News Digest - 2004.12.08 to 2005.05.31
======================================


New York Times --

May 27, 2005
JUST SHUT IT DOWN
By Thomas L. Friedman

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/opinion/27friedman.html

London

Shut it down. Just shut it down.

I am talking about the war-on-terrorism P.O.W. camp at Guantanamo Bay. Just shut
it down and then plow it under. It has become worse than an embarrassment. I am
convinced that more Americans are dying and will die if we keep the Gitmo prison
open than if we shut it down. So, please, Mr. President, just shut it down.

If you want to appreciate how corrosive Guantanamo has become for America's
standing abroad, don't read the Arab press. Don't read the Pakistani press.
Don't read the Afghan press. Hop over here to London or go online and just read
the British press! See what our closest allies are saying about Gitmo. And when
you get done with that, read the Australian press and the Canadian press and the
German press.

It is all a variation on the theme of a May 8 article in The Observer of London
that begins, "An American soldier has revealed shocking new details of abuse and
sexual torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in the first high-profile whistle-
blowing account to emerge from inside the top-secret base." Google the words
"Guantanamo Bay and Australia" and what comes up is an Australian ABC radio
report that begins: "New claims have emerged that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay
are being tortured by their American captors, and the claims say that
Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib are among the victims."

Just another day of the world talking about Guantanamo Bay.

Why care? It's not because I am queasy about the war on terrorism. It is because
I want to win the war on terrorism. And it is now obvious from reports in my own
paper and others that the abuse at Guantanamo and within the whole U.S. military
prison system dealing with terrorism is out of control. Tell me, how is it that
over 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody so far? Heart attacks? This is not
just deeply immoral, it is strategically dangerous.

I can explain it best by analogy. For several years now I have argued that
Israel needed to get out of the West Bank and Gaza, and behind a wall, as fast
as possible. Not because the Palestinians are right and Israel wrong. It's
because Israel today is surrounded by three large trends. The first is a huge
population explosion happening all across the Arab world. The second is an
explosion of the worst interpersonal violence between Israelis and Palestinians
in the history of the conflict, which has only recently been defused by a cease-
fire. And the third is an explosion of Arabic language multimedia outlets - from
the Internet to Al Jazeera.

What was happening around Israel at the height of the intifada was that the Arab
multimedia explosion was taking the images of that intifada explosion and
feeding them to the Arab population explosion, melding in the minds of a new
generation of Arabs and Muslims that their enemies were J.I.A. - "Jews, Israel
and America." That is an enormously toxic trend, and I hope Israel's withdrawal
from Gaza will help deprive it of oxygen.

I believe the stories emerging from Guantanamo are having a similar toxic effect
on us - inflaming sentiments against the U.S. all over the world and providing
recruitment energy on the Internet for those who would do us ill.

Husain Haqqani, a thoughtful Pakistani scholar now teaching at Boston
University, remarked to me: "When people like myself say American values must be
emulated and America is a bastion of freedom, we get Guantanamo Bay thrown in
our faces. When we talk about the America of Jefferson and Hamilton, people back
home say to us: 'That is not the America we are dealing with. We are dealing
with the America of imprisonment without trial.' "

Guantanamo Bay is becoming the anti-Statue of Liberty. If we have a case to be
made against any of the 500 or so inmates still in Guantanamo, then it is high
time we put them on trial, convict as many possible (which will not be easy
because of bungled interrogations) and then simply let the rest go home or to a
third country. Sure, a few may come back to haunt us. But at least they won't be
able to take advantage of Guantanamo as an engine of recruitment to enlist
thousands more. I would rather have a few more bad guys roaming the world than a
whole new generation.

"This is not about being for or against the war," said Michael Posner, the
executive director of Human Rights First, which is closely following this issue.
"It is about doing it right. If we are going to transform the Middle East, we
have to be law-abiding and uphold the values we want them to embrace - otherwise
it is not going to work."

*


New York Times --

THE BAGRAM FILE

"I would acknowledge that a lot of these investigations appear to have taken
excessively long," the Defense Department's chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita, said
in an interview on Friday. "There's no other way to describe an investigation
that takes two years. People are being held accountable, but it's taking too
long."

Mr. Di Rita said the Pentagon was examining ways to speed up such
investigations, "because justice delayed is justice denied."

                              -- from Part 2 (2005.05.22).


[ Part 1 ] May 20, 2005

IN US REPORT, BRUTAL DETAILS OF 2 AFGHAN INMATES' DEATHS
By Tim Golden

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers
continued to torment him.

The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was
hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2
a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he
arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs
were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He
had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous
four days.

Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators,
Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he
punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled
weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The
soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully
into Mr. Dilawar's face.

"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the
prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees.
But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no
longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after
they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the
guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By
then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before
Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators
had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the
American base at the wrong time.

The story of Mr. Dilawar's brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point - and
that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in
December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army's
criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New
York Times.

Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram
file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. The
harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers,
went well beyond the two deaths.

In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by
interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by
military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by
little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.

In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female
interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate
detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner
being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of
his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic
bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy
to soften him up for questioning.

The Times obtained a copy of the file from a person involved in the
investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military's
response to the deaths.

Although incidents of prisoner abuse at Bagram in 2002, including some details
of the two men's deaths, have been previously reported, American officials have
characterized them as isolated problems that were thoroughly investigated. And
many of the officers and soldiers interviewed in the Dilawar investigation said
the large majority of detainees at Bagram were compliant and reasonably well
treated.

"What we have learned through the course of all these investigations is that
there were people who clearly violated anyone's standard for humane treatment,"
said the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita. "We're finding some cases
that were not close calls."

Yet the Bagram file includes ample testimony that harsh treatment by some
interrogators was routine and that guards could strike shackled detainees with
virtual impunity. Prisoners considered important or troublesome were also
handcuffed and chained to the ceilings and doors of their cells, sometimes for
long periods, an action Army prosecutors recently classified as criminal
assault.

Some of the mistreatment was quite obvious, the file suggests. Senior officers
frequently toured the detention center, and several of them acknowledged seeing
prisoners chained up for punishment or to deprive them of sleep. Shortly before
the two deaths, observers from the International Committee of the Red Cross
specifically complained to the military authorities at Bagram about the
shackling of prisoners in "fixed positions," documents show.

Even though military investigators learned soon after Mr. Dilawar's death that
he had been abused by at least two interrogators, the Army's criminal inquiry
moved slowly. Meanwhile, many of the Bagram interrogators, led by the same
operations officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in July
2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to a
high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that
were "remarkably similar" to those used at Bagram.

Last October, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command concluded that there was
probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted personnel with criminal
offenses in the Dilawar case ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and
involuntary manslaughter. Fifteen of the same soldiers were also cited for
probable criminal responsibility in the Habibullah case.

So far, only the seven soldiers have been charged, including four last week. No
one has been convicted in either death. Two Army interrogators were also
reprimanded, a military spokesman said. Most of those who could still face legal
action have denied wrongdoing, either in statements to investigators or in
comments to a reporter.

"The whole situation is unfair," Sgt. Selena M. Salcedo, a former Bagram
interrogator who was charged with assaulting Mr. Dilawar, dereliction of duty
and lying to investigators, said in a telephone interview. "It's all going to
come out when everything is said and done."

With most of the legal action pending, the story of abuses at Bagram remains
incomplete. But documents and interviews reveal a striking disparity between the
findings of Army investigators and what military officials said in the aftermath
of the deaths.

Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even
after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those
autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K.
McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the
two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were "in accordance with what
is generally accepted as interrogation techniques."

THE INTERROGATORS

In the summer of 2002, the military detention center at Bagram, about 40 miles
north of Kabul, stood as a hulking reminder of the Americans' improvised hold
over Afghanistan.

Built by the Soviets as an aircraft machine shop for the operations base they
established after their intervention in the country in 1979, the building had
survived the ensuing wars as a battered relic - a long, squat, concrete block
with rusted metal sheets where the windows had once been.

Retrofitted with five large wire pens and a half dozen plywood isolation cells,
the building became the Bagram Collection Point, a clearinghouse for prisoners
captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The B.C.P., as soldiers called it,
typically held between 40 and 80 detainees while they were interrogated and
screened for possible shipment to the Pentagon's longer-term detention center at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The new interrogation unit that arrived in July 2002 had been improvised as
well. Captain Wood, then a 32-year-old lieutenant, came with 13 soldiers from
the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg, N.C.; six Arabic-speaking
reservists were added from the Utah National Guard.

Part of the new group, which was consolidated under Company A of the 519th
Military Intelligence Battalion, was made up of counterintelligence specialists
with no background in interrogation. Only two of the soldiers had ever
questioned actual prisoners.

What specialized training the unit received came on the job, in sessions with
two interrogators who had worked in the prison for a few months. "There was
nothing that prepared us for running an interrogation operation" like the one at
Bagram, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Staff Sgt.
Steven W. Loring, later told investigators.

Nor were the rules of engagement very clear. The platoon had the standard
interrogations guide, Army Field Manual 34-52, and an order from the secretary
of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, to treat prisoners "humanely," and when
possible, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But with President Bush's
final determination in February 2002 that the Conventions did not apply to the
conflict with Al Qaeda and that Taliban fighters would not be accorded the
rights of prisoners of war, the interrogators believed they "could deviate
slightly from the rules," said one of the Utah reservists, Sgt. James A. Leahy.

"There was the Geneva Conventions for enemy prisoners of war, but nothing for
terrorists," Sergeant Leahy told Army investigators. And the detainees, senior
intelligence officers said, were to be considered terrorists until proved
otherwise.

The deviations included the use of "safety positions" or "stress positions" that
would make the detainees uncomfortable but not necessarily hurt them - kneeling
on the ground, for instance, or sitting in a "chair" position against the wall.
The new platoon was also trained in sleep deprivation, which the previous unit
had generally limited to 24 hours or less, insisting that the interrogator
remain awake with the prisoner to avoid pushing the limits of humane treatment.

But as the 519th interrogators settled into their jobs, they set their own
procedures for sleep deprivation. They decided on 32 to 36 hours as the optimal
time to keep prisoners awake and eliminated the practice of staying up
themselves, one former interrogator, Eric LaHammer, said in an interview.

The interrogators worked from a menu of basic tactics to gain a prisoner's
cooperation, from the "friendly" approach, to good cop-bad cop routines, to the
threat of long-term imprisonment. But some less-experienced interrogators came
to rely on the method known in the military as "Fear Up Harsh," or what one
soldier referred to as "the screaming technique."

Sergeant Loring, then 27, tried with limited success to wean those interrogators
off that approach, which typically involved yelling and throwing chairs. Mr.
Leahy said the sergeant "put the brakes on when certain approaches got out of
hand." But he could also be dismissive of tactics he considered too soft,
several soldiers told investigators, and gave some of the most aggressive
interrogators wide latitude. (Efforts to locate Mr. Loring, who has left the
military, were unsuccessful.)

"We sometimes developed a rapport with detainees, and Sergeant Loring would sit
us down and remind us that these were evil people and talk about 9/11 and they
weren't our friends and could not be trusted," Mr. Leahy said.

Specialist Damien M. Corsetti, a tall, bearded interrogator sometimes called
"Monster" -he had the nickname tattooed in Italian across his stomach, other
soldiers said - was often chosen to intimidate new detainees. Specialist
Corsetti, they said, would glower and yell at the arrivals as they stood chained
to an overhead pole or lay face down on the floor of a holding room. (A military
police K-9 unit often brought growling dogs to walk among the new prisoners for
similar effect, documents show.)

"The other interrogators would use his reputation," said one interrogator,
Specialist Eric H. Barclais. "They would tell the detainee, 'If you don't
cooperate, we'll have to get Monster, and he won't be as nice.' " Another
soldier told investigators that Sergeant Loring lightheartedly referred to
Specialist Corsetti, then 23, as "the King of Torture."

A Saudi detainee who was interviewed by Army investigators last June at
Guantanamo said Specialist Corsetti had pulled out his penis during an
interrogation at Bagram, held it against the prisoner's face and threatened to
rape him, excerpts from the man's statement show.

Last fall, the investigators cited probable cause to charge Specialist Corsetti
with assault, maltreatment of a prisoner and indecent acts in the incident; he
has not been charged. At Abu Ghraib, he was also one of three members of the
519th who were fined and demoted for forcing an Iraqi woman to strip during
questioning, another interrogator said. A spokesman at Fort Bragg said
Specialist Corsetti would not comment.

