by Mark Fallon
Similarly, when navy captain Daniel Donovan, the Joint Forces Command senior legal advisor, reviewed the JPRA plan for interrogating high-value targets, he responded back to Moulton that “even if Rumsfeld approved techniques for use in Guantanamo, where al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters were considered unlawful combatants, Iraqi prisoners fell under the full protection of the Geneva Conventions” and said interrogation techniques “would not be legal” in Iraq.
Donovan didn’t give up there, though. On September 29, when he saw that general Wagner and chief of staff for joint forces command lieutenant general James Soligan might visit JPRA, Donovan alerted them that the Defense Intelligence Agency had approached JPRA about interrogation techniques and that the request “may have gone a bit further by asking JPRA to develop a plan for ‘more effective’ interrogations.” Donovan notified the generals that the JPRA plan was “highly aggressive (such as the ‘water board’), and it probably goes without saying that if JPRA is to include such techniques in a plan they prepare for an operational unit in another AOR, they need to be damn sure they’re appropriate in both a legal and policy sense.”
Ballsy patriots such as Nathan Hoepner, Steve Kleinman, Robert Wagner, and Daniel Donovan can be found in every war theater, in every age, but in Iraq and Afghanistan, at Gitmo, the Pentagon, and elsewhere, they were too few and far between as the summer of 2003 wore on. When Geoffrey Miller, the commander of advanced torture at Guantanamo Bay, showed up in Iraq in August 2003 “to discuss current theater ability to exploit internees rapidly for actionable intelligence,” the deal was all but sealed. The fact that Miller had been hand-selected by the secretary of defense himself put the final imprimatur on the package: Gitmo was going global.
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Miller had somehow convinced the Pentagon that his approach at Gitmo was successful and was the model others should be emulating. Even though it had no bearing in the Iraq War, where the Geneva Conventions applied, Miller brought with him the secretary of defense’s April 16, 2003, policy guidelines for Guantanamo to serve as a model for the command-wide policy he recommended they establish.
When we at the CITF heard Miller was Donald Rumsfeld’s choice for this key advisory role, we frankly couldn’t believe it. The guy who presided over the aggressive expansion of torture at Gitmo was being sent to the front lines? What about the incredible controversy created when he began using the EITs at Guantanamo? More to the point, what about the total failure of that experiment in his Gitmo Battle Lab? For this, the Pentagon was going to expose him to a volatile operational theater?
But it no longer seemed to matter what interrogation professionals or lawyers said. When we alerted the Department of Defense’s Office of General Counsel that Miller’s trip would be an absolute disaster—that torture was a cancer and Miller was about to carry it into other theaters—we were told Rumsfeld personally selected Miller and there was no way to oppose the visit. Those in power, it seemed, were simply hell-bent on the notion that torturing prisoners was the way to do business. Somehow the Global War on Terror was becoming the Global War of Terror. We had turned into the very adversary we feared.
In case anyone had missed the point, Geoffrey Miller made it abundantly clear when he first met with the ISG’s chief of interrogations at Baghdad International Airport’s Camp Cropper. Miller asserted it looked like they were “running a country club.”
“You’re too lenient with the detainees,” he added, then went on to recommend shackling the detainees; making them walk on the gravel rather than on the concrete pathways, to show them who was in control; manipulating room temperature; and one of his “innovations,” depriving the detainees of sleep. After listening to Miller, one strategic debriefer assigned to the camp wrote a letter to his commander saying he would resign if they tried to implement the techniques Miller was recommending. Nonetheless Miller’s advice—to “Gitmo-ize” the operation—began to echo throughout Iraq.
He had help: his legal counsel, Diane Beaver, also traveled with him to the Iraq Survey Group to spread the gospel. An SMU task force legal advisor told Beaver while she was in-country that he was concerned about the physical violence used during interrogations, including punching, choking, and beating detainees—later adding (shades of Steven Kleinman) that he was “risking his life” talking to her about these issues. But whether Beaver ever passed this news on to Geoffrey Miller is unknown. In 2007 Beaver would tell Senate investigators she had. For his part, Miller denied ever hearing about such concerns from Beaver.
