by Mark Fallon
Donald Ryder was appointed to assist Taguba. Well versed in Miller’s complicity—as well as Miller’s attempts to suppress any contrary position from the CITF—Ryder knew exactly where to look for evidence. Taguba’s team reviewed photographs and videos and read fifty witness statements taken by Ryder’s CID agents. The group also visited Iraq, inspected the Abu Ghraib prison, and spoke with additional witnesses. While Rumsfeld limited Taguba’s scope, he couldn’t easily stop him from carrying out his mission.
When Taguba filed his report in March 2004—still well before the floodgates opened—it contained multiple damning revelations about the “sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses [that] were inflicted on several detainees” at Abu Ghraib between October and December of 2003. The report cited several MPs as well as members of two military intel battalions and the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center for having systematically abused detainees.
While some of the tactics Taguba reported conformed to the psychological abuses developed by the pseudo-BSCT at Gitmo, others seemed to be the horrific result of frustrated, bored, and angry guards who had been ordered to soften up the detainees. Some broke chemical lights and poured the phosphoric liquid on detainees’ bodies; other prisoners were sodomized with lightbulbs. Male detainees were arranged in piles and jumped on; dead detainees on ice were photographed with smiling MPs posing next to them. Abu Ghraib also held some female inmates, at least one of whom was sodomized by a uniformed male guard.
Taguba also found that Abu Ghraib was holding “ghost detainees” for OGAsXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXX XXXXXXXXand moving them around in the facility to avoid detection by groups such as the International Committee of the Red Cross. “This maneuver was deceptive,” stated the report, “contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law.” Taguba was not authorized to investigate the military intelligence or CIA personnel involved, but he could document what he identified in the course of his investigation.
While the abuse at Abu Ghraib was already under way before Miller took over in March 2004, his impact on the nature of detainee treatment and interrogations was clear. Taguba’s report included Miller’s recommendation that “it is essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.”
Taguba also made specific the link between Miller’s presence and rampant abuse. “I think it important to point out,” stated the report, “that almost every witness testified that the serious criminal abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib occurred in late October and in early November 2003.” In other words, the sadistic and harsh treatment ramped up right after Miller visited Abu Ghraib and infected Iraq with the EIT and behavioral management process of detainee degradation. Taguba could not make any official finding about Miller, as he was beyond the scope of his investigation. But Miller’s appearance in the report was probably as close to an indictment as Taguba could offer. Brigadier General Janis Karpinksi, head of military police at the prison, whom Miller had counseled to get tougher with the prisoners, was the only general officer at Abu Ghraib who was ever penalized. She was removed from her command and then demoted to colonel. Even then, neither action was officially related to the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
On March 24, 2004, within weeks of Taguba filing his report, Miller relinquished command of JTF-GTMO and left for Iraq. This was all as originally planned, but now with a different mission. Rumsfeld had initially picked Miller to Gitmo-ize the operations in Iraq. By the time the general arrived, however, his mission there had dramatically changed. Miller was now responsible for cleaning up the looming abuse scandal he had played a huge part in creating. Miller was appointed the deputy commander for detainee operations in Iraq, overseeing Abu Ghraib and other detention and interrogation facilities. It was the equivalent of Nixon sending H. R. Haldeman to investigate the Watergate break-in.
Not everyone was a villain in Taguba’s report. XXXXXXX XXXXXX, a navy dog handler, refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressures from military intelligence personnel at Abu Ghraib. Private Joe Darby had, of course, turned over evidence to CID. First Lieutenant XXXXX XXXXXX, an MP, took immediate action, stopped an abuse, and reported it. While the bravery of these three service members is commendable, the fact that Taguba was able to list only three individuals who stood up to the abuses is disturbing and reflective of the command climate there. It makes their moral fiber and courage even more noteworthy.
While Taguba’s report was classified, it was leaked in late April 2004, causing further panic within the Pentagon. Rumsfeld wanted the allegations investigated, but he didn’t want anybody to know the results.
Once the details in the report were widely publicized, congressional hearings were inevitable. Rumsfeld would have to try to cover his tracks. I don’t know what Rumsfeld’s lawyers told him directly. I was, however, present when his lawyers discussed that if Rumsfeld authorized the EITs at Guantanamo, he would be placing himself in jeopardy of possibly being tried internationally as a war criminal.
Of course, Rumsfeld wasn’t the only one who might have been indicted for unlawful acts. Miller had followed through on Dunlavey’s original request and had implemented the EIT program at Guantanamo. He had also infected Abu Ghraib and Iraq with the SERE EIT and detainee behavioral management program. The JPRA and SERE program were also on the verge of being exposed for their implementation of learned helplessness within the DOD. The Pentagon had been able to silence those of us at CITF, but the evidence of detainee abuse was mounting and the media would no longer be a pawn in the perception-management campaign. Rumsfeld, Miller, and the other DOD torture architects realized they were either going to sink or swim together.
