Torture and bureaucratic imperative, part 2. [A follow-on, more or less, to the preceding post.] My eyes kind of lit up on Sunday at this report from Douglas Jehl and Andrea Elliott:

Interrogation experts from the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were sent to Iraq last fall and played a major role in training American military intelligence teams at Abu Ghraib prison there, senior military officials said Friday.

The teams from Guantánamo Bay, which had operated there under directives allowing broad latitude in questioning "enemy combatants," played a central role at Abu Ghraib through December, the officials said, a time when the worst abuses of prisoners were taking place. ... The teams were sent to Iraq for 90-day tours at the urging of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the head of detention operations at Guantánamo. ...

Confirming an account from military intelligence soldiers who served in Iraq, a senior military official in Iraq said Friday that five interrogation teams, or about 15 interrogators, analysts and other specialists, were sent in October from Guantánamo Bay to the American command in Iraq "for use in the interrogation effort" at Abu Ghraib. ... According to a military officer on the Miller delegation to Iraq, interrogation teams from Guantánamo took part in interrogations at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq. The interrogators demonstrated the "tiger team" concept that was developed at Guantánamo, integrating interrogators with an intelligence analyst and an interpreter to focus on particular groups of detainees and pieces of information being sought.

"Cuba Base Sent Its Interrogators to Iraqi Prison"

What do you want to bet that those Gitmo teams were sent to Iraq equipped with nicely formatted PowerPoint presentations?

The Jehl/Elliott article is interesting to me because it fills in my developing picture of Gen. Geoffrey "Gitmo" Miller. [You can start here to see Miller, via Dexter Filkins, offering a self-satisfied account of his Tiger Teams in more innocent days, at the start of his pick-up-the-pieces tenure as Abu Ghraib commandant. Bottom of the post.] Gen. Miller seems to be the Pentagon's very own torture bureaucrat: a careerist whose stars came into alignment when Donald Rumsfeld (with his henchman Stephen Cambone) decided that the mission to reinvent the military for a new era of warfare meant getting rid of an antiquated attachment to the rights of prisoners. (So Old Europe, that.) Miller went down to Gitmo, spreadsheets blazing, and he made torture systematic, rational: in the place vacated by law (with its prohibitions) he established something better, a psuedo-legal matrix of permissions.

Even before General Miller's arrival at Guantánamo, the military lawyer who had taken over as the staff judge advocate there, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, sought formal clarification of what were acceptable interrogation methods, Pentagon officials said. That request prompted a broad legal review of interrogation techniques by a working group of Pentagon lawyers.

When the review was completed in February 2003, it included a spreadsheet with 24 approved techniques, officials who viewed it said. For each method, the matrix indicated whether it posed problems under various United States and international laws, and at what level of the military bureaucracy it needed to be approved. The following month, a brief document spelling out specific guidelines for approved interrogation techniques was sent to Guantánamo.

Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt, NYT (May 13, 2004), "General Took Guantánamo Rules to Iraq for Handling of Prisoners"

[I'd love to know who was in charge of that "working group of Pentagon lawyers."] The signal advantage of the matrix approach, of course, is that it offers a structure for producing the sort of reportable, quantifiable results on which bureaucratic advancement can depend. Miller didn't create the torture matrix, certainly, but it was central to his regime at Gitmo and he evangelized for it to commanders during his stint in Iraq as an interrogation consultant.

And now we have Miller promoting his other torture innovation, the Tiger Team, even after having completed his summer tour of the Iraq gulag. It smacks of entrepreneurship: Miller recognizing a need, and seeing in it an opportunity to advance his system and his career. Whatever the reasons that Cambone deputed Miller to Iraq last August, it's hard not to think that Miller saw it as a vote of confidence, and as a warrant for his hopes: he was on the side of history, as mapped out by Rummy and Cambone, and before long history was likely to be dropping a nice promotion in his path. Why not seize the day?

From this angle, the idea of "Gitmo"-izing Abu Ghraib starts to look more like Gitmo®-izing. Independent of a desire to produce actionable intelligence, is there another agenda at work: the desire, on the part of Miller and (more important) his Pentagon sponsors, to go from strength to strength, to extend the Gitmo model and demonstrate its global utility? And the prison having been Gitmo®-ized, how much of the pressure put on the poor suckers working there would have derived from bureaucratic urgency? Because the System was in place, the System was proven, and so results would have to follow, and woe to them that failed to produce.

posted by michael  4:59:50 PM  
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Torture and bureaucratic imperative. I can't say that this surprises me much.

Last fall, military-intelligence interrogators at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison found themselves in a bind.

With attacks on both civilians and American troops occurring almost daily, and demands building from Washington to round up insurgents, soldiers at Abu Ghraib were under enormous pressure to produce information that could be used on the battlefield. But their sources were dubious: a collection of Iraqi prisoners who didn't seem to have much information and who frequently arrived in huge numbers without documentation showing why they had been detained or even who they were. ...

