INDEPTH: IRAQ
The Road to Abu Ghraib
David Halton,
From The National,
May 13, 2004
The stories were out there. Prisoners were being abused in Iraq. But for many onlookers, the scandal only took shape when the first pictures turned up. When that happened, American officials tried to contain the damage. It was just a few rogue soldiers, they said, just one prison. But was there more to it? Some say yes, much more, that the seeds of this scandal were sown not even in Iraq, but in Afghanistan.
A detainee waits to see a delegation of official visitors at the Abu Ghraib Prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq, May 11, 2004. She later said that half a dozen members of the Iraqi Governing Council and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, visited her and the other four women in the camp, pledging that they are working to release them very soon. (AP Photo)
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It was just over 2� years ago, the bombs were still falling in Afghanistan. And battles still raging. Already U.S. Afghan allies were rounding up prisoners: Taliban fighters, suspected al-Qaeda militants, and a few people they just wanted to get rid of. Hundreds of the captives were turned over to U.S. troops. Because most of them were captured on the battlefield, they qualified as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, in theory, guaranteeing them protection from mental and physical abuse.
Within weeks, though, a dramatic new order came in from the Pentagon: these are terrorists. The old rules no longer apply.
"They will be handled not as prisoners of war because they're not, but as unlawful combatants. As I understand it technically, unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention," Donald Rumsfeld said at the time.
Rumsfeld's message was delivered at the Pentagon, and it sent a powerful signal to the U.S. military that, in the age of terror, international law is not always relevant, and that previous regulations on the detention and interrogation of foreign prisoners needn't be observed.
Critics say the road that led to Abu Ghraib began with signals like that. Retired colonel Tom Laney was a U.S. battalion commander in the Gulf War in 1991.
"It starts to create a culture of coercion that begins to permeate not just the military, but the government," Laney says. "So people who think they're doing the right thing begin to do the wrong thing. And, as a result, efforts to extract intelligence become more important than the strategic objectives for which we are fighting, and that creates a problem."
Soon there were fleeting glimpses of what happens to prisoners who have lost their rights. Hooded, manacled figures are seen on their way to a place that would become the symbol of a tough new U.S. policy: Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Some 600 prisoners are sequestered on the U.S. naval base in legal limbo.
American soldiers stand behind a pyramid of naked Iraqi prisoners in this undated photo. (AP Photo/Courtesy of The New Yorker)
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David Cole is a law professor at Georgetown University. "You look most conspicuously at the situation at Guantanamo where we claim that we can pick up any person in the world, claim that he's a bad guy, and then lock them up there forever without any kind of a hearing, without any charges, without any trial, without any access to the outside world, and then when we're challenged on that, we say one of the reasons we want to do that is so that we can break these people," Cole says.
Few outsiders know much about what breaking prisoners involved at Gitmo, as the base is called. But U.S. officers have confirmed that so-called "stress and duress" techniques are used to extract information from prisoners. That could mean sleep deprivation, stripping prisoners naked, hooding them, and forcing them into uncomfortable or painful positions for long periods.
According to human rights groups, U.S. soldiers at Gitmo were violating international conventions that banned not only torture but also anything judged to be "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment."
There have been at least 32 suicide attempts at Gitmo, but Donald Rumsfeld dismissed any criticism that abuse was involved.
"Oh, come on now. The International Committee of the Red Cross is crawling down around there. People from all those countries. There's no issue about how these people are being treated. They're being treated very, very well by the fine young men and women who went to the high schools that you went to, and any implication to the contrary would be false," he says.
The person in charge of those "fine young men and women" was Maj.-Gen. Geoffrey Miller. Last August, Miller was sent to Baghdad with orders, in the words of one senior officer, to "Gitmo-ize" Iraq. Insurgent attacks are becoming more frequent and deadly, and the pressure is on to get better intelligence from prisoners. At Abu Ghraib and other prisons, Miller extends the same stress and duress techniques used at Guantanamo. Military police are ordered to soften up prisoners before army intelligence interrogates them.
Unlike the prisoners at Guantanamo, though, Iraqi captives are protected by the Geneva Conventions, in theory at least. In practice, according to human rights groups, those protections were widely ignored. Alexandra Ariaga says her organization, Amnesty International, found evidence of these violations.
"Severe sleep deprivation, sometimes withholding of food or medicine that was life threatening, hoodings, of which we've seen photographs now, that were used to intimidate and to manipulate mentally the prisoners, and then beatings, severe beatings, handcuffs very tightly held and forcing people to stay in very uncomfortable positions for long periods of time," Ariaga says. "Beatings and the handcuffs and the uncomfortable positions were severe enough to leave marks on people's bodies, even a month after they'd been released."
According to Amnesty and the International Red Cross, many Iraqis are brutalized even before they're locked up in prisons. Critics say rough treatment is encouraged because the Bush administration paints the rebels as terrorists, no better than al-Qaeda. Arrests are often indiscriminate. The Red Cross says 70 to 90 per cent of those detained are not insurgents. Once inside, even the Pentagon concedes the captives were frequently handled by badly-trained guards who hadn't even been informed about the Geneva Conventions.
"What people who have studied the military, people who have studied prisons have found is that, without clear rules, those in authority are very likely to be tempted to abuse that authority," Cole says. "And when the message from above is not there are clear rules and you must be bound by them, but, rather, a do what you have to do to get information, then I think you set the conditions for this kind of abuse to occur�.It's essentially a signal that anything goes."
And so these ruinous pictures. In Washington, the Pentagon tells you that this is an aberration, the work of a few rogue soldiers. The psychosexual overtones at Abu Ghraib may indeed be an aberration. But even a report by the army's own Maj.-Gen. Antonio Taguba says abuse was systemic, its rot spreading deep into U.S. military prisons worldwide.
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller (AP Photo)
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Retired colonel Tom Laney says prosecutions need to reach high up the chain of command.
"If we're going to re-establish ourselves as a moral force, if we're going to hold ourselves above international law and hold ourselves separate from things like the International Criminal Court, then we have to be accountable to ourselves, and we have to re-establish accountability," Laney says. "That's what we need to do now is re-establish accountability. It can't be done by prosecuting sergeants and privates. When you've had a culture of coercion from the top, it's got to start at the top."
But will that happen? It's been widely noted that the officer who's just been ordered to clean up the prison system in Iraq is none other than Geoffrey Miller, the same major-general who Gitmo-ized the system in the first place.
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