December 19, 2004
HOW DUBIOUS EVIDENCE SPURRED RELENTLESS GUANTANAMO SPY HUNT
By Tim Golden

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/politics/19gitmo.html

Capt. Theodore C. Polet Sr., an Army counterintelligence officer at the
detention camp for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had just begun
investigating a report of suspicious behavior by a Muslim chaplain at the prison
last year when he received what he thought was alarming new information.

The F.B.I. had found that a car belonging to the chaplain, Capt. James J. Yee,
had been spotted twice outside the home of a Muslim activist in the Seattle area
who, years earlier, had been a host for a visit from Omar Abdel Rahman, the
militant Egyptian cleric convicted in a 1993 plot to blow up various New York
landmarks.

Although it was unclear what the activist had done or whether Captain Yee even
knew him, Captain Polet took the report to the Guantanamo commander, Maj. Gen.
Geoffrey D. Miller, and laid it out in stark terms.

"I said we had found something that connected Yee with a known terrorist
supporter in Washington State, and at that point, he got very upset," Captain
Polet said, noting that General Miller's ears turned red with anger. "This
became far more serious than a basic security violation. The case was going to
get bigger."

In fact, documents and interviews show that the case grew much bigger than has
been publicly disclosed, spinning into a web of counterintelligence
investigations that eventually involved more than a dozen suspects, a handful of
military and civilian agencies and numerous agents in the United States and
overseas.

Within less than a year, however, the investigations into espionage and aiding
the enemy grew into a major source of embarrassment for the Pentagon, as the
prosecutions of Captain Yee and another Muslim serviceman at the base, Airman
Ahmad I. Al Halabi, unraveled dramatically.

Even now, Defense Department officials refuse to explain in detail how the
investigations originated and what drove them forward in the face of questions
about much of the evidence. Military officials involved in the case have
defended their actions, emphasizing that some of the inquiries continue.

But confidential government documents, court files and interviews show that the
investigations drew significantly on questionable evidence and disparate bits of
information that, like the car report, linked Captain Yee tenuously to people
suspected of being Muslim militants in the United States and abroad.

Officials familiar with the inquiries said they also fed on petty personal
conflicts: antipathy between some Muslim and non-Muslim troops at Guantanamo,
rivalries between Christian and Muslim translators, even the complaint of an old
boss who saw Airman Al Halabi as a shirker.

The military's aggressive approach to the investigation was established at the
outset by General Miller, the hard-charging Guantanamo commander. Along the way,
some investigators and prosecutors suggested that the job of ferreting out spies
at the base had put them, too, on the front lines of the fight against
terrorism.

Perhaps the most aggressive was the lead Air Force investigator in the case of
Airman Al Halabi, Lance R. Wega, a probationary agent who took over the inquiry
after barely a month on the job. While he was later commended by superiors and
rewarded with a $1,986 bonus, testimony showed that Agent Wega had mishandled
important evidence.

Ultimately, Air Force prosecutors could not substantiate a vast majority of the
charges they brought against Airman Al Halabi, a translator at Guantanamo, who
had faced the death penalty. He pleaded guilty in September to four relatively
minor charges of mishandling classified documents, taking two forbidden
photographs of a guard tower and lying to investigators about the snapshots. He
was sentenced to the 10 months imprisonment he had already served, and is
appealing a bad-conduct discharge.

Captain Yee, 36, a West Point graduate from Springfield, N.J., was held for 76
days in solitary confinement, charged with six criminal counts of mishandling
classified information and suspected of leading a ring of subversive Muslim
servicemen. He was found guilty only of noncriminal charges of adultery and
downloading Internet pornography. That conviction was set aside in April, and
his punishment was waived.

Another Guantanamo interpreter, and sometime interrogator, Ahmed F. Mehalba, has
been jailed since September 2003 on federal charges that he lied to
investigators who found that at least two classified documents on a compact disc
he had taken with him on a trip to visit relatives in Egypt. He has pleaded not
guilty.

Coloring much of the episode, interviews and documents indicate, were simmering
tensions over the military's treatment of the roughly 660 foreign men who were
then held at Guantanamo without charge.

"Lots of the guards saw us as some sort of sympathizers with the detainees,"
Airman Al Halabi recalled in one of several interviews. "We heard it many times:
'detainee-lovers,' or 'sympathizers.' They called us 'sand niggers.' "

Airman Al Halabi, who came to the United States at 16 after growing up in
poverty in his native Syria, has emphasized his loyalty as a naturalized
American citizen. While insisting that he was careful not to share his views
with anyone but close friends at Guantanamo, he said he was one of many
servicemen and translators there who were uncomfortable with the way the
detainees were treated.

"I did disagree with what was going on," he said. "These people had been there
forever and were blocked from the legal system. This country stands for justice
and human rights, and there we were at Guantanamo doing none of that."

Chaplains Under Scrutiny

The conflicts between Muslim and non-Muslim servicemen and the suspicions of
improper relationships with the detainees by Muslim chaplains had taken root at
Guantanamo well before Captain Yee arrived there in November 2002, officials
said.

"Every one of the chaplains was accused of something while I was there," said
Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus, a former military police commander at the base,
dismissing the suspicions as unfounded.

"They were always under suspicion by the interrogators, because they were
interacting with the detainees and giving them Korans," General Baccus said in
an interview. "The M.P.'s suspected them all the time, too. They just didn't
like the chaplains going around talking to the detainees."

One chaplain who served under General Baccus, Lt. Abuhena Saiful Islam of the
Navy, was accused by interrogators of sending messages from several detainees
back to their families overseas. The allegations prompted a formal investigation
by the Naval Criminal Intelligence Service.

According to three officials familiar with the inquiry, it turned up no evidence
of any wrongdoing by the chaplain. Rather, they said, the case reflected the
depth of suspicion among the guards and the need for a clearer understanding of
the chaplains' role in dealing with the detainees. (A spokeswoman for the
Norfolk Naval Station, where Lieutenant Saiful Islam is now based, said the
chaplain had no comment.)

General Miller, who assumed command on Nov. 4, 2002, placed a premium on
clarifying the responsibilities of those serving beneath him.

Captain Yee, a Muslim convert who had studied Islam in Syria in the late 1990's,
arrived a short time later. He was assigned to advise senior officers on
religious questions regarding the detainees, provide detainees with Korans and
prayer beads and oversee the distribution of reading materials as part of an
effort to limit the radicalization of the prisoners. Officers said Captain Yee
was shunned as a traitor by some of the detainees, but cultivated relationships
with others in what he described as an attempt to reduce tensions.

Soon, however, the chaplain's presence became a source of discomfort for some of
his colleagues, most notably Capt. Jason B. Orlich, a 33-year-old former
schoolteacher who had taken over as the intelligence officer for the guard force
at Camp Delta, the main Guantanamo detention center.

In one of several sworn statements of his filed in the Al Halabi investigation,
Captain Orlich complained that Muslim soldiers and contract linguists would come
into the building where he worked each day to pray, often loudly, "while non-
Muslims were performing their duties."

"They were fervent in their beliefs and encouraged other Muslims to participate
in their religious activities," he said in another statement, referring to
Captain Yee, Airman Al Halabi and two of their friends, Capt. Tariq O. Hashim
and Petty Officer Samir Hejab. "A lot of their religious beliefs mirrored those
of the detainees."

The tensions reached a climax in late March or early April 2003, several
officers said, after Captain Yee questioned assertions made by Captain Orlich
during a briefing for interrogators and others about the behavior of the Camp
Delta prisoners.

According to one investigator involved in the case, Captain Orlich filed a sworn
statement to the counterintelligence group on what he considered the chaplain's
improper participation at the briefing. Based on Captain Orlich's complaint,
officers said, Captain Yee was barred from attending further intelligence
briefings. The half-dozen officers of the counterintelligence group also began
to more closely scrutinize the chaplain's activities and take note of the
grumbling against him.

"I was very methodical in making sure this was not just a personality conflict,"
Captain Polet said in an interview. "From a counterintelligence standpoint,
there was nothing to act on. But we made a conscious decision to monitor it."

According to investigators and prosecutors, some of the primary accusations
against Captain Yee echoed those that had been made earlier against Lieutenant
Saiful Islam: that he spent an inordinate amount of time speaking with the
detainees, took frequent notes during those conversations and seemed to some
guards overly sympathetic with the prisoners' plight.