What I do know for certain is that a slide presentation created following the ISG visit clearly showed that the group had discussed SMU “interrogation practices such as physical contact and choking.” That same presentation further noted that other agencies, such as the CIA, wouldn’t conduct interrogations in the SMU facilities due to prisoner treatment concerns. The detainee abuse, it turned out, was already rampant, widespread and accepted as a routine matter, even before Miller’s arrival. That is perhaps understandable in a war theater. Violence begets violence. But Miller was dropping hints all over the place of what the official command position on detainee abuse would be going forward.
Major General Miller was going to push harsh, abusive interrogation even further—indeed, as far as he could. Forget Abu Ghraib Country Club. Captain Wood, who had been charged with creating standard operating procedures for the interrogators, understood that Miller and his team wanted to build a “miniature Guantanamo Bay” at Abu Ghraib prison.
Miller told Wood that the SMU plan for using the SERE EIT was a “good start” but that she should consider using something along the lines of what he had developed for Gitmo. According to one witness, Miller told Pappas, “These people are scared to death of dogs, and the dogs have a tremendous effect.” (Miller later claimed he was not referring to using dogs in interrogations, just in the context of security operations. But if that was true, others took away a different message.)
Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, a military police officer from Rahway, New Jersey, oversaw the detention operations at Abu Ghraib. During Miller’s August visit, he told her, “You’re too nice. They don’t know you are in charge. . . . You have to treat them like dogs,” Karpinski also said Miller had told her: “We’re going to change the nature of interrogation out of Abu Ghraib.”
Before Miller left Iraq, he drafted new interrogation policies in a report titled “Assessment of DOD Counterterrorism Interrogation and Detention Operations in Iraq.” In it, Miller wrote that if his recommendations were implemented, “a significant improvement of actionable intelligence [would] be realized within thirty days.” Miller also recommended the detention guard force be subordinate to a new consolidated commander “that set the conditions for successful interrogations and exploitation of internees/detainees.”
“It is essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of internees,” Miller wrote. “Joint strategic interrogation operations are hampered by the lack of active control of the internees within the detention environment.”
Just as he had done at Guantanamo, Miller set about consolidating operations into one lean, unified torturing machine.
Last, Miller recommended establishing a BSCT to support interrogations because “psychologists and psychiatrists are essential in developing integrated interrogation strategies and assessing interrogation intelligence production.”
Miller listed CITF’s XXXXXX XXXXXX as part of his visit team on his report, making it appear as if CITF somehow concurred with his findings. But although XXXXXX had been part of the team traveling with Miller, the general prohibited him from attending his meetings. “He’s icing me out,” XXXXXX told me in a phone call while he was still in-country.
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Following his visit, Miller sent six personnel from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to assist in implementing his recommendations and to establish a Joint Intelligence and Debriefing Center. On September 14, 2003, just a wee
k after Miller left Iraq, Lieutenant General Richard Sanchez issued a SERE EIT policy for the war region, including Abu Ghraib. Just as Gitmo had called its EIT program counterresistance strategies, Sanchez called his EIT program “interrogation and counter-resistance policy.” The policy, he said, “drew heavily” on what Rumsfeld had previously green-lighted for Gitmo, including all of the twenty-four techniques Rumsfeld had approved.
Initially, Sanchez authorized stress positions, sleep deprivation, load music and light control, and the use of dogs, as well as techniques honed in Afghanistan after being originated at Gitmo, effective immediately. That same day, still more interrogation techniques were appended. Anxious to begin, interrogators took turns reading the guidelines line by line to each other. Not only had yelling, light control, loud music, deception, and false-flag operations been green-lighted, but with approval from the interrogation officer or noncommissioned officer in charge, interrogators could now also use stress positions, presence of dogs, dietary manipulation, environmental manipulation, and sleep management.