In late August of 2002, the Bagram interrogators were joined by a new military
police unit that was assigned to guard the detainees. The soldiers, mostly
reservists from the 377th Military Police Company based in Cincinnati and
Bloomington, Ind., were similarly unprepared for their mission, members of the
unit said.

The company received basic lessons in handling prisoners at Fort Dix, N.J., and
some police and corrections officers in its ranks provided further training.
That instruction included an overview of "pressure-point control tactics" and
notably the "common peroneal strike" - a potentially disabling blow to the side
of the leg, just above the knee.

The M.P.'s said they were never told that peroneal strikes were not part of Army
doctrine. Nor did most of them hear one of the former police officers tell a
fellow soldier during the training that he would never use such strikes because
they would "tear up" a prisoner's legs.

But once in Afghanistan, members of the 377th found that the usual rules did not
seem to apply. The peroneal strike quickly became a basic weapon of the M.P.
arsenal. "That was kind of like an accepted thing; you could knee somebody in
the leg," former Sgt. Thomas V. Curtis told the investigators.

A few weeks into the company's tour, Specialist Jeremy M. Callaway overheard
another guard boasting about having beaten a detainee who had spit on him.
Specialist Callaway also told investigators that other soldiers had
congratulated the guard "for not taking any" from a detainee.

One captain nicknamed members of the Third Platoon "the Testosterone Gang."
Several were devout bodybuilders. Upon arriving in Afghanistan, a group of the
soldiers decorated their tent with a Confederate flag, one soldier said.

Some of the same M.P.'s took a particular interest in an emotionally disturbed
Afghan detainee who was known to eat his feces and mutilate himself with
concertina wire. The soldiers kneed the man repeatedly in the legs and, at one
point, chained him with his arms straight up in the air, Specialist Callaway
told investigators. They also nicknamed him "Timmy," after a disabled child in
the animated television series "South Park." One of the guards who beat the
prisoner also taught him to screech like the cartoon character, Specialist
Callaway said.

Eventually, the man was sent home.

THE DEFIANT DETAINEE

The detainee known as Person Under Control No. 412 was a portly, well-groomed
Afghan named Habibullah. Some American officials identified him as "Mullah"
Habibullah, a brother of a former Taliban commander from the southern Afghan
province of Oruzgan.

He stood out from the scraggly guerrillas and villagers whom the Bagram
interrogators typically saw. "He had a piercing gaze and was very confident,"
the provost marshal in charge of the M.P.'s, Maj. Bobby R. Atwell, recalled.

Documents from the investigation suggest that Mr. Habibullah was captured by an
Afghan warlord on Nov. 28, 2002, and delivered to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives
two days later. His well-being at that point is a matter of dispute. The doctor
who examined him on arrival at Bagram reported him in good health. But the
intelligence operations chief, Lt. Col. John W. Loffert Jr., later told Army
investigators, "He was already in bad condition when he arrived."

What is clear is that Mr. Habibullah was identified at Bagram as an important
prisoner and an unusually sharp-tongued and insubordinate one.

One of the 377th's Third Platoon sergeants, Alan J. Driver Jr., told
investigators that Mr. Habibullah rose up after a rectal examination and kneed
him in the groin. The guard said he grabbed the prisoner by the head and yelled
in his face. Mr. Habibullah then "became combative," Sergeant Driver said, and
had to be subdued by three guards and led away in an armlock.

He was then confined in one of the 9-foot by 7-foot isolation cells, which the
M.P. commander, Capt. Christopher M. Beiring, later described as a standard
procedure. "There was a policy that detainees were hooded, shackled and isolated
for at least the first 24 hours, sometimes 72 hours of captivity," he told
investigators.

While the guards kept some prisoners awake by yelling or poking at them or
banging on their cell doors, Mr. Habibullah was shackled by the wrists to the
wire ceiling over his cell, soldiers said.

On his second day, Dec. 1, the prisoner was "uncooperative" again, this time
with Specialist Willie V. Brand. The guard, who has since been charged with
assault and other crimes, told investigators he had delivered three peroneal
strikes in response. The next day, Specialist Brand said, he had to knee the
prisoner again. Other blows followed.

A lawyer for Specialist Brand, John P. Galligan, said there was no criminal
intent by his client to hurt any detainee. "At the time, my client was acting
consistently with the standard operating procedure that was in place at the
Bagram facility."

The communication between Mr. Habibullah and his jailers appears to have been
almost exclusively physical. Despite repeated requests, the M.P.'s were assigned
no interpreters of their own. Instead, they borrowed from the interrogators when
they could and relied on prisoners who spoke even a little English to translate
for them.

When the detainees were beaten or kicked for "noncompliance," one of the
interpreters, Ali M. Baryalai said, it was often "because they have no idea what
the M.P. is saying."

By the morning of Dec. 2, witnesses told the investigators, Mr. Habibullah was
coughing and complaining of chest pains. He limped into the interrogation room
in shackles, his right leg stiff and his right foot swollen. The lead
interrogator, Sergeant Leahy, let him sit on the floor because he could not bend
his knees and sit in a chair.

The interpreter who was on hand, Ebrahim Baerde, said the interrogators had kept
their distance that day "because he was spitting up a lot of phlegm."

"They were laughing and making fun of him, saying it was 'gross' or 'nasty,' "
Mr. Baerde said.

Though battered, Mr. Habibullah was unbowed.

"Once they asked him if he wanted to spend the rest of his life in handcuffs,"
Mr. Baerde said. "His response was, 'Yes, don't they look good on me?' "

By Dec. 3, Mr. Habibullah's reputation for defiance seemed to make him an open
target. One M.P. said he had given him five peroneal strikes for being
"noncompliant and combative." Another gave him three or four more for being
"combative and noncompliant." Some guards later asserted that he had been hurt
trying to escape.

When Sgt. James P. Boland saw Mr. Habibullah on Dec. 3, he was in one of the
isolation cells, tethered to the ceiling by two sets of handcuffs and a chain
around his waist. His body was slumped forward, held up by the chains.

Sergeant Boland told the investigators he had entered the cell with two other
guards, Specialists Anthony M. Morden and Brian E. Cammack. (All three have been
charged with assault and other crimes.) One of them pulled off the prisoner's
black hood. His head was slumped to one side, his tongue sticking out.
Specialist Cammack said he had put some bread on Mr. Habibullah's tongue.
Another soldier put an apple in the prisoner's hand; it fell to the floor.

When Specialist Cammack turned back toward the prisoner, he said in one
statement, Mr. Habibullah's spit hit his chest. Later, Specialist Cammack
acknowledged, "I'm not sure if he spit at me." But at the time, he exploded,
yelling, "Don't ever spit on me again!" and kneeing the prisoner sharply in the
thigh, "maybe a couple" of times. Mr. Habibullah's limp body swayed back and
forth in the chains.

When Sergeant Boland returned to the cell some 20 minutes later, he said, Mr.
Habibullah was not moving and had no pulse. Finally, the prisoner was unchained
and laid out on the floor of his cell.

The guard who Specialist Cammack said had counseled him back in New Jersey about
the dangers of peroneal strikes found him in the room where Mr. Habibullah lay,
his body already cold.

"Specialist Cammack appeared very distraught," Specialist William Bohl told an
investigator. The soldier "was running about the room hysterically."

An M.P. was sent to wake one of the medics.

"What are you getting me for?" the medic, Specialist Robert S. Melone,
responded, telling him to call an ambulance instead.

When another medic finally arrived, he found Mr. Habibullah on the floor, his
arms outstretched, his eyes and mouth open.

"It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared,"
the medic, Staff Sgt. Rodney D. Glass, recalled.

Not all of the guards were indifferent, their statements show. But if Mr.
Habibullah's death shocked some of them, it did not lead to major changes in the
detention center's operation.

Military police guards were assigned to be present during interrogations to help
prevent mistreatment. The provost marshal, Major Atwell, told investigators he
had already instructed the commander of the M.P. company, Captain Beiring, to
stop chaining prisoners to the ceiling. Others said they never received such an
order.

Senior officers later told investigators that they had been unaware of any
serious abuses at the B.C.P. But the first sergeant of the 377th, Betty J.
Jones, told investigators that the use of standing restraints, sleep deprivation
and peroneal strikes was readily apparent.

"Everyone that is anyone went through the facility at one time or another," she
said.

Major Atwell said the death "did not cause an enormous amount of concern 'cause
it appeared natural."

In fact, Mr. Habibullah's autopsy, completed on Dec. 8, showed bruises or
abrasions on his chest, arms and head. There were deep contusions on his calves,
knees and thighs. His left calf was marked by what appeared to have been the
sole of a boot.

His death was attributed to a blood clot, probably caused by the severe injuries
to his legs, which traveled to his heart and blocked the blood flow to his
lungs.

THE SHY DETAINEE

On Dec. 5, one day after Mr. Habibullah died, Mr. Dilawar arrived at Bagram.

Four days before, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar
set out from his tiny village of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used
Toyota sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks earlier to drive as a
taxi.

Mr. Dilawar was not an adventurous man. He rarely went far from the stone
farmhouse he shared with his wife, young daughter and extended family. He never
attended school, relatives said, and had only one friend, Bacha Khel, with whom
he would sit in the wheat fields surrounding the village and talk.

"He was a shy man, a very simple man," his eldest brother, Shahpoor, said in an
interview.

On the day he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar's mother had asked him to gather his
three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday.
But he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial capital,
Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares.

At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back toward Yakubi. On the way,
they passed a base used by American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the
target of a rocket attack that morning.

Militiamen loyal to the guerrilla commander guarding the base, Jan Baz Khan,
stopped the Toyota at a checkpoint. They confiscated a broken walkie-talkie from
one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers. In the trunk, they found an electric stabilizer
used to regulate current from a generator. (Mr. Dilawar's family said the
stabilizer was not theirs; at the time, they said, they had no electricity at
all.)

The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers at the base as
suspects in the attack. Mr. Dilawar and his passengers spent their first night
there handcuffed to a fence, so they would be unable to sleep. When a doctor
examined them the next morning, he said later, he found Mr. Dilawar tired and
suffering from headaches but otherwise fine.

Mr. Dilawar's three passengers were eventually flown to Guantanamo and held for
more than a year before being sent home without charge. In interviews after
their release, the men described their treatment at Bagram as far worse than at
Guantanamo. While all of them said they had been beaten, they complained most
bitterly of being stripped naked in front of female soldiers for showers and
medical examinations, which they said included the first of several painful and
humiliating rectal exams.

"They did lots and lots of bad things to me," said Abdur Rahim, a 26-year-old
baker from Khost. "I was shouting and crying, and no one was listening. When I
was shouting, the soldiers were slamming my head against the desk."

For Mr. Dilawar, his fellow prisoners said, the most difficult thing seemed to
be the black cloth hood that was pulled over his head. "He could not breathe,"
said a man called Parkhudin, who had been one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers.

Mr. Dilawar was a frail man, standing only 5 feet 9 inches and weighing 122
pounds. But at Bagram, he was quickly labeled one of the "noncompliant" ones.

When one of the First Platoon M.P.'s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to Mr.
Dilawar's cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and
started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee
strikes to the leg of the shackled man.

"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was
crying out to his god," Specialist Jones said to investigators. "Everybody heard
him cry out and thought it was funny."

Other Third Platoon M.P.'s later came by the detention center and stopped at the
isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said.

It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this
detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he
said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100
strikes."

In a subsequent statement, Specialist Jones was vague about which M.P.'s had
delivered the blows. His estimate was never confirmed, but other guards
eventually admitted striking Mr. Dilawar repeatedly.

Many M.P.'s would eventually deny that they had any idea of Mr. Dilawar's
injuries, explaining that they never saw his legs beneath his jumpsuit. But
Specialist Jones recalled that the drawstring pants of Mr. Dilawar's orange
prison suit fell down again and again while he was shackled.

"I saw the bruise because his pants kept falling down while he was in standing
restraints," the soldier told investigators. "Over a certain time period, I
noticed it was the size of a fist."

As Mr. Dilawar grew desperate, he began crying out more loudly to be released.
But even the interpreters had trouble understanding his Pashto dialect; the
annoyed guards heard only noise.

"He had constantly been screaming, 'Release me; I don't want to be here,' and
things like that," said the one linguist who could decipher his distress, Abdul
Ahad Wardak.