There was also an argument - often made by Captain Orlich - that Captain Yee and
some members of his small Muslim prayer group at Guantanamo constituted a
suspicious fellowship of servicemen who appeared to sympathize with the
detainees and question some of the government's counterterrorism policies.

"There was a concern that there was, like, a clique of people who would go off
and spend time away from the unit and were not as supportive of the mission as
they ought to be," said the chief Air Force prosecutor in the Al Halabi case,
Lt. Col. Bryan T. Wheeler. "If people want to have a prayer group, that's great.
If, on the other hand, you have people complaining about the treatment people
are receiving, there are ways to do that. Subverting the mission is not the way
to do it."

Over the course of 2002, the handling of the Guantanamo detainees had been
criticized in briefings and memorandums by many of those who served there:
General Baccus, his counterpart for intelligence, Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey,
a chief of the C.I.A. field group on the base, the military's criminal
investigators, senior F.B.I. agents and others.

But according to many officers, General Miller ran a tighter operation. Morale
improved, they said, but with that came an atmosphere in which criticism of the
detainees' treatment was tacitly discouraged.

"People were definitely careful about expressing their opinions," said one
Guantanamo veteran who knew Captain Yee and Airman Al Halabi. "But a lot of us
felt some sympathy for some of the detainees. A lot of those guys were low-level
or no-level. They were not terrorists."

Developing a Case

The case against Captain Yee turned, several officers said, after Captain Orlich
returned to the counterintelligence office at the base in April 2003 with one of
the contract Arabic interpreters who had what several people described as a
frosty relationship with Captain Yee and his friends.

The officers said the interpreter reported overhearing the chaplain speaking in
Arabic to a detainee at the base hospital, mocking a psychological-operations
posters intended to encourage the detainees' cooperation with interrogators.

This time, the counterintelligence unit responded more quickly, filing a basic
report of suspected espionage or subversion to the 470th Military Intelligence
Group in Puerto Rico.

The intelligence officials in Puerto Rico responded in early May, two officers
said, dismissing the allegation and instructing the Guantanamo office to drop
the matter. But Captain Polet, then the head of Guantanamo's counterintelligence
unit, remained concerned. He rewrote what was basically the same report,
officials said, and forwarded it to a higher-level authority, the Army Central
Control Office.

While Captain Polet's unit awaited a response, one of its agents sent the Social
Security numbers for Captains Yee and Hashim, Airman Al Halabi and Petty Officer
Hejab to a friend at the F.B.I., two military officers said. The friend called
back to report that a computer search turned up the report of the chaplain's car
having been observed at the home of the activist in the Seattle area - once
while Captain Yee was at Guantanamo, and once while he was believed to be
stationed at Fort Lewis, just south of Tacoma.

By the time the Army control office authorized a preliminary investigation,
General Miller had been briefed on the F.B.I. information and had ordered
Captain Polet to investigate thoroughly. "Exonerate this man or bring him to
justice," two officers quoted him as saying of Captain Yee. "Whatever support
you need to conduct this investigation, you will have." A spokesman said General
Miller would not comment.

In mid-June, General Miller was also briefed on the Al Halabi case by Agent
Wega, who had been sent to Guantanamo from Travis Air Force Base in northern
California to investigate.

As with Captain Yee, the initial conduit for accusations of wrongdoing was
Captain Orlich. He had discovered the disposable camera with which Airman Al
Halabi had photographed the guard tower, and he learned that Airman Al Halabi
had come under investigation at Travis for supposedly plugging his laptop into a
government network. Captain Orlich had also sent two subordinates to confiscate
a box of photocopied documents from the library where Airman Al Halabi worked
under Captain Yee, on the suspicion that the two men were distributing radical
literature to the detainees.

"Who's to say what it was," Second Lt. Victor Ray Wheeler, one of the people who
retrieved the documents, said in an interview. "But it could have been
reinforcing fanatical beliefs of the detainees."

The concerns about the documents later proved unfounded. But two searches of
Airman Al Halabi's Guantanamo dorm room by Agent Wega turned up some the letters
from detainees that the airman routinely translated in his primary job as a
linguist. Agent Wega also surreptitiously copied the hard drive of Airman Al
Halabi's laptop, and later found a letter from the Syrian Embassy authorizing
him to enter the country.

For months, Airman Al Halabi had been telling co-workers he was preparing to
travel to Damascus to marry his Syrian fiancée, a family friend. But the
investigators suspected something more ominous.

When Agent Wega detained Airman Al Halabi as he returned from Guantanamo on July
23, 2003, he found computer files containing 186 detainee letters he had
translated - all of which, he said, Captain Orlich had told him were classified.
Rather than keep him at Travis while the investigation continued, Air Force
commanders ordered Airman Al Halabi's immediate arrest and Air Force prosecutors
got to work.

Airman Al Halabi soon faced 30 different charges, including attempted espionage,
aiding the enemy and bank fraud. But many of the accusations began to dissolve
almost as quickly.

The Prosecution Unravels

One charge of aiding the enemy was based on the second-hand claim that Airman Al
Halabi had boasted of distributing baklava pastries to the detainees. It was
soon determined, however, that he had been on a mission in Afghanistan when the
sweets arrived at Guantanamo by mail, and that they had been consumed by other
translators before he returned.

Another accusation, that he distributed radical literature to the detainees, was
based on an erroneous translation of an Islamic symbol in Ottoman-style
calligraphy. The bank-fraud charge collapsed after the government found that
bank and credit card companies had simply misspelled Airman Al Halabi's name on
some of his cards.

But defense lawyers also protested that the prosecutors withheld some crucial
evidence that undermined their case.

One of the prosecutors' most important assertions was that a computer analysis
showed that some detainee letters had been e-mailed from Airman Al Halabi's
laptop, possibly overseas. Months after that claim was quietly dropped, the
defense learned that early on, a computer expert had told the government that it
was not clear the documents had been e-mailed at all.

Airman Al Halabi's lawyers also made a charge of misconduct after a government
translator contacted them to say that one of the prosecutors, Capt. Dennis Kaw,
had discouraged her from alerting the court when she found a mistake in her
translation of the Syrian government's letter. Captain Kaw had insisted, rather
improbably, that the Syrian government had given Airman Al Halabi permission in
the letter to travel not only to Syria but also to Qatar; instead, the relevant
word meant "the homeland."

The translator, Staff Sgt. Suzan Sultan, also disclosed that Agent Wega and
other investigators had celebrated with beer as they examined a package that
Airman Al Halabi had sent home with the documents later used to convict him on
minor charges. The agents later taped up the box, put on gloves and photographed
their steps as they reopened it, she testified.

"This is not the way our system of justice is set up," said one of the defense
lawyers, Maj. James E. Key III. "You are supposed to investigate, and then
charge. The system is premised on the idea that men and women who serve should
not be subjected to these kinds of baseless allegations."

In the case of Captain Yee, Army investigators also operated on the mistaken
belief that the names and identity numbers of Guantanamo detainees, which were
found in notebooks that the chaplain carried with him when he went on leave,
were classified.

But their suspicions were also raised by information from the F.B.I. and other
sources that suggested possible connections between Captain Yee and Islamic
militants.

A Dec. 30, 2003, memo by the F.B.I. counterterrorism analysis section asserted
that the Abu Nour Institute in Syria, where Captain Yee had studied Islam, "may
be an international center of Islamic terrorism," according to a document
reviewed by The New York Times.

But the memorandum based that claim primarily on the activities of a few
unrelated persons and it noted that "the exact nature of terrorist activity or
training" at the center was "currently unclear." (Officials of the institute,
which is known for teaching a moderate brand of Sufi Islam and is affiliated
with the Syrian government, have denied that it supports terrorism.)

According to another F.B.I. document, a search of Captain Yee's home in Seattle
also turned up notations linking him to two men already in the bureau's sights:
the assistant imam of an Islamic center in Baltimore and another Baltimore man
Captain Yee knew who belonged to the Nation of Islam. Military investigators
said the F.B.I. also raised questions about some Muslims whom Captain Yee had
met in Germany around the time he converted to Islam in 1991.

