[Mb-civic] Torture Begins at the Top

[Michael Butler]

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    Torture Begins at the Top
    By Joe Conason 
    Salon.com

     Friday 17 December 2004

     Renewed exposure of prisoner abuse, torture and even murder by American
military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan is widening already deep
divisions between the Pentagon and the intelligence community - and creating
an untenable situation for Donald Rumsfeld, the beleaguered secretary of
defense. A recently disclosed FBI memo indicates that "marching orders" to
abandon traditional interrogation methods came from the defense secretary
himself.

     In recent days, a coalition of human rights groups led by the American
Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights has brought
new cases of abuse to public attention. Using the Freedom of Information
Act, they have pried thousands of pages of previously secret documents from
the Defense Department and other agencies.

     Even after the shock of Abu Ghraib, these substantiated stories of
cruelty, sadism and lawlessness are stunning. Files from the Navy's Criminal
Investigative Service describe how U.S. Marines ordered four Iraqi teenagers
to kneel while a gun was "discharged to conduct a mock execution"; how they
inflicted severe burns on a detainee's hands with flaming alcohol; and how
they tortured another detainee with an electric transformer, making him
"dance." In June, a Navy investigator revealed in an e-mail that his
caseload of "high visibility" cases of abuse was "exploding." As a result of
such offenses, at least two Marines were convicted and sent to prison.

     If justice has been done in a few cases, the ACLU documents show that
abuses were more common - and more extreme - than the Bush administration
had previously conceded. More important, however, the documents show that
the impetus for abuse came from above, not below. The use of coercive and
violent methods spread from Guantánamo Bay, where alleged Taliban and
al-Qaida prisoners are incarcerated, to Iraq and Afghanistan.

     The documents also show that officers from the CIA, the FBI and the
Defense Intelligence Agency lodged "heated" objections to the abusive
methods of interrogation used by the military, denouncing them in previously
secret memoranda as not only unethical but useless and destructive.

     In the files released by the government, FBI officials with special
expertise in counterterrorism and interrogation techniques recorded their
ongoing debate with Army officers about the harsh, coercive techniques
authorized by the Pentagon. They were as concerned about the efficacy of
those methods - which they believe often produce poor intelligence - as with
possible violations of law and regulations. But the commanders overseeing
the military interrogations simply dismissed the sharp warnings of the law
enforcement and intelligence officers.

     The abuses continued, in some cases even after the initial furor over
Abu Ghraib. What's more, an internal FBI memo indicates that the directive
to discard traditional restraints came from the very highest civilian
official in the Pentagon: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

     That revealing memo is dated May 10, 2004, a time when the Abu Ghraib
revelations were humiliating the United States before the entire world. An
e-mail, it is addressed to FBI counterterrorism officer Thomas J. Harrington
from an agent whose name is redacted (along with much else), and its subject
is captioned "Instructions to GTMO [Guantánamo] Interrogators." The memo's
obvious purpose is to set down, for the record, the FBI's opposition to the
Pentagon's use of coercive and abusive methods when questioning the
Guantánamo detainees. It describes the FBI's fundamental disagreement over
interrogation tactics with Gen. Geoffrey Miller and Gen. Michael Dunlavey,
then the military commanders at Guantánamo Bay.

     "I will have to do some digging into old files," the unnamed author
begins. "We did advise each supervisor that went to GTMO to stay in line
with Bureau policy and not deviate from that ... I went to GTMO ... We had
also met with Generals Dunlevy & Miller explaining our position (Law
Enforcement Techniques) vs. DoD [Department of Defense]. Both agreed the
Bureau has their way of doing business and DoD has their marching orders
from the SecDef [Secretary of Defense]. Although the two techniques [of
interrogation] differed drastically, both Generals believed they had a job
to accomplish."

     The e-mail goes on to recall how, during the questioning of one
prisoner, the Pentagon interrogators wanted to "pursue expeditiously their
methods" to "get more out of him ... We were given a so-called deadline to
use our traditional methods."

     Scott Horton, a New York lawyer and president of the International
League for Human Rights, has spent months investigating the role Bush
administration officials played in the torture scandal. He says there is
mounting evidence - including the May 10 FBI e-mail - that strongly suggests
that Rumsfeld and his top intelligence aides were directly responsible for
the wholesale abandonment of legal and ethical norms as well as
international treaty obligations. Now that Republican senators and
neoconservative ideologues are publicly turning their backs on the defense
secretary, perhaps even he may someday be held accountable for this
disgraceful stain on the honor of the U.S. armed forces.

  

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