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Gillian Findlay: HOW AND WHY DID POLICY MIGRATE TO A PLACE [IRAQ] WHERE GENEVA CONVENTIONS VERY CLEARLY WERE SAID WERE GOING TO APPLY?
Scott Horton: Well, if you look in the summer, you know that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the White House are both out there saying that we'll be taking care of our problems in Iraq very quickly. That all we're dealing with are a few Ba'ath party dead-enders. That's the whole problem. Matter of a few weeks and it'll all be gone.
But actually, things were getting worse and worse and worse and Rumsfeld was expecting to get intelligence that would show they're just a handful of Ba'ath party cells organized around senior officers from the Saddam regime. You get information about those cells, you break it and you'll come to an end of it. But he wasn't getting intelligence about these Ba'ath party cells and there was a briefing session, an INTEL briefing within the Pentagon, a number of very senior staffers present with Secretary of Defense and they were going over data that they had gathered, HUMINT, they call it, Human Intelligence – they gathered from Iraq, and it really wasn't, let's say it wasn't validating Rumsfeld's understanding of what the problem was.
And he was angry about this and I'm told he pounded his fist on the table and said, more or less these words. I want to gitmoize Iraq and I want it to happen now.
Gillian Findlay: WHAT DID THAT MEAN?
Scott Horton: Get [Major General Geoffrey] Miller out to Iraq and take care of it. And he issued this as an order. And almost immediately thereafter, there were discussions involving Jerry Boykin and Steven Cambone who is an undersecretary of Defense responsible for intelligence and arrangements were made very quickly to get Major General Miller out to Iraq.
Now what does gitmoize mean?…That was the process of introducing these highly coercive interrogation procedures to Guantanamo. And these are procedures that were developed consciously in circumvention of the Geneva Convention rules. Remember what they did is first of all, this detailed explanation of why Geneva doesn't apply and then they cast aside all the Geneva constraints. And then they developed a new palette of techniques. Okay? So, Major General Miller goes out to Iraq and he takes with him some of his interrogators.
Now I've looked at the list of interrogators and I know some of the individuals who've been associated with the most serious abuses in Guantanamo, have been the subject of internal criminal investigations. And they're the subject of a report by Lt. General Schmidt, went with Major General Miller on that trip, including some of the authors of the sexual humiliation techniques. They went with Major General Miller. He had his visits with the command authority in Baghdad and he was in Abu Ghraib and when he was in Abu Ghraib, he talked to the military intelligence leaders, Colonel Pappas, Lt-Colonel Jordan and he took these interrogators along with him, including the sexual humiliation expert along with him.
And what we see is that in a matter of weeks, things changed dramatically. And we see the introduction of the Guantanamo techniques in Abu Ghraib and not just there. People have focused on Abu Ghraib, but at Camp Cropper, at Volterna, at Camp Victory, other places around Iraq, we see the same procedures coming in…
Gillian Findlay: WHAT IS THE BEST EVIDENCE YOU HAVE, THAT YOU HAVE BEEN PARTY TO, THAT SHOWS THAT GENERAL MILLER'S VISIT TO ABU GHRAIB WAS INSTRUMENTAL IN SOME WAY?
Scott Horton: Well, talking to NCOs at Abu Graib, they all say there was a night and day shift before and after his visit. After his visit, their own officers were instructing them to begin to adopt a series of totally new techniques. And these new techniques are all things that we now know were practiced at Guantanamo. So clearly there is an implementation of these Guantanamo techniques. And moreover, these techniques are linked to the most abusive things we know about at Abu Ghraib, the things we associate with the photographs.
So, a great example of this is the celebrated Lynddie England photograph where she's holding a leash and there is a detainee who's stripped naked with a dog collar around him. And this is the thing that, one of the things, that [former Secretary of Defense] Schlesinger in his report later says is Animal House on the night shift. He's suggesting these are puerile fraternity house pranks, certainly nothing that the military would ever in any way have authorized. That's a lie. I mean we now know that that's a lie and we know that through the report that was issued by Lt. General Schmidt.
If you look at – we don't have the full text of Schmidt's reports. We have a slide and we have his presentation before a Congressional committee. And if you look through the slides, you'll see one of the panels talks about "dog tricks" and what are dog tricks? It's exactly what Lynddie England was doing. And in this slide, he describes it. He describes how it's used and he says: this is an accepted practice under Pride and Ego Down, which is one of the rubrics from the Secretary Rumsfeld approved list. So we know based on that that the Gitmo techniques were introduced, were coached and were used. And you know and anyone who says otherwise at this point is simply misleading.
Gillian Findlay: WHAT IS YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF HOW THAT PROCESS HAPPENED? HOW DID THE LYNDDIE ENGLANDS OF THE WORLD, THE SABRINA HARMONS, THE ARMAN CRUZs? HOW DID THEY LEARN WHAT MILLER BROUGHT?
Scott Horton: The way the military works – through the chain of command. So the order was given you know from Rumsfeld to Miller, from Miller to officers in the field in Abu Ghraib. I mean, we know he met with Colonel Pappas, we know he met with Lt. Colonel Jordan. You know Brigadier General Janis Karpinsky has testified about this. And we also know that paper orders were issued backing this up, paper orders that have subsequently disappeared, have not appeared as part of the record.