One F.B.I. official familiar with the Yee and Al Halabi cases suggested that the
agency had merely assisted military investigators but had not endorsed their
approach. But two military investigators said that the F.B.I. played a far
greater role, and that information it provided had bolstered the notion that the
two servicemen might be involved in subversive activities.

A lawyer for Captain Yee, Eugene R. Fidell, had no comment on the F.B.I.
information. But he sharply criticized the prosecution of his client.

"What happened to Chaplain Yee was a grave miscarriage of justice," he said.
"The career and personal life of a loyal American officer has been turned inside
out, and he's not the only victim. This case has proven to be a self-inflicted
wound for the military justice system."

Captain Yee declined a request to be interviewed. He is to leave the military on
Jan. 7, with an honorable discharge.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

* * *


TORTURE'S PATH

The paper trail is long, and it isn't pretty. But it's sure to produce some
tough Senate questions for Alberto Gonzales.

By Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman and Michael Hirsh, Newsweek International

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6733558/site/newsweek/

Dec. 27 / Jan. 3 - The CIA had a question for the top lawyers in the Bush
administration: how far could the agency go in interrogating terror suspects --
in particular, Abu Zubaydah, the close-mouthed Qaeda lieutenant who was
resisting standard methods? So in July of 2002 the president's chief counsel,
Alberto Gonzales, convened his colleagues in his cozy, wood-paneled White House
office. One by one, the lawyers went over five or six pressure techniques
proposed by the CIA. One such technique, a participant recalls, was
"waterboarding" (making a suspect think he might drown). Another, mock burial,
was nixed as too harsh. A third, the open-handed slapping of suspects, drew much
discussion. The idea was "just to shock someone with the physical impact," one
lawyer explained, with "little chance of bone damage or tissue damage." Gonzales
and the lawyers also discussed in great detail how to legally justify such
methods.

Among those at that first White House meeting was Justice Department lawyer John
Yoo, who sat on a couch along the wall. And partly out of the discussions in
Gonzales's office came the most notorious legal document to emerge from last
spring's Abu Ghraib interrogation scandal. This was an Aug. 1, 2002, memo --
drafted by Yoo, signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and addressed to
Gonzales -- which provoked outrage among human-rights advocates by narrowly
defining torture. The memo concluded, among other things, that only severe pain
or permanent damage that was "specifically intended" constituted torture. Mere
"cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment did not qualify.

At the White House meeting, Gonzales was concerned about observing the law, the
participant recalls. "We didn't want to go over the line," he says. But
Gonzales's worry was: "Are we forward-leaning enough on this?" "That's a phrase
I heard Gonzales use many times," recalls this lawyer. "Lean forward" had become
a catchphrase for the administration's offensive approach to the war on terror.
"And the second part of that statement was always, 'Prevent an attack, save
lives.' If Gonzales had any role in this, it was to be the fair arbiter of 'Are
we doing enough?'"

Such aggressiveness after 9/11 was typical for Alberto Gonzales, the soft-spoken
Harvard Law graduate who has been George W. Bush's lawyer since the latter's
days in the Texas governor's mansion. Gonzales's legal and ethical advice will
be the focus of confirmation hearings next month on his nomination as Bush's
second-term attorney general. In the first months after 9/11, Gonzales helped to
craft some of the most momentous and controversial decisions of Bush's
presidency. Among them: to create military commissions for the trials of
terrorists, to designate U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants" and to disregard
the Geneva Conventions in the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. But
until now he has steered clear of the spotlight. "He's kind of an enigma," says
one lawyer who worked with him. "His defining characteristic is loyalty to the
president."

Yet memos reviewed by NEWSWEEK and interviews with key principals show that
Gonzales's advice to the president reflected the bold views laid out in the Aug.
1 memo and other documents. Sources close to the Senate Judiciary Committee say
a chief focus of the hearings will be Gonzales's role in the so-called "torture
memo," as well as his legal judgment in urging Bush to sidestep the Geneva
Conventions. In a Jan. 25, 2002, memo to Bush, Gonzales said the new war on
terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy
prisoners." Some State Department lawyers charge that Gonzales misrepresented so
many legal considerations and facts (including hard conclusions by State's
Southeast Asia bureau about the nature of the Taliban) that one lawyer considers
the memo to be "an ethical breach." In response, a senior White House official
says Gonzales's memo was only a "draft" and just one part of an extensive
decision-making process in which all views were aired.

By several accounts, Gonzales and his team were constantly looking to push legal
limits, to widen and maximize Bush's powers. Just two weeks after September 11,
an earlier secret memo drafted by Yoo had landed on Gonzales's desk, arguing
there were effectively "no limits" on Bush's powers to respond to the attacks.
Startlingly, the memo said the president could deploy military force "pre-
emptively" against terror groups or entire countries that harbored them,
"whether or not they can be linked to the specific terror incidents of Sept.
11." The president's decisions "are for him alone and are unreviewable," the
memo said. Never before disclosed, the Sept. 25, 2001, memo was quietly posted
on an obscure government Web site late last week. The 15-page memo is the
earliest known statement of Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war.

Last June, Gonzales indicated he no longer held some of the extreme views of the
president's "unlimited" powers first laid out in this memo. Amid the furor over
the Abu Ghraib Prison photos that depicted Iraqis being abused and humiliated by
U.S. soldiers, Gonzales insisted to reporters that the "torture" memo of Aug. 1
and other documents then making headlines were little more than "irrelevant"
legal theorizing. It is not surprising why Gonzales was distancing himself: the
Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility recently launched an
investigation into the origins of the Aug. 1 memo. The probe will look into
whether the lawyers were irresponsible in pushing beyond the normal boundaries
of advocacy. In a tense meeting last June, Jack Goldsmith, then head of the
Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, told Gonzales he was withdrawing
the Aug. 1 memo. Goldsmith then resigned -- at least partly due to his
discomfort about the memo. It was only then that Gonzales decided to distance
himself from it. (Goldsmith declined to comment.)

But there is no evidence that Gonzales ever rejected such reasoning before the
Abu Ghraib scandal came to light. On the contrary, sources say, he and his staff
relied heavily on John Yoo and his legal theories. Most observers still expect
Gonzales to be confirmed by the GOP-majority Senate. Yet it's clear he'll face
some tough questioning first.

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.



Washington Post --

December 17, 2004; Page A01

AT GUANTANAMO, A PRISON WITHIN A PRISON
CIA Has Run a Secret Facility for Some Al Qaeda Detainees, Officials Say

By Dana Priest and Scott Higham, Washington Post Staff Writers

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5918-2004Dec16

Within the heavily guarded perimeters of the Defense Department's much-discussed
Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, the CIA has maintained a detention facility for
valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public, according to
military officials and several current and former intelligence officers.

The buildings used by the CIA are shrouded by high fences covered with thick
green mesh plastic and ringed with floodlights, officials said. They sit within
the larger Camp Echo complex, which was erected to house the Defense
Department's high-value detainees and those awaiting military trials on
terrorism charges.

The facility has housed detainees from Pakistan, West Africa, Yemen and other
countries under the strictest secrecy, the sources said. "People are constantly
leaving and coming," said one U.S. official who visited the base in recent
months. It is unclear whether the facility is still in operation today. The CIA
and the Defense Department declined to comment.

Most international terrorism suspects in U.S. custody are held not by the CIA
but by the Defense Department at the Guantanamo Bay prison. They are guaranteed
access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and, as a result
of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this year, have the right to challenge their
imprisonment in federal courts.

CIA detainees, by contrast, are held under separate rules and far greater
secrecy. Under a presidential directive and authorities approved by
administration lawyers, the CIA is allowed to capture and hold certain classes
of suspects without accounting for them in any public way and without revealing
the rules for their treatment. The roster of CIA prisoners is not public, but
current and former U.S. intelligence officials say the agency holds the most
valuable al Qaeda leaders and many mid-level members with knowledge of the
group's logistics, financing and regional operations.

The CIA facility at the Guantanamo Bay prison was constructed over the past year
as the agency confronted one of its toughest emerging problems: where to hold
terrorists for interrogations that could last for years.

During the 1990s, the CIA typically had custody of half a dozen terrorists at
any time and usually kept them in foreign prisons, mostly in Egypt and Jordan.
But just two months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, CIA paramilitary teams
working with foreign intelligence services had arrested dozens of people thought
to have knowledge of upcoming attacks on the United States.