THE INTERROGATION

On Dec. 8, Mr. Dilawar was taken for his fourth interrogation. It quickly turned
hostile.

The 21-year-old lead interrogator, Specialist Glendale C. Walls II, later
contended that Mr. Dilawar was evasive. "Some holes came up, and we wanted him
to answer us truthfully," he said. The other interrogator, Sergeant Salcedo,
complained that the prisoner was smiling, not answering questions, and refusing
to stay kneeling on the ground or sitting against the wall.

The interpreter who was present, Ahmad Ahmadzai, recalled the encounter
differently to investigators.

The interrogators, Mr. Ahmadzai said, accused Mr. Dilawar of launching the
rockets that had hit the American base. He denied that. While kneeling on the
ground, he was unable to hold his cuffed hands above his head as instructed,
prompting Sergeant Salcedo to slap them back up whenever they began to drop.

"Selena berated him for being weak and questioned him about being a man, which
was very insulting because of his heritage," Mr. Ahmadzai said.

When Mr. Dilawar was unable to sit in the chair position against the wall
because of his battered legs, the two interrogators grabbed him by the shirt and
repeatedly shoved him back against the wall.

"This went on for 10 or 15 minutes," the interpreter said. "He was so tired he
couldn't get up."

"They stood him up, and at one point Selena stepped on his bare foot with her
boot and grabbed him by his beard and pulled him towards her," he went on. "Once
Selena kicked Dilawar in the groin, private areas, with her right foot. She was
standing some distance from him, and she stepped back and kicked him.

"About the first 10 minutes, I think, they were actually questioning him, after
that it was pushing, shoving, kicking and shouting at him," Mr. Ahmadzai said.
"There was no interrogation going on."

The session ended, he said, with Sergeant Salcedo instructing the M.P.'s to keep
Mr. Dilawar chained to the ceiling until the next shift came on.

The next morning, Mr. Dilawar began yelling again. At around noon, the M.P.'s
called over another of the interpreters, Mr. Baerde, to try to quiet Mr. Dilawar
down.

"I told him, 'Look, please, if you want to be able to sit down and be released
from shackles, you just need to be quiet for one more hour."

"He told me that if he was in shackles another hour, he would die," Mr. Baerde
said.

Half an hour later, Mr. Baerde returned to the cell. Mr. Dilawar's hands hung
limply from the cuffs, and his head, covered by the black hood, slumped forward.

"He wanted me to get a doctor, and said that he needed 'a shot,' " Mr. Baerde
recalled. "He said that he didn't feel good. He said that his legs were
hurting."

Mr. Baerde translated Mr. Dilawar's plea to one of the guards. The soldier took
the prisoner's hand and pressed down on his fingernails to check his
circulation.

"He's O.K.," Mr. Baerde quoted the M.P. as saying. "He's just trying to get out
of his restraints."

By the time Mr. Dilawar was brought in for his final interrogation in the first
hours of the next day, Dec. 10, he appeared exhausted and was babbling that his
wife had died. He also told the interrogators that he had been beaten by the
guards.

"But we didn't pursue that," said Mr. Baryalai, the interpreter.

Specialist Walls was again the lead interrogator. But his more aggressive
partner, Specialist Claus, quickly took over, Mr. Baryalai said.

"Josh had a rule that the detainee had to look at him, not me," the interpreter
told investigators. "He gave him three chances, and then he grabbed him by the
shirt and pulled him towards him, across the table, slamming his chest into the
table front."

When Mr. Dilawar was unable to kneel, the interpreter said, the interrogators
pulled him to his feet and pushed him against the wall. Told to assume a stress
position, the prisoner leaned his head against the wall and began to fall
asleep.

"It looked to me like Dilawar was trying to cooperate, but he couldn't
physically perform the tasks," Mr. Baryalai said.

Finally, Specialist Walls grabbed the prisoner and "shook him harshly," the
interpreter said, telling him that if he failed to cooperate, he would be
shipped to a prison in the United States, where he would be "treated like a
woman, by the other men" and face the wrath of criminals who "would be very
angry with anyone involved in the 9/11 attacks." (Specialist Walls was charged
last week with assault, maltreatment and failure to obey a lawful order;
Specialist Claus was charged with assault, maltreatment and lying to
investigators. Each man declined to comment.)

A third military intelligence specialist who spoke some Pashto, Staff Sgt. W.
Christopher Yonushonis, had questioned Mr. Dilawar earlier and had arranged with
Specialist Claus to take over when he was done. Instead, the sergeant arrived at
the interrogation room to find a large puddle of water on the floor, a wet spot
on Mr. Dilawar's shirt and Specialist Claus standing behind the detainee,
twisting up the back of the hood that covered the prisoner's head.

"I had the impression that Josh was actually holding the detainee upright by
pulling on the hood," he said. "I was furious at this point because I had seen
Josh tighten the hood of another detainee the week before. This behavior seemed
completely gratuitous and unrelated to intelligence collection."

"What the hell happened with that water?" Sergeant Yonushonis said he had
demanded.

"We had to make sure he stayed hydrated," he said Specialist Claus had
responded.

The next morning, Sergeant Yonushonis went to the noncommissioned officer in
charge of the interrogators, Sergeant Loring, to report the incident. Mr.
Dilawar, however, was already dead.

THE POST-MORTEM

The findings of Mr. Dilawar's autopsy were succinct. He had had some coronary
artery disease, the medical examiner reported, but what caused his heart to fail
was "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities." Similar injuries
contributed to Mr. Habibullah's death.

One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for
Specialist Brand, saying the tissue in the young man's legs "had basically been
pulpified."

"I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus," added Lt. Col.
Elizabeth Rouse, the coroner, and a major at that time.

After the second death, several of the 519th Battalion's interrogators were
temporarily removed from their posts. A medic was assigned to the detention
center to work night shifts. On orders from the Bagram intelligence chief,
interrogators were prohibited from any physical contact with the detainees.
Chaining prisoners to any fixed object was also banned, and the use of stress
positions was curtailed.

In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla
commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been
detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno
himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to
win their trust, the military official said.

The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent home from Guantanamo in
March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed "no
threat" to American forces.

They were later visited by Mr. Dilawar's parents, who begged them to explain
what had happened to their son. But the men said they could not bring themselves
to recount the details.

"I told them he had a bed," said Mr. Parkhudin. "I said the Americans were very
nice because he had a heart problem."

In late August of last year, shortly before the Army completed its inquiry into
the deaths, Sergeant Yonushonis, who was stationed in Germany, went at his own
initiative to see an agent of the Criminal Investigation Command. Until then, he
had never been interviewed.

"I expected to be contacted at some point by investigators in this case," he
said. "I was living a few doors down from the interrogation room, and I had been
one of the last to see this detainee alive."

Sergeant Yonushonis described what he had witnessed of the detainee's last
interrogation. "I remember being so mad that I had trouble speaking," he said.

He also added a detail that had been overlooked in the investigative file. By
the time Mr. Dilawar was taken into his final interrogations, he said, "most of
us were convinced that the detainee was innocent."

[ Ruhallah Khapalwak, Carlotta Gall and David Rohde contributed reporting for
this article, and Alain Delaqueriere assisted with research. ]


[ Part 2 ] May 22, 2005

ABUSE INQUIRY BOGGED DOWN IN AFGHANISTAN
By Tim Golden

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/international/asia/22abuse.html

Despite autopsy findings of homicide and statements by soldiers that two
prisoners died after being struck by guards at an American military detention
center in Bagram, Afghanistan, Army investigators initially recommended closing
the case without bringing any criminal charges, documents and interviews show.

Within days after the two deaths in December 2002, military coroners determined
that both had been caused by "blunt force trauma" to the legs. Soon after,
soldiers and others at Bagram told the investigators that military guards had
repeatedly struck both men in the thighs while they were shackled and that one
had also been mistreated by military interrogators.

Nonetheless, agents of the Army's Criminal Investigation Command reported to
their superiors that they could not clearly determine who was responsible for
the detainees' injuries, military officials said. Military lawyers at Bagram
took the same position, according to confidential documents from the
investigation obtained by The New York Times.

"I could never see any criminal intent on the part of the M.P.'s to cause the
detainee to die," one of the lawyers, Maj. Jeff A. Bovarnick, later told
investigators, referring to one of the deaths. "We believed the M.P.'s story,
that this was the most combative detainee ever."

The investigators' move to close the case was among a series of apparent
missteps in an Army inquiry that ultimately took almost two years to complete
and has so far resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers. Early on,
the documents show, crucial witnesses were not interviewed, documents
disappeared, and at least a few pieces of the evidence were mishandled.

While senior military intelligence officers at Bagram quickly heard reports of
abuse by several interrogators, documents show they also failed to file reports
that are mandatory when any intelligence personnel are suspected of misconduct,
including mistreatment of detainees. Those reports would have alerted military
intelligence officials in the United States to a problem in the unit, military
officials said.

Those interrogators and others from Bagram were later sent to Iraq and were
assigned to Abu Ghraib prison. A high-level military inquiry last year found
that the captain who led interrogation operations at Bagram, Capt. Carolyn A.
Wood, applied many of the same harsh methods in Iraq that she had overseen in
Afghanistan.

Citing "investigative shortfalls," senior Army investigators took the Bagram
inquiry away from agents in Afghanistan in August 2003, assigning it to a task
force based at the agency's headquarters in Virginia. In October 2004, the task
force found probable cause to charge 27 of the military police guards and
military intelligence interrogators with crimes ranging from involuntary
manslaughter to lying to investigators. Those 27 included the seven who have
actually been charged.

"I would acknowledge that a lot of these investigations appear to have taken
excessively long," the Defense Department's chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita, said
in an interview on Friday. "There's no other way to describe an investigation
that takes two years. People are being held accountable, but it's taking too
long."

Mr. Di Rita said the Pentagon was examining ways to speed up such
investigations, "because justice delayed is justice denied."

A spokesman for the Criminal Investigation Command, Christopher Grey, would not
discuss details of the case, but played down the significance of the agents'
early proposal to close it. He said that the investigation had been guided by a
desire for thoroughness rather than speed, and that it eventually included more
than 250 interviews around the world.

"Case agents make recommendations all the time," Mr. Grey said. "But the review
process looks at investigations constantly and points to other things that need
to be completed or other investigative approaches."

While the recommendation to close the case was ultimately rejected by senior
officials, documents show that the inquiry was at a virtual standstill when an
article in The New York Times on March 4, 2003, reported that at least one of
the prisoner's deaths had been ruled a homicide, contradicting the military's
earlier assertions that both had died of natural causes. Activity in the case
quickly resumed.

The details of the investigation emerged from a file of almost 2,000 pages of
confidential Army documents about the death on Dec. 10, 2002, of a 22-year-old
taxi driver named Dilawar. The file was obtained from a person involved in the
investigation who was critical of the abuses at Bagram and the military's
response to the deaths.

The file presents the fates of Mr. Dilawar and another detainee who died six
days earlier, Mullah Habibullah, against a backdrop of frequent harsh treatment
by guards and interrogators who were in many cases poorly trained, loosely
supervised and only vaguely aware of or attentive to regulations limiting their
use of force against prisoners they considered to be terrorists.

According to interviews with military intelligence officials who served at
Bagram, only a small fraction of the detainees there were considered important
or suspicious enough to be transferred to the American military prison at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for further interrogation. Two intelligence officers
estimated that about 85 percent of the prisoners were ultimately released.

Still, most new detainees at Bagram were hooded, shackled and isolated for at
least 24 hours and sometimes as long as 72 hours, the commander of the military
police guards at Bagram, Capt. Christopher M. Beiring, told investigators.
Prisoners caught in infractions like talking to one another were handcuffed to
cell doors or ceilings, often for half an hour or an hour, but sometimes for far
longer. Interrogators trying to break the detainees' resistance sometimes
ordered that they be forced to sweep the same floor space over and over or scrub
it with a toothbrush.

The responsibility of senior officers at Bagram for carrying out such methods is
not clear in the Army's criminal report.

In several instances, the documents show Captain Wood and her deputy, Staff Sgt.
Steven W. Loring, sought clarification about what techniques they could use.
"Numerous requests for strict guidance on P.U.C. treatment have been voiced to
the Staff Judge Advocate," Sergeant Loring said, referring to the detainees by
the initials for Persons Under Control, "but no training has been offered."