As part of the expanding investigations, Morgan Banks was ordered to come up to DC to explain his role in the now very public detainee abuse scandal. Afterward Banks called Larry James.
“General Miller wants you in Abu Ghraib,” he told James. “He needs your help to fix the mess. Larry, I need to talk with you ASAP.”
Miller got his way. Within two months of his arrival in Iraq, he brought James, his former JTF-GTMO BSCT chief psychologist, over. James had skin in the game too. He needed to insulate himself from the growing scandal.
• • •
With the leaking of the Taguba report, Rumsfeld was also forced to expand the scope of his reviews. He tapped Vice Admiral Albert Thomas Church, the naval inspector general, to investigate the detainee abuse scandal, this time including Gitmo. On May 4, 2004, I met with Church and laid out for him and his staff the DOD abuses that began with the establishment of JTF-170’s BSCT and the Guantanamo Battle Lab. I told Church he needed to “find the logs”—the interrogation logs—not the sanitized reports JTF-GTMO was disseminating.
XXXX XXX X XXXX XXXX XXXXXX XX XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXX XX XXX XXXXX XXXXXX XX XXX XXXX XX XXXX XXXXXXXX We had no idea how far people at the DOD or CIA were willing to go to cover up the abuse. But Britt Mallow felt we should have a backup printed copy of our important documents, in the event someone was able to purge our electronic records. I didn’t tell Church about my backup plan: I had forwarded other copies of documents to trusted associates within NCIS for safekeeping.
On May 7, 2004, Donald Rumsfeld was called to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which was holding hearings due to increasing media accounts of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. “I feel terrible about what happened to these Iraqi detainees. They are human beings,” testified Rumsfeld. “They were in US custody. Our country had an obligation to treat them right. We didn’t, and that was wrong. So to those Iraqis who were mistreated by members of the US armed forces, I offer my deepest apology. It was inconsistent with the values of our nation. It was inconsistent with the teachings of the military, to the men and woman of the armed forces. And it was certainly fundamentally un-American.”
Rumsfeld continued, “I wish we had known more sooner and been able to tell you more soon
er, but we didn’t.” It was an audacious performance for someone who had hand-picked both Dunlavey and Miller to lead the Gitmo Battle Lab, sent Miller to Abu Ghraib, and worked to scuttle high-level legal reviews of the very torture tactics the committee was investigating. Rumsfeld knew he had blood on his hands, but there was no remorse in his conscience.
Two days later, on May 9, 2004, the Associated Press published a report with the headline PRISONERS’ EARLY ACCOUNTS OF EXTENSIVE IRAQ ABUSE MET U.S. SILENCE. The article detailed allegations of psychological abuse, deprivation, beatings, and death at the US-run detention facilities under Miller. The AP also cited an army investigation documenting that “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.” The Red Cross in Geneva made a rare public statement on the matter too: “We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system.” An Iraqi provincial governor urged the US to stop the abuse, imploring, “What you are doing to the Iraqi people will turn against you!” And turn against us they did.
The next day in the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reported on allegations of CIA domination at the prison as well as ghost detainees. The conspiracy was unraveling. If someone followed the trail, it would lead directly to the office of the secretary of defense, and maybe even the president. Alberto Mora had urged Jim Haynes to protect his client. Haynes didn’t.
• • •
May 28, 2004, was my last official day as the CITF deputy commander and special agent in charge. By that time, it had become clear to me that the Bush administration had no real intention of bringing detainees to justice through a legitimate judicial process. I believe the administration had actually made that decision only three months after detainees began arriving at Gitmo. On April 5, 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Bush at his Crawford ranch and pledged his unqualified support for an invasion of Iraq. From that point onward, Iraq became the administration’s focus.
Over the next two years, the United States created a national policy of state-sponsored torture. I had spent too much of my time at CITF trying to stop the creation of these torture policies. I knew from hard-won experience that well-positioned people at the Pentagon and White House would go to any lengths to cover them up. I had even begun to feel like CITF was a decoy—a feint that we were going to bring terrorists to justice—more than a commitment to do so.
So I left the CITF having failed to bring Al Qaeda terrorists to justice or to ensure detainees were treated humanely. But I took every step I could to counter the illegal and inhumane activity at Gitmo. Despite my failures, I was able to leave with my integrity intact, knowing I fulfilled my oath to protect and defend the Constitution.
CHAPTER 13
* * *
“THE WORST OF THE WORST”
On March 10, 2005, US Navy Vice Admiral Albert Church testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the investigation he had led into allegations of detainee abuse at Guantanamo. Church told the committee: “Clearly there was no policy written or otherwise at any level that directed or condoned torture or abuse; there was no link between the authorized interrogation techniques and the abuses that in fact occurred.”
I had a foretaste of this revisionism. Admiral Church had called me a few days earlier, after he briefed Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, to let me know the unclassified executive results of his findings were about to be made public and to thank me for my assistance. After all, my allegations had kicked off the process, and the logs I had shared with the Church committee had provided a factual basis for its investigation. But then Church moved on to an apology: “I can’t believe that after you started it all, there was no interview of you recorded in the official report.”