The CIA is believed to be holding about three dozen al Qaeda leaders in
undisclosed locations, U.S. national security officials say. Among them are
pivotal Sept. 11 plotters Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu
Zubaida and the leader of Southeast Asia's Islamic terrorist movement, Nurjaman
Riduan Isamuddin, who is also known as Hambali.

CIA detention facilities have been located on an off-limits corner of the Bagram
air base in Afghanistan, on ships at sea and on Britain's Diego Garcia island in
the Indian Ocean.

Maintaining facilities in foreign countries is difficult, however, said current
and former CIA officials. Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida were believed to have been
taken to Thailand immediately after capture. The Thai government eventually
insisted that they be transferred elsewhere.

"People are willing to help but not to hold," said one CIA veteran of
counterterrorism operations.

The U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay thus provided the CIA with an isolated venue
devoid of the sensitive international politics. But it came with strings
attached.

The U.S. military, which controls the base, required the agency to register all
detainees, abide by military detention standards and permit the ICRC some level
of access.

"If you're going to be in my back yard, you're going to have to abide by my
rules" is how one defense official explained it.

Army officials investigating the Abu Ghraib prison scandal concluded that the
CIA had held "ghost detainees" at the prison, inmates who were not registered or
officially acknowledged, a violation of military rules.

Asked about the arrangement with the CIA at Guantanamo Bay, Pentagon spokesman
Bryan Whitman said he could not comment on operations of other agencies. "As we
have stated since the beginning of detention operations at Guantanamo, the ICRC
has access to detainees at Guantanamo and is permitted to meet with them,
consistent with military necessity," Whitman said in a statement. Pentagon
policy "is that all [Defense] detainees, including those at Guantanamo, are
treated humanely, and in accordance with applicable law," the statement
continued.

One U.S. official knowledgeable about the arrangement with the ICRC considered
it a positive step forward. "There is no one in Gitmo who is not identified," he
said, using Guantanamo Bay's nickname.

Red Cross officials declined to say where they had been permitted to visit, or
whom. "We have been granted broad access to the camp," the ICRC said in a
prepared statement. "We are confident we have visited all of the people detained
at Guantanamo, in all of the places they are being detained."

The CIA has worked at Guantanamo Bay since the early days of the prison camps,
which opened in January 2002 when the first men captured in the Afghan war were
transferred to a collection of chain-link cages called Camp X-Ray. The CIA has
kept an office at the Navy base and takes part in interrogation sessions of
Defense Department detainees alongside FBI agents, military intelligence
officers and others in what are called Tiger Teams.

Many of the interrogations have been conducted inside trailers set up within the
perimeter of Camp Delta, a more permanent compound of steel cages that took the
place of Camp X-Ray by the end of 2003.

The facility used by the CIA is in Camp Echo, which also houses high-value
military detainees. The camp consists of more than a dozen single-story
concrete-block huts built away from the main prison complex. Each hut is divided
in half. Inside is a steel cage, a restroom, and a table for interviews and
interrogations, according to sources familiar with the facility.

The CIA's facility has been "off-limits to nearly everyone on the base," said
one military official familiar with operations at Guantanamo Bay.

One of the huts at Camp Echo has been occupied by a detainee named Mohamedou
Oulad Slahi, according to one source familiar with the new compound. Slahi, a
Mauritanian businessman, acted as the liaison between a group of Islamic
radicals living in Hamburg and al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to the
Sept. 11 commission.

According to statements given by the key plotter, Binalshibh, Slahi persuaded
the men to go to Afghanistan, rather than Chechnya, to fight.

He arranged their travel and for them to meet al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan,
who in turn arranged a meeting between Binalshibh and bin Laden.

Slahi was arrested by secret police in Mauritania during the night on Sept. 27,
2001, members of his family told local media at the time. By December, he was in
U.S. custody.

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company



December 16, 2004

EX-MILITARY LAWYERS OBJECT TO BUSH CABINET NOMINEE

By Neil A. Lewis

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/politics/16jag.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Several former high-ranking military lawyers say they are
discussing ways to oppose President Bush's nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to
be attorney general, asserting that Mr. Gonzales's supervision of legal
memorandums that appeared to sanction harsh treatment of detainees, even
torture, showed unsound legal judgment.

Hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination are expected to
begin next month. While Mr. Gonzales is expected to be confirmed, objections
from former generals and admirals would be a setback and an embarrassment for
him and the White House.

Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy's judge advocate general from
1997 to 2000 before he retired, said that while Mr. Gonzales might be a lawyer
of some stature, "I think the role that he played in the one thing that I am
familiar with is tremendously shortsighted."

Mr. Gonzales, as White House counsel, oversaw the drafting of several
confidential legal memorandums that critics said sanctioned the torture of
terrorism suspects in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and opened the door
to abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

A memorandum prepared under Mr. Gonzales's supervision by a legal task force
concluded that Mr. Bush was not bound either by an international treaty
prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority
as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation.

The memorandum also said that executive branch officials, including those in the
military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against
torture for a variety of reasons, including a belief by interrogators that they
were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to
be patently unlawful." Another memorandum said the Geneva Conventions did not
apply to the conflict in Afghanistan.

Mr. Hutson, who is dean and president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in
Concord, N.H., said that Mr. Gonzales "was not thinking about the impact of his
behavior on U.S. troops in this war and others to come."

"He was not thinking about the United States' history in abiding by
international law, especially in the wartime context," he said. "For that
reason, some of us think he is a poor choice to be attorney general."

Mr. Hutson said talks with other retired senior military officials had not yet
produced a decision on how to oppose the selection, though testifying at the
hearings was a possibility. He said that while several opposed the nomination,
some were unsure if opposition would be "worth the effort" because of little
expectation the nomination could be derailed.

Brig. Gen. James Cullen, retired from the Army, said on Wednesday that he
believed that in supervising the memorandums, Mr. Gonzales had purposely ignored
the advice of lawyers whose views did not accord with the conclusions he sought,
which was that there was some legal justification for illegal behavior.

"He went forum-shopping," General Cullen said, saying Mr. Gonzales had ignored
the advice of military lawyers adamantly opposed to some of the legal strategies
adopted, including narrowly defining torture so as to make it difficult to prove
it occurred. "When you create these kinds of policies that can eventually be
used against your own soldiers, when we say 'only follow the Geneva Conventions
as much as it suits us,' when we take steps that the common man would understand
is torture, this undermines what we are supposed to be, and many of us find it
appalling," he said.

General Cullen, a lawyer in New York City, said the group of former military
lawyers who oppose the nomination hoped to decide soon what specific action to
take.

The memorandums produced largely by lawyers in the Justice Department and other
government agencies created great bitterness at the time among military lawyers,
who said they were not consulted.

Mr. Gonzales and the White House have already been put on notice by Senate
Democrats that he should expect to be questioned vigorously about his role in
the memorandums. Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee's
ranking Democrat, sent several letters to Mr. Gonzales, the most recent of which
said that "you will be asked to describe your role in both the interpretation of
the law and the development of policies that led to what I and many others
consider to have been a disregard for the rule of law," the practices at Abu
Ghraib. "You will be called upon to explain in detail your role in developing
policies related to the interrogation and treatment of foreign prisoners."

When the memorandums began appearing this year in news accounts in The New York
Times and elsewhere, the White House said in a statement that they had been only
advisory opinions and that the administration did not and had not condoned
torture or mistreatment.

In a confidential report this summer disclosed recently, the International
Committee of the Red Cross said that the interrogation techniques regularly
practiced at Guantanamo were tantamount to torture.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

* * *


Washington Post --


December 11, 2004
DETAINEE HEARINGS YIELD NEW DETAILS, DISPUTES

By Carol D. Leonnig and Julie Tate, Washington Post Staff Writers

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56170-2004Dec10

The government contends that Feroz Abbasi trained as a suicide bomber, that
Martin Mubanga had a list of Jewish targets in New York he was studying for
future attack and that a group of three Bosnian men were plotting to blow up the
U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.

Abbasi, they charge, was training in guerrilla warfare at an al Qaeda base
called Camp Farooq when Osama bin Laden gave a speech to future fighters just
before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Detainee volunteered for advanced courses . . . because this training was a
[prerequisite] for being sent to the front of the front lines," the government
concluded. "After completing his basic training . . . he volunteered for a
martyrdom mission" to defend an airport in Kandahar from American troops, it
said.