Major Bovarnick, the former legal adviser to the detention center, told
investigators that the shackling of detainees with their arms overhead was
standard operating procedure when he arrived at Bagram in mid-November 2002. On
Nov. 26, after complaints from the International Committee of the Red Cross, he
convened a group of military and C.I.A. officials at Bagram to discuss methods
of interrogation and punishment, including shackling to fixed objects.

"My personal question then was, 'Is it inhumane to handcuff somebody to
something?' " he said. Referring to his consultations with the two senior
lawyers at Bagram, he added, "It was our opinion that it was not inhumane."

After the deaths, officers who served at Bagram said, there was a similar debate
over whether criminal charges were warranted.

Military lawyers noted that the autopsies of the two dead detainees had found
severe trauma to both prisoners' legs - injuries that a coroner later compared
to the effect of being run over by a bus. They also acknowledged statements by
more than half a dozen guards that they or others had struck the detainees. But
the lawyers and other officers did not press for a fuller accounting, two
officers said in interviews.

Instead, statements showed, they pointed to indications that both detainees had
some existing medical problems when they arrived at Bagram, and emphasized that
it would be difficult to determine the responsibility of individual guards for
the injuries they sustained in custody.

"No one blow could be determined to have caused the death," the senior staff
lawyer at Bagram, Col. David L. Hayden, said he had been told by the Army's lead
investigator. "It was reasonable to conclude at the time that repetitive
administration of legitimate force resulted in all the injuries we saw." Both
Major Bovarnick and Colonel Hayden declined requests for comment.

As late as Feb. 7 - nearly two months after the first autopsy reports had
classified both deaths as homicides - the American commander of coalition forces
in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said in an interview that he had "no
indication" that either man had been injured in custody.

Asked repeatedly to clarify his remarks, General McNeill, who has since been
promoted, said last week through his spokesman, Col. Lewis M. Boone, that he
would answer questions sent to him by e-mail. But after telling a reporter on
Thursday that the responses would be delivered momentarily, Colonel Boone said
he had heard nothing from the general and could not account for what had
happened.

In retrospect, many of the investigators' initial interviews with guards,
interrogators and interpreters at the detention center appear cursory and
sometimes contradictory. As transcribed, many of the statements are little more
than a page or two long.

Most of the guards who admitted punching the detainees or kneeing them in the
thighs said they did so in order to subdue prisoners who were extraordinarily
combative. But both detainees were shackled at the hands and feet virtually all
of the time they were at Bagram. One of them, Mr. Dilawar, weighed only 122
pounds and was described by interpreters as neither violent nor aggressive. Both
detainees also complained of being beaten and seemed to have trouble walking,
yet they were not seen by doctors after their initial examinations.

The early interviews also included statements by two of the interpreters that
they had been so troubled by the abusive behavior of some interrogators that
they had gone to the noncommissioned officer in charge of the military
intelligence group, Staff Sergeant Loring, to complain. One of the
interrogators, Specialist Damien M. Corsetti, refused speak to the agents at
all, and another told of the guards' beating one of the detainees who died.

Even so, investigators failed to interview some crucial witnesses, including the
officer in charge of the interrogators, Captain Wood, and the commander of the
military police company, Captain Beiring. They also neglected an interrogator
who had been present for most of Mr. Dilawar's questioning. When he finally went
to investigators at his own initiative, he described one of the worst episodes
of abuse.

Many of the guards who later provided important testimony were also initially
overlooked. Computer records and written logs that were supposed to record
treatment of the detainees were not secured and later disappeared. Blood taken
from Mr. Habibullah was stored in a butter dish in the agents' office
refrigerator, from which it was only recovered - or "seized" as a report
explains it - when the office was moved months later.

The record of the investigation indicated that Army investigators almost
entirely stopped interviewing witnesses within three weeks after Mr. Dilawar's
death. And although Major Bovarnick, the detention center's legal adviser, said
he told Captain Beiring after the first death "that there would be no shackling
to the ceiling ever again," the issue was largely ignored in the initial
investigation.

While the Army's criminal inquiry continued, General McNeill ordered a senior
officer, Col. Joseph G. Nesbitt, to conduct a separate, classified examination
of procedures at the detention center. That led to changes including
prohibitions against the shackling of prisoners for sleep deprivation and
interrogators' making physical contact with detainees.

Documents from the criminal investigation suggested that Colonel Nesbitt was
also dismissive of the notion that the two deaths pointed to wider wrongdoing.
He concluded that military police guards at the detention center "knew, were
following and strictly applying" proper rules on the use of force, documents
showed, and he cited a "conflict between obtaining accurate, timely information
and treating detainees humanely."

Senior officials at the Criminal Investigation Command's headquarters took a
different view. On April 15, 2003, they rejected the field agents' proposal to
close the case, sending it back "for numerous investigative, operational,
administrative and security classification-related issues, which required
additional work, pursuit, clarification or scrutiny." Four months later, the
headquarters officials reassigned the case to the task force that eventually
implicated the 27 soldiers.

*

New York Times --

May 17, 2005
NEWSWEEK SAYS IT IS RETRACTING KORAN REPORT
By Katharine Q. Seelye and Neil A. Lewis

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/17/politics/17koran.html?pagewanted=print

After a drumbeat of criticism from the Bush administration and others, Newsweek
magazine yesterday went beyond an apology it issued Sunday and retracted an
article published May 1 that stated that American interrogators at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, had tried to rattle Muslim detainees by flushing a Koran down a
toilet.

The original article was blamed for inciting widespread protests and riots in
the Muslim world, where desecration of the Koran is viewed as an incendiary act,
and where at least 17 people were killed in the ensuing violence.

"Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an
internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay,"
the statement from Newsweek said.

The carefully worded retraction came after the White House said the Newsweek
article had damaged the image of the United States abroad. It reflected the
severity of consequences that even one sentence in a brief news item can have at
a time of intense anti-American sentiment overseas and political polarization,
as well as extreme distrust of the mainstream media at home.

Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek, said in an interview that the magazine was
retracting the part of the article saying sources told Newsweek that a coming
military report would say interrogators had flushed a holy book down the toilet
to unnerve detainees. As it turned out, Newsweek now says, there was one source.
And Mr. Whitaker said that because that source had "backed away" from his
original account, the magazine could "no longer stand by" it.

"I did not want to be in the position of splitting hairs," Mr. Whitaker said,
"to look like we were being evasive or not fully forthcoming."

The magazine's retraction was the latest step in a complicated and fast-moving
drama that involved a disparate cast of players, including one of the nation's
top investigative news reporters and a cricket star in Pakistan. In the span of
a few days, it has added a new dimension to the journalistic debate about
anonymous sources as well as new questions about how the United States treats
captives from the Muslim world.

In the interview, Mr. Whitaker contrasted his action with that of CBS News when
it refused to back down immediately last year from a report that raised
questions about President Bush's National Guard service.

"Clearly it became a problem for CBS because people thought they weren't
acknowledging that they screwed up," Mr. Whitaker said.

He continued: "Unlike CBS, we felt we were being extremely forthcoming by
publishing all the details and publishing the Pentagon's denials and saying we
committed an error. But then it seemed that people felt like we weren't
apologizing. In order for people to understand we had made an error, we had to
say 'retraction' because that's the word they were looking for."

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said yesterday morning that he
found it "puzzling" that Newsweek had not retracted the article. "There is a
certain journalistic standard that should be met," he said, "and in this case it
was not."

Mr. McClellan and Mr. Whitaker said that no senior White House officials had
spoken privately to Newsweek's management to seek a retraction. After Newsweek
retracted the article in the afternoon, Mr. McClellan called it a "good first
step."

Mr. McClellan and other administration officials blamed the Newsweek article for
setting off the anti-American violence that swept Afghanistan and Pakistan. "The
report had real consequences," Mr. McClellan said. "People have lost their
lives. Our image abroad has been damaged."

But only a few days earlier, in a briefing on Thursday, Gen. Richard B. Myers,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had said that the senior commander in
Afghanistan believed the protests had stemmed from that country's reconciliation
process.

"He thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine," General
Myers said.

In the interview, Mr. Whitaker expressed frustration at the Pentagon for not
informing the magazine of questions about the accuracy of the original account
until about 10 days after it was published. He added that the magazine was
continuing to report on the underlying accusations of Koran desecration.

An article in the current Newsweek said the original item, written by a veteran
investigative reporter, Michael Isikoff, and the magazine's national security
correspondent, John Barry, relied on a "longtime reliable source" who told Mr.
Isikoff that a new report on prisoner abuses at Guantanamo would include a
mention of a Koran being flushed down a toilet. The magazine said it showed the
original article to a Pentagon official who challenged one aspect of the story
but not the report about the desecration of the Koran.

Because of other reports about prisoner abuses there, the magazine said, the
toilet incident "seemed shocking but not incredible."

In fact, complaints from released inmates that the Koran had been thrown into a
toilet go back at least two years.

Among the more detailed accounts of United States soldiers mishandling copies of
the Koran were depositions from three Britons who were released from Guantanamo
in the summer of 2004. Asif Iqbal, one of the men, who were from Tipton,
England, and had been captured in Afghanistan, said that guards "would kick the
Koran, throw it in the toilet and generally disrespect it."

Military officials dismissed the complaints as commanders at Guantanamo
conducted media tours of the facility during which they emphasized steps taken
to demonstrate respect for Islam. Inmates, they noted, were given copies of the
Koran along with a cloth surgical mask, which they used as a kind of sling to
suspend the book from the wire mesh walls to ensure it did not touch the floor.

The official accounts of Guantanamo began fraying in later months, as the
International Committee of the Red Cross charged in a confidential report in
November that the procedures at Guantanamo amounted to torture, and F.B.I.
memorandums disclosed in December portrayed harsh and abusive treatment by
interrogators. The F.B.I. memorandums, disclosed in a lawsuit, did not mention
any mishandling of the Koran.

Last month, a former American interrogator confirmed to The New York Times an
account given in an interview by a former Kuwaiti detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser
al-Mutairi, who said that mishandling of the Koran once led to a major hunger
strike. The strike ended only after a senior officer expressed regret over the
camp's loudspeaker system, which was simultaneously translated by linguists at
the end of each cell block, the former interrogator said.

In that case, the accusations were of copies of the Koran being tossed on the
floor in a pile and treated roughly, but there was no assertion that any had
been put in the toilet.

Erik Saar, a co-author of the book "Inside the Wire" and an Arabic language
translator at Guantanamo from January to June 2003, said in an interview Monday
that while he "never saw anything along the lines of a Koran being flushed down
a toilet," the issue of how guards and interrogators handled the book was a
chronic problem.

"It was one of the things that kept resurfacing because guards had to inspect
the cells occasionally for contraband," Mr. Saar said. He said that commanders
tried to deal with detainees' sensitivity about the Koran in several ways,
including enlisting some of the Muslims working for the military as translators
to handle the books during inspections, so that nonbelievers would not touch the
books. But that was not always done, he said, and there was no regular policy.
The issue "created friction and problems all the time," he said.

The outcry over the Newsweek article apparently began in Pakistan, when Imran
Khan, the legendary cricketer turned opposition politician, summoned reporters
to a press conference on May 6 to draw attention to it. Once close to the
Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and a onetime crusader against
corruption, Mr. Khan has been vocal in recent years against United States
strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Islam is under attack in the name of the war on terror," Mr. Khan, now one of
General Musharraf's most stalwart critics, told reporters. He pressed the
Musharraf regime to demand an apology from Washington.

For the next several days, the report dominated the front pages of English and
Urdu-language newspapers in Pakistan and became the center of debate in the
Pakistan Parliament. Predictably, a coalition of Islamist parties seized on the
Newsweek report to excoriate General Musharraf's government for colluding with
the West against Islam. But the criticism was not limited to the religious
right. Legislators from across the political spectrum denounced the reported
desecration, and by Friday, May 13, Parliament had passed a unanimous resolution
condemning it.

Adnan Rehmat, the country director for Internews, a media training program
financed by the United States government, said the article struck a particularly
sensitive chord among Pakistanis not only because it implied an act of sacrilege
against the holy book but also because it represented yet another act of horror
out of Guantanamo Bay. He called it "a reconfirmation of what they've suspected,
a straight disrespect for the sensitivities of Muslims."

The criticism of General Musharraf, however, did not explode in Pakistan in the
way that it could have. As though to clip opposition wings, an official
statement from the foreign affairs ministry condemned the reported desecration
and called for an inquiry just one day after Mr. Khan's press conference.

