lasting three days. Americans, he
says, visited the prison regularly and did nothing to stop or discourage the
torture.

Even worse were those identified to Schafer as the Mukhabarat, the secret police
who did the bulk of the toenail ripping and penis clamping during Saddam's
rule. Ahmed was summoned for an interview with the secret police, who claimed to
be operating with the tacit approval of the U.S. "He came back half-insane,"
spooked senseless by the Mukhabarat's promise to torture him "till you can't
tell day from night," Schafer says.

Eventually the Iraqi police, who had taken a liking to Schafer, granted him five
minutes on a satellite phone to talk to his mother, who relayed the information
to New Zealand's Foreign Affairs Ministry that Schafer was stuck in a jail in
Diwaniya. Weeks later, after transfers to two other prisons, a British consular
officer met him at Camp Victory in Baghdad and gave him a plane ticket to
Jordan. Throughout the ordeal, the United States denied having had contact with
Schafer, even when the highest levels of the New Zealand government made it
clear they were set on pursuing the case. The U.S. State Department still has
not acknowledged interacting with him.

Schafer's experience demonstrates not only the unpreparedness of the coalition
and the cruelty of its Iraqi allies but also the deception about what is
actually happening in the war. It is disturbing that New Zealand -- not as
staunch a U.S. ally as Australia, but still friendly enough to have sent a few
dozen noncombat personnel to southern Iraq -- could not secure a straight answer
about the fate of one of its citizens.

Most of all, it shows how poorly the U.S.-led coalition dealt with the
unexpected. Their training apparently did not prepare them to meet shaggy
backpackers or ungrateful illiterate locals any more than it prepared them for
the pitiless Sunni insurgency in Iraq's north. Although it is a cliché to point
out that the military is a monstrous bureaucracy incapable of making fast feints
to accommodate changes in situation, in Schafer's case the cliché is relevant:
He fit no battlefield category, and as a result found himself in a hellish
holding pattern, at the mercy of the shadow U.S. military.

Schafer was just the type of person the coalition must have hoped would come to
Baghdad: educated, unafraid of mortal danger, eager to put his training to use
in a country from which anyone with a passport and money was fleeing. His story
stands as a cautionary tale for potential U.S. allies, another example of the
danger of testing the limits of the inflexible imagination of the Iraq war
planners.

--------------------------------------

AP: U.S. Report Details Guantanamo Abuses

By PAISLEY DODDS
Nov 5, 8:34 AM (ET)

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) - A detainee was forced to kneel so many
times he was bruised, a barber gave reverse mohawks and a female interrogator
ran her fingers through a prisoner's hair and sat in his lap, the
U.S. government says in the most detailed accounting of eight abuse cases at its
Guantanamo Bay prison for terror suspects.

Those responsible for the abuse have been demoted, reprimanded or sent for more
training, according to an 800-word U.S. military response to a written query
from The Associated Press.

Allegations of mistreatment at Guantanamo, where 550 terror suspects have been
held for nearly three years, surfaced after the abuse scandal broke last year at
the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where pictures showed beatings and
sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners.

The details of abuse at Guantanamo come as lawyers for several prisoners
challenge evidence presented by the government, saying some could have been
obtained by force.

Only four prisoners have been formally charged at Guantanamo, where most are
held without charge or access to lawyers. The military has reported 34 suicide
attempts among detainees, though none has been reported since January.

Guantanamo's new commander says lessons have been learned from past abuses cases
and troops are treating detainees humanely with a rigorous system of checks and
balances.

"They've not been mistreated, they've not been tortured in any respect," Army
Brig. Gen. Jay Hood said in an interview Wednesday.

Human rights monitors are not convinced.

"We're confident that there's more information out there that hasn't been
released," said Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has
obtained nearly 6,000 documents about procedures at U.S.-run prisons. He was in
Guantanamo to observe pretrial hearings.

Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, now in charge of U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, commanded
the Guantanamo prison from November 2002 to March 2004 with a mandate to get
better intelligence. Most abuses reported in August by James R. Schlesinger, who
headed a U.S. Congressional committee to investigate abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan
and Guantanamo, occurred under Miller's watch.

The Department of Defense, responding to an AP query made nearly two months ago,
this week provided details of the eight Guantanamo abuses cases Schlesinger
cited. No names were given.

In one case, a female interrogator took off her uniform top to expose her
T-shirt to a detainee, ran her fingers through his hair and climbed on his lap
in April 2003. A supervisor monitoring the session terminated it, and the woman
was reprimanded and sent for more training, the military said.

The same month, an interrogator told military police to repeatedly bring a
detainee from a standing to kneeling position, so much that his knees were
bruised, the government said. The interrogator got a written reprimand and
Miller reportedly stopped use of that technique.

Also that month, a guard was charged with dereliction of duty and assault after
a detainee assaulted another guard. After the detainee was subdued, the guard
punched the prisoner with his fist. He was demoted.

In a separate case, a guard was charged with assault after he sprayed a detainee
with a hose when the prisoner allegedly tried to throw water from his toilet at
him in September 2002. The guard was reduced in rank and reassigned.

Another female interrogator wiped dye from a red magic marker on a detainee's
shirt, telling him it was blood, after he allegedly spat on her. She received a
verbal reprimand in early 2003.

In March 2003, a military policeman used pepper spray on a detainee allegedly
preparing to throw unidentified liquid on an officer. The policeman was
acquitted by a court martial.

Incidents this year include a military policeman who squirted a detainee with
water in February, and a camp barber who gave two "unusual haircuts." The
haircuts were reverse mohawks, according to a government official who spoke on
condition of anonymity.

The barber gave the cuts to frustrate detainee efforts to wear their hair the
same way to demonstrate unity, the government said. The barber and his company
were reprimanded.

Air Force Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, defense attorney for a Guantanamo prisoner,
announced Thursday that she would file a petition in federal court challenging
her client's detention and alleging systematic abuse at the prison. She
represents Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al-Qosi of Sudan, an alleged al-Qaida paymaster
whose conspiracy trial is scheduled for February.

"The abuse allegations at Guantanamo are a matter of growing concern," Shaffer
said. "He was constantly being told he would be sent to Egypt to be
interrogated, where many of the detainees believed they would be killed. And he
was forced to sit for hours in the freezing cold."

At least one military insider at Guantanamo has gone public with allegations of
abuse - a military police officer who was injured after going undercover as a
detainee.

National Guardsman Sean Baker said the attack occurred in November 2002, the
month after Miller arrived in Guantanamo, when he was told to put on an orange
detainee jumpsuit, get in a cell and wait for an Initial Response Force - the
teams used to subdue misbehaving detainees.

From under the bunk, Baker heard the extraction team come in, he said in his
latest comments during a CBS television program aired Wednesday.

"My face was down. And of course, they're pushing it down against the steel
floor, you know, my right temple, pushing it down against the floor," Baker told
CBS.

The incident was purportedly recorded, one of some 500 hours of tapes that the
military has refused to publicly release.

Baker said he tried to tell his attackers he was a soldier but they repeatedly
slammed his head against the floor. Baker was airlifted to a naval hospital in
Virginia where doctors said he suffered a brain injury. He has been plagued by
seizures since, he said.

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Two cases of abuse alleged at base
Guantanamo site is the focus

By Paisley Dodds, Associated Press  |  November 13, 2004

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba -- Two new cases of detainee abuse have surfaced
at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, including one in which a US military
commander failed to properly investigate a prison guard who threw cleaning
solvent on a terror suspect.

The guard threw the solvent on the prisoner in January and was demoted and
reassigned in June, a month after Navy Inspector General Vice Admiral Albert
T. Church visited the remote outpost to investigate claims of abuse. The guard's
commanding officer also was reprimanded, military officials said.

Another incident involved a guard who hit a detainee in October after the man
allegedly spat on the guard and tried to bite him. The guard was demoted and
reassigned the same month.

''We have a process in place to review all allegation reports. Each report that
alleges mistreatment at Guantanamo is taken seriously," said Army Lieutenant
Colonel Leon Sumpter, a spokesman.

The commander who mishandled the solvent incident was an Army captain and the
highest known ranking officer to be disciplined in an abuse case at the outpost
in eastern Cuba, Sumpter said. The company commander generally is in charge of
more than 130 soldiers.

After the scandal at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq -- where American
soldiers were photographed abusing detainees -- military officials at the US
Southern Command in Miami said there were three substantiated abuse cases at
Guantanamo.

The military last week provided details of eight substantiated cases of abuse by
personnel from prison guards to a barber. The information came nearly two months
after the military was asked for details of cases described in an August report
by James R. Schlesinger, who headed a US congressional committee to investigate
abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo.

Despite the previous request, the two new cases only surfaced Thursday.

''This problem won't be solved by dribbling out bits of information over a
period of months. The US government needs to stop hiding behind closed doors and
create an independent commission to look into all charges of abuse," said Jumana
Musa of Amnesty International, one of four observers who came to Guantanamo to
observe motions hearings ahead of military commissions, or trials.

Other abuse allegations have been reported by detainees appearing before review
tribunals evaluating their status as enemy combatants. An Afghan man testified
Wednesday the Taliban killed members of his family and imprisoned members
continued attacks in Guantanamo by beating him, spitting on him, and throwing
urine on him.

Abuse allegations are a core complaint in a habeas corpus petition filed Monday
by lawyers representing Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan, an alleged
paymaster for Al Qaeda and accused associate of Osama bin Laden who is one of
four people charged with conspiracy. Habeas corpus is a petition for the prompt
release of someone in custody, and places the burden of proof on those holding
the person to justify the detention.

He alleges Guantanamo interrogators wrapped prisoners in an Israeli flag, showed
them pornographic photos, and forced them to be present while others had
sex. Qosi's lawyers did not say in which cases their client witnessed the abuse,
who had sex in detainees' presence, or how many incidents were reported.

Qosi's petition in US District Court in Washington is one of several challenges
that could halt his trial, tentatively scheduled for Feb. 8.

Qosi's lawyers said in their petition -- one of more than 60 pending cases --
that interrogations often occurred in an area detainees called the ''Hell Room,"
where pornographic pictures were displayed.

They said methods included ''taunting detainees in sexually humiliating ways,
including having sex in detainees' presence or having female interrogators rub
their bodies suggestively against detainees."

Cases in the congressional report included a female interrogator who climbed
onto a detainee's lap and ran her fingers through his hair, and another detainee
whose knees were bruised from being forced to kneel repeatedly.

---------------------------------------------------------

Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo

By NEIL A. LEWIS
November 30, 2004

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged
in confidential reports to the United States government that the American
military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion
"tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The finding that the handling of prisoners detained and interrogated at
Guantánamo amounted to torture came after a visit by a Red Cross inspection team
that spent most of last June in Guantánamo.

The team of humanitarian workers, which included experienced medical personnel,
also asserted that some doctors and other medical workers at Guantánamo were
participating in planning for interrogations, in what the report called "a
flagrant violation of medical ethics."

Doctors and medical personnel conveyed information about prisoners' mental
health and vulnerabilities to interrogators, the report said, sometimes
directly, but usually through a group called the Behavioral Science Consultation
Team, or B.S.C.T. The team, known informally as Biscuit, is composed of
psychologists and psychological workers who advise the interrogators, the report
said.

The United States government, which received the report in July, sharply
rejected its charges, administration and military officials said.

The report was distributed to lawyers at the White House, Pentagon and State
Department and to the commander of the detention facility at Guantánamo,
Gen. Jay W. Hood. The New York Times recently obtained a memorandum, based on
the report, that quotes from it in detail and lists its major findings.

It was the first time that the Red Cross, which has been conducting visits to
Guantánamo since January 2002, asserted in such strong terms that the treatment
of detainees, both physical and psychological, amounted to torture. The report
said that another confidential report in January 2003, which has never been
disclosed, raised questions of whether "psychological torture" was taking place.

The Red Cross said publicly 13 months ago that the system of keeping detainees
indefinitely without allowing them to know their fates was unacceptable and
would lead to mental health problems.

The report of the June visit said investigators had found a system devised to
break the will of the prisoners at Guantánamo, who now number about 550, and
make them wholly dependent on their interrogators through "humiliating acts,
solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions."
Investigators said that the methods used were increasingly "more refined and
repressive" than learned about on previous visits.

"The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of
intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel,
unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture," the report said. It said
that in addition to the exposure to loud and persistent noise and music and to
prolonged cold, detainees were subjected to "some beatings." The report did not
say how many of the detainees were subjected to such treatment.

Asked about the accusations in the report, a Pentagon spokesman provided a
statement saying, "The United States operates a safe, humane and professional
detention operation at Guantánamo that is providing valuable information in the
war on terrorism."

It continued that personnel assigned to Guantánamo "go through extensive
professional and sensitivity training to ensure they understand the procedures
for protecting the rights and dignity of detainees."

The conclusions by the inspection team, especially the findings involving
alleged complicity in mistreatment by medical professionals, have provoked a
stormy debate within the Red Cross committee. Some officials have argued that it
should make its concerns public or at least aggressively confront the Bush
administration.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is based in Geneva and is
separate from the American Red Cross, was founded in 1863 as an independent,
neutral organization intended to provide humanitarian protection and assistance
for victims of war.

Its officials are able to visit prisoners at Guantánamo under the kind of
arrangement the committee has made with governments for decades. In exchange for
exclusive access to the prison camp and meetings with detainees, the committee
has agreed to keep its findings confidential. The findings are shared only with
the government that is detaining people.

Beatricé Mégevand-Roggo, a senior Red Cross official, said in an interview that
she could not say anything about information relayed to the United States
government because "we do not comment in any way on the substance of the reports
we submit to the authorities."

Ms. Mégevand-Roggo, the committee's delegate-general for Europe and the
Americas, acknowledged that the issue of confidentiality was a chronic and
vexing one for the organization. "Many people do not understand why we have
these bilateral agreements about confidentiality," she said. "People are led to
believe that we are a fig leaf or worse, that we are complicit with the
detaining authorities."

She added, "It's a daily dilemma for us to put in the balance the positive
effects our visits have for detainees against the confidentiality."

Antonella Notari, a veteran Red Cross official and spokeswoman, said that the
organization frequently complained to the Pentagon and other arms of the
American government when government officials cite the Red Cross visits to
suggest that there is no abuse at Guantánamo. Most statements from the Pentagon
in response to queries about mistreatment at Guantánamo do, in fact, include
mention of the visits.

In a recent interview with reporters, General Hood, the commander of the
detention and interrogation facility at Guantánamo, also cited the committee's
visits in response to questions about treatment of detainees. "We take
everything the Red Cross gives us and study it very carefully to look for ways
to do our job better," he said in his Guantánamo headquarters, adding that he
agrees "with some things and not others."

"I'm satisfied that the detainees here have not been abused, they've not been
mistreated, they've not been tortured in any way," he said.

Scott Horton, a New York lawyer, who is familiar with some of the Red Cross's
views, said the issue of medical ethics at Guantánamo had produced "a tremendous
controversy in the committee." He said that some Red Cross officials believed it
was important to maintain confidentiality while others believed the United
States government was misrepresenting the inspections and using them to counter
criticisms.

Mr. Horton, who heads the human rights committee of the Bar Association of the
City of New York, said the Red Cross committee was considering whether to bring
more senior officials to Washington and whether to make public its criticisms.

The report from the June visit said the Red Cross team found a far greater
incidence of mental illness produced by stress than did American medical
authorities, much of it caused by prolonged solitary confinement. It said the
medical files of detainees were "literally open" to interrogators.

The report said the Biscuit team met regularly with the medical staff to discuss
the medical situations of detainees. At other times, interrogators sometimes
went directly to members of the medical staff to learn about detainees'
conditions, it said.

The report said that such "apparent integration of access to medical care within
the system of coercion" meant that inmates were not cooperating with
doctors. Inmates learn from their interrogators that they have knowledge of
their medical histories and the result is that the prisoners no longer trust the
doctors.

Asked for a response, the Pentagon issued a statement saying, "The allegation
that detainee medical files were used to harm detainees is false." The statement
said that the detainees were "enemy combatants who were fighting against
U.S. and coalition forces."

"It's important to understand that when enemy combatants were first detained on
the battlefield, they did not have any medical records in their possession," the
statement continued. "The detainees had a wide range of pre-existing health
issues including battlefield injuries."

The Pentagon also said the medical care given detainees was first-rate. Although
the Red Cross criticized the lack of confidentiality, it agreed in the report
that the medical care was of high quality.

Leonard S. Rubenstein, the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights,
was asked to comment on the account of the Red Cross report, and said, "The use
of medical personnel to facilitate abusive interrogations places them in an
untenable position and violates international ethical standards."

Mr. Rubenstein added, "We need to know more about these practices, including
whether health professionals engaged in calibrating levels of pain inflicted on
detainees."

The issue of whether torture at Guantánamo was condoned or encouraged has been a
problem before for the Bush administration.

In February 2002, President Bush ordered that the prisoners at Guantánamo be
treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate with military necessity, in a
manner consistent with" the Geneva Conventions. That statement masked a roiling
legal discussion within the administration as government lawyers wrote a series
of memorandums, many of which seemed to justify harsh and coercive treatment.

A month after Mr. Bush's public statement, a team of administration lawyers
accepted a view first advocated by the Justice Department that the president had
wide powers in authorizing coercive treatment of detainees. The legal team in a
memorandum concluded that Mr. Bush was not bound by either the international
Convention Against Torture or a federal antitorture statute because he had the
authority to protect the nation from terrorism.

That document provides tightly constructed definitions of torture. For example,
if an interrogator "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if
causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent
even though the defendant did not act in good faith," it said. "Instead, a
defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of
inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control."

When some administration memorandums about coercive treatment or torture were
disclosed, the White House said they were only advisory.

Last month, military guards, intelligence agents and others described in
interviews with The Times a range of procedures that they said were highly
abusive occurring over a long period, as well as rewards for prisoners who
cooperated with interrogators. The people who worked at Camp Delta, the main
prison facility, said that one regular procedure was making uncooperative
prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled
hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights
and loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the
air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels.

Some accounts of techniques at Guantánamo have been easy to dismiss because they
seemed so implausible. The most striking of the accusations, which have come
mainly from a group of detainees released to their native Britain, has been that
the military used prostitutes who made coarse comments and come-ons to taunt
some prisoners who are Muslims.

But the Red Cross report hints strongly at an explanation of some of those
accusations by stating that there were frequent complaints by prisoners in 2003
that some of the female interrogators baited their subjects with sexual
overtures.

Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention and intelligence operation at
Guantánamo until April, when he took over prison operations in Iraq, said in an
interview early this year about general interrogation procedures that the female
interrogators had proved to be among the most effective. General Miller's
observation matches common wisdom among experienced intelligence officers that
women may be effective as interrogators when seen by their subjects as mothers
or sisters. Sexual taunting does not, however, comport with what is often
referred to as the "mother-sister syndrome."

But the Red Cross report said that complaints about the practice of sexual
taunting stopped in the last year. Guantánamo officials have acknowledged that
they have improved their techniques and that some earlier methods they tried
proved to be ineffective, raising the possibility that the sexual taunting was
an experiment that was abandoned.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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U.S. Generals in Iraq Were Told of Abuse Early, Inquiry Finds

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 1, 2004; Page A01

A confidential report to Army generals in Iraq in December 2003 warned that
members of an elite military and CIA task force were abusing detainees, a
finding delivered more than a month before Army investigators received the
photographs from Abu Ghraib prison that touched off investigations into prisoner
mistreatment.

The report, which was not released publicly and was recently obtained by The
Washington Post, concluded that some U.S. arrest and detention practices at the
time could "technically" be illegal. It also said coalition fighters could be
feeding the Iraqi insurgency by "making gratuitous enemies" as they conducted
sweeps netting hundreds of detainees who probably did not belong in prison and
holding them for months at a time.

The investigation, by retired Col. Stuart A. Herrington, also found that members
of Task Force 121 -- a joint Special Operations and CIA mission searching for
weapons of mass destruction and high-value targets including Saddam Hussein --
had been abusing detainees throughout Iraq and had been using a secret
interrogation facility to hide their activities.

Herrington's findings are the latest in a series of confidential reports to come
to light about detainee abuse in Iraq. Until now, U.S. military officials have
characterized the problem as one largely confined to the military prison at Abu
Ghraib -- a situation they first learned about in January 2004. But Herrington's
report shows that U.S. military leaders in Iraq were told of such allegations
even before then, and that problems were not restricted to Abu
Ghraib. Herrington, a veteran of the U.S. counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam,
warned that such harsh tactics could imperil U.S. efforts to quell the Iraqi
insurgency -- a prediction echoed months later by a military report and other
reviews of the war effort.

U.S. treatment of detainees remains under challenge. Representatives of the
International Committee of the Red Cross recently told U.S. military officials
that the treatment of inmates held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was "cruel, inhumane
and degrading" (story, Page A10). Herrington's report, which was commissioned by
Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top intelligence officer in Iraq, said some
detainees dropped off at central U.S. detention facilities other than Abu Ghraib
had clearly been beaten by their captors.

"Detainees captured by TF 121 have shown injuries that caused examining medical
personnel to note that 'detainee shows signs of having been beaten,' " according
to the report, which later concluded: "It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be
reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees."

A group of Navy SEALs who worked as part of the task force has been charged with
abuse in connection with the deaths of two detainees they arrested in the
field. One died in a shower room at Abu Ghraib on Nov. 4, 2003, a month before
Herrington arrived for his review.

A military source who participated in Task Force 20, the predecessor to TF 121,
said the task forces comprised several 12-man units that had targeted missions,
such as searching for Hussein loyalists and terrorists. TF 20, which had about
1,000 soldiers, incorporated Army Rangers, members of Delta Force and Special
Forces units working with CIA agents. They planned their missions nearly
autonomously and answered either directly to the theater commander or to
officials in Washington, the source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity
because the missions were classified.

Task Force 121 added Navy SEAL units but was slightly smaller
overall. Herrington wrote that an officer in charge of interrogations at a
high-value target detention facility in Baghdad told him that prisoners taken by
TF 121 showed signs of having been beaten.

Herrington asked the officer whether he had alerted his superiors to the
problem, and the officer replied: "Everyone knows about it."

While several investigations have been completed into the Abu Ghraib scandal and
U.S. interrogation practices in Iraq, an official military inquiry into the
detention activities of Special Operations forces has not been released. That
probe, headed by Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica, was expected to be presented to
Congress earlier this year, but a Pentagon spokesman said it is ongoing.

Of the Herrington report, a Pentagon official said top generals in Iraq,
including Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who at the time directed U.S. forces
there, reported the alleged abuses to officials at U.S. Central Command, which
oversees military activities in the Middle East. The official said TF 121 was
investigated, but he could not provide results.

"The Herrington report was taken very seriously," said the official, who spoke
on the condition of anonymity because the report has not been released.

The report also provided an early account of the practice of holding some
detainees -- sometimes called "ghost detainees" -- in secret and keeping them
from international humanitarian organizations. Herrington also wrote that agents
from other government agencies, which commonly refers to the CIA, regularly kept
ghost detainees by not logging their arrests.

Nearly six months later, Defense Department officials were forced to acknowledge
the practice because of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Soldiers who worked at the
prison said several detainees were hidden, and a prison logbook showed a
consistent stream of them from October 2003 to January 2004.

Herrington, who is considered an expert in human intelligence operations, ran
programs during Operation Desert Storm and in Panama and was part of the
controversial Phoenix Program, which targeted the roots of the Viet Cong
insurgency in Vietnam. He compiled his report after a week-long trip to Iraq
beginning Dec. 2, 2003, joined by a military intelligence officer and an Army
intelligence official from the Pentagon.

His ultimate conclusion was that much needed to be done to increase intelligence
capabilities, which he called below average, though he praised Fast's
determination.

"Given the fact that the United States and its coalition partners paid and
continue to pay a steep price in losses and national treasure to lay our hands
on these detainees, it is disappointing that the opportunity to thoroughly and
professionally exploit this source pool has not been maximized, in spite of your
best efforts and those of several hundred MI [military intelligence] soldiers,"
Herrington wrote to Fast in the Dec. 12 report. "Even one year ago, we would
have salivated at the prospect of being able to talk to people like the hundreds
who are now in our custody. Now that we have them, we have failed to devote the
planning and resources to optimize this mission."

Herrington, contacted by telephone, declined to discuss the report. A Pentagon
official said Fast personally requested Herrington's visit, and the report
indicates Fast was interested in improving U.S. intelligence and detention
operations, saying that "in spite of efforts to upgrade this effort, [she]
remained concerned about its state of health."

In the 13-page report, Herrington wrote that overcrowding and a lack of
resources caused the Army to use "primitive prison accommodations" for even the
most important targets. He said that led to the loss of considerable significant
intelligence and might have fueled the Iraqi insurgency.

He added that some detainees were arrested because targets were not at home when
homes were raided. A family member was instead captured and then released when
the target turned himself in -- a practice that, Herrington wrote, "has a
'hostage' feel to it."

A separate report by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, issued this past May
and intended for internal use, gave the sense that some Army tactics served to
"alienate common Iraqis who initially supported the coalition."

The 134-page CALL report singled out the practice of detaining female family
members to force wanted Iraqi males to turn themselves in, similar to
Herrington's findings.

"It is a practice in some U.S. units to detain family members of anti-coalition
suspects in an effort to induce the suspects to turn themselves in, in exchange
for the release of their family members," the report stated. The CALL report
also was critical of the delays in notifying family members about the status of
detainees held in U.S. custody, reminding family members of Hussein's tactics.

Herrington's report also noted that sweeps pulled in hundreds and even thousands
of detainees who had no connection to the war. Abu Ghraib, for example, swelled
to several thousand more detainees than it could handle. Herrington wrote that
aggressive and indiscriminate tactics by the 4th Infantry Division, rounding up
random scores of detainees and "dumping them at the door," was a glaring
example.

As the United States recently has picked up its counterinsurgency efforts, the
number of new detainees has again surged.

"Between the losers and dead end elements from the former regime and foreign
fighters, there are enough people in Iraq who already don't like us," Herrington
wrote. "Adding to these numbers by conducting sweep operations . . . is
counterproductive to the Coalition's efforts to win the cooperation of the Iraqi
citizenry. Similarly, mistreatment of captives as has been reported to me and
our team is unacceptable, and bound to be known by the population."

Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.

(C) 2004 The Washington Post Company

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Navy probes apparent Iraqi prisoner photos

By Seth Hettena, Associated Press  |  December 4, 2004

CORONADO, Calif. --The US military has launched a criminal investigation into
photographs that appear to show Navy SEALs in Iraq sitting on hooded and
handcuffed detainees, and photos of what appear to be bloodied prisoners, one
with a gun to his head.

Some of the photos have date stamps suggesting they were taken in May 2003,
which could make them the earliest evidence of possible abuse of prisoners in
Iraq. The far more brutal practices photographed in Abu Ghraib prison occurred
months later.

An Associated Press reporter found more than 40 of the pictures among hundreds
in an album posted on a commercial photo-sharing website by a woman who said her
husband brought them from Iraq after his tour of duty. It is unclear who took
the pictures, which the Navy said it was investigating after the AP furnished
copies to get comment for this story.

These and other photos found by the AP appear to show the immediate aftermath of
raids on civilian homes. One man is lying on his back with a boot on his
chest. A mug shot shows a man with an automatic weapon pointed at his head and a
gloved thumb jabbed into his throat. In many photos, faces have been blacked
out. What appears to be blood drips from the heads of some. A family huddles in
a room in one photo, and other photos show debris and upturned furniture.

"These photographs raise a number of important questions regarding the treatment
of prisoners of war and detainees," Navy Commander Jeff Bender, a spokesman for
the Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, said in a written response to
questions. "I can assure you that the matter will be thoroughly investigated."

The photos were turned over to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which instructed the SEAL command to determine whether they show any serious crimes, Bender said yesterday. That investigation will determine the identities of the troops and what they were doing in the photos.

Some of the photos recall aspects of the images from Abu Ghraib, which led to charges against seven soldiers accused of humiliating and assaulting prisoners. In several of the photos obtained by the AP, grinning men wearing US flags on their uniforms, and one with a tattoo of a SEAL trident, take turns sitting or lying atop what appear to be three hooded and handcuffed men in the bed of a pickup truck.

A reporter found the photos, which since have been removed from public view, while researching the prosecution of a group of SEALs who allegedly beat prisoners and photographed one of them in degrading positions. Those photos, taken with a SEAL\x{2019}s personal camera, have not been publicly released.

Though they have alarmed SEAL commanders, the photographs found by the AP do not necessarily show anything illegal, according to specialists in the laws of war who reviewed photos at AP\x{2019}s request.

Gary Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor and judge who teaches at the US Military Academy, said the images showed \x{2018}\x{2018}stupid\x{2019}\x{2019} and \x{2018}\x{2018}juvenile\x{2019}\x{2019} behavior \x{2014} but not necessarily a crime.

John Hutson, a retired rear admiral who served as the Navy\x{2019}s judge advocate general from 1997 to 2000, said they suggested possible Geneva Convention violations. Those international laws prohibit souvenir photos of prisoners of war.

\x{2018}\x{2018}It\x{2019}s pretty obvious that these pictures were taken largely as war trophies,\x{2019}\x{2019} Hutson said. \x{2018}\x{2018}Once you start allowing that kind of behavior, the next step is to start posing the POWs in order to get even better pictures.\x{2019}\x{2019}

At a minimum, the pictures violate Navy regulations that prohibit photographing prisoners other than for intelligence or administrative purposes, according to Bender, the SEALs spokesman.

All Naval Special Warfare personnel were told that prior to deployment, he said, but \x{2018}\x{2018}it is obvious from some of the photographs that this policy was not adhered to.\x{2019}\x{2019}

The images were posted to the Internet site Smugmug.com. The woman who posted them told the AP they were on the camera her husband brought back from Iraq. She said her husband has returned to Iraq. He does not appear in photos with prisoners.

The Navy goes to great lengths to protect the identities and whereabouts of its 2,400 SEALs \x{2014} which stands for Navy Sea, Air, Land \x{2014} many of whom have classified counterterrorist missions around the globe.

\x{2018}\x{2018}Some of these photos clearly depict faces and names of Naval Special Warfare personnel, which could put them or their families at risk,\x{2019}\x{2019} Bender said.

Out of safety concerns, the AP is not identifying the woman who posted the
photos.

The wife said she was upset that a reporter was able to view the album, which
includes family snapshots.

Hundreds of other photos depict everyday military life in Iraq, some showing
commandos standing around piles of weapons and waving wads of cash.

The images were found through the online search engine Google.

The same search yesterday led to the Smugmug.com Web page, which now prompts the
user for a password. Nine scenes from the SEAL camp remain in Google's archived
version of the page.

"I think it's fair to assume that it would be very hard for most consumers to
know all the ways the search engines can discover Web pages," said a Smugmug
spokesman, Chris MacAskill.

Before the site was password protected, the AP purchased reprints for 29 cents
each.

Some men in the photos wear patches that identify them as members of Seal Team
Five, based in Coronado, and the unit\x{2019}s V-shaped insignia decorates a
July Fourth celebration cake.

The photos surfaced amid a case of prisoner abuse involving members of another
SEAL team also stationed at Coronado, a city near San Diego.

Navy prosecutors have charged several members of SEAL Team Seven with abusing a
suspect in the bombing of a Red Cross facility.

According to charge sheets and testimony during a military hearing last month,
SEALs posed in the back of a Humvee for photos that allegedly humiliated Manadel
al-Jamadi, who died hours later at Abu Ghraib.

Testimony from that case suggests personal cameras became increasingly common on
some SEAL missions last year.

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FBI letter alleged abuse of detainees

By Paisley Dodds, Associated Press  |  December 7, 2004

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- FBI agents witnessed "highly aggressive" interrogations
and mistreatment of terror suspects at the US prison camp in Cuba starting in
2002 -- more than a year before the prison abuse scandal broke in Iraq --
according to a letter a senior Justice Department official sent to the Army's
top criminal investigator.

In the letter obtained by the Associated Press, the FBI official suggested the
Pentagon didn't act on FBI complaints about the acts, including a female
interrogator grabbing a detainee's genitals and bending back his thumbs, another
where a prisoner was gagged with duct tape, and a third where a dog was used to
intimidate a detainee who later was thrown into isolation and showed signs of
"extreme psychological trauma."

One Marine told an FBI observer that some interrogations led to prisoners
"curling into a fetal position on the floor and crying in pain," according to
the letter dated July 14, 2004.

Thomas Harrington, an FBI counterterrorism specialist who led a team of
investigators at Guantanamo Bay, wrote the letter to Major General Donald
J. Ryder, the Army's chief law enforcement officer who is investigating abuses
at US-run prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at Guantanamo.

Harrington said FBI officials complained about the pattern of abusive techniques
to top Defense Department attorneys in January 2003, and it appeared that
nothing was done.

Although a senior FBI attorney "was assured that the general concerns expressed,
and the debate between the FBI and DoD [Department of Defense] regarding the
treatment of detainees was known to officials in the Pentagon, I have no record
that our specific concerns regarding these three situations were communicated to
the Department of Defense for appropriate action," Harrington wrote.

Harrington told Ryder he was writing to follow up a meeting he had with the
general the week before about detainee treatment, saying the three cases
demonstrate the "highly aggressive interrogation techniques being used against
detainees in Guantanamo."

"I refer them to you for appropriate action," Harrington wrote.

Brigadier General Jay Hood, the current commander of the mission in Guantanamo,
said allegations of mistreatment and abuse are taken seriously and investigated.

"The appropriate actions were taken. Some allegations are still under
investigation," Hood said. "Once investigations are completed, we report them
immediately."

None of the people named in the letter are still at the base, a Guantanamo
spokesman said, but it wasn't clear whether any disciplinary action had been
taken. The letter identified the military interrogators only by last name and
rank, and mentioned a civilian contractor.

Lieutenant Colonel Gerard Healy, an Army spokesman, confirmed the authenticity
of the FBI letter, as did the FBI. Healy said the female interrogator --
identified only as Sergeant Lacey in the letter -- is being investigated, but
the Army would not comment further or fully identify her.

The US military says prisoners are treated in accordance with the Geneva
Conventions, which prohibit violence, torture, and humiliation of
combatants. Still, at least 10 acts of abuse have been substantiated at
Guantanamo, all from 2003 or this year. They range from a guard hitting a
detainee to a female interrogator climbing on a prisoner's lap.

Those acts pale in comparison to alleged abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq,
a scandal that erupted when photographs surfaced of US troops forcing Iraqi
prisoners to strip and pose in sexually humiliating positions. Some prisoners
were bound and hooded.

At Guantanamo, some detainees have been held without charge and without access
to attorneys since the camp opened in January 2002 at the remote US Naval base
on Cuba's eastern tip. The United States has imprisoned some 550 men accused of
links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime or the Al Qaeda terror network;
only four have been charged.

None of the four 2002 cases cited were detailed in any of the 5,000 documents
received by the New York-based American Civil Liberties Union under two Freedom
of Information Act requests, said Anthony Romero, the union's executive
director.

"Despite the government's statements, there seems to be increasingly little
doubt that torture is occurring at Guantanamo," said Romero.

Romero said the information in the FBI letter "raises questions about the
government's willingness to be forthcoming in these legal proceedings and shows
that even the FBI has been uncomfortable with some of the tactics used at
Guantanamo."

One of the documents the ACLU received was a letter from an FBI agent to
Harrington dated May 10. It underscored the friction between the FBI and the
military, mentioning conversations that were "somewhat heated" over
interrogation methods.

"In my weekly meetings with the Department of Justice we often discussed
techniques and how they were not effective or producing intelligence that was
reliable," according to the exchange, which was heavily redacted to remove
references to dates and names.

"I finally voiced my opinion . . . It still did not prevent them from continuing
the . . . methods," the FBI agent says.

Three of the four acts mentioned in the letter obtained by the AP occurred under
the watch of General Geoffrey D. Miller, who ran the Guantanamo camp from
October 2002 to March 2004 and left to run the Abu Ghraib prison. Last month,
Miller was reassigned to the Pentagon, with responsibility for housing and other
support operations.

According to the letter, in late 2002 an FBI agent observed an interrogation
where Sergeant Lacey whispered in the ear of a handcuffed and shackled detainee,
caressed him, and applied lotion to his arms. This occurred during Ramadan,
Islam's holy month, when contact with women is considered particularly offensive
to a Muslim man.

Later, the detainee appeared to grimace in pain, and the FBI agent asked a
Marine who was present why. "The Marine said [the interrogator] had grabbed the
detainee's thumbs and bent them backward and indicated that she also grabbed his
genitals. The Marine also implied that her treatment of that detainee was less
harsh than her treatment of others by indicating that he had seen her treatment
of other detainees result in detainees curling into a fetal position on the
floor and crying in pain," Harrington wrote.

In September or October 2002, FBI agents saw a dog used "in an aggressive manner
to intimidate a detainee," the letter said.

About a month later, agents saw the same detainee "after he had been subjected
to intense isolation for over three months . . . totally isolated in a cell that
was always flooded with light. By late November, the detainee was evidencing
behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma . . . talking to
nonexistent people, reported hearing voices, [and] crouching in a corner of the
cell covered with a sheet," the letter said.

In October 2002, another FBI agent saw a detainee "gagged with duct tape that
covered much of his head" because he would not stop chanting from the Koran.

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Interrogators objected to tactics
Documents indicate abuses occurred after Abu Ghraib

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  December 8, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration's aggressive techniques for extracting
information from detainees captured in Afghanistan and Iraq sparked sharp
dissent among some experienced interrogators in the military and the FBI,
according to government documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union
yesterday.

The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, indicate that some
prisoners in Iraq continued to be physically abused even after details of abuse
at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison became public in the spring of this year.

Among other incidents, the documents indicate that two months after the Abu
Ghraib scandal, two Defense Intelligence Agency interrogators saw members of a
detention task force ''punch a prisoner in the face to the point that the
individual needed medical attention" while questioning him. They told a task
force supervisor, but were ''threatened," ordered not to talk about it, and had
their photos of the beaten prisoner confiscated, according to an agency report.

The papers also show that FBI interrogators sent to the US naval base at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002 were troubled by unorthodox techniques used
against the ''enemy combatants" held there, reporting back to their superiors
that they felt the coercive approaches would not produce reliable information
and were outlawed by FBI procedures.

The ACLU obtained the thousands of pages of memos, e-mails, and government
reports after a legal battle with the Bush administration, which sought to keep
them secret. The Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights,
and two veterans groups also joined in the lawsuit.

''The more the government is forced to reveal, the more we learn that
individuals in US custody, many of whom have not been accused of wrongdoing,
were tortured and abused," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony
D. Romero. ''These documents tell a damning story of sanctioned government abuse
-- a story that the government has tried to hide and may well come back to haunt
our own troops captured in Iraq."

The ACLU also said it would ask a judge to order more documents released and to
restore redacted portions of documents that have already been made public.

A spokesman in the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that the
Pentagon would not address each document point by point, and would only
reiterate its general policy on detainee treatment.

''US policy condemns and prohibits torture," the spokesman said. ''US personnel
are required to follow this policy and applicable law. We've said all along we
don't tolerate any mistreatment of detainees. We investigate thoroughly any
credible allegations and take appropriate actions if they're substantiated. And
the same process applies to these allegations."

But the trove of documents underscored critics' continuing suspicions that
abusive interrogation techniques, disavowed publicly by the government, were
authorized in private following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, despite
being illegal under both US law and treaties to which the country is a party.

Yesterday, Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the ranking member of
the Senate Judiciary Committee, delivered a speech on the Senate floor making it
clear that the Bush administration's policies regarding torture will be a large
part of next month's nomination hearings of White House Counsel Alberto
Gonzales, whom Bush has tapped to be attorney general in his second term.

Gonzales wrote one of several memos questioning the application of the Geneva
Conventions and outlining a legal strategy for overcoming the prohibition on
torture. His nomination hearings may be the only real opportunity for Democrats,
a minority in both houses of Congress, to probe whether responsibility for the
abuses went beyond the rogue actions of low-ranking guards.

''The Bush administration circled the wagons long ago and has continually
maintained that the abuses were the work of 'a few bad apples,' " Leahy
said. ''But we know that the photos from Abu Ghraib do not depict an isolated
incident. Abuses have occurred in many locations, including Afghanistan,
Guantanamo Bay, and in a number of other facilities within Iraq. I have long
said that somewhere in the upper reaches of the executive branch a process was
set in motion that rolled forward until it produced this scandal."

The numerous documents released yesterday include several memos and e-mails from
Defense Intelligence Agency interrogators in Iraq written around the time of the
Abu Ghraib scandal media coverage. One interrogator disavowed responsibility for
alleged abuse he had witnessed but did not take part in, even though his name
appeared on a report from the interrogation session.

The interrogator recounted a raid in May in which soldiers seized the
28-year-old wife of a suspected insurgent, who was nursing a 6-month-old child,
and held her for two days as ''leverage" to lure her husband into custody. There
were also several incidents in which officials allegedly ''slapped around"
detainees during questioning by a group of guards and interrogators called Task
Force 62-6.

The documents also included correspondence from FBI agents who had been sent to
the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba in 2002 and witnessed ''aggressive"
and ''extreme interrogation practices" at the base, though the heavily redacted
memos do not list many details about what they saw.

One e-mail by an FBI agent said the bureau ''battled" Major General Geoffrey
Miller, then the commander of the interrogation prison in Cuba, over coercive
interrogation strategies ''we not only advised against, but questioned in terms
of effectiveness."

Miller has been at the center of the Abu Ghraib scandal because he visited Iraq
in September 2003 and made suggestions on how to extract more intelligence from
prisoners. Shortly after his trip, the sexually humiliating abuses at the Abu
Ghraib prison began, leading to questions about what he had suggested and what
was going on in Cuba.

The military has said interrogators at Guantanamo are instructed to give rewards
to detainees who cooperate, and that those who refuse to answer questions may be
subject to changes in temperature or exposure to loud music.

Defense officials said Miller did not make any recommendations for Iraqi prisons
that could have been interpreted as leading to the Abu Ghraib abuses.

In the thousands of pages of documents released about detainee operations since
the Abu Ghraib scandal became public -- leaked to the media, made public by the
Bush administration, and now released by the ACLU's lawsuit -- none has shown an
official policy authorizing the abusive tactics used at Abu Ghraib.

Mark Jacobson, a former official in Rumsfeld's Detainee Policy Group, said that
evidence that the FBI agents disagreed with Guantanamo interrogation techniques
in 2002 should not be viewed as a surprise. He noted that memos made public
earlier this year showed that people on the base were confused about what was
permissible and sought Pentagon guidance about interrogation rules in the fall
of 2002.

He also suggested the FBI agents may have been accustomed to the bureau's more
restrictive guidelines on questioning, aimed at obtaining information that could
be used in court, but military interrogators seeking information about Al Qaeda
could go further. He added, however, that physical abuse, such as punching a
detainee in the face, would be neither legal nor effective.

The ACLU documents were publicized after two other recent disclosures. The
Associated Press reported earlier this week that an FBI counterterrorism
specialist had written a letter in July 2004 reporting abuse of Guantanamo
detainees by interrogators in 2002, such as squeezing genitals and bending back
fingers.

The New York Times recently reported that the International Committee of the Red
Cross privately told the Pentagon in June that it believed some tactics used
with Guantanamo detainees -- such as solitary confinement, exposure to
temperature extremes, and forced positions -- were ''tantamount to torture."

-----------------------------------------------------------

Documents detail abuse of detainees

By Thomas E. Ricks, Reuters  |  December 15, 2004

WASHINGTON -- Marines operating in Iraq over the last two years committed a
variety of abuses against Iraqi prisoners, including burning a detainee's hands
by igniting alcohol-based cleanser in August 2003, according to internal Defense
Department documents released yesterday.

Several other incidents, most of them previously undisclosed, are described in
investigative reports and legal summaries. In Karbala in May 2003, one Marine
held a 9 mm pistol to the back of a bound detainee's head while another Marine
took a photograph. Two months later, in Diwaniyah, four Marines ordered teenage
Iraqi looters to kneel alongside holes and then fired a pistol "to conduct a
mock execution."

In April of this year, shortly before the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal
shook the US military, three Marines in Al-Mahmudiya shocked a detainee with an
electric transformer, forcing him to "dance" as the electricity hit him,
according to a witness, one document states. The Washington Post reported that
incident in June, after two of the Marines pleaded guilty in the case.

This new catalogue of abuses involves members of various units, and is distinct
from earlier disclosures of the torture of prisoners by Army reservists at the
Abu Ghraib and the maltreatment of detainees in Afghanistan by Army soldiers and
Special Operations troops.

Overall, according to a summary prepared for the Pentagon's inspector general
but obtained and released by the American Civil Liberties Union, there were 10
substantiated incidents of Marines abusing prisoners. Those involved a total of
24 members of the Corps, and resulted in 11 court-martial convictions and three
instances of lesser punishment. Charges were dismissed against six other
Marines, and four cases are pending, the summary said. All the abuses involved
members of various units within the Marines' First Marine Division.

The August 2003 burning incident, which occurred at Camp Dogwood, near Al
Iskandariyah, blistered the Iraqi detainee's hands and resulted in a special
court martial in which a Marine was found guilty of assault, confined for 90
days, and demoted. Other incidents resulted in similar punishments.

The most severe sentences were handed down in the case of the detainee being
shocked, the summary said, with two Marines court-martialed at Camp Fallujah in
May. One was sentenced to one year in confinement and the other eight
months. Several other prosecutions are pending in that case, the document noted.

The internal summary also stated there were 11 other incidents in which
allegations of abuse were not substantiated and five cases in which
investigations were still pending.

The dozens of documents were obtained by the ACLU under the Freedom of
Information Act. The organization recently has distributed a series of documents
it has received from various parts of the military. "Abuse of detainees was not
aberrational," ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer said in a prepared statement
accompanying the release. "The Defense Department adopted extreme interrogation
techniques as a matter of policy."

Supporting that assertion, the ACLU said, is a statement taken last October by
the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in which a Navy corpsman who had been
attached to the Marines in Iraq stated that it was routine to take a prisoner to
an empty swimming pool, place cuffs on his hands and legs, put a burlap bag over
his head, and then "the EPW (enemy prisoner of war) would remain in the kneeling
position for no longer than 24 hours while the EPW was awaiting interrogation."

A Marine spokesman said the documents underscore not just that abuses occurred
but that allegations involving them are taken seriously. "Each of these acts
referred to by the ACLU resulted in courts-martial convictions," said Major Nat
Fahy. "This clearly demonstrates our commitment to thoroughly investigate all
allegations of detainee abuse and hold those people accountable."

-------------------------------------------------

US disclosures signal wider detainee abuse

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  December 26, 2004

WASHINGTON -- A trove of government disclosures forced by a Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit has signaled that the abuse of detainees in Iraq and at
the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was much broader than the Bush
administration has portrayed it since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal became
public this spring.

A heavily redacted internal e-mail from an FBI agent in June, for example,
reported hearing of ''numerous serious physical abuse incidents of Iraqi
civilian detainees . . . strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes
into the detainees' ear openings, and unauthorized interrogations" and refers to
''coverup efforts."

Another FBI agent wrote in an e-mail in August of witnessing an interrogation in
Guantanamo:

''The A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room
probably well over 100 degrees," the report said. ''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."

Thousands of pages of documents, including two sets of FBI reports made public
in the past week, have been released since October in response to a suit filed
by the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups.

The documents suggest that severe mistreatment was far more widespread than
previously known and that there may have been higher-level authorization by Bush
administration officials for a policy of aggressive interrogation tactics. The
White House last week again denied that anyone authorized torture and pledged to
investigate the new allegations.

Because the e-mails and memos recounting scenes of abuse were written by
government officials -- largely FBI agents appalled by interrogation practices
they found unprofessional and counterproductive -- the disclosures lend greater
credibility to prior claims of abuse by former detainees, according to an
advocate for the detainees.

''This is really disturbing and frightening," Khalid al-Odah, father of a
Guantanamo detainee, said in a phone interview from Kuwait City. He says his son
went to Pakistan to teach the Koran just before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
and was later sold into detention under false pretenses by villagers seeking a
bounty for Al Qaeda members.

''Before the FBI reports, we did not take these stories from the [human rights]
organizations and released detainees as full fact," Odah said. ''We thought
maybe there was some exaggerating, or they are not sure about what is happening
exactly. Now we don't have any doubt."

The disclosures also fill in details of what occurred at critical moments in the
story of how the administration's detention and interrogation policies adopted
after the Sept. 11 attacks led to a downward spiral in how detainees were
treated.

Faced with a need to gain greater human intelligence about Al Qaeda plans but
stymied by provisions in the Geneva Conventions that prohibit coercive
interrogations of prisoners of war, the administration announced in February
2002 that the conventions would not cover treatment of Taliban and Al Qaeda
detainees captured in Afghanistan.

At Guantanamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller established a positive-rewards
system for detainees who cooperated. But by fall 2002, questions arose about
what pressures could be brought against those who did not. In April 2003,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed off on techniques including loud music,
temperature changes, stress positions, and isolation.

The FBI memos have done two things to broaden public understanding of what
occurred at this stage to detainees captured in Afghanistan and held at the
naval base. First, they demonstrate that service members also used growling dogs
to frighten detainees at Guantanamo, something the military had denied. Second,
they have rendered vivid that, in practice, the options amounted to physical and
sensory assault.

''These documents that describe particular interrogations witnessed by FBI
agents are useful because in the past, when we have talked about 'stress and
duress' and hooding or loud music, it's been sterile," said Jameel Jaffer, an
ACLU staff attorney. ''People don't understand how these things work in practice
-- what it means to bombard someone with loud music for a long time."

A vivid FBI e-mail, which recounted the detainee who pulled his hair out, also
describes sessions in which detainees were chained in a fetal position with no
food or water for 24 hours or more, causing them to urinate and defecate on
themselves.

During one prolonged period, the room temperature was set so low that a barefoot
detainee shook with cold. Another time the unventilated room was made
''unbearably hot" while ''extremely loud rap music" blasted a detainee for more
than a day, the agent said.

Another FBI agent reported in July 2004: ''I saw another detainee sitting on the
floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music
being played, and a strobe light flashing."

And two FBI reports from Guantanamo also present possible new evidence of higher
responsibility for authorizing abuses. A e-mail from last December protests
about Defense Department interrogators impersonating FBI officers at Guantanamo.

''If this detainee is . . . released or his story made public in any way, DOD
interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were
done [by] the 'FBI' interrogators," the FBI agent wrote in December 2003.

Then, an e-mail from January 2004 discussing the sessions in which interrogators
impersonated FBI agents -- but which itself does not use the phrase ''torture
techniques" -- connects the practice to the second-highest official at the
Pentagon, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz: ''Once again, this technique,
and all of those used in these scenarios, was approved by the Dep Sec Def."

The Pentagon has denied that Wolfowitz approved interrogation techniques of any
kind, although it says Rumsfeld approved the tactic of impersonation.

The other sets of e-mails provide greater clarity about what has occurred in
Iraq.

In August 2003, as the insurgency in Iraq was gaining strength, the Pentagon
sent Miller to Abu Ghraib to offer advice on gaining more intelligence from
prisoners. He gave them a set of Guantanamo's procedures and suggested guards
should ''set the conditions" for successful interrogations, but noted that the
Geneva Conventions applied to Iraq.

The Abu Ghraib abuses, which included beatings and the sexual humiliation of
prisoners, began shortly after Miller's visit. The Pentagon later said that in
giving his advice, Miller meant only passive tasks like watching who prisoners
talked with, not abusing detainees to soften them up. It blamed a few rogue
sadists among the guard force who have since faced prosecution.

The newly disclosed memos indicated incidents of abuse were more widespread than
Abu Ghraib and continued into this year. But they have not indicated any further
systematic use of sexual humiliation.

A typical example: Last summer, two Defense Intelligence Agency interrogators
saw members of a special forces task force ''punch a prisoners in the face to
the point that the individual needed medical attention." They told a task force
supervisors, but were ''threatened," ordered not to talk about it, and had their
photos of the beaten prisoner confiscated.

A document indicated that an FBI official thought President Bush had personally
authorized some aggressive interrogation techniques in Iraq, a charge the White
House denies.

A May e-mail from an FBI commander in Baghdad makes repeated references to a
presidential order allegedly authorizing military interrogators to use
techniques such as sleep deprivation, hooding, and stress positions.

''The things our personnel witnessed (but did not participate in) were
authorized by the President under his Executive Order," the FBI agent wrote.

The White House denies such an order exists. If it does and was issued before
the Abu Ghraib abuses, such a directive would contradict the government's
account that the interrogation policy went no higher than the top US commander
in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez.

''We need more information, but there is evidence here of high-up approval of
these techniques," said Jaffer, from the ACLU. ''This is the first we've heard
about the existence of this type of order."

Bush and Pentagon officials have repeatedly denied authorizing torture. Last
week, reacting to the new disclosures, the administration pledged once again to
investigate what had happened.

''If there is abuse that occurs, we expect it to be investigated fully and
people to be held accountable, and measures taken to make sure that it doesn't
happen again," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

But the disclosures are leading to new calls for the Republican-led Congress to
use its subpoena powers for further inquiry independent from the
administration's investigations.

''What's remarkable and disgraceful about this whole proceeding is that it is
being pursued through the Freedom of Information Act," said Steven Aftergood,
director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American
Scientists, which is not a party to the lawsuit. ''Where is Congress? Why isn't
this the subject of regular ongoing hearings?"

Democrats in Congress, who as minorities in both houses lack power to convene
hearings and issue subpoenas, are frustrated that they have not been able to
conduct a larger investigation of their own.

But earlier this month, Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said
hearings next month on Bush's nomination as attorney general of Alberto
Gonzales, who as White House counsel wrote one of the memos urging Bush to
declare that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to the Afghanistan conflict,
would focus on detainee abuse. ''Somewhere in the upper reaches of the executive
branch a process was set in motion that rolled forward until it produced this
scandal," Leahy said in a Senate floor speech.

----------------------------------

New U.S. Memo Says Torture Violates Law

By CURT ANDERSON
Dec 31, 11:29 AM (ET)

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Justice Department backed off its narrow definition of
torture as "excruciating and agonizing pain" by releasing a legal memo rewritten
since the Iraqi prison abuse scandal. The new document said torture violates
U.S. and international law.

