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Subject: NYTimes.com Article: General Took Guant�namo Rules to Iraq for Handling of Prisoners
Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 20:32:32 -0400 (EDT)
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General Took Guant�namo Rules to Iraq for Handling of Prisoners
May 13, 2004
By TIM GOLDEN and ERIC SCHMITT
When Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller arrived in Iraq last
August with a team of military police and intelligence
specialists, the group was confronted by chaos.
In one prison yard, a detainee was being held in a
scorching hot shipping container as punishment, one team
member recalled. An important communications antenna stood
broken and unrepaired. Prisoners walked around barefoot,
with sores on their feet and signs of untreated illness.
Garbage was everywhere.
Perhaps most important, with the insurgency raging in Iraq,
there was no effective system at the prisons for wringing
intelligence from the prisoners, officials said.
"They had no rules for interrogations," a military officer
who traveled to Iraq with General Miller said. "People were
escaping and getting shot. We tried to offer them some very
basic recommendations."
According to information from a classified interview with
the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib
prison, General Miller's recommendations prompted a shift
in the interrogation and detention procedures there.
Military intelligence officers were given greater authority
in the prison, and military police guards were asked to
help gather information about the detainees.
Whether those changes contributed to the abuse of prisoners
that grew horrifically more serious last fall is now at the
center of the widening prison scandal.
General Miller's recommendations were based in large part
on his command of the detention camp in Guant�namo Bay,
Cuba, where he won praise from the Pentagon for improving
the flow of intelligence from terrorist suspects and
prisoners of the Afghanistan war.
In Iraq, General Miller's team gave officers at the prisons
copies of the procedures that had been developed at
Guant�namo to interrogate and punish the prisoners,
according to the officer who traveled with him. Computer
specialists and intelligence analysts explained the systems
they had used in Cuba to process information and report it
back to the United States.
General Miller also recommended streamlining the command
structure at the prisons, much as was done when military
intelligence and military police units were merged when he
took command of Joint Task Force Guant�namo in November
2002.
But to at least a few of the officers who met General
Miller in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib crisis was partly rooted in
what they described as his determination to apply his
Guant�namo experience in Iraq. Senators raised similar
concerns on Tuesday at the Armed Services Committee.
General Miller and some of his former aides have dismissed
the notion that his visit to Iraq helped unleash the
abuses. They argue that if his prescriptions had any link
to the problems there, it was because they were
misinterpreted by ineffective commanders in a chaotic
environment.
"When you don't have rules and you let lower-level people
decide things on an arbitrary and capricious basis, you're
going to have problems," the officer who accompanied
General Miller said. "Our reference to techniques was to
say, `You need a policy.' "
A Democratic Senate aide who reviewed General Miller's
report on the Iraqi prisons said he had sought to revamp
the intelligence apparatus in Iraq primarily to improve the
collection and transmission of broader, strategic
information about the insurgency that was particularly
important to senior military officials.
To those officials, the work at Guant�namo by General
Miller, a former paratrooper from Menard, Tex., made him an
obvious candidate for Iraq.
By the time he took over in Cuba, most of the detainees
there had been in custody for nearly a year. Still, General
Miller was credited by Pentagon officials with using
interrogations there to produce a valuable historical
account of the workings and financing of terrorist training
camps in Afghanistan, among other subjects, officials said.
His hard-charging attitude has also raised questions that
go beyond interrogation methods. He was the official most
responsible for pressing a case last year against a Muslim
chaplain at the base, Capt. James J. Yee, that was
initially billed as a major episode of espionage. In March,
the military announced that it would drop all charges.
At the Senate hearing on Tuesday, the deputy commander of
American forces in the Middle East, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith,
said General Miller, now the chief of interrogations and
detentions in Iraq, had made it clear to the officers he
briefed on his 10-day visit to Iraq that some of the
procedures developed in Cuba could not be applied there.
But despite the vast differences between the settings, two
officials who worked with General Miller in Cuba suggested
that he offered very similar solutions to some problems he
found in Iraq.
Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, in his report on Iraqi prison
abuses, said General Miller's recommendation of a guard
force that "sets the conditions for the successful
interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees"
violated Army doctrine; the report hinted that it might
also have contributed to the abuses.
The Taguba report also highlighted General Miller's
recommendation that commanders in Iraq form and train a
prison guard force "subordinate to the Joint Interrogation
Debriefing Center (J.I.D.C.) Commander" that "sets the
conditions for the successful interrogation and
exploitation of internees/detainees."
The former director of that interrogation center, Lt. Col.
Steve Jordan, was implicated in the abuses by General
Taguba and is under investigation in a separate military
inquiry.
At Guant�namo the role of guards in intelligence gathering
was largely limited to observing the detainees' behavior
and trying to detect their leaders, according to
interrogators who worked there.
A fundamental difference between Iraq and Guant�namo was
the Bush administration's determination that the Geneva
Conventions did not govern the treatment of the detainees
in Cuba. However, military officers who served in Cuba said
the controls on coercive interrogation methods appeared to
have been stronger at Guant�namo than they were in Iraq.
Because the administration had designated the Taliban and
Al Qaeda detainees at Guant�namo as "enemy combatants" - to
whom it would accord humane treatment but not other rights
granted by the Conventions - military officers in Cuba soon
grew concerned that they were operating without clear
rules.
According to several officers who served at Guant�namo, the
methods, begun in early 2002, included depriving detainees
of sleep; leaving them in cold, air-conditioned rooms;
placing them in "stress positions"; and forcing them to
stand or crouch for long periods, sometimes with their arms
extended, until exhausted.
Even before General Miller's arrival at Guant�namo, the
military lawyer who had taken over as the staff judge
advocate there, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, sought formal
clarification of what were acceptable interrogation
methods, Pentagon officials said. That request prompted a
broad legal review of interrogation techniques by a working
group of Pentagon lawyers.
When the review was completed in February 2003, it included
a spreadsheet with 24 approved techniques, officials who
viewed it said. For each method, the matrix indicated
whether it posed problems under various United States and
international laws, and at what level of the military
bureaucracy it needed to be approved. The following month,
a brief document spelling out specific guidelines for
approved interrogation techniques was sent to Guant�namo.
General Miller and another officer on his team said they
urged commanders in Iraq to draft their own guidelines. A
chart of approved techniques, entitled the "Interrogation
Rules of Engagement," was drawn up for American forces in
Iraq on Oct. 12, 2003, barely a month after General
Miller's visit.
"The recommendations that the team and I made was about how
you could improve the interrogation process and the
development and collection of intelligence," General Miller
told reporters last Saturday. "Those recommendations that
were made were based on the system that provided humane
detention and excellent interrogation."
Three officials familiar with the methods approved for
Guant�namo said they appeared to be more restrictive than
those promulgated for Iraq. At Guant�namo, methods like
extended isolation and putting detainees into "stress
positions" require approval from senior Pentagon officials;
in Iraq, they need only that of the task force commander.
Tim Golden reported from New York for this article and Eric
Schmitt from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/politics/13MILL.html?ex=1085494751&ei=1&en=541b89a4b60b4f4e
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