The allegations, and dozens like them, have been trickling in to a federal court
in Washington in the past several weeks. They publicly reflect for the first
time the Pentagon's justifications for detaining some of the 550 captives at the
U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The information comes from special hearings -- conducted by the government at
Guantanamo Bay in an attempt to comply with a landmark Supreme Court ruling in
June -- in which three military officers weigh the assembled information about
the detainees and decide whether they were rightfully held because of links to
the Taliban or al Qaeda. The tribunals have conducted 475 hearings. One man has
been freed, 193 have been ordered to remain in prison and the cases of the
others are pending.

Classified Evidence

The newly released federal court documents provide far more detail than was
previously available about dozens of detainees arrested around the world in the
aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and taken to the U.S. naval base in Cuba. They
also show how the special tribunals rely overwhelmingly on classified evidence
and often ignore information that the detainees assert proves their innocence.

The detainees, who cannot consult lawyers at the hearings, are not allowed to
see the classified evidence or learn the sources of the allegations against
them.

Several contend that American interrogators physically and psychologically
abused them until they made false, incriminating statements about themselves and
fellow prisoners, according to their statements to the tribunals or their
lawyers. In papers released Thursday, an Australian detainee who faces charges
of war crimes asserted that U.S. interrogators repeatedly beat him while he was
blindfolded, injected him with drugs against his will and offered him a
prostitute in exchange for information about his fellow prisoners.

"I can't believe these things can happen, that they can come and take your
husband away at night and, without reason or evidence, destroy your family, ruin
your dreams," Nadja Dizdarevic, the wife of a Bosnian Muslim seized by U.S.
authorities in January 2002, wrote to the federal court. Her husband, Boudella
al Hajj, was taken into custody on the steps of a Sarajevo court that had found
him not guilty of terrorism charges.

"Why? Why are they doing this to us?" Dizdarevic asked.

A Pentagon spokeswoman, Capt. Becky Brenton, said the combatant status-review
tribunals are not legal proceedings and the Pentagon does not have to meet court
standards for the use of evidence or to prove a charge beyond a reasonable
doubt. Rather, she said, the wartime military reviews seek to answer one
question with the facts close at hand: Is the person an enemy combatant, either
because he is a member of al Qaeda or the Taliban, or by supporting them?

"A lot of information and witnesses the person wants to bring forward may not be
relevant to answering that question," Brenton said. "Of course, we do have a
presumption going into these that they are enemy combatants, based on prior
[informal] reviews."

The dispute moved to the U.S. District Court in Washington after the Supreme
Court ruled on June 28 that Guantanamo detainees cannot be held indefinitely and
that they have a right to contest their imprisonment in U.S. courts. Within
days, civil liberties groups began filing claims for detainees; so far, 63 are
before the federal court.

Military law expert Eugene R. Fidell said the tribunals fail to provide the due
process required in any challenge to a detainee's imprisonment, known as a
habeas corpus petition. But Douglas W. Kmiec, a Pepperdine University law
professor, said the tribunals are fair because they allow detainees to contest
charges, and the Supreme Court did not specify that the military had to do more.

Disavowed Confessions

In a large majority of the more than 50 case files reviewed by The Washington
Post, each panel of three military officers that made the decision found the
detainee's denial of the allegations unpersuasive and relied instead on
classified evidence withheld from the detainee or on confessions that he said
were made under duress. The military says releasing the classified material
would jeopardize national security and its intelligence sources.

"The best you could say of the government's evidence against these people is
that it's extraordinarily thin -- to the point of being nonexistent -- and
anything that cuts against their case is rejected," said Brent Mickum, Mubanga's
attorney.

Some of the transcripts draw portraits of fanatical holy warriors bent on
violence against the United States and Israel. Abbasi, for example, admitted to
interrogators that he traveled from his home in London to Afghanistan "to take
action against Americans and Jews" and that he learned how to use assault
weapons, grenade launchers and machine guns in "Camp Farooq." After Sept. 11,
2001, he volunteered to help an elite terrorist group defend the airport in
Kandahar against U.S. forces. The tribunal reported that he said he was not
disturbed about being called an enemy combatant but was "humbled Allah would
honor me so."

Abbasi was removed from his tribunal hearing as he disputed some allegations,
and as he shouted that the tribunal had denied him his rights as a prisoner of
war. "Your actions will come before Allah," Abbasi told the tribunal. "And Allah
may forgive you and Allah may punish you."

Charges' Credibility

Detainee lawyers say the allegations made during the tribunal hearings cannot be
trusted, for three main reasons.

First, they said the tribunal definition of enemy combatant is so broad that the
military has incarcerated people who never took up arms against the United
States or were arrested thousands of miles from Afghanistan or Iraq, Koran
teachers who taught Taliban members, and professionals who say they unknowingly
gave money to charitable organizations that funded al Qaeda.

Abd Al Aziz Sayer Uwain Al Shammeri, a Kuwaiti professor of Islamic studies,
questioned the tribunal's presumption that he was an al Qaeda member, an
accusation that the tribunal based on three facts: that a version of his name
was on an international terrorist list, that he traveled to Afghanistan in
September 2001 and that he tried to cross into Pakistan without a visa. He said
millions of Arabs linked to the same Saudi tribe share his last name, and that
he traveled to Afghanistan to teach the Koran as a Muslim duty.

"How can it be that travel to a large country with millions of people is travel
for al Qaeda?" he asked, according to tribunal documents. "For is a person who
traveled to China considered a communist?"

Al Shammeri said he fled Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks without
returning to his host's home to retrieve his passport when he heard that the
Northern Alliance, the Taliban's main military opposition at the time, was
rounding up and killing any Arabs it could find. He said he presumed Pakistani
authorities would return him to Kuwait once they verified his identity.

The military officers found Al Shammeri's explanation about his passport
"unpersuasive" and cited other classified evidence.

"I didn't think they would tell me, 'Since you don't have identification or a
passport, that means you're a follower of Usama Bin Laden,' " Al Shammeri said,
according to tribunal documents.

Detainee attorneys also contend that tribunal authorities select the information
they consider. Al Hajj, a Bosnian Muslim clergyman originally from Algeria, was
arrested in October 2001 based on an FBI tip that he and others were plotting to
bomb the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. The Bosnian Supreme Court ruled in January
2002 that there was no credible evidence that he and five others had hatched
such a plot. The day they were released, they were immediately taken into
custody by U.S. authorities.

Al Hajj's lawyers provided the Bosnian court documents to the Justice Department
months ago. The tribunal agreed that the records would be relevant but said they
were "not reasonably available." The panel did, however, obtain a copy of an
earlier Bosnian court document, which indicated al Hajj was under investigation.

"They can get their hands on information they want , but they can't get their
hands on what detainees ask for," said Melissa Hoffer, one of al Hajj's
attorneys.

Hoffer said her clients have never been questioned about the alleged bombing
plot, despite nearly three years of captivity.

Dizdarevic wonders when her husband will meet the U.S. standard for release. The
members of al Hajj's panel, citing classified evidence to continue holding him,
said, however, that another review board should consider his exoneration before
a Bosnian court the next time his case is reviewed, next year.

"After three years of fight, without any reason, they declare that my husband is
an enemy combatant, a man that was so good that he would never in his life wish
anyone any harm," she wrote. "What am I supposed to tell my children, who at
every phone ring, every door bell, ask 'Is this our father?' "

Pentagon officials declined to comment on specific cases.

Allegations of Abuse

Detainee lawyers also say that captives are subjected to abuse designed to aid
U.S. interrogators. This includes extremes of heat and cold, extended periods in
painful positions, blaring music and strobe lights for hours at a time. The
lawyers say some detainees have made false statements to halt the mistreatment.

In July, the International Committee of the Red Cross formally told Guantanamo
Bay authorities that these and other tactics were tantamount to torture. Last
week, a Justice Department lawyer told one of the judges hearing the cases that
it would not be illegal to torture detainees to obtain statements about them.

Australian David Hicks, 29, a Muslim convert who is charged with training in an
al Qaeda camp and defending a Taliban tank after the U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan, told his military lawyer in an August affidavit about an atmosphere
at Guantanamo in which abuse was often part of the interrogation process. He
said that his head was rammed into the asphalt several times, that he was hit
with a rifle butt, and that he and other detainees routinely witnessed abuse or
heard the cries of their fellow captives.