"Last Friday, in mass protests called by the Islamist parties, Pakistanis took
to the streets holding aloft 'death to America' banners," the statement said.
"There were no casualties."

But demonstrations turned violent in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, stone throwers
were out on the streets. Along with local government offices, the Pakistani
consulate was attacked apparently as a symbol of Pakistani aid for United States
intervention in Afghanistan. By Friday, the protests had spread to several other
towns in Afghanistan, and by nightfall, 17 people were dead and more than 100
wounded.

That the outcry against the Newsweek report came from two of the Bush
administration's most trusted allies in the Muslim world is not likely to be a
coincidence, analysts said.

Both countries, they pointed out, have political forces seeking to undermine
their respective United States-allied heads of state: the Taliban against
President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, the religious right against the self-
described moderate, General Musharraf, in Pakistan.

On Monday, after Newsweek's published clarification, an Afghan presidential
spokesman, Jawed Ludin, pressed for a "professional and sensitive approach" to
coverage of "potentially sensitive issues."

An article published Monday in Jang, an Urdu-language daily in Pakistan, offered
the most biting assessment of the political fallout of the Newsweek report:
"Osama must be smiling victoriously in his cave," it declared.

In the interview yesterday, Mr. Whitaker said the magazine did not have a
written policy regarding the use of anonymous sources or other reporting
procedures but said the incident would prompt the editors to examine its
policies.

"We'll look to see if this can be codified," he said.

He said he would "more aggressively" discourage the use of anonymous sources and
would consider rules about having a single source on a sensitive article. But he
said he was not prepared to issue a blanket rule against having only one source.

"Sometimes there is only one person, a corporate whistleblower, who is brave
enough to come forward," he said, "but your level of confidence has to be in
inverse proportion to your number of sources."

Still, damage-control experts said that Newsweek's handling of the story had
created a public relations disaster.

"They tap-danced," said Robert K. Passikoff, president of Brand Keys Inc., a
consumer loyalty firm based in New York. "They should have immediately bit the
bullet and admitted they were wrong. There was no middle ground here.'"

Dr. Passikoff said that the retraction "seems like too little, too late" because
of the nature of the error. "It had such far-reaching effects," he said. "People
died because of this story."

Analysts said Newsweek was also damaged by the timing of this event, coming
after a spate of high-profile journalistic scandals involving fabrications and
plagiarism by reporters at other news organizations, including The New York
Times.

"I think that this has the potential to be one of those so-called tipping
points," said David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a senior aide to four presidents.
Mr. Gergen also works for U.S. News & World Report, a competitor to Newsweek.

"There is a lot of anger, both here and abroad," Mr. Gergen added. "The Muslim
world is going to continue to believe that this actually happened and that
Newsweek is only issuing a retraction because of the reaction."

He said the magazine was smart to issue the retraction, but that it would not
quell the outrage. "If anything, it is mushrooming and becoming uglier by the
hour," he said.

Katharine Q. Seelye reported from New York for this article, and Neil A. Lewis
from Washington. Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan;
Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan;and Somini Sengupta from New Delhi.

*

Washington Post --

April 24, 2005
IN A JAIL IN CUBA BEAT THE HEART OF A POET
By N.C. Aizenmann

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12399-2005Apr23.html

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Among the old leather volumes in the library of Abdul
Rahim Muslim Dost is a black plastic binder full of rumpled letters he wrote,
sent from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

At the bottom of each form is a perfunctory salutation. The rest is taken up
with the poems that helped Dost keep his sanity during nearly three years of
confinement.

"Bangle bracelets befit a pretty young woman," begins one of the poems.
"Handcuffs befit a brave young man."

The letters were one in a series of measures the Afghan-born author said he took
to record the torrent of imagery and insights that flooded his brain nearly
every day of his captivity.

At first, deprived of paper and pen, Dost memorized his best lines or scribbled
them secretly on paper cups. Later, he was supplied with writing materials and
made up for lost time by producing reams of poems and essays -- only to have all
but a few of the documents confiscated by the U.S. government upon his release.

"Why did they give me a pen and paper if they were planning to do that?" Dost
asked last week with evident anguish. "Each word was like a child to me --
irreplaceable."

The slight, soft-spoken man of 44 was back in his library Friday in this city
near the Pakistani-Afghan border, surrounded by stacks of Islamic texts. It was
just two days after the U.S. government had delivered him and 15 other former
prisoners to Afghan authorities.

As soon as he was freed, Dost headed east to Peshawar, his home since the 1980s,
where several hundred well-wishers and eight shy children waited to greet him in
a large carpeted parlor.

Dost said he was arrested by Pakistani police in November 2001, along with his
younger brother, Badr. The two were kept in solitary confinement for two months,
then transferred to U.S. military detention in Afghanistan, where prisoners were
kept in larger groups but forbidden to speak to one another.

The brothers, both gemstone dealers, said they had been falsely accused by
enemies linked to the Pakistani government and detained in the frenzied hunt for
terrorists that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They said they had no
links to either Afghanistan's Taliban regime or al Qaeda.

But their American captors, they said, seemed to believe otherwise. In
Afghanistan, they said, Americans sheared off their beards, forbade them to
wash, shoved their faces into the dirt and screamed curses in their ears during
frequent interrogations.

The accounts could not be independently verified. The procedures are secret, and
U.S. officials in Afghanistan refused to comment on the 16 detainees released
last week.

Badr, who was released six months ago, said he volunteered to clean out the
metal drums used by prisoners for bathing, hoping to get close enough to Dost to
quietly compare notes on the accounts they were giving interrogators.

Dost had other priorities.

"What kind of spring is this," he whispered in verse as Badr approached, "where
there are no flowers and the air is filled with a miserable smell?"

Badr said he gaped in disbelief. Even in prison, his brother was composing
poems.

But Badr said he gained new appreciation for Dost's talent after they were
shipped to Guantanamo in May 2002. The two were kept in separate wire pens, and
could only glimpse each other from a distance. The U.S. government had declared
all such prisoners "enemy combatants," subject to indefinite detention and
ineligible for many rights accorded prisoners of war.

Badr said he grew increasingly depressed, until one day someone handed him a
tiny note written on a flattened paper cup.

"It was just a short poem," Badr recalled. "Something about how in life
everything is possible and we should be patient because freedom is close at
hand." But it was enough to swell his heart with hope. "I was suddenly so
happy," he said.

Dost had smuggled the note to Badr through an ingenious ruse. Every few days,
representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived with
forms so prisoners could write brief letters home. They were given only 10
minutes, but that was enough to dash off other notes on hidden scraps of paper
cups. Prisoners then passed the messages between wire pens on pulleys made of
threads from their prayer caps.

Dost said he also began adding poems to the Red Cross forms. When they reached
Peshawar, his oldest son carefully stowed each new missive in the black plastic
binder.

In his first months of confinement, Dost's poetry had been full of despair. But
now, having at last found a way to record his compositions, Dost said he felt
his spirits lift. The heat and mosquitoes in the camp were as bothersome as
ever, but his sense of hopelessness gave way to optimism and defiance.

"Just as the heart beats inside the darkness of the body, so I, although in a
cage, continue to beat with life," began one letter-poem. "Those who have no
courage or honor think themselves free, but are slaves. I am flying on the wings
of thought, and so, even in this cage, I am more free than they."

Meanwhile, about a year after Dost's arrival in Cuba, he learned that U.S.
authorities had agreed to allow the prisoners pens and paper.

The rules were strict. To prevent detainees from using pens as weapons, the
guards gave out a flexible, rubber variety that made writing awkward. Each man
was limited to one sheet of paper per shift, but Dost said fellow inmates
donated their paper to him, then eagerly read his poems. One of his most popular
was a satire criticizing the U.S. military for sending people to Cuba on thin
evidence.

"That poem was on everybody's lips," he recalled with a proud smile.

Dost's satirical penchant had gotten him into trouble before. After he wrote a
poem lampooning an Islamic cleric in Peshawar, he said, the man bore him such a
grudge that he fingered him to Pakistani intelligence agents, leading to his
arrest.

At Guantanamo, he said, he had to spend hours explaining to interrogators a
satirical essay he had published in 1998, after President Bill Clinton offered a
$5 million reward for Osama bin Laden. Dost's essay offered a reward of 5
million afghanis -- then the equivalent of about $113, he said -- for Clinton.

Eventually, he said, the interrogators seemed convinced that he had not meant
any serious harm. In February 2004, Dost said, he was transferred to another
section of Guantanamo where he had access to as much paper as he wanted.

He continued to produce hundreds of poems, translated the Koran into Pashto and
wrote a text on Islamic jurisprudence.

In the meantime, Dost said, he was taken before a review tribunal, a brief
procedure that he described as a "show trial," even though it ultimately
resulted in his release. To date, U.S. military officials said, 232 Guantanamo
detainees have been released and more than 500 remain in custody.

Often, Dost said, the guards conducted raids when officials suspected a detainee
had issued a fatwa -- an Islamic decree against them. Each time, all inmates'
writings were confiscated. Dost said he was assured that his work would be
returned to him on his release.

But when that day finally came last week, Dost said, he received only a duffel
bag with a blanket, a change of clothes and a few hundred papers -- a fraction
of his writings.

This parting blow, he said, struck him harder than all the humiliations of
confinement. On Friday, as well-wishers swarmed into his home, he said his only
thought was how to recover his work.

"If they give me back my writings, truly I will feel as though I was never
imprisoned," he said. "And if they don't . . . "

Dost's voice trailed off. For the first time in three years, he was at a loss
for words.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

* * *


-- Boston Globe / IHT

March 16, 2005
ABUSE LED NAVY TO CONSIDER PULLING CUBA INTERROGATORS
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/03/16/abuse_led_navy_
to_consider_pulling_cuba_interrogators/

WASHINGTON -- Top US Navy officials were so outraged at abusive interrogation
techniques being used at the Guantanamo Bay prison in late 2002 that they
considered removing Navy interrogators from the operation, according to a
portion of a recent Pentagon report that has not been made public.

A top Navy psychologist reported to his supervisor in December 2002 that
interrogators at Guantanamo were starting to use "abusive techniques." In a
separate incident that same month, the Defense Department's joint investigative
service, which includes Navy investigators, formally "disassociated" itself from
the interrogation of a detainee, after learning that he had been subjected to
particularly abusive and degrading treatment.

The two events prompted Navy law enforcement officials to debate pulling out of
the Guantanamo operation entirely unless the interrogation techniques were
restricted. The Navy's general counsel, Alberto Mora, told colleagues that the
techniques were "unlawful and unworthy of the military services."

The previously undisclosed events were disclosed at a hearing of the Senate
Armed Forces Committee yesterday. The disclosures shed new light on the military
services' objections to the Bush administration's policies on how to interrogate
prisoners from the Afghanistan war.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said the events are outlined in the
largely classified report on military detention and interrogation operations
delivered last week by Navy Vice Admiral Albert T. Church. Levin did not
disclose which techniques were used on prisoners that triggered the Navy's
unusual concerns.

Levin said the Navy's expressions of outrage prompted Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld's decision in January 2003 to revoke an aggressive interrogation
policy for Guantanamo detainees, according to the Church report. Rumsfeld then
convened a Pentagon working group to examine interrogation issues more
thoroughly. It came up with a more restricted interrogation policy in April
2003.

Specifically, the chain of events began when Dr. Michael Gelles, the chief
psychologist of the Navy Criminal Investigative Service, or NCIS, completed a
study of Guantanamo interrogations in December 2003 that included extracts of
interrogation logs. Gelles reported to the service director, David Brant, that
interrogators were using "abusive techniques and coercive psychological
procedures."

The news prompted Brant to argue that if those aggressive practices continued,
the agency would have to "consider whether to remain" at Guantanamo. At the same
time, Mora, the Navy's general counsel, told colleagues that the techniques were
"unlawful and unworthy of the military services," according to Levin's account.

That same month, Brant told Mora about a specific detainee who was "being
subjected to physical abuse and degrading treatment." Mora took those concerns
to the Defense Department's criminal investigative task force, which took the
extraordinary step of deciding to disassociate itself from that detainee's
interrogation.

Calling the Navy officials' concerns "very serious," Levin yesterday asked the
commander of the US Southern Command, General Bantz Craddock, whether he could
shed any further light on the matter at yesterday's hearing. Craddock has
overseen Guantanamo since last year and was previously Rumsfeld's top uniformed
military aide.