For many of the interrogators, the unrelenting pressure to ramp up the number of interrogations and intelligence reports brought a sense of futility. "The whole ball game over there is numbers," said Sgt. First Class Roger Brokaw, one of the senior interrogators at Abu Ghraib. "How many raids did you do last week? How many prisoners were arrested? How many interrogations were conducted? How many [intelligence] reports were written? It was incredibly frustrating." Sgt. Brokaw, a 59-year-old reservist, left Iraq in January and now works as a security guard in Minneapolis, Minn. "We all knew the system was broken," he said.

Interviews with more than 20 interrogators and analysts at the prison -- most of whom haven't spoken out before -- suggest the problems at the now notorious Abu Ghraib prison were more complex than suggested by the widely distributed images of abuse. ... The interviews show an intelligence system ill-equipped to battle a largely faceless insurgency. Interrogators and analysts at Abu Ghraib, some of whom say they had little experience interrogating prisoners, knew little about the enemy they were fighting. And they were working within a military-intelligence system that was never designed to incarcerate and interrogate thousands of prisoners for months on end.

Problems were exacerbated by a corrosive relationship between soldiers and some of their superiors, who pressed interrogators to meet quotas on the number of interviews and reports they generated. The soldiers also faced unclear rules of interrogation that often seemed improvised on the fly.

Christopher Cooper and Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal (June 1, 2004), "Under Fire: At Abu Ghraib, Soldiers Faced Pressure to Produce Intelligence"

[Sorry, no link—WSJ online is subscription only.] Much of the article focuses on the role of Col. Thomas Pappas, chief military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib. Pappas seems to have played an ambiguous role: brought on to tighten a set of ad hoc, improvised interrogation procedures, he also tightened the screws on his often untrained interrogators, with disastrous results.

Col. Pappas and his team were responsible for gleaning as much information as possible about the insurgency's leaders, supply routes and structure, often from detained Iraqis. But many of them were trained to analyze data about opposing armies on an organized battlefield. ...

Col. Pappas constantly sought ways to speed up the assembly line, even instituting a quota system in late November for the five interrogation teams, said several interrogators. Depending on the workload, interrogation teams were required to conduct as many as half a dozen interrogations and file a similar number of reports each day. "If an interrogation isn't going well you might cut it short after 30 minutes, but if it is going well you might want to go eight hours," said one interrogator. "We kept having to cut interrogations short so we could meet our numbers."

Col. Pappas also imposed the round-the-clock shifts. The 24-hour schedule created a perception among some interrogators that Col. Pappas wasn't concerned about their safety. Facing mortar attacks, which almost always took place between midnight and 4 a.m., several soldiers said they felt uncomfortable conducting interviews in canvas tents during those hours.

Why doesn't this surprise me? Partly because I see something like an iron law of bureaucracy at work here: a demand for results inevitably becomes interpreted, as it moves down through the layers, as a demand for quantity of result, in proportion as the demand is urgent and the source of the demand is insulated from the producers. (Add to which the fact that bureaucracies are biased toward the measurable to begin with: quantity is always easier to demonstrate to your superiors than quality.)

More immediately, I'm not surprised because Douglas Jehl's reporting in the Times last week was already leading in this direction. An article on Friday, written by Jehl and Kate Zernike ("Greater Urgency on Prison Interrogation Led to Use of Untrained Workers"), suggested a system being stressed not just from below, by an influx of (often randomly detained) prisoners, but by pressure from above for more intelligence product, faster. In fact, today's WSJ report seems incomplete without this context: it's no accident that interrogators at Abu Ghraib were ill-equipped for their jobs, they were poorly trained because they were rushed into place to meet a demand:

The interrogation effort at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq took on such urgency last fall that untrained personnel were pressed into service as analysts and even interrogators, according to accounts spelled out in documents and interviews.

The pace accelerated last December, after the capture of Saddam Hussein, which led to a near-doubling of the number of two-person "Tiger Teams" assigned to an interrogation center at the prison ... The accounts depict a high-pressure environment at the prison, particularly within the interrogation center, where military intelligence personnel exerted substantial influence over a cellblock where most of the notorious abuses at Abu Ghraib apparently took place. In interviews, some soldiers who served in military intelligence units at the prison said the sense of urgency contributed to the loosened standards and the abuses that followed.

"By early January, the number of interrogation teams at the center had gone from about 16 to 30, all to help run down leads about the opposition," said a senior Army officer who served in Iraq. These Tiger Teams consisted of an interrogator and an intelligence analyst, who would usually be accompanied by a translator during interrogations. ... All fall, said Sergeant [Samuel] Provance [of the 302nd MI Battalion], "Personnel just started coming faster and faster, there was more and more stuff, more expansion, and it just never slowed down."

Most of the intelligence officers who worked in the interrogation center said they had been assigned to their posts in October or November, the period when the worst abuses are believed to have taken place, according to the documents and interviews.

"We all came there because they were short-handed," said the intelligence analyst, who asked that he not be identified. "None of us did the jobs we were trained for."

The question becomes: What's the source and character of the demand that the interrogation system at Abu Ghraib was rigged up to meet? Since this post is getting long, with all the quoting, and there's another report I want to fit in here to add to the picture, consider this part 1. I'll post part 2 in a bit.

posted by michael  10:18:32 AM  
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