Mubanga, a British citizen, was accused of being a member of al Qaeda who
traveled to Pakistan to fight U.S. forces and was studying ways of attacking 33
Jewish organizations in New York. He told the tribunal that the allegations were
false and that he confessed to some of his interrogators' accusations under
duress and physical abuse.

"I see now that the duress and mistreatment that I am incurring shall not stop
until they [the American government] get the result they want," Mubanga told the
tribunal, according to the transcript.

Mubanga said he was fighting in Pakistan to help Muslims reclaim disputed
Kashmiri territory from India, and fled to an uncle's home in Zambia when U.S.
bombs began dropping in Afghanistan. He told the tribunal that his relatives and
passport documents could prove his innocence.

The tribunal ruled that some of the records and witnesses he requested were "not
reasonably available" or were irrelevant to the question of whether Mubanga was
an al Qaeda member. But in a rare admonishment, a military legal adviser later
told the panel it had erroneously rejected that evidence. The tribunal is
preparing for another review of Mubanga's case.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company



Salon --

December 8, 2004
WHITEWASHING TORTURE?
A veteran sergeant who told his commanding officers that he witnessed his
colleagues torturing Iraqi detainees was strapped to a gurney and flown out of
Iraq -- even though there was nothing wrong with him.
By David DeBatto

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/12/08/coverup/print.html

On June 15, 2003, Sgt. Frank "Greg" Ford, a counterintelligence agent in the
California National Guard's 223rd Military Intelligence (M.I.) Battalion
stationed in Samarra, Iraq, told his commanding officer, Capt. Victor Artiga,
that he had witnessed five incidents of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at
his base, and requested a formal investigation. Thirty-six hours later, Ford, a
49-year-old with over 30 years of military service in the Coast Guard, Army and
Navy, was ordered by U.S. Army medical personnel to lie down on a gurney, was
then strapped down, loaded onto a military plane and medevac'd to a military
medical center outside the country.

Although no "medevac" order appears to have been written, in violation of Army
policy, Ford was clearly shipped out because of a diagnosis that he was
suffering from combat stress. After Ford raised the torture allegations, Artiga
immediately said Ford was "delusional" and ordered a psychiatric examination,
according to Ford. But that examination, carried out by an Army psychiatrist,
diagnosed him as "completely normal."

A witness, Sgt. 1st Class Michael Marciello, claims that Artiga became enraged
when he read the initial medical report finding nothing wrong with Ford and
intimidated the psychiatrist into changing it. According to Marciello, Artiga
angrily told the psychiatrist that it was a "C.I. [counterintelligence] or M.I.
matter" and insisted that she had to change her report and get Ford out of Iraq.

Documents show that all subsequent examinations of Ford by Army mental-health
professionals, over many months, confirmed his initial diagnosis as normal.

An officer at the California Office of the Adjutant General in Sacramento,
Calif., Sgt. Maj. Patrick Hammond, has known Ford for over 15 years during their
service in the California National Guard. Hammond said, "I have never had any
reason to question his honesty and I don't do so now." This reporter served in
the military with Ford in Iraq for seven months and can also attest that he is
sane and level-headed.

Ford, who has since left the military, claims that his superiors shipped him out
of the country to prevent him from exposing the abusive behavior. "They were
determined to protect their own asses no matter who they had to take down," he
says.

Col. C. Tsai, a military doctor who examined Ford in Germany and found nothing
wrong with him, told a film crew for Spiegel Television that he was "not
surprised" at Ford's diagnosis. Tsai told Spiegel that he had treated "three or
four" other U.S. soldiers from Iraq that were also sent to Landstuhl for
psychological evaluations or "combat stress counseling" after they reported
incidents of detainee abuse or other wrongdoing by American soldiers.

Artiga and other higher-ups in the 223rd M.I. Battalion deny Ford's charges. But
in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, federal agencies including the
Department of Defense, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID), and the
FBI are finally looking into them. The Department of the Army's Office of the
Inspector General has launched an investigation, according to Ford and his
attorney, Kevin Healy, who have been contacted by investigators. If Ford's
allegations are proven, the Army would be faced with evidence that its prisoner
abuse problem is even more widespread than previously acknowledged -- and that
some of its own officers not only turned a blind eye to abuses but actively
participated in covering them up.

The 223rd M.I. Battalion was one of the first divisions to enter Iraq after the
U.S. "Shock and Awe" aerial bombardment ended, in mid-April 2003. (I also served
in that unit in-country from April through October 2003. I met Ford in February
2003, at Fort Bragg, N.C., and continued to stay in contact with him until he
was shipped out of the country. I have also since left the military.) The
battalion's mission was to collect counterintelligence. Its agents, highly
trained soldiers responsible for force protection and for investigating national
security crimes committed against the Army, were divided into small units called
Tactical Human Intelligence Teams, or THTs. Every day, these teams went out from
their forward operating bases in Iraq and interacted with the local people in an
effort to gather critical intelligence on such matters as the location of
conventional and unconventional weapons and the whereabouts of the fugitives
depicted on the Pentagon's 55-most-wanted playing cards. It was arguably one of
the most sensitive and important jobs in the entire Iraqi theater of operations.
As the team sergeant of his THT, Ford was second in command of his four-person
team and responsible for training, discipline, logistics and supervision of day-
to-day operations. He was also the team's designated combat life saver, or
medic.

Ford spent his first weeks in Iraq at Balad Air Base, also known as Camp
Anaconda, about 50 kilometers north of Baghdad along the Tigris. In early May,
he was assigned to a THT that was headed for Samarra, another 20 kilometers to
the northeast. An ancient trading center that dates to the Mesopotamian era,
Samarra was known as a hotbed of Sunni Arab loyalists, ex-Baath Party officials,
and Islamist extremists. The two-story police station the Army occupied was
located in the center of town, closely surrounded by taller buildings, giving
anyone who cared to fire on the Americans an excellent field in which to do so.
And fire they did. Almost every night, Ford and his teammates would be forced to
dive from their bunks for cover as mortar rounds rocked the compound. The
concussions shook the foundation and broke whatever glass windows remained.
Fortunately, the Iraqi mortar crews proved wildly inaccurate, and no Americans
were killed, but several were wounded and the attacks never let up. There was
immense pressure on the THT to find out who was behind the attacks and to supply
the information to the "gunslingers" of the 4th Infantry Division. It was in
that environment that Ford says he saw the incidents that led to the end of his
long military career.

Late last summer I met Ford for lunch on a sunny afternoon at the Delta King
Riverboat, which is tied to the docks in downtown Sacramento. Ford has returned
to his longtime job as a corrections officer at Folsom Prison, and his wavy
brown hair is longer than it was when I knew him in Iraq. He has spent the past
year trying to clear his name, but apart from a few newspaper interviews he gave
after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last spring, he has not told his story to
anyone until now.

Ford seemed calm and resolute as he talked about how the events that took place
in Samarra contradicted everything he thought he knew about the military. For
more than three decades, he said, he had always served with "people that I knew
I could depend on when it really mattered. They were people that I would have
sacrificed my life to save if need be, and I knew they would do the same for me,
no questions asked."

He went on, "There were also rules and regulations to follow. Some of the rules
applied only in peacetime, some only in time of war. Some always applied. You
knew which was which. These simple, basic rules were pounded into your head from
the day you got off the bus at basic training. You broke the rules, you paid the
price. Period. Everyone knew that simple fact, and everyone accepted it."

But Ford said those rules were savagely broken in Samarra in June 2003. He
described multiple incidents of what he called "war crimes" and "torture" of
Iraqi detainees ranging in age from about 15 to 35. According to Ford, his
teammates, three counterintelligence agents like himself -- one of them a woman
-- systematically and repeatedly abused several Iraqi male detainees over a two-
to three-week time period. Ford describes incidents of asphyxiation, mock
executions, arms being pulled out of sockets, and lit cigarettes forced into
detainee's ears while they were blindfolded and bound. These atrocities took
place in an Iraqi police station, Ford said. His attempts to stop the abuse were
met with either indifference or threats by his team leader, who was himself one
of the abusers, according to Ford.