The 17-page memo omitted two of the most controversial assertions made in
now-disavowed 2002 Justice Department documents: that President Bush, as
commander in chief in wartime, had authority superseding U.S. anti-torture laws
and that U.S. personnel had several legal defenses against criminal liability in
such cases.

"Consideration of the bounds of any such authority would be inconsistent with
the president's unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in
torture," said the memo from Daniel Levin, acting chief of the Office of Legal
Counsel, to Deputy Attorney General James Comey.

Critics in Congress and many legal experts say the original documents set up a
legal framework that led to abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, in
Afghanistan and at the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba. After the Iraqi prison abuses came to light, the Justice Department in
June disavowed its previous legal reasoning and set to work on the replacement
document.

The White House insisted on Friday that the United States has operated under the
spirit of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit violence, torture and
humiliating treatment.

"It has been U.S. policy from the start to treat detainees humanely and in
accordance with the Geneva Conventions or under the spirit of the Conventions
where they do not apply," said White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy.

The Justice Department memo, dated Thursday, was released less than a week
before the Senate Judiciary Committee was to consider Bush's nomination of his
chief White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to replace John Ashcroft as
attorney general.

Democrats have said they would question Gonzales closely on memos he wrote that
were similar to the now-disavowed Justice Department documents that critics said
appeared to justify torture.

The release also coincided with continuing revelations of possible detainee
abuse, most recently a series of memos from FBI agents uncovered in an American
Civil Liberties Union lawsuit alleging instances of Defense Department
wrongdoing during a variety of interrogations.

The new Justice Department memo sets a far different tone, beginning with this
sentence: "Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to
international norms."

The document, again directly contradicting the previous version, says torture
need not be limited to pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying
serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function,
or even death."

Instead, the memo concludes that anti-torture laws passed by Congress equate
torture with physical suffering "even if it does not involve severe physical
pain" but still must be more than "mild and transitory." That can include mental
suffering under certain circumstances, but it would not have to last for months
or years, as the previous document said.

"This damage need not be permanent, but it must continue for a prolonged period
of time," the memo says.

In addition, the memo clearly states that U.S. personnel involved in
interrogations cannot contend that their actions were motivated by national
security needs or other reasons. And, it says, the interrogator cannot justify
torture after telling the victim that he could avoid it if only he would
cooperate.

"Presumably, that has frequently been the case with torture, but that fact does
not make the practice of torture any less abhorrent or unlawful," the Justice
Department memo says.

Most of the original memos were signed by then-assistant Attorney General Jay
Bybee, who was writing in the shadow of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as
government officials scrambled to confront a new terrorist foe. Bybee is now a
judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco.

The Pentagon, Justice Department and CIA have opened numerous investigations
into allegations of prisoner abuse and some detainee deaths stemming from the
war on terror and in Iraq. Several U.S. soldiers have also been subjected to
court-martial proceedings for their roles in the alleged abuse, some of which
was documented in photographs from Abu Ghraib circulated worldwide earlier in
2004.

---

On the Net:

Justice Department: www.usdoj.gov

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Witness: Graner Punched Iraqi Prisoner

By T.A. BADGER
Jan 10, 1:24 PM (ET)

FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) - A military guard testified Monday that he saw
Spc. Charles Graner Jr. punch an Iraqi detainee in the face a moment after a
notorious photo was taken at Abu Ghraib prison.

Another witness said Graner was "laughing and having a good time" while making
naked prisoners pose.

Spc. Matthew Wisdom, the first witness in Graner's prisoner abuse court-martial,
said Graner was among a number of guards who roughed up detainees on Nov. 7,
2003. Graner is the first soldier to be tried in the case, and prosecutors say
he was the ringleader of the abuse.

Testimony got under way Monday after opening statements.

Wisdom described a prominent photo from Abu Ghraib that showed the muscular
Graner holding a detainee as if he were about to strike him in the face.

The witness said Graner cocked his arm while the picture was taken, and then he
punched the detainee.

Asked how hard Graner hit the prisoner, Wisdom said, "If I was that detainee, I
know that it would be very painful."

Wisdom said he was urged to participate in abuse, but that he instead reported
it to his immediate superior.

"I was very upset," he said. "It made me kind of sick, almost. It didn't seem
right."

Graner, a 36-year-old former prison guard from Uniontown, Pa., is charged with
conspiracy to maltreat Iraqi detainees, assault, dereliction of duty and
committing indecent acts.

The defense contends that Graner was told by higher-ranking soldiers and
intelligence agents to rough up the detainees prior to interrogation, and that
he had no choice but to obey despite personal misgivings.

An all-male jury of four Army officers and six senior enlisted men will decide
his fate in what is expected to be a weeklong trial. If convicted on all counts,
he faces up to 17 1/2 years in a military prison.

Under military law, a conviction requires guilty votes by seven of the 10
jurors, all of whom have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

Wisdom testified that he did not see Graner when a naked Iraqi was allegedly
forced to masturbate. That incident is the basis of one of the maltreatment
charges against Graner.

But another member of the 372nd Military Police Company said Graner was not only
there, but that the defendant photographed a simulated oral sex scene.

Pvt. Jeremy Sivits, who in May pleaded guilty to taking part in abuse, said
Graner was in charge of stacking naked prisoners into a human pyramid with which
he later posed for pictures.

"He was trying to get the job done, but he was also laughing and having a good
time," said Sivits, who told the court that his testimony against Graner was
part of his plea deal.

Sivits received the maximum sentence of one year in prison, a reduction in rank
and a bad conduct discharge.

Two other members of Graner's unit who have made plea deals, Ivan Frederick and
Megan Ambuhl, are also scheduled to testify against him.

Sgt. Joseph Darby, who first reported the alleged abuse, also is scheduled to
appear. As many as three Iraqi detainees may testify via videotaped deposition.

Three more soldiers from the 372nd also are awaiting trial at Fort Hood. One is
Lynndie England, who in October gave birth to a child who Army prosecutors say
was the result of a relationship with Graner.

------------------------------------------------

Lawyer: Iraqi Abuse Was Like Act of 'Cheerleaders'

By Adam Tanner
Jan 10, 12:33 PM (ET)

FORT HOOD, Texas (Reuters) - A lawyer for Charles Graner, accused ringleader in
the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal, defended piling naked prisoners in pyramids on
Monday as valid prisoner control and compared it to shows by cheerleaders.

"Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year? Is
that torture?" Guy Womack, Graner's attorney, said in opening arguments to the
10-member military jury at the reservist sergeant's court-martial.

Graner and Pvt. Lynndie England, with whom he fathered a child and who is also
facing a court-martial, became the faces of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal after
they appeared in photographs that showed degraded, naked prisoners.

The prosecution showed some of those pictures in their opening argument,
including one of naked Iraqi men piled on each other and another of England
holding a crawling naked Iraqi man on a leash.

Womack said using a tether was a valid method of controlling detainees. "You're
keeping control of them. A tether is a valid control to be used in corrections,"
he said.

Pictures of the humiliating treatment of the prisoners at the prison outside
Baghdad prompted outrage around the world and further eroded the credibility of
the United States already damaged in many countries by the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Apart from arguing that the methods were not illegal, Graner's defense is that
he was following orders from superiors. "He was doing his job. Following orders
and being praised for it," Womack told the court.

The chief prosecutor, Maj. Michael Holley, asked rhetorically, "Did the accused
honestly believe that was a lawful order?"

The Bush administration has said the actions were those of a small group and
were not part of a policy or condoned by senior officers.

But investigations have shown many prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the
U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba also suffered abusive treatment after
the government considered ways to obtain information in the war against
terrorism.

The trial of Graner, a former Pennsylvania civilian prison guard who chatted and
joked with his defense attorneys before the hearing opened, was expected to last
at least a week.

Graner, 36, faces up to 17 1/2 years in prison on charges that include
mistreating detainees, dereliction of duty and assault. He has pleaded not
guilty.

Four of seven accused members of Graner's unit have already pleaded guilty to
abuse charges and three have been sentenced to prison.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Witness: Graner Often Disobeyed Orders

By T.A. BADGER
Jan 12, 2:01 PM (ET)

FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) - Army Spc. Charles Graner had a habit of disobeying
orders from his military police superiors while serving as a guard at Abu Ghraib
prison, according to testimony Wednesday from the first witness for the defense.

Master Sgt. Brian Lipinski, then the top noncommissioned officer in the 372nd
Military Police Company, said under cross-examination that Graner wore his hair
too long, altered his uniform in violation of regulations and refused to stay
away from Pfc. Lynndie England despite being repeatedly told to do so.

"He just didn't like to follow orders," said prosecutor Maj. Michael Holley
asked Lipinski.

"That's true, sir," Lipinski said.

"He wants to do his own thing?" Holley said.

"Yes, sir," the sergeant responded.

England, who is awaiting trial on Abu Ghraib abuse charges, gave birth in
October to a child who Army prosecutors say was the result of a relationship
with Graner.

The testimony raised questions about the very foundation of Graner's defense:
When he abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib, he had no choice but to follow orders
from military and civilian intelligence officers.

Graner, a 36-year-old reservist from Uniontown, Pa., is the first soldier to be
tried in the case. Graner is accused of being the ringleader of abuse at Abu
Ghraib. He is charged with conspiracy, assault, committing indecent acts and
other offenses. He could get up to 17 1/2 years in a military prison if found
guilty by a jury of four Army officers and six enlisted men.

Lipinski also testified that Graner initially lied about the cause of face and
neck injuries suffered by a detainee in November 2003.

Graner and then-Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick told Lipinski and an officer that the
detainee tripped on a pile of rubble in the prison, the witness said. But later
Graner admitted that he slammed the prisoner against the wall, Lipinski
said. The impact was hard enough to leave a smear of blood on the wall.

Lipinski said Graner was warned then about his conduct and told that leaders of
the 372nd would be watching him. The warning came after the offenses Graner is
charged with, according to prosecutors.

Lipinski was called by the defense as a way to introduce a report about the
wall-slamming incident because the report also included references to military
intelligence officers praising Graner and others for softening up prisoners for
interrogation.

He was not the only defense witness who ended up offering useful testimony for
the prosecution.

Frederick, earlier a prosecution witness, was called back to testify about the
role played by intelligence officers.

He said they knew about the use of force, and that they didn't tell them the
guards to stop.

"They told us we were doing a good job, and to keep up the good work," Frederick
said.

But under cross-examination, Frederick said he once refused to follow
instructions from a military intelligence officer because that person wanted him
to use too much force. He said Graner was with him when he refused.

Prosecutors rested their case Tuesday after an Iraqi detainee testified by video
that Graner stacked him and others into a naked human pyramid and later forced
them to masturbate in front of female soldiers while pictures were taken.

Another detainee said Graner forced him to eat pork and drink alcohol in
violation of his Muslim faith, and on one occasion made him thank Jesus for
keeping him alive at the notorious Baghdad prison.

----------------------------------------------------------------

White House Fought Curbs on Interrogations

Jan 13, 11:35 AM (ET)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration urged Congress to drop a
legislative proposal that would have curbed the ability of U.S. intelligence to
use extreme interrogation tactics, the White House acknowledged on Thursday.

But White House spokesman Scott McClellan insisted President Bush has made clear
that his administration opposes the use of torture under any circumstances.

"We've made it very clear that we do not condone torture. The president would
never authorize torture and that applies to everyone," he said at a news
briefing.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that, in response to White House
pressure, congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure that would have
extended a ban on torture and inhumane treatment to intelligence officers.

McClellan acknowledged that the White House had sent a letter to legislators in
October opposing the measure, which was included in a broad bill overhauling
national intelligence.

But he said the White House had made the letter known at the time. "It's in the
letter. Our view was stated in the letter," he said.

The Oct. 18 letter said the administration opposed attaching the measure on
intelligence officer interrogations and was signed by White House budget chief
Joshua Bolten and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

It expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds it "provides legal
protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under
applicable law and policy."

The letter, addressed to Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Democratic
U.S. Rep. Jane Harman of California, also said the issue of intelligence
interrogations was addressed in another legislative proposal.

In addition to explicitly extending to intelligence officers a prohibition
against torture or inhumane treatment, the measure would have required the CIA
as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress about the methods they were using.

In closed-door negotiations, four senior members from the House and Senate
deleted the interrogation restrictions from the final bill after the White House
expressed opposition, the Times said.

Some Democratic congressional officials said they believed the Bush
administration was trying to maintain some legal latitude for the CIA to use
interrogation practices more extreme than those permitted by the military, the
Times said.

-------------------------------------------------------

Abu Ghraib Guard's Ex-Lover Says Told to Humiliate

By Adam Tanner
Jan 13, 2:33 PM (ET)

FORT HOOD, Texas (Reuters) - A former military policewoman testified on Thursday
that an intelligence officer at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison asked her to mock the
genitals of naked detainees, supporting defense contentions that guards were
following intelligence orders.

In the strongest defense testimony to date, Megan Ambuhl said at the
court-martial of Spc. Charles Graner, portrayed as the lead figure in the 2003
prisoner abuse scandal, that military interrogators would tell the guards what
to do with detainees.

Seven military police and one intelligence officer were charged in the case, in
which detainees were photographed naked in sexually humiliating
positions. Graner faces up to 17 1/2 years in prison in a trial officials hope
to conclude this week.

Defense told jurors in the morning Graner would testify but unexpectedly rested
their case Thursday afternoon.

Ambuhl, who worked with Graner at the prison and admitted under
cross-examination for the first time in public to having a sexual relationship
with him, pleaded guilty last year to one count of dereliction of duty and was
spared prison time.

"They would come down with their detainees and let us know what they wanted us
to do with them," Ambuhl said, referring to military interrogators. "They might
say this guy is cooperating, not cooperating."

In one instance, she said an intelligence interrogator asked her to watch a male
detainee shower even though prisoners usually had privacy. "They wanted me to go
in the shower and point at the genital area and laugh at them," she said.

Another time, a civilian interrogator ordered her to deal with a detainee called
"al Qaeda" because he was a suspected member of the network, said Ambuhl, who
was present when a naked Iraqi prisoner was leashed and photographed.

"Steve (the interrogator) told us we were doing a good job and that breaking al
Qaeda (the prisoner) would have a global impact and save a lot of lives," she
said.

CONFUSED COMMAND STRUCTURE

Ambuhl, testifying on the second day of defense witnesses, said she had heard
two military intelligence officers ask Graner and Pvt. Ivan Frederick, who is
serving an eight-year sentence in the case, to rough up a detainee.

"I feel good, I feel good. I almost cried at one point but I'm doing good,"
Graner told reporters after Ambuhl's testimony.

Witnesses have described a confused command structure at Abu Ghraib in which
military police ran the prison, interacting with civilian and military
interrogators and other intelligence agencies.

Graner's lawyers argue that he was acting at the behest of these
interrogators. The abuse of Iraqi prisoners included repeated beatings, stacking
detainees into a naked human pyramid, and putting a leash on a man.

A second witness from Graner's unit said he saw military intelligence officials
bind together three naked Iraqis accused of raping an Iraqi boy. Kenneth Davis
said Graner assisted three military intelligence officers, even though he
outranked them, and followed their request to shout at one man to undress.

"It was enough to scare me; Graner has a drill instructor's voice," he said. "It
appeared that MI was calling the shots that night and Graner was following
suit."

In questioning, prosecutors highlighted that the rapists were not intelligence
targets.

The court viewed photos of the three bound prisoners from that October 2003
night taken by Pfc. Lynndie England, a clerk with whom Graner later fathered a
child and who also is facing a court-martial.

The photos of England holding a naked prisoner on a leash and others shocked the
world and turned the abuse scandal into a major U.S. foreign policy setback.

---------------------------------------------------------

BOOK REVIEW
Atrocities in Plain Sight

By ANDREW SULLIVAN
January 13, 2005

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.

Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist at Time.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

----------------------------------------------------

Detainee says judge's order was violated
Alleges isolation at Guantanamo

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  January 21, 2005

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- A former driver for Osama bin Laden whose lawsuit led to
a judge's finding that the Bush administration violated the Geneva Convention
told his lawyer this week that he was returned to ''de facto isolation" here in
defiance of a court order.

The general in charge of the Guantanamo prison called the charge ''absolutely,
unequivocably wrong."

The dispute centers on Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 34, a Yemeni who sued Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last summer seeking to stop his trial before the first
US military commission since World War II. The lawsuit was the first major test
of a landmark Supreme Court ruling granting Guantanamo detainees access to
federal civilian courtrooms.

On Nov. 9, District Judge James Robertson, a 1994 Clinton appointee, halted
Hamdan's commission in the midst of a pretrial hearing, declaring that the
military must apply Geneva Convention standards to Guantanamo detainees. The
ruling infuriated the Bush administration, which launched an appeal.

In the same order, the judge also told the military it must house Hamdan in the
prison's ''general population." Hamdan's military defense lawyer had said his
client suffered mental problems, including suicidal tendencies, from being held
alone for 10 months last year, during which his only human contact was when
guards brought food or took him out for exercise.

His lawyer, Navy Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, visited Hamdan this week
for the first time since November. In an interview with the Globe on the base
afterward, Swift angrily said that Hamdan told him he had been held for the past
two months in a cellblock with no other detainees nearby.

''He is being held apart from the others in a cell where he is not permitted to
speak with other detainees and has had only solitary exercise," Swift said. ''He
is in de facto isolation. This is not in the spirit of the judge's order and is
certainly debilitating to Mr. Hamdan. He has started to exhibit signs of
paranoia again. He was placed on [a] 24-hour suicide watch."

Swift said Hamdan told him he was moved to a solitary block Nov. 17, a week
after Robertson's order, according to a calendar Swift gave Hamdan to keep in
his cell.

Army Brigadier General Jay Hood, commander of the Guantanamo operation, said
Swift was wrong and insisted that the operation went ''to extraordinary lengths
to see that we have complied precisely with the instructions of any federal
judge" about detainee treatment.

''We were instructed to place Hamdan back in the general population," Hood
said. ''In fact, he was [there] before that, but we moved him to make it even
more clear that we were compliant with that order."

Hamdan, charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes, acknowledges being a
driver for bin Laden at the Al Qaeda leader's Kandahar farm, but says he was a
laborer, not a terrorist.

Swift said he would ask the government to correct the alleged situation and
consider a new lawsuit if it did not move his client.

Swift's allegation adds a military voice to a chorus of complaints by civilian
attorneys who say the Bush administration has resisted complying with the thrust
of the Supreme Court decision last June, which provoked a flood of challenges to
the continued detention of various so-called ''enemy combatants" in federal
court.

They say the military has dragged its feet on allowing them access to client
prisoners; has delayed cases by repeating arguments that the Supreme Court has
already rejected; and has tried to keep the matter out of the civilian court
system by substituting an administrative review tribunal, which denies the
detainee a defense lawyer and access to classified evidence against him.

Meanwhile, Swift sued Rumsfeld last summer, challenging the Pentagon's plan to
try Hamdan before a military commission instead of a conventional
court-martial. Court martial rules afford greater protections to defendants.

Under the Geneva Convention, prisoners of war are entitled to be tried under the
same procedures that a military force uses to try its own soldiers. The treaty
also says that all people captured in a battle zone are presumptive POWs unless
a ''competent tribunal" decides otherwise.

The Bush administration contends that the Geneva Convention does not apply to
the Afghanistan war. Robertson ruled that the administration was wrong and
halted Hamdan's trial.

Two weeks earlier, the government had told the judge that Hamdan was no longer
held in isolation. Robertson noted the change but said the government was
''capable of repeating" the treatment, adding Hamdan must be ''returned to the
general population of detainees, unless some other than the pending charges
against him requires different treatment."

But, Swift said, Hamdan told him that a week after the ruling, the guards moved
him to a different cellblock where he was unable to communicate with other
detainees and he has been there for two months.

Swift said the reason for the alleged move was not clear. It did not seem to be
for disciplinary reasons because Hamdan was wearing the beige jumpsuit given to
cooperative detainees rather than the orange jumpsuit given to unruly detainees,
Swift said.

Denying the allegation while sitting across a table from a Globe reporter, Hood
said, ''Hamdan is about as far away as you to me from the main contact of his
cellblock security personnel."

When it was noted that being near a guard is different than being near fellow
detainees who speak his language, Hood said, ''I answered your question, and I
told you about Swift and I told you he was wrong, and you can get competent
authority to come check on it."

[see follow-up below, Feb 15]

----------------------------------------------------------

The white room

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  January 22, 2005

THERE ARE incidents and stories that, try as you may to banish them, never leave
the mind. One such incident was recorded by Frank Snepp, a CIA case officer, who
spent more than four years in the Saigon station during that war.

He was tasked with the interrogation of Nguyen Van Tai, a former North
Vietnamese deputy minister of public security, who had come south in 1962 to
take charge of the communist espionage and terrorist network in Saigon. He
helped organize the attack on the American embassy in 1968, but two years later
he was bagged in a South Vietnamese dragnet.

He knew a lot, and both the South Vietnamese and the Americans were interested
in what he had to tell them. As for his eight months with the South Vietnamese,
Snepp says only that he "had not been treated kindly." But they had failed to
break him.

The Americans and their allies discovered that, like many Vietnamese, Tai had a
horror of being cold. He believed that his blood vessels contracted. So they
built him a separate cell and interrogation room, all to himself. Both were
windowless, and painted white, totally white, with nothing but a chair, a table,
a cot, and a hole in the floor for a toilet.

The cell and the interrogation chamber were then attached to heavy duty air
conditioners so that the rooms could be kept frigid at all times. And there he
remained in solitary confinement, year in and year out, without ever seeing the
rising or the setting of the sun.

Tai was a tough nut to crack. The only time Snepp ever saw a fracture in his
implacable facade was when Snepp mentioned Tai's family, whom he had not seen in
10 years. "I cannot think about my wife and children," Tai said. "The only way I
can survive this is by putting all such hope aside. Then there are no illusions
or disappointments."

Then, in 1973, the Paris peace talks arranged for a prisoner release, and Snepp
briefed Tai. "If what you tell me is true," then this is the happiest day of my
life," Tai said.

But it was not true, at least not for Tai. The South Vietnamese said that the
prisoner exchange did not extend to spies like Tai because he had never admitted
his true identity. Snepp never saw him again.

Snepp learned some two years later, however, that just before the communist
tanks rolled into Saigon, a senior CIA official suggested that it would be
useful if Tai were to disappear. He was, after all, a trained terrorist and
could not be expected to be magnanimous in victory.

And so it was that Tai was taken out of the white room, where he had been in
solitary confinement for four years, loaded on an airplane, and thrown out at
10,000 feet over the South China Sea.

I have ever since wondered how it felt, after being cold for so long, to emerge
into the heat of that long ago Saigon April, only to be cold again as the plane
climbed and climbed. Did he think he was finally going home, only to guess the
truth when the door was opened over the ocean?

It must have been only a few days later that I rose over the roof tops of Saigon
and flew out over the South China Sea, leaving behind the wreckage of 30 years
of American policy as the North Vietnamese army prepared for its entry into
Saigon in the morning.

Today I read of how the Bush administration lobbied Congress to scrap
legislation that would have imposed tight restrictions on the use of extreme
interrogation measures by intelligence officers, and I think that for all the
horror and despair of the white room, today's internees are receiving worse
treatment in Guantanamo Bay and in nameless cells in undisclosed countries.

I think of how the interrogators at Abu Ghraib sensed that sexual humiliation
was a fear among Arab men as being cold was to Nguyen Van Tai, and how that fear
was exploited, and of how it has been reported that prisoner abuse continues
even after Abu Ghraib.

I have never believed that the white room, and others like it, helped our cause
in Vietnam, nor do I believe that torture can win our struggle against Islamic
extremism. I watched us lose one war, and if policies are not changed, I fear I
am watching us lose another one now.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

-----------------------------------------------

The 'white room' revisited

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  May 6, 2005

IN NEARLY half a century of newspapering I have often wished I could have
written a happier ending to many of the sad tales I have been told. If only the
story could have turned out a little differently, I have thought. This is one
story that did.

In January I wrote of an incident during the Vietnam War, told by a CIA officer
named Frank Snepp, whom I knew during those last, desperate days of the old
Saigon before the fall 30 years ago.

I wrote of a windowless, snow white cell in which the CIA kept for years a North
Vietnamese spy named Nguyen Van Tai. Not only was Tai kept in complete isolation
except for his CIA interrogators. He was kept always cold in frigid air
conditioning. This was done because the CIA knew that Tai, like many Vietnamese,
had a horror of being cold.

Frank Snepp was one of his interrogators, and he found Tai a tough nut to
crack. In his book, ''Decent Interval," Snepp wrote that the only time he ever
saw a fracture in Tai's implacable façade was when Snepp mentioned Tai's
family. ''I cannot think about my wife and children," Tai told Snepp. ''The only
way I can survive this is by putting all such hope aside. Then there are no
illusions or disappointments."

As the North Vietnamese were gathering for their final assault in 1975, a senior
CIA official suggested that it would be useful if Tai disappeared. And, quoting
from Snepp's book, I wrote that Tai was taken from his cell, put into a
helicopter, and thrown out at 10,000 feet over the South China Sea.

After the war, Snepp left CIA, but, unable to get Tai out of his mind, he
traveled to Paris specifically to pass the word through the Vietnamese mission
that Tai had comported himself honorably and died bravely.

But that is not how the story ends. I am grateful to the BBC's Carol Hills, who
informed me that Tai, unbeknownst to Snepp, managed to talk his South Vietnamese
captors into releasing him once the last of the CIA had fled Saigon 30 years
ago. Tai lives and wrote his own account of his interrogation.

Hills directed me to www.cia.gov/csi/studies.html, a CIA website, in which I
learned that the treatment of Tai at the hands of the South Vietnamese, before
CIA took over, was worse than I had known. The website says that ''they
administered electric shock, beat him with clubs, poured water down his nose
while his mouth was gagged, applied 'Chinese water torture,' dripping water
slowly, drop by drop, on the bridge of his nose . . . , and kept (him) without
food or water" while he was hanging by his arms from the rafters.

Frank Snepp did not find out that Tai survived until years later. He says today
that ''for me, the interrogation of Tai brought into full focus the moral
ambiguity of the war. There is no question that Tai would have shot me down on
the street if he'd been given a chance at the time. And I would surely have
returned the favor. But face to face across the interrogation desk, the
'despicable' persona of 'our enemy' altered to reveal a deeply committed warrior
enlisted in a cause he deeply felt. I could not but admire his strength, if not
his ruthlessness, and wonder if his commitment might not have chastened other
Americans so convinced of the righteousness of our own cause.

''Personally, the circumstances of the (CIA's) interrogation, veering so close
as they did to psychological torture, eroded my own sense of certitude about my
role in Vietnam," Snepp told me. ''True, I always console myself that I treated
Tai as well as I could. But confining Tai in that snow white room also made me
realize how the war was compromising my own values. It was a catalyst to the
disillusionment that would ultimately carry me out of the agency," but "I am
greatly relieved that Tai was not part of the ghastly body count of that war."

The CIA website's account of the Nguyen Van Tai affair concludes that ''we as
Americans must not let methods betray our goals. War is a nasty business. There
is nothing wrong with a little psychological intimidation. There are limits,
however, beyond which we cannot and should not go if we are to continue to call
ourselves Americans."

Yet there are those high up in the current administrations who have allowed,
even encouraged, the accepted limits beyond which we cannot go to slide, and the
results from Guantanamo, from Afghanistan, and from Abu Graib are more chilling
than the frigid air of the white room.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

-----------------------------------------------

AP: Gitmo Soldier Details Sexual Tactics

By PAISLEY DODDS
Jan 27, 9:39 PM (ET)

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - Female interrogators tried to break Muslim
detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing
a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with
fake menstrual blood, according to an insider's written account.

A draft manuscript obtained by The Associated Press is classified as secret
pending a Pentagon review for a planned book that details ways the U.S. military
used women as part of tougher physical and psychological interrogation tactics
to get terror suspects to talk.

It's the most revealing account so far of interrogations at the secretive
detention camp, where officials say they have halted some controversial
techniques.

"I have really struggled with this because the detainees, their families and
much of the world will think this is a religious war based on some of the
techniques used, even though it is not the case," the author, former Army
Sgt. Erik R. Saar, 29, told AP.

Saar didn't provide the manuscript or approach AP, but confirmed the
authenticity of nine draft pages AP obtained. He requested his hometown remain
private so he wouldn't be harassed. Saar, who is neither Muslim nor of Arab
descent, worked as an Arabic translator at the U.S. camp in eastern Cuba from
December 2002 to June 2003. At the time, it was under the command of
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had a mandate to get better intelligence from
prisoners, including alleged al-Qaida members caught in Afghanistan.

Saar said he witnessed about 20 interrogations and about three months after his
arrival at the remote U.S. base he started noticing "disturbing" practices.

One female civilian contractor used a special outfit that included a miniskirt,
thong underwear and a bra during late-night interrogations with prisoners,
mostly Muslim men who consider it taboo to have close contact with women who
aren't their wives.

Beginning in April 2003, "there hung a short skirt and thong underwear on the
hook on the back of the door" of one interrogation team's office, he
writes. "Later I learned that this outfit was used for interrogations by one of
the female civilian contractors ... on a team which conducted interrogations in
the middle of the night on Saudi men who were refusing to talk."

Some Guantanamo prisoners who have been released say they were tormented by
"prostitutes."

In another case, Saar describes a female military interrogator questioning an
uncooperative 21-year-old Saudi detainee who allegedly had taken flying lessons
in Arizona before the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Suspected Sept. 11 hijacker Hani
Hanjour received pilot instruction for three months in 1996 and in December 1997
at a flight school in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"His female interrogator decided that she needed to turn up the heat," Saar
writes, saying she repeatedly asked the detainee who had sent him to Arizona,
telling him he could "cooperate" or "have no hope whatsoever of ever leaving
this place or talking to a lawyer.'"

The man closed his eyes and began to pray, Saar writes.

The female interrogator wanted to "break him," Saar adds, describing how she
removed her uniform top to expose a tight-fitting T-shirt and began taunting the
detainee, touching her breasts, rubbing them against the prisoner's back and
commenting on his apparent erection.

The detainee looked up and spat in her face, the manuscript recounts.

The interrogator left the room to ask a Muslim linguist how she could break the
prisoner's reliance on God. The linguist told her to tell the detainee that she
was menstruating, touch him, then make sure to turn off the water in his cell so
he couldn't wash.

Strict interpretation of Islamic law forbids physical contact with women other
than a man's wife or family, and with any menstruating women, who are considered
unclean.

"The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to her he was
unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength," says
the draft, stamped "Secret."

The interrogator used ink from a red pen to fool the detainee, Saar writes.

"She then started to place her hands in her pants as she walked behind the
detainee," he says. "As she circled around him he could see that she was taking
her hand out of her pants. When it became visible the detainee saw what appeared
to be red blood on her hand. She said, 'Who sent you to Arizona?' He then glared
at her with a piercing look of hatred.

"She then wiped the red ink on his face. He shouted at the top of his lungs,
spat at her and lunged forward" - so fiercely that he broke loose from one ankle
shackle.

"He began to cry like a baby," the draft says, noting the interrogator left
saying, "Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean yourself."

Events Saar describes resemble two previous reports of abusive female
interrogation tactics, although it wasn't possible to independently verify his
account.

In November, in response to an AP request, the military described an April 2003
incident in which a female interrogator took off her uniform top, exposed her
brown T-shirt, ran her fingers through a detainee's hair and sat on his
lap. That session was immediately ended by a supervisor and that interrogator
received a written reprimand and additional training, the military said.

In another incident, the military reported that in early 2003 a different female
interrogator "wiped dye from red magic marker on detainees' shirt after detainee
spit (cq) on her," telling the detainee it was blood. She was verbally
reprimanded, the military said.

Sexual tactics used by female interrogators have been criticized by the FBI,
which complained in a letter obtained by AP last month that U.S. defense
officials hadn't acted on complaints by FBI observers of "highly aggressive"
interrogation techniques, including one in which a female interrogator grabbed a
detainee's genitals.

About 20 percent of the guards at Guantanamo are women, said Lt. Col. James
Marshall, a spokesman for U.S. Southern Command. He wouldn't say how many of the
interrogators were female.

Marshall wouldn't address whether the U.S. military had a specific strategy to
use women.

"U.S. forces treat all detainees and conduct all interrogations, wherever they
may occur, humanely and consistent with U.S. legal obligations, and in
particular with legal obligations prohibiting torture," Marshall said late
Wednesday.

But some officials at the U.S. Southern Command have questioned the formation of
an all-female team as one of Guantanamo's "Immediate Reaction Force" units that
subdue troublesome male prisoners in their cells, according to a document
classified as secret and obtained by AP.

In one incident, dated June 19, 2004, "The detainee appears to be genuinely
traumatized by a female escort securing the detainee's leg irons," according to
the document, a U.S. Southern Command summary of videotapes shot when the teams
were used.

The summary warned that anyone outside Department of Defense channels should be
prepared to address allegations that women were used intentionally with Muslim
men.

At Guantanamo, Saar said, "Interrogators were given a lot of latitude under
Miller," the commander who went from the prison in Cuba to overseeing prisons in
Iraq, where the Abu Ghraib scandal shocked the world with pictures revealing
sexual humiliation of naked prisoners.

Several female troops have been charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Saar said he volunteered to go to Guantanamo because "I really believed in the
mission," but then he became disillusioned during his six months at the prison.

After leaving the Army with more than four years service, Saar worked as a
contractor briefly for the FBI.

The Department of Defense has censored parts of his draft, mainly blacking out
people's names, said Saar, who hired Washington attorney Mark S. Zaid to
represent him. Saar needed permission to publish because he signed a disclosure
statement before going to Guantanamo.

The book, which Saar titled "Inside the Wire," is due out this year with Penguin
Press.

Guantanamo has about 545 prisoners from some 40 countries, many held more than
three years without charge or access to lawyers and many suspected of links to
al-Qaida or Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime, which harbored the terrorist
network.

---

EDITOR'S NOTE: Paisley Dodds is an Associated Press reporter based in San Juan,
Puerto Rico, and has been covering the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
since it opened in 2002.

---

On the Web:

http://www.defenselink.mil

------------------------------------------------------------

Saying nothing is torture in itself

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist  |  January 30, 2005

THE LATEST allegation of prisoner abuse by the US military comes from Erik Saar,
a former Army sergeant and translator at the American naval base at
Guantanamo. In a forthcoming book, Saar describes the use of female sexuality as
a tactic against Muslim detainees, for many of whom modesty between the sexes is
a deeply ingrained religious requirement.

According to the Associated Press, Saar writes of one female interrogator who
attempted to ''break" a devout Saudi prisoner. She removed her top to reveal a
tight T-shirt, then taunted the man by fondling herself, rubbing her breasts
against his back, and commenting on his erection. When that didn't work, she
smeared red ink on her fingers and pretended it was menstrual blood.

''As she circled around him he could see that she was taking her hand out of her
pants. When it became visible, the detainee saw what appeared to be red blood on
her hand. . . . She then wiped the red ink on his face. He shouted at the top of
his lungs, spat at her, and lunged forward." Then he began to cry, prompting the
interrogator to mock him: ''Have a fun night in your cell without any water to
clean yourself."

Writes Saar: ''The concept was to make the detainee feel that . . . he was
unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength."

Are Americans OK with using religious humiliation as tools of war?

How about religious torture?

In Abu Ghraib, the cruelties inflicted on prisoners by Specialist Charles Graner
and his little band of sadists weren't limited to the sexual. Inmates told
investigators they were forced to swallow pork and liquor -- both are forbidden
to Muslims -- and to denounce Islam.

''They stripped me naked," said a detainee named Ameen Saeed Al-Sheik. ''They
asked me, 'Do you pray to Allah?' I said yes. They said, '[Expletive] you. And
[expletive] him.' They ordered me to curse Islam and because they started to hit
my broken leg, I cursed my religion. They ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm
alive. And I did what they ordered me. This is against my belief."

Graner has since been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his crimes, and four
other Abu Ghraib soldiers have pleaded guilty. But the charges keep spilling
forth.

Last month the ACLU obtained documents in which FBI agents repeatedly complain
about the mistreatment of prisoners in military custody. One report to the FBI
director transmits allegations of ''numerous serious physical abuse incidents of
Iraqi civilian detainees," including ''strangulation, beatings, placement of lit
cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings, and unauthorized interrogations."
In August, an agent reported seeing Muslim detainees in Guantanamo chained hand
and foot in a fetal position ''with no chair, food, or water. Most times they
had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left for 18 to 24 hours or
more." A document released by the US Navy alleges that Marines touched live
electrical wires to an Iraqi inmate's shoulders. The victim, it was said,
''danced as he was shocked."

Granted, these are only allegations. But there are a lot of them -- enough to
fill this whole page, never mind this column. That is too many to dismiss as
unfounded. Too many to shrug off as the deeds of a few rogues on the night
shift. And too many to make excuses for in the name of political or ideological
loyalty.

As regular readers know, I write as a war hawk. I strongly support the mission
in Iraq. I voted for President Bush. I believe the struggle against Islamist
totalitarianism is the most urgent conflict of our time.

But none of that justifies the administration's apparent willingness to
countenance -- under at least some circumstances -- the indecent abuse of
prisoners in military custody. Something is very wrong when the Justice
Department advises the president's legal adviser that a wartime president is not
bound by the international Convention Against Torture or the US laws
incorporating it. Or when that legal adviser tells the Senate, as Alberto
Gonzales did last week, that ''there is no legal prohibition under the
Convention Against Torture on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment with
respect to aliens overseas."

If this were happening on a Democratic president's watch, the criticism from
Republicans and conservatives would be deafening. Why the near-silence now? Who
has better reason to be outraged by this scandal than those of us who support
the war? More than anyone, it is the war hawks who should be infuriated by
it. It shouldn't have taken me this long to say so.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

------------------------------------------------------

AP: Videos Show Guantanamo Prisoner Abuse

By PAISLEY DODDS
Feb 1, 6:01 PM (ET)

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - Videotapes of riot squads subduing troublesome
terror suspects at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay show the guards
punching some detainees, tying one to a gurney for questioning and forcing a
dozen to strip from the waist down, according to a secret report. One squad was
all-female, traumatizing some Muslim prisoners.

Investigators from U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which oversees the camp in
Cuba, wrote the report that was obtained by The Associated Press after spending
a little over a week in June reviewing 20 of some 500 hours of videotapes
involving "Immediate Reaction Forces."

The camp's layout prevented videotaping in all the cells where the five-person
teams - also known as "Immediate Response Forces" - operated, the report said.

Although the report cited several cases of physical force, reviewers said they
found no evidence of systemic detainee abuse, according to the six-page summary
dated June 19, 2004. An official familiar with the report authenticated it,
speaking to AP on condition of anonymity. AP also reviewed an unclassified log
of the videotape footage.

The tapes raised questions about mistreatment and misconduct, however, said the
investigators, who suggested some clips needed more scrutiny to rule out
abuse. The military has cited 10 substantiated cases of abuse at Guantanamo, and
announced Tuesday an extension would be granted for an investigation to
interview of witnesses in the United States and abroad.

One such clip the investigators flagged was from Feb. 17, 2004. It showed "one
or more" team members punching a detainee "on an area of his body that seemingly
would be inconsistent with striking a pressure point," which is a sanctioned
tactic for subduing prisoners.

In five other clips showing detainees who appeared to have been punched by team
members, the investigators said: "The punching was in line with accepted law
enforcement practice of striking the pressure point on the back of the thigh to
temporarily distract the detainee."

In other "questionable" cases, reviewers said a video showed a guard kneeing a
detainee in the head, while another showed a team securing a detainee to a
gurney for an interrogation.

A separate clip captured a platoon leader taunting a detainee with pepper spray
and repeatedly spraying him before letting the reaction team enter the cell,
reviewers wrote.

Investigators also noted about a dozen cases where detainees were stripped from
the waist down and taken to the "Romeo block," of the camp. No female guards
were involved, they said.

Romeo block is a camp section where prisoners were often left naked for days,
according to two former detainees, Britons Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, who were
released last year.

Although no female guards were videotaped in any of the stripping cases,
investigators cautioned the U.S. government about using the all-female team to
handle disruptive detainees, citing religious and cultural issues. Many of the
prisoners are Muslim men and under strict interpretations of Islam view contact
with other women other than their wives as taboo.

"Several detainees express displeasure about female MPs either escorting them,
or touching them as members of an IRF team," the report says. "Because some have
questioned our sensitivity to the detainees' religion and culture, we believe
that talking points are appropriate to address incorporation of female soldiers
into the guard force."

In one video clip of the reaction teams, the memo says, "A detainee appears to
be genuinely traumatized by a female escort securing the detainee's leg
irons. In another video, inexplicably an all-female IRF team forcibly extracts a
detainee from his cell."

While stating that female troops have a right to serve as equals alongside their
male counterparts, investigators warned the all-female team could create the
perception that the gender of the squad was taken into consideration for the
Muslim population.

"By forming an all-female IRF team for use with one detainee we potentially
undercut our position that we do not distinguish between male and female
soldiers. Clearly, the soldiers' gender did play a role in forming the
all-female IRF team," the memo says.

The memo suggests that military "personnel showing the IRF videos outside of
(Defense Department) channels should be prepared with talking points to refute
or diminish the charge that we use women (against) the detainees' culture or
religion."

The U.S. military wouldn't comment on whether there's a specific strategy
involved in using an all-female response force but said female guards - who
serve on mixed reaction teams as well - comprise about 20 percent of the guard
force.

"As a matter of policy, we do not discuss specific Immediate Response Force
composition or methods, but they are consistent with those used in the
corrections profession and are always carried out with the security and safety
of detainees and troopers in mind," said Lt. Col. James Marshall, a spokesman at
U.S. Southern Command.

Prisoners released from Guantanamo have accused the extraction teams of abuse
and one former U.S. National Guardsmen received brain damage after posing
undercover as a rowdy detainee and being beaten by teammates.

"The obvious problem with our armed forces is their inability to comply with
international law," said Arsalan T. Iftikhar, national legal director for the
Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations. "Many of us
thought that the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq was going to shake us into awakening
but it seems like the things we keep learning about Guantanamo indicate there
was, in fact, systematic abuse."

Joe Navarro, a former FBI interrogator who has taught questioning methods and is
familiar with Guantanamo, said treating prisoners poorly makes them more
stubborn and unwilling to talk.

"The military has been cavalier in their attitudes toward these individuals to
the point that it has been detrimental to the overall mission," Navarro told AP.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a Freedom of Information Act
request asking for all photographs and videotapes depicting the treatment of the
detainees.

Although a court ordered the government to comply with the ACLU request and turn
over documents - thousands of which the ACLU has received - the government has
refused to provide videos, citing privacy concerns, said Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU
attorney.

Although the extraction team actions are videotaped, interrogations with
detainees aren't.

The use of female guards and interrogators has created controversy.

A former Army linguist who served at Guantanamo as an Arabic translator from
December 2002 to June 2003 wrote in a draft manuscript that female interrogators
tried to break Muslim detainees by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and
thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual
blood. The draft written by former Army Sgt. Erik R. Saar was obtained by AP,
which reported on its contents last week.

About 545 prisoners from some 40 countries are being held at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, most accused of links to Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime or al-Qaida
terror network.

---

EDITOR'S NOTE: Associated Press Writer Paisley Dodds is based in San Juan,
Puerto Rico, and has been covering the U.S. detention mission at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, since it began in 2002.

---

On the Net:

Joint Task Force Guantanamo: http://www.nsgtmo.navy.mil/jtfgtmo/mission.html

-------------------------------------------------

US detainee moved out of confinement
Lawyer complaint preceded action

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  February 15, 2005

WASHINGTON -- US officials moved a prominent Guantanamo detainee to a new cell
where he can have contact with fellow prisoners, one day after his defense
lawyer protested that the military was defying a federal court order that he be
housed with the general prison population, the lawyer said yesterday.

Even as the Justice Department acknowledged the move, it denied that there had
been anything improper about the military's decision to hold Salim Ahmed Hamdan,
a Yemeni man accused of being a driver for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, far
from any other occupied cell.

''His conditions of confinement did not violate the court's order," assistant to
the solicitor general Jonathan L. Marcus wrote to Navy Lieutenant Commander
Charles Swift, the appointed military defense lawyer for Hamdan.

Hamdan, who argues he was a laborer and not a terrorist, was the plaintiff in a
major case overruling the Bush administration's authority to deny detainees the
protections of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. In November, a
federal judge blocked the administration's attempt to try Hamdan and others
before a military commission with limited defense rights.

The judge also ordered the military to house Hamdan in the general prison
population after Swift provided evidence that his client suffered extreme mental
distress as a result of being held in isolation for 10 months. Last month, Swift
visited Guantanamo for the first time since November and learned that Hamdan was
being held in an otherwise empty part of a cellblock.

Swift angrily recounted that discovery to a Globe reporter, and later wrote to
the Justice Department protesting that Hamdan had been held in quarters that
were ''tantamount to solitary confinement" in a manner ''calculated to prevent
him from speaking to or having contact with any other detainee."

His letter, dated Jan. 21, said ''returning Mr. Hamdan to isolation has again
had severe mental and emotional consequences for him -- the very same
consequences our psychologists have continually warned about." Earlier that
month, Hamdan ''was placed on suicide watch after it was noted that he was
destroying some of his papers and a picture of his children."

The dispute added Swift's voice to charges by civilian lawyers that the Bush
administration is dragging its feet in complying with judicial rulings regarding
the 550 accused ''enemy combatants" held at the US Navy base in Cuba.

Asked about Swift's allegation last month, Brigadier General Jay Hood, commander
of the Guantanamo operation, called it ''absolutely, unequivocally wrong,"
saying the military was going ''to extraordinary lengths to see that we have
complied precisely with the instructions of any federal judge."

In his Jan. 28 letter back to Swift, Marcus also denied that Hamdan's
confinement had violated the judge's order. But he also acknowledged that the
government made a change one day after Swift's letter.

''Hamdan was moved for operational and intelligence reasons on Jan. 22, 2005, to
another cell block in the general population," Marcus wrote. ''It is our
understanding that several cells in his immediate vicinity are
occupied. Contrary to the contentions in your letter, Hamdan has not been
singled out for adverse treatment, but rather, his treatment has been based on
the neutral application of operational and intelligence considerations
applicable to the general detainee population."

Swift said he plans to return to Guantanamo later this month to check on the
situation.

''Until we can be satisfied he wasn't intentionally placed by Urdu speakers so
that he's in effect continuously isolated, we'll have to reserve judgment on
whether this ends the issue or not," he said.

------------------------------------------------------

Files suggest US troops tried to hide abuses

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff |  February 18, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A former Iraqi detainee told Army investigators that a US soldier
forced him to sign a statement that he had not been abused even though American
interrogators in September 2003 had dislocated his arms, beaten his leg with a
bat, crushed his nose, and put an unloaded gun in his mouth and pulled the
trigger, according to newly released internal military documents.

In addition, a sergeant at a military camp in southern Afghanistan told an Army
investigator in July 2004 that his unit erased a series of digital photographs
showing guards beating detainees and aiming guns at hooded prisoners. The
sergeant said the pictures were deleted after photos from the Abu Ghraib prison
appeared in the media, out of the unit's fear that the pictures could spark a
second wave of scandal.

The disclosures provide the first evidence that in both the Iraq and Afghanistan
theaters of war, soldiers involved in alleged abuse incidents may have sought to
suppress evidence of their actions, muddying any inquiry into how pervasive the
abuse of detainees was. Other documents released yesterday also suggest that
while the military has said it is investigating all allegations of abuse, it is
also closing many of the investigations on the grounds that no conclusion can be
reached.

''These raise the question of how many other allegations of abuse were buried in
the same way," said Jameel Jaffer, a staff attorney with the American Civil
Liberties Union, which has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking
government documents on detainee abuses. ''That's very troubling because we
already think that abuse was pervasive, but maybe there is a whole layer of
abuse that we haven't seen."

Lieutenant Colonel Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman, released a fact sheet about
the documents and a statement saying, ''The Army remains committed to addressing
identified problems in detainee operations and to communicating the progress to
the public."

The newly disclosed abuse allegations were among 988 pages of Army Criminal
Investigation Division files released yesterday by the ACLU, which is making the
documents public when it obtains them from various federal agencies.

In addition to indicating two examples of evidence of abuse that allegedly was
suppressed, the documents also indicated that military investigators often
closed cases quickly on the grounds that they did not have enough evidence to
prove or refute the claims, Jaffer said.

''What we do see here is more evidence of a pattern in which the government
failed to aggressively investigate credible allegations of abuse," he said.

The files released yesterday cover eight separate Army investigations in
detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the one in which the Iraqi
detainee was forced to sign a statement saying he was not abused -- in exchange
for his freedom -- and the sergeant in Afghanistan who said soldiers wiped out
digital pictures of abuse.

The ACLU documents also include the case of a detainee who died while in US
custody, and seven alleged assaults on detainees or civilians. Army
investigators determined that the detainee died from natural causes, and five of
the seven alleged assault cases were closed with a conclusion that the claims
were unfounded or there was not enough evidence to support them. The cases have
not been previously reported.

An Army fact sheet released yesterday said six soldiers were punished under the
Uniform Code of Military Justice, and two soldiers were disciplined through less
serious administrative proceedings. The military did not match the cases to the
punishments.

In one case, two soldiers allegedly punched and kicked an Iraqi whom they had
captured at a roadblock after a female passenger in his car accused him of
raping her. A sergeant allegedly videotaped the beating. An investigator
concluded there was ''probable cause" to believe this assault had occurred, but
the file did not say whether any punishment resulted.

Jaffer suggested that the cases that the military closed for insufficient
evidence merited greater scrutiny.

For example, senior ''psychological operations" officers in Afghanistan reported
seeing special forces soldiers assault civilians during raids in the villages of
Gurjay and Sukhagen in May 2004. But investigators could not go to those
villages and interview witnesses because the area was deemed too dangerous, so
they closed the case without a finding.

In the case of the Iraqi who said he was forced to sign a document clearing his
captors, investigators initially closed his case almost immediately, according
to the documents. Six months later, after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal grabbed
headlines, investigators reopened his case. The documents report that
investigators found medical records apparently confirming his broken nose and
other injuries, and tracked the man down in Tikrit to take a statement. But the
case was closed for insufficient evidence after one of his interrogators denied
he had seen the alleged abuse.

The Army statement said it ''stands prepared to reopen any investigation should
additional information become available that warrants further investigative
action. In fact, (the Criminal Investigative Division) has done so on a number
of occasions when new information or evidence has come to light."

The Army also noted that it has conducted 950 interviews in its investigation of
alleged detainee mistreatment around the world and opened more than 300 criminal
investigations. Allegations against more than 100 military members have led to
courts-martial and administrative punishments, it said.

The Defense Department has released about 21,600 pages of documents on
allegations of detainee abuse, and thousands more have come from other
agencies. Jaffer said most of the documents that have not yet been made public
are from the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Justice Department's Office of Legal
Counsel, which analyzed interrogation techniques and laws against torture.

One previously released batch included descriptions of aggressive interrogations
at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as recounted in 2002 and 2003
by FBI agents who said they were outraged by what they had witnessed. It also
made reference to top Pentagon approval for certain techniques.

The FBI agents described seeing detainees bound in painful positions for 24
hours or more; one detainee defecated on himself. They also described detainees
being left in rooms that were freezing or sweltering, with loud music piped in
on speakers.

The release of the FBI files in December renewed questions about whether the
Bush administration had secretly authorized interrogation techniques that
violate US laws against torture and the Convention Against Torture and Other
Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The Bush administration
has denied any policy authorizing torture.

During a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, Senator Carl
Levin, Democrat of Michigan, asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about
the FBI memos. Rumsfeld testified that he had been aware of the general dispute
between FBI interrogators and the military about whether the aggressive
interrogation techniques were appropriate or counterproductive. He noted that
the specific allegations of abuse contained in the memos are under
investigation, and ''we will pursue every one of them."

----------------------------------------------------------------

Guantanamo captives say abuse included mocking Islam
Claims cast doubt on US portrayals of treatment

By Carol Rosenberg, Knight Ridder |  March 6, 2005

MIAMI -- Captives at the Guantanamo Bay prison are alleging that guards kicked
and stomped on Korans and cursed Allah, and that interrogators punished them by
taking away their pants, knowing that would prevent them from praying.

Guards also mocked captives at prayer and censored Islamic religious books, the
captives allege. And in one incident, they say, a prison barber cut a
cross-shaped patch of hair on an inmate's head.

Most of the complaints come from the recently declassified notes of defense
lawyers' interviews with prisoners, which Guantanamo officials initially stamped
''secret." Under a federal court procedure for due-process appeals by about 100
inmates, portions are now being declassified.

The allegations of religious abuses contradict Pentagon portrayals of the
Guantanamo prison for Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects as respectful of
Islam. Commanders at the base in Cuba have showcased the presence of Muslim
chaplains and the issuance of Korans, prayer rugs, caps and beads and
religiously correct halal meals.

Army Colonel David McWilliams, the spokesman for the Miami-based Southern
Command, which supervises the prison, said he could not confirm or deny the
specific complaints. They could not be independently investigated because the US
military bans reporters from interviewing detainees.

But McWilliams denied any policy of religious abuse.

''There's certainly no planned approach from guards to interrogators that pits
Christianity against Islam," he told The Miami Herald. ''The policy has been to
show respect for the Islamic religion -- and that runs the gamut from providing
the items they need for prayer to making sure their diets are appropriate."

The accounts of religious indignities and abuses come from at least two dozen
captives and a range of attorneys -- from US military lawyers assigned to defend
prisoners to activist law professors and private corporate lawyers who have sued
since the Supreme Court ruled in June that the captives can contest their
detention in US courts.

''On or about Christmas 2002, the head of shift banged on detainees cells,
yelling Merry Christmas and cursing Allah," said New York attorney Joshua
Colangelo-Bryan's notes from his interview with Jumah al Dossari, 31, of
Bahrain. ''Subsequently, a lieutenant arrived and . . . he hit Mr. al Dossari
and insulted the Koran."