Craddock said he was unaware of the extent of the Navy's objections and had not
read the full Church report, but the account matched the timeline of events as
he recalled them. Guantanamo interrogators asked permission to use more
aggressive techniques in the fall of 2002, he noted. Rumsfeld approved a list of
techniques around December 2002, and then rescinded it in January 2003.

"I do recall the Navy general counsel advising the secretary that there were
concerns with regards to interrogation techniques," Craddock said. "It was [at]
a point thereafter that the approval of those techniques was rescinded in
January and the working group was formed."

A former member of the Pentagon's detainee working group noted in an interview
yesterday that the NCIS trains its agents to gather information that can be used
to prosecute criminal defendants. He argued that it was appropriate for
Guantanamo interrogations to use more aggressive methods because their purpose
was to gather information for fighting terrorism, but he said NCIS officials may
not have accepted that distinction.

The major source of Church's findings, Levin said at the hearing, is a memo Mora
wrote in July 2004. At about the same time, FBI agents wrote a series of e-
mails, recently made public, about abusive interrogations they said they
witnessed.

The FBI memos described "torture techniques" that it said included shackling
detainees into painful positions, forced nakedness, deafening music, temperature
extremes, and sexual humiliation by female interrogators.

Southcom is investigating the FBI reports. This week, Newsweek reported that
Southcom has recalled to active duty four reservists who had served as
interrogators because they may have to face courts-martial for their handling of
prisoners. Craddock yesterday said only that the investigation was "ongoing" and
that the Newsweek report was "news to me."

Rumsfeld tapped Church to review the military's detention-and-interrogation
operations after the disclosure of the Abu Ghraib photographs in May 2004.
Church concluded there was no policy, "written or otherwise," by which top
officials sanctioned abuses. He attributed abuses to battlefield stress and
insufficient oversight.

Democrats have criticized his inquiry as insufficiently thorough.

* * *


Washington Post --

February 1, 2005; Page A01

JUDGE RULES DETAINEE TRIBUNALS ILLEGAL

By Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post Staff Writer

A federal judge ruled yesterday that the Bush administration must allow
prisoners at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to contest their
detention in U.S. courts, concluding that special military reviews established
by the Pentagon as an alternative are illegal.

U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green said that the approximately 550 men held as
"enemy combatants" are entitled to the advice of lawyers and to confront the
evidence against them in those proceedings. But, she found, the Defense
Department has largely denied them these "most basic fundamental rights" during
the reviews conducted at Guantanamo Bay, in the name of protecting the United
States from terrorism.

Green's ruling directly conflicts with one issued by another federal court judge
in Washington two weeks ago. U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon, who heard the
case of a smaller group of detainees, wrote that their bid for freedom is
supported by "no viable legal theory." Green went beyond the question of whether
detainees had rights and found the "combatant status review tribunals" illegal.

The conflict will now head to higher courts. Still, Green's decision was a legal
victory for the detainees and for the civil liberties groups that filed claims
on their behalf last summer. It underscored the ongoing legal battle over how to
implement a landmark Supreme Court ruling last summer that gave the detainees
the right to contest U.S. accusations and challenge their indefinite detentions.

Green, who is overseeing more than 60 legal claims from detainees challenging
their imprisonment, said some captives may indeed be Taliban or al Qaeda
fighters, as the U.S. military argues. But, she said, the reviews designed to
determine that are so stacked against them that their findings cannot be
trusted. Because of the imbalance, she said, she cannot dismiss the detainees'
claims, as the government had asked.

"Although this nation unquestionably must take strong action under the
leadership of the commander in chief to protect itself against enormous and
unprecedented threats, that necessity cannot negate the existence of the most
basic fundamental rights for which the people of this country have fought and
died for well over two hundred years," Green wrote.

Green found that the military relied heavily on reported confessions of
detainees to determine whether they are enemy combatants. But she expressed some
skepticism about the reliability of such confessions because of widespread
allegations and some evidence of abuse of detainees during interrogations.

The Pentagon has completed 558 combatant status reviews since July and taken
final action in 330 cases. Military officials have determined that 327 men were
rightfully classified as enemy combatants and ordered the release of the other
three.

One lawyer who filed dozens of legal challenges on behalf of detainees within
hours of the Supreme Court ruling said the government has stonewalled for more
than seven months since that decision.

"The good thing about this ruling is it says, 'Hey, you, in the White House,
this law applies to you,' " said Barbara Olshansky of the Center for
Constitutional Rights. "But it also sends a message around the world, that
despite this vigilante administration, our democratic institutions are working
and are here to make sure we stay in line with the principles upon which our
country was founded."

Lawyers and a spokesman for the government said they agreed with Leon's decision
and planned to appeal Green's. "The Department of Defense continues to believe
that the combatant status review tribunals provided an appropriate venue for
detainees to meaningfully challenge their enemy combatant designation," said
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico.

Green criticized the military for using what she called an illogically broad
definition of "enemy combatant" in deciding to hold Muslim men from dozens of
countries for as long as three years. She said in many cases people were
detained simply for being alleged members of groups that do not like Americans.

Green quoted extensively from the tribunal proceeding against Mustafa Ait Idir,
34, an Algerian living in Bosnia who was accused of plotting with others to blow
up a U.S. embassy there. Idir noted that a Bosnian court found no evidence
against him and repeatedly but unsuccessfully asked tribunal officials to
present their evidence that he was an al Qaeda fighter. He argued he could not
prove a negative, and that he would hit a person who claimed he was a terrorist
in the face, which prompted the tribunal members to laugh.

The exchange "might have been truly humorous had the consequences of the
detainee's 'enemy combatant' status not been so terribly serious and had the
detainee's criticism of the process not been so piercingly accurate," the judge
wrote.

Green also differentiated between fighters for Afghanistan's former Taliban
government and al Qaeda operatives, concluding that Taliban members, because
they fought in the name of the Afghan government, are entitled to international
protections provided to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. The U.S.
government has repeatedly asserted that it is not required to apply the
protections to members of either group because all are enemy combatants engaged
in terrorism.

Lawyer Eugene R. Fidell, an expert on military law, said Green's ruling is one
of a growing number of court decisions limiting White House efforts to claim
unbridled power in the name of combating terrorism.

"This is a classic illustration of someone speaking truth to power," Fidell
said. "It's things like this that make the judiciary the jewel in the crown of
our democracy."

Bruce Fein, who was a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration,
criticized Green's ruling, saying she had "made a strained effort to slap the
government" and confused wartime enemies with American citizens.

[ Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. ]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51007-2005Jan31.html

* * *

New York Times --

January 13, 2005

WHITE HOUSE FOUGHT NEW CURBS ON INTERROGATIONS, OFFICIALS SAY

By Douglas Jehl and David Johnston

http://nytimes.com/2005/01/13/politics/13intel.html

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 - At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders
scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new
restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American
intelligence officers, Congressional officials say.

The defeat of the proposal affects one of the most obscure arenas of the war on
terrorism, involving the Central Intelligence Agency's secret detention and
interrogation of top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind
of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen other senior members of Al Qaeda
and its offshoots.

The Senate had approved the new restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the
intelligence reform legislation. They would have explicitly extended to
intelligence officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and
would have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress
about the methods they were using.

But in intense closed-door negotiations, Congressional officials said, four
senior members from the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final
bill after the White House expressed opposition.

In a letter to members of Congress, sent in October and made available by the
White House on Wednesday in response to inquiries, Condoleezza Rice, the
national security adviser, expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds
that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not
now entitled under applicable law and policy."

Earlier, in objecting to a similar measure in a Senate version of the military
authorization bill, the Defense Department sent a letter to Congress saying that
the department "strongly urges the Senate against passing new legislation
concerning detention and interrogation in the war on terrorism" because it is
unnecessary.

The Senate restrictions had not been in House versions of the military or
intelligence bills.

In interviews on Wednesday, both Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican
negotiator, and Representative Jane Harman of California, a Democratic
negotiator, said the lawmakers had ultimately decided that the question of
whether to extend the restrictions to intelligence officers was too complex to
be included in the legislation.

"The conferees agreed that they would drop the language but with the caveat that
the intelligence committees would take up the issue this year," Ms. Collins
said.

Ms. Harman said, "If there are special circumstances around some intelligence
interrogations, we should understand that before we legislate."

Some Democratic Congressional officials said they believed that the Bush
administration was trying to maintain some legal latitude for the C.I.A. to use
interrogation practices more extreme than those permitted by the military.

In its report last summer, the independent commission on the Sept. 11 attacks
recommended that the United States develop policies to guarantee that captured
terrorists were treated humanely.

Martin Lederman, a former Justice Department lawyer who left the department in
2002, said in an interview on Wednesday that he believed that the administration
had "always wanted to leave a loophole where the C.I.A. could engage in actions
just up to the line of torture."

The administration has said almost nothing about the C.I.A. operation to
imprison and question terror suspects designated as high-value detainees, even
as it has expressed disgust about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Senior officials have sought in recent public statements to emphasize that the
government will continue to abide by federal laws that prohibit torture.

At his confirmation hearing last week on his nomination to be attorney general,
Alberto R. Gonzales said he found torture abhorrent.

The issue of the C.I.A.'s treatment of detainees first arose after agency
officials sought legal guidance on how far its employees and contractors could
go in interrogating terror suspects and whether the law barred the C.I.A. from
using extreme methods, including feigned drowning, in the interrogation of Abu
Zubaydah, the first of the Qaeda leaders captured by the United States. He was
apprehended in Pakistan in early 2002.

An August 2002 legal opinion by the Justice Department said that interrogation
methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to "organ failure,
impairment of bodily function or even death" could be allowable without being
considered torture. The administration disavowed that opinion last summer after
the classified legal opinion was publicly disclosed.

A new opinion made public late last month, signed by James B. Comey, the deputy
attorney general, explicitly rejected torture and adopted more restrictive
standards to define it.

But a cryptic footnote to the new document about the "treatment of detainees"
referred to what the officials said were other still-classified opinions. The
footnote meant, the officials said, that coercive techniques approved by the
Justice Department under the looser interpretation of the torture statutes were
still lawful even under the new, more restrictive interpretation.

Current and former government officials said specific interrogation methods were
addressed in a series of still-secret documents, including an August 2002 one by
the Justice Department that authorized the C.I.A.'s use of some 20 interrogation
practices. The legal opinion was sent to the C.I.A. via the National Security
Council at the White House.

Among the procedures approved by the document was waterboarding, in which a
subject is made to believe he might be drowned.

The document was intended to guide the C.I.A. in its interrogation of Mr.
Zubaydah and a handful of other high-level detainees. Instead, it led to a
series of exchanges between the Justice Department and the intelligence agency
as they debated exact procedures to be employed against individual detainees.

At times, their discussion included an assessment of whether specific measures,
on a detainee by detainee basis, would cause such pain as to be considered
torture.

In addition to Ms. Collins and Ms. Harman, the lawmakers in the conference
committee negotiations were Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of
Connecticut, and Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan.

The Senate measure to impose new restrictions on the use of extreme
interrogation measures, drafted by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of
Illinois, was in an amendment introduced by Mr. Lieberman and Senator John
McCain, Republican of Arizona. And in little-noticed comments on the Senate
floor in December, Mr. Durbin complained that the decision by conferees to
delete the measure had been "troublesome."

"I think the intelligence community should be held to the same standards as the
Department of Defense," Mr. Durbin said in those remarks, "and taking this
language out of the bill will make that very difficult to monitor, as I hoped we
would be able to do."

A Congressional Democrat said the White House stance had left the impression
"that the administration wanted an escape hatch to preserve the option of using
torture" against prisoners held by the C.I.A.

The only public statement from the Bush administration about the kinds of
restrictions proposed by Mr. Durbin came last June, when the Defense Department
expressed strong opposition to a measure in the military authorization bill.
That measure, adopted by the Senate, also imposed restrictions prohibiting
torture as well as cruel, inhuman and other degrading treatment but it applied
only to Defense Department personnel.

In a letter to Congress, Daniel J. Dell'Orto, the Pentagon's principal deputy
counsel, criticized the legislation as unnecessary, saying it would "leave the
current state of the law exactly where it is." Mr. Dell'Orto also criticized as
"onerous" and inappropriate other provisions in the measure that would require
the Pentagon to submit annual facility-by-facility reports to Congress on the
status of detainees.

