The torture regime. Quoted in Emily Bazelon's Mother Jones article about detainee abuse in Afghanistan, former Army interrogator Chris Mackey talks about a technique called "monstering," a technique he thought of at the time, in early 2002, as being on the "absolute edge" of permissible interrogation practice:

His team realized that they often got their best information in the last half-hour of a 10-hour session, and they concluded that fatigue was their best available weapon. “We decided by committee that we couldn’t get away with sleep deprivation under the Geneva Convention,” Mackey says. “So we came up with this technique we called ‘monstering.’ We said that if you put one interrogator in with one prisoner and scrupulously gave them the same water and food and bathroom breaks, the interrogation could go on as long as the interrogator could stand it. Of course, we were hoping that the interrogator would be fully rested, whereas the prisoner would have just come off the battlefield.” ...

The Bush administration had decided at the beginning of the conflict that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the Afghan detainees. But Mackey’s commander never told him of that decision, and Mackey worried that he could be disciplined for breaking the rules. “As part of your training as an interrogator, it’s hardwired into your system that a violation of the Geneva Convention will bring swift justice down on you,” he says. At one point, Mackey remembers, a military police official at Bagram suggested that the interrogators use dogs to scare the detainees. “He was a reservist from Michigan, where there’s a big Arab population, and he said that Arabs are terrified of dogs,” Mackey says. “I remember sitting in a hot pizza oven of an office, arguing with everyone, trying to figure out how we could do this. But we couldn’t—not out of any love for the enemy. We just thought we would get into trouble.”

It's remarkable that Mackey was unaware during his stint of the administration's withdrawal of Geneva Convention protections from Afghan detainees. Carolyn Wood, whose 519th MI Battalion replaced Mackey's unit at Bagram Control Point, was evidently less in the dark:

Wood rewrote the interrogation policy set by Mackey’s group, adding to it nine techniques not approved by military doctrine or included in Army field manuals. Her expanded list included “the use of dogs, stress positions, sleep management, [and] sensory deprivation,” according to an internal Pentagon investigation known as the Fay-Jones report; the report noted that other techniques, such as “removal of clothing and the use of detainee’s phobias,” were also used at Bagram.

The pattern suggested here seems to have obtained subsequently, in amplified form, in Iraq: an early, haphazard security regime, one mostly (but inconsistently) respectful of Geneva Conventions restraints, is replaced over time by a regime operated at much higher pressure and with a much greater bias toward rationalizing abuse.

Like Guantanamo commandant Geoffrey Miller, whose mission to review intelligence collection in the Iraqi gulag prefaced the worst of the abuses there, Carolyn Wood and the abusive 519th MI were known quantities when they were dispatched to Abu Ghraib. Looking over my own posts on the detainee torture scandal from last summer, what strikes me strongest is how rapidly, and with what an extraordinary convergence of activity, the torture regime in Iraq seems to have been precipitated. Consider what is on the record as happening within a very short span of weeks in late summer - early fall of 2003:

• Sometime in the summer, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, from her post as second-in-command of the Army intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, is given command of American intelligence in Iraq. (During her tenure at Fort Huachuca, the school features a program called "Intel Support to Counter Terrorism," which offers "lessons learned from Guantanamo to our folks in Afghanistan and Iraq.")
• At the end of August, Miller is sent by Rumsfeld deputy Stephen Cambone from Guantanamo to consult on interrogation and detention procedures in Iraq.
• Pentagon officials direct Fast to bring the abusive methods of a top-secret Battlefield Interrogation Facility (BIF) at Baghdad airport, run by Delta forces, to Abu Ghraib and other facilities. The BIF may be one of the black-ops Special Access Programs recounted by Seymour Hersh last May in the New Yorker.
• Sometime in September, Gen. Fast brings Carolyn Wood and the 519th MI to Abu Ghraib to set up the prison's Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center.
• On Oct. 9, the JIDC issues a "memorandum for the record" allowing wide latitude for abusive and degrading interrogation techniques, including the use of military dogs to intimidate prisoners. The techniques are similar to those written by Wood for Bagram; they also echo Guantanamo practices. This seems to be the formal beginning of the ugliest period of torture at Abu Ghraib.

Does anything in this set of events suggest an undirected process, the work of a few rogue elements? Do these events suggest, in fact, anything other than a determined and coordinated effort from on high to create a systematically abusive detention regime in Iraq?

posted by michael  10:54:15 PM  
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Bagram to Abu Ghraib. Yesterday's front-pager by Douglas Jehl on the horrible beating deaths of two Afghan prisoners more than two years ago ("Army Details Scale of Abuse of Prisoners in an Afghan Jail") has been receiving some passionate comment since it appeared:

Two Afghan prisoners who died in American custody in Afghanistan in December 2002 were chained to the ceiling, kicked and beaten by American soldiers in sustained assaults that caused their deaths, according to Army criminal investigative reports that have not yet been made public.