And after Dossari asked a military policeman identified only as Smith why Smith
had beaten him unconscious in one episode, according to the lawyer's notes,
''Smith replied, 'Because I'm Christian.' "

New York lawyer Adrian Stewart said one of his 14 Yemeni clients, a man in his
20s, had his eyebrows and head shaved three times as punishment -- and one time
the Army barber left what his client described as a cross-shaped patch of hair
on his head.

Military spokesmen would not say whether they believed that the incident was the
same one for which a prison barber was reprimanded for giving a detainee a
haircut described as a Mohawk in February 2003.

The latest allegations of abuses at the prison in southeastern Cuba come as a
three-star Air Force general is investigating FBI accounts of harsh
interrogation tactics -- and subsequent reports that women soldiers used sexual
taunts during interrogations. Devout Muslim men believe they must not touch
women other than their wives.

New York attorney Marc Falkoff said his 13 Yemeni clients, men in their 20s and
30s, were also victims of religious humiliation.

Falkoff said prisoner Majid Ahmad, 24, told him that an interrogator stepped on
his Koran at one point -- a sacrilege in Islam -- and that prisoners are
''mocked during prayers."

Falkoff and other lawyers said prisoners also claimed to them that US troops
periodically blared music during prayer time or tried to drown out a recording
of the call to prayers. But that's not the worst.

''The things they always complain about is their trousers are routinely taken
away from them for a variety of disciplinary actions, including not talking
during interrogations," Falkoff said. ''Now, the reason this is a punishment
. . . is that these guys can't pray without being covered head to foot . . . and
they see this as a religious insult."

The military says soldiers take pants from prisoners who might try to hang
themselves; captives call it calculated punishment because Islam requires that
they be covered as they pray five times a day.

The alleged religious indignities and abuses have disturbed US military officers
assigned to defend the detainees.

''From vaunted religious freedom to what actually exists for Mr. Hamdan are
worlds apaoperation. He said censors prohibited them and explained that only
Army-issued Korans were allowed.

''He did get one religious book -- it was approved in two days -- the Bible,"
Swift said.

Defense lawyers were unwilling to speculate on which alleged religious abuses
involved approved US interrogation techniques, and which were committed by
soldiers acting on their own.

But Pentagon interrogation rules have at times permitted the use of religion as
a pressure point at Guantanamo, which, unlike the Abu Ghraib prison during the
early, chaotic days in Iraq, was a strictly controlled site 8,000 miles from the
battle zone.

Guantanamo commanders have boasted in successive media presentations that the
Army captain who serves as intelligence chief systematically strips prisoners of
religious articles such as prayer beads, a prayer rug, or prayer oils if they
are deemed uncooperative.

''The issue of removing published religious items or materials would be relevant
if these were United States citizens with a First Amendment right. Such is not
the case with the detainees," said an Oct. 11, 2002, legal brief written by the
Guantanamo interrogation unit's lawyer, Army Lieutenant Colonel Diane E. Beaver.

------------------------------------------------

An Afghan prison stirs doubts on CIA
A man's death brings inquiry

By Dana Priest, Washington Post |  March 6, 2005

WASHINGTON -- In November 2002, a new CIA case officer in charge of a secret
prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip an uncooperative
Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor, and leave him there overnight
without blankets, according to four US government officials who have been made
aware of the case.

The Afghan guards, paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an
abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit, dragged their captive around on the
concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell,
two of the officials said on condition of anonymity.

As night fell, so did the temperature. And by morning, the Afghan man had frozen
to death.

After a quick autopsy by a CIA medic -- ''hypothermia" was listed as the cause
of death -- the guards buried the man, who was in his 20s, in an unmarked and
unacknowledged cemetery used by Afghan forces, officials said. The captive's
family has never been notified; his remains have never been returned for burial.

He is on no one's registry of captives, not even as a ''ghost detainee," the
term for CIA captives held in military prisons but not registered on the books,
they said.

''He just disappeared from the face of the earth," said a US government official
with knowledge of the case.

The CIA case officer, meanwhile, has been promoted, two of the officials said,
who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity
because they are not authorized to talk about the matter. The case is under
investigation by the CIA inspector general's office.

The fact that the Salt Pit case has remained secret for more than two years
reflects how little is known about the CIA's treatment of detainees and its
handling of allegations of abuse.

The public airing of abuse at Abu Ghraib prompted the Pentagon to undertake and
release scathing reports about conduct by military personnel, to revise rules
for handling prisoners, and to prosecute soldiers accused of wrongdoing. There
has been no comparable public scrutiny of the CIA, whose operations and
briefings to Congress are kept classified by the administration.

Thirty-three military workers have been court-martialed and an additional 55
have received reprimands for their mishandling of detainees, according to the
Defense Department. One CIA contractor, David A. Passaro, has been charged with
a crime related to allegations of detainee abuse. Passaro is on trial in federal
court in North Carolina, facing four assault charges in connection with the
death of Abdul Wali, a prisoner who died while at a US base in Afghanistan in
June 2003.

The CIA is investigating at least half a dozen allegations of serious abuse in
Iraq and Afghanistan, including two previously reported deaths in Iraq, one in
Afghanistan, and the death at the Salt Pit, US officials said.

A CIA spokesman said last week that the agency actively pursues allegations of
misconduct. Other US officials said CIA cases can take longer to resolve
because, unlike the military, the agency must rely on the Justice Department to
conduct its own review and to prosecute when warranted.

''The agency has an aggressive, robust office of the inspector general with the
authority to look into any CIA program or operation anywhere," said a CIA
representative. ''The inspector general has done so." The spokesman declined to
comment on any case.

The Salt Pit was the top-secret name for an abandoned brick factory, a warehouse
just north of the Kabul business district. The 10-acre facility included a
three-story building, eventually used by the US military to train the Afghan
counterterrorism force, and several smaller buildings, which were off-limits to
all but the CIA and a handful of Afghan guards and cooks, said several current
and former military and intelligence officers.

The CIA wanted the Salt Pit to be a ''host-nation facility," an Afghan prison
with Afghan guards. Its designation as an Afghan facility was intended to give
US personnel some insulation from actions taken by Afghan guards.

The CIA, however, paid the entire cost of maintaining the facility. The CIA also
decided who would be kept inside, including some ''high-value targets," senior
Al Qaeda leaders in transit to other, more secure secret CIA prisons.

In spring 2004, when the CIA first referred the Salt Pit case to the Justice
Department for possible prosecution, the department cited the prison's status as
a foreign facility, outside the jurisdiction of the US government, as one reason
for declining to prosecute, US government officials aware of the decision said.

The case officer in charge of the Salt Pit was on his first assignment.
Described by colleagues as ''bright and eager," he was the kind of person the
agency needed for such a dismal job. The officer's name could not be learned.

------------------------------------------------

Rule Change Lets C.I.A. Freely Send Suspects Abroad to Jails

By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID JOHNSTON 
March 6, 2005

WASHINGTON, March 5 - The Bush administration's secret program to transfer
suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogation has been carried out
by the Central Intelligence Agency under broad authority that has allowed it to
act without case-by-case approval from the White House or the State or Justice
Departments, according to current and former government officials.

The unusually expansive authority for the C.I.A. to operate independently was
provided by the White House under a still-classified directive signed by
President Bush within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, the officials said.

The process, known as rendition, has been central in the government's efforts to
disrupt terrorism, but has been bitterly criticized by human rights groups on
grounds that the practice has violated the Bush administration's public pledge
to provide safeguards against torture.

In providing a detailed description of the program, a senior United States
official said that it had been aimed only at those suspected of knowing about
terrorist operations, and emphasized that the C.I.A. had gone to great lengths
to ensure that they were detained under humane conditions and not tortured.

The official would not discuss any legal directive under which the agency
operated, but said that the "C.I.A. has existing authorities to lawfully conduct
these operations."

The official declined to be named but agreed to discuss the program to rebut the
assertions that the United States used the program to secretly send people to
other countries for the purpose of torture. The transfers were portrayed as an
alternative to what American officials have said is the costly,
manpower-intensive process of housing them in the United States or in
American-run facilities in other countries.

In recent weeks, several former detainees have described being subjected to
coercive interrogation techniques and brutal treatment during months spent in
detention under the program in Egypt and other countries. The official would not
discuss specific cases, but did not dispute that there had been instances in
which prisoners were mistreated. The official said none had died.

The official said the C.I.A.'s inspector general was reviewing the rendition
program as one of at least a half-dozen inquiries within the agency of possible
misconduct involving the detention, interrogation and rendition of suspected
terrorists.

In public, the Bush administration has refused to confirm that the rendition
program exists, saying only in response to questions about it that the United
States did not hand over people to face torture. The official refused to say how
many prisoners had been transferred as part of the program. But former
government officials say that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the C.I.A. has flown
100 to 150 suspected terrorists from one foreign country to another, including
to Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan.

Each of those countries has been identified by the State Department as
habitually using torture in its prisons. But the official said that guidelines
enforced within the C.I.A. require that no transfer take place before the
receiving country provides assurances that the prisoner will be treated
humanely, and that United States personnel are assigned to monitor compliance.

"We get assurances, we check on those assurances, and we double-check on these
assurances to make sure that people are being handled properly in respect to
human rights," the official said. The official said that compliance had been
"very high" but added, "Nothing is 100 percent unless we're sitting there
staring at them 24 hours a day."

It has long been known that the C.I.A. has held a small group of high-ranking
leaders of Al Qaeda in secret sites overseas, and that the United States
military continues to detain hundreds of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba, and in Afghanistan.  The rendition program was intended to augment those
operations, according to former government officials, by allowing the United
States to gain intelligence from the interrogations of the prisoners, most of
whom were sent to their countries of birth or citizenship.

Before Sept. 11, the C.I.A. had been authorized by presidential directives to
carry out renditions, but under much more restrictive rules. In most instances
in the past, the transfers of individual prisoners required review and approval
by interagency groups led by the White House, and were usually authorized to
bring prisoners to the United States or to other countries to face criminal
charges.

As part of its broad new latitude, current and former government officials say,
the C.I.A. has been authorized to transfer prisoners to other countries solely
for the purpose of detention and interrogation.

The covert transfers by the C.I.A. have faced sharp criticism, in part because
of the accounts provided by former prisoners who say they were beaten, shackled,
humiliated, subjected to electric shocks, and otherwise mistreated during their
long detention in foreign prisons before being released without being
charged. Those accounts include cases like the following:

* Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, who was detained at Kennedy Airport two
  weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks and transported to Syria, where he said he
  was subjected to beatings. A year later he was released without being charged
  with any crime.

* Khaled el-Masri, a Lebanese-born German who was pulled from a bus on the
  Serbia-Macedonia border in December 2003 and flown to Afghanistan, where he
  said he was beaten and drugged. He was released five months later without
  being charged with a crime.

* Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian who was arrested in Pakistan
  several weeks after the 2001 attacks. He was moved to Egypt, Afghanistan and
  finally Guantánamo.  During his detention, Mr. Habib said he was beaten,
  humiliated and subjected to electric shocks. He was released after 40 months
  without being charged.

In the most explicit statement of the administration's policies, Alberto
R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, said in written Congressional
testimony in January that "the policy of the United States is not to transfer
individuals to countries where we believe they likely will be tortured, whether
those individuals are being transferred from inside or outside the United
States." Mr. Gonzales said then that he was "not aware of anyone in the
executive branch authorizing any transfer of a detainee in violation of that
policy."

Administration officials have said that approach is consistent with American
obligations under the Convention Against Torture, the international agreement
that bars signatories from engaging in extreme interrogation techniques. But in
interviews, a half-dozen current and former government officials said they
believed that, in practice, the administration's approach may have involved
turning a blind eye to torture. One former senior government official who was
assured that no one was being mistreated said that accumulation of abuse
accounts was disturbing. "I really wonder what they were doing, and I am no
longer sure what I believe," said the official, who was briefed periodically
about the rendition program.

In Congressional testimony last month, the director of central intelligence,
Porter J. Goss, acknowledged that the United States had only a limited capacity
to enforce promises that detainees would be treated humanely. "We have a
responsibility of trying to ensure that they are properly treated, and we try
and do the best we can to guarantee that," Mr. Goss said of the prisoners that
the United States had transferred to the custody of other countries. "But of
course once they're out of our control, there's only so much we can do. But we
do have an accountability program for those situations."

The practice of transporting a prisoner from one country to another, without
formal extradition proceedings, has been used by the government for
years. George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has
testified that there were 70 cases before the Sept. 11 attacks, authorized by
the White House. About 20 of those cases involved people brought to the United
States to stand trial under informal arrangements with the country in which the
suspects were captured.

Since Sept. 11, however, it has been used much more widely and has had more
expansive guidelines, because of the broad authorizations that the White House
has granted to the C.I.A. under legal opinions and a series of amendments to
Presidential Decision Directives that remain classified. The officials said that
most of the people subject to rendition were regarded by counterterrorism
experts as less significant than people held under direct American control,
including the estimated three dozen high ranking operatives of Al Qaeda who are
confined at secret sites around the world.

The Pentagon has also transferred some prisoners to foreign custody, handing
over 62 prisoners to Pakistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, among other
countries, from the American prison in Guantánamo Bay, in actions that it has
publicly acknowledged. In some of those cases, a senior Defense Department
official said in an interview on Friday, the transfers were for the purpose of
prosecution and trials, but others were intended solely for the purpose of
detention. Those four countries, as well Egypt, Jordan and Syria, were among
those identified in a State Department human rights report released last week as
practicing torture in their prisons.

In an interview, the senior official defended renditions as one among several
important tools in counterterrorism efforts. "The intelligence obtained by those
rendered, detained and interrogated have disrupted terrorist operations," the
official said. "It has saved lives in the United States and abroad, and it has
resulted in the capture of other terrorists."

---------------------------------------------------------------

Video Shows U.S. Soldiers in 'Ramadi Madness' Abuse

By Will Dunham
Mar 7, 8:12 PM (ET)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Army soldiers in Iraq filmed themselves kicking a
gravely wounded prisoner in the face and making the arm of a corpse appear to
wave, then titled the effort "Ramadi Madness" after the city where it was made.

The video, made public on Monday, was shot by Florida National Guard
soldiers. They edited and compiled it into a DVD in January 2004, with various
sections bearing titles such as "Those Crafty Little Bastards" and "Another Day,
Another Mission, Another Scumbag."

The soldiers' unit served in the restive Sunni Muslim city Ramadi, about 70
miles west of Baghdad, before returning home a year ago.

The video's existence had been revealed in Army documents obtained by the
American Civil Liberties Union under court order through the Freedom of
Information Act.

The Pentagon did not release the video, saying it believed it had been
destroyed. But a Florida newspaper, The Palm Beach Post, obtained it and posted
some of it on its Web site on Monday.

The ACLU has obtained thousands of pages of documents from the Pentagon and said
they show an pattern of widespread abuses of detainees by military forces in
Iraq. Digital pictures that were disclosed last year of U.S. soldiers abusing
prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison drew international condemnation.

Soldiers depicted in the new video would not face criminal charges, the Pentagon
said.

One section of the video showed a bound and wounded prisoner sprawled on the
ground, and showed his bullet entry and exit wounds. At one point, a
U.S. soldier kicked the prisoner in the face.

Army documents quoted a soldier at the scene as saying he "thought the dude
eventually died. We weren't in any hurry to call the medics."

WAVING CORPSE

In another part of the video, a soldier grabbed the arm of a truck driver who
had just be shot dead and makes the corpse wave to the camera.

The events that preceded the incident were not shown on the video. The newspaper
reported that U.S. troops had stopped the truck and ordered the driver to step
out, but he ran back into the vehicle and sped away only to be shot dead by an
American soldier. It said the booby-trapped rear door of the truck exploded.

Documents released by the Pentagon showed that Army criminal investigators
looked into the matter and decided no criminal charges were warranted against
the soldiers. Documents showed that the Army deemed the actions shown on the
video "inappropriate" rather than criminal.

"It didn't rise to the level of criminal abuse, according to the
investigations," said Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, an Army spokesman at the
Pentagon. "Clearly, the soldiers probably exercised poor judgment ... and I'm
sure that they were admonished by their command for their actions."

Ramadi has been a flash point in the guerrilla war that followed the U.S.-led
ouster of President Saddam Hussein in 2003. More than 1,500 U.S. troops have
been killed in the war.

ACCOUNTABILITY

ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer said the Army documents indicated that a soldier
stated he destroyed disks containing the video to avoid having it released to
the news media, and a colonel stated the unit's leaders likely would destroy
copies.

"It's difficult for me to understand why nobody was held accountable for the
abuse of detainees here. There's no justification for kicking an enemy prisoner
of war when he's wounded on the ground in front of you and about to die," Jaffer
said.

"Clearly, there's some stuff in this video that's inappropriate but not
criminal. But then there's quite a lot of other stuff in here that does seem to
be criminal," Jaffer added.

The Palm Beach Post stated on its Web site it did not post video showing the
gruesome aftermath of a suicide bombing and excluded the audio portion because
of profane language.

---------------------------------------------------------

Abuse led Navy to consider pulling Cuba interrogators

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  March 16, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Top US Navy officials were so outraged at abusive interrogation
techniques being used at the Guantanamo Bay prison in late 2002 that they
considered removing Navy interrogators from the operation, according to a
portion of a recent Pentagon report that has not been made public.

A top Navy psychologist reported to his supervisor in December 2002 that
interrogators at Guantanamo were starting to use ''abusive techniques." In a
separate incident that same month, the Defense Department's joint investigative
service, which includes Navy investigators, formally ''disassociated" itself
from the interrogation of a detainee, after learning that he had been subjected
to particularly abusive and degrading treatment.

The two events prompted Navy law enforcement officials to debate pulling out of
the Guantanamo operation entirely unless the interrogation techniques were
restricted. The Navy's general counsel, Alberto Mora, told colleagues that the
techniques were ''unlawful and unworthy of the military services."

The previously undisclosed events were disclosed at a hearing of the Senate
Armed Forces Committee yesterday. The disclosures shed new light on the military
services' objections to the Bush administration's policies on how to interrogate
prisoners from the Afghanistan war.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said the events are outlined in the
largely classified report on military detention and interrogation operations
delivered last week by Navy Vice Admiral Albert T. Church. Levin did not
disclose which techniques were used on prisoners that triggered the Navy's
unusual concerns.

Levin said the Navy's expressions of outrage prompted Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld's decision in January 2003 to revoke an aggressive interrogation
policy for Guantanamo detainees, according to the Church report. Rumsfeld then
convened a Pentagon working group to examine interrogation issues more
thoroughly. It came up with a more restricted interrogation policy in April
2003.

Specifically, the chain of events began when Dr. Michael Gelles, the chief
psychologist of the Navy Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, completed a
study of Guantanamo interrogations in December 2002 that included extracts of
interrogation logs. Gelles reported to the service director, David Brant, that
interrogators were using ''abusive techniques and coercive psychological
procedures."

The news prompted Brant to argue that if those aggressive practices continued,
the agency would have to ''consider whether to remain" at Guantanamo. At the
same time, Mora, the Navy's general counsel, told colleagues that the techniques
were ''unlawful and unworthy of the military services," according to Levin's
account.

That same month, Brant told Mora about a specific detainee who was ''being
subjected to physical abuse and degrading treatment." Mora took those concerns
to the Defense Department's criminal investigative task force, which took the
extraordinary step of deciding to disassociate itself from that detainee's
interrogation.

Calling the Navy officials' concerns ''very serious," Levin yesterday asked the
commander of the US Southern Command, General Bantz Craddock, whether he could
shed any further light on the matter at yesterday's hearing. Craddock has
overseen Guantanamo since last year and was previously Rumsfeld's top uniformed
military aide.

Craddock said he was unaware of the extent of the Navy's objections and had not
read the full Church report, but the account matched the timeline of events as
he recalled them. Guantanamo interrogators asked permission to use more
aggressive techniques in the fall of 2002, he noted. Rumsfeld approved a list of
techniques around December 2002, and then rescinded it in January 2003.

''I do recall the Navy general counsel advising the secretary that there were
concerns with regards to interrogation techniques," Craddock said. ''It was [at]
a point thereafter that the approval of those techniques was rescinded in
January and the working group was formed."

A former member of the Pentagon's detainee working group noted in an interview
yesterday that the NCIS trains its agents to gather information that can be used
to prosecute criminal defendants. He argued that it was appropriate for
Guantanamo interrogations to use more aggressive methods because their purpose
was to gather information for fighting terrorism, but he said NCIS officials may
not have accepted that distinction.

The major source of Church's findings, Levin said at the hearing, is a memo Mora
wrote in July 2004. At about the same time, FBI agents wrote a series of
e-mails, recently made public, about abusive interrogations they said they
witnessed.

The FBI memos described ''torture techniques" that it said included shackling
detainees into painful positions, forced nakedness, deafening music, temperature
extremes, and sexual humiliation by female interrogators.

Southcom is investigating the FBI reports. This week, Newsweek reported that
Southcom has recalled to active duty four reservists who had served as
interrogators because they may have to face courts-martial for their handling of
prisoners. Craddock yesterday said only that the investigation was ''ongoing"
and that the Newsweek report was ''news to me."

Rumsfeld tapped Church to review the military's detention-and-interrogation
operations after the disclosure of the Abu Ghraib photographs in May
2004. Church concluded there was no policy, ''written or otherwise," by which
top officials sanctioned abuses. He attributed abuses to battlefield stress and
insufficient oversight.

Democrats have criticized his inquiry as insufficiently thorough.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Split seen on interrogation techniques
Navy official says many back stance against coercion

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  March 31, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A top Navy official whose warnings about ''abusive" interrogation
policies at Guantanamo Bay in December 2002 led the Navy to consider pulling its
investigators out of the prison operation says his view that coercion does not
produce quality information is shared by many specialists in the military and
intelligence world.

In his first interview since his warnings were disclosed, Dr. Michael Gelles,
the head psychologist for the Navy Criminal Investigative Service, said last
week that many government intelligence professionals believe that coercive
interrogation techniques -- inflicting pain or humiliation in order to extract
information -- simply don't work.

And he expressed frustration that Bush administration policymakers have
''dismissed" critics of coercive techniques as doves who are unwilling to do
what is necessary to obtain information from terror suspects. In fact, Gelles
said, many experienced interrogators are convinced coercive techniques do more
harm than good.

The best way to extract intelligence from a captured Muslim extremist, Gelles
said, is through ''rapport-building" -- by engaging the suspect in conversations
that play on his cultural sensitivities. Gelles said he and others have
identified patterns of questioning that can elicit accurate information from
Middle Easterners, but declined to disclose them for security reasons.

''We do not believe -- not just myself, but others who have to remain unnamed --
that coercive methods with this adversary are . . . effective," Gelles
said. ''If the goal is to get information, then using coercive techniques may be
effective. But if the goal is to get reliable and accurate information, looking
at this adversary, rapport-building is the best approach."

Gelles, the NCIS's top psychologist for 15 years, has participated in
interrogations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo. He noted that the NCIS's
experience with Muslim extremists predates Sept. 11, 2001, including probes into
the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen and the 1983 bombing of a Marine
barracks in Lebanon.

The Navy granted Gelles permission to speak to the Globe after the recent
disclosure of his role in prompting the first internal review of interrogation
techniques at Guantanamo Bay. The Navy prohibited him from discussing specific
experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Cuba, or disclosing conversations with
senior officials.

But he described a broad division between interrogation specialists like himself
and Pentagon policy makers. Gelles said that his skepticism about coercive
interrogations is quietly supported by many government specialists, including
fellow psychologists, intelligence analysts, linguists, and interrogators who
have experience extracting information from captured Islamist militants.

The strategy behind a coercive approach, he said, is to try ''vacuum up all the
information you can and figure out later" what is true and what is not. This
method, he argued, clogs the system with false and misleading data. He compared
it to ''coercive tactics leading to false confessions" by suspects in police
custody.

Gelles said rapport-building need not be soft just because it is not humiliating
or physically painful: Telling a detainee that he is a contemptible murderer of
children or that he may never be released from detention if he doesn't cooperate
are perfectly acceptable tactics. ''Being respectful doesn't mean you don't
confront, clarify, and challenge the detainee when he gives the appearance of
being deceptive," he said.

But, he warned, coercive techniques will induce a detainee to say anything to
make the discomfort stop. At various points, US officials have approved of
threatening prisoners with menacing dogs, shackling prisoners into painful
''stress positions" for up to four hours, and engaging in physical contact that
threatens the subject but does not injure him. Some interrogations have gone
further. FBI reports say prisoners have been sexually humiliated and shackled
for 24 hours without food.

''Why would you terrify them with a dog? So they'll tell you anything to get the
dog out of the room?" Gelles asked. ''I know there is a school of thought that
believes [stress positions] are effective. In my experience, I've never see it
be of any value."

Sometimes, he said, innocent suspects who have no information to provide will
make up stories just to stop the abuse.

A Red Cross report last year estimated that between 70 percent and 90 percent of
military detainees in Iraq had been arrested by mistake in the confusion of the
insurgency. The head of interrogations at Guantanamo has said that the majority
of the 540 detainees there have no useful information.

The military has also already released at least 211 former Guantanamo inmates --
among them several British men who said they falsely confessed under duress to
being in a video with Osama bin Laden, but who were later cleared when the
British government determined that they had been in England at the time the
video was shot in Afghanistan.

Gelles's assertions were further bolstered last week by the release of newly
uncensored portions of a memo written by an FBI agent who had been at Guantanamo
in 2002. The previously withheld passages show that FBI agents considered the
results obtained from certain military interrogations to be ''suspect at best."

The previously censored passages were disclosed by the Bush administration at
the request of Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

The memo also describes how FBI agents tried to persuade military commanders
that coercive techniques were unreliable and recounts a ''heated" video
teleconference in which the FBI showed the military that certain intelligence
produced by coercive techniques ''was nothing more" than what the FBI got with
traditional tactics: ''[The Defense Department] finally admitted the information
was the same the Bureau obtained. It still did not prevent them from continuing
[their own] methods."

Gelles could not, under Navy rules, describe his own role in exposing possible
abuses at Guantanamo Bay. But the most comprehensive military review of
interrogations around the world cited him as sounding an early warning about
''abusive techniques and coercive psychological procedures" in December 2002.

A month later, in response to the Navy's concerns, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld rescinded an order allowing some of the most coercive techniques.

But in the two years that followed, accounts of the physical abuse -- and, in
some cases, the deaths -- of military detainees under interrogation around the
world have emerged, leading to a series of official investigations and ongoing
lawsuits.

---------------------------------------------------------

US orders 38 freed from Guantanamo

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  March 30, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon announced yesterday that military tribunals have
determined that 38 out of 558 detainees at Guantanamo Bay were not ''enemy
combatants" and ordered them released from the isolated Navy base in Cuba
without compensation.

The military said that the rest of the detainees have now had their chance to
make the case that they are innocent, and that it believes it has complied with
a landmark 2004 Supreme Court order to give Guantanamo detainees a fair chance
to challenge the basis for their indefinite incarceration without trial.

''I am pleased to report that we have completed a major milestone," said Navy
Secretary Gordon England, who has overseen the process. ''Combatant Status
Review Tribunals for all [Defense Department] detainees at Guantanamo are
completed. . . . [The tribunals] have provided a venue for detainees to
personally challenge their status as enemy combatants."

But human rights groups and lawyers representing the detainees immediately
challenged England's conclusion, saying the Pentagon reviews were
unfair. Detainees were not allowed to have lawyers, and they could not challenge
secret evidence against them that the tribunals reviewed in classified sessions.

''These things are a sham," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for
Constitutional Rights, which represented Guantanamo detainees in the Supreme
Court case last term. ''They just confirm findings already made by other
soldiers in the same military."

Although the Supreme Court's decision in June 2004 was a rebuke to President
Bush, who had claimed to have absolute power to hold anyone as an enemy
combatant at Guantanamo with no judicial oversight, the ruling on exactly what
rights detainees have has resulted in continuing court battles.

The court said all detainees are entitled to a ''fair opportunity to rebut the
government's factual assertions before a neutral decision maker," but didn't
specify what kind of a hearing would be sufficient. Two federal district judges
have disagreed in separate cases about whether the military's tribunals
constitute such an opportunity.

The matter is pending before the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia.

Ratner pointed to the case of Murat Kurnaz, a German of Turkish descent who was
arrested in Pakistan while traveling with a busload of religious missionaries in
October 2001 and taken to Guantanamo. A military tribunal determined last fall
that Kurnaz was a member of Al Qaeda and properly categorized as an enemy
combatant.

US District Judge Joyce Hens Green, who ruled in January that the military
review tribunals are unconstitutional, cited Kurnaz's case as a particularly
egregious example of how the process was insufficient to give an innocent
detainee a fair chance of being released. Much of her opinion discussing Kurnaz
was redacted because it dealt with classified evidence.

However, the military later provided a three-page summary of classified findings
by its investigators to Kurnaz's lawyer, Baher Azmy. The document was marked
''unclassified" by mistake, the military said, which later reclassified it and
ordered him not to talk about it anymore.

By then, Azmy had already read portions of the document at a March 9 news
conference in Germany, which was covered by the Associated Press. The Washington
Post also obtained the document and published a front-page article about the
case on Sunday.

Both news accounts quoted the document as saying that military investigators
could find ''no definite link/evidence" that Kurnaz had any association with Al
Qaeda or had made a threat against the United States. It also said that ''the
Germans have confirmed that the detainee had no connection to an [Al Qaeda] cell
in Germany."

Yesterday, England described the military tribunal process as one in which three
military officers balanced their duty to protect the United States with the
rights of the prisoners. Faced with often ''conflicting information," he said,
they did their best to decide based on a ''preponderance of the evidence."

''Is it perfect in every case? At the end of the day, this is a judgment,"
England said. ''They try to make the best decision they could. It's human beings
so it's obviously not perfect, but it's as perfect as we can make the system and
as fair to the detainees as possible while protecting America."

Asked how he reconciled his description of the process with what is known about
the Kurnaz case, England said the tribunal had access to more evidence against
Kurnaz that has not been made public.

''I know the data reported in the Washington Post was not all the data reported
to the tribunal," he said.

However, Judge Green did have all the classified evidence before her. The Post
reported that in the redacted portion of her opinion, she wrote that the
tribunal's decision was based on a single memo that ''fails to provide
significant details to support its conclusory allegations, does not reveal the
sources for its information and is contradicted by other evidence in the
record."

Said Azmy: ''There's a 'preponderance of the evidence' in their Alice in
Wonderland regime, not in any regime that resembles one governed by the rule of
law."

England said the detainees were being held to keep them from fighting against
the United States. He also repeatedly said that the military modeled its
tribunals on an Army regulation cited by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in her June
2004 opinion outlining one possible way to give enemy combatants a fair hearing.

The regulation covers how to give a prisoner of war hearing to a detainee as
required by the Geneva Conventions. The Bush administration announced in early
2001 that the conventions -- international law prohibiting coercive
interrogations for prisoners of war -- would not apply to the war in
Afghanistan, and said at the time that the status hearings were not required.

Ratner argued that O'Connor was writing in the context of a traditional war --
the Afghanistan invasion -- with a specific end, after which all enemy
combatants would be released, not an open-ended ''war on terrorism" that could
conceivably last beyond the life span of the prisoners.

England said that five of the 38 detainees who were deemed not to be enemy
combatants have left Guantanamo, and that the State Department is trying to
arrange for the other 33 to be sent home as quickly as possible. He did not
disclose the nationalities of the prisoners due to be released.

In a related development, US District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. issued a
preliminary injunction yesterday ordering the military to give the court 30
days' notice before transferring any of 13 Yemeni detainees who were arrested by
Pakistani police after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Although lawyers for most of the detainees at Guantanamo are eager to see their
clients return home, the Yemenis are examples of a smaller set who believe they
will be tortured if they are handed over to their home governments.

England also confirmed yesterday that he is a candidate for the nomination to
replace Paul Wolfowitz as deputy secretary of defense, and that the decision is
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's to make.

''I have discussed the job with Secretary Rumsfeld, yes," England said. ''I
would be pleased to serve if nominated."

Charlie Savage can be reached at csavage@globe.com.

---------------------------------------------------

Records shed light on alleged beating
Imprisoned Iraqi was abused, died

By Robert Weller, Associated Press Ê|Ê April 3, 2005

FORT CARSON, Colo. -- Previously secret court testimony indicates an Iraqi
general imprisoned by US forces was badly bruised and may have been severely
beaten two days before he died of suffocation during interrogation.

References to the alleged beating appear in a transcript, released under court
order, from a military preliminary hearing for three soldiers charged with
murder and dereliction of duty in the death of Major General Abed Mowhoush on
Nov. 26, 2003. A fourth soldier faces the same charges but waived a hearing.

During the interrogation, Army prosecutors claim Mowhoush was put headfirst into
a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord, and knocked down before the
soldiers sat and stood on him, prosecutors said. The cause of death was
determined to be suffocation.

The defendants -- Chief Warrant Officers Lewis Welshofer and Jefferson Williams,
Sergeant First Class William Sommer, and Specialist Jerry Loper -- have all
denied wrongdoing, saying commanders had sanctioned their actions.

According to the transcript, witnesses said others had also beaten Mowhoush days
before the Army interrogation. Their names and agencies were blacked out.

Colonel David A. Teeples, the soldiers' commander, said during the closed
hearing: ''My thought was that the death of Mowhoush was brought about by . . ."
-- blacked out -- ''and then it was unfortunate and accidental, what had
happened under an interrogation by our people."

According to the transcript, Army special investigator Curtis Ryan testified
that he found extensive bruising when he examined Mowhoush shortly after he
died. ''So, at some point prior to the 26th, he had been beaten," Ryan said.

An autopsy revealed that Mowhoush had also suffered broken ribs, testimony
showed.

The military closed the hearing to the public shortly after it began in
December, but The Denver Post successfully sued to open it, and the proceeding
concluded last week in open court. The transcript was released Thursday and
posted on the Internet.

Fort Carson's commander, Major General Robert Mixon, will decide whether the
soldiers are court-martialed after he receives a recommendation from the
investigating officer, Captain Robert Ayers. No timetable was set.

--------------------------------------------------------

Rank and file have taken heat for Abu Ghraib
Upper-level officials don't face charges

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  April 28, 2005

WASHINGTON -- With his job on the line over the shocking revelations of torture
at Abu Ghraib prison last year, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the
world to ''watch how democracy deals with wrongdoing and scandal and the pain of
acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes and, indeed, our own weaknesses."

Now, exactly one year after the photographs from Abu Ghraib became public, the
Defense Department has placed seven low-ranking guards under court-martial. No
general -- or colonel, or CIA intelligence officer, or political appointee --
has faced any charges.

Human rights groups yesterday seized on the anniversary to reiterate their
dismay over the lack of command responsibility, saying Abu Ghraib will be
remembered as much for who wasn't held accountable as who was.

But while investigations into the Iraqi prison case have come to a close, the
scandal has led to broader revelations about the mistreatment of prisoners in US
military custody around the world.

Disclosures at other military detention centers, from Guantanamo Bay to
Afghanistan, have revealed use of sleep deprivation, shackling in painful
positions, exposure to temperature extremes, and beatings that have resulted in
at least 28 deaths -- suggesting that the detainee abuse scandal that started
with Abu Ghraib will haunt the war on terrorism for years to come.

''The abuses aren't as sexy, so to speak, as some of the genuinely perverted
images that came from Abu Ghraib," said Ken Hurwitz of Human Rights First. ''But
the real interrogations have been, by all accounts, quite brutal. As more and
more detainees are released from places like Guantanamo, the idea that
Guantanamo was doing it right and Abu Ghraib was doing it wrong is just not
holding up."

The Army is preparing to update its interrogation manual to bar such harsh
techniques and to incorporate safeguards to prevent such misconduct at military
prison camps, The New York Times reports today, quoting Army officials. The
officials said that such practices as stripping prisoners, keeping them in
stressful positions for long periods, and using dogs to intimidate inmates would
be prohibited.

At the height of the Abu Ghraib controversy, the FBI asked agents who had been
to Guantanamo Bay to report any abuses they had seen at the prison for detainees
from Afghanistan. Agents responded with graphic descriptions of what one called
''torture techniques."

Further reports disclosed this spring that the Army is investigating 28
homicides of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan -- only one of which was at Abu
Ghraib. And pressure has been building on the CIA to open its files about the
treatment of those in its custody, including rendering prisoners to other
countries that use torture.

Meanwhile, the Army has tried or administratively punished about 125 soldiers
for abusing detainees in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2002, including seven
reservists who appeared in the Abu Ghraib pictures. None of the Abu Ghraib
defendants are ranked higher than staff sergeant, even though several asserted
that they were acting on superiors' orders.

Five of the seven have pleaded guilty or been convicted of criminal charges,
including Specialist Charles Graner Jr., who was sentenced to 10 years in
prison. The other two, including Private First Class Lynndie England, are
scheduled to go on trial next month.

But investigations into the culpability of higher authorities -- from the CIA to
military leaders to civilians in the Bush administration -- have been far less
fruitful.

One of the investigations, led by Major General George Fay, found that the CIA,
which oversaw some of the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, had ''poisoned the
atmosphere" and led to ''a loss of accountability [and] abuse." But he went no
further, complaining that the agency did not turn over information he requested.

But disclosures in the past year have shed light on secret discussions among
high-ranking civilian officials in the Bush administration about what kind of
interrogation techniques would be allowed.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while he was serving as White House counsel,
commissioned a memo from Justice Department aides that defined torture as only
those techniques that can cause major organ failure or death, a standard that
would allow many types of pain to be inflicted on detainees. Lawyers for
then-secretary of state Colin L. Powell and for the military services objected
strenuously to the definition, but Rumsfeld's top lawyer, William Haynes,
overruled them.

After the memo was leaked to the public in late 2004, however, the
administration disavowed it and replaced it with a less permissive version,
saying it had never relied on the more extreme claims in setting policy.

To many human rights activists, the memo is the evidence that proved high-level
culpability for prisoner abuses. But that view is not universal.

James Carafano, a national security analyst at the conservative Heritage
Foundation, argued that ''you can't draw a line from the [memo] to the White
House, and from the White House to torture . . . I'm all for having heads roll,
but I want to have evidence first that people's actions led to the bad events."

Still, reports have shown that Rumsfeld himself briefly approved the use of
particularly harsh techniques at Guantanamo Bay in December 2002, and Lieutenant
General Ricardo Sanchez briefly approved such a list for use at Abu Ghraib in
September 2003. In both cases, the officials rescinded those policies after only
a month.

But the 10 official investigations into detainee abuses have all concluded that
top officials did not authorize a systematic policy of torturing
detainees. Instead, they blamed abuse cases on confusion amid changing rules,
lax supervision, poor training, and individual misconduct.

An independent panel led by former defense secretary James Schlesinger said
there was ''both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels" for
the ''widespread abuses," but characterized this culpability as indirect.

The Army's inspector general recently completed the final investigation into
detainee matters. Though its report has not been made public, the Washington
Post reported that it clears Sanchez and top aides of misconduct, while
recommending an administrative reprimand for Brigadier General Janis Karpinski,
who was in charge of Abu Ghraib at the time of the abuses.

Karpinski has said her Army superiors banned her from the wing of the prison
where interrogations took place after Major General Geoffrey Miller, then the
Guantanamo commander, visited Abu Ghraib in September 2003. Miller, who made
recommendations to Sanchez about how to get more information from prisoners, has
denied that his suggestions could have led to any mistreatment of prisoners.

At a press conference this week, Rumsfeld declined to answer critics who said
the inspector general's report shows the Army is unwilling to hold high-ranking
officials responsible for abuses. He said he has not seen the report.

Meanwhile, in a Senate speech this week marking the anniversary of the Abu
Ghraib revelations, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts,
accused the Bush administration of letting low-ranking soldiers be scapegoated
for the consequences of policies enacted by top military and civilian officials.

Kennedy and other administration critics have called for a full outside
inquiry. But even if such an inquiry doesn't occur, one said, the full truth
will eventually be known, even if it takes decades.

''The full story of the torture and abuse that has happened, and the systematic
nature of it, will come out," said ACLU president Anthony Romero. ''The question
is, will future generations look back at us and decide that we were sufficiently
vigorous in prosecuting the torture and abuse that happened?"

--------------------------------------------------------

Book says Cuba site's information exaggerated

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  May 3, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A former commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison exaggerated the
value of information gleaned from detainees and knew that aggressive
intelligence teams were staging friendly interrogations for visiting lawmakers
and senior military officers, according to a former Army interpreter stationed
there two years ago.

''I had access to the intelligence team e-mail system and I would see e-mails
and hear a buzz on the base regarding what was going to take place when VIP's
came to visit," Erik Saar, a former sergeant, said in an interview
yesterday. ''The interrogators were told by their leadership that they were to
find someone who had been cooperative in the past who they could have civil
discussions with, and they wouldn't use intense tactics like the 'fear-up'
approach to intimidate the detainee into talking."

In ''Inside the Wire," a new book detailing his six-month tour at Guantanamo,
Saar also said that Major General Geoffrey Miller, who ran the prison operation
on the base from late 2002 until March 2004, participated in hiding detainees
from the Red Cross after guards shaved their hair and eyebrows as punishment.

''The missing eyebrow trick made some camp officials nervous because of the
potential for the Red Cross to take note, so on occasion these detainees were
slapped in a special isolation cell, hidden away from Red Cross scrutiny," Saar
wrote. ''The Red Cross got to see all the detainees, but not necessarily on
every visit; General Miller could say that certain captives were unavailable."

Saar said that Miller also exaggerated the value of the information
interrogation teams gleaned about Al Qaeda and the Taliban, in order to justify
the operation's heavy cost to the United States -- both in terms of taxpayer
dollars and international criticism of President Bush's decision to ignore the
Geneva Conventions in the Afghanistan War.

An Army spokesman said Miller would not comment about Guantanamo because the US
Southern Command is investigating allegations of abuse under his watch. In
internal memos, FBI agents assigned to assist interrogations at Guantanamo say
military interrogators abused detainees and used what one agent described as
''torture techniques."

Several news outlets, citing anonymous sources, have reported that the Southcom
investigation has confirmed some of those allegations. Newsweek also reported
this week that, among the previously unreported cases, investigators have found
that interrogators led one detainee around with a collar and dog leash to try to
break his resistance.

Colonel David McWilliams, a Southcom spokesman, said that the military's
investigation is still under legal review and he would not comment on its
findings or any recommendations. But he denied Saar's claim that cooperative
interrogations had been staged to convey a false impression to visiting
dignitaries.

''We don't stage interrogations," McWilliams said. ''We do adjust interrogation
schedules if necessary. If there are visitors coming to Guantanamo with a bona
fide reason to watch an interrogation, we will reschedule one to make sure that
there is one going on when they are there."

In his book, Saar also describes witnessing a female interrogator smearing red
ink -- which she portrayed as menstrual blood -- on the face of a devout Muslim
detainee in an attempt to break his will. He says that another interrogator wore
clothing such as thong underwear and ''a microscopic dress with a sheer top"
while questioning uncooperative prisoners in the middle of the night. Close
contact with any woman other than their wives is taboo among Muslims.

''The theory was that these men were leaning on their faith and gaining strength
from that connection," Saar wrote. The female interrogator's ''strategy was to
be sexually provacative to try to make the detainee feel impure and unworthy of
going before his God in prayer and thereby gaining strength."

Saar acknowledges in his book that some Guantanamo detainees are truly dangerous
men, citing Mohamed al Qahtani, whom the Sept. 11 Commission identified as the
intended ''20th hijacker." But Saar said many of the prisoners were not hardened
terrorists.

McWilliams said the Guantanamo operation has and continues to gain valuable
intelligence. ''I don't want to besmirch Mr. Saar's observations or what he
believes to be true, but I have concerns because his role was that of a
linguist, not of someone who assessed the strategic value of the intelligence we
were gaining," he said.

---------------------------------------------------------

2d look at Guantanamo interrogation
Lawmaker asks if it was staged

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  May 5, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A House Democrat called yesterday for hearings to determine
whether the military staged interrogations at Guantanamo Bay to deceive visiting
lawmakers, an allegation contained in a new book by a former Army translator who
was stationed at the base in 2003.

Representative Adam Schiff of California wrote a letter to House Judiciary
Committee chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, asking
him to ''conduct a thorough inquiry as to whether these allegations have any
merit."

''The fact that members of the committee and other members of Congress may have
been deliberately deceived is extremely disturbing, if true," Schiff wrote.

Sensenbrenner declined to comment yesterday, saying he had not yet seen Schiff's
letter.

Schiff was a member of a congressional delegation that visited the Navy base in
Cuba in May 2004 and witnessed interrogations of suspected Taliban or Al Qaeda
prisoners. In an interview yesterday, Schiff recalled the questioning as civil
and said the detainee was served food during the session.

When he returned, Schiff pronounced himself satisfied that prisoners were not
being abused. ''The detention facility appears clean, well-run, and consistent
with all aspects of the Geneva Convention," Schiff said at the time. ''Important
intelligence is being derived from detainee interviews conducted in a humane
manner."

But in a new book, ''Inside the Wire," a former Army sergeant, Erik Saar, called
into question the genuineness of the interrogations that visiting dignitaries
saw at Guantanamo. Saar said camp leaders would put on ''facade" interrogations
to ''put the best possible face on the camp when VIPs came" to inspect the
operation.

Visitors ''always wanted to sit in the observation room outside an interrogation
booth, watching through the one-way glass," Saar wrote. ''A flurry of e-mails
went back and forth . . . about which detainee to schedule for these
observations and what to ask him. The key was to pick someone who had already
been cooperative, and the interrogator would simply go back over material
covered with him previously. A foolproof recipe for faux interrogations and the
VIPs were none the wiser."

Other interrogations were less civil. According to internal FBI memos that
surfaced last year, detainees were sometimes shackled for long periods in
painful positions, blasted by loud music, exposed to extreme heat and cold,
menaced by dogs, and subjected to other ''torture techniques."

A spokesman for the US Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo, denied that
the base staged interrogations. He said that they were sometimes rescheduled to
ensure one was happening when visitors were on the base, and that it is common
practice to repeatedly ask detainees the same questions to see if their story
changes.

A Republican lawmaker on Schiff's trip, Representative Howard Coble of North
Carolina, said through a spokesman that he wanted to learn more about Saar's
allegations but said everything ''appeared to be in order" when he toured
Guantanamo.

-------------------------------------------------------

May 21, 2005
Guantánamo Comes to Define U.S. to Muslims
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and SALMAN MASOOD

NEW DELHI, May 20 - In one of Pakistan's most exclusive private schools for
boys, the annual play this year was "Guantánamo," a docudrama based on
testimonies of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, the United States naval base in
Cuba.

The cast was made up of students between 16 and 18 years old, each playing the
role of a prisoner being held on suspicion of terrorism. To deepen their
understanding of their characters, the boys pored through articles in Pakistani
newspapers, studied the international press and surfed Web sites, including one
that described itself as a nonsectarian Islamic human rights portal and is
called cageprisoners.com.

It didn't matter that the boys at the Lahore Grammar School, an elite academy
that has sent many of its graduates to study in American universities, lived in
a world quite removed from that known by most prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. The
more they explored, the more the play resonated, the director of the school's
production, Omair Rana, recalled Friday in a telephone interview. The detainees
were Muslim, many were Pakistani and one had been arrested in Islamabad, the
country's capital.

"It was something we all could relate to," Mr. Rana said of "Guantánamo," a play
created "from spoken evidence" by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, a Briton
and a South African, that was staged in London and in New York last year. "All
that seemed very relevant, very nearby - in fact, too close for comfort."

Accounts of abuses at the actual American detention center at Guantánamo Bay,
including Newsweek magazine's now-retracted article on the desecration of the
Koran, ricochet around the world, instilling ideas about American power and
justice, and sowing distrust of the United States. Even more than the written
accounts are the images that flash on television screens throughout the Muslim
world: caged men, in orange prison jumpsuits, on their knees. On Al Jazeera and
Al Arabiya, two satellite networks, images of the prisoners appear in station
promos.

For many Muslims, Guantánamo stands as a confirmation of the low regard in which
they believe the United States holds them. For many non-Muslims, regardless of
their feelings toward the United States, it has emerged as a symbol of American
hypocrisy.

"The cages, the orange suits, the shackles - it's as if they're dealing with
something that's like a germ they don't want to touch," said Daoud Kuttab,
director of the Institute of Modern Media at Al Quds University in Ramallah, in
the West Bank. "That's the nastiness of it."

The Bush administration's response to the Newsweek article - a general
condemnation of prison abuses, coupled with an attack on the magazine -
apparently did little to allay the concerns of many Muslims. Then on Thursday,
the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a report detailing the many
complaints from detainees at Guantánamo about desecrations of the Koran between
early 2002 and mid-2003.

In India, a secular country by law whose people and government are growing
increasingly close to the United States, a cartoon appeared in Midday, an
afternoon tabloid, on Friday showing a panic-stricken Uncle Sam flushing copies
of Newsweek magazine down a toilet.

To the cartoonist, Hemant Morparia, it appeared as though the Bush
administration's answer to the problem was to bury the truth.

"People suspect American intentions," Mr. Morparia, a Mumbai-based radiologist
who doubles as a cartoonist, said. "It has nothing to do with being Muslim."

From Mumbai, India, to Amman, Jordan, to London, Guantánamo is a continuing
subject for discussion, from television talk shows to sermons to everyday
conversations. In countries like Afghanistan, Britain and Pakistan, released
detainees often return home and relate their experiences on television news
programs. Accusations of egregious abuse sometimes prompt violence, as in last
week's demonstrations in Afghanistan.

Guantánamo provides rhetorical fodder for politicians seeking to bring down
United States-allied rulers in their own countries, and it offers a ready
rallying point against American dominance, even in countries whose own police
and military have been known for severe violations of human rights.

"Even illiterate people pronounce it in a perfect manner, which surprises me a
bit, quite frankly," said Irfan Siddiqui, a columnist for Pakistan's popular
Urdu-language daily, Nawa-i-Waqt. "But it shows the significance this issue has
attained."

In Europe, accusations of abuse at Guantánamo, as much as the war in Iraq, have
become a symbol of what many see as America's dangerous drift away from the
ideals that made it a moral beacon in the post-World War II era. There is a
persistent and uneasy sense that the United States fundamentally changed after
September 11, and not for the better.

"The simple truth is that America's leaders have constructed at Guantánamo Bay a
legal monster," the French daily, Le Monde, said in a January editorial.

The United States opened the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, on the eastern end of
Cuba as a detention center for suspected terrorists from the Taliban and Al
Qaeda. It houses about 680 prisoners, mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan, but
also some from Britain.

On many Arab streets, there was as much conspiracy seen in the retraction of the
Newsweek story as in the story itself.

"People already expect the U.S. to deny it, because it already has no
credibility in the region," said Mustafa al-Ani, director of the Security and
Terrorism Studies Program at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "So the initial
story will have an impact, and the response simply will not."

Or as a Jordanian pharmacist, Farouk Shoubaki, said of the original report, "It
is something the Americans would do."

As Mr. Shoubaki's remark reflects, Guantánamo offers disconcerting testimony
that for many Muslims, the America they used to admire has sunk to the level of
their own repressive governments.

Najam Sethi, editor of The Daily Times, an English-language newspaper in
Pakistan, said the Guantánamo accusations were seen in his country as "further
proof" of hypocrisy and anti-Islamic sentiment in the government of the United
States. To many, he said, it was taken "as evidence of how America and the West
makes the war against terrorism synonymous with the war against Islam."

"Everyone is focused on the desecration of the Koran and attempts to hurt the
feelings of Muslims," he said. "The tenor of the debate is acquiring
'civilizational' dimensions."

Afghans, who have the largest number of citizens held at Guantánamo, with as
many as 300 at its height, share the general dislike of the prison, but are
generally practical and philosophical about it. They say they are used to people
being thrown into prison, being tortured there and even dying.

But public anger has grown at the reports of sexual abuse and desecration of the
Koran. Even a former Afghan commander, Abdul Khaliq, who said he was happy to
see captured Taliban members sent to Guantánamo, is now upset by the stories of
sexual abuse and insults to Islam reportedly perpetrated there.

"The Americans were good people before," said Mr. Khaliq, who now works on a
road construction project. "Definitely, people are changing their minds towards
the Americans."

In a country like Pakistan, the issue is especially vivid because Guantánamo
prisoners who have been released are often interviewed by a local news
organizations.

As far back as November 2003, a television talk show, modeled after "The
O'Reilly Factor," featured an interview with Mohammad Sagheer, the first
Pakistani to be released from Guantánamo. And as recently as Friday, an
Urdu-language television talk show taped interviews with two ex-prisoners who
said they witnessed the desecration of the Koran there.

The latest issue of Newsline, a Karachi-based magazine, featured a story titled,
"Back from Camp," which chronicled the story of a former prisoner, Abdul Rahim
Muslim Dost, a poet who pleaded for the Americans to return his writing.

"These are issues that sink into people's minds," said Samina Ahmed, the
Pakistani representative of the Brussels-based research and advocacy
organization, International Crisis Group. "Their religion is being demeaned in
the context of the war on terror. That's an issue the U.S. is going to have to
address."

In Britain, Guantánamo has entered the political lexicon along with Bagram Air
Base in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad as an emblem of American
injustice and abuse. During the London marathon in April this year, David
Nicholl, a neurologist, ran the race in an orange jumpsuit to protest the
detention of five former British residents at Guantánamo.

"We are all against terrorism but we are not obliged to close our eyes to the
excesses of our allies," Chris Mullin, a former British Foreign Office minister
told Parliament on Wednesday.

In India, one human rights advocate who routinely takes the Indian military to
task for its alleged abuses against insurgents in Kashmir and the northeast,
said the United States stance on things like torture and interrogation of
suspects at Guantánamo signaled what he called "a human rights disaster" for
everyone.

On Friday afternoon in an Islamabad bookshop, Maheen Asif, 33, leafed through a
women's magazine, and paused for only a moment when asked for her impression of
Guantánamo Bay.

"Torture," she said, as her daughters, 8 and 5, scampered through the
stalls. "The first word that comes to my mind is 'torture' - a place where
Americans lock up and torture Muslims in the name of terrorism."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Craig S. Smith and Ariane Bernard
in Paris; Alan Cowell in London; Hassan Fattah in Amman, Jordan; Carlotta Gall
in Kabul, Afghanistan; Salman Masood in Islamabad, Pakistan; and Somini Sengupta
in New Delhi.