Ultimately, the House did not include the measure in its version of that
military bill, and the final version of the legislation included only nonbinding
language expressing a sense of Congress that American personnel should not
engage in torture.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

* * *

Seattle Times --

January 09, 2005
REPORTER INVESTIGATES INVESTIGATION INTO YEE
By Mike Fancher, Times executive editor

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002146215_fancher09.html

January 9-16, 2005
SUSPICION IN THE RANKS
Inside the spy investigation of Capt. James Yee
A special report by Ray Rivera

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/nation-world/jamesyee/

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002144979_yeechapter1.html

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002145880_yeechapter2.html

* * *


January 2, 2005

LONG-TERM PLAN SOUGHT FOR TERROR SUSPECTS

By Dana Priest, Washington Post Staff Writer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41475-2005Jan1

Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely
imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn over
to courts in the United States or other countries, according to intelligence,
defense and diplomatic officials.

The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more
permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds
of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have
enough evidence to charge in courts. The outcome of the review, which also
involves the State Department, would also affect those expected to be captured
in the course of future counterterrorism operations.

"We've been operating in the moment because that's what has been required," said
a senior administration official involved in the discussions, who said the
current detention system has strained relations between the United States and
other countries. "Now we can take a breath. We have the ability and need to look
at long-term solutions."

One proposal under review is the transfer of large numbers of Afghan, Saudi and
Yemeni detainees from the military's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center into
new U.S.-built prisons in their home countries. The prisons would be operated by
those countries, but the State Department, where this idea originated, would ask
them to abide by recognized human rights standards and would monitor compliance,
the senior administration official said.

As part of a solution, the Defense Department, which holds 500 prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay, plans to ask Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed prison
to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for
lack of evidence, according to defense officials.

The new prison, dubbed Camp 6, would allow inmates more comfort and freedom than
they have now, and would be designed for prisoners the government believes have
no more intelligence to share, the officials said. It would be modeled on a U.S.
prison and would allow socializing among inmates.

"Since global war on terror is a long-term effort, it makes sense for us to be
looking at solutions for long-term problems," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon
spokesman. "This has been evolutionary, but we are at a point in time where we
have to say, 'How do you deal with them in the long term?' "

The administration considers its toughest detention problem to involve the
prisoners held by the CIA. The CIA has been scurrying since Sept. 11, 2001, to
find secure locations abroad where it could detain and interrogate captives
without risk of discovery, and without having to give them access to legal
proceedings.

Little is known about the CIA's captives, the conditions under which they are
kept -- or the procedures used to decide how long they are held or when they may
be freed. That has prompted criticism from human rights groups, and from some in
Congress and the administration, who say the lack of scrutiny or oversight
creates an unacceptable risk of abuse.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the House intelligence committee
who has received classified briefings on the CIA's detainees and interrogation
methods, said that given the long-term nature of the detention situation, "I
think there should be a public debate about whether the entire system should be
secret.

"The details about the system may need to remain secret," Harman said. At the
least, she said, detainees should be registered so that their treatment can be
tracked and monitored within the government. "This is complicated. We don't want
to set up a bureaucracy that ends up making it impossible to protect sources and
informants who operate within the groups we want to penetrate."

The CIA is believed to be holding fewer than three dozen al Qaeda leaders in
prison. The agency holds most, if not all, of the top captured al Qaeda leaders,
including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Abu Zubaida and the lead
Southeast Asia terrorist, Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, 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. The Washington Post reported last month that the CIA has also
maintained a facility within the Pentagon's Guantanamo Bay complex, though it is
unclear whether it is still in use.

In contrast to the CIA, the military produced and declassified hundreds of pages
of documents about its detention and interrogation procedures after the Abu
Ghraib prison scandal. And the military detainees are guaranteed access to the
International Committee of the Red Cross and, as a result of a U.S. Supreme
Court ruling, have the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court.

But no public hearings in Congress have been held on CIA detention practices,
and congressional officials say CIA briefings on the subject have been too
superficial and were limited to the chairman and vice chairman of the House and
Senate intelligence committees.

The CIA had floated a proposal to build an isolated prison with the intent of
keeping it secret, one intelligence official said. That was dismissed
immediately as impractical.

One approach used by the CIA has been to transfer captives it picks up abroad to
third countries willing to hold them indefinitely and without public
proceedings. The transfers, called "renditions," depend on arrangements between
the United States and other countries, such as Egypt, Jordan and Afghanistan,
that agree to have local security services hold certain terror suspects in their
facilities for interrogation by CIA and foreign liaison officers.

The practice has been criticized by civil liberties groups and others, who point
out that some of the countries have human rights records that are criticized by
the State Department in annual reports.

Renditions originated in the 1990s as a way of picking up criminals abroad, such
as drug kingpins, and delivering them to courts in the United States or other
countries. Since 2001, the practice has been used to make certain detainees do
not go to court or go back on the streets, officials said.

"The whole idea has become a corruption of renditions," said one CIA officer who
has been involved in the practice. "It's not rendering to justice, it's
kidnapping."

But top intelligence officials and other experts, including former CIA director
George J. Tenet in his testimony before Congress, say renditions are an
effective method of disrupting terrorist cells and persuading detainees to
reveal information.

"Renditions are the most effective way to hold people," said Rohan Gunaratna,
author of "Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror." "The threat of sending
someone to one of these countries is very important. In Europe, the custodial
interrogations have yielded almost nothing" because they do not use the threat
of sending detainees to a country where they are likely to be tortured.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

* * *


New York Times --

January 1, 2005

FRESH DETAILS EMERGE ON HARSH METHODS AT GUANTANAMO

By Neil A. Lewis

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/01/national/01gitmo.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 - Sometime after Mohamed al-Kahtani was imprisoned at
Guantanamo around the beginning of 2003, military officials believed they had a
prize on their hands - someone who was perhaps intended to have been a hijacker
in the Sept. 11 plot.

But his interrogation was not yielding much, so they decided in the middle of
2003 to try a new tactic. Mr. Kahtani, a Saudi, was given a tranquilizer, put in
sensory deprivation garb with blackened goggles, and hustled aboard a plane that
was supposedly taking him to the Middle East.

After hours in the air, the plane landed back at the United States naval base at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was not returned to the regular prison compound
but put in an isolation cell in the base's brig. There, he was subjected to
harsh interrogation procedures that he was encouraged to believe were being
conducted by Egyptian national security operatives.

The account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment given to The New York Times recently by
military intelligence officials and interrogators is the latest of several
developments that have severely damaged the military's longstanding public
version of how the detention and interrogation center at Guantanamo operated.

Interviews with former intelligence officers and interrogators provided new
details and confirmed earlier accounts of inmates being shackled for hours and
left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing
of a cat-food commercial. In addition, some may have been forcibly given enemas
as punishment.

While all the detainees were threatened with harsh tactics if they did not
cooperate, about one in six were eventually subjected to those procedures, one
former interrogator estimated. The interrogator said that when new interrogators
arrived they were told they had great flexibility in extracting information from
detainees because the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base.

Military officials have gone to great lengths to portray Guantanamo as a largely
humane facility for several hundred prisoners, where the harshest sanctioned
punishments consisted of isolation or taking away items like blankets,
toothpaste, dessert or reading material. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who was
the commander of the Guantanamo operation from November 2002 to March 2004,
regularly told visiting members of Congress and journalists that the approach
was designed to build trust between the detainee and his questioner.

"We are detaining these enemy combatants in a humane manner," General Miller
told reporters in March 2004. "Should our men or women be held in similar
circumstances, I would hope they would be treated in this manner."

His successor, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, told reporters in November that he was
"satisfied that the detainees here have not been abused, they've not been
mistreated, they've not been tortured in any way."

Journalists who were permitted to view an interview session from behind a glass
wall during General Hood's tenure were shown an interrogator and detainee
sharing a milkshake and fries from the base's McDonald's and appearing to chat
amiably. It became apparent to reporters comparing notes in August, however,
that the tableau of the interrogator and prisoner sharing a McDonald's meal was
presented to at least three sets of journalists.

In addition to the account of Mr. Kahtani's treatment, the new interviews
provide details and confirm some of the accounts in other recent disclosures
about procedures at Guantanamo: the November report in which the International
Committee of the Red Cross complained privately last summer to the United States
government that the procedures at Guantanamo were "tantamount to torture";
memorandums from F.B.I. officials, most of which were released in December as
part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union; and another set
of interviews with The Times in October in which other former Guantanamo
officials described coercive and abusive techniques regularly employed there.

The information from the various sources frequently matched, providing
corroboration of the use of specific procedures, which included prolonged sleep
deprivation and shackling prisoners in uncomfortable positions for many hours.
One F.B.I. agent wrote his superiors that he saw such restraining techniques
several times. In the most gruesome of the bureau memorandums, he recounted
observing a detainee who had been shackled overnight in a hot cell, soiled
himself and pulled out tufts of hair in misery.

Military officials who participated in the practices said in October that
prisoners had been tormented by being chained to a low chair for hours with
bright flashing lights in their eyes and audio tapes played loudly next to their
ears, including songs by Lil' Kim and Rage Against the Machine and rap
performances by Eminem.

In a recent interview, another former official added new details, saying that
many interrogators used a different audio tape on prisoners, a mix of babies
crying and the television commercial for Meow Mix in which the jingle consists
of repetition of the word "meow."

The people who spoke about what they saw or whose duties made them aware of what
was occurring said they had different reasons for granting interviews. Some said
they objected to the methods, others said they objected to what they regarded as
a chaotic and badly run system, while others offered no reason. They all
declined to be identified by name, some saying they feared retaliation.

Lt. Col. Leon H. Sumpter, the spokesman for the military command at Guantanamo,
said in a statement that officials would not comment on accusations about the
treatment of any individual detainee including Mr. Kahtani, who was captured in
Afghanistan.

"We do not discuss specific interrogation techniques nor do we identify any
specific detainee," Colonel Sumpter said in a statement. "All detainees are
safeguarded and are assured food, drink, clothing, shelter, health care and
basic rights, all in accordance with the Geneva Convention. The U.S. does not
permit, tolerate or condone torture by any of its personnel or employees."

Colonel Sumpter said that the interrogation regimen at Guantanamo had produced
useful intelligence "based on trust and not out of fear or duress."

The intelligence officials who spoke with The Times said that the interrogation
personnel and their assigned prisoners were divided into five groups. Four were
geographically based - one for Saudi Arabia, one for the Gulf States, another
for Pakistan and Afghanistan and the last for Asia, Europe and the Americas. The
fifth, termed "special projects," included Mr. Kahtani.

There was a high confidence among military intelligence officials that Mr.
Kahtani was a dangerous operative of Al Qaeda. The federal commission
investigating the Sept. 11 attacks concluded in its June report that he was
denied entry into the United States on Aug. 4, 2001, at the Orlando airport, the
same day that Mohamed Atta, the plot's ringleader, was there and most likely
intended to meet him.

The officials who spoke about the detainees' treatment said, however, that very
few of the other prisoners had much value. "So much of the questioning was about
Afghanistan," one intelligence official said. "Most of it was dated. Information
about facilitators and recruiters was useful only in style, not in facts."

The clearest indication that senior commanders at Guantanamo were aware of and
supported what was occurring may be in some F.B.I. memorandums. One, dated May
10, 2003, and written by an unidentified agent, describes a sharp exchange
between bureau officials and General Miller and Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who
was in charge of the intelligence operations at Guantanamo then.

"Both sides agreed that the bureau has its way of doing things and the D.O.D.
has their marching orders from SecDef," the memorandum said, using abbreviations
for the Department of Defense and the secretary of defense. "Although the two
techniques differed drastically, both generals believed they had a job to do."

The frustration caused by Mr. Kahtani's refusal to cooperate set off a high-
level review of allowable interrogation techniques, according to documents
released earlier by the Pentagon. After officials at Guantanamo asked for more
leeway in dealing with Mr. Kahtani, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in
December 2002 approved a list of 16 techniques for use there in addition to the
17 methods in the Army Field Manual. He suspended those approvals the next month
after some Navy lawyers complained that they were excessive and possibly
illegal. But after a review, Mr. Rumsfeld issued a final policy in April 2003,
approving 24 techniques, some of which needed his permission to be used.

None of the approved techniques, however, covered some of what people have now
said occurred. Mr. Kahtani was, for example, forcibly given an enema, officials
said, which was used because it was uncomfortable and degrading.

Pentagon spokesmen said the procedure was medically necessary because Mr.
Kahtani was dehydrated after an especially difficult interrogation session.
Another official, told of the use of the enema, said, however, "I bet they said
he was dehydrated," adding that that was the justification whenever an enema was
used as a coercive technique, as it had been on several detainees.