By October 25 the interrogation repertoire for SMU Task Force Iraq had been expanded still further to include the use of controlled fear, environmental manipulation, isolation, and removal of comfort items. None of these techniques were part of army interrogation doctrine or authorized by the Army Field Manual. Based specifically on Miller’s recommendation, military working dogs arrived at Abu Ghraib on November 20, 2003. According to a subsequent investigation, “abusing detainees with dogs started almost immediately after the dogs arrived.”
None of this had gone entirely unnoticed in the larger world. On November 1, 2003, for example—six weeks after Sanchez approved the EITs Miller had recommended and almost three weeks before the dog abuse started—the Associated Press presented a special report on massive human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib. But at the Department of Defense, such negative attention hardly seemed to matter.
To complete the “Gitmo-ization” of Abu Ghraib, in April 2004 Donald Rumsfeld personally picked Miller to be reassigned to Iraq as the deputy commanding general for detention operations. Now in command of both the military intelligence and military police functions in Iraq detention facilities, Miller essentially controlled the way detainees were to be treated in the entire theater. Just as Miller had hoped, his recommendations for abusive interrogation had been accepted wholesale, and he was in charge.
For Miller and the Department of Defense there was, however, one critical difference between Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. At Guantanamo, it was easy to control the spread of information within a US naval base operating on a heavily guarded little slice of an island in the Caribbean. On the other hand, Abu Ghraib was a prison just outside a huge city in the midst of a war zone filled with military and civilians coming and going, including people from many nationalities and international media.
In late 2003 and early 2004 British Special Forces soldiers returning from Iraq began reporting to the media that American private contractors were using SERE exploitation techniques in interrogations at Abu Ghraib, but “they didn’t know what they were doing.” Returning American service members began echoing some of their British counterparts, complaining about the abuses they were observing and ordered to participate in. Human rights groups were receiving hundreds of what they considered credible allegations of cruel, degrading, inhuman treatment. Some of those allegations were starting to arrive first-person, from detainees themselves. Their numbers kept growing; space at Gitmo and elsewhere was finite. Try as we might, we couldn’t hold all of them forever, and once they were repatriated, many had stories to tell. By the time Miller took command at Abu Ghraib, what had begun as a trickle of reports had grown into something the general would have a very hard time containing. Simultaneously, the accounts of repatriated detainees were helping fuel an insurgency that was beginning to surge out of control itself.
This wasn’t because Miller was not afraid to push back. A few days after he took command, the Guardian reported that detainees were being subjected to “sexual jibes and degradation, along with stripping naked.” Miller confidently “confirmed that a battery of 50-odd special ‘coercive techniques’ can be used against enemy detainees.” The problem for Miller was that, while the cover from Department of Defense lawyers and psychologists made it seem the SERE interrogation tactics were technically legal, the techniques were still horrific. People outside of the military and intel bubble would know torture when they saw it. And that was only a matter of time.
As reports of Abu Ghraib abuse were leaking out, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay abuse stories also continued to be reported. Soldiers from the Afghani theater revealed the abuses were built into standard operating procedures. And the tactics, created by psychologists who theorized that learned helplessness would break a detainee’s will to resist, actually did the opposite: they simply broke the detainee’s will to live. Some elected suicide over subjugation. Others died or were killed (a semantic distinction in some cases) while in custody. Either way, they were useless as intel sources. Dead men don’t talk.
The US Army Criminal Investigation Command (commonly known as CID) opened dozens of criminal investigations into detainee abuse as witnesses began to come forward and report on what they had witnessed, or had been part of. I had heard about some of the deaths, and rumors of more, and I had no doubt they were related to the Guantanamo Battle Lab and the SERE psychologists who had gone over to the dark side. After all, I had been reporting those same abuses for years. Still, I had no idea how rampant the abuse was at Abu Ghraib. Finally others were joining the cause, but the question remained: would anybody care this time?