----------------------------

May 20, 2005
In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths
By TIM GOLDEN

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers
continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was
hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2
a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he
arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs
were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He
had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous
four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators,
Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he
punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled
weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The
soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully
into Mr. Dilawar's face.

"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the
prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his
knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could
no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor
after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though,
the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By
then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before
Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators
had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the
American base at the wrong time.

The story of Mr. Dilawar's brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point - and
that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in
December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army's
criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New
York Times.

Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram
file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. The
harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers,
went well beyond the two deaths.

In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by
interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by
military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by
little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.

In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female
interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate
detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner
being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of
his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic
bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy
to soften him up for questioning.

The Times obtained a copy of the file from a person involved in the
investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military's
response to the deaths.

Although incidents of prisoner abuse at Bagram in 2002, including some details
of the two men's deaths, have been previously reported, American officials have
characterized them as isolated problems that were thoroughly investigated. And
many of the officers and soldiers interviewed in the Dilawar investigation said
the large majority of detainees at Bagram were compliant and reasonably well
treated.

"What we have learned through the course of all these investigations is that
there were people who clearly violated anyone's standard for humane treatment,"
said the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita. "We're finding some cases
that were not close calls."

Yet the Bagram file includes ample testimony that harsh treatment by some
interrogators was routine and that guards could strike shackled detainees with
virtual impunity. Prisoners considered important or troublesome were also
handcuffed and chained to the ceilings and doors of their cells, sometimes for
long periods, an action Army prosecutors recently classified as criminal
assault.

Some of the mistreatment was quite obvious, the file suggests. Senior officers
frequently toured the detention center, and several of them acknowledged seeing
prisoners chained up for punishment or to deprive them of sleep. Shortly before
the two deaths, observers from the International Committee of the Red Cross
specifically complained to the military authorities at Bagram about the
shackling of prisoners in "fixed positions," documents show.

Even though military investigators learned soon after Mr. Dilawar's death that
he had been abused by at least two interrogators, the Army's criminal inquiry
moved slowly. Meanwhile, many of the Bagram interrogators, led by the same
operations officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in July
2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to a
high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that
were "remarkably similar" to those used at Bagram.

Last October, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command concluded that there was
probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted personnel with criminal
offenses in the Dilawar case ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and
involuntary manslaughter. Fifteen of the same soldiers were also cited for
probable criminal responsibility in the Habibullah case.

So far, only the seven soldiers have been charged, including four last week. No
one has been convicted in either death. Two Army interrogators were also
reprimanded, a military spokesman said. Most of those who could still face legal
action have denied wrongdoing, either in statements to investigators or in
comments to a reporter.

"The whole situation is unfair," Sgt. Selena M. Salcedo, a former Bagram
interrogator who was charged with assaulting Mr. Dilawar, dereliction of duty
and lying to investigators, said in a telephone interview. "It's all going to
come out when everything is said and done."

With most of the legal action pending, the story of abuses at Bagram remains
incomplete. But documents and interviews reveal a striking disparity between the
findings of Army investigators and what military officials said in the aftermath
of the deaths.

Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even
after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those
autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel
K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to
the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were "in accordance with
what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques."

The Interrogators

In the summer of 2002, the military detention center at Bagram, about 40 miles
north of Kabul, stood as a hulking reminder of the Americans' improvised hold
over Afghanistan.

Built by the Soviets as an aircraft machine shop for the operations base they
established after their intervention in the country in 1979, the building had
survived the ensuing wars as a battered relic - a long, squat, concrete block
with rusted metal sheets where the windows had once been.

Retrofitted with five large wire pens and a half dozen plywood isolation cells,
the building became the Bagram Collection Point, a clearinghouse for prisoners
captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The B.C.P., as soldiers called it,
typically held between 40 and 80 detainees while they were interrogated and
screened for possible shipment to the Pentagon's longer-term detention center at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The new interrogation unit that arrived in July 2002 had been improvised as
well. Captain Wood, then a 32-year-old lieutenant, came with 13 soldiers from
the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg, N.C.; six Arabic-speaking
reservists were added from the Utah National Guard.

Part of the new group, which was consolidated under Company A of the 519th
Military Intelligence Battalion, was made up of counterintelligence specialists
with no background in interrogation. Only two of the soldiers had ever
questioned actual prisoners.

What specialized training the unit received came on the job, in sessions with
two interrogators who had worked in the prison for a few months. "There was
nothing that prepared us for running an interrogation operation" like the one at
Bagram, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Staff
Sgt. Steven W. Loring, later told investigators.

Nor were the rules of engagement very clear. The platoon had the standard
interrogations guide, Army Field Manual 34-52, and an order from the secretary
of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, to treat prisoners "humanely," and when
possible, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But with President Bush's
final determination in February 2002 that the Conventions did not apply to the
conflict with Al Qaeda and that Taliban fighters would not be accorded the
rights of prisoners of war, the interrogators believed they "could deviate
slightly from the rules," said one of the Utah reservists, Sgt. James A. Leahy.

"There was the Geneva Conventions for enemy prisoners of war, but nothing for
terrorists," Sergeant Leahy told Army investigators. And the detainees, senior
intelligence officers said, were to be considered terrorists until proved
otherwise.

The deviations included the use of "safety positions" or "stress positions" that
would make the detainees uncomfortable but not necessarily hurt them - kneeling
on the ground, for instance, or sitting in a "chair" position against the
wall. The new platoon was also trained in sleep deprivation, which the previous
unit had generally limited to 24 hours or less, insisting that the interrogator
remain awake with the prisoner to avoid pushing the limits of humane treatment.

But as the 519th interrogators settled into their jobs, they set their own
procedures for sleep deprivation. They decided on 32 to 36 hours as the optimal
time to keep prisoners awake and eliminated the practice of staying up
themselves, one former interrogator, Eric LaHammer, said in an interview.

The interrogators worked from a menu of basic tactics to gain a prisoner's
cooperation, from the "friendly" approach, to good cop-bad cop routines, to the
threat of long-term imprisonment. But some less-experienced interrogators came
to rely on the method known in the military as "Fear Up Harsh," or what one
soldier referred to as "the screaming technique."

Sergeant Loring, then 27, tried with limited success to wean those interrogators
off that approach, which typically involved yelling and throwing
chairs. Mr. Leahy said the sergeant "put the brakes on when certain approaches
got out of hand." But he could also be dismissive of tactics he considered too
soft, several soldiers told investigators, and gave some of the most aggressive
interrogators wide latitude. (Efforts to locate Mr. Loring, who has left the
military, were unsuccessful.)

"We sometimes developed a rapport with detainees, and Sergeant Loring would sit
us down and remind us that these were evil people and talk about 9/11 and they
weren't our friends and could not be trusted," Mr. Leahy said.

Specialist Damien M. Corsetti, a tall, bearded interrogator sometimes called
"Monster" -he had the nickname tattooed in Italian across his stomach, other
soldiers said - was often chosen to intimidate new detainees. Specialist
Corsetti, they said, would glower and yell at the arrivals as they stood chained
to an overhead pole or lay face down on the floor of a holding room. (A military
police K-9 unit often brought growling dogs to walk among the new prisoners for
similar effect, documents show.)

"The other interrogators would use his reputation," said one interrogator,
Specialist Eric H. Barclais. "They would tell the detainee, 'If you don't
cooperate, we'll have to get Monster, and he won't be as nice.' " Another
soldier told investigators that Sergeant Loring lightheartedly referred to
Specialist Corsetti, then 23, as "the King of Torture."

A Saudi detainee who was interviewed by Army investigators last June at
Guantánamo said Specialist Corsetti had pulled out his penis during an
interrogation at Bagram, held it against the prisoner's face and threatened to
rape him, excerpts from the man's statement show.

Last fall, the investigators cited probable cause to charge Specialist Corsetti
with assault, maltreatment of a prisoner and indecent acts in the incident; he
has not been charged. At Abu Ghraib, he was also one of three members of the
519th who were fined and demoted for forcing an Iraqi woman to strip during
questioning, another interrogator said. A spokesman at Fort Bragg said
Specialist Corsetti would not comment.

In late August of 2002, the Bagram interrogators were joined by a new military
police unit that was assigned to guard the detainees. The soldiers, mostly
reservists from the 377th Military Police Company based in Cincinnati and
Bloomington, Ind., were similarly unprepared for their mission, members of the
unit said.

The company received basic lessons in handling prisoners at Fort Dix, N.J., and
some police and corrections officers in its ranks provided further
training. That instruction included an overview of "pressure-point control
tactics" and notably the "common peroneal strike" - a potentially disabling blow
to the side of the leg, just above the knee.

The M.P.'s said they were never told that peroneal strikes were not part of Army
doctrine. Nor did most of them hear one of the former police officers tell a
fellow soldier during the training that he would never use such strikes because
they would "tear up" a prisoner's legs.

But once in Afghanistan, members of the 377th found that the usual rules did not
seem to apply. The peroneal strike quickly became a basic weapon of the
M.P. arsenal. "That was kind of like an accepted thing; you could knee somebody
in the leg," former Sgt. Thomas V. Curtis told the investigators.

A few weeks into the company's tour, Specialist Jeremy M. Callaway overheard
another guard boasting about having beaten a detainee who had spit on
him. Specialist Callaway also told investigators that other soldiers had
congratulated the guard "for not taking any" from a detainee.

One captain nicknamed members of the Third Platoon "the Testosterone Gang."
Several were devout bodybuilders. Upon arriving in Afghanistan, a group of the
soldiers decorated their tent with a Confederate flag, one soldier said.

Some of the same M.P.'s took a particular interest in an emotionally disturbed
Afghan detainee who was known to eat his feces and mutilate himself with
concertina wire. The soldiers kneed the man repeatedly in the legs and, at one
point, chained him with his arms straight up in the air, Specialist Callaway
told investigators. They also nicknamed him "Timmy," after a disabled child in
the animated television series "South Park." One of the guards who beat the
prisoner also taught him to screech like the cartoon character, Specialist
Callaway said.

Eventually, the man was sent home.

The Defiant Detainee

The detainee known as Person Under Control No. 412 was a portly, well-groomed
Afghan named Habibullah. Some American officials identified him as "Mullah"
Habibullah, a brother of a former Taliban commander from the southern Afghan
province of Oruzgan.

He stood out from the scraggly guerrillas and villagers whom the Bagram
interrogators typically saw. "He had a piercing gaze and was very confident,"
the provost marshal in charge of the M.P.'s, Maj. Bobby R. Atwell, recalled.

Documents from the investigation suggest that Mr. Habibullah was captured by an
Afghan warlord on Nov. 28, 2002, and delivered to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives
two days later. His well-being at that point is a matter of dispute. The doctor
who examined him on arrival at Bagram reported him in good health. But the
intelligence operations chief, Lt. Col. John W. Loffert Jr., later told Army
investigators, "He was already in bad condition when he arrived."

What is clear is that Mr. Habibullah was identified at Bagram as an important
prisoner and an unusually sharp-tongued and insubordinate one.

One of the 377th's Third Platoon sergeants, Alan J. Driver Jr., told
investigators that Mr. Habibullah rose up after a rectal examination and kneed
him in the groin. The guard said he grabbed the prisoner by the head and yelled
in his face. Mr. Habibullah then "became combative," Sergeant Driver said, and
had to be subdued by three guards and led away in an armlock.

He was then confined in one of the 9-foot by 7-foot isolation cells, which the
M.P. commander, Capt. Christopher M. Beiring, later described as a standard
procedure. "There was a policy that detainees were hooded, shackled and isolated
for at least the first 24 hours, sometimes 72 hours of captivity," he told
investigators.

While the guards kept some prisoners awake by yelling or poking at them or
banging on their cell doors, Mr. Habibullah was shackled by the wrists to the
wire ceiling over his cell, soldiers said.

On his second day, Dec. 1, the prisoner was "uncooperative" again, this time
with Specialist Willie V. Brand. The guard, who has since been charged with
assault and other crimes, told investigators he had delivered three peroneal
strikes in response. The next day, Specialist Brand said, he had to knee the
prisoner again. Other blows followed.

A lawyer for Specialist Brand, John P. Galligan, said there was no criminal
intent by his client to hurt any detainee. "At the time, my client was acting
consistently with the standard operating procedure that was in place at the
Bagram facility."

The communication between Mr. Habibullah and his jailers appears to have been
almost exclusively physical. Despite repeated requests, the M.P.'s were assigned
no interpreters of their own. Instead, they borrowed from the interrogators when
they could and relied on prisoners who spoke even a little English to translate
for them.

When the detainees were beaten or kicked for "noncompliance," one of the
interpreters, Ali M. Baryalai said, it was often "because they have no idea what
the M.P. is saying."

By the morning of Dec. 2, witnesses told the investigators, Mr. Habibullah was
coughing and complaining of chest pains. He limped into the interrogation room
in shackles, his right leg stiff and his right foot swollen. The lead
interrogator, Sergeant Leahy, let him sit on the floor because he could not bend
his knees and sit in a chair.

The interpreter who was on hand, Ebrahim Baerde, said the interrogators had kept
their distance that day "because he was spitting up a lot of phlegm."

"They were laughing and making fun of him, saying it was 'gross' or 'nasty,' "
Mr. Baerde said.

Though battered, Mr. Habibullah was unbowed.

"Once they asked him if he wanted to spend the rest of his life in handcuffs,"
Mr. Baerde said. "His response was, 'Yes, don't they look good on me?' "

By Dec. 3, Mr. Habibullah's reputation for defiance seemed to make him an open
target. One M.P. said he had given him five peroneal strikes for being
"noncompliant and combative." Another gave him three or four more for being
"combative and noncompliant." Some guards later asserted that he had been hurt
trying to escape.

When Sgt. James P. Boland saw Mr. Habibullah on Dec. 3, he was in one of the
isolation cells, tethered to the ceiling by two sets of handcuffs and a chain
around his waist. His body was slumped forward, held up by the chains.

Sergeant Boland told the investigators he had entered the cell with two other
guards, Specialists Anthony M. Morden and Brian E. Cammack. (All three have been
charged with assault and other crimes.) One of them pulled off the prisoner's
black hood. His head was slumped to one side, his tongue sticking
out. Specialist Cammack said he had put some bread on Mr. Habibullah's
tongue. Another soldier put an apple in the prisoner's hand; it fell to the
floor.

When Specialist Cammack turned back toward the prisoner, he said in one
statement, Mr. Habibullah's spit hit his chest. Later, Specialist Cammack
acknowledged, "I'm not sure if he spit at me." But at the time, he exploded,
yelling, "Don't ever spit on me again!" and kneeing the prisoner sharply in the
thigh, "maybe a couple" of times. Mr. Habibullah's limp body swayed back and
forth in the chains.

When Sergeant Boland returned to the cell some 20 minutes later, he said,
Mr. Habibullah was not moving and had no pulse. Finally, the prisoner was
unchained and laid out on the floor of his cell.

The guard who Specialist Cammack said had counseled him back in New Jersey about
the dangers of peroneal strikes found him in the room where Mr. Habibullah lay,
his body already cold.

"Specialist Cammack appeared very distraught," Specialist William Bohl told an
investigator. The soldier "was running about the room hysterically."

An M.P. was sent to wake one of the medics.

"What are you getting me for?" the medic, Specialist Robert S. Melone,
responded, telling him to call an ambulance instead.

When another medic finally arrived, he found Mr. Habibullah on the floor, his
arms outstretched, his eyes and mouth open.

"It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared,"
the medic, Staff Sgt. Rodney D. Glass, recalled.

Not all of the guards were indifferent, their statements show. But if
Mr. Habibullah's death shocked some of them, it did not lead to major changes in
the detention center's operation.

Military police guards were assigned to be present during interrogations to help
prevent mistreatment. The provost marshal, Major Atwell, told investigators he
had already instructed the commander of the M.P. company, Captain Beiring, to
stop chaining prisoners to the ceiling. Others said they never received such an
order.

Senior officers later told investigators that they had been unaware of any
serious abuses at the B.C.P. But the first sergeant of the 377th, Betty
J. Jones, told investigators that the use of standing restraints, sleep
deprivation and peroneal strikes was readily apparent.

"Everyone that is anyone went through the facility at one time or another," she
said.

Major Atwell said the death "did not cause an enormous amount of concern 'cause
it appeared natural."

In fact, Mr. Habibullah's autopsy, completed on Dec. 8, showed bruises or
abrasions on his chest, arms and head. There were deep contusions on his calves,
knees and thighs. His left calf was marked by what appeared to have been the
sole of a boot.

His death was attributed to a blood clot, probably caused by the severe injuries
to his legs, which traveled to his heart and blocked the blood flow to his
lungs.

The Shy Detainee

On Dec. 5, one day after Mr. Habibullah died, Mr. Dilawar arrived at Bagram.

Four days before, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar
set out from his tiny village of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used
Toyota sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks earlier to drive as a
taxi.

Mr. Dilawar was not an adventurous man. He rarely went far from the stone
farmhouse he shared with his wife, young daughter and extended family. He never
attended school, relatives said, and had only one friend, Bacha Khel, with whom
he would sit in the wheat fields surrounding the village and talk.

"He was a shy man, a very simple man," his eldest brother, Shahpoor, said in an
interview.

On the day he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar's mother had asked him to gather his
three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the
holiday. But he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial
capital, Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares.

At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back toward Yakubi. On the way,
they passed a base used by American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the
target of a rocket attack that morning.

Militiamen loyal to the guerrilla commander guarding the base, Jan Baz Khan,
stopped the Toyota at a checkpoint. They confiscated a broken walkie-talkie from
one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers. In the trunk, they found an electric stabilizer
used to regulate current from a generator. (Mr. Dilawar's family said the
stabilizer was not theirs; at the time, they said, they had no electricity at
all.)

The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers at the base as
suspects in the attack. Mr. Dilawar and his passengers spent their first night
there handcuffed to a fence, so they would be unable to sleep. When a doctor
examined them the next morning, he said later, he found Mr. Dilawar tired and
suffering from headaches but otherwise fine.

Mr. Dilawar's three passengers were eventually flown to Guantánamo and held for
more than a year before being sent home without charge. In interviews after
their release, the men described their treatment at Bagram as far worse than at
Guantánamo. While all of them said they had been beaten, they complained most
bitterly of being stripped naked in front of female soldiers for showers and
medical examinations, which they said included the first of several painful and
humiliating rectal exams.

"They did lots and lots of bad things to me," said Abdur Rahim, a 26-year-old
baker from Khost. "I was shouting and crying, and no one was listening. When I
was shouting, the soldiers were slamming my head against the desk."

For Mr. Dilawar, his fellow prisoners said, the most difficult thing seemed to
be the black cloth hood that was pulled over his head. "He could not breathe,"
said a man called Parkhudin, who had been one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers.

Mr. Dilawar was a frail man, standing only 5 feet 9 inches and weighing 122
pounds. But at Bagram, he was quickly labeled one of the "noncompliant" ones.

When one of the First Platoon M.P.'s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to
Mr. Dilawar's cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face
and started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of
knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man.

"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was
crying out to his god," Specialist Jones said to investigators. "Everybody heard
him cry out and thought it was funny."

Other Third Platoon M.P.'s later came by the detention center and stopped at the
isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said.

It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this
detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he
said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100
strikes."

In a subsequent statement, Specialist Jones was vague about which M.P.'s had
delivered the blows. His estimate was never confirmed, but other guards
eventually admitted striking Mr. Dilawar repeatedly.

Many M.P.'s would eventually deny that they had any idea of Mr. Dilawar's
injuries, explaining that they never saw his legs beneath his jumpsuit. But
Specialist Jones recalled that the drawstring pants of Mr. Dilawar's orange
prison suit fell down again and again while he was shackled.

"I saw the bruise because his pants kept falling down while he was in standing
restraints," the soldier told investigators. "Over a certain time period, I
noticed it was the size of a fist."

As Mr. Dilawar grew desperate, he began crying out more loudly to be
released. But even the interpreters had trouble understanding his Pashto
dialect; the annoyed guards heard only noise.

"He had constantly been screaming, 'Release me; I don't want to be here,' and
things like that," said the one linguist who could decipher his distress, Abdul
Ahad Wardak.

The Interrogation

On Dec. 8, Mr. Dilawar was taken for his fourth interrogation. It quickly turned
hostile.

The 21-year-old lead interrogator, Specialist Glendale C. Walls II, later
contended that Mr. Dilawar was evasive. "Some holes came up, and we wanted him
to answer us truthfully," he said. The other interrogator, Sergeant Salcedo,
complained that the prisoner was smiling, not answering questions, and refusing
to stay kneeling on the ground or sitting against the wall.

The interpreter who was present, Ahmad Ahmadzai, recalled the encounter
differently to investigators.

The interrogators, Mr. Ahmadzai said, accused Mr. Dilawar of launching the
rockets that had hit the American base. He denied that. While kneeling on the
ground, he was unable to hold his cuffed hands above his head as instructed,
prompting Sergeant Salcedo to slap them back up whenever they began to drop.

"Selena berated him for being weak and questioned him about being a man, which
was very insulting because of his heritage," Mr. Ahmadzai said.

When Mr. Dilawar was unable to sit in the chair position against the wall
because of his battered legs, the two interrogators grabbed him by the shirt and
repeatedly shoved him back against the wall.

"This went on for 10 or 15 minutes," the interpreter said. "He was so tired he
couldn't get up."

"They stood him up, and at one point Selena stepped on his bare foot with her
boot and grabbed him by his beard and pulled him towards her," he went on. "Once
Selena kicked Dilawar in the groin, private areas, with her right foot. She was
standing some distance from him, and she stepped back and kicked him.

"About the first 10 minutes, I think, they were actually questioning him, after
that it was pushing, shoving, kicking and shouting at him," Mr. Ahmadzai
said. "There was no interrogation going on."

The session ended, he said, with Sergeant Salcedo instructing the M.P.'s to keep
Mr. Dilawar chained to the ceiling until the next shift came on.

The next morning, Mr. Dilawar began yelling again. At around noon, the M.P.'s
called over another of the interpreters, Mr. Baerde, to try to quiet Mr. Dilawar
down.

"I told him, 'Look, please, if you want to be able to sit down and be released
from shackles, you just need to be quiet for one more hour."

"He told me that if he was in shackles another hour, he would die," Mr. Baerde
said.

Half an hour later, Mr. Baerde returned to the cell. Mr. Dilawar's hands hung
limply from the cuffs, and his head, covered by the black hood, slumped forward.

"He wanted me to get a doctor, and said that he needed 'a shot,' " Mr. Baerde
recalled. "He said that he didn't feel good. He said that his legs were
hurting."

Mr. Baerde translated Mr. Dilawar's plea to one of the guards. The soldier took
the prisoner's hand and pressed down on his fingernails to check his
circulation.

"He's O.K.," Mr. Baerde quoted the M.P. as saying. "He's just trying to get out
of his restraints."

By the time Mr. Dilawar was brought in for his final interrogation in the first
hours of the next day, Dec. 10, he appeared exhausted and was babbling that his
wife had died. He also told the interrogators that he had been beaten by the
guards.

"But we didn't pursue that," said Mr. Baryalai, the interpreter.

Specialist Walls was again the lead interrogator. But his more aggressive
partner, Specialist Claus, quickly took over, Mr. Baryalai said.

"Josh had a rule that the detainee had to look at him, not me," the interpreter
told investigators. "He gave him three chances, and then he grabbed him by the
shirt and pulled him towards him, across the table, slamming his chest into the
table front."

When Mr. Dilawar was unable to kneel, the interpreter said, the interrogators
pulled him to his feet and pushed him against the wall. Told to assume a stress
position, the prisoner leaned his head against the wall and began to fall
asleep.

"It looked to me like Dilawar was trying to cooperate, but he couldn't
physically perform the tasks," Mr. Baryalai said.

Finally, Specialist Walls grabbed the prisoner and "shook him harshly," the
interpreter said, telling him that if he failed to cooperate, he would be
shipped to a prison in the United States, where he would be "treated like a
woman, by the other men" and face the wrath of criminals who "would be very
angry with anyone involved in the 9/11 attacks." (Specialist Walls was charged
last week with assault, maltreatment and failure to obey a lawful order;
Specialist Claus was charged with assault, maltreatment and lying to
investigators. Each man declined to comment.)

A third military intelligence specialist who spoke some Pashto, Staff
Sgt. W. Christopher Yonushonis, had questioned Mr. Dilawar earlier and had
arranged with Specialist Claus to take over when he was done. Instead, the
sergeant arrived at the interrogation room to find a large puddle of water on
the floor, a wet spot on Mr. Dilawar's shirt and Specialist Claus standing
behind the detainee, twisting up the back of the hood that covered the
prisoner's head.

"I had the impression that Josh was actually holding the detainee upright by
pulling on the hood," he said. "I was furious at this point because I had seen
Josh tighten the hood of another detainee the week before. This behavior seemed
completely gratuitous and unrelated to intelligence collection."

"What the hell happened with that water?" Sergeant Yonushonis said he had
demanded.

"We had to make sure he stayed hydrated," he said Specialist Claus had
responded.

The next morning, Sergeant Yonushonis went to the noncommissioned officer in
charge of the interrogators, Sergeant Loring, to report the
incident. Mr. Dilawar, however, was already dead.

The Post-Mortem

The findings of Mr. Dilawar's autopsy were succinct. He had had some coronary
artery disease, the medical examiner reported, but what caused his heart to fail
was "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities." Similar injuries
contributed to Mr. Habibullah's death.

One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for
Specialist Brand, saying the tissue in the young man's legs "had basically been
pulpified."

"I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus," added
Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the coroner, and a major at that time.

After the second death, several of the 519th Battalion's interrogators were
temporarily removed from their posts. A medic was assigned to the detention
center to work night shifts. On orders from the Bagram intelligence chief,
interrogators were prohibited from any physical contact with the
detainees. Chaining prisoners to any fixed object was also banned, and the use
of stress positions was curtailed.

In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla
commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been
detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno
himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to
win their trust, the military official said.

The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent home from Guantánamo in
March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed "no
threat" to American forces.

They were later visited by Mr. Dilawar's parents, who begged them to explain
what had happened to their son. But the men said they could not bring themselves
to recount the details.

"I told them he had a bed," said Mr. Parkhudin. "I said the Americans were very
nice because he had a heart problem."

In late August of last year, shortly before the Army completed its inquiry into
the deaths, Sergeant Yonushonis, who was stationed in Germany, went at his own
initiative to see an agent of the Criminal Investigation Command. Until then, he
had never been interviewed.

"I expected to be contacted at some point by investigators in this case," he
said. "I was living a few doors down from the interrogation room, and I had been
one of the last to see this detainee alive."

Sergeant Yonushonis described what he had witnessed of the detainee's last
interrogation. "I remember being so mad that I had trouble speaking," he said.

He also added a detail that had been overlooked in the investigative file. By
the time Mr. Dilawar was taken into his final interrogations, he said, "most of
us were convinced that the detainee was innocent."

Ruhallah Khapalwak, Carlotta Gall and David Rohde contributed reporting for this
article, and Alain Delaqueriere assisted with research.

-----------------------------------

GLOBE EDITORIAL
The torture line

May 21, 2005

BOTH INTERNATIONAL and US law are as clear about psychological torture of
prisoners as they are about physical torture: Thou shalt not do it. Yet US
documents and the International Committee of the Red Cross have detailed US use
of mock executions, extended isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, and
sexual humiliation as ways to break down prisoners from the Afghan and Iraqi
wars. This is in addition to physical abuse and the 26 deaths of detainees that
the Army has classified as confirmed or suspected homicides. The New York Times
yesterday drew on 2,000 pages of Army confidential files to describe the halting
criminal investigations of two brutal killings of Afghan detainees.

The Bush administration should spell out to interrogators and guards that
psychological torture, which can have devastating long-term effects, is beyond
the pale. It should also disavow all the confusing memos and orders from
officials that have authorized exceptions. It is in the oversight role of
Congress to investigate why these abuses occurred, how to keep them from
recurring, and who should be held accountable for them. If these practices are
not stopped and if abusers are not punished, the United States will invite
future mistreatment of US personnel when they are in enemies' hands.

A recent report by Physicians for Human Rights describing the abuse and the
administration's equivocating response was eclipsed by the furor over Newsweek
magazine's retraction of its report that a military document included an account
of US troops flushing a Koran in a toilet. The magazine report ignited riots in
Afghanistan in which at least 16 people died. Newsweek had based its report on a
source who turned out not to be reliable. The magazine deserves criticism for
this.

But the administration also deserves strong criticism for giving troops the
impression that they need not adhere to the Geneva Conventions or to antitorture
laws. The administration approach of loopholes and winks also ignores the strong
wording of the Army's rulebook for interrogation, Field Manual 34-52, which not
only states that psychological torture is illegal but that it is a ''poor
technique, as it yields unreliable results."

In spite of this, just last month a draft that Physicians for Human Rights
acquired of a new detainee operations doctrine states that rules of humane
treatment can be set aside for ''military necessity" in the case of ''enemy
combatants," the detainees often denied the more protected status of prisoners
of war. But the international and US antitorture laws allow no such
exemptions. Congress has an obligation to force the administration to abide by
rules of prisoner treatment that do not break the law, blacken the nation's
reputation, and jeopardize our own soldiers.

----------------------------

Passing the prison abuse buck
By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  July 15, 2005

AMERICA AGAIN parsed the treatment of prisoners from 9/11 and Iraq. A military
investigation of alleged abuses at Guantanamo Bay found that, yes, some
prisoners were physically and mentally roughed up under techniques approved by
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The most notable detainee was Mohamed
Qahtani, the alleged ''20th hijacker" of 9/11.

Yes, the military admits, Qahtani was led around on a dog leash and forced to do
dog tricks. Yes, he was forced to stand naked in front of female soldiers, wear
a bra, and wear a woman's thong panties on his head. Yes, he was forced to dance
with a male interrogator. Yes, he was told he was a homosexual and that his
mother and sister were whores. Yes, some other prisoners were treated in a
similar manner.

Yes, the military admits that this was ''abusive and degrading."

But, no, the military said it was not torture. Lieutenant General Randall
Schmidt told the Senate Armed Services Committee Wednesday that, overall,
''detention and interrogation operations were safe, secure, and humane."

Once again, the jobs of Rumsfeld and his superior military officers were safe
and secure, even though many of these ''humane" operations were shipped over to
the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where photographs of degrading abuse and a
prisoner on a leash caused an international scandal.

To this day, only grunts have gone to jail. The ''face" of abuse became a female
reservist, Lynndie England. The only senior military officer to be demoted was
Janis Karpinski.

Rumsfeld is still defense secretary, Alberto Gonzales, who mused that the Geneva
Conventions are quaint and obsolete, is the attorney general and a much-rumored
possibility for the Supreme Court. The former commander in Iraq, Ricardo
Sanchez, is under consideration for promotion by Rumsfeld to four-star general.

Sanchez's deputy commander, Major General Walter Wodjakowski, was promoted last
month to run the Army's infantry training school at Fort Benning. The former top
military lawyer in Baghdad, Colonel Marc Warren, has been nominated to be a
brigadier general. Major General Barbara Fast, Sanchez's top intelligence
official, was promoted to the command of the Army intelligence center in
Arizona. All of the military officers were exonerated by past investigations.

The very safety that these ''investigations" provided Rumsfeld and his officers
surely undermine security for the rest of us. The Iraq invasion had already
caused a massive loss of support for our foreign policy in the Arab world. A
Zogby International poll last year found that support for the invasion in
Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates ranged
between 1 and 4 percent. Overall support for President Bush's ''war on terror"
was no higher than 21 percent in any of those countries.

Yesterday, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a
global attitudes survey that found a dramatic drop in general support for
suicide bombings in defense of Islam. But even with that decline, support
remains at disconcerting levels for such bombings in Iraq against Americans and
other Westerners. Support is at 24 percent in Turkey, 26 percent in Indonesia,
29 percent in Pakistan, 49 percent in both Lebanon and Jordan, and 56 percent in
Morocco.

Some Muslim-majority countries such as Morocco and Indonesia have seen a sharp
drop in people who say they have some or a lot of confidence in Al Qaeda's
leader, Osama bin Laden. But confidence in bin Laden has actually increased in
Pakistan from 45 to 51 percent and in Jordan from 55 to 60 percent. While a
majority of women in Pakistan have a dim view of bin Laden, 65 percent of men
say they place some or a lot of confidence in him.

The Pew survey found a conundrum. A majority of Muslims in countries like
Morocco, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Turkey see Islamic extremism as being a threat
to their countries. But in some countries, such as Lebanon and Jordan, a
plurality of people blamed US policies and influence for that extremism. In last
year's Zogby poll of Arab attitudes, the most prominent response to an
open-ended question of what was the first thing someone thought of when they
hear the word ''America" was: ''unfair foreign policy."

Schmidt, to his minor credit, found the abuses at Guantanamo bad enough to
recommend a reprimand for its commander, Major General Geoffrey Miller. That
recommendation was overruled by General Bantz Craddock of the US Southern
Command. Craddock said Miller broke no laws. Once again, no one bears
responsibility for mistreatment of prisoners. This latest parsing is sure to add
more poison to our relations in the Arab world.

-----------------

US lawyers fought interrogation policy
3 say they filed complaints on 'torture' definition
By Josh White, Washington Post  |  July 15, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Three top military lawyers said yesterday that they have lodged
complaints about the Justice Department's definition of torture and how it would
be applied to interrogations of prisoners captured by US forces. It was the
first time they had publicly acknowledged that they had objected to the policy
as it was being developed in early 2003.

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the judge advocate generals -- or JAGs -- for the
Army, Air Force, and Marines said they had expressed their concerns as the
policy was being developed at the Pentagon in March and April 2003. Although
their letters to the Defense Department's general counsel are classified,
sources familiar with them said the lawyers worried that tough interrogation
tactics would not only contravene longstanding military doctrine -- leaving too
much room for interpretation by interrogators -- but also would cause public
outrage if the tactics became known.

''We did express opposition," said Major General Thomas Romig, the Army's top
lawyer. ''It was accepted in some cases, maybe not in all cases. It did modify
the proposed list of policies and procedures."

Senator Lindsay Graham, a South Carolina Republican who chaired the Armed
Services subcommittee hearing yesterday, voiced concern that the JAG objections
might have fallen on deaf ears and that the policy might have opened the door to
abuses at US detention facilities.

''If they had listened to you from the outset, we wouldn't have a lot of the
problems we've dealt with," Graham said.

While sources had discussed the nature of the JAG concerns to media members,
their viewpoints are classified.

In 2002, the State Department's legal adviser expressed concerns that the Bush
administration had ignored the Geneva Conventions in deciding how to treat
captured members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Because such captives have been categorized as ''enemy combatants" and not
prisoners of war, the administration has said the conditions of their detention
are not governed by the Geneva Conventions, though they would be treated
humanely.

A military investigation into allegations of abuse at Guantanamo Bay reported
this week that a number of specific interrogation tactics -- such as forced
nudity and the use of military working dogs -- were employed at Guantanamo Bay
to extract information from a so-called ''high-value" detainee. They were
considered authorized by the Army field manual and Defense Department guidance,
and were therefore not abusive. Identical tactics were later used at Iraq's Abu
Ghraib prison by military police officers who were not authorized to employ
them.

According to senators at the hearing yesterday who cited military investigations
into abuse, the JAG concerns ultimately were overruled by the general counsel's
office. A Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said yesterday their concerns
were weighed along with discussion from intelligence and policy officials.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and the ranking Democrat on the
committee, asked the JAGs whether they felt the tactics recently reported by
investigators were consistent with Geneva Convention prohibitions on
torture. Air Force Major General Jack Rives said he believed they were
inconsistent. Levin also asked the generals if they would want US prisoners of
war treated that way.

''No senator, we would not," Rives said.

Graham and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, argued that Congress
should legislate the definitions of enemy combatants and their official legal
status, as well as the process for adjudicating their cases. They said the
delays that have kept hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay without a single
prosecution need to end. The military is waiting on federal court decisions
about how to proceed.

A law enacted in 1994 bars torture by US military. But the Pentagon working
group's 2003 report, prepared under general counsel William J. Haynes II, said
''to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a
military campaign," a prohibition of torture ''must be construed as inapplicable
to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority."

Haynes, through Daniel Dell'Orto, principal deputy general counsel for the
Defense Department, wrote a memo March 17 that rescinded the working group's
report, and Dell'Orto confirmed that withdrawal at the hearing yesterday.

-------------------------------------

Put cleared detainees in a hotel, lawyer says
Fears of repression keep them on base
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  July 26, 2005

WASHINGTON -- In small bunkhouses surrounded by green fences at Guantanamo Bay,
16 Chinese and Uzbek Muslim men are approaching their fourth anniversary as
prisoners of America. They live like convicted criminals: confined to small
spaces far from their families and watched by guards.

But these 16 men are different from the other 510 prisoners at
Guantanamo. Months ago, a military tribunal looked at the evidence and decided
that they were not ''enemy combatants." They had just been in the wrong place at
the wrong time. Yet despite clearing them of terrorist suspicions, the US
government continues to keep them locked up in its prison.

The prisoners are stuck in limbo because the United States fears the governments
of China and Uzbekistan, which have a history of repressing Muslims, would kill
them if they were sent home, but no other country wants them.

Now, a Boston-based lawyer who is representing two of the Chinese Uighurs, as
their ethnic group is called, has come up with a startling proposal: move them
out of the prison and into a hotel.

In court papers declassified Friday, Attorney Sabin Willett asked a federal
judge to force the military to let his clients live among civilians and off-duty
soldiers on the vast military base, where they could move about freely in
unrestricted areas and have access to such luxuries as a shopping center, a
movie theater, and a McDonald's.

''Just because there is not yet a country to which the petitioners may be sent
does not mean that the only option is to incarcerate them indefinitely," Willett
wrote. ''They were brought to Cuba by the United States government against their
will. There is vastly more to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station than a prison,
and even if petitioners' stay must be prolonged for some period of time, there
is no reason to prolong their imprisonment there."

So far, the Pentagon has not shown any sign that it would be willing to allow
the detainees to live on the base. In addition to the 15 Uighurs and one Uzbek
who were cleared of being enemy combatants, there are two more stranded Uzbeks
who were deemed eligible for release because they no longer pose a threat.

Army Major Jeff Weir, a spokesman for the prison, said in a phone interview that
''safety and security" concerns would prevent moving the detainees out of the
secure zone and into the regular part of the base, where about 8,000 soldiers,
sailors, and civilians live, many with their families.

''They have been detained in here with some very bad people, under some very bad
influences," Weir said. ''We can't just release them into a hotel amongst the
civilians on the base. . . . We understand the point of what the lawyers are
saying, but it's an impossibility."

A Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Commander Alvin Plexico, said the government
would respond to the request in court. He also noted that the military has tried
to separate the stranded detainees from the rest of the inmate population,
housing them in communal bunkhouses with ''shared living and dining areas and
unlimited recreation time."

But Willett, the lawyer for two of the Uighurs, said it's still jail. And, he
told the court, ''the government itself . . . has acknowledged that there is no
lawful basis to imprison" his clients: Abu Bakker Qassim, 36, and A'del Abdu
Al-Hakim, 31.

Both men, he said, have wives and children back in their Uighur homeland in
China. Both told him they left their homes, fleeing Communist oppression, before
the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and met at a market in Kyrgystan.

They eventually moved on, hoping to find a way to Turkey, where they planned to
start a new life and send for their families. But they were arrested by
Pakistani police in late 2001 and turned over to the United States as suspected
Al Qaeda members, apparently in return for $5,000 bounties, he said. The United
States brought them to Guantanamo in mid-2002.

Weir, the prison spokesman, argued that even though the detainees were found by
the military tribunal not to have been part of Al Qaeda, they could be dangerous
for other reasons. Tribunal transcripts show that some Uighurs received weapons
training in Afghanistan to fight the Chinese government, though they testified
that they bore no ill will toward the United States.

Willett, who visited his clients this month, said he saw nothing ''that would
indicate the remotest interest in terrorism." America has locked them up without
justification for more than three years, he said, and putting them up at a hotel
now that the country knows it made a mistake is the least it could do.

Willett, a bankruptcy specialist, is among dozens of lawyers who have taken on
Guantanamo detainees at their own expense since June 2004, when the Supreme
Court ruled that the prisoners were entitled to challenge their designation as
enemy combatants.

Those lawsuits are all frozen while an appeals court decides whether the
military's tribunals -- in which detainees had no legal representation and were
not shown all the evidence against them -- were sufficient to satisfy the
Supreme Court's ruling.

But last week, Willett asked a judge to rule immediately on moving his clients
into a hotel. Ultimately, Willett said, if no other country will take them in,
the United States should grant them asylum as refugees from religious
persecution, though he has not made a formal request.

''Everybody can understand how a mistake might be made in the fog of war to
begin with," he said. ''It'd be a great thing if the executive could reach out
and show the good grace to try to correct such a mistake. I'm hopeful that might
happen."

-----------------------------------

Iraq warden testifies on dog use
By Associated Press  |  July 28, 2005

FORT MEADE, Md. -- The commander in charge of the Guantanamo Bay prison visited
Abu Ghraib in 2003 and recommended the use of military dogs during
interrogations, the former warden in Iraq testified yesterday at a hearing for
two Army dog-handlers accused of detainee abuse.

''We understood that he was sent over by the secretary of defense," Major David
Dinenna testified. He said teams of trainers were also sent to Abu Ghraib ''to
take these interrogation techniques, other techniques they learned at Guantanamo
Bay, and try to incorporate them in Iraq."

Dinenna's testimony follows assertions by the defense that using unmuzzled dogs
to terrify Abu Ghraib inmates was sanctioned high up the chain of command and
was not just by two rogue soldiers, as the government contends. Investigations
into detainee abuse have led to charges against several soldiers there. Defense
lawyers contended their clients were following orders.

---------------------------------------------

Detainee trials unfair, prosecutors alleged

August 1, 2005

Confidential electronic messages obtained by The New York Times indicate that
two senior prosecutors alleged that the trial system for four Guantanamo Bay
detainees had been secretly arranged to improve the chances of conviction and
keep from the defendants exculpatory material. One officer, US Air Force Captain
John Carr, wrote in an e-mail that the chief prosecutor had said the members of
the military commission that would try the first four defendants would be
''handpicked" to ensure convictions. The second officer, Major Robert Preston,
also of the Air Force, told the prosecutor's office he could not state the
proceedings would be ''full and fair" because he knew they were not. The Defense
Department said an investigation found the allegations were not substantiated.

--------------------------

US judge eyes moving 2 Guantanamo detainees
Could order them brought to him
By Charles Savage, Globe Staff  |  August 2, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A federal judge yesterday said that he may order the Bush
administration to bring two cleared but stranded Guantanamo Bay detainees to his
courtroom in the nation's capital, an extraordinary proposal that could enable
the men to leave the tight restrictions of the military prison in Cuba.

Alternatively, District Judge James Robertson said yesterday that he is
considering an order that would force the government to move them into a special
facility for migrants on the Navy base, where the US houses intercepted rafters
from Cuba and Haiti who have applied for asylum.

Though he's unlikely to decide for several weeks, Robertson could become the
first federal judge to order the military to discharge a detainee from the
prison, an unprecedented event at Guantanamo. The Supreme Court ruled last year
that detainees can sue the government to challenge their designation as ''enemy
combatants," but all cases have been stalled until an appeals court decides how
to handle them.

But the detainees before Robertson -- Abu Bakker Qassim, 36, and A'del Abdu
Al-Hakim, 31, both Muslims and ethnic Uighurs from China -- are different from
the other 500 Guantanamo prisoners. A military tribunal has found the men were
in the wrong place at the wrong time and ordered them released. But the men are
languishing at the prison because the United States cannot send them back to
China, which has a history of persecuting Muslims, and no other country will
take them.

Sabin Willett, a Boston-based lawyer who volunteered to aid the men, asked
Robertson to allow his clients to move from the prison to the civilian portion
of Guantanamo, a vast Navy base that has housing for some 8,000 troops and their
families as well as restaurants and a shopping center. Willett also suggested
the men could be released under supervision into the small community of American
Uighurs.

In any case, he argued, the US government has no legal justification to continue
their detention because the military itself acknowledged that they are not
combatants.

''They are not soldiers. They are not criminals. They are just Uighur people,"
Willett said. ''There might not be a more pro-US Muslim group in the world
because the Uighurs have traditionally suffered under the oppression of the
Communist Chinese. I can remember a time when we liked people like that."

The military, however, insists it must keep them in custody for ''safety and
security" reasons.

Robertson said housing the cleared detainees in barracks among off-duty soldiers
is ''a nonstarter," but he said he was intrigued by the idea of treating them
like migrants on the base, housing them where they would have more freedom but
remain under supervision.

Terry Henry, a Justice Department lawyer, said the Bush administration is
working to find a country willing to take the men, but their status is similar
to a situation at the end of World War II, where some prisoners of war had to
stay in prison camps for several years because of complications with
repatriating them.

''The executive power to make war includes the power to hold enemy combatants
and suspected enemy combatants," he said. ''That includes the authority to wind
up that detention in an orderly fashion."

But Robertson there was a key difference: Unlike the Uighurs, the German POWs
had fought against US forces.

Willett also asked the judge to grant his clients the right to use a telephone
so they could talk to their families and so he could communicate with them
without traveling to Cuba. Henry balked, saying other lawyers would demand the
same privilege.

But Robertson said that the problem would be solved if he had the Uighurs
brought to Washington, invoking a power of judges to order the state to produce
a prisoner in their courtrooms and justify their incarceration.

When he first visited his clients last month, Willett learned that the military
had ruled the men weren't combatants. He told the judge that the Bush
administration never informed him and had implied in court papers that the
detainees were ordinary enemy combatants.

Willett said Qassim and Hakim both left home before the attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, fleeing persecution in China. Pakistani police subsequently arrested them
and turned them over to the US military as Al Qaeda suspects -- apparently in
exchange for $5,000 bounties. The US transferred the men to Guantanamo.

The Boston Globe first wrote about their case last week. After it was published,
Willett said, Hakim's sister, who is now living in Sweden, called him in tears.

''A'del's sister told us she thought her brother was dead," Willett said. ''She
was right; these prisoners are dead to the outside world."

In a related development, several news organizations reported yesterday that
they had been given e-mails written last year by two military prosecutors who
were involved in planning for war crimes trials of Guantanamo detainees before a
military commission.

The prosecutors alleged that the trials had been rigged against defendants by
picking commission members who were certain to convict and by planning to
withhold evidence, for security reasons, that might help the detainees. But the
chief prosecutor called the criticisms false, and a military review backed his
decision.

The American Civil Liberties Union, a critic of the military trial system, said
the e-mails show the system is flawed.

''Clearly the concerns raised by these two confirm what we've been saying from
the beginning: [The Pentagon] rigged the system to render the result the Bush
administration wants," Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, told
the Associated Press.

----------------------------------------------------------------

WWII tale applied to Guantanamo case
Detainees' lawyer cites Boston story

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  August 12, 2005

WASHINGTON -- In 1944, months after Italy had surrendered to the Allies, life
improved for Italian prisoners of war detained at Camp McKay in South
Boston. They could not go home because World War II still raged, but the United
States stopped treating them as POWs.

They moved out of the prison, got jobs at the port, and attended Mass at
St. Leonard's Church in the North End.

Yesterday, the American government's handling of the Italian soldiers in Boston
was put before a federal judge in the case of cleared but stranded Chinese
detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Their Boston-based lawyer, Sabin Willett, cited the
all-but-forgotten slice of Boston history to bolster his argument that the Bush
administration should let his clients out of the prison.

''The situation of Italian prisoners of war during World War II is instructive,"
Willett told the court in a filing that was declassified yesterday. ''These
former enemy combatants were given increased freedom of movement among the
population.

''They held jobs and earned money. Particularly in US regions that had large
Italian-American communities, liberty became the norm."

Willett is representing several of a group of 15 Uighurs, as their ethnic group
is called, who are stranded in the prison despite being cleared for release. A
military tribunal determined they had not been Taliban or Al Qaeda
combatants. But the men cannot go home because the Chinese government has a
history of persecuting Muslims, and other countries won't take them.

The lawyer has asked a Washington judge, James Robertson, to order the military
to move the men out of the prison, saying the United States has no justification
to hold them. Willett suggested either letting them live in greater freedom
elsewhere on the Guantanamo Bay Navy Base, or bringing them to the United States
to live among Uighur-Americans.

A Justice Department lawyer has likened the Uighurs to former POWs who were not
immediately repatriated at the end of World War II. But in his new filing,
Willett questioned whether that analogy holds, citing the case of the Italians
in Boston.

After Italy surrendered to the Allies on Sept. 3, 1943, the former POWs moved
out of the stockade into better housing on Peddocks Island in Boston
Harbor. They would ride the ferry to jobs at the port, for which they were paid
partially in cash and partially in room and board. On their days off, they could
socialize in the city in groups of 10 to 25 with an Army sergeant chaperon.

Globe archives show that this treatment was somewhat controversial at the
time. A group of American veterans complained that the government was
''pampering" former enemies.

But military authorities rebuked them, saying they were trying to abide by the
Geneva Conventions in the hope that American POWs would also be treated well.

Many other Bostonians embraced their presence. On June 4, the Italians were
taken to St. Leonard's Church for Mass. Afterward, crowds cheered them as they
were driven through the North End. At the Hatch Shell, they stopped and sang an
Italian song called ''A Bouquet of Flowers," posed for pictures, played boccie,
and had a picnic, the Globe reported.

''Then as now, the North End of Boston has been home to large numbers of
Italian-Americans," Willett noted. ''It appears that the spirit of welcome among
the small group of Uighur expatriates in the District [of Columbia] and its
environs would be no less heartfelt."

In a court filing, the Bush administration argued that the judge cannot order
the Uighurs freed from the military prison because the commander-in-chief's
''power to detain a suspected enemy combatant necessarily includes the authority
to wind up that detention in an orderly fashion."

The administration also said that only executive branch immigration officials,
not judges, may issue a visa or parole an alien into the country.

The administration also argued that the judge should not order the military to
move the Uighurs to a less restrictive facility on the base. Brigadier General
Jay Hood, the commander of the Guantanamo prison, told the court that even
though the tribunal cleared the Uighurs of being enemy combatants, that didn't
mean ''the detainees are benign in every respect."

Hood also said that a separate wing of the prison was being retrofitted to house
the cleared detainees more comfortably. There, though still fenced in, they will
soon have air conditioning, a view of the sea, more food, a library of books and
magazines, a stereo, a television, and a DVD player. The general also said they
could make telephone calls to family.

But Willett said a few extra amenities are not enough to change the fact that
his clients are imprisoned. The Uighurs, he said, were never enemies of the
United States, and should be treated in the same spirit as the former Italian
POWs in Boston.

Robertson has not said when he will issue a ruling in the case.

--------------------------------------

Lawyers cite Guantanamo concessions
US said to be negotiating with prisoners
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  August 13, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The US military is negotiating with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay
prison and meeting some demands for improved living conditions -- including
bottled water at every meal, better food, and more access to books -- according
to two attorneys who separately learned of the development during recent visits
with inmate clients.

The concessions were prompted by a hunger strike last month that allegedly
resulted in dozens of detainees being hospitalized on intravenous fluids. To end
the protest, the military allowed six detainee representatives to gather
complaints and negotiate over living conditions with prison authorities, said
attorney Rob Kirsch, whose notes from a visit this week were declassified
yesterday.

''As a result of the hunger strike, a colonel . . . set up a committee which has
six prisoners on it that meets together," Kirsch said. ''They are from different
areas of the camp. They are allowed limited ability to speak to other
prisoners. They are allowed to meet for a few hours a week, and occasionally
should be meeting with the colonel."

Kirsch, who represents six Algerian detainees, said one of his clients was among
the group who negotiated with prison authorities, meeting for the first time on
Aug. 1, he said.

At that meeting, the military agreed to give each detainee three fresh bottles
of drinking water a day. Previously, inmates had access only to tap water that
was piped into sinks in their cells. The poor quality of water was a chief
complaint in the hunger strike.

''Because of the work of the committee and the promises made as of Aug. 1,
prisoners began receiving three bottles of bottled water each day -- one with
each meal -- compared to what they had previously gotten, which in some
instances was only one a month," Kirsch said, citing his notes. ''The fact that
they are getting three bottles of clean water is, we think, a significant
improvement over the horrible water they got before."

The prison command staff, responding to Globe questions in writing, said,
''There is no new committee formed by the detainees. Camp leadership routinely
receives and addresses concerns from detainees consistent with the spirit of the
Geneva Conventions."

The staff spokesman did not offer a response to the assertion that detainees are
now receiving three bottles of water per day for the first time. He wrote that
the prison staff is working ''to increase the selection of books in our library"
and ''is always working to improve the manner in which we provide safe and human
[sic] detention of enemy combatants."

But attorney David Remes, whose notes from a visit to his Yemeni clients at the
base last week were also declassified yesterday, confirmed Kirsch's account of
negotiations with detainee representatives. He said his clients, too, told him
that the military had promised the inmates better food and that they would no
longer be issued differently colored clothing to signify their treatment.

Under a system established by the command staff in 2003, detainees who cooperate
with guards and interrogators are allowed to wear white clothing, while those
who do not cooperate wear orange jumpsuits. In the recent negotiations, Remes
said the detainees asked for the dual-uniform to be dropped.

''Some detainee representatives were negotiating the resolution of the hunger
strike," Remes said. ''I can confirm the bottled water, the improvement of the
food, and the elimination of the uniform gradations as an independent matter. I
don't know if that means they will all end up wearing white, or if they will all
end up wearing olive gray, or something else."

The command staff, in its written response to the Globe, said: ''Detainees
continue to wear different colored clothing consistent with detainee compliance
of camp rules." The statement made no reference to any plans to change the
policy, and spokesmen declined to elaborate beyond the written response.

The improvement of conditions at Guantanamo Bay comes amid several other signs
that the Bush administration is changing its policy toward the roughly 500
prisoners at the prison, most of whom are approaching their fourth anniversary
of being held without trials.