Ford clenched his fists tightly and shook his head slowly from side to side. "I
guess one of the things that pisses me off most is the arrogance," he said. "The
condescending attitude that my team had. Some of the medics, too. Saying things
like 'So what, he's just another haji,' like they were scum or some kind of
animal, really just pisses me off."

Ford said he was fighting a raging battle with himself over whether to report
what he'd seen to his superiors at Anaconda or to confront the team leader one
last time. He felt "sick inside" about the mistreatment of detainees, but he did
not want to be a "rat," either. Having worked as a corrections officer for
almost 20 years, Ford knew how he would be perceived among the troops if he
snitched. "I didn't want to have to watch my back at the same time I was dodging
mortar rounds from the Iraqis. I decided that I had to confront [the team
leader] and tell him, in no uncertain terms, that I would not stand for any more
of that kind of shit toward the detainees."

Ford said he found the team leader and had it out with him. "I told him that if
there was ever a court-martial over these incidents, I would absolutely testify
against him. I said that this kind of crap has to stop or else I would report it
to Artiga." According to Ford, the team leader replied, "Fine, Greg, you do what
you have to do." By then, Ford said, he'd "had enough." He told the team leader
that he would be filing a complaint against him and the other agent as soon as
possible. He said the team leader told him he was "crazy" and "seeing things"
and no one would believe him anyway, so "knock yourself out."

The next day, Ford said he rode with the rest of his team down to Camp Anaconda,
where the 223rd had its headquarters, as did the 205th M.I. Brigade, which was
made infamous by the Abu Ghraib scandal. Both divisions were commanded by Col.
Thomas Pappas. Upon his arrival, Ford said that he immediately went to the
company headquarters and met with Artiga and 1st Sgt. John Vegilla. Ford said
that it was clear that Artiga knew he was coming. "I told them that I wanted to
request a formal investigation into allegations of war crimes committed by my
team against Iraqi detainees. I said I wanted to request a removal of this whole
team and their replacement by a senior team, because they're bringing the house
down. He looked right at me and said, 'Nope, that never happened. You're
delusional, you imagined the whole thing. And you've got 30 seconds to withdraw
your complaint. If you do, it will be as if this conversation never took
place.'" Ford refused, and Artiga told him to "get out of here" and that he
would call him when the complaint was ready.

In an interview, Artiga denied making those statements. Vegilla did not respond
to interview requests.

A few hours later, Marciello, a senior counterintelligence agent, arrived to
accompany Ford from the transient tent where he was staying to company
headquarters to see Artiga and Vegilla. The slight and bespectacled Marciello,
who looks like a cross between Woody Allen and Wally Cox, recently retired from
the National Guard after almost 35 years of service. According to Marciello,
"Artiga then instructed Vegilla to take Ford's M-16 and ammunition away from him
for safekeeping and said that he was revoking Ford's security clearance. He
[Artiga] also said that I was being assigned to escort Ford 24 hours a day until
further notice." Artiga then ordered Ford to report immediately to Capt. Angela
Madera, an Army psychiatrist, at the base mental-health facility for a "combat
stress evaluation." Marciello says he escorted Ford to his meeting with Madera.

According to Marciello, he waited outside Madera's office for approximately one
hour while Madera interviewed Ford. After the interview, "I escorted Ford back
to his tent and then stayed with him for the remainder of the day." To
Marciello, Ford seemed frustrated at the situation but calm and under control.

Marciello remembers being summoned the next morning, June 16, to company
headquarters by Artiga, who according to Marciello was "really pissed" about the
report Madera had written regarding Ford. "He was pacing around in the office
holding the report up," Marciello said. "Dr. Madera had diagnosed Ford as
completely 'normal' and 'not a danger to himself or others.'" Artiga was "just
livid," Marciello recalls. "He took me in tow over to meet with Madera. Just me
and him. We practically ran over there. Once we got there, he held up her report
and asked her what she thought she was doing. He walked right over to her and
got right in her face. Then he told her that this report cannot stay the way it
is. He said that she will change it to read that Ford is unstable and must be
sent out of [the Iraqi] theater immediately. He then said something to the
effect that this was a C.I. or M.I. matter and that he was telling her that she
had better see to these changes right now."

Artiga denied pressuring Madera to change her diagnosis and said he did not
recall whether Marciello or anyone else was in the room during the meeting.

According to Marciello, "Madera was really shook up by the encounter with Artiga
... She was trembling." With that, Marciello said, "Me and Artiga just up and
left Madera's office and headed back to the company area. Artiga went back to
the office and I went to find Ford." Marciello found Ford in his tent and
related what had just occurred. "I told him to stay put and that I would return
in a little while." It was the last time Marciello saw Greg Ford.

The Geneva Conventions signed by the United States and 114 other countries in
1949 give prisoners of war strict protections. They cannot be assaulted,
photographed (except for counterintelligence purposes), threatened with physical
harm, denied medical care and medication, or deprived of food, water, clothing
or sleep. They are also entitled to have mail access and regular visits from the
Red Cross or other humanitarian groups.

The photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that became public in the
spring showed interrogators flagrantly violating those conventions. Seven low-
level soldiers have since been charged, with one conviction, but no one up the
ladder has been held accountable. Meanwhile, it has become increasingly clear
that the mistreatment at Abu Ghraib was symptomatic of a wider problem. The
Department of Defense is currently investigating more than a hundred allegations
of prisoner abuse. So far, not a single officer or high-ranking enlisted soldier
has been charged in any of them.

There are striking parallels between the conditions at Abu Ghraib when the
abuses took place and those at Samarra when Greg Ford says he saw his colleagues
torturing detainees. Both facilities were suffering heavy casualties as the
result of daily mortar attacks from an invisible enemy. In both cases, the
command became increasingly frustrated at its inability to identify, locate and
stop the attackers and -- bolstered by directives from top military brass to
"set the conditions" for information collection -- allowed combat troops and
military intelligence operatives to use harsh tactics. Both facilities were
populated mostly by young reservists with no combat experience. The majority of
detainees, meanwhile, were adolescents or old men of little to no intelligence
value.

The M.I. units at both centers also shared a commanding officer, Col. Thomas
Pappas, who arrived in Iraq sometime in the middle of June 2003 and formally
took charge of the 205th M.I. Brigade at an elaborate change-of-command ceremony
at Anaconda on July 1. The 205th comprises Ford's 223rd M.I. Battalion and the
519th M.I. Battalion, which played a part in both the Abu Ghraib scandal and at
least one detainee death in Afghanistan, resulting in criminal charges being
filed. After Pappas ordered all members of the 205th to be present at his
change-of-command ceremony, three soldiers from the 519th were killed in a
vehicular accident while traveling through hostile territory from northern Iraq
in order to attend.

The Army has already dealt with one case of abuse by soldiers stationed at
Samarra. At a recent court-martial in Fort Hood, Texas, four enlisted soldiers
from the 4th Infantry Division in Samarra were convicted of manslaughter for
forcing two handcuffed Iraqi men to jump off a bridge over the Tigris River
during an interrogation. One of the Iraqis drowned. The soldiers' commanding
officer, a lieutenant colonel that regularly worked with agents of the 223rd,
was administratively disciplined for helping to cover up the incident.

Not long after Marciello left him, Ford said, Madera, accompanied by an unknown
male captain, entered Ford's tent and told him to get ready because he was going
to be "medevac'd" to Germany immediately. "What the hell is going on here?" Ford
remembered demanding, but Madera told him to "be quiet," that he "had to leave,"
and that she would explain once they were airborne. She escorted him to a
waiting Humvee that took them to the base airstrip, where a C-130 was warming up
on the tarmac.

"Madera ordered me to lie down on a gurney that had been in the rear of the
Humvee so she could strap me down. I again asked what was going on, only this
time a lot more pissed off. I said that I was perfectly able to walk." Ford said
Madera insisted, telling him it was the order of "[Lt. Col. Timothy] Ryan and
Artiga" that he be "bound and secured" when taken "out of country." "I saw that
I had no choice and finally said OK, anything just to get the fuck out of
there," Ford recalled. With the help of the male captain, who Ford said
identified himself as a medical officer, Madera strapped him to the gurney.

Just then, Ford claimed, Ryan, Artiga's superior officer, pulled up in his
Humvee and walked over to where Ford was lying on the gurney. "He looked down at
me and said, 'Don't worry. We are going to get you the best treatment
available.' I was enraged at that point, and it was a good thing I was strapped
down. I just stared back at Ryan with looks that I hoped could kill, but I
didn't say nothing. What was the point? He had won that round."

