[News] NYT: General Took Guantanamo Rules to Iraq for Handling of Prisoners

[News at freedomarchives.org]

May 13, 2004




General Took Guantanamo Rules to Iraq for Handling of Prisoners

By TIM GOLDEN and ERIC SCHMITT

Then 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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo than they were in Iraq.

Because the administration had designated the Taliban and Al Qaeda 
detainees at Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo, 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 Guantánamo, the military lawyer who 
had taken over as the staff judge advocate there, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, 
sought formal clarification of what were acceptable interrogation methods, 
Pentagon officials said. That request prompted a broad legal review of 
interrogation techniques by a working group of Pentagon lawyers.

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

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 Guantánamo said they 
appeared to be more restrictive than those promulgated for Iraq. At 
Guantánamo, 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.



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