In a court filing this week, Brigadier General Jay Hood, the commander of the
prison operation, said the military was planning improvements in the living
conditions for detainees who have been cleared to leave but cannot be sent home
for various reasons. Hood said they would soon live in a special wing of the
prison with air conditioning, better food, a television, and a DVD player.

Moreover, the State Department announced last week that it had finalized an
agreement with Afghanistan to transfer custody of more than 100 accused Taliban
prisoners as soon as a new prison is built. The administration said it is
negotiating with several countries and hopes to transfer custody of 80 percent
of the prison population within the year.

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice and a
critic of the Bush administration's Guantanamo policy, said allowing detainees
to have representatives to negotiate with prison authorities would bring
Guantanamo closer in line with a traditional prisoner-of-war camp under the
Geneva Conventions.

''It sounds more and more like a POW camp down there," Fidell said. ''I would
say that this is a sea change if it's true. And it would be very hard to roll it
back once the crisis of a mass hunger strike has passed. Expectations take
root. That's human nature."

That view was echoed by Mark Jacobson, who helped formulate Guantanamo policy at
the Pentagon from 2001 until 2003. Jacobson said allowing detainees to have
representatives would mark a major shift in how the military handles the prison
population.

He said such a move would hold the risk of allowing the detainees to organize
against their captors, but that it could also make them more compliant at a time
when many detainees may be moved around in preparation for transfers home.

-------------------------------

3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine

By ERIC SCHMITT
September 24, 2005

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 - Three former members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division
say soldiers in their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners in
2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse
themselves.

The new allegations, the first involving members of the elite 82nd Airborne, are
contained in a report by Human Rights Watch. The 30-page report does not
identify the troops, but one is Capt. Ian Fishback, who has presented some of
his allegations in letters this month to top aides of two senior Republicans on
the Senate Armed Services Committee, John W. Warner of Virginia, the chairman,
and John McCain of Arizona. Captain Fishback approached the Senators' offices
only after he tried to report the allegations to his superiors for 17 months,
the aides said. The aides also said they found the captain's accusations
credible enough to warrant investigation.

An Army spokesman, Paul Boyce, said Friday that Captain Fishback's allegations
first came to the Army's attention earlier this month, and that the Army had
opened a criminal investigation into the matter, focusing on the division's
First Brigade, 504th Parachute Infantry. The Army has begun speaking with
Captain Fishback, and is seeking the names of the two other soldiers.

In separate statements to the human rights organization, Captain Fishback and
two sergeants described systematic abuses of Iraqi prisoners, including
beatings, exposure to extremes of hot and cold, stacking in human pyramids and
sleep deprivation at Camp Mercury, a forward operating base near
Falluja. Falluja was the site of the major uprising against the American-led
occupation in April 2004. The report describes the soldiers' positions in the
unit, but not their names.

The abuses reportedly took place between September 2003 and April 2004, before
and during the investigations into the notorious misconduct at the Abu Ghraib
prison near Baghdad. Senior Pentagon officials initially sought to characterize
the scandal there as the work of a rogue group of military police soldiers on
the prison's night shift. Since then, the Army has opened more than 400
inquiries into detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, and punished 230 enlisted
soldiers and officers.

The trial of a soldier charged in an investigation into Abu Ghraib, Pfc. Lynndie
R. England, continued Friday in Fort Hood, Tex.

In the newest case, the human rights organization interviewed three soldiers:
one sergeant who said he was a guard and acknowledged abusing some prisoners at
the direction of military intelligence personnel; another sergeant who was an
infantry squad leader who said he had witnessed some detainees' being beaten;
and the captain who said he had seen several interrogations and received regular
reports from noncommissioned officers on the ill treatment of detainees.

In one incident, the Human Rights Watch report states, an off-duty cook broke a
detainee's leg with a metal baseball bat. Detainees were also stacked, fully
clothed, in human pyramids and forced to hold five-gallon water jugs with arms
outstretched or do jumping jacks until they passed out, the report says. "We
would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down,
kick dirt on them," one sergeant told Human Rights Watch researchers during one
of four interviews in July and August. "This happened every day."

The sergeant continued: "Some days we would just get bored, so we would have
everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid. This was before
Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did it for amusement."

He said he had acted under orders from military intelligence personnel to soften
up detainees, whom the unit called persons under control, or PUC's, to make them
more cooperative during formal interviews.

"They wanted intel," said the sergeant, an infantry fire-team leader who served
as a guard when no military police soldiers were available. "As long as no PUC's
came up dead, it happened." He added, "We kept it to broken arms and legs."

The soldiers told Human Rights Watch that while they were serving in
Afghanistan, they learned the stress techniques from watching Central
Intelligence Agency operatives interrogating prisoners.

Captain Fishback, who has served combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, gave
Human Rights Watch and Senate aides his long account only after his efforts to
report the abuses to his superiors were rebuffed or ignored over 17 months,
according to Senate aides and John Sifton, one of the Human Rights Watch
researchers who conducted the interviews. Moreover, Captain Fishback has
expressed frustration at his civilian and military leaders for not providing
clear guidelines for the proper treatment of prisoners.

In a Sept. 16 letter to the senators, Captain Fishback, wrote, "Despite my
efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership
about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees. I am certain
that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death
threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced
physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading
treatment."

Reached by telephone Friday night, Captain Fishback, who is currently in Special
Forces training at Fort Bragg, N.C., referred all questions to an Army
spokesman, adding only that, "I have a duty as an officer to do this through
certain channels, and I've attempted to do that."

The two sergeants, both of whom served in Afghanistan and Iraq, gave statements
to the human rights organization out of "regret" for what they had done
themselves at the direction of military intelligence personnel or witnessed but
did not report, Mr. Sifton said. They asked not to be identified, he said, out
of fear they could be prosecuted for their actions. They did not contact Senate
staff members, aides said.

One of the sergeants has left the Army, while the other is no longer with the
82nd, Mr. Sifton said. Both declined to talk to reporters, he said.

A spokeswoman for the 82nd Airborne, Maj. Amy Hannah, said the division's
inspector general was working closely with Army officials in Washington to
investigate the matter, including the captain's assertion that he tried to alert
his chain of command months ago.

John Ullyot, a spokesman for Senator Warner, said Captain Fishback had spoken by
telephone with a senior committee aide in the last 10 days, and that his
allegations were deemed credible enough that the aide recommended he report them
to his new unit's inspector general.

While they also witnessed some abuses at another forward base near the Iraqi
border with Syria, the three said most of the misconduct they witnessed took
place at Camp Mercury, where prisoners captured on the battlefield or in raids
were held for up to 72 hours before being released or transferred to Abu Ghraib.

Interrogators pressed guards to beat up prisoners, and one sergeant recalled
watching a particular interrogator who was a former Special Forces soldier
beating the detainee himself. "He would always say to us, 'You didn't see
anything, right?' " the sergeant said. "And we would always say, 'No, sergeant.'
"

One of the sergeants told Human Rights Watch that he had seen a soldier break
open a chemical light stick and beat the detainees with it. "That made them glow
in the dark, which was real funny, but it burned their eyes, and their skin was
irritated real bad," he said.

A second sergeant, identified as an infantry squad leader and interviewed twice
in August by Human Rights Watch, said, "As far as abuse goes, I saw hard
hitting." He also said he had witnessed how guards would force the detainees "to
physically exert themselves to the limit."

Some soldiers beat prisoners to vent their frustrations, one sergeant said,
recalling an instance when an off-duty cook showed up at the detention area and
ordered a prisoner to grab a metal pole and bend over. "He told him to bend over
and broke the guy's leg with a mini-Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat."

Even after the Abu Ghraib scandal became public, one of the sergeants said, the
abuses continued. "We still did it, but we were careful," he told the human
rights group.

-----------------------------------

Navy office contracted planes for CIA's terrorist 'renditions'

By Seth Hettena, Associated Press  |  September 25, 2005

SAN DIEGO -- A branch of the Navy secretly contracted for a 33-plane fleet that
included two Gulfstream jets reportedly used to fly terror suspects to countries
known to practice torture, according to documents obtained by the Associated
Press.

At least 10 US aviation companies were issued classified contracts in 2001 and
2002 by the obscure Navy Engineering Logistics Office for the ''occasional
airlift of USN [Navy] cargo worldwide," according to Defense Department
documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Two of the companies, Richmor Aviation Inc. and Premier Executive Transport
Services Inc., chartered luxury Gulfstreams that flew terror suspects captured
in Europe to Egypt, according to US and European media reports. Once there, they
were tortured, the men told relatives. Authorities in Italy and Sweden have
expressed outrage over flights they say were illegal and orchestrated by the US
government.

The Gulfstreams faced scrutiny in 2001, but what hasn't been disclosed is the
Navy's role in contracting planes involved in operations the CIA terms
''rendition" and what Italian prosecutors call kidnapping.

''A lot of us have been focusing on the role of the CIA, but also suspecting
that certain parts of the armed forces are involved," said Margaret
Satterthwaite, a New York University School of Law researcher who has
investigated renditions.

The Navy contracts involve more planes than previously reported -- other news
outlets said there were 26 planes; the AP identified 33.

Italian judges have issued arrest warrants for 19 purported CIA operatives who
allegedly snatched a Muslim cleric from Milan in 2003 and flew him to Cairo
aboard Richmor's Gulfstream IV, according to FAA records cited by the Chicago
Tribune. The jet belongs to a part-owner of the Boston Red Sox, who told The
Boston Globe that the team's logo was covered when the CIA leased the
plane. Another case involves two men taken from Sweden to Egypt in 2001 aboard
Premier's Gulfstream V.

Neither the CIA nor a Navy spokeswoman at the Pentagon would comment for this
story. Officials at the Navy Engineering Logistics Office in Arlington, Va., did
not respond to messages requesting comment.

Joseph P. Duenas, counsel for the logistics office, declined to provide the
contracts, saying they ''involve national security information that is
classified."

The secrecy surrounding the contracts makes it unclear why the logistics office
issued them, but one reason may be the office's anonymity -- some career Navy
officials have never heard of it.

John Hutson, a retired rear admiral who was the Navy's judge advocate general
from 1997 to 2000 and is critical of the Bush administration's detainee
policies, said he was not familiar with the office. Told of its activities,
Hutson said logistics office employees could be held liable if they knew the
planes would be used for renditions.

The office has been around since the mid-1970s, according to a former employee
who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the office's activities are
secret. The office operates under different names: it's also known as the Navy's
Office of Special Projects and its San Diego location is called the Navy
Regional Plant Equipment Office.

None of those names is listed in the US Government Manual, the official
compilation of federal departments, agencies, and offices. A man who answered
the phone at Navy Engineering Logistics' Arlington office refused to give his
name or the agency's address, suggesting it may be classified.

In court documents filed in the case of a fired Office of Special Projects
whistleblower, government lawyers described the agency's principal function as
''the conduct of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence activities."

---------------------------------------------

Judge rejects US stance on Guantanamo detainees
Prisoners given option of revealing their identities

By Larry Neumeister, Associated Press  |  September 27, 2005

NEW YORK -- A federal judge rejected a government argument yesterday that he was
interfering with the president's constitutional authority to wage war by
insisting that Guantanamo Bay detainees be asked whether they want their names
to be made public.

The government raised the objection after US District Judge Jed S. Rakoff last
month ordered the Defense Department to pose the question to detainees held at
the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.

The judge wrote that the argument was without merit and that it was offered
improperly after he had already rejected the government's other reasons for
insisting that the information not be released to The Associated Press.

In April, the AP filed a lawsuit asking for transcripts of 558 tribunals
conducted in the last year to give detainees a chance to challenge their
incarceration. The government released the documents but redacted facts about
each detainee's identity.

In his ruling last month, Rakoff noted that the government had argued the
identities should be kept secret to protect the privacy of the detainees rather
than for national security reasons.

The judge said each detainee could answer ''yes" or ''no" to the question of
whether he wanted his identity revealed.

In its new argument, the government said the ''questionnaire approach somehow
encroaches on the president's constitutional authority to wage war as commander
in chief," Rakoff said.

The government had argued that the question ''intrudes on the relationship
between the military and the captured enemy combatants."

The judge said the argument was ''wholly unpersuasive" and that the Supreme
Court had approved far more intrusive judicial involvement concerning detainees.

--------------------------------------------------

The buck stops with Lynndie

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist  |  September 28, 2005

LYNNDIE ENGLAND is convicted. Donald Rumsfeld cackles. England, the 22-year-old
private, was found guilty as prosecutors convinced an all-male Army jury that
she bore full responsibility for ''her own sick humor" in the infamous
photographs of her at Abu Ghraib holding a naked prisoner on a leash and smiling
as she pointed at a prisoner's genitals.

Defense lawyers depicted England as a depressed reservist, a mere file clerk who
was compliant to authority and easy to manipulate. The defense failed as a
prosecuting lawyer stained England for life with, ''What soldier wouldn't know
that's illegal?"

Off in much higher, more stainproof places, Rumsfeld behaved as if he were
carving President Bush into Mt. Rushmore. Last week, he serenaded the press
about how some of America's greatest moments were originally considered failure
or folly.

''Today, history records the brilliance of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address,"
Rumsfeld said. ''The Marshall Plan helped Europe recover. And Ronald Reagan's
tough line at Reykjavik -- according to the Soviets, anyway -- was the beginning
of the end of the Cold War. In thinking about Afghanistan and Iraq, we should
ask what history will say. . . . it will show . . . that America was on
freedom's side, and it will remember the millions of people who have been freed
and the hundreds of thousands of coalition forces who helped achieve that
freedom."

You would never know this was the Rumsfeld who said last year about Abu Ghraib,
''These events occurred on my watch. As secretary of defense, I am accountable
for them, and I take full responsibility."

The truth lay in the reaction to England's conviction by Richard Myers, the
outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He called it ''one more example
of holding people accountable, because that's who did it." He said, ''We had a
problem, and we dealt with the problem and dealt with it in an appropriate way."

A problem? When Abu Ghraib exploded into worldwide view last year, Bush said the
prison practices ''represent the actions of a few people. . . . it's important
for people to understand that in a democracy that there will be a full
investigation." Since then, the number of punishments handed out to lower-rung
soldiers in prisoner abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan has reached 230. The number
of inquiries has passed 400. Bush has blocked any calls for a full, independent
investigation.

Just last week came the news that Army Captain Ian Fishback and two sergeants
from the 82d Airborne Division wrote ranking members of the Senate Armed
Services Committee and told Human Rights Watch that they witnessed torture of
prisoners near Fallujah, Iraq, in 2003 and early 2004, with some of the same
tactics depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos.

In a letter to Senator John McCain, Fishback said he repeatedly asked superior
officers for guidance on handling detainees but ''despite my efforts, I have
been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership. . . . I am
certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including
death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme
forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation, and
degrading treatment."

The ''confusion" started at the top, where then-White House counsel and
now-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wrote the torture memo suggesting that the
United States need not follow international prisoner treatment laws. It
continued with Rumsfeld, who approved overly aggressive tactics at Guantanamo
Bay that were quickly adopted in Afghanistan and Iraq. It continued with Major
General Geoffrey Miller, who imported abusive tactics at Guantanamo Bay over to
Abu Ghraib. It continued with former Iraq commander Ricardo Sanchez, who moved
too slow on reports of abuse.

It is obvious that the administration wants the ''confusion" to
continue. Embarrassed by the continuing stench over detainee abuse, McCain,
Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner, and committee member
Lindsey Graham, all Republicans, proposed an amendment to the $491 billion
defense bill that would standardize treatment under the rules of the Army Field
Manual. Detainees would also be registered with the Red Cross to prevent
''ghost" prisoners. But Vice President Dick Cheney has been lobbying to kill the
amendment.

The same Myers who says ''a problem" was dealt with was in federal court last
month fighting the release of other photos of degrading treatment of Abu Ghraib
prisoners. Myers said if the photos were released, ''riots, violence and attacks
by insurgents will result." Of course, the more the White House stonewalls, the
more explosive the truth will be.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

----------------------------------------

Military tightens use of electronic media
Move follows alleged posting of gruesome photos from Iraq

By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff  |  September 29, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon has tightened guidelines governing the use of
photography, e-mail, Web logs, and other electronic media by US troops in Iraq
and Afghanistan, amid allegations that some soldiers snapped close-up
photographs of corpses in Iraq and posted them on a pornographic website.

Senior Army officials said yesterday that criminal investigators have not been
able to authenticate the photos or determine whether American troops snapped the
gruesome scenes of mutilated corpses and provided them to an adult website --
which would clearly be a violation of the code of conduct and possibly the
international laws of armed conflict.

The existence of the images was first reported in August by an Italian Web
blogger and then this week by a small San Francisco alternative newspaper, the
East Bay Express.

While no criminal inquiry has been opened, commanders are continuing to look
into the matter to determine whether any disciplinary action is called for,
officials said. The images provide little detail of the surroundings or easily
identifiable features, and without evidence of a crime the military at this
point can only pursue the case as one of possible conduct unbecoming of a
soldier -- grounds for a dishonorable discharge from the military.

However, to avoid such violations in the future, commanders have updated the
rules for using the Internet and other communications technologies such as
digital cameras, which have captured the brutal reality on the ground in Iraq
like perhaps no previous conflict.

A bulletin issued yesterday to US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan outlined new
''Internet security" guidelines. Among other things, the one-page memo warned
troops against posting ''any photographs on any websites."

''Some soldiers continue to post sensitive information on the Internet and
especially on their Web logs or online diaries," the bulletin said. Such
violations ''needlessly place lives at risk and degrade the effectiveness of our
operations."

The new guidelines were primarily designed to protect security of US military
operations, the Army explained yesterday, noting that the advent of personal
electronic communications has made it extremely difficult to keep a lock on the
details of military operations and other data that could be useful to potential
enemies.

The Pentagon has sought to provide soldiers with unprecedented access to
electronic media in order to communicate with loved ones in the United States
during their overseas tours. But such privileges have also been abused. In some
cases they have led to major public relations disasters for the United States in
the Muslim world, most notably when US prison guards at the infamous Abu Ghraib
prison captured on the film the abuse of Iraq prisoners in 2003 and 2004.

If authenticated, the latest allegations could prove to be another setback for
the Bush administration in the battle of images in the war on terrorism.

The photographs were allegedly posted by American troops on a pornographic
website in return for free access to the pornographic images. Among the images
are soldiers posing with a charred corpse, depictions of body parts, organs, and
mutilated corpses. One shows smiling soldiers standing over what appears to be a
badly burned corpse, with the caption ''Cooked Iraqi." Another appears to show a
bloody pulp where a driver's head used to be.

Army spokesman Paul Boyce said such photography by US troops would be
''unacceptable." But he said determining the authenticity of the photos may
prove extremely difficult because they were posted anonymously and it is not
clear where they were taken.

However, the operator of the website in question, Chris Wilson, has been
contacted ''and we're trying to sort it out," Boyce said. Wilson, who lives in
Florida, did not return several messages yesterday.

Meanwhile, President Bush warned yesterday that insurgent violence could rise in
Iraq in advance of the planned Oct. 15 referendum on a new Iraqi
constitution. After meeting in Washington yesterday with his top commanders in
Iraq, Generals John Abizaid and George Casey, Bush said that ''we can expect
[insurgents will] do everything in their power to try to stop the march of
freedom. And our troops are ready for it."

He also expressed new confidence in the ability of Iraqi security forces to take
on more responsibility in battling the insurgency.

''The growing size and increasing capability of the Iraqi security forces are
helping our coalition address the challenge we have faced since the beginning of
the war," Bush said.

However, Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, yesterday backed away from his
prediction that a substantial pullout of US troops could begin by next spring.

Casey repeatedly has said ''fairly substantial" troop withdrawals could happen
after parliamentary balloting in December, if the political process stayed on
track, if the insurgency did not expand, and if the training of Iraqi security
forces continued as planned.

After the commanders met with senators, reporters asked Casey whether he still
believed that to be the case, given current conditions in Iraq.

''I think right now we're in a period of a little greater uncertainty than when
I was asked that question back in July and March," Casey said. ''Until we're
done with this political process here with the referendum and the elections in
December, I think it's too soon to tell," Casey said.

Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com. Material from the Associated Press
was used in this report.

--------------------------

Iraq photos ordered released

By Larry Neumeister, Associated Press  |  September 30, 2005

NEW YORK -- A federal judge yesterday ordered the release of dozens more
pictures of prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib, rejecting government arguments
that the images would provoke terrorists and incite violence against US troops
in Iraq.

US District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said that terrorists ''do not need
pretexts for their barbarism" and that suppressing the pictures would amount to
submitting to blackmail.

''Our nation does not surrender to blackmail, and fear of blackmail is not a
legally sufficient argument to prevent us from performing a statutory command,"
he said. ''Indeed, the freedoms that we champion are as important to our success
in Iraq and Afghanistan as the guns and missiles with which our troops are
armed."

The photographs covered by yesterday's ruling were taken by a soldier. A
military policeman who saw them turned them over to the Army.

An appeal of Hellerstein's ruling is expected, which could delay release of the
pictures for months.

General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, said Thursday yesterday
that releasing the photos would hinder his work against terrorism.

------------------------------------------------

In New Book Ex-Chaplain at Guantánamo Tells of Abuses

By NEIL A. LEWIS
October 3, 2005

WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 - James J. Yee, a former Muslim chaplain at the Guantánamo
Bay detention center, says in a new book that military authorities knowingly
created an atmosphere in which guards would feel free to abuse prisoners.

Mr. Yee, 37, is a former Army captain and a West Point graduate who was arrested
and imprisoned in 2003 on suspicion of espionage. It was a case that, in the
end, proved groundless, to the embarrassment of the Pentagon.

Mr. Yee was ultimately deemed guilty of minor administrative charges involving
adultery and the presence of pornography on his computer, and given an honorable
discharge. But those convictions, too, were later dropped.

The book, "For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire," offers
Mr. Yee's first public comments on what occurred at the camp while he was there.

In the book, to be published this week by PublicAffairs, Mr. Yee writes that
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the prison's commanding officer - who would later
become Mr. Yee's chief antagonist in pressing suspicions of espionage against
him - regularly incited anger toward the prisoners with emotional slogans
delivered to the troops.

Mr. Yee writes that when General Miller visited the prison, he would tell the
guards sternly, "The war is on." That remark and similar comments, Mr. Yee
writes, were designed to let soldiers know they were operating in a combat
environment where it was understood that rules protecting detainees were relaxed
and instances of mistreatment would be overlooked.

"Soldiers know that when you are in combat there's considerable leniency in the
rules," Mr. Yee said in an interview, "and the leaders, including General
Miller, wanted to put them in that frame of mind."

He said that General Miller told him that he remained deeply angry over the loss
of military friends who were killed in the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11,
2001.

The general, who is now assigned to duty in the Pentagon, declined through a
spokesman to comment on the book.

Mr. Yee says the guards were constantly reminded of the Sept. 11 attacks by
General Miller and others, and they "retaliated in whatever way they could"
against the detainees.

"In some cases, punishment often meant physical force," he writes.

Mr. Yee describes how, to extract prisoners from their cells, soldiers used a
procedure known as "irfing": a team in heavy body armor, called an Immediate
Reaction Force, would physically subdue the prisoners and remove them from their
cells.

He writes that the irfing operations were sometimes needed to control unruly
prisoners, but "they were doing it so frequently, so regularly at Guantánamo
that I came to believe it was solely to rile the prisoners."

He says some prisoners were irfed because of such violations as having extra
plastic foam cups in their cells; the procedure would later be described as
necessary to "retrieve contraband."

The military has said repeatedly that incidents of abuse have occurred, but that
they are isolated and that all accusations are thoroughly investigated.

In the book, Mr. Yee writes that as he got to know prisoners through his
chaplain duties, he became increasingly certain that many were not the hardened
terrorists that the authorities had depicted them to be.

He says that while he was chaplain to about 600 detainees, the authorities
regularly arranged for him to meet reporters and Congressional visitors to
demonstrate the military's efforts to accommodate the inmates' religion. He came
to believe, however, that he was being exploited to present a false image about
the camp's atmosphere.

He writes that he rarely witnessed physical abuse of the sort that has since
become a point of contention between the military on one side and human rights
groups and defense lawyers on the other. But he says that in his tenure at
Guantánamo, he regularly heard about prisoners being beaten and humiliated in
their interrogation sessions.

He says he was told of the abuse by detainees and by Arabic-speaking translators
who were present at many of the interrogations. He writes that these accounts
were given to him months before similar accusations became public through press
reports and the disclosure of internal memorandums by agents of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation.

In the interview, Mr. Yee declined to discuss the details of the adultery and
pornography charges against him, except to say they were used to humiliate him
because the military was embarrassed over its handling of his case. He also does
not go into the details of the charges in his book.

Mr. Yee was reared as a Lutheran in New Jersey and graduated from West Point in
1990. He converted to Islam and left the Army in the early 1990's, returning
later as a chaplain. He now lives with his family in Olympia, Wash., where he is
studying for a doctorate in international relations.

----------------------------------

Senate Debates Treatment for Detainees

By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer

U.S. troops interrogating terrorism suspects don't know which techniques are
permitted and Congress owes it to them to establish clear standards, Senate
Republicans said Wednesday, opening a politically volatile debate over the
treatment of detainees.

The White House opposes legislation that would impose restrictions on the
Pentagon's detention, interrogation and prosecution of prisoners, arguing that
it would tie the president's hands in wartime.

Despite a veto threat, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.,
are trying to tack that legislation onto the $440 billion military spending
bill. Votes could come as early as Wednesday night.

McCain's amendment would ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
or punishment" against anyone in U.S. custody and require all U.S. troops to
follow procedures in the Army Field Manual when they detain and interrogate
suspects. Graham's amendment would define "enemy combatant" and put into law
procedures for prosecuting detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

"Confusion about the rules results in abuses in the field. We need a clear
consistent standard," McCain, a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, said on
the Senate floor.

Graham, an Air Force judge for 20 years, added: "We have let the troops down
when it comes to trying to give them guidance in very stressful situations."

Opposing the effort, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said that requiring all
U.S. troops to follow procedures in the Army manual is not practical in the
current war environment. "The techniques very upon the circumstances and the
physical location of people involved," he said.

Backed by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., McCain
and Graham offered the same proposals in the summer as the Senate worked on a
bill setting Pentagon policy. But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.,
scuttled that bill in part because of White House opposition to the detainee
proposals.

As they did before, Democrats also plan to continue to push their own proposal
that would establish an independent commission to investigate allegations of
prisoner abuse. The Pentagon already has done several of its own investigations
and argues that another would be redundant.

But Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Armed Services
Committee, said those reviews weren't thorough enough. "This is a rich target
for a true investigation," he said Wednesday. He accused the White House of
issuing a "false threat" to veto the bill over detainee amendments.

McCain, Graham and Warner decided that standards for handling detainees were
needed in light of allegations of mistreatment at the Navy's Guantanamo Bay
prison in Cuba and the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The high-profile Senate debate comes as fresh allegations of prisoner abuse
surface and support builds for Republican-sponsored amendments.

Since July, a list of retired generals and admirals backing the effort has
doubled from 14 to 28.

"It is now apparent that the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and
elsewhere took place in part because our men and women in uniform were given
ambiguous instructions," the retired officers said in a letter dated last
month. "Our service members were denied clear guidance, and left to take the
blame when things went wrong. They deserve better than that."

Last month, Human Rights Watch, a U.S. rights organization, reported that
soldiers in the Army's elite 82nd Airborne Division systematically tortured
Iraqi detainees in 2003 and 2004. The Pentagon says it's investigating.

Army Capt. Ian Fishback of the 82nd Airborne was one of the soldiers who claimed
that he had heard about widespread prisoner abuse while serving in Iraq. He was
on Capitol Hill this week to meet with senators, including McCain and Levin.

Last week, a federal judge in New York ordered the release of dozens more
pictures of prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib, rejecting government arguments
that the images would provoke terrorists and incite violence against U.S. troops
in Iraq.

-------------------------------

Senate supports setting interrogation limits
Amendment seeks rules on detainees

By Charles Babington and Shailagh Murray, Washington Post  |  October 6, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The Senate defied the White House yesterday by voting to set new
limits on interrogating detainees in Iraq and elsewhere, underscoring Congress's
growing concerns about reports of abuse of suspected terrorists and others in
military custody.

Forty-six Republicans joined 43 Democrats and one Independent in voting to
define and limit interrogation techniques that US troops may use against
terrorism suspects, the latest sign that alarm over treatment of prisoners in
the Middle East and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is widespread in both parties. The
White House had fought to prevent the restrictions, with Vice President Dick
Cheney visiting key Republicans in July and a spokesman yesterday repeating
President Bush's threat to veto the larger bill that the language is now
attached to -- a $440 billion military spending measure.

Senate GOP leaders had fended off the detainee language this summer, saying the
Congress should not constrain the executive branch's options. But last night, 89
senators sided with Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who led the
fight for the restrictions. McCain said military officers have implored Congress
for guidelines, adding that he mourns ''what we lose when by official policy or
by official negligence we allow, confuse, or encourage our soldiers to forget
that which is our greatest strength: that we are different and better than our
enemies."

The vote came hours after Senate Democratic leaders blasted Republicans for
canceling a classified briefing on antiterrorism matters by the director of
national intelligence, John Negroponte. Senate Democrats also sent Bush a letter
demanding more information about how he intends to succeed in Iraq.

The president, who defended his Iraq policies at a news conference Tuesday,
plans to deliver ''a significant speech on the war on terrorism" today,
spokesman Scott McClellan said. He said Bush will ''talk in unprecedented detail
about the nature of the enemy we face" and ''about our comprehensive strategy
for defeating" that enemy.

The Senate's 90-to-9 vote suggested a new boldness among Republicans to
challenge the White House on war policy. The amendment by McCain would establish
uniform standards for interrogating people detained by US military personnel,
prohibiting ''cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment.

McCain's allies included Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and
former military lawyer, and Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner,
Republican of Virginia. They said new standards are needed to clear up confusion
among US troops that may have led to the mistreatment alleged at the Navy's
Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq.

The military came under condemnation throughout the world two years ago upon the
release of photos showing US troops humiliating and terrifying inmates at Abu
Ghraib. Some low-ranking soldiers have been sentenced to prison for the abuse,
but many lawmakers and others said they continue to worry about tactics that
border on torture in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay.

In his closing speech, McCain said terrorists ''hold in contempt" international
conventions ''such as the Geneva Conventions and the treaty on torture."

''I know that," he said. ''But we're better than them, and we are the stronger
for our faith."

In its statement on the veto threat, the White House said the measure would
''restrict the president's authority to protect Americans effectively from
terrorist attack and bringing terrorists to justice."

But as new allegations of abuse surface, the number of McCain supporters appears
to be growing. McCain read a letter on the Senate floor from former secretary of
state Colin Powell, who endorsed the amendment and said it would help address
''the terrible public diplomacy crisis created by Abu Ghraib." Powell joins a
growing group of retired generals and admirals who attribute prison abuse to
''ambiguous instruction," as the officers wrote in a recent letter. They urged
restricting interrogation methods to those outlined in the US Army Field Manual
on Intelligence Interrogation.

Despite his victory last night, McCain has two major obstacles remaining: House
GOP leaders object to attaching it to a spending bill, and Bush could veto
it. But senior GOP Senate aides said they think the differences could be bridged
by tweaking the measure.

--------------------------------------------

Guantanamo medics accused of abusive force-feeding
Detainees' lawyers go before judge

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  October 15, 2005

WASHINGTON -- US military medics have attempted to dissuade Guantanamo Bay
detainees from continuing a hunger strike by forcing finger-thick feeding tubes
through their noses without painkillers, lawyers for the detainees told a
federal judge yesterday.

Military medics have also recycled dirty feeding tubes used on other prisoners,
the lawyers claimed, relaying what they were told by their clients. Calling the
alleged practices abusive, the attorneys asked US District Judge Gladys Kessler
to order the military to turn over their clients' medical records and to allow
an outside doctor to examine the detainees.

Terry Henry, an attorney for the Bush administration, called the allegations
''outrageous." He argued that the doctors at the base provide excellent care to
the prisoners, saying the allegations ''should be seen as story-telling,
exaggerations, misunderstandings, or miscomprehensions of what is going on."

But Kessler was skeptical, saying she found the accounts ''extraordinarily
disturbing."

''The allegations are very serious and certainly describe treatment that is
needlessly painful, abusive, and extremely inappropriate in terms of needlessly
causing further deterioration to the mental condition of the detainees," the
judge said, ordering the government to respond in writing to the allegations by
the middle of next week.

The abusive force-feeding claims revived attention to the issue of the medical
ethics of US military doctors serving in the war on terrorism. The New England
Journal of Medicine has run articles criticizing military doctors for allegedly
having allowed interrogators to read prisoners' medical records and for helping
interrogators determine the detainees' physical and psychological
vulnerabilities.

Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of
Pennsylvania, said yesterday that, if it is true that Guantanamo medics have
used unnecessarily harsh feeding tube techniques to punish prisoners on the
hunger strike, then they have committed ''a grave violation of medical ethics."

''Medicine is supposed to remain neutral," Caplan said. ''When you start to
become complicit in efforts to break resistance using medical expertise that
should be there simply to protect the health of people, you're headed down the
wrong track."

Henry said 24 prisoners at Guantanamo remain on a hunger strike, down from 107
at its height. Seven are hospitalized, and many of the rest, who are being held
in a special cellblock, are also being forcibly fed to keep them alive. The
detainees have been refusing to eat or drink since Aug. 8 in order to protest
their continued detention without trials.

Their hunger strike had prompted renewed interest in the military's medical
practices at Guantanamo. The International Committee for the Red Cross sent an
investigative team with a doctor from Switzerland to the base this week, Red
Cross spokesman Simon Schorno said yesterday. He declined to disclose their
findings, citing Red Cross policy.

In addition, the American Medical Association said yesterday that it is working
with the military to send representatives to the base in the next few weeks.

Other groups, including Physicians for Human Rights, have argued that it is
unethical for a doctor to force-feed a Guantanamo detainee who has chosen not to
eat, citing international medical standards that call for respecting a patient's
autonomy. The antiforce-feeding standard is endorsed by the American Medical
Association.

But lawyers for the detainees said yesterday that they have no quarrel with
force-feeding prisoners ''in a humane and a medically appropriate manner"
because their clients are in a deep depression.

''We do not believe that, in the situation they're in, they're competent to make
the decision to terminate their lives," said attorney Julia Tarver, who recently
visited several Saudi detainees who are refusing to eat or drink.

Lawyers for the government and the detainees also sparred over whether it is
standard medical practice for a doctor to administer a painkiller in order to
reduce the trauma of forcibly inserting the feeding tube. Both sides indicated
that the medics gave no such treatment to the detainees.

Zahid Bajwa, a Harvard Medical School professor who directs clinical pain
research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said the detainee lawyers are
correct. Even under the best of conditions, he said, physicians would always use
a local anesthetic or a sedative to reduce the pain of inserting a feeding tube.

''It is painful," Bajwa said. ''The standard of care is pretty clear in this
scenario. . . . They have to use painkillers or sedatives."

Detainee lawyers also asked Kessler yesterday to order the military to allow
more frequent attorney visits, as well as phone calls with family members who
would urge them to resume eating.

Henry argued that granting special privileges to the hunger strikers would be
logistically difficult and would only create a perverse incentive for more
hunger strikes.

---------------------------------

Man accused in Qaeda plot says Saudis tortured him

By Matthew Barakat, Associated Press  |  October 20, 2005

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- A man accused of joining Al Qaeda angrily testified yesterday
that he was whipped and tortured by Saudi interrogators who he said refused his
requests to contact the US Embassy.

Ahmed Omar Abu Ali testified at a pretrial hearing in federal court to determine
whether the confession he gave to the Saudis in June 2003 was coerced through
torture. ''I have never felt any pain like it in my life," Abu Ali said. ''They
were telling me to confess."

Abu Ali, 24, of Falls Church, was born in Houston and was the 1999 valedictorian
of an Islamic high school in Virginia. He is accused of joining Al Qaeda while
attending college in Saudi Arabia and planning several terrorist plots,
including assassinating President Bush. His trial is scheduled for later this
month.

If US District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee finds that Abu Ali was tortured, he could
dismiss the government's entire case. The trial is scheduled to begin Monday.

Prosecutors deny the torture allegations and say Abu Ali confessed willingly
after he was confronted with evidence obtained from another Al Qaeda member.

In a videotaped confession Abu Ali gave to the Saudis, he said he joined Al
Qaeda because he hated the United States for its support of Israel.

''I wasn't really cooperative at first. I said I would like to call the US
Embassy. I was denied that," Abu Ali testified, angrily smacking his hand on the
podium.

He said the Saudis told him, ''The embassy is not going to help you; you have to
help yourself."

---------------------------------------

US soldiers said to burn dead Taliban in TV footage

By Bradley Graham, Washington Post  |  October 20, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Australian television aired video yesterday showing US soldiers in
Afghanistan allegedly burning two dead Taliban fighters and using the charred
bodies in an attempt to taunt other enemy forces in the area.

According to an Australian photojournalist who reportedly witnessed the event,
the Taliban bodies were intentionally laid out on the ground to face Mecca, part
of what the broadcast described as a deliberate desecration of Muslim
beliefs. Two US soldiers, said to be specialists in psychological operations,
were pictured reciting propaganda messages aimed at Taliban fighters in
surrounding mountains, calling them too ''cowardly" to retrieve the bodies.

The broadcast prompted the US military to order an immediate criminal
investigation. Central Command, which oversees US military operations in the
region, issued a statement decrying any desecration of enemy combatants as
contrary to US policy and the Geneva Conventions.

''This command does not condone the mistreatment of enemy combatants or the
desecration of their religious and cultural beliefs," Major General Jason
Kamiya, the top US tactical commander in Afghanistan, said in a separate
statement. ''This alleged action is repugnant to our common values, is contrary
to our command's approved tactical operating procedures, and is not sanctioned
by this command."

At the Pentagon, several officials expressed concern privately that the alleged
incident could trigger violent protests in Afghanistan and elsewhere similar to
the riots that erupted in May after a Newsweek report, later retracted, said
guards at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a Koran
down a toilet.

The images, broadcast on the Australian program ''Dateline," were said to have
been shot early this month by Stephen DuPont while he was traveling with an
unidentified US military unit in in southern Afghanistan.

John Martinkus, a ''Dateline" journalist who narrated the broadcast, said the
two men whose bodies were burned had been killed the night before by US soldiers
during a fight near the village of Gonbaz.

------------------------------------------------------

C.I.A. to Avoid Charges in Most Prisoner Deaths

By DOUGLAS JEHL and TIM GOLDEN
October 23, 2005

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22 - Despite indications of C.I.A. involvement in the deaths of
at least four prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, C.I.A. employees now appear
likely to escape criminal charges in all but one of those incidents, according
to current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials.

Federal prosecutors reviewing cases of possible misconduct by C.I.A. employees
have recently notified lawyers that they do not intend to bring criminal charges
in several cases involving the handling of terrorism suspects and Iraqi
insurgents, the officials said.

Some of the cases are still technically under review by the Justice Department,
but the intelligence and law enforcement officials said they had been told that
the department was not preparing to bring charges against C.I.A. employees in
those cases.

The Justice Department has charged only one person linked to the C.I.A. with
wrongdoing in any of the cases: David A. Passaro, who was a contract worker, not
a C.I.A. officer. The details of the C.I.A. cases remain classified, as do the
Justice Department reviews.

But the prosecutors' decisions appear to reflect judgments that the C.I.A. was
far less culpable in the mistreatment of prisoners than was the military, where
dozens of soldiers have been convicted or accepted administrative punishment for
their actions in cases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The cases became public in April 2004, with reports about abuses at Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq and have led to the convictions of Pvt. Charles A. Graner Jr.,
Pfc. Lynndie R. England and other soldiers implicated in those episodes. The
decisions are based on reviews of eight dossiers referred to the Justice
Department by the C.I.A.'s inspector general, describing possible misconduct by
a half dozen to a dozen C.I.A. employees in the deaths and other cases.

A case still technically under review by the Justice Department, the officials
said, involves a high-profile episode in which a C.I.A. officer has been linked
to mistreatment of prisoners, in a case involving an Iraqi who died under
C.I.A. interrogation in a shower room at Abu Ghraib. But in another case,
involving the hypothermia death of an Afghan at a C.I.A.-run detention center
called the Salt Pit in Afghanistan in November 2002, the Justice Department has
signaled that it does not intend to bring charges.

A third episode studied within the C.I.A. involves a former Iraqi general who
died of asphyxiation after being stuffed head-first into a sleeping bag at the
base at an American base in Al Asad, in western Iraq, on Nov. 26, 2003, after
several days of interrogation. The questioning involved beatings by a group that
included at least one C.I.A. contract worker. One official said that case was
never referred to the Justice Department for prosecution.

Mr. Passaro is awaiting trial in North Carolina in connection with his role in a
fourth case, involving the death of a prisoner in Afghanistan in June 2003.

It was not previously known that the C.I.A. had sent eight dossiers to the
Justice Department. An article by The New York Times in February said only that
the C.I.A. inspector general had made at least two such referrals, asking that
the Justice Department review the cases for possible prosecution.

All of the cases have been reviewed by the C.I.A. inspector general, and in at
least two of the cases - the deaths at the Salt Pit and Abu Ghraib - the
individuals could still face punishment by internal accountability review
boards, which could be convened at the discretion of Porter J. Goss, director of
the agency.

C.I.A. officials have expressed deep unease over the possibility that career
officers could be prosecuted or punished administratively for their conduct
during interrogations and detentions of terrorism suspects.

Most of the Justice Department reviews have been handled by federal prosecutors
in the Eastern District of Virginia, law enforcement officials said. But they
said officials at Justice Department headquarters in Washington had taken part
in the decisions not to prosecute some of the cases.

The details remain classified, and the current and former law enforcement and
intelligence officials who described the status of the cases declined to discuss
them in detail. The officials came from several intelligence, law enforcement
and military agencies.

They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to speak
publicly about matters still under investigation. They would not say exactly how
many C.I.A. employees were named in the reports or how many cases of possible
abuse were described in the eight dossiers.

In a classified report this summer, the Senate Intelligence Committee expressed
concern about what it called shortcomings in the C.I.A.'s handling of prisoners,
government officials briefed on the document said. An unclassified section said
Mr. Goss had carried out only 5 of 10 recommendations made last year in a
classified report by the C.I.A. inspector general.

The Justice Department has also been reviewing cases involving possible
misconduct by Defense Department contractors in the handling of prisoners. A
Justice Department official said the department had assigned a team of lawyers
to conduct criminal investigations of abuse cases involving the deaths of
detainees.

The team has traveled to the Middle East and elsewhere to investigate, the
official said, while declining to discuss how many people were subjects of the
inquiries, the precise nature of the accusations against them and how many
inquiries had been closed.

"There is a team that is dedicated to actively investigating these types of
cases," the Justice Department official said. "We expect that these cases will
move forward. In some cases, it appears there is insufficient evidence to move
forward."

The cases cited in the eight dossiers include the hypothermia death of the
prisoner in Afghanistan in November 2002 at a site nominally under Afghan
control, in a case first reported by The Washington Post; the death of Manadel
al-Jamadi on Nov. 24, 2003, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where he had been
taken after his capture by members of the Navy Seals, but was imprisoned in
C.I.A. custody; and the asphyxiation of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush. He died
in the sleeping bag at a base in western Iraq on Nov. 26, 2003, after several
days of interrogation that included at least one C.I.A. officer.

Mr. Jamadi's death was among the most notorious of the incidents at Abu Ghraib
that became public in the spring of 2004, in part because his body was
photographed wrapped in plastic and packed in ice. He died after being beaten by
commandos of the Navy Seals who struck him in the head with rifle butts and then
turned him over to C.I.A. interrogators at Abu Ghraib.

A lieutenant in the Navy Seals was acquitted in May of striking Mr. Jamadi and
failing to restrain his men from hitting Mr. Jamadi. The lieutenant, Andrew
K. Ledford, remains the only person to have been prosecuted in that death.

Eight members of the Seals and a sailor who served under him, received
administrative punishments for abusing Mr. Jamadi and other detainees.

Former intelligence officials have said that questions remain about the role of
a C.I.A. officer and a contract interrogator who had taken custody of Mr. Jamadi
and were questioning him in the shower room at Abu Ghraib when he
died. Mr. Jamadi was found with his hands bound behind his back and shackled to
a barred window. Mr. Jamadi had not been examined by a physician when he was
brought to Abu Ghraib, because the C.I.A. officers had circumvented normal
procedures of registering his presence as a prisoner.

An intelligence official briefed on the case said it was clear that the
C.I.A. officers and members of the Navy Seals team bore some responsibility for
the prisoner's death, but that the legal culpability of each was difficult to
untangle. A government official who reviewed a coroner's report said evidence
suggested that Mr. Jamadi's broken ribs - apparently sustained in beatings by
the Navy Seals - contributed to his death.

"It may have been too hard a case to prove," said the intelligence official,
referring to possible criminal charges against the C.I.A. employees. "He was in
de facto agency custody, but he was in a military prison. They could see that he
was injured, but they maybe didn't know he was so injured. If he had had a
medical examination they would have known. But they didn't do one."

Four soldiers are awaiting trial in military court in Colorado in the case of
General Mowhoush. Testimony presented in a pretrial hearing at Fort Carson,
Colo., indicated that General Mowhoush had been beaten with a piece of
insulating rubber, by a team that included a C.I.A. contract worker, and that
his interrogators had, on at least one occasion, piled onto his chest, before he
suffocated in the sleeping bag.

In the case from Afghanistan from 2002, a young C.I.A. officer who ran the
detention center had ordered that the prisoner be left out in the cold, one
intelligence official said, confirming the account in The Washington Post. The
prisoner was stripped and dragged outside by Afghan guards at what was
technically an Afghan-run detention center, they said.

The intelligence official described the death as a case of "negligent homicide,"
but said the legal culpability the of C.I.A. officer who ran the center was less
clear-cut, because there was no way to prove that Afghan guards had not abused
the prisoner during the night.

David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

-----------------------------------------------

We Don't Want a Hanoi Hilton

By Richard Cohen
Thursday, October 27, 2005; A27

Five years ago I went to Vietnam with Sen. John McCain. We went to the so-called
Hanoi Hilton, the jail where American POWs were kept and where McCain spent much
of his 5 1/2 years in captivity, most of the time being brutalized, some of the
time being tortured. It was a dark, fetid place where waves of claustrophobia
washed over me, and I wanted to flee, as McCain could not have done. "Nice
place, huh?" he said to me as we left. For the stoical McCain, that amounted to
a primordial scream.

I watched McCain closely that day. I know only a few people who were tortured,
and never had I accompanied any of them back to where they were put through so
much pain. McCain is not a let-it-all-hang-out sort of guy. He does not weep on
cue or choke for the cameras. But he does resolve. Somewhere along the way, he
apparently resolved that what happened to him should not happen to anyone else
-- especially at the hands of Americans.

So McCain's amendment, added to a $440 billion military spending bill, would ban
the U.S. military and other government agencies -- the CIA, for instance -- from
engaging in "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of detainees. The Senate
approved the amendment 90 to 9. Whatever it meant to 89 of the senators, to
McCain it was simply a matter of doing to others what he would have wanted done
unto him. It is, in that sense, a very old idea.

Stunningly, George W. Bush has threatened to veto this measure. Bush has vetoed
not one bill in all of his presidency but would, he says, veto this one. The
threat borders on the preposterous, or maybe the idiotic, because it is hard to
imagine any president vetoing a measure that forbids torture, given the black
eye that the United States has received over the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison
outside Baghdad. After that, Bush would have to issue his veto in the middle of
the night and have it recorded in invisible ink. I'd leave it to Karen Hughes to
explain it to the Islamic world.

It's worth noting that the very conservative Sen. Lindsey Graham supports McCain
in this effort. Graham was a judge in the Air Force. It is worth noting, too,
that Sen. John Warner also supports McCain. He was once secretary of the Navy
and is a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War. Colin Powell also
supports this amendment. He was once just about everything, including a combat
Army officer. As you can see, McCain has not assembled a group of bleeding-heart
liberals, as the insulting caricature goes. His coalition is virtually America
in miniature.

The administration says the amendment would shackle American
intelligence-gathering. Indeed it would. That's the whole idea. But while some
interrogators might be inhibited, they would not necessarily be impeded in their
work. The apparent utility of ugly interrogation procedures can often be a
chimera. Put a man in enough pain and he'll tell you anything -- anything you
want to hear, that is. More important, putting such extreme measures out of
bounds provides every American with guidelines. They sure could have used some
at Abu Ghraib.

Vice President Cheney, the administration's point man in its effort to defeat or
water down the McCain amendment, is seeking an exception for the CIA. This makes
no sense, because the military could merely turn over a detainee to the CIA and,
anyway, when you think about it, even CIA agents are Americans. In other words,
they too ought to be bound by an American ethic: There are some things we will
not do.

President Bush is infected with a Frank Hague complex. Hague was the longtime
(1917-47) mayor and political boss of Jersey City, who supposedly waved aside an
inconvenient statute by proclaiming, "I am the law!" Bush has done something
similar, trashing the Geneva Conventions and asserting the government's right to
jail anyone for any time for any reason -- as long as national security is at
stake. The many laws and precedents that limit government authority do not, Bush
insists, limit him. He is, as always, a firm believer in what he believes.

But this is no time for tautologies. The experience that McCain brings to the
question of torture has to be respected. If not, it is appallingly conceivable
that someday someone could take the press to a spot and say that here -- here in
this dark and fetid place -- is where he was cruelly abused by Americans. We
would all be degraded by that.

------------------------------------------

CIA allegedly has secret prisons
Soviet-era facility said to hold Qaeda suspects

By Dana Priest, The Washington Post  |  November 2, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most
important Al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe,
according to US and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly
four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries,
including Thailand, Afghanistan, and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as
well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to
current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's
unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign
intelligence services and on keeping even basic information about the system
secret from the public, foreign officials, and nearly all members of Congress
charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as ''black sites"
in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department, and congressional documents
-- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually,
only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of
the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer
questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are
held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what
interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about
whether they should be detained or for how long.

The Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony
about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu
Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, but the CIA has not acknowledged the
existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program,
could open the US government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign
courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the
US military, which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of
Congress, have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments, and human
rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month,
when Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA Director Porter Goss asked Congress to
exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would
bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in US custody.

Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence
officials defend the agency's approach and say the defense of the country
requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected
terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the US
legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at
Guantanamo Bay.

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European
countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior US
officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism
efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible
terrorist retaliation.

The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first
months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a
second strike was imminent.

-------------------------------------------------

Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us

By M. GREGG BLOCHE and JONATHAN H. MARKS
November 14, 2005

Washington --- How did American interrogation tactics after 9/11 come to include
abuse rising to the level of torture? Much has been said about the illegality of
these tactics, but the strategic error that led to their adoption has been
overlooked.

The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red Army
methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were ineffective. For
Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force
compliance to the point of false confession.

Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of
intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Pentagon officials
turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for
torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for
Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and
Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train
American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE's teachings on their head, mining the
program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June
2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James
T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a
list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees. General Hill had
sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation,
stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees' phobias -
to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in
December 2002.

Some within the Pentagon warned that these tactics constituted torture, but a
top adviser to Secretary Rumsfeld justified them by pointing to their use in
SERE training, a senior Pentagon official told us last month.

When internal F.B.I. e-mail messages critical of these methods were made public
earlier this year, references to SERE were redacted. But we've obtained a
less-redacted version of an e-mail exchange among F.B.I. officials, who refer to
the methods as "SERE techniques." We also learned from a Pentagon official that
the SERE program's chief psychologist, Col. Morgan Banks, issued guidance in
early 2003 for the "behavioral science consultants" who helped to devise
Guantánamo's interrogation strategy (we've been unable to learn the content of
that guidance).

SERE methods are classified, but the program's principles are known. It sought
to recreate the brutal conditions American prisoners of war experienced in Korea
and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators forced false confessions from some
detainees, and broke the spirits of many more, through Pavlovian and other
conditioning. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, painful body positions and
punitive control over life's most intimate functions produced overwhelming
stress in these prisoners. Stress led in turn to despair, uncontrollable anxiety
and a collapse of self-esteem. Sometimes hallucinations and delusions
ensued. Prisoners who had been through this treatment became pliable and craved
companionship, easing the way for captors to obtain the "confessions" they
sought.

SERE, as originally envisioned, inoculates American soldiers against these
techniques. Its psychologists create mock prison regimens to study the effects
of various tactics and identify the coping styles most likely to withstand
them. At Guantánamo, SERE-trained mental health professionals applied this
knowledge to detainees, working with guards and medical personnel to uncover
resistant prisoners' vulnerabilities. "We know if you've been despondent; we
know if you've been homesick," General Hill said. "That is given to
interrogators and that helps the interrogators" make their plans.

Within the SERE program, abuse is carefully controlled, with the goal of
teaching trainees to cope. But under combat conditions, brutal tactics can't be
dispassionately "dosed." Fear, fury and loyalty to fellow soldiers facing mortal
danger make limits almost impossible to sustain.

By bringing SERE tactics and the Guantánamo model onto the battlefield, the
Pentagon opened a Pandora's box of potential abuse. On Nov. 26, 2003, for
example, an Iraqi major general, Abed Hamed Mowhoush, was forced into a sleeping
bag, then asphyxiated by his American interrogators. We've obtained a memorandum
from one of these interrogators - a former SERE trainer - who cites command
authorization of "stress positions" as justification for using what he called
"the sleeping bag technique."

"A cord," he explained, "was used to limit movement within the bag and help
bring on claustrophobic conditions." In SERE, he said, this was called close
confinement and could be "very effective." Those who squirmed or screamed in the
sleeping bag, he said, were "allowed out as soon as they start to provide
information."

Three soldiers have been ordered to stand trial on murder charges in General
Mowhoush's death. Yet the Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains
resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America's image. That's
because the techniques designed by communist interrogators were created to
control a prisoner's will rather than to extract useful intelligence.

A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red
Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model's embrace by
the Pentagon's civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to
torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After
the shock of 9/11 - when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that
suddenly seemed terrifying - this policy had visceral appeal. But it's the task
of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush
administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that
Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.