I was shocked. After Church and his staff had conducted more than 800 interviews of personnel in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, my input didn’t warrant inclusion? How could that be? Church explained this was an oversight, but then he made another curious statement. He said he was sure there would be additional investigations of the matter, most likely at the congressional level. In other words, he had just finished a voluminous report that unreservedly stated there was no policy of abuse, but he was certain the matter was far from settled. His strongest recommendation going forward, he assured me, was for future congressional investigators to interview me about detainee abuse. None of the subsequent Rumsfeld-appointed panels—and there were many of them—ever did.
I never found out if there was an actual order issued that no one was to talk with me. I just know I’d made allegations, a commission was formed, no one got back to me, and the issue I had raised—sanctioned torture—was basically whitewashed by a panel appointed by the man to whom my allegations might ultimately lead: the secretary of defense.
But that’s pretty much how things went in the early days of pushback against what was happening at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. By the spring of 2004, the detainee abuses had widespread public attention. But after flurries of activity, everything would die down. Aside from a few soldiers, most of them far down the chain of command, no one had been held responsible. In fact, the people behind the EITs—not just the torturers themselves, but their facilitators back in Washington, in the DOD or at the Department of Justice, or at the CIA or elsewhere—still controlled the narrative: Torture was good. It was necessary, it was yielding actionable intel, it was protecting America from additional attacks. And, hey, if it sometimes got a little out of hand? Well, you have to break eggs to make an omelet.
What’s more, these people also controlled the ultimate gateways through which internal protests had to pass. An example: In early 2005 Michael Chertoff was nominated by President Bush to replace Tom Ridge as the secretary of homeland security. Chertoff had been the deputy attorney general when many of the legal justifications for torture were being produced. He had also been one of the top lawyers who visited Gitmo and met with Dunlavey back in September 2002. Upon Chertoff’s nomination, the American Civil Liberties Union called for an outside special counsel to investigate the exact role he had played in creating and implementing the Bush administration’s torture policies. Unfortunately for the ACLU, their request landed on the desk of newly appointed US attorney general Alberto Gonzales. Not only had Gonzales been on the same Gitmo trip as Chertoff, as White House counsel he had also played a central role formulating and promoting the very interrogation practices the ACLU was protesting. The ACLU’s request died on Gonzales’s desk, the special counsel was never appointed, and Chertoff was unanimously approved by the US Senate on February 15, 2005.
Another example: XXXX XX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XXXXX XXXXXX XXX XXX XXXX XX XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXXXXXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXX XXX XXXXXXXXX XXXX XX XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXX XX XXX XXXXXX. Apparently they did indeed XXXXX XXXXXX because on November 9, 2005, Jose Rodriguez, the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and RDI (Rendition, Detention and Interrogation) program, ordered that all the tapes be destroyed. His decision not only disappeared a smoking gun; it also defied an order from CIA director Porter Goss and resistance from senior US officials, including John Negroponte, then director of national intelligence. The destroyed videotapes were evidence of war crimes and violations of international and US law, but Rodriquez suffered hardly a whit for what he had done. What’s more, Rodriguez was not held accountable by the Obama administration either. In 2010 the Obama Department of Justice decided not to press charges against Rodriguez for destroying the tapes.
• • •
Early on in this whole process, I had reminded my staff of what more than two decades in criminal investigations and counterintelligence work had taught me: there are no secrets, only delayed disclosures. My goal then had been proactive: do everything as if the whole world is watching, even when no one is in the room with you. At Gitmo—where so much took place beneath the radar, where observers fro
m the International Committee of the Red Cross and even my own staff were not allowed to be—that turned out to be revolutionary advice. But it wasn’t until 2006 that my advice appeared like it might also be correct.
That was the year the US Supreme Court ruled that the provisions of the Geneva Conventions did in fact apply to Guantanamo detainees. Specifically it called out Common Article 3 of the Conventions that includes the prohibition against cruel treatment, torture, and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Violations of Common Article 3 are deemed war crimes. Similarly, the War Crimes Act of 1996, enacted by the 104th US Congress, made “grave abuses” of detainees a violation of federal law. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 amended the 1996 statute by limiting “grave abuses” to torture, cruel or inhumane punishment, murder, mutilation, rape, sexual assault, or the taking of hostages.
Also in 2006 the United Nations Commission on Human Rights issued a report from a group of international experts, including the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. According to the report, the legal regime the US was applying to its detainees at GTMO “seriously undermine[d] the rule of law and a number of fundamental universally recognized human rights, which are the essence of democratic societies.”
A nation’s obligations under the Convention Against Torture allow for “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any public emergency may be invoked as a justification of torture.” The UN report also recommended closing the Guantanamo detention facilities and called on the US to ensure all allegations of torture are investigated “and that all persons found to have perpetrated, ordered, tolerated or condoned such practices, up to the highest level of military and political command, are brought to justice.”