We know, for instance, that there
was an order that was posted at Guantanamo with a list of highly abusive,
clearly illegal techniques that were authorized and this included hooding
and use of military dogs and several other things. And this order bore
the signature of Donald Rumsfeld. And on the side, a notation that said:
be sure this happens – with two exclamation points in Rumsfeld's
own handwriting. That order has been described by a great number of soldiers
and officers and it's never been put forward. And you know it appears
there was a clean-up that was done to take that out. We also know when
Miller was on his way out, he had an exit interview with Lt. General Sanchez,
the commander in Iraq for all allied forces. And that within 24 hours of
that exit interview, Sanchez is issuing his first fragmentary orders, the
first of a series of three in which he's authorizing Guantanamo interrogation
techniques – interrogation techniques that the Department of the
Army in its own internal review says are potentially war crimes or things
that clearly could not have been done in Iraq because of the applicability
of the Geneva Convention.
So, the evidence, the documentary evidence – we don't need
the documentary evidence, but it's there. It's very compelling,
it's very clear. And frankly, I just have to express my amazement
that the administration has the audacity to suggest that what happened
didn't occur as a result of Rumsfeld's decisions when it's
completely obvious from all the objective evidence that it did.
Gillian Findlay: YOU'VE TALKED SEVERAL TIMES ABOUT A SANITATION PROCESS THAT YOU UNDERSTAND TOOK PLACE. WHAT WAS THAT? WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN AND HOW WIDE WAS IT?
Scott Horton: I just know the results. I mean because a number of people have described to me orders and documents that were issued that confirmed the use of these highly coercive techniques. And then it appears when investigators get there, the files are empty, there's nothing there.
Gillian Findlay: IS THERE EVIDENCE THAT PEOPLE ACTIVELY WENT IN AND PICKED STUFF UP? I MEAN DO YOU KNOW, DO YOU HAVE ANY PROOF THAT THERE WAS A SANITATION PROCESS?
Scott Horton: Well, you know in the law, we have a doctrine called res ipso locatur, which says: if you know the documents were there and then they're not there, you can infer from all the outside objective facts that an act occurred that caused them to disappear. And these are documents which were highly classified, sensitive documents subject to careful control. So the idea that they were lost or discarded by accident is something you can reject.
Gillian Findlay: CLEARLY THE ADMINISTRATION AND THE ARMY ITSELF HAS TRIED TO MINIMIZE THE IMPACT OF ALL OF THIS, TRIED TO MIMINIMIZE THE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION THAT HAS BEEN RELEASED PUBLICLY. THOSE SOLDIERS, FOR THE MOST PART, THE LOWER RUNG SOLDIERS, THE PLAYERS IN ALL OF THIS, TO WHAT EXTENT HAVE THEY BEEN INTIMIDATED BY THE ADMINISTRATION, BY THE ARMY, TO KEEP QUIET?
Scott Horton: Well, I'll just give you some examples of things that happened. When Major General Faye was working on his investigation – well, just by coincidence, I was in Germany and I was in Germany right in the area of V Corps at that time. And I had a number of connections with soldiers at V Corps and I paid some visits on them and discussed with them the investigation, you know how was Major General Faye pursuing his investigation?
And I heard the same story over and over again, which is: units of soldiers being brought together for a meeting with Faye or a senior person on his staff. And they will be told: if you observed any abuse of a detainee back at Abu Ghraib, or back when you were in Iraq, and you failed to report it then – you broke the rules and we'll bring you up on charges for it. Now, did any of you observe anything? Yeah, well what's the point of that? The point is to ensure that people keep quiet and that's what they did very aggressively.
Now we have a large number of soldiers who, for reasons of conscience principally, didn't want to keep quiet. They wanted to come forward and talk about it, about the whole thing. And one thing we can see consistently looking at the punishment that was meted out, particularly within V Corps, the Army and particularly the military intelligence units, is that those who contributed to public awareness of abuse were singled out for sanction very quickly.
Those who participated in abuse and kept quiet about it got promoted…There's one soldier who gave a couple of interviews to broadcast media and to print media in which he described a number of things which he didn't witness – he heard about from other soldiers. So he really had no direct basis for things. But he was given a written order not to speak to the press. And then when they ascertained that he'd given an interview violating that order, he was demoted and sanctioned. And he's not the only one that falls into that category. I mean there were other people who were subject to similar sanctions because it was believed that they were talking to the media.
Gillian Findlay: DO YOU BELIEVE THAT AT THE END OF THE DAY, THE ENTIRE TRUTH WILL EVENTUALLY COME OUT?
Scott Horton: Entire is an awful lot. But I think over time we're going to see a much more honest portrait of what happened – and in particularly the investigations we've had today, they tell us what the grunts did and what the people at the absolute bottom of the chain of command did. What we have not seen is the story of the top of the chain of command, what they did. That is going to be developed and when it's developed, we may very well see that it's right that there were a few rotten apples involved in this story. But, if there are, the rotten apples are at the top of the chain of command, not at the bottom.
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