M. Gregg Bloche is a law professor at Georgetown University and a visiting
fellow at the Brookings Institution. Jonathan H. Marks, a barrister in London,
is a bioethics fellow at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins.

------------------------------------------------------

Detainee's Lawyer Says Captors Foment Mistrust

By NEIL A. LEWIS
December 7, 2005

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is a bioethics fellow at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins.

------------------------------------------------------

Detainee's Lawyer Says Captors Foment Mistrust

By NEIL A. LEWIS
December 7, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 - A lawyer for a Guantánamo Bay detainee facing war crimes
charges before a military commission said in a court filing on Tuesday that the
military authorities had been ignoring a court order and undermining the
prisoner's confidence in his lawyers.

The Guantánamo authorities violated a court order by moving a prisoner from the
general population there and placing him in close contact with a hard-core
operative for Al Qaeda known for urging detainees to refuse to cooperate with
their lawyers, according to papers filed with the United States District Court
here by Lt. Cmdr. Charles D. Swift.

Commander Swift represents the detainee, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni whom the
government describes as having been a driver for Osama bin Laden.

Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to consider Mr. Hamdan's challenge to the
system of military commissions. As a result, his trial has been postponed
indefinitely.

But Commander Swift said he learned that just weeks after the Supreme Court's
decision, Mr. Hamdan had been "plucked out of the general prison population and
put in a special unit for people who are facing trials before a military
commission."

In addition, he said Mr. Hamdan's requests to get word to his lawyer were
ignored for two weeks.

"I tell him we're going to the Supreme Court, and three weeks later he's yanked
out of the general prison population and told he's going before a commission,"
Commander Swift said in an interview. "He's got to be wondering if his attorney
is lying to him."

Commander Swift said that in November 2004, a federal judge ordered the
authorities to return Mr. Hamdan to the general prison population for his mental
health, which was deteriorating. Instead, he said, Mr. Hamdan is now in
semi-isolation and placed next to Ali Hamaz Ahmed Sulayman al-Bahlul, who was
described in court papers as someone "known among prisoners and by the camp
authorities to actively oppose cooperation with defense counsel."

Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, the spokesman for the command at Guantánamo, said
officials would not comment on any individual detainee.

Commander Swift said the treatment of Mr. Hamdan should be seen against the
background of a battle between factions of inmates at Guantánamo. Members of one
group, he said, "think the best they can do is refuse to cooperate and be
martyrs." The other faction, he said, retains a tenuous faith in the system and
the rule of law.

He said it was very difficult for lawyers to convince detainees that they were
working faithfully on their behalf and that using the legal system might result
in their freedom.

--------------------------------------------

U.S. Rebuffs Red Cross Request for Access to Detainees Held in Secret

By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
December 10, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 - The United States said Friday that it would continue to
deny the International Committee of the Red Cross access to "a very small,
limited number" of prisoners who are held in secret around the world, saying
they are terrorists being kept incommunicado for reasons of national security
and are not guaranteed any rights under the Geneva Conventions.

Adam Ereli, the State Department's deputy spokesman, said the United States
would not alter its position after the president of the International Red Cross
said in Geneva that his organization was holding discussions to gain access to
all detainees, including those held in secret locations.

Mr. Ereli said that the Geneva Conventions requiring humane treatment of
prisoners of war did not apply to certain terrorism suspects seized as "unlawful
enemy combatants," but that, in any case, the United States treats most of them
as prisoners of war.

"We're going the extra mile here," Mr. Ereli said, by allowing the Red Cross
access to Al Qaeda suspects and others held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in
Afghanistan. The Red Cross also has access to prisoners held in Iraq.

Aside from those detainees, about two or three dozen terrorism suspects,
including a handful of top Al Qaeda operatives, are said by current and former
intelligence officials to be held in secret locations.

On Thursday in Geneva, John Bellinger, the senior legal adviser of the State
Department, acknowledged that the International Red Cross does not have access
to all detainees held by American forces but declined to discuss the existence
of secret detention centers.

The Red Cross has recognized that some of those held by the United States are
not prisoners of war, and do not have the full protection of the Geneva
Conventions. But it has argued that no prisoners, not even those alleged to be
terrorists, should fall into what it calls a "black hole" outside any protection
under international humanitarian law. A central purpose of the Red Cross is to
visit prisoners and protect their human rights.

On Friday, Jakob Kellenberger, the president of the International Red Cross,
said the situation of those held secretly remained "a major concern" that would
continue to be the focus of discussions with the United States. "We continue to
be in an intense dialogue with them with the aim of getting access to all people
detained in the framework of the so-called war on terror," he said.

Mr. Ereli of the State Department said that "cases that pose unique threats to
our security" would be denied visits by the Red Cross, even on a confidential
basis.

In a related development, the Defense Department announced Friday that
Anne-Marie Lizin, a representative of the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, a 55-nation group, would visit American detention
facilities at Guantánamo and may question the commanding officers and other
staff members.

"The department strives for transparency in our operations to the extent
possible, in light of security and operational requirements and the need to
ensure the safety of our forces," a department statement said.

Mr. Ereli said "there's no legal requirement" to provide Red Cross access to
Guantánamo. "Nevertheless, and even though we're not required to do so, we do
provide access to the vast majority of detainees under our control, and we do
accord Geneva protections to them."

The Red Cross has been seeking greater access to detainees for at least two
years but has been careful to mute its criticism in order to keep the
negotiations more productive, according to committee officials.

In Europe over the last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice emphasized
that it is American policy not to subject detainees to "cruel, inhumane or
degrading" punishment in any location, no matter whether they are held by
military or intelligence authorities.

Ms. Rice also said on her European trip that the United States would not hand
any prisoners over to other countries in the process known as rendition without
obtaining assurances that they would not be tortured.

--------------------------------------------

Judge nears decision on fate of 15 Guantanamo detainees
Military tribunal ordered release of Chinese Muslims

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  December 13, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A federal judge yesterday said he will decide in the next two
weeks whether to issue an order that could bring two cleared-but-stranded
Guantanamo detainees to his courtroom in the nation's capital as a first step
toward possibly releasing them into the United States.

US District Court Judge James Robertson said that the Bush administration had
run out of time to find some other country willing to take in 15 Chinese
Muslims, known as Uighurs, who were arrested during the Afghanistan war.

A military tribunal later decided that the Uighurs were not enemy combatants
after all. They had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The tribunal
ordered them released from Guantanamo.

But because China has a history of persecuting Uighurs, US law prevents the Bush
administration from sending them to China, and no other country wants
them. Their imprisonment at the hands of the US military has now entered its
fifth year.

In July, the Uighurs's attorney, Boston-based Sabin Willett, asked Robertson to
order the military to release his clients from the prison. Willett suggested
either letting them live in a hotel among the civilian population of the base or
allowing them to live in the United States in the care of a small
Uighur-American community.

The Bush administration opposed both requests, questioning Robertson's legal
authority to intervene. But after five months with no diplomatic breakthrough,
Robertson said he has waited long enough.

''The question is whether I or anybody should tolerate that situation, and if it
is intolerable, what I or or anybody else should do about it," Robertson
said. ''From the standpoint of the petitioners at Guantanamo, it clearly is
intolerable."

Robertson also said that he may order the Uighurs released temporarily in the US
without being legally admitted for immigration or asylum purposes.

Any ruling against the military would mark the first time that a court has
ordered an inmate released from the Guantanamo prison despite more than 150
lawsuits filed on behalf of prisoners. The military is holding about 500
suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda members at the base.

Congress is considering stripping courts of jurisdiction to hear most Guantanamo
lawsuits, including the Uighurs's.

The bill's sponsor, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, argues
that detainees are clogging courts with frivilous claims.

----------------------------------------------------

December 13, 2005
Probe Supports Allegations of C.I.A. Prisons in Europe

By KATRIN BENNHOLD
International Herald Tribune
PARIS, Dec. 13 - Europe's chief investigator looking into allegations about the
existence of secret C.I.A. prisons said today that preliminary evidence
suggested that American agents had kidnapped people and illegally transferred
them between countries.

Dick Marty, who leads an investigation for the 46-country Council of Europe,
sharply criticized the United States as failing to come clean on the
allegations, notably during a five-day visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice to Europe last week. But he also said he believed that there was some
degree of collaboration from European officials.

In his first written interim report on the issue, Mr. Marty said that his
investigation so far had "reinforced the credibility of the allegations
concerning the transfer and temporary detention of individuals, without any
judicial involvement, in European countries."

His report, which was presented to the Council's Legal Affairs and Human Rights
committee in Paris, also said: "Legal proceedings in progress in certain
countries seemed to indicate that individuals had been abducted and transferred
to other countries without respect for any legal standards."

Mr. Marty's investigation is still in the earliest stages. According to the
statement released today, the preliminary report is based primarily on published
information, ongoing legal proceedings, talks with some of the non-governmental
organizations and individuals involved - including Ms. Rice - and discussions
with journalists.

Mr. Marty, a Swiss senator, was appointed by Europe's human rights watchdog to
investigate whether the United States had breached the Continent's human rights
rules - and whether European governments had turned a blind eye or even allowed
such breaches.

The allegations have been circulating since Nov. 2, when The Washington Post
said it had evidence of C.I.A. prisons in at least eight countries, including
some in Eastern Europe. Human Rights Watch has identified Poland as the C.I.A.'s
main base for holding and interrogating terrorist suspects and said Romania was
a key transit point for moving detainees. Both countries have denied the
charges.

Mr. Marty said he believed that the United States was no longer holding
detainees in Europe. He said he believed that prisoners were moved to North
Africa after the claims were first published in early November.

Washington and a number of European capitals have also come under pressure to
account for dozens of C.I.A. flights on the Continent, some of which are thought
to have transported suspects to countries with a track record of torture and
cruel treatment.

During last week's visit, Ms. Rice acknowledged that the United States had used
"renditions" to move terrorist suspects to third countries to be "questioned,
held or brought to justice," but, she insisted, only with the permission of the
governments of the countries where the suspects were captured. She also said
that all American personnel - including the C.I.A. - were subject to the United
Nations Convention Against Torture.

But she did not confirm or deny the reports on the secret detention centers, a
point Mr. Marty criticized in a statement today.

The investigator said he "deplores the fact that no information or explanation
had been provided on this point by Ms. Rice during her visit to Europe."

The State Department declined to comment on Mr. Marty's report. A spokesman,
Justin Higgins, said Ms. Rice had "said all she plans to say on this matter for
right now."

Mr. Marty also said he suspected that European secret services knew about the
alleged C.I.A. transfers.

"I think it would have been difficult for these actions to have taken place
without a degree of collaboration," he said, although he added, "It is possible
that secret services did not inform their governments."

At least eight European Union member states, many of which launched their own
investigations, demanded a clarification from the United States last month. Many
decided to accept Ms. Rice's response for now. But until Mr. Marty publishes his
final conclusions, officials say, the issue will not go away.

"We were given assurances by the Americans, and we don't have the intention to
demand more," said a French diplomat, who in accordance with French practice
spoke on condition of anonymity. "But we'll see what the Council of Europe
investigation finds out."

Mr. Marty announced today that the Council of Europe's Legal and Human Rights
Committee would next debate the issue at the end of January.

Brian Knowlton of The International Herald Tribune contributed reporting from
Washington for this article.

---------------------------------

House endorses ban on torture
But language on terror suspects is only symbolic
By Liz Sidoti, Associated Press  |  December 15, 2005

WASHINGTON -- In a symbolic move, the House yesterday endorsed a Senate-passed
ban on cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of foreign terrorism suspects as
negotiations between the White House and Senator John McCain over the provision
appeared at an impasse.

Approved 308 to 122, the procedural vote puts political pressure on House
negotiators -- but does not require them -- to include in a military spending
bill the ban and another provision standardizing interrogation techniques used
by US troops.

Both provisions are sponsored by the Arizona Republican. With both chambers of
Congress controlled by the GOP, the House endorsement of the provisions further
embarrasses the Bush administration, which months ago threatened to veto
legislation containing either one.

The vote in the House followed a morning meeting between McCain and President
Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, in which the two sides failed
to reach a compromise on the Arizona senator's provisions. ''We're still
talking," McCain said yesterday afternoon. ''We'll get this resolved one way or
another."

But progress on any compromise appeared stalled just hours later when the House
GOP considered a nonbinding effort by Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania
Democrat, to put the House on record supporting McCain's provisions.

''We cannot torture and still retain the moral high ground," said Murtha, the
senior Democrat on the House appropriations defense panel. ''There can be no
waiver to the use for torture. No torture and no exceptions."

Representative Bill Young, a Florida Republican who is chairman of that panel,
said the United States does not torture but that it's ''important that we make
it very clear that we are opposed to torture -- period." However, he said the
provisions would give terrorists too many protections.

For months, House Republican leaders had delayed appointing negotiators for the
defense spending bill in part to avoid a House vote on the McCain
provisions. Leaders had been waiting for the result of negotiations between the
White House and McCain.

Congressional aides cautioned that a vote did not signal a deal between the
administration and the senator, and some aides said the two sides remained far
apart.

Nevertheless, Young said: ''We hope that a reasonable agreement on this issue
will be reached."

McCain's provisions have stalled two defense bills, including the $453 billion
wartime spending measure. Congress is under pressure to approve the spending
bill before adjourning for the year because it includes $50 billion for the Iraq
war.

The administration fears the McCain provisions could limit the president's
ability to stop a terrorist attack, and it has been seeking to add language that
would offer some protection from prosecution for interrogators accused of
violating the provision.

-----------------------------------------------

Doctors and torture

By Alan A. Stone  |  December 16, 2005

THERE IS GOOD REASON to believe that psychologists and psychiatrists have been
involved in the cruel interrogations that have taken place in Guantanamo Bay and
elsewhere in the war against terrorism. Both the American Psychological
Association and the American Psychiatric Association have therefore made clear
that it is unethical for members of their profession -- whether in the military
or not -- to participate in torture. But that ethical injunction has little
force unless there is a clear definition of what constitutes torture.

Are prolonged isolation, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity,
growling guard dogs, sensory deprivation, and strobe lights psychological
torture? And what about using coercive methods based on psychiatric evaluations
that reveal the fears, concerns, and anxieties of the detainee? Or having a
Behavioral Science Consultation Team hidden behind a one-way mirror guiding
interrogators on how best to exploit the vulnerabilities of a detainee?

According to the Physicians for Human Rights, all of these measures, which they
describe as ''systematic psychological torture," have been used at Guantanamo
Bay with the participation of psychologists, psychiatrists and other
physicians. But until Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's statement in Kiev
last week, the American government's position was that none of these measures
could be defined as torture or was forbidden by American law.

The now notorious Justice Department Bybee memorandum prepared in 2002 for
Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales had declared that acts of
interrogators ''may be cruel, inhumane, or degrading" but still not torture. The
department set the bar for torture so high that almost any cruel measure would
be permissible under US law. The memorandum's definition of the level of severe
pain that had to be met for torture sounded particularly strange to physicians
-- pain ''equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical
injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."
Even more extreme was the definition of psychological torture requiring that the
torturer ''intended to cause prolonged mental harm." Under this interpretation
the interrogators could escape liability by saying that none of them
specifically intended to cause the prolonged mental harms that detainees have
apparently suffered (22 of them have attempted suicide).

In January, Gonzales, by then nominee for attorney general, explained why the
lines had been drawn this way. He stated that torture was forbidden but that
interrogation involving cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment was not
forbidden if it took place outside the United States and American citizens were
not the victims -- tailor-made for Guantanamo Bay and the CIA. This was the
Justice Department's interpretation of the international treaty ratified in
1994, called the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel Inhumane and
Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Defenders of the Bush administration have said that their critics have confused
torture with cruel and inhumane treatment. But if there was confusion, it was
because most Americans had no idea that their government had adopted such an
appalling legal interpretation of torture and permitted everything else that
took place at Guantanamo Bay.

Senator John McCain has proposed legislation that would remedy these abuses, and
this week the Army approved a manual that protects prisoners from some of the
practices that took place in Guantanamo and elsewhere, but the details remain
classified. Still troubling is the report that the Army guidelines are based on
the Geneva Conventions, which the Bush administration says do not apply to
suspected terrorists or to the Guantanamo detainees.

Given the long tradition of ''Do No Harm," it is difficult to imagine any
healthcare professional saying it would be ethical for physicians to participate
in cruel, inhumane, degrading, and punitive interrogations even if the attorney
general decrees that it is not a crime.

Rice seems to have joined those of us who are appalled by the administration's
manipulation of the law. In Kiev last week, she broke ranks and said that the
ban on ''cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment applies . . . both in the US
and around the world." One can only hope that Rice is articulating a new Bush
administration position and that the American Psychiatric Association and the
American Psychological Association will both issue new guidelines emphasizing
that it is unethical to participate in any interrogation involving torture or
any other cruel, inhumane, degrading measures.

There are those who will still want to use torture in ticking bomb
scenarios. Such concerns do not justify the shameful practices at Guantanamo
Bay. What American law and American psychiatrists and psychologists need to do
now is to reassert our basic norms of decent and ethical conduct, which seem to
have collapsed in our response to 9/11.

Dr. Alan A. Stone is a professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard University.

----------------------------------------------

House calls for details on overseas detentions
Presses for language in final defense bill

By Liz Sidoti, Associated Press  |  December 17, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The House called yesterday for the Bush administration to give
Congress details of secret detention facilities overseas, a day after President
Bush agreed to a proposal to ban cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of
terrorism detainees in US custody.

The GOP-run House voted 228 to 187 for a resolution to urge -- but not force --
House-Senate negotiators to include in a final defense bill language requiring
national intelligence director John Negroponte to provide classified reports to
House and Senate intelligence committees on such facilities.

Although the vote was symbolic, it showed that the issue of the treatment of
detainees has not been completely defused, despite Bush's acceptance Thursday of
a proposal by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, to bar harsh treatment
of terrorist suspects. And it indicated that Republican lawmakers are not afraid
to buck the president on the issue.

The administration has declined to confirm news reports that the CIA runs secret
detention facilities abroad. But lawmakers from both parties say they have been
troubled by the reports, and the Senate inserted the disclosure provision,
sponsored by John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, into its version of the
defense bill.

The House version omitted it, but the vote puts pressure on negotiators to
include the provision in the bill sent to the president's desk.

''Meaningful oversight must include proper scrutiny of all US detention
facilities, whether those facilities are located on US or foreign soil,"
Representative Ike Skelton, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services
Committee, said in forcing the House to vote on the matter.

The vote came as Congress worked to complete that policy bill and a $453 billion
must-pass wartime spending bill now that Bush has agreed to a proposal to ban
cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of terrorism detainees in US custody.

Bush's reluctant endorsement Thursday came after months of opposition that
included White House veto threats of any bill that contained the McCain
provisions.

''This is the democratic system working," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
said yesterday on the CBS news program ''The Early Show."

''Senator McCain worked tirelessly with the administration to get to legislation
that will allow us both to protect the American people . . . and to do so within
our laws and within our international obligations."

The proposal by McCain, a former Navy pilot who was a prisoner of war for 5 1/2
years in Vietnam, has held up completion of two defense bills. Senate versions
of the measure included the language, but the House bills did not.

House and Senate negotiators on both defense bills hoped to complete their work
this weekend, and sought to finalize conference reports yesterday. Lawmakers are
expected to sign off on the McCain proposal in at least one of the bills before
adjourning in a few days.

The spending measure, which also provides $50 billion for the Iraq war, had
appeared the most likely vehicle Thursday. But early yesterday, Representative
Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who chairs the House Armed Services
Committee, said he would not make good on his threat to block the other bill,
which sets defense policy, over the McCain language. Hunter said he would accept
the bill, because he had been assured by Negroponte that the agency would report
to Congress six months after the ban goes into effect on its impact on
intelligence gathering.

Also contained in that bill is a less controversial proposal that would let
detainees at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appeal their detention
status and punishment. But changes were made during House-Senate negotiations
that human rights groups say could undermine the McCain provisions.

-----------------------------------------------------

Lawmakers Back Use of Evidence Coerced From Detainees

By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN
December 17, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - House and Senate negotiators agreed Friday to a measure
that would enable the government to keep prisoners at Guantánamo Bay
indefinitely on the basis of evidence obtained by coercive interrogations.

The provision, which has been a subject of extensive bargaining with the Bush
administration, could allow evidence that would not be permitted in civilian
courts to be admissable in deciding whether to hold detainees at the American
military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In recent days, the Congressional
negotiators quietly eliminated an explicit ban on the use of such material in an
earlier version of the legislation.

The measure is contained in the same military policy bill that includes Senator
John McCain's provision to ban the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of
detainees in American custody worldwide. Mr. Bush reluctantly embraced
Mr. McCain's ban on Thursday. The full House is expected to approve the
compromise bill soon, with the Senate to follow in the next few days,
Congressional officials said.

The juxtaposition of the seemingly contradictory measures immediately led
lawyers for Guantánamo prisoners to assert that Congressional Republicans were
helping to preserve the utility of coercive interrogations that senior White
House officials have argued are vital to the fight against war against terror.

While the measure would allow the Guantánamo prisoners prisoners to challenge in
federal court their status as enemy combatants and to appeal automatically any
convictions and sentences handed down by military tribunals in excess of 10
years, it would still prevent the detainees from asking civilian courts to
intervene with the administration over harsh treatment or prison conditions.

Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer who represents a group of Kuwaiti detainees at
Guantánamo Bay, said in an interview that the new language would render the
McCain restrictions unenforceable at the Cuban prison. "If McCain is one small
step forward, enactment of this language would be two giant steps backwards,"
Mr. Wilner said.

Two of the main Senate sponsors of the measure, Lindsey Graham, Republican of
South Carolina, and Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, defended the changes made
to the language that the Senate passed last month, 84 to 14.

Mr. Graham acknowledged the measure's intention to make it possible to use
information obtained by coercive interrogation techniques in military panels
that evaluate whether detainees at Guantánamo are being rightfully held as
"enemy combatants." He argued that the techniques were not abusive.

He also said that under his measure, the panels would weigh the value of the
intelligence gained from an interrogation against a judgment on whether the
statement was coerced. He said in a telephone interview with reporters that the
amendment would promote "a balanced approach." A similar rule now applies in the
military commissions that have been established to prosecute terror suspects at
Guantánamo.

Human rights advocates criticized Mr. Levin, the chief Senate Democratic
negotiator, for agreeing to restrict further the legal rights of Guantánamo
detainees. Mr. Levin suggested that he had settled for the less damaging of two
bad outcomes, saying he had deflected more onerous provisions that House
Republicans wanted, including a demand that interrogators who abused prisoners
be granted immunity from prosecution. Mr. Levin added in a telephone interview,
"I don't think courts will allow coerced evidence in any proceeding."

The Bush administration has repeatedly considered - and rejected - explicitly
prohibiting the use of evidence obtained by torture in the military
commissions. Most recently, the issue was a major part of a lengthy internal
debate over new rules for the tribunals that were promulgated on Aug. 31 in
response to longstanding criticism in the United States and overseas that the
tribunals are unfair.

Several officials familiar with the internal discussions said State Department
officials and some senior Defense Department aides had strongly advocated an
explicit ban on the use of evidence obtained by torture in a series of
interagency discussions that began last December.

At one point in that process, the Pentagon official in charge of the tribunals,
Maj. Gen. John D. Altenburg Jr., who is now retired, proposed barring any
"confession or admission that was procured from the accused by torture,"
according to parts of a draft document read to a reporter. The rule defined
torture as any act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental
pain and suffering."

The ban was also championed by the counselor of the State Department, Philip
D. Zelikow, two officials said. The deputy defense secretary, Gordon R. England,
also supported the ban in meetings on the revised commission rules, as did some
senior military officers, said a spokesman for Mr. England, Capt. Kevin Wensing.

But such a prohibition was opposed by other officials involved in the debate,
including David S. Addington, who was then Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel
and is now his chief of staff. A spokesman for the vice president said
Mr. Addington would have no comment on his reported role in the policy debates.

Since the drafting of the presidential order that established the commissions on
Nov. 13, 2001, White House officials have sought to give the commissions wide
latitude to consider evidence that would be inadmissible in civilian courts.

Mr. Addington, who was a primary architect of the presidential order, argued in
the debates earlier this year that by explicitly prohibiting evidence obtained
by torture, the administration would raise an unnecessary red flag suggesting
at least implicitly that prisoners in American custody were, in fact, being
tortured, officials said.

Justice Department officials involved in the debates contended that such a
prohibition was not necessary because the matter was already covered by the
Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or
Punishment, a treaty adopted by the United Nations more than two decades ago and
ratified by the United States in 1994.

---------------------------------------------

Men's detention is ruled illegal
But federal judge blocks Chinese Muslims' release
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  December 23, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A federal judge ruled yesterday that it is illegal for the Bush
administration to continue holding two Chinese detainees at the US prison at
Guantanamo Bay, but the judge said that his court does not have the power to
order Bush to release the men.

The detainees are among 15 Chinese Muslims, part of an ethnic group known as
Uighurs. All have been held at Guantanamo for four years after being arrested in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. A military tribunal ruled nine months ago that the
Uighurs were not ''enemy combatants" fighting against the United State after
all, and ordered them released.

But because China has a history of persecuting Muslims, US law forbade returning
them to their homeland and no other nation has been willing to take them in.

The plaintiffs' lawyers argued that Judge James Robertson should order that the
military release the men from the prison and either house them in the civilian
portion of Guantanamo or allow them to live in the United States.

Robertson ruled yesterday that while the president lacks the authority to hold
innocent prisoners, a federal district court cannot by itself provide them with
a home.

''An order requiring their release into the United States . . . would have
national security and diplomatic implications beyond the authority of this
court," Robertson wrote.

Last summer the Bush administration that the president's authority as commander
in chief included the power to continue holding the men in order to wrap up
their detention in an orderly fashion. Robertson had agreed to give the
government time to find a new home for the Uighurs.

But after six months went by without a diplomatic breakthrough, Robertson said
he had to issue a ruling, so the plaintiffs could at least seek a remedy through
an appeals court.

Sabin Willett, a Boston-based attorney representing the two men, could not be
reached for comment late yesterday. A Justice Department spokesman did not
return a call late yesterday.

------------------------------------

Bush could bypass new torture ban
Waiver right is reserved

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  January 4, 2006

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the
torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his
powers as commander in chief.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a ''signing statement" -- an
official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law
-- declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his
broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can
waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

''The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the
constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief," Bush
wrote, adding that this approach ''will assist in achieving the shared objective
of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from
further terrorist attacks."

Some legal specialists said yesterday that the president's signing statement,
which was posted on the White House website but had gone unnoticed over the New
Year's weekend, raises serious questions about whether he intends to follow the
law.

A senior administration official, who spoke to a Globe reporter about the
statement on condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman,
said the president intended to reserve the right to use harsher methods in
special situations involving national security.

''We are not going to ignore this law," the official said, noting that Bush,
when signing laws, routinely issues signing statements saying he will construe
them consistent with his own constitutional authority. ''We consider it a valid
statute. We consider ourselves bound by the prohibition on cruel, unusual, and
degrading treatment."

But, the official said, a situation could arise in which Bush may have to waive
the law's restrictions to carry out his responsibilities to protect national
security. He cited as an example a ''ticking time bomb" scenario, in which a
detainee is believed to have information that could prevent a planned terrorist
attack.

''Of course the president has the obligation to follow this law, [but] he also
has the obligation to defend and protect the country as the commander in chief,
and he will have to square those two responsibilities in each case," the
official added. ''We are not expecting that those two responsibilities will come
into conflict, but it's possible that they will."

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive
power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can
still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.

''The signing statement is saying 'I will only comply with this law when I want
to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it's important
to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the
authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,' " he
said. ''They don't want to come out and say it directly because it doesn't sound
very nice, but it's unmistakable to anyone who has been following what's going
on."

Golove and other legal specialists compared the signing statement to Bush's
decision, revealed last month, to bypass a 1978 law forbidding domestic
wiretapping without a warrant. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to
eavesdrop on Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without a court
order starting after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The president and his aides argued that the Constitution gives the commander in
chief the authority to bypass the 1978 law when necessary to protect national
security. They also argued that Congress implicitly endorsed that power when it
authorized the use of force against the perpetrators of the attacks.

Legal academics and human rights organizations said Bush's signing statement and
his stance on the wiretapping law are part of a larger agenda that claims
exclusive control of war-related matters for the executive branch and holds that
any involvement by Congress or the courts should be minimal.

Vice President Dick Cheney recently told reporters, ''I believe in a strong,
robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands
it. . . . I would argue that the actions that we've taken are totally
appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the president."

Since the 2001 attacks, the administration has also asserted the power to bypass
domestic and international laws in deciding how to detain prisoners captured in
the Afghanistan war. It also has claimed the power to hold any US citizen Bush
designates an ''enemy combatant" without charges or access to an attorney.

And in 2002, the administration drafted a secret legal memo holding that Bush
could authorize interrogators to violate antitorture laws when necessary to
protect national security. After the memo was leaked to the press, the
administration eliminated the language fess approved it, Bush called a press
conference with McCain, praised the measure, and said he would accept it.

Legal specialists said the president's signing statement called into question
his comments at the press conference.

''The whole point of the McCain Amendment was to close every loophole," said
Marty Lederman, a Georgetown University law professor who served in the Justice
Department from 1997 to 2002. ''The president has re-opened the loophole by
asserting the constitutional authority to act in violation of the statute where
it would assist in the war on terrorism."

Elisa Massimino, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, called Bush's
signing statement an ''in-your-face affront" to both McCain and to Congress.

''The basic civics lesson that there are three co-equal branches of government
that provide checks and balances on each other is being fundamentally rejected
by this executive branch," she said.

''Congress is trying to flex its muscle to provide those checks [on detainee
abuse], and it's being told through the signing statement that it's
impotent. It's quite a radical view."

--------------------------------------------------

3 GOP senators blast Bush bid to bypass torture ban
Reject assertion he has right to waive rules to protect US security
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  January 5, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Three key Republican senators yesterday condemned President Bush's
assertion that his powers as commander in chief give him the authority to bypass
a new law restricting the use of torture when interrogating detainees.

John W. Warner Jr., a Virginia Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services
Committee, and Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, issued a joint
statement rejecting Bush's assertion that he can waive the restrictions on the
use of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment against detainees to protect
national security.

''We believe the president understands Congress's intent in passing, by very
large majorities, legislation governing the treatment of detainees," the
senators said. ''The Congress declined when asked by administration officials to
include a presidential waiver of the restrictions included in our
legislation. Our committee intends through strict oversight to monitor the
administration's implementation of the new law."

Separately, the third primary sponsor of the detainee treatment law, Senator
Lindsey O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told the Globe in a phone
interview that he agreed with everything McCain and Warner said ''and would go a
little bit further."

''I do not believe that any political figure in the country has the ability to
set aside any . . . law of armed conflict that we have adopted or treaties that
we have ratified," Graham said. ''If we go down that road, it will cause great
problems for our troops in future conflicts because [nothing] is to prevent
other nations' leaders from doing the same."

The White House did not return calls yesterday about the senators'
statements. On Friday, in signing the ban on torture, Bush issued a ''signing
statement," saying he would interpret the restrictions in the context of his
broader constitutional powers as commander in chief. A ''signing statement" is
an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new
law.

A senior administration official later confirmed that the president believes the
Constitution gives him the power to authorize interrogation techniques that go
beyond the law to protect national security. But in enacting the law, Congress
intended to close every loophole and impose an absolute ban on all forms of
torture, no matter the circumstances, Graham said.

David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive
power issues, said the senators' statements ''mean that the battle lines are
drawn" for an escalating fight over the balance of power between the two
branches of government.

''The president is pointing to his commander in chief power, claiming that it
somehow gives him the power to dispense with the law when he's conducting war,"
Golove said. ''The senators are saying: 'Wait a minute, we've gone over
this. This is a law Congress has passed by very large margins, and you are
compelled and bound to comply with it.' "

Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First, said the senators'
statement should send a clear warning to military and CIA interrogators that
they would be subject to criminal prosecution if they abuse a detainee.

''That power [to override the law] was explicitly sought by the White House, and
it was considered and rejected by the Congress," she said. ''And any US official
who relies on legal advice from a government lawyer saying there is a
presidential override of a law passed by Congress does so at their peril. Cruel
inhuman and degrading treatment is illegal."

But Golove said that it is politically unlikely that Attorney General Alberto
R. Gonzales would prosecute an official for taking an action Bush ordered him to
take. Still, he said, Congress has a number of tools for compelling the
president to obey the law. Congress can withhold funds for programs. It can
subpoena administration officials to testify under oath. It can pass stricter
laws or block legislation Bush needs. In an extreme and politically unlikely
scenario, it can impeach the president.

Bush's interpretation of another detainee-related provision in the new law
sparked further friction yesterday with some lawmakers.

The provision stripped courts of the jurisdiction to hear most lawsuits from
detainees held at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Citing that provision, the administration said this week that it would ask
courts to dismiss more than 180 Guantanamo lawsuits.

----------------------------------------

Records Show Army Ended Abuse Probe Early

By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
Thu Jan 12, 6:26 PM ET

The Army closed a criminal investigation of abuse allegations by an Iraqi
detainee last year, finding no reason to believe his claims, even though no
Americans involved in the case were questioned, according to Pentagon records
made public Thursday.

Internal Army documents about the Iraqi's capture on Jan. 4, 2004, and his
subsequent interrogation at an unspecified facility at or near Baghdad
International Airport were not reviewed, the records show, because investigators
were told they had been lost in a computer malfunction.

The Iraqi, whose full name was blacked out in the documents by U.S. censors, is
described as a relative of a former bodyguard for Saddam Hussein.

The detainee alleged that he was kicked in the stomach once and punched in the
spine once by his interrogators. He said he was placed in front of a window air
conditioner after being stripped naked and having a bag placed over his
head. Cold water was poured over the bag every few minutes, he said, and he was
dragged around a room by his arm.

The investigation records were among thousands of pages of records released by
the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained them from the Defense
Department as part of a Freedom of Information request.

Army spokesman Paul Boyce said more than 500 investigations have been conducted
on allegations of detainee abuse and that so far at least 251 military members
have been court-martialed or given other forms of punishment.

"This effort by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command demonstrates the
Army's continuing and tireless commitment to investigate any allegation of
detainee abuse by any unit or soldier, and to locate possible witnesses to
allegations of detainee abuse," he said.

The documents include numerous references to investigators being blocked from a
thorough investigation, yet the matter was closed a final time on June 17, 2005,
by the Army Criminal Investigation Command.

An April 8, 2005, report, for example, said an Army investigation unit had been
unable to fully investigate 23 criminal cases "due to the suspects and witnesses
involvement in Special Access Programs and/or the security classification of the
unit they were assigned to during the offense." Special Access Programs are
highly classified activities such as Task Force 6-26, which was hunting
high-value targets like insurgent leaders.

A Feb. 26, 2005, report said that even though the Iraqi who made the abuse
allegations had given a detailed description of the interpreter who was present,
as well as others, "no effort was made to identify and interview the
interrogators and screening personnel who were working" at the screening
facility.

A report two weeks earlier said, "The only names identified by this
investigation were determined to be fake names utilized by the capturing
soldiers," yet it added that "necessary requirements" of the probe had been met.

"Hell, even if we reopened it we wouldn't get any more information than we
already have," it concluded.

The records indicate that the Iraqi was captured in a house in Tikrit, Saddam's
home town, and screened by members of Task Force 6-26. They also indicated that
the probe was impeded in part by the fact that Task Force members involved in
captures of detainees had been authorized to use fake names.

The case was initially closed Oct. 27, 2004, about three months after it was
opened. A memo explaining the decision said records to refute or substantiate
the alleged abuses "could not be located," adding that this result "did not
diminish the integrity or credibility of (the) allegation" by the unidentified
detainee.

Even so, the memo said, investigators said continuing the investigation "would
be of little or no value and leads remaining to be developed would not impact on
the investigative findings of this investigation."

Four months later the probe was reopened after a review concluded that the
investigation was flawed. Commenting on the absence of documentation, the review
said the "`lost records' explanation is unacceptable"  referring to the
assertion that records had been lost in a computer glitch.

"The bottom line is this detainee's circumstances were rather unique, due to his
relationship to another high-value detainee," the review said. "Because of this
relationship, the interrogators would have prepared and submitted a report to
higher echelons."

In an indication that superiors were kept informed, one of the investigation
documents released Thursday noted that investigators had been instructed to
provide an update "concerning the conduct of our investigation" to
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was in charge of detainee operations in Iraq from
March-December 2004.

Also Thursday:

_Military officials said Miller had declined to answer questions in two
courts-martial cases involving the use of dogs during interrogations at the
detention center at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Miller
commanded that facility from November 2002 to March 2004.

_Solicitor General Paul Clement asked the Supreme Court to dismiss an appeal by
Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a terror suspect held at Guantanamo Bay. Hamdan is
challenging the administration's plan to try him and others by military
commission.

___

On the Net:

Army records on ACLU Web site:
http://action.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/011206

-------------------------------------------

Army Interrogator Convicted in Death of Iraqi General

By ERIC SCHMITT
January 22, 2006

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 - A senior Army interrogator was convicted late Saturday of
negligent homicide in the death of an Iraqi general after he shoved the general
head-first into a sleeping bag, sat on his chest and put his hands over his
mouth.

A jury of six officers at Fort Carson, Colo., found the interrogator, Chief
Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer Jr., guilty of the charge, which carries a
maximum sentence of three years in a military prison. He was also found guilty
of negligent dereliction of duty. He was acquitted of murder and assault
charges. Sentencing is scheduled for Monday.

Army prosecutors contended that Mr. Welshofer, 43, a chief interrogator with the
Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Qaim, Iraq, suffocated Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed
Mowhoush after wrapping him in the sleeping bag and sitting on him during an
interrogation session on Nov. 26, 2003. Prosecutors said Mr. Welshofer knew his
interrogation techniques were potentially lethal and violated Army standards.

Defense lawyers countered that Mr. Welshofer, a 19-year Army veteran, did
nothing illegal and was using a technique that his commander had approved for
use on uncooperative prisoners. They also said that General Mowhoush, 57, whom
military officials said weighed more than 250 pounds, died from an irregular
heart rhythm caused by heart disease and stress.

The widely publicized incident has drawn special attention from human rights
groups as one of the worst instances of abuse against detainees in American
custody in Iraq, and because General Mowhoush had been beaten shortly before his
death by a team that included one or more C.I.A. contract workers.

The case also underscores the confusion among military interrogators and their
superiors over the use of aggressive interrogation techniques in the summer and
fall of 2003, when the insurgency in Iraq was rapidly gaining momentum and
ferocity, and top Pentagon officials and commanders in Iraq were demanding
better intelligence with which to combat the militants.

Testimony at Mr. Welshofer's court-martial last week confirmed that a team of
Iraqis had beaten the general two days before he died, but the C.I.A.'s
involvement remained largely a mystery.

At one point, a defense lawyer, Frank Spinner, questioned a witness whose
identity was so secret that he was shielded from reporters and others in the
courtroom by a green tarp suspended from the ceiling, The Associated Press
reported. The witness said that when he spoke to Mr. Welshofer on the day before
General Mowhoush died, he was alarmed when Mr. Welshofer told him he thought the
Army's interrogation guidelines were being broken every day.

"And you didn't report it to the C.I.A.?" Mr. Spinner asked. He then stopped
himself and quickly apologized to the judge.

In his testimony, Mr. Welshofer and his lawyers argued that the Army had
provided no guidance for what was authorized and unauthorized. "They asked for a
kind of interrogation techniques wish list," Mr. Welshofer testified last
Thursday, The Denver Post reported. "It was not clear on what we were to do."

Mr. Welshofer said he received an e-mail message from his unit's commanders
saying that there were no rules for interrogations yet, and that top officers
were "tired of taking casualties and that the gloves were coming off." He said
he never received memorandums from Sept. 14 and Oct. 12, which first authorized
the use of "stress positions," but called for prior approval of Lt. Gen. Ricardo
S. Sanchez, the top general in Iraq at the time.

As result, Mr. Welshofer said he escalated his tactics over the course of
several interviews to frighten the general, who was providing little useful
information. Mr. Welshofer and another interrogator designed the sleeping bag
technique as a last resort, believing it would create a claustrophobic effect on
a prisoner, Mr. Spinner said in a telephone interview today. A small hole was
cut in the bottom of the sleeping bag to allow the detainee to breathe.

General Mowhoush was considered a prized intelligence prospect. He had been
commander of air defenses in western Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and military
intelligence officials believed he might have been a leader and financier of the
insurgency there, providing money and housing for fighters coming in from
Syria. General Mowhoush had surrendered to military authorities two weeks before
his death, saying he wanted to secure the release of his four sons in American
custody.

But the military prosecutor, Maj. Tiernan Dolan, said that Mr. Welshofer had
abused General Mowhoush, treating him "worse than you would treat a dog," The
A.P. reported.

An Army spokesman, Paul Boyce, said an in e-mail message today that more than
500 investigations had examined accusations of detainee mistreatment. Thus far,
he said, accusations against at least 251 military members have been addressed
in courts-martial, nonjudicial punishment and other adverse administrative
actions.

-------------------------------------------------------------

NYT Editorial
The Shame of the Prisons
February 18, 2006

Who needs sophomoric cartoons to inflame the Muslim world when you've got the
Bush administration's prison system? One reason the White House stands so
helpless against the violence spawned by those Danish cartoons is that it has
squandered so much of its moral standing at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. This
week, the world got two chilling reminders of why both prisons must be closed.

On Thursday, the United Nations Human Rights Commission issued a scathing report
on the violations of democratic principles, human rights and the rule of law at
Guantánamo Bay: indefinite arbitrary detentions, hearings that mock fair process
and justice, coercive and violent interrogations, and other violations of laws
and treaties.

The Bush administration offered its usual weak response, that President Bush has
decided there is a permanent state of war that puts him above the law. And that
is exactly the problem: by creating Guantánamo outside the legal system for
prisoners who, according to Mr. Bush, have no rights, the United States is stuck
holding these 500 men in perpetuity. The handful who may be guilty of heinous
crimes can never be tried in a real court because of their illegal detentions. A
vast majority did nothing or were guilty only of fighting on a battlefield, but
the administration refuses to sort them out.

Some members of Congress tried to exert control over Guantánamo Bay late last
year. But their efforts were hijacked by Bush loyalists, who made matters worse
by stripping the prisoners there of the basic human right to challenge their
detentions.

Now the only solution is to close Guantánamo Bay and account for its prisoners
fairly and openly. The United States then needs a prisons policy that conforms
to the law and to democratic principles.

The U.N. report followed a broadcast by an Australian television station of
previously unpublicized photographs taken at Abu Ghraib in 2003. Many were
similar to the pictures the world saw two years ago when the scandal of abuse,
humiliation and torture first broke. Others show even worse abuses and
degradation.

All are a reminder that the Bush administration has yet to account for what
happened at Abu Ghraib. No political appointee has been punished for the
policies that led to the atrocities. Indeed, most have been rewarded.

The prison was a symbol of the worst of the Hussein regime. Now it's a symbol of
the worst of the American occupation. Congress should order it replaced. And
perhaps John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, could keep
his promise to dig out the truth about Abu Ghraib.

-------------------------------------------

Op-Ed Contributor
Tortured Logic

By ANTHONY LAGOURANIS
February 28, 2006

Chicago --- I HAVE never met Sgt. Santos Cardona or Sgt. Michael Smith, but we
share similar experiences. In late 2003 and early 2004, both men used their dogs
to intimidate Iraqi prisoners during interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison. They
maintain that they were following legal orders. Now they both face impending
court-martial.

From January 2004 to January 2005, I served in various places in Iraq (including
Abu Ghraib) as an Army interrogator. Following orders that I believed were
legal, I used military working dogs during interrogations. I terrified my
interrogation subjects, but I never got intelligence (mostly because 90 percent
of them were probably innocent, but that's another story). Perhaps, I have
thought for a long time, I also deserve to be prosecuted. But if that is the
case, culpability goes much farther up the chain of command than the Army and
the Bush administration have so far been willing to admit.

When the chief warrant officer at our interrogation site in Mosul first told me
to use dogs during interrogations, it seemed well within what was allowed by our
written rules and consistent with what was being done at Abu Ghraib and other
detention centers. The dogs were muzzled and held by a handler. The prisoners
didn't know that, though, because they were blindfolded; if they gave me an
answer I didn't like, I could cue the handler so the dog would bark and lunge
toward them. Sometimes they were so terrified they'd wet their jumpsuits. About
halfway through my tour, I stopped using dogs and other "enhancements" like
hypothermia that qualify as torture even under the most nonchalant readings of
international law. I couldn't handle being so routinely brutal.

In training, we learned that all P.O.W.'s are protected against actual and
implied threats. You can never put a "knife on the table" to get someone to
talk. That was clear. But our Iraqi prisoners weren't clearly classified as
P.O.W.'s, so I never knew what laws applied. Instead, a confusing set of verbal
and written orders had supplanted the Geneva Conventions.

When an Army investigator asked Col. Thomas Pappas, the top military
intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, how intimidation with dogs could be allowed
under this treaty, he gave the chilling reply, "I did not personally look at
that with regard to the Geneva Convention." Colonel Pappas later testified that
he was taking his cue on the use of dogs from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who
took over detainee operations in Iraq after running them in Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba.

General Miller has denied recommending the use of guard dogs to intimidate
prisoners during interrogations in Iraq. He also recently said he would not
testify in the courts-martial of Sergeants Cardona and Smith, invoking his right
to avoid self-incrimination. As someone who voluntarily spoke at length about my
actions in Iraq to investigators, without a lawyer present, I can't have a
favorable opinion of General Miller. By doing the military equivalent of "taking
the Fifth," he's decided to protect himself, apparently happy to let two dog
handlers take the fall --- a stunning betrayal of his subordinates and Army
values.

Sergeants Cardona and Smith have been accused of sick and sadistic
behavior. They face the prospect of serious jail time. But they almost certainly
acted believing they were following legal orders. In the military, orders are
orders unless there is clear, uncluttered law transmitted from far above our
commanders' rank and station. Instead of a clear message prohibiting torture,
our top commanders gave us a deliberate muddying of the waters.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, recently shepherded a ban on torture
through Congress. Then, while reluctantly signing the legislation, President
Bush muddled this very clear ban on torture by stating that he would construe it
"in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president."

Those who serve in the prisons of Iraq deserve to know clearly the difference
between legal and illegal orders. Soldiers on the ground need a commander in
chief who does not seek strained legalisms that "permit" the use of torture. The
McCain amendment, prohibiting "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment in all
instances, is an accurate reflection of the true values of the military and
American society. We should adhere to it strictly and in all cases. I know, from
personal experience, that any leeway given will be used to maximum effect
against detainees. No slope is more slippery, I learned in Iraq, than the one
that leads to torture.

Anthony Lagouranis served in the Army from May 2001 to July 2005.

---------------------------------------------

Hunger strike said to be broken brutally

By Associated Press  |  March 4, 2006

LONDON -- A prisoner being held at Guantanamo Bay said US personnel used methods
that amounted to torture to break his hunger strike, according to a broadcast
report yesterday.

''I would still be on the strike if I had any choice. Death is better than
continuing life like this," Fawzi al-Odah was quoted as saying on British
Broadcasting Corp. radio.

A BBC reporter put written questions to Odah's lawyer, Tom Wilner, who wrote
down the responses obtained in a meeting at Guantanamo, the US naval base in
Cuba.

Many of the details of the story were released by Wilner on Feb. 8 after the US
Department of Defense declassified his notes.

The 29-year-old Kuwaiti, in his exchanges with the BBC, repeated his assertions
that hunger strikers were warned they would be strapped tightly to a restraint
chair and force-fed with a thick tube three times a day if they persisted.

When Wilner first released Odah's account last month, US Department of Defense
spokesman Bryan Whitman said the feeding was administered by medical
professionals in ''a humane and compassionate manner" and only when necessary.

-------------------------------

US releases IDs of detainees
Guantanamo suit led to move

By Miranda Leitsinger and Ben Fox, Associated Press  |  March 4, 2006

US NAVAL BASE, GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- After four years of secrecy, the Pentagon
handed over documents yesterday that contain the names of detainees held at the
US military prison at Guantanamo. The release resulted from a victory by the
Associated Press in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The Bush administration had hidden the identities, home countries, and other
information about the men accused of taking up arms against the United
States. But a federal judge rejected the administration's arguments that
releasing the identities would violate the detainees' privacy and could endanger
them and their families.

The names were scattered throughout more than 5,000 pages of transcripts of
hearings at Guantanamo Bay. The names were given only in the testimony -- when
court officials referred to them by name in their remarks or when one detainee
spoke of another detainee by name. The documents themselves did not identify
each detainee who testified.

In some cases, even having the name didn't clarify the identity. In one
document, the tribunal president asks a detainee whether his name is Jumma
Jan. The detainee responds that no, his name is Zain Ul Abedin.

Zahir Shah, an Afghan accused of being a member of an Islamic militant group and
of having a grenade launcher and other weapons in his house, admitted to having
rifles. He said it was for protection, and insisted that he did not fight US
troops.

''The only thing I did in Afghanistan was farming. Other than that, I did not do
anything else in the country," Shah said, according to the transcripts.

The documents also contain the names of former prisoners, such as Moazzam Begg
and Feroz Abbasi, both British citizens. A handwritten note has Abbasi pleading
for prisoner-of-war status.

The status of other named detainees, such as Naibullah Darwaish, was not
immediately clear. Darwaish was described as having been the chief of police for
the Shinkai district in Zabol Province, Afghanistan, when he was captured.

Most of the men were captured during the 2001 US-led war that drove the Taliban
from power in Afghanistan and sent Osama bin Laden deeper into hiding.

Most of the Guantanamo hearings were held to determine whether the detainees
were enemy combatants. That classification, Bush administration lawyers say,
deprives the detainees of prisoner-of-war protections under the Geneva
Conventions and allows them to be held indefinitely without charges.

Documents released last year -- also because of a Freedom of Information Act
lawsuit -- had the detainees' names and nationalities blacked out.

The documents, transcripts from at least 317 hearings at Guantanamo Bay, may
shed light on the scope of an insurgency still battling US troops in
Afghanistan, in part by detailing how Muslims from many countries wound up
fighting alongside the Taliban.

Some current and former Guantanamo detainees remained unidentified, even after
the release of the documents. An unknown number of the named prisoners have been
freed or transferred to custody elsewhere.

The AP has also filed a suit seeking a list of all detainees who are being held
or have been held at the prison.

''This is extremely important information," said Curt Goering, senior deputy
executive director of Amnesty International USA. ''We've been asking ever since
the camp opened for a list of everyone there as one of the most basic first
steps for any detaining authority."

Human rights monitors say keeping identities of prisoners secret can lead to
abuses and deprive their families of information about their fate.

The United States, which opened the prison on its Navy base in eastern Cuba in
January 2002, now holds about 490 prisoners at Guantanamo. Only 10 have been
charged with crimes.

Neal Sonnett, chairman of the American Bar Association's task force on enemy
combatants, said he hopes the documents will help focus attention on the
conditions for the detainees and the way the hearings were handled.

The documents released yesterday were unedited transcripts of the hearings.

''Perhaps even more important than just the identities of the detainees are the
unedited transcripts of the hearings, which I think will reveal a lot about the
way in which the detainees have been treated and the way in which their status
has been determined," Sonnett said. He was at Guantanamo to observe pretrial
hearings for two detainees charged with crimes.

The Defense Department had argued that releasing the identities of detainees
could subject their families, friends, and associates to embarrassment and
retaliation.

But US District Judge Jed S. Rakoff of New York said the relatives and others
''never had any reasonable expectation" of anonymity. Yesterday was the deadline
he set for the release of the material.

-------------------------------------

U.S. Cast a Wide Net in Terror War

By BEN FOX, Associated Press WriterSat Mar 4, 5:05 PM ET
New documents on the Guantanamo detainees suggest the Bush administration has
cast a wide net in its war on terror. But the U.S. has often come up empty as
American troops picked up suspects with descriptions as varied as a Kazakh apple
seller and a Pakistani millionaire.

Evidence against the apple seller, for example, showed he had been captured by
the Taliban and forced to work as a cook.

In fact, the man told his U.S. military tribunal, he was only a cook's helper,
and had never heard of al-Qaida or the Taliban until he was kidnapped and
conscripted by Afghanistan's former hardline Islamic regime.

"I never had a weapon. I never carried a weapon with me and I've never been in
any kind of armed fight," he said in one of hundreds of military hearings held
to determine whether detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay are being
properly held without charges as "enemy combatants."

These and other details emerging from about 5,000 pages of transcripts released
Friday suggest the Bush administration has picked up any number of low-level
suspects along with admitted al-Qaida and Taliban members and the rare
high-value target, a Pakistani millionaire who twice met Osama bin Laden.

The Pentagon was forced to release the documents by a federal judge in response
to an Associated Press lawsuit, but much of the administration's war on terror
remains shrouded in overwhelming secrecy. The transcripts reveal only
unclassified information, for example --- the detainees and their
representatives are not told what other evidence the military might have against
them.

The apple seller's weak link to the Taliban or al-Qaida does not appear to be
unique at Guantanamo Bay, the mostly unredacted transcripts reveal.

Some detainees say they attended training camps U.S. authorities believe were
run by al-Qaida or militants linked to the terror group. A few admit to meeting
bin Laden. Some are prominent, like the governor of Afghanistan's Herat province
or the Taliban's minister of commerce, or the Pakistani millionaire, a man with
businesses in the U.S. and ties to Middle Eastern leaders.

Some were picked up after their names were found on lists at al-Qaida safe
houses in Pakistan, or taken from the battlefields of Afghanistan shortly after
U.S. troops invaded and helped drive out the Taliban.

The evidence against others can seem flimsy. In at least one case, it appears to
include only the fact that the suspect wore a Casio watch --- a brand allegedly
favored by terrorists for use as bomb timers.

And some of those captured seem to be small fry indeed, such as Hafizullah Shah,
a farmer who said he had never left his village before being arrested because he
wore an olive drab jacket.

"I was just walking in the street and I was captured," Shah said. "The next
thing I found out is that I am sitting here."

It is impossible to gauge from the transcripts alone whether someone is
improperly held at Guantanamo Bay, where the U.S. now holds about 490 detainees.