In order to carry on the charade that he was not at Guantanamo, the military
arranged it so Mr. Kahtani was not visited by the Red Cross on a few of its
regular visits, creating a window of several months, said a person who dealt
with him at Guantanamo. Officials at the Washington office of the Red Cross,
which makes periodic visits to each of the Guantanamo detainees, said they would
not discuss their meetings with any prisoners as part of their agreement with
the United States government.

Two interrogators confirmed several of the complaints in the Red Cross report,
including the notion that interrogators were able to obtain prisoners' medical
records easily, which human rights groups say could discourage inmates from
seeking medical care. The interrogators also discussed another factor in the Red
Cross report, the use of a Behavioral Science Consultation Team, known as
Biscuit, comprising a psychologist or psychiatrist and psychiatric workers. The
team was used to suggest ways to make prisoners more cooperative in
interrogations.

"They were supposed to help us break them down," one said.

The same former interrogator said the Red Cross report was correct in asserting
that some female interrogators used sexual taunts to harass the detainees.

It is unclear whether the Justice Department's new, broader definition of
torture, posted on the department's Web site late Thursday, would have affected
operations at Guantanamo.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

*

New York Times --

January 1, 2005

JUSTICE DEPT. TOUGHENS RULE ON TORTURE

By Neil A. Lewis

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/01/politics/01torture.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 - The Justice Department has broadened its definition of
torture, significantly retreating from a memorandum in August 2002 that defined
torture extremely narrowly and said President Bush could ignore domestic and
international prohibitions against torture in the name of national security.

The new definition was in a memorandum posted on the department's Web site late
Thursday night with no public announcement. It comes one week before the Senate
Judiciary Committee is set to question Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House
counsel and nominee for attorney general, about his role in formulating legal
policies that critics have said led to abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and
at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The new memorandum, first reported in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington
Post, largely dismisses the August 2002 definition, especially the part that
asserted that mistreatment rose to the level of torture only if it produced
severe pain equivalent to that associated with organ failure or death.

"Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international
norms," said the new memorandum written by Daniel Levin, the acting assistant
attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, which had produced
the earlier definition.

Mr. Gonzales, who will go before the Senate committee for confirmation hearings,
served as a supervisor and coordinator inside the administration as lawyers
drafted new approaches on the limits of coercive techniques in interrogations
and the scope of the president's authority in fighting a war against terrorists.

A memorandum in January 2002 to President Bush that Mr. Gonzales signed sided
with the Justice Department in asserting that the Geneva Conventions did not
bind the United States in its treatment of detainees captured in the fighting in
Afghanistan.

The August 2002 Justice Department memorandum and a later memorandum from an
administration legal task force with similar conclusions were widely denounced
in Congress and by human rights groups as cornerstones in the approach to
detainees that led to abuses at Abu Ghraib and at the detention center in
Guantanamo.

The political effect of the new memorandum on Mr. Gonzales's appearance before
the committee was unclear. He has been expected to assert, as he has before,
that neither he nor Mr. Bush condones torture.

But the change could underline what had been the undisputed policy of the
administration at least until June, when officials said it was no longer
applicable and would be rewritten. That position came just after the August 2002
memorandum was disclosed in published reports.

Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has
sued the administration over its interrogation policies, said Friday that the
redefinition "makes it clear that the earlier one was not just some intellectual
theorizing by some lawyers about what was possible."

"It means it must have been implemented in some way," Mr. Ratner said. "It puts
the burden on the administration to say what practices were actually put in
place under those auspices."

The International Committee of the Red Cross has said in private messages to the
United States government that American personnel have engaged in torture of
detainees, both in Iraq and at Guantanamo.

The 2002 memorandum was signed by Jay S. Bybee, who was then the head of the
legal counsel office in the Justice Department. Now a federal appeals court
judge in Nevada, Mr. Bybee has declined to comment on the issue.

The bulk of the memorandum is devoted to the Convention Against Torture and
legislation enacted by Congress that gives it the force of law. "We conclude
that torture as defined in and proscribed by" the statute and treaty, covers
only extreme acts and severe pain," it says.

It also says: "When the pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to
that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure.
Severe mental pain requires suffering not just at the moment of infliction but
it also requires lasting psychological harm."

In revising that view, the current memorandum parses the language and the treaty
differently, saying, for example, that torture could include "severe physical
suffering" as well as "severe physical pain." The Bybee memorandum tried to
limit torture to severe physical pain. But the new memorandum also noted that
physical suffering was difficult to define.

One distinction is that the new memorandum rejects the earlier assertion that
torture may be said to occur only if the interrogator meant to cause the harm
that resulted.

David Scheffer, a senior State Department human rights official in the Clinton
administration who teaches law at George Washington University, said Friday that
while the Justice Department's change was commendable, it might still provide
too flexible a definition of torture, leaving too many judgments in the hands of
interrogators.

The new memorandum dealt with the issue of the earlier opinion's granting the
president the power to authorize torture by saying that the Justice Department
did not have to consider that matter any longer as "such authority would be
inconsistent with the president's unequivocal directive that United States
personnel not engage in torture."

Mr. Bush's spokesman in Crawford, Tex., Trent Duffy, said on Friday that while
the Justice Department took the lead on the issue, it sought comment from the
president's Office of Legal Counsel. The thrust of the comments were "to
reiterate the president's determination that the United States never engage in
torture," Mr. Duffy said.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

*

New York Times --

December 30, 2004

Editorial Observer
LEGAL BREACH: THE GOVERNMENT'S ATTORNEYS AND ABU GHRAIB

By Andrew Rosenthal

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/opinion/30thu4.html

The most obvious victims of the brutal treatment of prisoners at American
military jails are the men, women and children who have been humiliated,
sexually assaulted, beaten, tortured and even killed. But, as in all wars, the
Bush administration's assault on the Geneva Conventions has caused collateral
damage - in this case, to the legal offices of the executive branch and the
military.

To get around the inconvenience of the Geneva Conventions, the administration
twisted the roles of the legal counsels of the White House, the Pentagon and the
Justice Department beyond recognition. Once charged with giving unvarnished
advice about whether political policies remained within the law, the Bush
administration's legal counsels have been turned into the sort of cynical
corporate lawyers who figure out how to make something illegal seem kosher - or
at least how to minimize the danger of being held to account.

This upheaval has been particularly vivid at the Pentagon, where the usual
balance between civilian and military authority has been stood on its head. The
American system of civilian control of the military recognizes that soldiers'
attention must be fixed on winning battles and staying alive, and that the fog
of war can sometimes obscure the rule of law. The civilian bosses are supposed
to provide coolheaded restraint.

Now America has to count on the military to step up when the civilians get out
of control.

When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the initial list of
interrogation methods for Guantanamo Bay in late 2002 - methods that clearly
violated the Geneva Conventions and anti-torture statutes - there were no
protests from the legal counsels for the secretary of defense, the attorney
general, the president, the Central Intelligence Agency or any of the civilian
secretaries of the armed services. That's not surprising, because some of those
very officials were instrumental in devising the Strangelovian logic that lay
behind Mr. Rumsfeld's order. Their legal briefs dutifully argued that the
president could suspend the Geneva Conventions when he chose, that he could even
sanction torture and that torture could be redefined so narrowly that it could
seem legal.

It took an internal protest by uniformed lawyers from the Navy to force the
Pentagon to review the Guantanamo rules and restrict them a bit. But the
military lawyers' concerns were largely shoved aside by a team of civilian
lawyers, led by Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel. The group reaffirmed
the notion that Mr. Bush could choose when to apply the Geneva Conventions.

That principle was originally aimed at the supposed members of Al Qaeda held at
Guantanamo Bay, but it was quickly exported to Iraq and led, inexorably, to the
horrors at Abu Ghraib and other recently disclosed crimes by American soldiers
against Iraqi and Afghan prisoners.

If it had not been for a group of uniformed lawyers, the nation might never have
learned of the torture and detention memos. In May 2003, soon after Ms. Walker's
group produced its rationalization for prisoner abuse, a half-dozen military
lawyers went to Scott Horton, who was chairman of the human rights committee of
the City Bar Association in New York.

That led to a bar report on the administration's policies, a report that was
published around the same time the Abu Ghraib atrocities came into public view.
Those lawyers had to do their duty anonymously to avoid having their careers
savaged. Meanwhile, the Justice Department official who signed the memo on
torturing prisoners, Jay Bybee, was elevated by Mr. Bush to the federal bench.

This month, several former high-ranking military lawyers came out publicly
against the nomination of the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to be
attorney general. They noted that it was Mr. Gonzales who had supervised the
legal assault on the Geneva Conventions.

Jeh Johnson, a New York lawyer who was general counsel for the secretary of the
Air Force under President Clinton, calls this shift "a revolution."

"One view of the law and government," Mr. Johnson said, "is that good things can
actually come out of the legal system and that there is broad benefit in the
rule of law. The other is a more cynical approach that says that lawyers are
simply an instrument of policy - get me a legal opinion that permits me to do X.
Sometimes a lawyer has to say, 'You just can't do this.' "

Normally, the civilian policy makers would have asked the military lawyers to
draft the rules for a military prison in wartime. The lawyers for the service
secretaries are supposed to focus on issues like contracts, environmental impact
statements and base closings. They're not supposed to meddle in rules of
engagement or military justice.

But the civilian policy makers knew that the military lawyers would never
sanction tossing the Geneva Conventions aside in the war against terrorists.
Military lawyers, Mr. Johnson said, "tend to see things through the prism of how
it will affect their people if one gets captured or prosecuted."

Some Senate Democrats have said they plan to question Mr. Gonzales about this
mess during his Senate confirmation hearings. But given the feckless state of
Congressional oversight on this issue, there's not a lot of hope in that news.

Meanwhile, the relationship between the civilian and the military lawyers has
gotten so bad that Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, pushed
through legislation that elevated the military services' top lawyers to a three-
star general's rank. That at least put them on a more equal footing with the
civilian lawyers.

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.

* * *


Financial Times --

December 8, 2004

TORTURING THE LAW, IF NOT PRISONERS
Editorial

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/cebf1b52-48bd-11d9-9162-00000e2511c8.html

When  an  internal  US  memo,  citing  International  Red Cross Committee
allegations  that  US treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo had  been  tantamount
to torture, was leaked last week to the press, many  supporters of the Bush
administration chose to flay the foreign messenger,  rather  than  address the
message itself. But they cannot dodge  the issue now that the same allegations
of prisoner abuse have also come from a senior FBI agent.

Such abuse may well have stopped at Guantanamo. But the Bush administration is
not only facing this steady drumbeat of appalling publicity about the past. It
is also making a mess of responding to last summer's Supreme Court order that
the detainees could not be cast into legal limbo, but were entitled to due
process of law.

The torture issue is clear. The practice is outlawed under the Geneva convention
on the treatment of prisoners, and where the Geneva convention does not apply -
or where in the case of Guantanamo the US has chosen not to apply it - the
practice is equally illegal under the international convention against torture.
So the US is no better off for deciding to operate outside the Geneva
convention, which it did in the apparent belief that this would give it the
ability to deal with al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects as freely and for as long as
it wanted to.

In fact, it would have been better off if it had applied the Geneva convention.
That convention would not have set a time limit on the Guantanamo detentions. It
would also have allowed the US to interrogate its detainees - if deemed not to
have prisoner of war status - though by means short of torture, as well as to
bring criminal prosecutions against them.

Outside the Geneva convention, however, the administration is finding itself in
an increasing legal tangle. The Pentagon has set up combatant status review
tribunals to confirm whether detainees were really once combatants or not;
created a further review of whether detainees are still a threat; and
established military commissions to try those who are deemed to have been
combatants and still a threat.

But a US judge has put a halt to these commissions on the grounds that since the
government failed to determine whether detainees deserved prisoner of war status
under the Geneva convention, they must be presumed to have this status and,
further, to be only eligible for trial under the US armed forces' own military
code. Not surprisingly, the government is appealing against this ruling.

In order to sort out this mess, the Supreme Court may at some point have to give
some further precision on the rights of the Guantanamo prisoners. In the
meantime, the Bush administration is discrediting its proclaimed campaign to
spread democracy and human rights around the world. It is hard to imagine
anything more counter-productive to this goal than its continuing mistreatment,
by legal if not physical means, of the Guantanamo detainees

* * *

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.

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