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I. In military parlance, J-1 is responsible for Joint Forces manpower and staffing, J-2 for intelligence, J-3 for operations, J-4 for logistics, and J-6 for plans. The same system applies to the various branches of the service. N-1, for example, would be responsible for Navy manpower and staffing.
CHAPTER 12
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A PATTERN AND A SYSTEM
On January 13, 2004, US Army Specialist XXX XXXXX, a twenty-four-year-old military police officer assigned to the Abu Ghraib prison, received an e-mail from an anonymous soldier. When XXXXX opened it, several photographs depicting horrific abuses at Abu Ghraib popped up on his screen—mistreatment of detainees at the hands of his own colleagues and friends.
XXXXX was stunned, but driven by a sense of duty, he went to see XXXXX XXXXXX, who was a special agent with the CID assigned to Abu Ghraib. XXXXX gave the CID agent a CD of the photographs he had downloaded, irrefutable evidence of atrocities. The proof was documented, in fact, by some of the perpetrators. CID pledged to XXXXX that they would not disclose his identity. Then they opened a massive criminal investigation that would rock their own command, CENTCOM, the Pentagon, DOD, and well beyond.
Within a few weeks, CENTCOM informed the media that an official investigation had begun, involving the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi detainees by a group of US soldiers. On February 24, 2004, reports came out that seventeen soldiers had been suspended. The military announced on March 21, 2004, that the first charges had been filed against six soldiers. But in a media narrative still driven by terrorist attacks and the ongoing war in Iraq, none of these stories received significant coverage in the mainstream press.
The story was too explosive to be contained forever, though. Indeed, it only took a little more than a month—until April 28, 2004—for a 60 Minutes II report filled with graphic images of abuse to blow the scandal wide open. Two days later, a Seymour Hersh New Yorker article detailing the abuses was posted online. After Hersh’s reporting and the 60 Minutes II photos, the unsettling abuse was injected into the mainstream consciousness. The images were so stark; there was no room to doubt that the United States was now a nation that tortured the people it captured.
For those of us who had been following the growth of harsh detainee treatment across the DOD, the disturbing actions of the military police captured in the photos had a
name. They were clearly “setting the conditions” for the interrogations—just as General Miller had practiced in Gitmo and recommended during his trip to Iraq. The most famous photos released thus far depicted MPs Charles Graner, Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman, and Ivan Frederick posing over naked, dead bodies, some covered in their own feces and on dog leashes. Minus death, these were the same techniques Gitmo had developed for al-Qahtani and Slahi in 2002 and 2003. Other photos correlated to the psychological abuse developed at Gitmo as well: detainees handcuffed in stress positions, with underwear on their heads, or being threatened with dogs.
One of the most haunting images is of a hooded detainee standing on a box, his thin arms outstretched, wires taped to his fingers. He was held in this standing stress position by the threat that he would electrocute himself if he moved. This is exactly the type of psychological torture Albert Biderman described in his 1957 study of how communists had elicited false confessions from our prisoners of war. Back then, however, the North Korean POW camps were widely thought to be the worst, most inhumane places in the world. Now they had competition.
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As more and more reports of widespread abuses came to light, the whole program started to unravel. Journalists began pelting the Pentagon with questions about detainee abuse. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon’s public affairs staff were no longer able to control the narrative about the treatment of detainees. Their charm had worn off; the media began to recognize the level of manipulation and deception the DOD had relied on.
In damage-control mode, the Pentagon attempted to prevent additional disclosures. Rumsfeld tried to insulate himself by appointing his own investigations, trying to avoid any external look at the program designed under his authority. The secretary of defense’s first such effort began shortly after XXX XXXXX had reported the incriminating images he had received to army CID, but well before the dam had burst. On January 31, 2004, Major General Antonio Taguba was appointed to conduct a noncriminal investigation into detainee abuse in Iraq. However, Rumsfeld limited Taguba’s scope to the 800th Military Police Brigade, the guards at Abu Ghraib.