Again and again, detainees are told that there is other evidence against them,
but they are not permitted to see it.

The Bush administration has kept almost all information about the detainees
secret since opening the prison in January 2002.

The military, however, has stopped bringing new detainees to the prison and has
transferred or released about 279. The Pentagon said it would reduce the
detainee population by about 30 percent with more transfers and releases.

The apple seller's fate is unknown. His name apparently was not mentioned in his
hearing, and so does not appear in the unredacted transcripts that have revealed
many other detainee names for the first time. But he had a theory about why he
was being held.

"I always knew America as a democratic country and always heard positive things
about America," he told the tribunal. "I believe that after 9/11 America became
very aggressive and that's probably the only reason I'm here."

-----------------------------------------------

Task Force 6-26
Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Unit Abused Detainees

By ERIC SCHMITT and CAROLYN MARSHALL
March 19, 2006

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations
forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad
into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the
former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation
cell. They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with
rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used
detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was
to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit
or were briefed on its operations.

The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret
headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at
Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents
on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL."
The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage
adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute
for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners
at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access
to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality
is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account
of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen
people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly
trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.

It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military
prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret Central
Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world.

The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated
prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were
made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions
that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.

The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from
an Army investigator and American intelligence and law enforcement officials in
Iraq. The C.I.A. was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that
August.

It is difficult to compare the conditions at the camp with those at Abu Ghraib
because so little is known about the secret compound, which was off limits even
to the Red Cross. The abuses appeared to have been unsanctioned, but some of
them seemed to have been well known throughout the camp.

For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26
seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since
2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating
prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit, according to
new figures the Special Operations Command provided in response to questions
from The New York Times. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three
months ago for kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005.

Some of the serious accusations against Task Force 6-26 have been reported over
the past 16 months by news organizations including NBC, The Washington Post and
The Times. Many details emerged in hundreds of pages of documents released under
a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union. But
taken together for the first time, the declassified documents and interviews
with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other
federal personnel provide the most detailed portrait yet of the secret camp and
the inner workings of the clandestine unit.

The documents and interviews also reflect a culture clash between the
free-wheeling military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians
working with them that escalated to a tense confrontation. At one point, one of
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top aides, Stephen A. Cambone, ordered a
subordinate to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct.

Most of the people interviewed for this article were midlevel civilian and
military Defense Department personnel who worked with Task Force 6-26 and said
they witnessed abuses, or who were briefed on its operations over the past three
years.

Many were initially reluctant to discuss Task Force 6-26 because its missions
are classified. But when pressed repeatedly by reporters who contacted them,
they agreed to speak about their experiences and observations out of what they
said was anger and disgust over the unit's treatment of detainees and the
failure of task force commanders to punish misconduct more aggressively. The
critics said the harsh interrogations yielded little information to help capture
insurgents or save American lives.

Virtually all of those who agreed to speak are career government employees, many
with previous military service, and they were granted anonymity to encourage
them to speak candidly without fear of retribution from the Pentagon. Many of
their complaints are supported by declassified military documents and e-mail
messages from F.B.I. agents who worked regularly with the task force in Iraq.

A Demand for Intelligence

Military officials say there may have been extenuating circumstances for some of
the harsh treatment at Camp Nama and its field stations in other parts of
Iraq. By the spring of 2004, the demand on interrogators for intelligence was
growing to help combat the increasingly numerous and deadly insurgent attacks.

Some detainees may have been injured resisting capture. A spokesman for the
Special Operations Command, Kenneth S. McGraw, said there was sufficient
evidence to prove misconduct in only 5 of 29 abuse allegations against task
force members since 2003. As a result of those five incidents, 34 people were
disciplined.

"We take all those allegations seriously," Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the commander of
the Special Operations Command, said in a brief hallway exchange on Capitol Hill
on March 8. "Any kind of abuse is not consistent with the values of the Special
Operations Command."

The secrecy surrounding the highly classified unit has helped to shield its
conduct from public scrutiny. The Pentagon will not disclose the unit's precise
size, the names of its commanders, its operating bases or specific
missions. Even the task force's name changes regularly to confuse adversaries,
and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified
the soldiers in public announcements as task force members.

General Brown's command declined requests for interviews with several former
task force members and with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who leads the Joint
Special Operations Command, the headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C., that supplies
the unit's most elite troops.

One Special Operations officer and a senior enlisted soldier identified by
Defense Department personnel as former task force members at Camp Nama declined
to comment when contacted by telephone. Attempts to contact three other Special
Operations soldiers who were in the unit --- by phone, through relatives and
former neighbors --- were also unsuccessful.

Cases of detainee abuse attributed to Task Force 6-26 demonstrate both confusion
over and, in some cases, disregard for approved interrogation practices and
standards for detainee treatment, according to Defense Department specialists
who have worked with the unit.

In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to members of the
Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his entire family at their home in
Baghdad. Task force soldiers beat him repeatedly with a rifle butt and punched
him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the
incident.

Some complaints were ignored or played down in a unit where a conspiracy of
silence contributed to the overall secretiveness. "It's under control," one unit
commander told a Defense Department official who complained about mistreatment
at Camp Nama in the spring of 2004.

For hundreds of suspected insurgents, Camp Nama was a way station on a journey
that started with their capture on the battlefield or in their homes, and ended
often in a cell at Abu Ghraib. Hidden in plain sight just off a dusty road
fronting Baghdad International Airport, Camp Nama was an unmarked, virtually
unknown compound at the edge of the taxiways.

The heart of the camp was the Battlefield Interrogation Facility, alternately
known as the Temporary Detention Facility and the Temporary Holding
Facility. The interrogation and detention areas occupied a corner of the larger
compound, separated by a fence topped with razor wire.

Unmarked helicopters flew detainees into the camp almost daily, former task
force members said. Dressed in blue jumpsuits with taped goggles covering their
eyes, the shackled prisoners were led into a screening room where they were
registered and examined by medics.

Just beyond the screening rooms, where Saddam Hussein was given a medical exam
after his capture, detainees were kept in as many as 85 cells spread over two
buildings. Some detainees were kept in what was known as Motel 6, a group of
crudely built plywood shacks that reeked of urine and excrement. The shacks were
cramped, forcing many prisoners to squat or crouch. Other detainees were housed
inside a separate building in 6-by-8-foot cubicles in a cellblock called Hotel
California.

The interrogation rooms were stark. High-value detainees were questioned in the
Black Room, nearly bare but for several 18-inch hooks that jutted from the
ceiling, a grisly reminder of the terrors inflicted by Mr. Hussein's
inquisitors. Jailers often blared rap music or rock 'n' roll at deafening
decibels over a loudspeaker to unnerve their subjects.

Another smaller room offered basic comforts like carpets and cushioned seating
to put more cooperative prisoners at ease, said several Defense Department
specialists who worked at Camp Nama. Detainees wore heavy, olive-drab hoods
outside their cells. By June 2004, the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib
galvanized the military to promise better treatment for prisoners. In one small
concession at Camp Nama, soldiers exchanged the hoods for cloth blindfolds with
drop veils that allowed detainees to breathe more freely but prevented them from
peeking out.

Some former task force members said the Nama in the camp's name stood for a
coarse phrase that soldiers used to describe the compound. One Defense
Department specialist recalled seeing pink blotches on detainees' clothing as
well as red welts on their bodies, marks he learned later were inflicted by
soldiers who used detainees as targets and called themselves the High Five
Paintball Club.

Mr. McGraw, the military spokesman, said he had not heard of the Black Room or
the paintball club and had not seen any mention of them in the documents he had
reviewed.

In a nearby operations center, task force analysts pored over intelligence
collected from spies, detainees and remotely piloted Predator surveillance
aircraft, to piece together clues to aid soldiers on their raids. Twice daily at
noon and midnight military interrogators and their supervisors met with
officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and allied military units to review operations
and new intelligence.

Task Force 6-26 was a creation of the Pentagon's post-Sept. 11 campaign against
terrorism, and it quickly became the model for how the military would gain
intelligence and battle insurgents in the future. Originally known as Task Force
121, it was formed in the summer of 2003, when the military merged two existing
Special Operations units, one hunting Osama bin Laden in and around Afghanistan,
and the other tracking Mr. Hussein in Iraq. (Its current name is Task Force
145.)

The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on
elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include
the Army unit Delta Force, Navy's Seal Team 6 and the 75th Ranger
Regiment. Military reservists and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel with
special skills, like interrogators, were temporarily assigned to the
unit. C.I.A. officers, F.B.I. agents and special operations forces from other
countries also worked closely with the task force.

Many of the American Special Operations soldiers wore civilian clothes and were
allowed to grow beards and long hair, setting them apart from their uniformed
colleagues. Unlike conventional soldiers and marines whose Iraq tours lasted 7
to 12 months, unit members and their commanders typically rotated every 90 days.

Task Force 6-26 had a singular focus: capture or kill Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian
militant operating in Iraq. "Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby,
they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a
detainee," one official said.

Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit's operations said the harsh
treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Falluja,
Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk. These stations were often nestled within the alleys of
a city in nondescript buildings with suburban-size yards where helicopters could
land to drop off or pick up detainees.

At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on
them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who
served with the unit.

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Mr. Hussein's
bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to
strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an
air-conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach
until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June
2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it
impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted
that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were
often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary
Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said. Prisoners deemed no threat to
American troops were often driven deep into the Iraqi desert at night and
released, sometimes given $100 or more in American money for their trouble.

Back at Camp Nama, the task force leaders established a ritual for departing
personnel who did a good job, Pentagon officials said. The commanders presented
them with two unusual mementos: a detainee hood and a souvenir piece of tile
from the medical screening room that once held Mr. Hussein.

Early Signs of Trouble

Accusations of abuse by Task Force 6-26 came as no surprise to many other
officials in Iraq. By early 2004, both the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had expressed
alarm about the military's harsh interrogation techniques.

The C.I.A.'s Baghdad station sent a cable to headquarters on Aug. 3, 2003,
raising concern that Special Operations troops who served with agency officers
had used techniques that had become too aggressive. Five days later, the
C.I.A. issued a classified directive that prohibited its officers from
participating in harsh interrogations. Separately, the C.I.A. barred its
officers from working at Camp Nama but allowed them to keep providing target
information and other intelligence to the task force.

The warnings still echoed nearly a year later. On June 25, 2004, nearly two
months after the disclosure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, an F.B.I. agent in Iraq
sent an e-mail message to his superiors in Washington, warning that a detainee
captured by Task Force 6-26 had suspicious burn marks on his body. The detainee
said he had been tortured. A month earlier, another F.B.I. agent asked top
bureau officials for guidance on how to deal with military interrogators across
Iraq who used techniques like loud music and yelling that exceeded "the bounds
of standard F.B.I. practice."

American generals were also alerted to the problem. In December 2003,
Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, warned in a
confidential memo that medical personnel reported that prisoners seized by the
unit, then known as Task Force 121, had injuries consistent with beatings. "It
seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of
detainees," Colonel Herrington concluded.

By May 2004, just as the scandal at Abu Ghraib was breaking, tensions increased
at Camp Nama between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators
and case officers from the D.I.A.'s Defense Human Intelligence Service, who were
there to support the unit in its fight against the Zarqawi network. The discord,
according to documents, centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as
restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues,
like monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls.

Maj. Gen. George E. Ennis, who until recently commanded the D.I.A.'s human
intelligence division, declined to be interviewed for this article. But in
written responses to questions, General Ennis said he never heard about the
numerous complaints made by D.I.A. personnel until he and his boss, Vice
Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, then the agency's director, were briefed on June 24,
2004.

The next day, Admiral Jacoby wrote a two-page memo to Mr. Cambone, under
secretary of defense for intelligence. In it, he described a series of
complaints, including a May 2004 incident in which a D.I.A. interrogator said he
witnessed task force soldiers punch a detainee hard enough to require medical
help. The D.I.A. officer took photos of the injuries, but a supervisor
confiscated them, the memo said.

The tensions laid bare a clash of military cultures. Combat-hardened commandos
seeking a steady flow of intelligence to pinpoint insurgents grew exasperated
with civilian interrogators sent from Washington, many of whom were novices at
interrogating hostile prisoners fresh off the battlefield.

"These guys wanted results, and our debriefers were used to a civil
environment," said one Defense Department official who was briefed on the task
force operations.

Within days after Admiral Jacoby sent his memo, the D.I.A. took the
extraordinary step of temporarily withdrawing its personnel from Camp Nama.

Admiral Jacoby's memo also provoked an angry reaction from Mr. Cambone. "Get to
the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable," Mr. Cambone said in a
handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lt. Gen. William
G. Boykin. "In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of
behavior by TF 6-26."

General Boykin said through a spokesman on March 17 that at the time he told
Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force.

A Shroud of Secrecy

Military and legal experts say the full breadth of abuses committed by Task
Force 6-26 may never be known because of the secrecy surrounding the unit, and
the likelihood that some allegations went unreported.

In the summer of 2004, Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a new headquarters
in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit's operations are now shrouded in
even tighter secrecy.

Soon after their rank-and-file clashed in 2004, D.I.A. officials in Washington
and military commanders at Fort Bragg agreed to improve how the task force
integrated specialists into its ranks. The D.I.A. is now sending small teams of
interrogators, debriefers and case officers, called "deployable Humint teams,"
to work with Special Operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senior military commanders insist that the elite warriors, who will be relied on
more than ever in the campaign against terrorism, are now treating detainees
more humanely and can police themselves. The C.I.A. has resumed conducting
debriefings with the task force, but does not permit harsh questioning, a
C.I.A. official said.

General McChrystal, the leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, received
his third star in a promotion ceremony at Fort Bragg on March 13.

On Dec. 8, 2004, the Pentagon's spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said that four
Special Operations soldiers from the task force were punished for "excessive use
of force" and administering electric shocks to detainees with stun guns. Two of
the soldiers were removed from the unit. To that point, Mr. Di Rita said, 10
task force members had been disciplined. Since then, according to the new
figures provided to The Times, the number of those disciplined for detainee
abuse has more than tripled. Nine of the 34 troops disciplined received written
or oral counseling. Others were reprimanded for slapping detainees and other
offenses.

The five Army Rangers who were court-martialed in December received punishments
including jail time of 30 days to six months and reduction in rank. Two of them
will receive bad-conduct discharges upon completion of their sentences.

Human rights advocates and leading members of Congress say the Pentagon must
still do more to hold senior-level commanders and civilian officials accountable
for the misconduct.

The Justice Department inspector general is investigating complaints of detainee
abuse by Task Force 6-26, a senior law enforcement official said. The only
wide-ranging military inquiry into prisoner abuse by Special Operations forces
was completed nearly a year ago by Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica, and was sent
to Congress.

But the United States Central Command has refused repeated requests from The
Times over the past several months to provide an unclassified copy of General
Formica's findings despite Mr. Rumsfeld's instructions that such a version of
all 12 major reports into detainee abuse be made public.

---------------------------------------

March 23, 2006
NYT Editorial
The Joy of Being Blameless

The contrast could not have been more stark, nor the message more clear. On the
day that a court-martial imposed justice on a 24-year-old Army sergeant for
tormenting detainees at Abu Ghraib with his dog, President Bush said once again
that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose benighted policies and managerial
incompetence led to the prisoner abuse scandal, was doing a "fine job" and
should stay at his post.

We've seen this sorry pattern for nearly two years now, since the Abu Ghraib
horrors first shocked the world: President Bush has clung to the fiction that
the abuse of prisoners was just the work of a few rotten apples, despite report
after report after report demonstrating that it was organized and systematic,
and flowed from policies written by top officials in his administration.

Just this week, Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall provided a bloodcurdling
account in the Times of how a Special Operations unit converted an Iraqi
military base into a torture chamber, even using prisoners as paintball targets,
in its frenzy to counter a widely predicted insurgency for which Mr. Rumsfeld
had refused to prepare. In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling
cars to members of a terrorist network was arrested and beaten
repeatedly. Another man said he had been forced to strip, punched in the spine
until he fainted, put in front of an air-conditioner while cold water was poured
on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. His crime? His father had
worked for Saddam Hussein.

These accounts are tragically familiar. The names and dates change, but the
basic pattern is the same, including the fact that this bestiality produced
little or no useful intelligence. The Bush administration decided to go outside
the law to deal with prisoners, and soldiers carried out that policy. Those who
committed these atrocities deserve the punishment they are getting, but
virtually all high-ranking soldiers have escaped unscathed. And not a single
policy maker has been called to account.

Col. Thomas Pappas, the former intelligence chief at Abu Ghraib, testified at
the dog handler's trial that the use of dogs had grown out of conversations he
had had with military jailers from Guantánamo Bay led by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey
Miller, who had been sent to Iraq to instruct soldiers there in the
interrogation techniques refined at Gitmo under Mr. Rumsfeld's torture-is-legal
policy. Colonel Pappas said General Miller had explained how to use the "Arab
fear of dogs" to set up interrogations.

What of General Miller? He invoked his right against self-incrimination to avoid
testifying, and Time magazine reported this week that he was exonerated by an
Army whitewash. Apparently he was not responsible for the actions of soldiers
operating under rules he put in place.

About the only high-ranking officer whose career has suffered over Abu Ghraib is
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was the commander in Iraq at the time. General
Sanchez should certainly take responsibility, but he was also a victim of
administration blunders.

General Sanchez was vaulted inappropriately from head of the First Armored
Division to overall commander because Mr. Bush declared "mission accomplished":
the war's over. He was then denied the staff, soldiers and equipment he needed
to deal with the insurgency that quickly broke out and produced thousands of
prisoners.

Mr. Bush has refused to hold himself or any of his top political appointees
accountable for those catastrophic errors. Indeed, he has promoted many of
them. And this is not an isolated problem. It's just one example, among many, of
how this president's men run no risk of being blamed for anything that happens,
no matter how egregious.

----------------------------------------

Force-Feeding at Guantanamo Is Now Acknowledged

BYLINE: By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN; Eric Schmitt reported from Washington
for this article, and Tim Golden from New York.

DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 

The military commander responsible for the American detention center at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, confirmed Tuesday that officials there last month turned
to more aggressive methods to deter prisoners who were carrying out long-term
hunger strikes to protest their incarceration.

The commander, Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, head of the United States Southern
Command, said soldiers at Guantanamo began strapping some of the detainees into
''restraint chairs'' to force-feed them and isolate them from one another after
finding that some were deliberately vomiting or siphoning out the liquid they
had been fed. 

''It was causing problems because some of these hard-core guys were getting
worse,'' General Craddock said at a breakfast meeting with reporters. Explaining
the use of the restraint chairs, he added, ''The way around that is you have to
make sure that purging doesn't happen.''

After The New York Times reported Feb. 9 that the military had begun using
restraint chairs and other harsh methods, military spokesmen insisted that the
procedures for dealing with the hunger strikes at Guantanamo had not
changed. They also said they could not confirm that the chairs had been used.

On Tuesday, General Craddock said he had reviewed the use of the restraint
chairs, as had senior officials at the Department of Defense, and they concluded
that the practice was ''not inhumane.'' General Craddock left no doubt, however,
that commanders had decided to try to make life less comfortable for the hunger
strikers, and that the measures were seen as successful.

''Pretty soon it wasn't convenient, and they decided it wasn't worth it,'' he
said of the hunger strikers. ''A lot of the detainees said: 'I don't want to put
up with this. This is too much of a hassle.' ''

A spokesman for the Southern Command, Lt. Col. James Marshall, said that
restraint chairs had been used in the feeding of 35 of the detainees so far, and
that 3 were still being fed that way. He said the number of prisoners refusing
to eat had fallen from 41 on Dec. 15 -- when the restraint chairs were first
used on a trial basis -- to 5, according to a military spokesman.

Military officials have said the tough measures were necessary to keep detainees
from dying. But while many of the strikers lost between 15 and 20 percent of
their normal body weight, only a few were thought to be in immediate medical
danger, two officers familiar with the strike said.

Lawyers for the detainees and several human rights groups have assailed the new
methods used against the hunger strikers as inhumane, and as unjustified by the
reported medical condition of the prisoners. 

According to newly declassified interview notes, several detainees who had been
on hunger strikes told their lawyers during visits late last month that the
military had begun using harsher methods more widely in the second week of
January. One Yemeni detainee, Emad Hassan, described the chair to lawyers in
interviews on Jan. 24 and 25. 

''The head is immobilized by a strap so it can't be moved, their hands are
cuffed to the chair and the legs are shackled,'' the notes quote Mr. Hassan as
saying. ''They ask, 'Are you going to eat or not?' and if not, they insert the
tube. People have been urinating and defecating on themselves in these feedings
and vomiting and bleeding. They ask to be allowed to go to the bathroom, but
they will not let them go. They have sometimes put diapers on them.''

Another former hunger striker, Isa al-Murbati of Bahrain, described a similar
experience to his lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, in an interview on Jan. 28. 

On Jan. 10, he said, a lieutenant came to his isolation cell and told him that
if he did not agree to eat solid food, he would be strapped into the chair and
force-fed. After he refused to comply, he said, soldiers picked him up by the
throat, threw him to the floor and strapped him to the restraint chair.

Like Mr. Hassan, Mr. Murbati said he had been fed two large bags of liquid
formula, which were forced into his stomach very quickly. ''He felt pain like a
'knife in the stomach' '' Mr. Colangelo-Bryan said. 

Detainees said the Guantanamo medical staff also began inserting and removing
the long plastic feeding tubes that were threaded through the detainees' nasal
passages and into their stomachs at every feeding, a practice that caused sharp
pain and frequent bleeding, they said. Until then, doctors there said, they had
been allowing the hunger strikers to leave their feeding tubes in, to reduce
discomfort.

Military spokesmen have generally discounted the complaints, saying the
prisoners are for the most part terrorists, trained by Al Qaeda to use false
stories as propaganda.

In a letter to a British physician and human rights activist, Dr. David
J. Nicholl, on Dec. 12, the former chief medical officer at Guantanamo,
Capt. John S. Edmondson of the Navy, wrote that his staff was not force-feeding
any detainees but ''providing nutritional supplementation on a voluntary basis
to detainees who wish to protest their confinement by not taking oral
nourishment.''

General Craddock suggested that the medical staff had indulged the hunger
strikers to the point that they had been allowed to choose the color of their
feeding tubes. 

Two other Defense Department officials said a decision had been made to try to
break the hunger strikes because they were having a disruptive effect and
causing stress for the medical staff.

That effort was stepped up, one official said, in January, when Captain
Edmondson left Guantanamo for a new post after receiving a Legion of Merit Medal
for ''inspiring leadership and exemplary performance.''

----------------------------------------

Senior Lawyer At Pentagon Broke Ranks On Detainees

By TIM GOLDEN
February 20, 2006

One of the Pentagon's top civilian lawyers repeatedly challenged the Bush
administration's policy on the coercive interrogation of terror suspects,
arguing that such practices violated the law, verged on torture and could
ultimately expose senior officials to prosecution, a newly disclosed document
shows.

The lawyer, Alberto J. Mora, a Republican appointee who retired last month after
more than four years as general counsel of the Navy, was one of many dissenters
inside the Pentagon. Senior uniformed lawyers in all the military services also
objected sharply to the interrogation policy, according to internal documents
declassified last year. 

But Mr. Mora's campaign against what he viewed as an official policy of cruel
treatment, detailed in a memorandum he wrote in July 2004 and recounted in an
article in the Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, made public yesterday,
underscored again how contrary views were often brushed aside in administration
debates on the subject.

''Even if one wanted to authorize the U.S. military to conduct coercive
interrogations, as was the case in Guantanamo, how could one do so without
profoundly altering its core values and character?'' Mr. Mora asked the
Pentagon's chief lawyer, William J. Haynes II, according to the memorandum.

A Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Tracy O'Grady-Walsh, declined to comment late
yesterday on specific accusations in Mr. Mora's memorandum. ''Detainee
operations and interrogation policies have been scrutinized under a microscope,
from all different angles,'' she said. ''It was found that it was not a
Department of Defense policy to encourage or condone torture.''

In interviews, current and former Defense Department officials said that part of
what was striking about Mr. Mora's forceful role in the internal debates was how
out of character it seemed: a loyal Republican, he was known as a supporter of
President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the fight against
terrorism.

''He's an extremely well-spoken, almost elegant guy,'' the former director of
the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, David L. Brandt, who first came to
Mr. Mora with concerns about the interrogation methods, said in an interview
last week. ''He's not a door-kicker.''

Mr. Mora is also known for generally avoiding public attention. Reached by
telephone yesterday, he declined to comment further on his memorandum.

Mr. Mora prepared the 22-page memorandum for a Defense Department review of
interrogation operations that was conducted by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III,
after the scandal involving treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq.

The document focused on Mr. Mora's successful opposition to the coercive
techniques that Mr. Rumsfeld approved for interrogators at Guantanamo Bay on
Dec. 2, 2002, and Mr. Mora's subsequent, failed effort to influence the legal
discussions that led to new methods approved by Mr. Rumsfeld the following
April.

Mr. Mora took up the issue after Mr. Brandt came to him on Dec. 17, 2002, to
relay the concerns of Navy criminal agents at Guantanamo that some detainees
there were being subjected to ''physical abuse and degrading treatment'' by
interrogators.

Acting with the support of Gordon R. England, who was then secretary of the Navy
and is now Mr. Rumsfeld's deputy, Mr. Mora took his concerns to Mr. Haynes, the
Defense Department's general counsel.

''In my view, some of the authorized interrogation techniques could rise to the
level of torture, although the intent surely had not been to do so,'' Mr. Mora
wrote. 

After trying to rally other senior officials to his position, Mr. Mora met again
with Mr. Haynes on Jan. 10, 2003. He argued his case even more forcefully,
raising the possibility that senior officials could be prosecuted for
authorizing abusive conduct, and asking: ''Had we jettisoned our human rights
policies?''

Still, Mr. Mora wrote, it was only when he warned Mr. Haynes on Jan. 15 that he
was planning to issue a formal memorandum on his opposition to the methods --
delivering a draft to Mr. Haynes's office -- that Mr. Rumsfeld suddenly
retracted the techniques.

In a break from standard practice, former Pentagon lawyers said, the final draft
of the report on interrogation techniques was not circulated to most of the
lawyers, including Mr. Mora, who had contributed to it. Several of them said
they learned that a final version had been issued only after the Abu Ghraib
scandal broke.

--------------------------------------

February 20, 2006
Officials Investigate Germany's Role in U.S. Detention of Citizen

By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
This article was reported by Don Van Natta Jr. (from Munich), Souad Mekhennet
(from Neu-Ulm and Munich) and Nicholas Wood (reporting from Skopje, Macedonia),
and written by Mr. Van Natta.

MUNICH, Germany, Feb. 20 --- For more than a year, the German government has
criticized the United States for its role in the abduction of a German man who
was taken to an American prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he said he was held
and tortured for five months after being mistaken for a terrorism suspect.

German officials said they knew nothing about the man's abduction and have
repeatedly pressed Washington for information about the case, which has sparked
outrage here. At a meeting in Berlin in December, Chancellor Angela Merkel of
Germany demanded an explanation from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over
the incident.

But today in Neu-Ulm near Munich, police and prosecutors opened an investigation
into whether Germany served as a silent partner of the United States in the
abduction of the man, Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Arab descent who was
arrested on New Year's Eve 2003 in Macedonia before being flown to the Kabul
prison.

The action came after a two-and-a-half-hour meeting at police headquarters in
which Mr. Masri told the police that he was "90 percent" certain that a senior
German police official was the interrogator who had visited him three times
inside the prison in Kabul but had identified himself only as "Sam." The German
prosecutors said today that they were also investigating whether the German
Embassy in Skopje, Macedonia, had been notified about Mr. Masri's kidnapping
within days of his capture there, but then did nothing to try to help him.

Mr. Masri's case has come to symbolize the C.I.A. practice known as
extraordinary rendition, in which terror suspects are sent to be interrogated in
other countries where torture is commonly used. In broadening its criminal
inquiry into the abduction of Mr. Masri to the activities of its own government,
German prosecutors are trying to determine whether the German government worked
secretly with the United States in the practice.

"I feel deceived and betrayed by my own country," Mr. Masri, a 42-year-old
unemployed car salesman from Neu-Ulm, said in an interview.

The German police official identified as "Sam" denied that he had visited
Mr. Masri in Afghanistan and said he was "on holiday" at the time in Germany,
but that he could not remember exactly where. The man was present today at the
police station, where Mr. Masri picked him out of a 10-person lineup. After
speaking with him, Mr. Masri said his voice was the similar but his hair style
was different.

Martin Hofmann, a prosecutor in Munich, said today that his office would not
"assume that this man is Sam" but would "go forward with our investigation."

A senior German official familiar with the case said that Mr. Masri was "at best
mistaken" and that the police official "cannot be Sam."

The New York Times is withholding the official's name at the request of
Germany's intelligence services because he often does undercover intelligence
work. He frequently gets "sensitive" assignments and helps clean up "dirty work"
for the German foreign intelligence service, said one of his longtime
colleagues, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

A senior Macedonian government official who was directly involved in Mr. Masri's
detention told The Times that not long after Mr. Masri's capture, Macedonian
officials notified the German Embassy in Skopje. C.I.A. officers in Macedonia
conducted the interrogation of Mr. Masri, according to Macedonian officials.

August Stern, the Munich-based federal prosecutor who is leading Germany's
criminal investigation of Mr. Masri's kidnapping, said his investigators were
trying to determine whether the German Embassy had been told about Mr. Masri's
capture, and then sent a German agent to the American prison in Kabul to talk
with him. Mr. Stern and other senior police and prosecutors said they would
attempt to interview the officials inside the German Embassy in Skopje in the
coming weeks.

August Hanning, secretary of state for the Ministry of the Interior, denied in
an interview that any member of Germany's secret services had visited Mr. Masri
while he was held captive. "He has never been to Afghanistan," Mr. Hanning said
of the German police official.

Two senior German officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of
the case's sensitive nature, denied that Germany's embassy in Skopje had been
told about Mr. Masri's capture. "The German Embassy in Skopje was not informed
by Macedonian authorities while German citizen el-Masri was in custody in
Macedonia," a Foreign Office spokesman said. A second official said that Germany
did not learn about Mr. Masri's detention until May 31, 2004, when the United
States ambassador to Germany at the time, Daniel Coats, informed German
officials about Mr. Masri's capture and eventual release.

"According to our investigation, I am convinced that German officials did not
have any knowledge before his release," the official said.

Later this week, the German government is expected to turn over a report to the
Parliament about Mr. Masri's case.

Meanwhile, investigators at the Council of Europe, led by Dick Marty, a Swiss
lawmaker, are investigating whether there was quiet cooperation between the
C.I.A. and their counterparts in European countries, including Germany, Italy
and Sweden, where suspected terrorists were kidnapped and sent to third
countries for interrogation.

In June, the authorities in Italy charged 23 C.I.A. agents with the abduction of
a terror suspect from the streets of Milan. Italian government officials have
insisted they did not know about the procedure, but some elected officials in
Italy said that the Americans must have tipped off their counterparts in the
Italian intelligence agency.

European officials have been sharply critical of the C.I.A.'s rendition
program. In particular, German officials have rebuked the United States for
playing a role in the abduction of one of its own citizens and then transporting
him to Afghanistan on a chartered C.I.A. plane.

"I have no explanation for the whole case," a senior German official said. "To
bring such a man like el-Masri from Europe to Afghanistan and to ask him some
questions and six months later, the explanation is that it's a terrible error is
not very convincing. To me there are still a lot of questions."

Manfred R. Gnjidic, Mr. Masri's lawyer, said he was convinced that Germany
"stood by like a little school boy, watching what was going on with my client
and doing nothing."

After more than five months in captivity, the United States released Mr. Masri
without filing charges. His case was first revealed in The Times in January
2005.

At the meeting last December in Berlin between the German chancellor and
Secretary Rice, the kidnapping of Mr. Masri was discussed privately but the two
leaders seemed to disagree about the substance of that conversation afterward.

Ms. Merkel said that the Bush administration had admitted it had mistakenly
abducted Mr. Masri. But Ms. Rice declined to discuss with reporters anything
about the case. She said only that she had pledged to Ms. Merkel: "When and if
mistakes are made, we work very hard and as quickly as possible to rectify
them."

In Washington, a senior State Department official said today that the department
would not comment on Mr. Masri's case, noting that it was a matter of litigation
in both Germany and the United States. In late 2003, Mr. Masri left his family
in Neu-Ulm for a trip to Macedonia. Macedonian and German officials said
Mr. Masri was arrested at a border checkpoint on Dec. 31, 2003, because his name
was on an Interpol terror watch list. But they said the name referred to another
Khaled el-Masri.

Mr. Masri was then held in a nearby hotel in Macedonia for several weeks, where
he was questioned by the C.I.A., according to senior Macedonian and American
government officials. One senior Macedonian official said that the German
Embassy was notified about Mr. Masri within days of his capture. "Unofficially,
they knew," the official said of the Germans.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.

Two senior Macedonian officials said that the Americans requested to have
Mr. Masri detained in Macedonia for 23 days. "We consider the Americans as our
partners," one senior Macedonian official said. "We cannot refuse them."

Mr. Masri said he had pleaded with his captors to let him go. "Call the German
Embassy," Mr. Masri recalled telling them repeatedly. "I'm a German citizen;
please tell them I am here!"

"They don't want to talk to you," Mr. Masri recalled one of his captors replied.

In a recent interview, Mr. Masri said, "I thought it was strange that they kept
telling me the Germans didn't care about me. Now I know why they said that ---
because it was true."

At the hotel, Mr. Masri said, he was asked whether he was a member of Al
Qaeda. But he was struck by the many questions he was asked about his time in
Germany. Mr. Masri said the questions led him to suspect that the Germans were
cooperating with the Macedonians.

A German official disputed that assertion, saying that Germany had often shared
information with their American counterparts about suspected terrorists. But the
official acknowledged that Mr. Masri was not considered by German police to be
an "important" suspect.

Publicly, Macedonia has denied that Mr. Masri was held illegally. "There is
nothing the ministry has done illegally," Hari Kostiv, the minister of interior
at the time and later the prime minister, said in an interview. "The man is
alive and back home with his family. Somebody made a mistake. That somebody is
not Macedonia."

By late January 2004, Mr. Masri was sent to Afghanistan, where he said he was
held and beaten over the next five months.

For Mr. Masri, one of the biggest mysteries was the identity of the interrogator
who identified himself as "Sam," and who spoke in fluent German. The man visited
three times during Mr. Masri's final month at the Kabul jail.

During the first meeting, Mr. Masri said he asked the man if he was from
Germany, but the man declined to answer. Mr. Masri recalled asking him, "Do the
Germans know I'm here?"

"He said he did not want to answer," Mr. Masri recalled. "I asked him if my wife
knew I was there. Sam said she doesn't know. He then said, I shouldn't ask
questions, I should only answer them."

During their second meeting, the man was no longer belligerent, Mr. Masri said,
bringing him cookies, chocolates and a copy of the German newsmagazine
Focus. The man also asked if Mr. Masri wanted "anything from Germany."

"I said, 'Nothing, thank you,' " Mr. Masri recalled.

In their last meeting, a week prior to Mr. Masri's release, the man told him
that he would be returning home soon. The last time Mr. Masri saw "Sam," the
interrogator was speaking with a man who he believed was an American. Soon
afterward, Mr. Masri was released.

On Dec. 12, 2005, Mr. Gnjidic, the lawyer for Mr. Masri, received an e-mail
message from a German journalist named Frank Kruger, who suggested that "Sam"
might be a German police official. Earlier this month, Mr. Gnjidic said he had
obtained a videotape of the police official that convinced Mr. Masri that he was
Sam. Today, after meeting the man at police headquarters, Mr. Masri said he was
90 percent certain that the police official was Sam.

"The man was very nervous and he could not look at me into my eyes," Mr. Masri
said. "The hair is different but the voice sounded very similar."

Mr. Masri added, "For me, it is very important that we know who this man was."

Mr. Gnjidic said he found it hard to believe that other than the prosecutors in
Munich, no one in the German government had sought Mr. Masri's testimony about
his ordeal. "The scandal for me is that the Germans did nothing when they heard
a German had been captured," he said. "They should have protested very hard and
tried to stop this."

-----------------------------

March 6, 2006
Voices Baffled, Brash and Irate in Guantanamo

By TIM GOLDEN
For the Record Appended
This article was reported by Margot Williams, Tim Golden and Raymond Bonner and
written by Mr. Golden.

Among the hundreds of men imprisoned by the American military at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, there are those who brashly assert their determination to wage war against
what they see as the infidel empire led by the United States.

''May God help me fight the unfaithful ones,'' one Saudi detainee, Ghassan
Abdallah Ghazi al-Shirbi, said at a military hearing where he was accused of
being a lieutenant of Al Qaeda.

But there are many more, it seems, who sound like Abdur Sayed Rahman, a
self-described Pakistani villager who says he was arrested at his modest home in
January 2002, flown off to Afghanistan and later accused of being the deputy
foreign minister of that country's deposed Taliban regime.

''I am only a chicken farmer in Pakistan,'' he protested to American military
officers at Guantanamo. ''My name is Abdur Sayed Rahman. Abdur Zahid Rahman was
the deputy foreign minister of the Taliban.'' 

Mr. Rahman's pleadings are among more than 5,000 pages of documents released by
the Defense Department on Friday night in response to a lawsuit brought under
the Freedom of Information Act by The Associated Press.

After more than four years in which the Pentagon refused to make public even the
names of those held at Guantanamo, the documents provide the most detailed
information to date about who the detainees say they are and the evidence
against them.

According to their own accounts, the prisoners range from poor Afghan farmers
and low-level Arab holy warriors to a Sudanese drug dealer, the son of a former
Saudi Army general and a British resident with an Iraqi passport who was
arrested in Gambia.

One 26-year-old Saudi, Muhammed al-Utaybi, said he was studying art when he
decided to travel to Pakistan to train with the militant group
Lashkar-e-Taiba. He was not much of a militant himself, he suggested, saying the
training ''was just like summer vacation.''

The documents -- hearing transcripts and evidentiary statements from the two
types of military panels that evaluate whether the detainees should remain at
Guantanamo -- are far from a complete portrait of those in custody there.

They do not include the classified evidence that is generally part of the review
panels' deliberations, nor their final verdicts on whether or not to recommend
the detainees' release. Of the about 760 men who have been held at Guantanamo,
the documents cover fewer than half. 

But a reading of the voluminous files adds texture to the accusations that the
men face and the way they have tried to respond to them. It also underscores the
considerable difficulties that both the military and the detainees appear to
have had in wrestling with the often thin or conflicting evidence involved.

At one review hearing last year, an Afghan referred to by the single name
Muhibullah denied accusations that he was either the former Taliban governor of
Shibarghan Province or had worked for the governor. The solution to his case
should have been simple, Mr. Muhibullah suggested to the three American officers
reviewing his case: They should contact the Shibarghan governor and ask him.

But the presiding Marine Corps colonel said it was really up to the detainee to
try to contact the governor. Assuming that the annual review board denied his
petition for freedom, noted the officer, whose name was censored from the
document, Mr. Muhibullah would have a year to do so.

''How do I find the governor of Shibarghan or anybody?'' the detainee asked. 

''Write to them,'' the presiding officer responded. ''We know that it is
difficult but you need to do your best.''

''I appreciate your suggestion, but it is not that easy,'' Mr. Muhibullah said.

Bush administration officials and military leaders have often justified the
extraordinary conditions under which detainees are held at Guantanamo by
insisting that the detainees are hardened terrorists. Secretary of Defense
Donald H. Rumsfeld famously described the Guantanamo detainees as ''the worst of
the worst.'' 

And while many administration officials have privately backed away from such
claims, they argue that most of the 490 detainees still being held would pose a
significant threat to the United States if released. Pentagon spokesmen have
generally dismissed the detainees' protestations of innocence as the predictable
lies of well-trained militants. 

Accusations and Replies


The hearing transcripts are from review panels known as Combatant Status Review
Tribunals, where three military officers weigh whether a detainee is properly
classified as an ''enemy combatant.'' Few of them have made the process as easy
as Ghassan Abdallah Ghazi al-Shirbi.

''Honestly,'' he said, ''I did not come here to defend myself, but defend the
Islamic nation; this is my duty, and I have to do it.''

Among the accusations against Mr. Shirbi recounted in the hearing transcript
were that he trained with Al Qaeda, was ''observed chatting and laughing like
pals with Osama bin Laden,'' and was known as the ''right-hand man'' to Abu
Zubaydah, a top Qaeda operative. Mr. Shirbi said he was willing to accept all of
those accusations.

He then told the hearing officers, ''I found the accusations against you to be
many.'' 

With that, Mr. Shirbi unleashed a tirade against capitalism, America,
homosexuality, Israel, support for Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, and
the more recent war against Iraq. 

''Your status as enemy combatants does not need a court,'' he told the officers.

As for his own classification of enemy combatant, Mr. Shirbi was blunt: ''It is
my honor to have this classification in this world until the end, until
eternity, God be my witness.''

In other cases, the incriminating evidence has generally been less clear-cut.

Another Saudi, Mazin Salih Musaid al-Awfi, was one of at least half a dozen men
against whom the ''relevant data'' considered by the annual review boards
included the possession at the time of his capture of a Casio model F-91W
watch. According to evidentiary summaries in those cases, such watches have
''been used in crime, why doesn't the United States arrest and sentence all the
shops and people who own them?''

Another detainee whose evidence sheet also included a Casio F-91W, Abdullah
Kamal, was an electrical engineer from Kuwait who once played on his country's
national volleyball team. He was also accused of being a leader of a Kuwaiti
militant group that collected money for Mr. bin Laden.

As for the Casio allegation, Mr. Kamal said the watch was a common one in Kuwait
and had a compass that could be used to find the direction of Mecca for his
prayers. ''We have four chaplains'' at Guantanamo, he said. ''All of them wear
this watch.''

While many of the detainees are citizens of Afghanistan or were captured there
during and after the Taliban's overthrow, the documents also make clear the long
reach of the American campaign against terror.

One unidentified Pakistani detainee was seized as he tried to cross into the
United States from Mexico. He said he had paid an immigrant smuggler $16,000 to
$18,000 to take him to Guatemala and then north; his smuggler was known to the
American authorities for having ties to Arab militant groups, documents from his
case show.

Another Pakistani, Saifullah Paracha, was arrested in Thailand in July
2003. Mr. Paracha, a wealthy real estate developer who said he attended the New
York Institute of Technology, was accused of making investments for Qaeda
members, plotting to smuggle explosives into the United States and urging the
use of nuclear weapons against American soldiers. He acknowledged having met
Mr. bin Laden twice, but denied the other allegations.

An unidentified 34-year-old Mauritanian who appears to be Mohamedou Ould Slahi,
the onetime imam of a mosque in Montreal who was linked in Germany to two of the
Sept. 11 hijackers, told of being ''kidnapped'' after he turned himself in to
the Mauritanian authorities and of being taken to Jordan for eight months while
''they tried to squeeze information out of me.'' He said he was flown from
Jordan to Afghanistan, and then on to Guantanamo.

Yet for all the gravity of the global fight against terrorism, the give-and-take
at the Guantanamo hearings is sometimes reminiscent of a local arraignment
court.

Consider the exchange over a Belgian detainee, captured in Afghanistan. One
allegation, read in court, was that he was a member of the Theological
Commission of the GICM.

''What is GICM?'' asked the detainee, who was not identified.

The tribunal president asked a clerk, ''Could you explain what GICM is? I have
the same question.''

The clerk said he was not sure, either. Another accusation was read: that GICM
is associated with Al Qaeda. The detainee answered again, ''I don't know this
group.''

The tribunal president announced a short break so the clerk could ''find out,
for everyone's benefit, What GICM stands for.'' When the tribunal reconvened,
the clerk announced that GICM stood for Groupe Islamiste Combatant du Maroc, or
the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group. 

To which the detainee responded, ''I never before heard of all this.''

Defining the Details


The files are replete with retractions. Detainees who had confessed to having
ties to Al Qaeda or the Taliban or terrorism frequently told the tribunals that
they had only made those admissions to stop beatings or torture by their
captors.

''The only reason for my original statements is because I was tortured when I
was captured,'' said a former mechanical engineering student from Saudi Arabia
who was accused of training at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. ''In Kabul, an
Afghan interrogator beat me and told me they would kill me if I didn't
talk. They shot and killed someone in front of me and said they would do the
same if I didn't cooperate.''

Another common defense of the detainees, particularly those captured in
Afghanistan or Pakistan, is that they were turned over to American forces in
exchange for some kind of bounty, or that they were arrested when they refused
to or could not pay bribes to the local authorities.

''The Pakistanis are making business out of this war,'' said a detainee from
Tajikistan who was arrested in Pakistan in November 2001. ''The detainees are
not being captured by U.S. forces, but are being sold by the Pakistan
government. They are making 2, 3, or $10,000 to sell detainees to the U.S.''

As the Pentagon has defined the term enemy combatant for purposes of the
tribunals, it includes anyone ''who was part of or supporting the Taliban or Al
Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the
United States or its coalition partners.''

But many of the detainees protested in their hearings that such a wide net was
catching many who were not real enemies of the United States.

One 29-year-old Saudi acknowledged having fought with jihadist groups in the
Philippines and Afghanistan, saying he had been a ''zealous'' younger man. But
he also said that he had a brother and a cousin who had both married Americans,
and he had a complex set of views on the United States.

''I'm an educated guy and I understand politics,'' the detainee said, suggesting
that he had had a change of heart. ''The United States has made some wrong
decisions, but that doesn't give me the right to consider them an enemy or kill
their people.''

However improbably, many of the detainees said that the allure of Afghanistan
for them was not jihad. Maasoum Abdah insisted that his mission was entirely
personal.

In 2000, he said, he left Syria and traveled to Turkey and Iran and finally
Afghanistan. He was accused of living in a Taliban safe house in Kabul. The
authorities said his name was on a list of men being trained as snipers.

He acknowledged that he knew how to shoot from his days in the Syrian
police. But even in the police, he said, ''in a year and a half, I only shot
seven bullets.'' And he said he had no allegiance to the Taliban.

Then why the long, arduous journey to Afghanistan, a tribunal officer asked. ''I
wanted to go to Afghanistan to find a wife and get married and stay there,''
Mr. Abdah answered through a personal representative.

Why not find a wife in Syria?

''It is very expensive to find a wife,'' Mr. Abdah explained. ''The price is at
least $3,000. I might work for years and still not be able to collect that much
money. In Afghanistan, it is very cheap. The most is $300.''

Correction: March 7, 2006
A front-page article yesterday about prisoners held by the American military at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as described in documents released Friday by the Defense
Department, misstated in some copies the total number of men who have been held
at Guantanamo. It is 760, not 660.

-------------------------------------

7 detainees report transfer to nations that use torture

By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff  |  April 26, 2006

WASHINGTON -- At least seven US prisoners at Guantanamo Bay say they were
transferred to countries known for torture prior to their arrival at the base,
according to recently released transcripts from military commission hearings and
other court documents.

At least three of them allege that they were tortured during interrogations in
Jordan, Morocco, and Egypt.

The transcripts represent the first accounts of rendition from prisoners who are
still in US custody, and they contradict statements made last year by the Bush
administration that all suspects who are ''rendered" to foreign countries are
treated in accordance with international laws.

In the statements, made during hearings to determine whether the detainees are
enemy combatants, some say American forces took them to foreign prisons. Others
don't specify who took them abroad, but most say the United States is holding
them at Guantanamo based on confessions coerced by foreign interrogators.

Military prosecutors did not challenge the fact that they were sent to other
countries, and limited their questioning to whether the detainees were, in fact,
tortured, according to the transcripts.

As the Pentagon slowly begins to prosecute detainees for terrorism-related
offenses, defense lawyers are arguing that those confessions should be thrown
out. One of the seven detainees was abruptly released before being charged with
terrorism, after his allegations of torture in an Egyptian prison became public.

Another of the seven detainees is on trial for conspiring to set off a nuclear
''dirty bomb" in the United States. But that defendant is arguing that the case
against him is built on a confession coerced in Morocco.

''After four years of torture and rendition, you have the wrong person in the
stand," Binyam Ahmad Muhammad, an Ethiopian detainee, told a military tribunal
earlier this month.

Like most of the seven detainees, Muhammad says he was arrested in Pakistan,
questioned by Americans, then transferred to a prison abroad, according to his
lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith.

Muhammad told tribunal officials that his jailers in Morocco sliced him with a
scalpel on his chest and genitals, Smith said.

In January 2004, Muhammad was sent to a US-run detention facility in Afghanistan
and then transferred to Guantanamo, where he became one of 10 out of 480
detainees to be formally charged with crimes.

But Smith, his lawyer, argues that the entire case should be dismissed.

''There is no evidence against Binyam that I am aware of that is not evidence
tortured out of him," Smith said.

Evidence obtained through torture is not admissible in US courts. But the
military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay had no such prohibition until last month,
when the rule was added just before a key Supreme Court decision on the
issue. Even now, defense lawyers and human rights groups say the rules of
evidence are so loose -- allowing secret evidence and anonymous witnesses --
that it is impossible to screen out evidence obtained illegally.

Still, allegations of torture led to the release of one of major suspect last
year.

Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen accused of having prior knowledge of the
Sept. 11 attacks, was on the verge of being formally charged before the military
tribunal. But US officials abruptly set him free in Australia after his
allegations of being tortured with a cattle prod in Egypt became public.

Habib's lawyer, Joseph Margulies, had described the alleged torture in a legal
filing in a US federal court.

''They released him because they didn't want the particulars of his rendition to
become the subject of inquiry by a federal district court," Margulies said.

John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch researcher who has been combing the newly
released Guantanamo documents for new information on rendition and torture, said
torturing terrorism suspects makes it difficult to try them later in court, and
increases their chances of walking free.

Pentagon officials say the US government does not transfer prisoners to other
countries for torture, but they do not challenge the detainees' assertions that
they were sent abroad.

''US policy requires all detainees to be treated humanely," said Lieutenant
Commander Chito Peppler, a Guantanamo spokesman. He also warned that Al Qaeda
members are trained to make false allegations.

In preliminary hearings at Guantanamo Bay to determine whether the detainees are
''enemy combatants," tribunal officials closely questioned prisoners on their
treatment in foreign prisons.

When Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a detainee from Mauritania, told tribunal officials
that he was pressured into confessing to plans to attack the United States on
New Year's Eve, 1999, during interrogations in Jordan, they asked him what kind
of pressure was applied.

''We just want to make sure that you were not tortured or coerced into saying
something that wasn't true," a tribunal official told him, according to the
transcripts. ''No US authorities abused you in any way?"

''I am not willing to answer this question," Slahi replied.

Slahi told them he turned himself in to the Mauritanian government on Sept. 29,
2001, after he heard that US officials were looking for him, and he ended up
spending eight months at a prison in Jordan.

''I was kidnapped," he said. ''They tried to squeeze information out of me."

A detainee identified as Jamal Mari told the tribunal a similar story about
being captured in Pakistan and sent to Jordan, but asserted that he was not
abused there. ''Some people simply kidnapped me while I was asleep," he said at
the hearing. ''An American interrogator interrogated me. . . . They never told
me where I was going. I found out later than I was in Jordan. . . . I was in a
Jordan cell, but I wasn't mistreated or anything like that."

But Hassan bin Attash, a Yemeni who was 17 at the time of his arrest, reported
that he was hung upside down, beaten on the soles of his feet, and threatened
with electric shocks after he was sent to Jordan by US officials.

''He says that he told them whatever they wanted to hear," said his attorney,
Robert Knowles. ''He just wanted it to stop."

Knowles said Attash was arrested in Pakistan in September 2002, and spent four
days in a US-run detention center in Afghanistan before being sent to Jordan for
16 months. In January 2004, he was transferred back to a US prison in
Afghanistan. In September 2004, he was sent to Guantanamo Bay.

A second Yemeni detainee, identified as Al-Shaqwi, was also sent to prison in
Jordan, according to Smith, but little is known about his case.

The new transcripts, released over the past three months by the Pentagon, also
solve the mystery of one of the most well-known cases of rendition.

Newspapers have speculated on the whereabouts of Muhammad Saad Iqbal al-Madni,
the son of a Saudi diplomat, who was arrested in Indonesia in January 2002, and
whisked away in an American private jet. Some reports speculated that he was
dead.

But the transcripts show that he is alive at Guantanamo, after spending three
months in Egypt, and nearly a year at a US facility in Afghanistan.

Charlie Savage of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

------------------------------------------------

European Inquiry Says C.I.A. Flew 1,000 Flights in Secret

By DAN BILEFSKY
April 27, 2006

BRUSSELS, April 26 --- Investigators for the European Parliament said Wednesday
that data gathered from air safety regulators and others found that the Central
Intelligence Agency had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over European territory
since 2001.

Sometimes the planes stopped to pick up terrorism suspects who had been
kidnapped to take them to countries that use torture, the investigators added.

The operation used the same American agents and the same planes over and over,
they said, though they could not say how many flights involved the transport of
suspects.

The investigation, by a committee looking into C.I.A. counterterrorism
activities in Europe, also concluded that European countries, including Italy,
Sweden and Bosnia and Herzegovina, were aware of the abductions or transfers and
therefore might have been complicit.

"The European Parliament deplores the fact that the C.I.A. has on several
occasions clearly been responsible for kidnapping and illegally detaining
alleged terrorists on the territory of member states, as well for extraordinary
renditions" to third countries, wrote Giovanni Fava of Italy, a Socialist member
of the European Parliament who led the committee.

The report, the first of several planned by the Parliament, grew out of three
months of hearings, including testimony by human rights advocates and
individuals who said they had been kidnapped by United States agents and flown
to other countries, including Egypt and Afghanistan, where they were tortured.

As for the question of secret C.I.A. detention centers in Europe, the new report
offered no hard evidence.

Its estimate of 1,000 undeclared flights exceeds the numbers previously
discussed, including those in an analysis by The New York Times late last year
that said the agency operated about 300 flights in Europe between November 2001
and the summer of 2005.

The report's conclusions are likely to heighten trans-Atlantic tensions at a
time when Europe and the United States are already at odds over how to balance
civil liberties with the fight against terrorists.

The inquiry was opened in January after The Washington Post reported that the
C.I.A. had hidden and interrogated suspected members of Al Qaeda at secret
prisons in Eastern Europe.