One soldier, Pfc. Willie V. Brand, was charged with manslaughter in a closed hearing last month in Texas in connection with one of the deaths, another Army document shows. Private Brand, who acknowledged striking a detainee named Dilawar 37 times, was accused of having maimed and killed him over a five-day period by "destroying his leg muscle tissue with repeated unlawful knee strikes."

The attacks on Mr. Dilawar were so severe that "even if he had survived, both legs would have had to be amputated," the Army report said, citing a medical examiner.

The reports, obtained by Human Rights Watch, provide the first official account of events that led to the deaths of the detainees, Mullah Habibullah and Mr. Dilawar, at the Bagram Control Point, about 40 miles north of Kabul. The deaths took place nearly a year before the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Among those implicated in the killings at Bagram were members of Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, from Fort Bragg, N.C. The battalion went on to Iraq, where some members established the interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib and have been implicated in some abuses there.

Despite the heavy breathing about "reports that have not yet been made public" and "first official accounts," this is the Times playing catchup, and not very vigorously at that. Everything in this report, except for a few minor details, has been previously and even copiously reported, as Jeralyn at TalkLeft reminds us. One has the distinct impression that the HRW document release is being used by the Times as cover (perhaps feeling that the media/political winds have shifted a bit?), allowing it to ease its way back into a story it briefly handled, then abjectly dropped, last summer.

Typically, the crucial information, the information that points to the planned, systematic nature of the abuse, gets buried after the jump, and Jehl merely waves at it in passing:

Among those mentioned in the new reports is Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, the chief military intelligence officer at Bagram. The reports conclude that Captain Wood lied to investigators by saying that shackling prisoners in standing positions was intended to protect interrogators from harm. In fact, the report says, the technique was used to inflict pain and sleep deprivation. ...

Captain Wood, who commanded Company A in Afghanistan, later helped to establish the interrogation and debriefing center at Abu Ghraib. Two Defense Department reports have said that a list of interrogation procedures she drew up there, which went beyond those approved by Army commanders, may have contributed to abuses at Abu Ghraib.

That's all Jehl can give us on the genuinely significant subject raised by this report, which is the preparation of torture tactics in Afghanistan prior to their importation to Iraq. (In a stunning display of credulity—or what would be a stunning display of credulity, if we weren't dealing with the New York Times—Jehl pre-emptively absolves the chain of command of responsibility for Wood's interrogation procedures, relying on DoD reports to do so as if they were neutral statements of fact.) If you want to read somebody really getting the Afghan abuse story, and working to find the thread that Jehl so clumsily fails to pick up here, read Emily Bazelon in the March/April issue of Mother Jones, "From Bagram to Abu Ghraib."

In August 2002, ... the detention unit in Bagram [was turned over] to the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The new head of the interrogation unit was Captain Carolyn Wood, a 34-year-old officer and 10-year Army veteran. Wood rewrote the interrogation policy set by Mackey’s group, adding to it nine techniques not approved by military doctrine or included in Army field manuals. Her expanded list included “the use of dogs, stress positions, sleep management, [and] sensory deprivation,” according to an internal Pentagon investigation known as the Fay-Jones report; the report noted that other techniques, such as “removal of clothing and the use of detainee’s phobias,” were also used at Bagram. ...

By the summer of 2003, it was the 519th’s turn to leave Bagram. Despite [Times reporter Carlotta] Gall’s report [on detainee deaths] and the ongoing criminal investigation, they were redeployed to run another prison—Abu Ghraib. There, Wood proceeded to implement new interrogation rules that, as a Pentagon report later noted, were “remarkably similar” to those she had developed at Bagram. ...Chris Mackey [a reserve MI officer at Bagram prior to the 519 deployment] had trained with Wood before she got her command at Bagram. He says that while he was “gravely disappointed” when he found out about her changes to the interrogation rules, he understands what might have been going on. “After she took over, the stakes got very high,” he says. “We went from losing three or four soldiers a month to scores of them. She must have been under a tremendous amount of pressure.”

Mackey also says he couldn’t imagine that Wood’s superiors didn’t know what she was doing. “I don’t think it was sinister and programmatic,” Mackey says of the military’s handling of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq. “But there was horrible incompetence at the leadership and oversight level. People were aware of what we were doing because we were open. [The prison] was practically a Disney ride, with lots of higher-ups and officials coming through. But the common response we got was, Aren’t you kind of babying them?”

[Chris Mackey, actually a pseudonym for the Army interrogator who wrote The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War against Al Qaeda, seems like a very significant informant.] Under these circumstances it makes no sense whatever to regard Wood, as Jehl is evidently satisfied to do, as a rogue officer. At the very least, the dispatch of the 519th MI to Abu Ghraib following its documented participation in atrocities at Bagram was an act of criminal negligence on the part of the higher command. At most—well, I'll talk about the "most" scenario in a follow-on.

posted by michael  12:37:09 PM  
tell me about it []