Ryan did not respond to interview requests for this story.

The propellers of the huge turboprop engines on the C-130 sent scorching blasts
of superheated air back toward the group, almost hot enough to singe the skin on
a face. (When I left Iraq from the same tarmac a few months later, I did get
burned from the blasts.) As Ford's gurney sank into the steaming tarmac, Madera
and the other medical officer wheeled him up the long ramp and into the
aircraft's cavernous interior. Once they were airborne, Madera unstrapped Ford
and motioned for him to sit next to her on one of the hard benches that run
along the sides of the plane. "She told me that she was forced to get me out of
Iraq ASAP by Ryan and Artiga, who she claimed were scared to death by what I
might say. She also told me that she wanted me to get out of Iraq as soon as
possible because she feared for my safety." Ford said Madera also told him,
"These people are serious and very scary." She apologized for having
orchestrated such an exit, but said there was no other way. "I told her that I
understood, but felt as though I had just been kidnapped." According to Ford,
Madera replied, "You were."

Madera did not respond to several requests to be interviewed for this story.

The C-130 took Ford to Kuwait, where he cooled his heels inside transient tents
for two to three days and waited for the 223rd to issue him an order. The order
never came -- in violation of Army regulations -- but eventually he boarded
another aircraft, still accompanied by Madera and the other officer but now
acting on his own volition, and flew to the Army Regional Medical Center in
Landstuhl, Germany. "The first thing they kept asking me at Landstuhl was,
'Where are your orders?' How'd you get out of theater?' I mean, I was probably
asked that 50 times when I was there. Everybody asked me that. They have a
reception group that meets you there and even the Air Force people when I was
getting off the plane said, 'We don't know how you got on this plane because you
don't have any orders. We don't have a single set of orders for you.'"

According to a senior official at the California National Guard headquarters in
Sacramento, Ford should have had what is known as a "medevac" order from his
unit in Iraq (205th M.I. Brigade) in order to leave the country. No one is
allowed out of a theater of operations without either a medevac order or a
standard set of written orders authorizing travel to a destination. Ford had
neither, which is a violation of Army policy.

After a brief stay for evaluation at Landstuhl, Ford says, he was flown to the
United States, where he went first to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and then to Fort
Lewis, Wash., where he was placed in the Madigan Army Medical Center. At Fort
Lewis, Ford filed a complaint with the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, or
CID, in which he cited both the uninvestigated "war crimes" allegations and the
retaliation that he says followed.

At every stop along the way, from Kuwait to Germany to the United States, Ford
was evaluated by Army mental-health professionals and given a clean bill of
health. Doctors at each location confirmed Madera's original diagnosis -- that
he was mentally stable. Ford supplied me with documents from all of the
hospitals he visited, showing diagnoses of "normal," "not delusional," "not
paranoid," "no evidence of hallucination," "stable mental condition," and other
similar remarks. There is nothing to suggest that any of the Army medical
personnel who evaluated Greg Ford after he made his allegations in Iraq felt
that there was anything wrong with him. Tsai at the Army Regional Medical Center
in Landstuhl, Germany, gave Ford a final diagnosis of "Stable Mental Condition."
Dr. Thomas Hardaway of the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston,
Texas, wrote, "there was not any indication of overt paranoia or delusional
quality to what he was saying about his circumstances." He went on to say,
"There is nothing on my initial screening evaluation indicating any overt
pathology or personality problems ... Release patient from Behavioral Medicine
Clinic."

Finally, in February 2004, eight months after he blew the whistle, Ford was
released from active duty and given an honorable discharge, and in October, 10
months after his initial application, he was formally retired from the Army.

Even if Ford's allegations of prisoner abuse turn out to be false, the Army's
treatment of him betrays an outrageous attempt to cover up a potential scandal
and a blatant disregard for its own rules. According to both Ford and a credible
witness, Marciello, Ford was strapped to a gurney and bundled off to a mental
ward on the basis of a coerced diagnosis for an indefinite period of time, all
before any investigation was even started, much less completed. When a CID
investigator finally began pursuing the matter in the fall, Artiga told the
investigator that the 223rd had "looked into it" and found "nothing wrong." If
what Ford and his witnesses say turns out to be true, then the officers involved
could face criminal charges ranging from threatening and intimidation, perjury,
and assault to false imprisonment, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The
list of potential breaches of Army regulations is just as long, including
"conduct unbecoming of an officer," a serious offense in the military.

In addition to Ford and the other soldiers treated by Tsai, other Army whistle-
blowers have also reported this type of mistreatment. According to a May 25
report by United Press International, Julian Goodrum, a decorated lieutenant in
the U.S. Army Reserves, was allegedly locked in a psychiatric ward as punishment
for filing a complaint over the death of a soldier in his command. He had also
testified before Congress about the poor medical care Reserve soldiers returning
from Iraq and Afghanistan were receiving at Fort Knox, Ky. After he escaped from
the locked ward, he was charged with being AWOL and was even given a $6,000 bill
for room and board during his involuntary hospital stay. Still another whistle-
blower, Sgt. Samuel Provance of the 205th M.I. Brigade, was stripped of his
security clearance and assigned to administrative duties in Germany after
reporting abuses at Abu Ghraib. Provance told me in recent e-mails that he has
been harassed by other soldiers and commanders since he made his allegations and
has become something of a pariah in his unit.

In August 2004, Ford filed a report on his allegations of war crimes and
abduction with the Sacramento office of the FBI. That office forwarded the
report to the Bureau's headquarters in Washington, which in turn passed it along
to the Department of Defense. Ford says he met with investigators from the DoD's
Office of the Inspector General in the last week of September. "It was obvious
from their line of questioning that their mission was to cover up for DoD and
the Army," Ford said. Special Agent Karen Ernst of the FBI's Sacramento office
told me that the Bureau "may" have jurisdiction in the matter and is prepared to
step in if the DoD "drops the ball on this." Although she would not offer an
opinion of Ford's case, she did say that they only file reports if they believe
the allegations have "some merit."

The Department of the Army Office of the Inspector General has also launched an
investigation into Ford's allegations. Although by policy they can neither
confirm nor deny the existence of a current investigation, Ford said that
investigators have flown out to California to interview him and have conducted
several follow-up interviews as well as requested documents and e-mail records
from him. Requests through the Freedom of Information Act to the Army or the DoD
for any reports relating to Ford and his allegations have resulted in a flurry
of letters stating essentially that the case is "complex" and that it will take
additional time to compile all of the requested documents.

Neither the California Office of the Adjutant General in Sacramento nor the
state's Judge Advocate General (JAG) office would officially comment, but staff
at both places told me off the record that they hoped Ford would be vindicated
and the officers in question punished for "abuse of authority."

According to an Army CID special agent who is familiar with Ford's case, "This
is a classic case of a whitewash. A coverup. The agent in Iraq never even looked
at the 15-6 investigation the 223rd supposedly did. No one was ever interviewed
until Abu Ghraib hit the fan." When I asked him whether the CID was complicit in
an Army coverup of the case, he said, "Absolutely ... Do you have any idea how
ugly this case could get if they ever really looked into it? It would open up a
whole can of worms that they just don't want to touch." The agent, who refused
to give his name for fear of retaliation, added, "Based on everything I know
about this case, I believe Ford. I have seen too many similar cases not to. It
fits the pattern. Everyone involved in this blatant coverup should be criminally
prosecuted. For this to have dragged on for over a year without being
investigated is ridiculous." In September, the CID conducted two telephone
interviews with Marciello, but no one else in the 223rd has yet been
interviewed, including myself.

His nightmarish experience with the Army in Iraq has changed him forever, Ford
told me as we sat on a bench near the fountain in front of California National
Guard headquarters in Sacramento. He said that he intended to devote the next
few years, and maybe even the rest of his life, to working with individuals and
organizations in the fight for human rights and dignity. He specifically
mentioned Amnesty International and the World Organization for Human Rights. The
latter has formally requested that Attorney General John Ashcroft file criminal
war-crimes charges against high-ranking administration officials, including
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush, over the
revelations coming out of Abu Ghraib. Ford said he hoped to join in pushing for
that action.