Mr. Fava said the committee hoped to send a fact-finding mission to Poland and
Romania in September. Both countries have been cited as possible locations for
prisons.

Mr. Fava said the investigation showed that agency planes had made hundreds of
flights and several secret stopovers in Europe, violating a treaty that requires
airlines to declare routes for police missions.

The C.I.A. declined to comment on the specifics, but an agency spokesman
defended the practice of taking suspects to third countries, a process known as
rendition.

"Renditions are an antiterror tool that the United States has used for years,
consistent with its laws and treaty obligations," said the spokesman, Paul
Gimigliano. "The C.I.A does not condone or tolerate torture, transport
individuals to other countries for the purpose of torture or knowingly receive
intelligence obtained by torture."

Mr. Fava emphasized that it was most likely that some authorities in Europe had
been aware that suspects were being detained on their territories. He pointed to
testimony by a senior prosecutor in Milan, Italy, Armando Spataro, that a
C.I.A. team had abducted a suspect, Abu Omar, in February 2003 in broad daylight
before he was flown to Egypt.

Mr. Fava also criticized Sweden for handing over two Egyptian suspects, Muhammad
al-Zary and Ahmed Agiza, to American agents who flew them to Egypt in December
2001. Their case was brought to light by Swedish television in 2004.

"Sweden has been criticized for this on numerous occasions, and we have taken a
number of steps in order for it not to happen again," Barbro Holmberg, the
minister for migration and asylum policy, said.

Mr. Fava said the Parliament found that Bosnian authorities had handed over six
suspects of Algerian origin to C.I.A. agents without assurances that they would
not be tortured, and in defiance of a ruling by the human rights court in Bosnia
and Herzegovina.

Ivar Ekman contributed reporting from Stockholm for this article, and Brian
Knowlton and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

--------------------------------------

Chinese Muslims sent from Guantanamo to Albania
Lawyer plans trip to check on clients after legal battle ends

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  May 6, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The US military said yesterday that it had transferred five
Chinese Muslims from its Guantanamo Bay prison to Albania, apparently ending a
long legal fight over their fate on the eve of arguments before a federal
appeals court.

The five men, who all belong to an ethnic group known as ''Uighurs," had been
imprisoned at the base for more than four years. More than a year ago, a
military tribunal had determined that none of them had been enemies of the
United States after all, and cleared them for release.

However, the US could not send them back to their homeland because the Chinese
government has a history of persecuting Uighurs, who have been seeking greater
autonomy from the central government. No other country would take them in,
either, and they remained stuck in the American prison.

Last December, a federal district judge ruled that it was illegal for the Bush
administration to continue to incarcerate the men because it had no basis for
holding them.

But the judge ruled that he did not have the power to order the government to
release them, saying he could not ask the administration to bring them into the
United States for national security reasons. Meanwhile, the State Department
kept looking for a third country willing to take them.

Sabin Willett, a Boston-based attorney who represents two of the Uighurs, said
the Justice Department abruptly informed him late yesterday that the search was
over, and that his clients were no longer at Guantanamo.

Willett had been preparing to argue his clients' case before a federal appeals
court on Monday morning. Upon learning the news, he suddenly began making plans
to fly to Albania.

''An hour ago I was told by the government that the men have been sent to
Albania and are there," Willett said yesterday evening in a telephone
interview. ''I have not been able to reach them or anybody who could confirm
this in Albania. I hope to [reach them] tomorrow morning, and I'll get on a
plane tomorrow night and be there on Sunday."

Albania has a majority-Muslim population. It is in southeastern Europe --
thousands of miles from the Uighurs' native China -- but Willett said he was
cautiously optimistic that the five men would be comfortable there.

Willett said he was told by the US government that his clients were being held
at the ''national accomodations center for asylum seekers" in Tirana, the
Albanian capital. The center is operated by the Albanian interior ministry in
conjunction with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, he said.

Beyond that, he knew nothing more.

''It's all very unclear," Willett said. ''They didn't give us any warning. Until
we can be sure that the men are safe, I'm worried, but I'm going to be
cautiously optimistic about this."

For its part, the Bush administration signaled that it was relieved to have at
least found a home for the Uighurs and resolved a case which has generated
negative publicity for Guantanamo Bay prison, since the military itself
acknowledged that it had held people for nearly five years who were not enemies
of the United States.

''The United States has done the utmost to ensure that the Uighurs will be
treated humanely upon release," a Pentagon statement said. ''Our key objective
has been to resettle the Uighurs in an environment that will permit them to
rebuild their lives. Albania will provide this opportunity."

-------------------------------

Freed from Guantanamo, 5 face danger in Albania

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff  |  May 18, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Five Chinese Muslims recently released from the Guantanamo Bay
prison are living under increasingly dangerous conditions in Albania, the only
country to let them in after the United States determined they were not ''enemy
combatants," according to their lawyer.

The lawyer, Sabin Willett of Boston, asked in court papers filed yesterday that
the Bush administration bring the five men to the United States for their own
safety.

The men, who are members of an ethnic group known as Uighurs, were arrested in
Afghanistan four years ago. A military tribunal later determined that the men
had never been enemies of the United States, and ordered them released.

But because the Chinese government has a history of persecuting Uighurs, who
have been seeking greater independence, the men could not be sent back to China.

Two weeks ago, on the eve of a court hearing into their fate, the military
announced that it had dropped the men off in Albania, a mostly Muslim country in
southeast Europe. Willett, who has been waging a court battle to get the Uighurs
brought to the United States as refugees, flew to Albania.

In an affidavit filed yesterday with the US Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia, Willett described a harrowing trip to a slum where the five men are
living in a refugee processing center. He said he was able to take his clients
to a restaurant and get glasses made for one of them, but since he left, they
have been afraid to leave the compound.

The men's arrival has caused a sensation in Albania, he said. The Chinese
government has called on Albania to extradite the men, whom it calls
terrorists. Members of the Albanian parliament have vowed to send them to
China. And even if the men are allowed to stay in Albania, Willett said, they
would face a bleak future.

''The impoverished country where they were dumped without community, common
language, family, or prospects is ill-suited to withstand the strident demands
of the most powerful communist dictatorship on earth," Willett wrote. ''These
men never wronged the United States in any way. What has happened is shameful."

The Bush administration has asked the court to dismiss the case on the grounds
that it is now moot. A Justice Department spokeswoman did not return a call
yesterday

Also yesterday, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister announced that 16 captives held
at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp would be transferred to Saudi jails in
coming days -- the first large-scale transfer from this isolated island prison
camp in more than a year.

-------------------------------------------------------

Factual errors cited in cases against detainees
Lawyers demand new trial system at Guantanamo

By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff  |  July 14, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The US military's accusations against detainees at Guantanamo Bay
contain factual errors and some easily disproved assertions, according to
declassified records, raising questions about whether the US military has
thoroughly investigated its cases against the roughly 400 inmates.

For instance, one detainee is accused of belonging to an Al Qaeda cell ``circa
1998," according to the summary of evidence prepared for his hearing. But
Pentagon records show the detainee was born in 1986, making him 11 or 12 in
1998.

In another case, a detainee stands accused of attending a terrorist training
camp in July 2001. But copies of pay stubs show he was a chef in London at the
time.

Defense lawyers say the cases underscore the need for new judicial procedures at
Guantanamo, as the Bush administration grapples with a Supreme Court ruling that
struck down the system of military trials at the base.

``We have been hearing about errors like this for years from numerous lawyers
across the country," said Emi MacLean , a fellow at the Center for
Constitutional Rights, which helps defend Guantanamo detainees.

Administration lawyers argued this week in hearings before Congress that giving
detainees the legal rights available in US courts would hinder the war on
terror.

``It is simply not feasible in time of war to gather evidence in a manner that
meets strict criminal procedural requirements," Daniel J. Dell'Orto , the
Defense Department's principal deputy general counsel, said Tuesday.

But two Republican senators said yesterday that the White House was considering
whether to create a system of trials for Guantanamo detainees based on the
uniform code of military justice. The code was established to try US soldiers
accused of crimes, and would give detainees far more legal rights than they have
now.

The current system includes initial hearings, annual reviews, and then, for a
small minority of detainees, military trials.

At each stage, the military is allowed to present anonymous witnesses, secret
evidence, and hearsay evidence -- all of which are difficult for the defense to
challenge.

The obvious errors in some of the accusations, lawyers say, raise deeper
questions about the care with which the still-secret portions of the cases were
prepared and make it that much more important that the system be revamped.

``You can see why they are afraid to present the evidence before an open and
transparent system," MacLean said.

One of the most visible errors became public in 2004, when three British
detainees who had been accused of appearing in an Al Qaeda video in Afghanistan
were released after the British government proved that they were in London at
the time.

Defense lawyers say such errors are more widespread.

In an ongoing case, the US military has accused Ahmed Errachidi , a Moroccan
detainee, of ``receiving training at the Al Farooq training camp in July 2001,
to include weapons training, war tactics, and bomb making," according to a
summary of evidence for his initial hearing provided to the Globe by his lawyers
at Reprieve, a British legal-services organization.

But Chris Chang , an investigator for Reprieve, uncovered pay stubs showing that
Errachidi had been a chef in two London restaurants, the Westbury and the
Archduke, in July 2001. Chang's office provided copies of the pay stubs to the
Globe.

``Presumably, the US military, in combination with the intelligence services of
the United States, has exponentially more resources than we do and could easily
have obtained the evidence discussed below, were it of a mind to look for it,"
Chang wrote in an affidavit submitted to Guantanamo officials.

Errachidi, who had worked as a chef in London since 1985, has been held at
Guantanamo Bay since his 2002 arrest in Pakistan.

In another case, military interrogators made significant translation mistakes
when they first interrogated Mohamed el Gharani , one of Guantanamo's youngest
detainees, according to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith .

Gharani, whose name the US military spells ``Qarani," was only 14 when he was
arrested in Pakistan in October 2001. He was later interrogated using a
translator from Yemen who spoke a different dialect of Arabic than was spoken in
his native Saudi Arabia, according to Gharani's lawyer.

``The word `zalata' in Yemen means money, but in his Saudi Arabian dialect, it
means tomato," said Smith. ``They asked him, `When you went to Pakistan, where
did you get your zalata?' and he tells them all these different shops where you
could buy tomatoes in Karachi. They write them all down, thinking that this
14-year-old kid is a big financier who was able to get money from all these
different places."

The mistake was soon caught, Smith said. Financing terrorism did not show up in
the list of accusations against Gharani.

But another key accusation appeared: that ``the detainee was identified as
belonging to a London, United Kingdom cell led by Abu Qatada al Masri, circa
1998." Yet, according to the Pentagon's own records, Gharani was born in 1986,
making him just 11 or 12 at the time.

Chito Peppler , a Pentagon spokesman, said the date referred to when ``Abu
Qatada became active." He maintained that it was possible that Gharani had been
a part of the cell before his arrest at 14.

Smith said Gharani has never been to London.

Peppler said he could not provide specifics on other cases.

Sam Zia-Zarifi , a Human Rights Watch researcher, said transcripts of Guantanamo
proceedings show widespread confusion over names, places, and events in
Afghanistan that are relevant to the detainees' classification as ``enemy
combatants."

``That happened in a handful of occasions," Zia-Zarifi said. ``I found enough of
a pattern to be alarming."

It is not the first time the military has been under fire for its Guantanamo
investigations. Last month, the Globe reported that the government routinely
failed to locate key defense witnesses.

According to the transcripts, 34 detainees had witnesses approved to testify at
the tribunal, but in all 34 cases, the detainees were told that the witnesses
could not be found. Yet a Globe reporter tracked down three witnesses in three
days of work.

``It's no surprise that it is often very difficult to find the necessary
evidence, yet the administration doesn't even try," Senator Edward M. Kennedy,
Democrat of Massachusetts, said on the Senate floor shortly after the article
ran.

``The shocking ease with which The Boston Globe located these witnesses suggests
that the government didn't make an effort to find them, and raises serious
questions about the administration's good faith in dealing with the detainees at
Guantanamo."

---------------------------------------------

GLOBE EDITORIAL
Outsourcing torture
September 28, 2006

CONGRESS WAS on the verge last night of jettisoning one of the nation's bedrock
constitutional protections -- habeas corpus, the right of prisoners to challenge
their detention.

The so-called terrorism detainee bill would also give the president far too much
latitude in deciding what aggressive interrogation techniques fall short of
torture. The legislation violates fundamental American principles, and could
well endanger future American detainees.

It is not even clear if the bill would bar a repetition of the ugly case of
Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen sent to Syria for torture in 2002. According to
a recent Canadian report, Arar suffered nearly a year of beatings in jail after
the United States outsourced his interrogation to Syria, a country with no
compunctions about prisoner mistreatment. The United States has refused to
disavow or even acknowledge its role in the case.

Arar's captors in Syria, a sometime ally against Al Qaeda, got no useful
information from him because, as the report makes clear, he had nothing to do
with terrorism. He initially became a suspect because of shoddy investigative
work by Canadian police, who passed his name on to US authorities. On the way
home to Canada from a visit to Tunisia in 2002, US agents in New York grabbed
Arar and, the report said, questioned him for 12 days before sending him to
Syria, his birthplace.

Details of US involvement are unclear, according to the report, because US
officials refused to cooperate in the Canadians' investigation.

After Arar's release in 2003, he tried to sue in a US federal court, but a judge
threw his case out because of supposed national security issues. He is trying to
get compensation from Canada.

In Syria, the beatings and confinement in a coffin-size dungeon led Arar to
confess he had trained in Afghanistan, a country he had in fact never been to.
So much for the quality of intelligence produced by abusive techniques.

Another lesson of prisoner abuse, whether it is done through "extraordinary
rendition," as in this case, or at the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency,
is that it undermines America's ability to insist that other countries uphold
human rights, including those spelled out in the Geneva Conventions. "If you
just look at how we are perceived in the world and the kind of criticism we have
taken over Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and renditions," Colin Powell told the
Washington Post recently, "whether we believe it or not, people are starting to
question whether we are following our own high standards."

If the United States would adhere to its "high standards" in dealing with
Muslims, it might look to them for assistance against Islamic extremists.
Instead, Congress and President Bush risk torturing detainees and embittering
their communities, spurning Powell's sound advice.

-----------------------------------------------------

Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspects Isolation

By DEBORAH SONTAG
December 4, 2006

One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant, Jose
Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a
bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, S.C.

That day, Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush
administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained
without charges, got to go to the dentist.

"Today is May 21," a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event.
"Right now we're ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy
combatant."

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They
unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla's bare
feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his
black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla's legs. Next, his hands emerged
through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla's cuffed
hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he
lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking
headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards,
whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking
prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

The videotape of that trip to the dentist, which was recently released to
Mr. Padilla's lawyers and viewed by The New York Times, offers the first
concrete glimpse inside the secretive military incarceration of an American
citizen whose detention without charges became a test case of President Bush's
powers in the fight against terror. Still frames from the videotape were posted
in Mr. Padilla's electronic court file late Friday.

To Mr. Padilla's lawyers, the pictures capture the dehumanization of their
client during his military detention from mid-2002 until earlier this year, when
the government changed his status from enemy combatant to criminal defendant and
transferred him to the federal detention center in Miami. He now awaits trial
scheduled for late January.

Together with other documents filed late Friday, the images represent the latest
and most aggressive sally by defense lawyers who declared this fall that charges
against Mr. Padilla should be dismissed for "outrageous government conduct,"
saying that he was mistreated and tortured during his years as an enemy
combatant.

Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They
argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation
that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his
own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions,
assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of "truth
serums."

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Vician, said Sunday that the military
disputes Mr. Padilla's accusations of mistreatment. And, in court papers,
prosecutors deny "in the strongest terms" the accusations of torture and say
that "Padilla's conditions of confinement were humane and designed to ensure his
safety and security."

"His basic needs were met in a conscientious manner, including Halal (Muslim
acceptable) food, clothing, sleep and daily medical assessment and treatment
when necessary," the government stated. "While in the brig, Padilla never
reported any abusive treatment to the staff or medical personnel."

In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew
Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded
by material and sensory deprivations. In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged
that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had
little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was
electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the
door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that
he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along
with his copy of the Koran, "as part of an interrogation plan."

Mr. Padilla's situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held
without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of
his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.

Philip D. Cave, a former judge advocate general for the Navy and now a lawyer
specializing in military law, said, "There's nothing comparable in terms of
severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially
considering that this was pretrial confinement."

Ali al-Marri, a Qatari and Saudi dual citizen and the only enemy combatant
currently detained in the United States, has made similar claims of isolation
and deprivation at the brig in South Carolina. The Pentagon spokesman,
Lieutenant Vician, said Sunday that he could not comment on the methods used to
escort Mr. Padilla to the dentist. Blackened goggles and earphones are rarely
employed in internal prison transports in the United States, but riot gear is
sometimes used for violent prisoners.

One of Mr. Padilla's lawyers, Orlando do Campo, said, however, that Mr. Padilla
was a "completely docile" prisoner. "There was not one disciplinary problem with
Jose ever, not one citation, not one act of disobedience," said Mr. do Campo,
who is a lawyer at the Miami federal public defender's office.

In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, "I was told by members of the brig staff that
Mr. Padilla's temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like
that of 'a piece of furniture.'"

Federal prosecutors and defense lawyers are locked in a tug of war over the
relevancy of Mr. Padilla's military detention to the present criminal case.
Federal prosecutors have asked the judge to forbid Mr. Padilla's lawyers from
mentioning the circumstances of his military detention during the trial,
maintaining that their accusations could "distract and inflame the jury."

But defense lawyers say it is unconscionable to ignore Mr. Padilla's military
detention because, among other reasons, it altered him in a way that will
impinge on his trial.

Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of forensic psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric
Center in Queens, N.Y., who examined Mr. Padilla for a total of 22 hours in June
and September, said in an affidavit filed Friday that he "lacks the capacity to
assist in his own defense."

"It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and
interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of
the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has
impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic
stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged
isolation," Dr. Hegarty said in an affidavit for the defense.

Mr. Padilla's status was abruptly changed to criminal defendant from enemy
combatant last fall. At the time, the Supreme Court was weighing whether to take
up the legality of his military detention --- and thus the issue of the
president's authority to seize an American citizen on American soil and hold him
indefinitely without charges --- when the Bush administration pre-empted its
decision by filing criminal charges against Mr. Padilla.

Mr. Padilla was added as a defendant in a terrorism conspiracy case already
under way in Miami. The strong public accusations made during his military
detention --- about the dirty bomb, Al Qaeda connections and supposed plans to
set off natural gas explosions in apartment buildings --- appear nowhere in the
indictment against him. The indictment does not allege any specific violent plot
against America.

Mr. Padilla is portrayed in the indictment as the recruit of a "North American
terror support cell" that sent money, goods and recruits abroad to assist
"global jihad" in general, with a special interest in Bosnia and Chechnya.
Mr. Padilla, the indictment asserts, traveled overseas "to participate in
violent jihad" and filled out an application for a mujahedin training camp in
Afghanistan.

Michael Caruso, a public defender for Mr. Padilla, pleaded "absolutely not
guilty" for him to charges of conspiracy and of providing material support to
terrorists. Mr. Padilla faces two charges that each carry a maximum penalty of
15 years.

Over the summer, Judge Marcia G. Cooke of United States District Court in Miami
threw out the most serious charge, of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim
persons in a foreign country, saying that it replicated accusations in the other
counts and could lead to multiple punishments for a single crime. This was a
setback for the government, which has appealed the dismissal.

Mr. Padilla's lawyers say they have had a difficult time persuading him that
they are on his side.

From the time Mr. Padilla was allowed access to counsel, Mr. Patel visited him
repeatedly in the brig and in the Miami detention center, and Mr. Padilla has
observed Mr. Patel arguing on his behalf in Miami federal court.

But, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit, his client is nonetheless mistrustful.
"Mr. Padilla remains unsure if I and the other attorneys working on his case are
actually his attorneys or another component of the government's interrogation
scheme," Mr. Patel said.

Mr. do Campo said that Mr. Padilla was not incommunicative, and that he
expressed curiosity about what was going on in the world, liked to talk about
sports and demonstrated particularly keen interest in the Chicago Bears.

But the defense lawyers' questions often echo the questions interrogators have
asked Mr. Padilla, and when that happens, he gets jumpy and shuts down, the
lawyers said.

Dr. Hegarty said Mr. Padilla refuses to review the video recordings of his
interrogations, which have been released to his lawyers but remain classified.

He is especially reluctant to discuss what happened in the brig, fearful that he
will be returned there some day, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit.

"During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and
contortions of his body," Mr. Patel said. "The contortions are particularly
poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has
meetings with counsel."

-----------------------------------------------------------------

'04 Pentagon Report Cited Detention Concerns
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 14, 2006; A01

A previously undisclosed Pentagon report concluded that the three terrorism
suspects held at a brig in South Carolina were subjected to months of isolation,
and it warned that their "unique" solitary confinement could be viewed as
violating U.S. detention standards.

According to a summary of the 2004 report obtained by The Washington Post,
interrogators attempted to deprive one detainee, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a
Qatari citizen and former student in Peoria, Ill., of sleep and religious
comfort by taking away his Koran, warm food, mattresses and pillow as part of an
interrogation plan approved by the high-level Joint Forces Command.

Interrogators also prevented the International Committee of the Red Cross from
visiting at least one detainee, according to the report, which noted evidence of
other unspecified, unauthorized interrogation techniques.

The report by the Navy's inspector general was presented to Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld in May 2004 and was declassified in 2005. It was the first to
raise the question of mistreatment of alleged enemy combatants inside the United
States.

Its details about conditions at the Navy brig in 2004 could prove critical to
the fate of two of the "enemy combatant" detainees who spent years in the
prison: Marri, the only one of the three who remains there and is facing the
prospect of a special military trial, and Jose Padilla, a Brooklyn-born
U.S. citizen now facing criminal charges in Miami.

Attorneys for Padilla have argued in recent court filings that any abusive
interrogation methods used on their client may mean that his statements to
government agents were coerced and, therefore, inadmissible in his trial. He is
accused of engaging in a conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens and provide material
support to terrorists abroad.

The attorneys told a federal judge in Florida yesterday that they have a right
to learn about those interrogation methods, and they recently sought to subpoena
Brig. Gen. Daryl D. Thiessen, the deputy inspector general who made the findings
after inspecting the brig, and other senior military officers who worked at the
prison. The attorneys said Padilla spent 1,307 days in a 9-by-7-foot cell in an
isolated unit, was often chained to the ground for hours by his wrists and
torso, and was kept awake at night by guards using bright lights and loud
noises.

Prosecutors asked the judge to quash the subpoenas, arguing that Padilla's
attorneys are making "meritless" and "sensationalist" claims to turn the court's
attention away from his alleged misconduct. In previous filings, the government
decried the "absurdity of Padilla's assertion" that he was abused, noting that
the government was "conscientious enough to tend to his toothache."

Marri remains at the brig awaiting an appeals court ruling on whether he will be
tried in a U.S. court or by a military commission, as the government requested
last month. He sued the government last year over the conditions of his
confinement, alleging that for 16 months in 2003 and 2004, he had been barred
from contact with anyone but guards delivering food, causing his mental state to
deteriorate.

Thiessen wrote in his summary that the Joint Forces Command had approved that
"one detainee in Charleston has Koran, mattress, and pillow removed and is fed
cold MRES as part of interrogation plan." He also noted concerns about
isolation: "Limited number and unique status of detainees in Charleston
precludes interaction with other detainees. Argument could be made that this
constitutes isolation."

Extended solitary confinement can be considered a form of inhumane treatment. In
2003, Rumsfeld specified the use of isolation as an interrogation tactic, but he
cautioned that its use required detailed plans and approvals from superiors for
the length of time. His memo warned that use of isolation for more than 30 days
was atypical, and that nations that consider detainees subject to
prisoner-of-war protections may view this technique as "inconsistent with the
requirements of Geneva [Article] III."

"What you're describing confirms what we said in our complaint," said Jonathan
Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice and an attorney for Marri, when asked
to review the summary findings. "There were periods of time when al-Marri felt
he was losing his mind. He went months without hearing a human voice. . . . And
these weren't rogue officers, but it was part of a deliberate violation of the
laws of the U.S. by the top levels of the administration."

Padilla's attorneys -- Orlando do Campo, Andrew Patel and Michael Caruso -- did
not return calls seeking comment or declined to comment. Federal prosecutors
also declined to comment. A hearing is expected soon on whether Padilla's
attorneys can question military officials about his treatment and the conditions
at the brig.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, said multiple reviews of detention
operations have not found policies that condoned abuse and have led to more
consistent policies to prevent abuse.

"The reviews have resulted in numerous recommendations which have been
implemented and have improved our detention operations," he said. "The
Department of Defense policy is clear: We treat detainees humanely."

Thiessen's report is part of a larger review by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III,
then the Navy's inspector general. Rumsfeld ordered the wide-ranging military
investigation to determine whether any interrogation policy for terrorism
suspects had caused detainee abuse in U.S. military detention facilities.

The Church report presented to Congress in March 2005 concluded that there was
no deliberate high-level policy that led to the numerous cases of
mistreatment. Instead, it blamed inept leadership at low levels and confusion
over changing interrogation rules.

Church focused on the conditions for foreign nationals held at Guantanamo
Bay. But the details of what Thiessen found in the Charleston brig were not
mentioned. When asked, high-ranking military officers asserted that the brig
fared well in the review.

"The brig here has a good record, and the people who run it are well trained,"
then-Secretary of the Navy Gordon England told reporters in 2004.

A third prisoner at the brig, Yaser Hamdi, was released in 2004 after the
Supreme Court ruled that the government could not hold him indefinitely without
a trial, and after he agreed to U.S. conditions that he go to Saudi Arabia and
give up his U.S. citizenship.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

---------------------------------------------------------

Trapped at Guantanamo

By Melissa Hoffer  |  January 11, 2007

WHEN I LAST saw my client, Saber Lahmar, in his cell at Guantanamo Bay, he told
me a story. He said that a soldier entered his cell one day and inadvertently
left the door ajar a few inches. An iguana darted in and went behind the
door. The soldier left, leaving the iguana inside.

At first, Saber said, the iguana appeared relaxed. It tried to crawl through a
hole under a partition, but it could not squeeze through. After realizing it was
trapped, it panicked and flew to the narrow opaque window next to the door,
banging its head against the glass. "This," Saber said, "is an animal after five
minutes. I have been here five years."

No matter how hard one wishes, the bars of a steel cage do not stop time. No one
is more aware of this fact than Lakhdar Boumediene, Mohammed Nechla, Mustafa Ait
Idir, Hadj Boudella, Belkacem Bensayah, and Saber Lahmar -- six Bosnian Algerian
men imprisoned at Guantanamo whom my colleagues and I have represented since
July 2004, in a habeas corpus case, Boumediene v. Bush, challenging their
detention . Today marks the fifth anniversary of the date the United States
first began to fly plane loads of prisoners to Guantanamo. Our clients arrived
on Jan. 20, 2002.

This time last year, Hadj's 6 -year-old daughter, Saaima, died of congenital
heart failure. He had not seen her since the fall of 2001, when he and the other
five men were arrested by Bosnian authorities under pressure from the United
States, which asserted that they were involved in planning terrorist activities
in Bosnia. After a three-month investigation, the Bosnian federal prosecutor
recommended to the Bosnian Supreme Court that all six be released. But again
under heavy pressure from the United States, the Bosnians caved, and as the men
were released from a jail in Sarajevo, the Bosnians turned them over to the
United States. Hooded, shackled, and packed into waiting cars while their
horrified families watched, they began the sickening odyssey that continues
today.

Saber's wife was pregnant when he was taken to Guantanamo. He has never met his
daughter Sara, whose shiny face framed in pink plastic sunglasses peers out from
the photographs we send to him. Mustafa, a former karate champion who suffered
months of facial paralysis from a brutal beating inflicted by Guantanamo camp
soldiers, worries about his ailing mother in Algeria. With each passing day, it
becomes more likely that he will never see her again.

Not one of these men has been charged with a crime. All they seek is a fair
hearing before a judge in a court of law to prove they are not so-called "enemy
combatants." Yet the Bush administration insists that they have no rights under
any source of law and maintains that it may hold them indefinitely -- a
potential life sentence -- without charge, until the war on terror ends. And no
one in the administration has been able to answer the question of how and when
we will know if the war on terror is over.

In the summer of 2004, 2 1/2 years after the administration repurposed
Guantanamo as a prison beyond the law and after the Supreme Court held that
Guantanamo prisoners are indeed able to challenge their detention in federal
courts, the administration finally instituted a process -- the Combatant Status
Review Tribunal -- with the stated goal of determining whether the men at
Guantanamo it deemed enemy combatants were truly enemy combatants. Not
surprisingly, the tribunal rubber-stamped nearly 100 percent of the Defense
Department's prior enemy combatant status determinations, on the basis of secret
evidence and evidence obtained by torture and while excluding evidence requested
by the prisoners. Naturally, several of our clients asked the tribunal to
consider the Bosnian Supreme Court's order releasing them. It refused.

Boumediene was argued before the US Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit in 2005. No decision has been issued. Congress attempted to
strip the courts of jurisdiction to hear the habeas cases in the fall of 2005,
and last summer, the Supreme Court rejected that effort. Congress again passed
legislation to strip jurisdiction in the fall of 2006 -- more briefs have been
filed, more months have passed.

So they wait. When we last saw Saber in November, he was in his sixth month of
solitary confinement. Since August, he has seen us, his legal team, twice and a
psychiatrist on three brief occasions. For a few minutes each day, he sees the
camp guards who bring his meals. He has had no other human contact. The glaring
lights in his cell are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When we left the
cell, we could hear Saber shouting -- brief, truncated cries. We could not
understand what he was saying.

Five years of freedom can never be reclaimed. Congress should right the
Guantanamo wrong now.

Melissa Hoffer is an attorney practicing in Boston.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Tactic Used After It Was Banned
Detainees at Guantanamo Were Moved Often, Documents Say
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 8, 2008; A12

At least 17 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to a program that
moved them repeatedly from cell to cell to cause sleep deprivation and
disorientation as punishment and to soften detainees for subsequent
interrogation, according to U.S. military documents.

Defense Department investigations of abuse had previously revealed that the
program was used in a limited manner and only on high-value detainees, but the
documents indicate that the program was far more widespread and that the
technique was still used months after it was banned at the facility in March
2004. Detainees were moved dozens of times in just days and sometimes more than
a hundred times over a two-week period.

Military police logs for cell blocks at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, show that guards
used the program -- dubbed the "frequent flyer" program in official documents --
on numerous detainees and noted the program in their 2003 and 2004 records. The
logs, reviewed by The Washington Post, also indicate that the frequent cell
movements took place on the same days a Navy admiral was visiting Guantanamo to
assess possible detainee abuses.

Some of the detainees violently objected to the moves, spitting at guards and
resisting handcuffs and shackles after enduring repeated cell transfers, leading
to even more sanctions. One "cell transfer schedule" for detainee 519 -- Maher
Rafat al-Quwari -- shows that he was moved six times a day for 12 days in July
2003, with a four-hour interrogation session in the middle.

Defense officials have previously acknowledged the program's existence, saying
it stopped in 2004. They also have said that detainees are treated humanely and
that credible allegations of abuse are investigated.

"There is no such program currently in place," said Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, a
spokeswoman for Joint Task Force Guantanamo. "JTF Guantanamo conducts the safe
and humane care and custody of detained enemy combatants legally, ethically and
transparently."

U.S. military investigators deemed the program "abusive" but did not describe
the extent of its use. Military police soldiers noted in handwritten entries
that the cell movements were part of interrogation plans and that they were
carefully organized.

For example, Moroccan detainee Ahmed Rashidi was scheduled for six-hour
interrogations in the middle of the night and then moved to his cell for four
hours, "then cycled through again repeatedly," according to one notation.

"Detainee must be monitored, observed, and recorded by on-duty MPs," the entry
states. "The room will contain nothing more than a chair."

Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi, a Saudi detainee who has been charged with terrorism
offenses, was in the "frequent flyer" program from November 2003 to February
2004, according to the records, moving repeatedly from cell K36 to K38. Sharbi's
civilian lawyer said he was troubled to learn that his client might have faced
sleep deprivation at the hands of his jailers.

"We have to assume that the frequent flyer program, what its details were, was
not designed to strengthen the comfort and resolve of the prisoner," said Robert
Rachlin, who represents Sharbi. "Sleep deprivation is coercive. Of course it
troubles me."

Mohammed Jawad, a 24-year-old detainee accused of trying to kill U.S. forces in
Afghanistan with a grenade, has asked through his lawyers to have all military
commission charges against him dismissed as a result of the abuse he suffered by
the frequent moves.

Other detainees could raise similar arguments in military commission cases, as
Salim Ahmed Hamdan did in his commission trial that ended yesterday. The judge
in that case ruled that some evidence could not be presented because of
"coercive" techniques but found that his treatment at Guantanamo, including the
frequent flier program, did not affect his statements to interrogators.

Jawad's lawyer, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, said the newly discovered records
indicate that "no one actually knows the full scope of the abuses at Guantanamo"
and that "all of these allegedly comprehensive investigations were whitewashes."

"This is only the tip of the iceberg," Frakt said. "This program was approved at
the highest levels. . . . It suggests that people had simply lost their ability
to distinguish right from wrong."

Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said
he worries that more of the organization's numerous clients at Guantanamo could
have faced the frequent flier technique.

"News that this methodology is more widespread than the government has initially
acknowledged is troubling but not initially surprising," Warren said. "Things
like sleep deprivation are against international law and U.S. domestic law, and
all investigators, including those in Congress, need to focus on these issues of
programmatic torture."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

----------------------------------------------

AP Exclusive: Documents say detainee near insanity
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer
10/7/8

A U.S. military officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was
being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory
deprivation in a U.S. military brig, according to documents obtained by The
Associated Press.

While the treatment of prisoners at detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, and in Afghanistan and Iraq have long been the subject of human rights
complaints and court scrutiny, the documents shed new light on how two American
citizens and a legal U.S. resident were treated in military jails inside the
United States.

The Bush administration ordered the men to be held in military jails as "enemy
combatants" for years of interrogations without criminal charges, which would
not have been allowed in civilian jails.

The men were interrogated by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, repeatedly
denied access to attorneys and mail from home and contact with anyone other than
guards and their interrogators. They were deprived of natural light for months
and for years were forbidden even minor distractions such as a soccer ball or a
dictionary.

"I will continue to do what I can to help this individual maintain his sanity,
but in my opinion we're working with borrowed time," an unidentified Navy brig
official wrote of prisoner Yaser Esam Hamdi in 2002. "I would like to have some
form of an incentive program in place to reward him for his continued good
behavior, but more so, to keep him from whacking out on me."

Yale Law School's Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic received the
documents through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by two attorneys
Jonathan Freiman and Tahlia Townsend, representing another detainee, Jose
Padilla. The Lowenstein group and the American Civil Liberties Union said the
papers were evidence that the Bush administration violated the 5th Amendment's
protections against cruel treatment. The U.S. military was ordered to treat the
American prisoners the same way prisoners at Guantanamo were treated, according
to the documents.

However, the Guantanamo jail was created by the Bush administration specifically
to avoid allowing detainees any constitutional rights. Administration lawyers
contended the Constitution did not apply outside the country.

"These documents are the first clear confirmation of what we've suspected all
along, that the brig was run as a prison beyond the law. There was an effort to
create a Gitmo inside the United States," Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU's National
Security Project in New York said, using the slang word for the U.S. naval
facility in Cuba.

The 91 pages of e-mails and documents produced by U.S. Fleet Forces Command,
which runs the military brigs in Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C., detail
daily decisions made about the treatment of Hamdi and Padilla, then both
American citizens, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a legal resident. All were
designated as by the White House as "illegal enemy combatants."

The paperwork show uniformed officials at the military brigs growing
increasingly uncomfortable and then alarmed that they were being directed to
handle their prisoners under the rules that governed Guantanamo.

The authors and recipients of the e-mails are censored from the documents. They
appear to be going to either military or Pentagon legal counsel and policy
offices.

The documents show that some officials at the Charleston brig were deeply
skeptical about the mandate that Guantanamo rules should apply in the United
States, a decision made by the defense secretary's office, according to the
documents.

"You have every right to question the 'lash-up' between GTMO and Charleston ---
it was the first thing I ask (sic) about a year ago when I checked on board,"
wrote one official to another in 2006. "In a nutshell, they gave the Charleston
detainee mission to (Joint Forces Command) who promptly gave it to (Fleet Forces
Command) with a 'lots of luck' and nothing else."

An officer was still raising alarms about Hamdi's mental state after 14 months
of jail with no contact with lawyers, his family or even other prisoners.

"I told him the last thing that I wanted to have happen was to send him anywhere
from here as a 'basket case,' of use to no one, to include himself," the officer
wrote in an e-mail to undisclosed government officials in June 2003. "I fear the
rubber band is nearing its breaking point here and not totally confident I can
keep his head in the game much longer."

The frustrated officer wrote that he had "to have the ability to exercise some
discretion when I believe it best for the health and welfare of those assigned
to my facility ... Know ... we are to remain consistent with the procedures that
were/are in place at Camp X-Ray" a reference to the Guantanamo jail. He pointed
out that imposing those conditions in the brig had a far harsher effect on his
prisoners because they had no contact with any other detainees, which was
allowed at Guantanamo.

Scores of pages of once-secret legal opinions regarding detainee rights and
treatment have been released under the Freedom of Information Act. At least two
apparently crucial memos about enemy combatant treatment inside the U.S. have
yet to be made public.

Hamdi was captured in Afghanistan in 2001, shipped to Guantanamo and then moved
to the U.S. after his citizenship was discovered. He was held and interrogated
for three years without charges. The Supreme Court in 2004 rejected the
government's attempt to hold him indefinitely without charge. He was released to
Saudi Arabia on the condition he give up his U.S. citizenship.

Al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was a legal resident studying for a master's
degree in Illinois when he was arrested in December 2001 by the FBI as a
material witness to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He was charged with credit card
fraud in 2002. A month before his trial in 2003, President Bush declared him an
enemy combatant and al-Marri was transferred to the consolidated naval brig in
Charleston. There he was held in isolation for 16 months, denied shoes and socks
for two years, and was not allowed any contact with his family for five
years. He remains in the military brig but is appealing his detention to the
Supreme Court.

Padilla was arrested in 2002 under suspicion he was collaborating with al-Qaida
to build a radioactive or "dirty" bomb. He was held as an enemy combatant for
more than three years. He was held totally incommunicado for 21 months. His
mother was only allowed to see Padilla after she agreed not to alert the media
to the visit, according to the documents.

The government dropped the dirty bomb charges and Padilla's case was moved to
civilian court where in 2007 he was convicted of supporting terrorism in Kosovo,
Bosnia and Chechnya.

------------------------------------------------

Report Blames Rumsfeld for Detainee Abuses

By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI
December 12, 2008

WASHINGTON --- A report released Thursday by leaders of the Senate Armed
Services committee said that top Bush administration officials, including Donald
H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, bear major responsibility for the
abuses committed by American troops in interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other military detention centers.

The report was issued jointly by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic
chairman of the panel, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the top
Republican. The report represents the most thorough review by Congress to date
of the origins of the abuse of prisoners in American military custody, and it
explicitly rejects the Bush administration's contention that tough interrogation
methods have helped keep the country and its troops safe.

The report also rejected previous claims by Mr. Rumsfeld and others that Defense
Department policies played no role in the the harsh treatment of prisoners at
Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and in other incidents of abuse.

The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the report says, "was not simply the
result of a few soldiers acting on their own" but grew out of interrogation
policies approved by Mr. Rumsfeld and other top officials "conveyed the message
that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for
detainees."

By the time of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Mr. Rumsfeld had formally withdrawn
approval for use of the harshest techniques, which he authorized in December
2002 and then ruled out a month later. But the report said that those methods,
including the use of stress positions and forced nudity, continued to spread
through the military detention system. It added that their use "damaged our
ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the
hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

Most of the report, the product of an 18-month inquiry and interviews of more
than 70 people by committee staff, remains classified. But the 29-page summary
offers the clearest timeline to date linking the acts of Pentagon officials,
including William J. Haynes II, the former Defense Department general counsel,
to abusive treatment in the field.

Committee staff members said the report was approved by a voice vote without
dissent, but only 17 of the committee's 25 members were present for the
vote. Mr. McCain, who was tortured while being held as a prisoner of war in
North Vietnam, has been an outspoken opponent of harsh interrogation tactics,
but some other Republicans have defended such methods as legal and necessary.

Most of the facts in the report summary have been previously made public,
notably at hearings the Senate committee held in June and September. But the
report documents how the military training program called Surveillance, Evasion,
Resistance and Escape, or SERE, became a major source for interrogation methods
as the Bush administration looked for tougher methods after the 2001 terrorist
attacks.

The SERE training was based on methods used by "a ruthless, lawless enemy,"
Mr. Levin said in a statement. "The techniques were never intended to be used
against detainees in U.S. custody," he said.

Mr. McCain called the adoption of SERE methods "inexcusable."

"These policies are wrong and must never be repeated," said Mr. McCain, who led
the successful fight in Congress in 2005 to prohibit military interrogators from
using coercive methods.

------------------------------------------------------------

March 15, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Tales From Torture's Dark World
By MARK DANNER

ON a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the
East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had
created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

"In addition to the terrorists held at Guantanamo," the president said, "a small
number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war
have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program
operated by the Central Intelligence Agency."

At these places, Mr. Bush said, "the C.I.A. used an alternative set of
procedures." He added: "These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply
with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of
Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be
lawful." This speech will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush's most important:
perhaps the only historic speech he ever gave. In his fervent defense of his
government's "alternative set of procedures" and his equally fervent insistence
that they were "lawful," he set out before the country America's dark moral epic
of torture, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled
still.

At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, Mr. Bush made it possible that day for
those on whom the alternative set of procedures were performed eventually to
speak. For he announced that he would send 14 "high-value detainees" from dark
into twilight: they would be transferred from the overseas "black sites" to
Guantanamo. There, while awaiting trial, the International Committee of the Red
Cross would be "advised of their detention, and will have the opportunity to
meet with them."

A few weeks later, from Oct. 6 to 11 and then from Dec. 4 to 14, 2006, Red Cross
officials --- whose duty it is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions
and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war --- traveled to Guantanamo and
began interviewing the prisoners.

Their stated goal was to produce a report that would "provide a description of
the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period
they were held in the C.I.A. detention program," periods ranging "from 16 months
to almost four and a half years."

As the Red Cross interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not
intended to be released to the public but, "to the extent that each detainee
agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities," to be given in strictest
secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding
them --- in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general
counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on Feb. 14, 2007.

The result is a document --- labeled "confidential" and clearly intended only
for the eyes of those senior American officials --- that tells a story of what
happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.

A short time ago, this document came into my hands and I have set out the
stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because
these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by
professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not
intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.

Indeed, since the detainees were kept strictly apart and isolated, both at the
black sites and at Guantanamo, the striking similarity in their stories would
seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely. As its authors state in their
introduction, "The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the
detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds particular
weight to the information provided below."

Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page --- "suffocation by
water," "prolonged stress standing," "beatings by use of a collar," "confinement
in a box" --- the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories
recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal
conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination:
"The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases,
the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program,
either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other
elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted
cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

*

Perhaps one should start with the story of the first man to whom, according to
news reports, the president's "alternative set of procedures" were applied:

"I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured
approximately 4 meters by 4 meters. The room had three solid walls, with the
fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not
sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several
days, but can't remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept,
shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next two to three
weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to
the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the
toilet, which consisted of a bucket.

"I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on
the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made
me vomit, but this became less with time.

"The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud,
shouting-type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every 15
minutes, 24 hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud
hissing or crackling noise.

"The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My
interrogators did not wear masks."

So begins the story of Abu Zubaydah, a senior member of Al Qaeda, captured in a
raid in Pakistan in March 2002. The arrest of an active terrorist with
actionable information was a coup for the United States.

After being treated for his wounds --- he had been shot in the stomach, leg and
groin during his capture --- Abu Zubaydah was brought to one of the black sites,
probably in Thailand, and placed in that white room.

It is important to note that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators,
that everyone in that white room --- guards, interrogators, doctor --- was in
fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on
the other side of the world. "It wasn't up to individual interrogators to
decide, .Well, I'm going to slap him. Or I'm going to shake him,'" said John
Kiriakou, a C.I.A. officer who helped capture Abu Zubaydah, in an interview with
ABC News.

Every one of the steps taken with regard to Abu Zubaydah "had to have the
approval of the deputy director for operations. So before you laid a hand on
him, you had to send in the cable saying, .He's uncooperative. Request
permission to do X.'"

He went on: "The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific.... No one
wanted to get in trouble by going overboard."

Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, C.I.A. officers briefed the National
Security Council's principals committee, including Vice President Dick Cheney,
the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John
Ashcroft, in detail on the interrogation plans for the prisoner. As the
interrogations proceeded, so did the briefings, with George Tenet, the
C.I.A. director, bringing to senior officials almost daily reports of the
techniques applied.

At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, Justice Department officials, led by
John Yoo, were working on a memorandum, now known informally as "the torture
memo," which claimed that for an "alternative procedure" to be considered
torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort "that would
be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure,
or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely
result." The memo was approved in August 2002, thus serving as a legal "green
light" for interrogators to apply the most aggressive techniques to Abu
Zubaydah:

"I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around
my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against
the hard walls of the room."

The prisoner was then put in a coffin-like black box, about 4 feet by 3 feet and
6 feet high, "for what I think was about one and a half to two hours." He added:
The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside.... They put a
cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my
air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw
that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From
now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my
neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the
impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard
wall would probably quickly result in physical injury."

After this beating, Abu Zubaydah was placed in a small box approximately three
feet tall. "They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and
restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to
crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs
held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very
painful. I think this occurred about three months after my last operation. It
was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made
it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to
bleed. I don't know how long I remained in the small box; I think I may have
slept or maybe fainted.

"I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly, and put on what
looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black
cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water
bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few
minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright
position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.

"The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture
carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a
bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and
the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps,
trying to breathe, but it was hopeless."

After being placed again in the tall box, Abu Zubaydah "was then taken out and
again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with
the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two
interrogators as before.

"I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the
next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.

This went on for approximately one week."

*

Walid bin Attash, a Saudi involved with planning the attacks on American
embassies in Africa in 1998 and on the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000, was captured
in Pakistan on April 29, 2003:

"On arrival at the place of detention in Afghanistan I was stripped naked. I
remained naked for the next two weeks.... I was kept in a standing position,
feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs
and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was
dark with no light, artificial or natural."

This forced standing, with arms shackled above the head, seems to have become
standard procedure. It proved especially painful for Mr. bin Attash, who had
lost a leg fighting in Afghanistan:

"After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed
my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache
and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my
wrists."

Cold water was used on Mr. bin Attash in combination with beatings and the use
of a plastic collar, which seems to have been a refinement of the towel that had
been looped around Abu Zubaydah's neck:

"On a daily basis during the first two weeks a collar was looped around my neck
and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room. It was
also placed around my neck when being taken out of my cell for interrogation and
was used to lead me along the corridor. It was also used to slam me against the
walls of the corridor during such movements.

"Also on a daily basis during the first two weeks I was made to lie on a plastic
sheet placed on the floor which would then be lifted at the edges. Cold water
was then poured onto my body with buckets.... I would be kept wrapped inside the
sheet with the cold water for several minutes. I would then be taken for
interrogation."

*

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the key planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in
Pakistan on March 1, 2003.

After three days in what he believes was a prison in Afghanistan, Mr. Mohammed
was put in a tracksuit, blindfold, hood and headphones, and shackled and placed
aboard a plane. He quickly fell asleep --- "the first proper sleep in over five
days" --- and remains unsure of how long the journey took. On arrival, however,
he realized he had come a long way:

"I could see at one point there was snow on the ground. Everybody was wearing
black, with masks and army boots, like Planet X people. I think the country was
Poland. I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me
without the label removed. It had [an] e-mail address ending in ..pl.'"

He was stripped and put in a small cell. "I was kept for one month in the cell
in a standing position with my hands cuffed and shackled above my head and my
feet cuffed and shackled to a point in the floor," he told the Red Cross.

"Of course during this month I fell asleep on some occasions while still being
held in this position. This resulted in all my weight being applied to the
handcuffs around my wrist, resulting in open and bleeding wounds. [Scars
consistent with this allegation were visible on both wrists as well as on both
ankles.] Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual
standing."

For interrogation, Mr. Mohammed was taken to a different room. The sessions
lasted for as long as eight hours and as short as four.

"If I was perceived not to be cooperating I would be put against a wall and
punched and slapped in the body, head and face. A thick flexible plastic collar
would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two
ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall. The
beatings were combined with the use of cold water, which was poured over me
using a hose-pipe."

As with Abu Zubaydah, the harshest sessions involved the "alternative set of
procedures" used in sequence and in combination, one technique intensifying the
effects of the others:

"The beatings became worse and I had cold water directed at me from a hose-pipe
by guards while I was still in my cell. The worst day was when I was beaten for
about half an hour by one of the interrogators. My head was banged against the
wall so hard that it started to bleed. Cold water was poured over my head. This
was then repeated with other interrogators. Finally I was taken for a session of
water boarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention
of the doctor."

Reading the Red Cross report, one becomes somewhat inured to the "alternative
set of procedures" as they are described: the cold and repeated violence grow
numbing. Against this background, the descriptions of daily life of the
detainees in the black sites, in which interrogation seems merely a periodic
heightening of consistently imposed brutality, become more striking.

Here again is Mr. Mohammed:

"After each session of torture I was put into a cell where I was allowed to lie
on the floor and could sleep for a few minutes. However, due to shackles on my
ankles and wrists I was never able to sleep very well.... The toilet consisted
of a bucket in the cell, which I could use on request" --- he was shackled
standing, his hands affixed to the ceiling --- "but I was not allowed to clean
myself after toilet during the first month.... I wasn't given any clothes for
the first month. Artificial light was on 24 hours a day, but I never saw
sunlight."

*

Abu Zubaydah, Walid bin Attash, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed --- these men almost
certainly have blood on their hands. There is strong reason to believe that they
had critical parts in planning and organizing terrorist operations that caused
the deaths of thousands of people. So in all likelihood did the other
"high-value detainees" whose treatment while secretly confined by the United
States is described in the Red Cross report.

From everything we know, many or all of these men deserve to be tried and
punished --- to be "brought to justice," as President Bush vowed they would
be. The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who
have been tortured --- and have already done so at Guantanamo --- means it is
highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most
important and consequential sense in which "torture doesn't work." The use of
torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the
possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect
relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value
is, at the least, much disputed.

As I write, it is impossible to know definitively what benefits --- in
intelligence, in national security, in disrupting Al Qaeda --- the president's
approval of use of an "alternative set of procedures" might have brought to the
United States. Only a thorough investigation, which we are now promised, much
belatedly, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, can determine that.

What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the
United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the
president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact. We can also say
that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed
American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of
the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and
helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist
cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they
had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now
confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away.

Mark Danner, a professor of journalism at the University of California,
Berkeley, and Bard College, is the author of "Torture and Truth: America, Abu
Ghraib and the War on Terror." This essay is drawn from a longer article in the
new issue of The New York Review of Books, available at www.nybooks.com.

----

When Israel Confronted and Rejected Torture
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
May 1, 2009

Reading about the Bush administration's convoluted attempts to justify torture
takes me back to reporting I did 12 years ago on the anguished debate in Israel
over its secret service's use of violence in interrogations.  That was two years
before the Israeli Supreme Court banned the practice.  "This is the destiny of
democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it and not all practices employed
by its enemies are open before it," wrote the president of the court, Aharon
Barak.

I had interviewed Justice Barak for my article, and I recall with some shame my
righteous certainty in those days that I came from a country that would never
stoop to such methods.

An internationally respected jurist and a deeply patriotic Israeli, Justice
Barak was acutely aware of the competing demands of what the ruling called "the
harsh reality of terrorism" and a "democratic, freedom-loving society."
Certainly nobody would question the reality of the threats faced by Israel.  And
none of its foes share its scruples about torture, as many critics furiously
pointed out to the high court (and to me after my article appeared).

Until the ruling, Israel, like the Bush administration, had insisted that
methods of torment permitted in interrogating detainees were not torture and,
therefore, not in violation of international and national law prohibiting the
use of torture.  Those methods included violent shaking, shackling prisoners to
a low and tilted stool, covering their heads with urine-drenched hoods and sleep
deprivation.

Israel's official euphemism, "a moderate measure of physical pressure," was a
touch more honest than the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation
techniques."  But the intent was the same.  The United Nations Convention
Against Torture, which both Israel and the United States have ratified, defines
torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or
mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person" to obtain information or a
confession.

Israel's other familiar line of defense was that the country was embroiled in a
"war on terrorism" (that was years before former President George W. Bush used
the term) and, therefore, could not deal gently with a Palestinian who may know
of a literally ticking bomb.

Having covered the gruesome aftermath of several suicide bombings, I was not
unsympathetic to "ticking-bomb" arguments.  But by then quite a few Israelis,
including Justice Barak, had ceased to believe that the ends were justifying the
violent means.

When judges or lawyers asked for evidence that "moderate physical pressure" was
actually saving lives, it was always classified.  Some Palestinians who had been
tortured told me they waited several days in detention before their turn came to
be questioned about a "ticking bomb."  Most were released.

In any case, for all their legal legerdemain, the Israelis, like the Americans,
seemed always to know that abusing prisoners was morally and legally wrong.
Politicians in both countries were eager to avoid a public debate.

The Israeli court decision grew out of the Supreme Court's irritation that it
was being made to shoulder an unsavory responsibility that really belonged to
the legislature --- "to pull Parliament's chestnuts out of the fire," in Justice
Barak's words.  And why would the Bush administration have used "extraordinary
renditions" or a prison in Cuba if it believed its actions were above board?

In both countries, whatever security benefits may have been gained by torture
were far outweighed by the damage done to a nation that betrays its own values.
As Justice Barak wrote in his decision in 1999, "Although a democracy must often
fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand."