US deception tactics

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Three Reports from The New York Times show how U.S. Government uses TV and Newspapers to decieve the public into accepting their agenda:

20 April 2008:
Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
29 November 2008:
One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex
16 January 2009:
Inspector General Sees No Misdeeds in Pentagon’s Effort to Make Use of TV Analysts

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Message Machine

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

A PENTAGON CAMPAIGN Retired officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage from inside the TV and radio networks.

By DAVID BARSTOW - New York Times - Published: April 20, 2008

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. “The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

“I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John C. Garrett is a retired Marine colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.

With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

“The impressions that you’re getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on “Today.” “There’s been over $100 million of new construction,” he reported. “The place is very professionally run.”

Within days, transcripts of the analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Charting the Campaign

By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.

In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the ultimate “key influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching mass audiences.

The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.

Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.”

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. “We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out,” Mr. Meyer said.

The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.

Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.

Assembling the Team

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. “We offer clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site.

Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a “world affairs” analyst for CNN. “The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’ in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of government decision makers,” the company tells prospective clients on its Web site.

There were also ideological ties.

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

The Selling of the War

From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of liberation.”

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.

The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the nation’s op-ed pages.

The trip invitation promised a look at “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, “My Year in Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had “about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”

“We’re up against a growing and sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during a private White House dinner.

That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.

Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.

Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed. The “growing and sophisticated threat” described by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.

“We’re winning,” a briefing document proclaimed.

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly “artificial” that he joked to another group member that they were on “the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that American officials had “brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of “up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq’s security forces.

Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.

Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.

“Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,” Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. “I tried to push hard with some of Bremer’s people to engage these people of Al Anbar,” he said.

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.

Access and Influence

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

“We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.

The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips “have the highest levels of visibility” at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, “picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars.”

Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a “conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract “the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had “a more supportive view” of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. “On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen,” he said.

For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.

Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. “You start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.”

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of “key influentials” had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.

An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts “are having a greater impact” on network coverage of the military. “They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

“We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.

“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.

“ ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

“Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this time.”

Pentagon Keeps Tabs

As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

“Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all,” the report concluded.

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable “surrogates” in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, “just upfront information,” while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. “None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General Scales said.

Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. “Not related at all,” General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN “in the lowest esteem.”

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”

“General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.

“Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.

The Generals’ Revolt

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept “very formal,” records show. “This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates.

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ”

“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”

“Frankly,” one participant said, “from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”

An analyst said at another point: “This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.

But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. “America hates a loser,” one analyst said.

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the “political tide.” One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to “just crush these people,” and assured him that “most of the gentlemen at the table” would enthusiastically support him if he did.

“You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. “You are our guy.”

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: “In one of your speeches you ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a world like that.’ ”

Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next “milestone” that would, as one analyst put it, “keep the American people focused on the idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.” They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.

“When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event,” an analyst said. “And again, I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job...”

“Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently and sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not “overly concerned” with the criticisms; that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,” including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:

“Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”

“Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

“I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.

View From the Networks

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”

“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”

For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.

Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.

“I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. “None of that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

“The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”

Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: “We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.”

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. “We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in this article.

CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.

CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.

General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.

“We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.

In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. “I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.

CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.

General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. “I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he said.

But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.

“We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html
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Message Machine
The Media Battleground

Part 2: Barry McCaffrey’s World



One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex

Photo: Barry R. McCaffrey is among the retired military officers working as network analysts.

By DAVID BARSTOW - New York Times - Published: November 29, 2008

In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity.

The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles.

Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially worth billions in sales, and Defense Solutions soon found its man. The company signed Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007.

Four days later the general swung into action. He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, strongly recommending Defense Solutions and its offer to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles from Eastern Europe. “No other proposal is quicker, less costly, or more certain to succeed,” he said.

Thus, within days of hiring General McCaffrey, the Defense Solutions sales pitch was in the hands of the American commander with the greatest influence over Iraq’s expanding military.

“That’s what I pay him for,” Timothy D. Ringgold, chief executive of Defense Solutions, said in an interview.

General McCaffrey did not mention his new contract with Defense Solutions in his letter to General Petraeus. Nor did he disclose it when he went on CNBC that same week and praised the commander Defense Solutions was now counting on for help — “He’s got the heart of a lion” — or when he told Congress the next month that it should immediately supply Iraq with large numbers of armored vehicles and other equipment.

He had made similar arguments before he was hired by Defense Solutions, but this time he went further. In his testimony to Congress, General McCaffrey criticized a Pentagon plan to supply Iraq with several hundred armored vehicles made in the United States by a competitor of Defense Solutions. He called the plan “not in the right ballpark” and urged Congress to instead equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.

“We’ve got Iraqi army battalions driving around in Toyota trucks,” he said, echoing an argument made to General Petraeus in the Defense Solutions briefing packet.

Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired generals, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and defense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.

Few illustrate the submerged complexities of this world better than Barry McCaffrey.

General McCaffrey, 66, has long been a force in Washington’s power elite. A consummate networker, he cultivated politicians and journalists of all stripes as drug czar in the Clinton cabinet, and his ties run deep to a new generation of generals, some of whom he taught at West Point or commanded in the Persian Gulf war, when he rose to fame leading the “left hook” assault on Iraqi forces.

But it was 9/11 that thrust General McCaffrey to the forefront of the national security debate. In the years since he has made nearly 1,000 appearances on NBC and its cable sisters, delivering crisp sound bites in a blunt, hyperbolic style. He commands up to $25,000 for speeches, his commentary regularly turns up in The Wall Street Journal, and he has been quoted or cited in thousands of news articles, including dozens in The New York Times.

His influence is such that President Bush and Congressional leaders from both parties have invited him for war consultations. His access is such that, despite a contentious relationship with former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon has arranged numerous trips to Iraq, Afghanistan and other hotspots solely for his benefit.

At the same time, General McCaffrey has immersed himself in businesses that have grown with the fight against terrorism.

The consulting company he started after leaving the government in 2001, BR McCaffrey Associates, promises to “build linkages” between government officials and contractors like Defense Solutions for up to $10,000 a month. He has also earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a defense industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, he is the chairman of HNTB Federal Services, an engineering and construction management company that often competes for national security contracts.

Many retired officers hold a perch in the world of military contracting, but General McCaffrey is among a select few who also command platforms in the news media and as government advisers on military matters. These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives. But with their business ties left undisclosed, it can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests.

On NBC and in other public forums, General McCaffrey has consistently advocated wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests. But those interests are not described to NBC’s viewers. He is held out as a dispassionate expert, not someone who helps companies win contracts related to the wars he discusses on television.

The president of NBC News, Steve Capus, said in an interview that General McCaffrey was a man of honor and achievement who would never let business obligations color his analysis for NBC. He described General McCaffrey as an “independent voice” who had courageously challenged Mr. Rumsfeld, adding, “There’s no open microphone that begins with the Pentagon and ends with him going out over our airwaves.”

General McCaffrey is not required to abide by NBC’s formal conflict-of-interest rules, Mr. Capus said, because he is a consultant, not a news employee. Nor is he required to disclose his business interests periodically. But Mr. Capus said that the network had conversations with its military analysts about the need to avoid even the appearance of a conflict, and that General McCaffrey had been “incredibly forthcoming” about his ties to military contractors.

General McCaffrey declined to be interviewed but released a brief statement.

“My public media commentary on the war labeled me as an early and serious critic of Rumsfeld’s arrogance and mismanagement of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the statement said. “The New York Times noted my strong on-air criticism as an NBC commentator. My op-ed objections to the execution of the war were published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, USA Today and other media. Hardly the stuff of someone shilling a war for the administration — or privately pushing his business interests with the Pentagon. Thirty-seven years of public service. Four combat tours. Wounded three times. The country knows me as a nonpartisan and objective national security expert with solid integrity.”

In earlier e-mail messages, General McCaffrey played down his involvement in lobbying for contracts, suggesting he mainly gave companies “strategic counsel.” His business responsibilities, he wrote, simply do not conflict with his duty to provide objective analysis on NBC. “Never has been a problem,” he wrote. “Period.”

General McCaffrey did in fact emerge as a tough critic of Mr. Rumsfeld, describing him as reckless and incompetent. His central criticism — that Mr. Rumsfeld fought the Iraq war “on the cheap” — reflected his long-stated views on waging war. But it also dovetailed with his business interests. And his clashes with Mr. Rumsfeld were but one facet of a more complex and symbiotic relationship with the Bush administration and the military’s uniformed leaders, records and interviews show.

With a few exceptions General McCaffrey has consistently supported Mr. Bush’s major national security policies, especially the war in Iraq. He advocated invasion, urged building up the military to sustain the occupation and warned that premature withdrawal would invite catastrophe.

In an article earlier this year, The New York Times identified General McCaffrey as one of some 75 military analysts who were the focus of a Pentagon public relations campaign that is now being examined by the Pentagon’s inspector general, the Government Accountability Office and the Federal Communications Commission. The campaign, begun in 2002 but suspended after the article’s publication, sought to transform the analysts into “surrogates” and “message force multipliers” for the Bush administration, records show. The analysts, many with military industry ties, were wooed in private briefings, showered with talking points and escorted on tours of Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The Pentagon inspector general is investigating whether special access gave any of these analysts an improper edge in the competition for contracts.

General McCaffrey offers a case study of the benefits that can flow from favored access: an inside track to sensitive information about strategy and tactics; insight into the priorities of ground commanders; a private channel to officials who oversaw war spending, as the Defense Solutions example shows. In that case the company has yet to win the contract it hired General McCaffrey to champion.

More broadly, though, his example reveals the myriad and often undisclosed connections between the business of war and the business of covering it.

A Move to Television

General McCaffrey made his debut as a military analyst in the weeks after 9/11. NBC anchors typically introduced him by describing his medals or his exploits in the gulf war. Or they noted he was a West Point professor, or the youngest four-star general in the history of the Army.

They did not mention his work for military contractors, including a lucrative new role with Veritas Capital.

Veritas was a relatively small player in 2001, looking to grow through acquisitions and Pentagon contracts. Competing for contracts is a complex and subtle sport, governed by highly bureaucratic bidding rules and the old-fashioned arts of access and influence.

Veritas would compete on both fronts.

Just days before the terrorist attacks — on Sept. 6, 2001 — Veritas had announced the formation of an “advisory council” of well-connected retired generals and admirals, including General McCaffrey. “They can really pick up the phone and call someone,” Robert B. McKeon, the president of Veritas, would later tell The Times.

Access was also part of what drew NBC to General McCaffrey. Mr. Capus said General McCaffrey “opens doors with generals and others who we would not otherwise be able to talk to.”

Veritas gave its advisers board seats on its military companies, along with profit sharing and equity stakes that were all the more attractive because Veritas intended to turn quick profits through initial public offerings. On Sept. 6, this might have been considered a gamble. Revenue growth — a key to successful I.P.O.’s — required sustained increases in military spending. But after Sept. 11, the only question was just how big those increases would be.

From his first months on the air, General McCaffrey called for huge, sustained increases in military spending for a global campaign against terrorism. He also advocated spending for high-tech weapons, including some like precision-guided munitions and unmanned aerial vehicles that were important to the Veritas portfolio. He called the C-17 cargo plane — also a source of Veritas contracts — a “national treasure.”

In a statement, Veritas said it had gained no “discernible benefit” from General McCaffrey’s television appearances and called his TV work “completely independent” from his role with Veritas.

In their corporate filings, Veritas military companies told investors they were well positioned to benefit from a widening global struggle against terrorism. The approaching conflict with Iraq, though, would create new areas of tension between General McCaffrey’s fiduciary obligations to Veritas and his duties to NBC.

General McCaffrey harbored significant doubts about the invasion plan. An informal participant in the war planning, he was troubled by Mr. Rumsfeld’s resistance to an invasion force of several hundred thousand, he acknowledged months and years later in interviews. Mr. Rumsfeld’s team, he said, was bent on making an “ideological” point that wars could be fought “on the cheap.” There were not enough tanks, artillery or troops, he would say, and the result was a “grossly anemic” force that unnecessarily put troops at risk.

That is not what General McCaffrey said when asked on NBC outlets to assess the risks of war. As planning for a possible invasion received intense news coverage in 2002, he repeatedly assured viewers that the war would be brief, the occupation lengthy but benign.

“These people are going to come apart in 21 days or less,” he told Brian Williams on MSNBC.

In the fall of 2002 General McCaffrey joined the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group formed with White House encouragement to fan support for regime change. He also participated in private Pentagon briefings in which network military analysts were armed with talking points that made the case for war, records show.

In early 2003 Forrest Sawyer asked General McCaffrey on CNBC what could go wrong after an invasion. Anticipating this very question, the Pentagon had invited General McCaffrey and other analysts to a special briefing. Years later General McCaffrey would say he knew that the post-invasion planning was a disaster. “They were warned very categorically and directly by many of us prior to that war,” he said.

Given a chance by Mr. Sawyer to raise an alarm, the general reiterated Pentagon talking points about the “astonishing amount” of postwar planning.

And when Tom Brokaw asked him, days before the invasion, “What are your concerns if we were to go to war by the end of this week?” he replied, “Well, I don’t think I have any real serious ones.”

Only when the invasion met unexpected resistance did General McCaffrey give a glimpse of his misgivings. “We’ve placed ourselves in a risky proposition, 400 miles into Iraq with no flank or rear area security,” he told Katie Couric on “Today.”

Mr. Rumsfeld struck back. He abruptly cut off General McCaffrey’s access to the Pentagon’s special briefings and conference calls.

General McCaffrey was stunned. “I’ve never heard his voice like that,” recalled one close associate who asked not to be identified. He added, “They showed him what life was like on the outside.”

Robert Weiner, a longtime publicist for General McCaffrey, said the general came to see that if he continued his criticism, he risked being shut out not only by Mr. Rumsfeld but also by his network of friends and contacts among the uniformed leadership.

“There is a time when you have to punt,” said Mr. Weiner, emphasizing that he spoke as General McCaffrey’s friend, not as his spokesman.

Within days General McCaffrey began to backpedal, professing his “great respect” for Mr. Rumsfeld to Tim Russert. “Is this man O.K.?” the Fox News anchor Brit Hume asked, taking note of the about-face.

For months to come, as an insurgency took root, General McCaffrey defended the Bush administration. “I am 100 percent behind what the administration, what the president of the United States, is doing in Iraq,” he told Mr. Williams that June.

A Corporate Troubleshooter

Mr. Rumsfeld’s swift reaction underscored the administration’s appreciation of General McCaffrey’s influence. His comments were catalogued and circulated at the White House and Pentagon.

Other network analysts were monitored, too, but not the way General McCaffrey was. He was different. He was one of the few retired four-star generals on television, and his well-known friendships with men like General Petraeus and Gen. John P. Abizaid gave him added currency.

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, General McCaffrey increasingly gave public expression to the private frustrations of generals pressing their civilian bosses for more troops, weapons and reconstruction money. The Army, he repeatedly warned, could break under the strain.

These were politically charged topics, and so the administration worked to influence his commentary, using carrots and sticks alike. In 2005, for example, Mr. Rumsfeld took umbrage at remarks General McCaffrey made to The Washington Times about the impact of unchecked poppy production in Afghanistan. Mr. Rumsfeld wrote to Gen. Peter Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, demanding to know where General McCaffrey “got his information,” records show. No less than an assistant secretary of defense was dispatched to speak with General McCaffrey, who said he had been misquoted.

In a letter to The Times, General McCaffrey’s lawyer, Thomas A. Clare, said the general’s recurring criticisms had cost him “business opportunities with defense contractors.” NBC executives said they, too, fielded high-level complaints, and General McCaffrey was not invited back to the Pentagon’s analyst briefings.

On the other hand, when Pentagon officials noticed that General McCaffrey was scheduled to appear on programs like “Meet the Press,” they asked generals close to him to suggest themes, records show. The Pentagon also began paying for General McCaffrey to travel to Iraq and Afghanistan. Other military analysts were invited on trips, but only in groups. General McCaffrey went by himself under the sponsorship of Central Command’s generals.

The stated purpose was for General McCaffrey to provide an outside assessment in his role as a part-time professor at West Point. But his trips were also an important public relations tool, meticulously planned to arm him with anecdotes of progress. Records show that Central Command’s generals expected him to “publicly support their efforts” upon his return home and solicited his advice on how to “reverse the perception” in Washington of a lost war.

After each trip General McCaffrey embarked on a news media campaign, writing opinion articles, granting interviews, publishing “after action” reports on his firm’s Web site. Each time he extolled Central Command’s generals and called for a renewed national commitment of money and support.

At the same time, General McCaffrey used his access to further business interests, as he did during the summer of 2005, when Americans were turning against the Iraq war in droves.

Veritas had been on a shopping spree, buying military contractors deeply enmeshed in the war. Its biggest acquisition was of DynCorp International, best known for training foreign security forces for the United States government. By 2005 operations in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for 37 percent of DynCorp’s revenues.

The crumbling public support, though, posed a threat to Veritas’s prize acquisition. The changing political climate and unrelenting violence, DynCorp warned investors, could force a withdrawal from Iraq.

What is more, some of DynCorp’s Iraq contracts were in trouble, plagued by cost overruns, inept work by subcontractors and ineffective training programs. So when DynCorp executives learned that General McCaffrey was planning to travel to Iraq that June, they asked him to sound out American commanders and reassure them of DynCorp’s determination to make things right.

“It is useful both ways,” Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman, said in an interview. “If there were problems, and there were, then we could get an independent judgment and fix them.”

Mr. Lagana said General McCaffrey had been a troubleshooter for DynCorp on other trips. “He’ll say: ‘I’m going over. Is there anyone you want me to see?’ ” Mr. Lagana said. “And then he’d go in and say, ‘I’m on the board. What can you tell me?’ ”

The Pentagon had its own agenda. For eight days, General McCaffrey was given red-carpet treatment. Iraqi commandos even staged a live-fire demonstration for him. But General McCaffrey also was given access to officials whose decisions were important to his business interests, including DynCorp, which was planning an I.P.O. He met with General Petraeus, who was then in charge of training Iraqi security forces and responsible for supervising DynCorp’s 500 police trainers. He also met with officials responsible for billions of dollars’ worth of contracts in Iraq.

General McCaffrey would not discuss these sessions, and General Petraeus said in an e-mail message to The Times that he had no reason to discuss DynCorp with General McCaffrey because he would have gone directly to DynCorp’s executives in Iraq.

Back home, General McCaffrey undertook a one-man news media blitz in which he contradicted the dire assessments of many journalists in Iraq. He bore witness to progress on all fronts, but most of all he vouched for Iraq’s security forces. A year earlier, before joining DynCorp’s board, he had described these forces as “badly equipped, badly trained, politically unreliable.” Just months before, Gary E. Luck, a retired four-star Army general sent to assess progress in Iraq, had reported to Mr. Bush that security training was going poorly. Yet General McCaffrey now emphasized his “surprising” conclusion that the training was succeeding.

After Mr. Bush gave a speech praising Iraq’s new security forces, Brian Williams asked General McCaffrey for an independent assessment. “The Iraqi security forces are real,” General McCaffrey replied, without noting the concerns about DynCorp.

His financial stake in the policy debates over Iraq was not mentioned. He did not disclose that he owned special stock that allowed him to share in DynCorp’s profits, up 87 percent that year largely because of the Iraq war.

“I took as objective a look at it as I could,” he told David Gregory, the NBC correspondent.

A Contract in Iraq

In his written statements to The Times, General McCaffrey said his role with Veritas was “governance, not marketing,” and Veritas insisted that he never “solicited new or existing government contracts.”

General McCaffrey did, however, play an indirect role in helping Veritas win one of its largest contracts, to supply more than 8,000 translators to the war in Iraq. The contract had been held by L-3 Communications, but when General McCaffrey got wind that the Army was considering seeking new bidders, he called his friend James A. Marks, a major general in the Army who was approaching retirement and was versed in the uses of translators, having served as intelligence chief for land forces during the Iraq invasion.

As General Marks recalls it, General McCaffrey asked him to lead an effort to win the contract for Veritas.

General Marks, who became a CNN military analyst after his retirement in 2004, would be named president of a new DynCorp subsidiary, Global Linguist Solutions, created in July 2006 to bid for the translation contract. In August 2006 Veritas designated General McCaffrey as chairman of Global Linguist. According to a 2007 corporate filing, General McCaffrey was promised $10,000 a month plus expenses once Global Linguist secured the contract. He would also be eligible to share in profits, which could potentially be significant: the contract was worth $4.6 billion over five years, but only if the United States did not pull out of Iraq first.

In the fall of 2006, that was hardly a sure thing. With casualties rising, the nation’s discontent had been laid bare by the November elections. Then, in December, the Iraq Study Group recommended withdrawing all combat brigades by early 2008.

That month, in a flurry of appearances for NBC, General McCaffrey repeatedly ridiculed this recommendation, warning that it would turn Iraq into “Pol Pot’s Cambodia.”

The United States, he said, should keep at least 100,000 troops in Iraq for many years. He disputed depictions of an isolated and deluded White House. After meeting with the president and vice president on Dec. 11 in the Oval Office, he went on television and described them as “very sober-minded.”

General McCaffrey was hardly alone in criticizing the Iraq Study Group, and in his e-mail messages to The Times he said his objections reflected his judgment that it was folly to leave American trainers behind with no combat force protection. But in none of those appearances did NBC disclose General McCaffrey’s ties to Global Linguist.

NBC executives asserted that the general’s relationships with military contractors are indirectly disclosed through NBC’s Web site, where General McCaffrey’s biography now features a link to his consulting firm’s Web site. That site, they said, lists General McCaffrey’s clients.

While the general’s Web site lists his board memberships, it does not name his clients, nor does it mention Veritas Capital, by one measure the second-largest military contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, after KBR. In any event, Mr. Capus, the NBC News president, said he was unaware of General McCaffrey’s connection to the translation contract. Mr. Capus declined to comment on whether this information should have been disclosed.

CNN officials said they, too, were unaware of General Marks’s role in the contract. When they learned of it in 2007, they said, they were so concerned about what they considered an obvious conflict of interest that they severed ties with him. (General Marks, who also spoke out against the withdrawal plan on CNN, said business considerations did not influence his comments.)

On Dec. 18, 2006, the Pentagon stunned Wall Street by awarding the translation contract to Global Linguist. DynCorp’s stock jumped 15 percent.

Hiring a General

After touring Iraq in March 2007 and meeting with American officials responsible for equipping Iraq’s military, General McCaffrey published a trip report recommending that the United States equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.

This kind of access had strong appeal to Mr. Ringgold, Defense Solutions’ chief, who had a plan to rebuild Iraq’s decimated fleets of armored vehicles by culling “leftovers” from depots across Eastern Europe. “I was looking for an advocate,” Mr. Ringgold recalled.

General McCaffrey soon arrived for an audition at the Defense Solutions headquarters outside Philadelphia. “Frankly,” Mr. Ringgold recalled, “I had to get over the sticker shock of what he was going to cost me.”

General McCaffrey liked his basic concept but told him to think bigger, Mr. Ringgold said. Instead of minimally refurbished equipment, he urged Mr. Ringgold to sell “Americanized” armored vehicles upgraded with thermal sights and other expensive extras. And why not also team up with DynCorp and others to supply the maintenance, logistics and training to keep them running?

The suggestions vastly increased the proposal’s scale and price tag, but the general seemed to have a read on the complex interplay between the Iraqi government and the American military leadership, Mr. Ringgold recalled. For a retainer and an undisclosed equity stake, General McCaffrey signed on weeks later, then promptly wrote to General Petraeus.

His letter, drafted with help from Defense Solutions, explained that in the three months since his trip to Iraq, he had found just one feasible way to equip Iraq with enough armored vehicles to permit a “phased redeployment” of American combat forces — the proposal by Defense Solutions. He urged General Petraeus to act quickly but did not disclose that he had just been hired by Defense Solutions.

In his e-mail message to The Times, General Petraeus said he received “innumerable” letters from “would be” contractors. In this case, he wrote, he simply sent General McCaffrey’s material “without any endorsement” to James M. Dubik, the general then responsible for training Iraq’s security forces.

General Dubik, now retired, said in an interview that he, too, received a letter and information packet, and as a result briefed Iraq’s defense minister. “Quite frankly,” he said, “I thought it was a good idea.”

General Dubik emphasized that although he used Defense Solutions briefing materials, he first “sanitized” them of any mention of the company. He said he presented the idea as his own, intending to ask Defense Solutions to bid if the Iraqis liked the concept. But the defense minister reacted coolly, he said, arguing that Iraq deserved advanced American-made vehicles.

General McCaffrey also sent letters to top lawmakers and approached contacts inside the Defense Department bureaucracy that oversees foreign military sales. His influence was immediately apparent. For example, General McCaffrey reached out to Maj. Gen. Timothy F. Ghormley, chief of staff at Central Command, who promptly invited Mr. Ringgold to a meeting in Tampa, Fla. Mr. Ringgold recalled General Ghormley’s first words: “Why aren’t we doing this already?”

Nevertheless, by late 2007, Defense Solutions still had no deal. General McCaffrey, Mr. Ringgold recalled, said the company needed to get to Baghdad and meet directly with Iraqi leaders and important Americans.

On Oct. 26, 2007, General McCaffrey wrote an e-mail message to General Petraeus proposing to return to Iraq. He said his “principal interest would be to document progress in standing up Iraqi security forces,” and he proposed traveling soon, before the presidential primaries, so he could “speak objectively — before politics goes to roar level.”

In early December General McCaffrey arrived in Baghdad, where he met with Generals Petraeus and Dubik, among others.

General Petraeus said he did not recall them discussing Defense Solutions. General Dubik recalled giving General McCaffrey a detailed briefing on the effort to equip Iraq’s army, including the plans for armored vehicles. He said it was a measure of General McCaffrey’s integrity that he did not raise Defense Solutions. “He’s not going to cross the line,” General Dubik said.

Mr. Ringgold said General McCaffrey “made it perfectly clear” that he would not discuss their proposal with the two generals and even sent instructions that he was not to be contacted in Iraq “to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest.”

But Defense Solutions used information General McCaffrey gleaned from his meetings to refine its proposal. Mr. Ringgold followed General McCaffrey to Baghdad in February 2008 and then made plans to return in the spring to meet with Generals Dubik and Petraeus. “General McCaffrey insisted that I see you,” Mr. Ringgold wrote to General Petraeus in a March 20 e-mail message.

General Petraeus forwarded Mr. Ringgold’s message to General Dubik, who warned Mr. Ringgold that while he was happy to meet, Iraq’s defense minister was still hesitant. “They’ve gone back and forth on the refurbished stuff,” General Dubik wrote.

Defense Solutions turned to the White House. On May 9, Mr. Ringgold and Tom C. Korologos, a Republican lobbyist, met with a military aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and two National Security Council officials.

The next day, in an e-mail memorandum to his staff, Mr. Ringgold discussed other ways to press Iraqi and American officials, including generating news media coverage to suggest that Iraq’s “failure to ready its Army” was prolonging the occupation. General McCaffrey had been making a similar argument for months on NBC and elsewhere. “The end of the game is that the Iraqis got to maintain internal order,” he told Ann Curry, the NBC journalist.

Mr. Ringgold said he had never asked the general to take positions supporting Defense Solutions in his news media appearances. On the other hand, he added, “I hope he was thinking of us.”

Mr. Weiner, the general’s longtime publicist, said General McCaffrey worked with clients “to get your mission achieved in the media.” General McCaffrey, he said, often speaks out with the twin goals of shaping policy and generating favorable coverage for clients with worthy products or ideas.

“His motive is pure,” Mr. Weiner said. “It is national interest.”

Despite Defense Solutions’ efforts, Iraq recently placed orders for billions of dollars’ worth of American-made armored vehicles. But the company is not giving up, and it continues to rely on the advice of General McCaffrey, who returned to Iraq on Oct. 31 for another visit sponsored by the Pentagon.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html
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Inspector General Sees No Misdeeds in Pentagon’s Effort to Make Use of TV Analysts

By DAVID BARSTOW - new York Times - Published: January 16, 2009

The office of the Defense Department’s inspector general said in a report Friday that it had found no wrongdoing in a Pentagon public relations program that made use of retired officers who worked as military analysts for television and radio networks.

The report was prompted by articles in The New York Times last year that described an elaborate and largely hidden Pentagon effort, dating from 2002, to transform a group of high-profile network military analysts into “surrogates” or “message force multipliers” for the Bush administration.

The articles also documented how military analysts with ties to defense contractors sometimes used their special access to seek advantage in the competition for contracts related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In response to the articles, at least 45 members of Congress called for inquiries into the program, with some asserting that it might have constituted an illegal campaign of propaganda directed at the American public.

But in the new report, the inspector general’s office, noting the absence of a clear legal definition of propaganda, said there was an “insufficient basis” to conclude that the program had violated laws prohibiting the government’s domestic use of it.

It also said investigators had been unable to document any instance where military analysts had used their special access — scores of meetings with senior officials, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, hundreds of pages of briefing materials — “to achieve a competitive advantage for their company.”

Moreover, while the report said two senior Pentagon officials had complained in sworn testimony that the outreach to military analysts had become “politicized,” and while it documented one instance in which an analyst had lost access because of critical war commentary, it also found there was not enough evidence to conclude that the Pentagon “undertook a disciplined effort” to assemble a contingent of influential analysts “who could be depended on to comment favorably on DoD programs.”

The report dismissed as merely a “personal view” one e-mail message, written by a senior public affairs official at the Pentagon, that urged her superiors to cultivate a core group of military analysts “that we can count on to carry our water.” It also discounted repeated references in Pentagon documents that described military analysts as administration “surrogates.” These references, the report said, simply reflected the fact that several of the officials who catered to the analysts had previously worked in political campaigns.

Some Democratic members of Congress immediately expressed concerns about the scope, methodology and accuracy of the report.

They noted that several leading architects of the program, including Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon’s chief public affairs official during the invasion of Iraq, and Lawrence DiRita, a senior aide to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, had refused to be interviewed by the inspector general’s office.

In addition, the inspector general’s office made no effort to search for e-mail messages beyond those the Defense Department had released to The Times in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

The report asserts that 43 military analysts had no affiliations with defense contractors. But its listing of analysts without ties to contractors included many with easily documented connections to them, including Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and NBC military analyst.

In fact, as The Times reported in November, General McCaffrey is a paid consultant to several military contractors and sits on the boards of several others, including DynCorp, one of the nation’s largest recipients of contracts connected to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Asked why General McCaffrey was listed as having no ties to contractors, officials at the inspector general’s office said their “search parameters” might not have uncovered all relevant business relationships.

Representative Paul W. Hodes, Democrat of New Hampshire, remarked: “To say there are factual inaccuracies in this report is the understatement of the century. I think it is a whitewash. It appears to be the parting gift of the Pentagon to the president.”

Two other inquiries into the program are continuing. One, being conducted by the Government Accountability Office, is scheduled to be completed next month. The other is being done by the Federal Communications Commission, which has regulatory oversight of broadcasters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/us/politics/17military.html?fta=y
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CIA shielded over torture

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Torture Headlines:

CIA will not be prosecuted for torture
UN: Not arresting CIA torture agents breaks International Law
Ten 'torture' techniques blessed by Bush Administration
Key players in the Bush 'torture' memos
President Obama releases documents showing CIA 'torture' during Bush-era
Obama shields CIA officers over US 'torture'
Memos describe CIA's harsh interrogation program

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16 April 2009

President Obama exempts CIA 'torture' staff

US President Barack Obama has said that CIA agents who used harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects during the Bush era will not be prosecuted.
The assurance came as memos were released detailing the range of techniques the CIA was allowed to use during the Bush administration.
Amnesty International said the Department of Justice appeared to be offering a "get-out-of-jail-free card" to individuals who were involved in acts of torture.
The Centre for Constitutional Rights, which has championed the legal rights of the "war on terror" detainees, also expressed its disappointment.
"It is one of the deepest disappointments of this administration that it appears unwilling to uphold the law where crimes have been committed by former officials," it said in a statement.
The Obama administration did not say that protection would extend to CIA agents who acted outside the boundaries laid out in the memos, or to those non-CIA staff involved in approving the interrogation limits.
That leaves open the possibility that those lawyers who crafted the legal opinions authorising the techniques, one of whom is now a federal judge, could yet face legal action.
But it seems that the Obama administration does not want any prosecutions and would like the matter closed.
Announcing the release of the four memos, Attorney General Eric Holder said the US was being "consistent with our commitment to the rule of law".
"The president has halted the use of the interrogation techniques described in these opinions, and this administration has made clear from day one that it will not condone torture," he said.
The four secret memos detail the legal justification for the Bush-era CIA interrogation programme, whose methods critics say amounted to torture.
Mr Obama gave an assurance that "those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice... will not be subject to prosecution".
One of the documents contained legal authorisation for a list of specific harsh interrogation techniques, including pushing detainees against a wall, facial slaps, cramped confinement, stress positions and sleep deprivation.
The memo also authorises the use of "waterboarding", or simulated drowning, and the placing of a detainee into a confined space with an insect.
Critics of the Bush-era interrogation programme say the newly-released memos provide evidence that many of the methods amount to torture under US and international law.
"Bottom line here is you've had crimes committed," Amnesty International analyst Tom Parker told the BBC.
"These are criminal acts. Torture is illegal under American law, it's illegal under international law. America has an international obligation to prosecute the individuals who carry out these kind of acts."
Mr Parker said the decision to allow the use of insects in interrogation was reminiscent of the Room 101 nightmare described by George Orwell in his seminal novel, 1984.
The release of the memos stems from a request by civil rights group the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).


UN expert criticizes US torture decision

VIENNA — United Nations top torture investigator said President Barack Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA operatives who used questionable interrogation practices violates international law. Manfred Nowak said the United States has committed itself under the U.N. Convention against Torture to make torture a crime and to prosecute those suspected of engaging in it.
Obama assured CIA operatives they would not be prosecuted for their rough interrogation tactics of terror suspects under the former Bush administration.
Nowak also says that a comprehensive independent investigation is needed, and that it is important to compensate victims.


Ten 'torture' techniques blessed by Bush Administration

In this August 1, 2002 memo to John Rizzo, the acting general counsel of the CIA, Jay S Bybee of the US Department of Justice approves ten methods of "enhanced interrogation" on the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah

These ten techniques are: (l) attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap (insult slap), (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in a confinement box, and (10) the waterboard.

You have informed us that the use of these techniques would be on an as-needed basis and that not all of these techniques will necessarily be used.


The interrogation team would use these techniques in some combination to convince Zubaydah that the only way he can influence his surrounding environment is through co-operation. You have, however, informed us that you expect these techniques to be used in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.

Moreover, you have also orally informed us that although some of these techniques may be used more than once, that repetition will not be substantial because the techniques generally lose their effectiveness after several repetitions. You have also informed us that Zubaydah sustained a wound during his capture, which is being treated.

Based on the facts you have given us, we understand each of these techniques to be as follows.

Attention grasp

The attention grasp consists of grasping the individual with both hands, one hand on each side of the collar opening, in a controlled and quick motion. In the same motion as the grasp, the individual is drawn toward the interrogator.

Walling

For walling, a flexible false wall will be constructed. The individual is placed with his heels touching the wall. The interrogator pulls the individual forward and then quickly and firmly pushes the individual into the wall. It is the individual's shoulder blades that hit the wall.

During this motion, the head and neck are supported with a rolled hood or towel that provides a c-collar effect to help prevent whiplash. To further reduce the probability of injury, the individual is allowed to rebound from the flexible wall. You have orally informed us that the false wall is in part constructed to create a loud sound when the individual hits it, which will further shock or surprise the individual. In part, the idea is to create a sound that will make the impact seem far worse than it is and that will be far worse than any injury that might result from the action.

Facial hold

The facial hold is used to hold the head immobile. One open palm is placed on either side of the individual's face. The fingertips are kept well away from the individual's eyes.

Facial slap

With the facial slap or insult slap, the interrogator slaps the individual's face with fingers slightly spread. The hand makes contact with the area directly between the tip of the individual's chin and the bottom of the corresponding earlobe. The interrogator invades the individual' s personal space. The goal of the facial slap is not to inflict physical pain that is severe or lasting. Instead, the purpose of the facial slap is to induce shock, surprise, and/or humiliation.

Cramped confinement

Cramped confinement involves the placement of the individual in a confined space, the dimensions of which restrict the individual's movement. The confined space is usually dark.

The duration of confinement varies based upon the size of the container. For the larger confined space, the individual can stand up or sit down; the smaller space is large enough for the subject to sit down. Confinement in the larger space can last up to eighteen hours; for the smaller space, confinement lasts for no more than two hours.

Wall standing

Wall standing is used to induce muscle fatigue. The individual stands about four to five feet from a wall, with his feet spread approximately to shoulder width. His arms are stretched out in front of him, with his fingers resting on the wall. His fingers support all of his body weight. The individual is not permitted to move or reposition his hands or feel.

Stress positions

A variety of stress positions may be used. You have informed us that these positions are not designed to produce the pain associated with contortions or twisting of the body, Rather, somewhat like walling, they are designed to produce the physical discomfort associated with muscle fatigue. Two particular stress positions are likely to be used on Zubaydah: (1) sitting on the floor with legs extended straight out in front of him with his hands raised above his head; and (2) kneeling on the floor while leaning back at a 45 degree angle. You have also orally informed us that through observing Zubaydah in captivity, you have noted that he appears to be quite flexible despite his wound.

Sleep deprivation

Sleep deprivation may be used. You have indicated that your purpose in using this technique is to reduce the individual's ability to think on his feet and, through the discomfort associated with lack of sleep to motivate him to cooperate. The effect of such sleep deprivation will generally remit after one or two nights of uninterrupted sleep.

You have informed us that your research has revealed that, in rare instances, some individuals who are already predisposed to psychological problems may experience abnormal reactions to sleep deprivation.

Even in those cases, however, reactions abate after the individual is permitted to sleep. Moreover, personnel with medical training are available to and will intervene in the unlikely event of an abnormal reaction. You have orally informed us that you would not deprive Zubaydah of sleep for more than eleven days at a time and that you have previously kept him awake for 72 hours, from which no mental or physical harm resulted.

Confinement with insects

You would like to place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him, You would, however, place a harmless insect in the box. You have orally informed us that you would in fact face a harmless insect such as a caterpillar in the box with him.

Waterboarding

Finally, you would like to use a technique called the "waterboard" in this procedure, the individual is bound securely to an inclined bench, which is approximately four feet by seven feet.
The individual's feet are generally elevated. A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes. Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner. As this is done, the cloth is lowered until it covers both the nose and mouth. Once the cloth is saturated and completely covers the mouth and nose, air flow is slightly restricted for 20 to 40 seconds due to the presence of the cloth. This causes an increase in carbon dioxide level in the individual's blood. This increase in the carbon dioxide level stimulates increased effort to breathe. This effort plus the cloth produces the perception of suffocation and incipient panic," i.e., the perception of drowning.

The individual does not breathe any water into his lungs. During those 20 to 40 seconds, water is continuously applied from a height of twelve to twenty-four inches. After this period, the cloth is lifted, and the individual is allowed to breathe unimpeded for three or four full breaths. The sensation of drowning is immediately relieved by the removal of the cloth. The procedure may then be repeated. The water is usually applied from a canteen cup or small watering can with a spout.
You have orally informed us that this procedure triggers an automatic physiological sensation of drowning that the individual cannot control even though he may be aware that he is in fact not drowning. You have also orally informed us that it is likely that this procedure would not last more than 20 minutes in anyone application.

We also understand that a medical expert with SERE experience will be present throughout this phase and that the procedures will be stopped if deemed medically necessary to prevent severe mental or physical harm to Zubaydah. As mentioned above, Zubaydah suffered an injury during his capture. You have informed us that steps will be taken to ensure that this injury is not in any way exacerbated by the use of these methods and that adequate medical attention will be given to ensure that it will heal properly.


Key players in the Bush 'torture' memos

Abu Zubaydah

Abu Zubaydah was one of the first senior al-Qaeda suspects to be captured. At the time he was said to have been one of the masterminds of the September 11 attacks, US officials claimed he was al-Qaeda's third in command.

The Palestinian-born man was captured in Pakistan, in March 2002, and then interrogated in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. According to US officials he has given information that foiled major terror attacks, however he has never been charged with any crime and remains in custody.

In a Red Cross report on Guantánamo Bay this year he was quoted saying of his waterboarding: "I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine. Since then, I still lose control of my urine when under stress".

"I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop,” he said.

John Rizzo

The current Acting General Counsel, John Rizzo, has worked for the CIA for more than 30 years.
The documents published by President Obama yesterday show that on at least three occasions Mr Rizzo asked the US Justice Department for explicit confirmation that the “enhanced interrogation” techniques employed by CIA agents did not breach the Bush Administration’s definition of torture.

Jay. S Bybee

The Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel signed the Justice Department memo from August 2002 approving the CIA’s interrogation techniques. Three years later he was promoted to become a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeal by President Bush.

Steven G. Bradbury

Soon after signing a memo to the CIA in May 2005 approving “enhanced interrogation” techniques, President Bush nominated him to become the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. Democrats in the Senate stymied that move and Mr Bradbury left the Justice Department at the end of the Bush Administration.


President Obama releases documents showing CIA 'torture' during Bush-era

But Obama ruled out prosecutions, saying the US needed a time of reflection, not retribution

President Obama last night released documents detailing the harsh CIA interrogation techniques that had been kept secret by the Bush Administration as he declared that it was time to move beyond "a dark and painful chapter in our history".

Four memos published yesterday showed that terror suspects had been subjected to tactics such as being slammed against walls wearing a special plastic neck collar, kept awake for up to 11 straight days, simulated drowning known as "waterboarding" and being placed in a dark, cramped box.

The CIA also approved exploiting one detainee's fear of insects by putting caterpillars in the box with him. Others were kept naked and cold for long periods, denied food, shackled for prolonged periods or had their family threatened.

Many senior figures in the Obama Administration, as well as human rights groups, believe that such practices amounted to torture.

Both the President and Attorney General Eric Holder, however, reassured CIA operatives yesterday that those involved in the interrogations would not face criminal prosecution so long as they had adhered to the legal advice given to them at the time from the Justice Department.

"Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past," said the President. "This is a time for reflection, not retribution."

CIA Dicrector Leon Pannetta told employees that the interrogation practices had been approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration and that they had nothing to fear if they had followed the rules. "You need to be fully confident that as you defend the nation, I will defend you," he said.

The techniques were used against 14 detainees that the US considered to have high intelligence value after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks between 2002 and 2005. These included the alleged al-Qaeda mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had initially refused to answer questions about other plots against the US.

Bush Administration officials believe that the "enhanced interrogations" subsequently used on him helped avert further attacks including one to crash a hijacked airliner into a tower in Los Angeles.

The memos, however, show just how much effort went into squaring the techniques with the letter, if not the spirit, of international laws against torture. Interrogators were told not to allow a prisoner's body temperature or food intake to fall below a certain level, because either could cause permanent damage. Passages describing forced nudity, slamming into walls, sleep deprivation and the dousing of detainees with water as cold as 41 degrees were interspersed with complex legal arguments about what constituted torture.

One memo authorised a method for combining multiple techniques, a practice that human rights lawyers claim crosses the line into torture even if any individual methods did not.

Although some sections were still redacted last night, the CIA had unsuccessfully argued for large parts of the documents to be blacked out. General Michael Hayden, who led the CIA during the Bush Administration, said: "If you want an intelligence service to work for you, they always work on the edge. That's just where they work." Foreign partners will be less likely to co-operate with the US because the release shows that it "can't keep anything secret".

Mr Obama, however, said that much of the information had already been widely publicised and it was important to emphasise that the programme no longer exists as it once did. Withholding the memos, he suggested, "could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States".

The documents were disclosed to meet a court-approved deadline in a legal case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's impossible not to be shocked by the contents of these memos," said ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer. "The memos should never have been written, but we're pleased the new administration has made them public."


Obama shields CIA officers over US 'torture'

AFP - US President Barack Obama has assured CIA agents involved in tough terror interrogations they will not be prosecuted as he released graphic memos detailing methods approved by the Bush White House.
In documents published Thursday, George W. Bush-era legal officials argued that the tactics such as simulated drowning, face slapping, the use of insects to scare prisoners and sleep deprivation did not amount to torture. "This is a time for reflection, not retribution," Obama said.
The four memos offered a stunning glimpse inside the covert interrogation program introduced after the September 11 attacks in 2001, which critics say amounted to torture, and Obama said undermined America's moral authority.
The documents argued that a long list of coercive techniques did not equal torture since they did not inflict severe mental or physical pain.Detailing methods used to question Al-Qaeda terror suspects, the memos reveal the use of dietary manipulation, forced nudity, facial and abdominal slaps, and the use of confined or "stress positions" for suspects.
In one technique known as "walling," interrogators could push a suspect against a false wall, so his shoulder blades make a slamming noise and lead him to think the impact is greater than in reality.
The memos also show interrogators asked for a ruling on whether the placing of a harmless insect in a cramped box with Al-Qaeda terror suspect Abu Zubaydah -- who had a bug phobia -- equated to torture.
The technique "certainly does not cause physical pain" and therefore could not be termed as torture and should be permissible, one of the memos said.
Similarly, techniques including waterboarding or simulated drowning, walling and sleep deprivation also fell short of torture, the memos said.Another memo details a "prototypical interrogation," which begins with a detainee stripped of his clothes, shackled and hooded, "with the walling collar over his head and around his neck."
Human rights groups reacted with dismay to Obama's decision to shield interrogators from prosecution.
"The Department of Justice appears to be offering a get-out-of-jail-free card to individuals who, by US Attorney General Eric Holder's own estimation, were involved in acts of torture," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International.
In a statement, Obama said the tactics adopted by the administration of his predecessor "undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer."
He said he was releasing the documents to avoid "an inaccurate accounting of the past," which would "fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States."
"In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution," he said in a statement.
"The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world," he said.
Dennis Blair, the director of National Intelligence, said the torture memos must be read in the context of the "horror" of the September 11 attacks.
"Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing," he said. "But we will absolutely defend those who relied on these memos and those guidelines."
He pledged, however, that Washington would not use similar methods in the future.


Memos describe CIA's harsh interrogation program

AP - The journey into the CIA's most extreme interrogation program began in darkness.
Blindfolded, hooded and wearing earmuffs, suspected terrorists were shackled and flown to secret interrogation centers. The buildings themselves were quiet, clinical and designed to fill prisoners with dread. Detainees were shaved, stripped and photographed nude.
The questioning began mildly, a shackled detainee facing a non-threatening CIA interrogator. But for detainees who refused to cooperate, the interrogation escalated in terrifying ways.
Few people have ever witnessed the process, which was designed to extract secrets from "high value" suspects during the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks on the U.S. But Justice Department documents, which the Obama administration simultaneously released and repudiated Thursday, describe the process from darkness to waterboarding in skin-crawling detail.
Prisoners were naked, shackled and hooded to start their interrogation sessions. When the CIA interrogator removed the hood, the questioning began. Whenever the prisoner resisted, the documents outlined a series of techniques the CIA could use to bring him back in line:
_ Nudity, sleep deprivation and dietary restrictions kept prisoners compliant and reminded them they had no control over their basic needs. Clothes and food could be used as rewards for cooperation.
_ Slapping prisoners on the face or abdomen was allowed. So was grabbing them forcefully by the collar or slamming them into a false wall, a technique called "walling" that had a goal of fear more than pain.
_ Water hoses were used to douse the prisoners for minutes at a time. The hoses were turned on and off as the interrogation continued.
_ Prisoners were put into one of three in "stress positions," such as sitting on the floor with legs out straight and arms raised in the air to cause discomfort.
At night, the detainees were shackled, standing naked or wearing a diaper. The length of sleep deprivation varied by prisoner but was authorized for up to 180 hours, or 7 1/2 days. Interrogation sessions ranged from 30 minutes to several hours and could be repeated as necessary and as approved by psychological and medical teams.
Some of these techniques, such as stripping a detainee naked, depriving him of sleep and putting a hood over his head, are prohibited under the U.S. Army Field Manual. But in 2002, the Justice Department authorized CIA interrogators to step up the pressure even further on suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah.
Justice Department lawyers said the CIA could place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box. Because Zubaydah appeared afraid of insects, they also authorized interrogators to place him in a box and fill it box with caterpillars (that tactic ultimately was not used).
Finally, the Justice Department authorized interrogators to take a step into what the United States now considers torture, waterboarding.
The Bush administration approved the use of waterboarding, a technique in which Zubaydah was strapped to a board, his feet raised above his head. His face was covered with a wet cloth as interrogators poured water over it.
The body responds as if it is drowning, over and over as the process is repeated."
We find that the use of the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death," Justice Department attorneys wrote. "From the vantage point of any reasonable person undergoing this procedure in such circumstances, he would feel as if he is drowning at the very moment of the procedure due to the uncontrollable physiological sensation he is experiencing."
But attorneys decided that waterboarding caused "no pain or actual harm whatsoever" and so did not meet the "severe pain and suffering" standard to be considered torture.
President Barack Obama has ended the CIA's interrogation program. CIA interrogators are now required to follow Army guidelines, under which waterboarding and many of the techniques listed above are prohibited.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8003537.stm

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US Soldier Murdered Iraqi Prisoners

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U.S. Soldier Guilty of Murdering Iraq Detainees

15 April 2009

U.S. Court finds John Hately guilty of killing four bound and blindfolded Iraqis.
A U.S. Army Sergeant was found guilty Wednesday of the murder of four detainees in Iraq in 2007, but acquitted in the death of a fifth. John E. Hatley, 40, was also found guilty of conspiracy to commit premeditated murder, but cleared on one count of obstruction of justice. Had entered a plea of not guilty, showed no emotion as the verdict from the eight-member jury was read out. He embraced his wife and soldiers from his former unit afterwards.
Hatley had been accused of involvement in two separate incidents. The first involved the shooting of a wounded detainee who medics said was close to death on or about January 3, 2007.
The second shooting -- of four blindfolded detainees -- allegedly took place in March or April 2007 in or near southwest Baghdad. Hatley was the highest ranking of three soldiers to face trial for killing the four detainees who, prosecutors say, were shot "execution style".
Private Michael Leahy, a combat medic, and Sergeant First Class Joseph P. Mayo were found guilty in March and sentenced to life and 35 years in prison respectively, with the possibility of parole.
An exact date and location have not been determined for the second shooting, however, and the bodies, which witnesses said were dumped into a canal, have never been found.
At the time, Hartley's unit was coming to terms with a fatal sniper attack on another sergeant a few weeks earlier.
The men were stationed at a highly exposed combat outpost in West Rashid, one of the most violent Baghdad neighbourhoods at the time.



Most civilian deaths in Iraq from executions

The most common cause of death for civilians in the first five years of the Iraq war was execution after being kidnapped, according to a report published Wednesday by an independent casualties monitor. Iraq Body Count (IBC), a group supported by researchers from the United States and Britain, said that such killings accounted for 33 percent of all civilian deaths in the five years after the 2003 US-led invasion. Based on a systematic survey of media accounts the group found that at least 19,706 people were kidnapped and executed during that period and that the remains of 5,760 of them, nearly one third, showed signs of torture.
The second leading cause of death was small arms gunfire, which killed 11,877 people. Suicide bombers killed 8,708 people during the same period and car bombs killed 5,360.
In the months after the invasion Iraq erupted with a fierce insurgency that briefly united Sunni and Shiite Muslims before it was convulsed by a wave of gruesome sectarian killings that peaked in 2006. At the height of the violence armed gangs were abducting, torturing and executing dozens of people each day. Bodies were frequently found with bruises, burns, and holes drilled into them with power tools. In the last two years US and Iraqi forces have allied with local tribes and former insurgents to bring a fragile calm to most areas, but armed groups continue to carry out sporadic attacks across the country.
The survey was conducted by IBC and researchers at Kings College and the University of London. It was to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday.
The researchers excluded more than 10,027 deaths that took place during periods of "prolonged violence" including the first weeks of the invasion and the US assault on the former insurgent bastion of Fallujah in November 2004.

US Doctors Torture Suspects

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Red Cross says doctors helped CIA "torture"

By Jane Sutton - Reuters - Tue Apr 7, 2009 4:04pm EDT

MIAMI (Reuters) - Health workers violated medical ethics when they helped interrogate terrorism suspects who were tortured at secret CIA prisons overseas, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.The medical workers, thought to be doctors and psychologists, monitored prisoners while they were mistreated at CIA prisons and advised interrogators whether to continue, adjust or halt the abuse, the ICRC said in a report based on interviews with 14 prisoners in 2007.

One prisoner alleged that medical personnel monitored his blood oxygen levels while he was subjected to waterboarding, a simulated drowning designed to induce panic and widely considered to be torture, the ICRC said.Other prisoners said that as they stood shackled with their arms chained above their heads, a doctor regularly measured the swelling in their legs and signaled when they should be allowed to sit down.The ICRC interviewed 14 men who had been held in secret CIA prisons overseas before being sent to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006.The 14 are considered by the United States to be "high-value" al Qaeda suspects who plotted or carried out mass murders, including the September 11 attacks and the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings. They had been held by the CIA, most for more than three years, in extreme isolation and had not been allowed contact with each other when the ICRC interviewed them at Guantanamo in November 2007.The ICRC said their claims had credence because they gave similar accounts of their treatment, including the actions of medical monitors whose names they never learned.The ICRC monitors compliance with the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of war captives and keeps its reports secret, sharing them only with the detaining government.The report, written in 2007, was posted on the New York Review of Books website on Monday night by journalist Mark Danner, who has not said publicly how he obtained it."VIOLATED ETHICAL DUTY"He first published excerpts last month, including a portion in which the ICRC concluded the al Qaeda captives' treatment in the CIA prisons "constituted torture" and violated international law.The report alleges collars were placed around some prisoners' necks and used to slam their heads against the walls, and that they were forced to stand with their arms shackled above them for two or three days and left to urinate or defecate on themselves.The prisoners told the ICRC they were beaten and kicked, left naked for long periods, subjected to sleep deprivation, loud music, cold temperatures, rape threats and forced shaving. Some said they were denied solid food unless they cooperated with interrogators and one said he was confined in a crouching position in a box too short to stand in.A previously undisclosed portion of the report concluded that medical workers who monitored or took part in the interrogations had violated their ethical duty to do no harm, preserve dignity and act in patients' best interest.The ICRC said "any interrogation process that requires a health professional to either pronounce on the subject's fitness to withstand such a procedure, or which requires a health professional to monitor the actual procedure, must have inherent health risks." "As such, the interrogation process is contrary to international law and the participation of health personnel in such a process is contrary to international standards of medical ethics," the ICRC concluded.The "high-value" captives quoted in the report are still at the Guantanamo prison, which President Barack Obama has ordered shut down by January 2010, and debate continues over what should be done with them.A military judge released a statement last month in which some of them bragged that they were "terrorists to the bone".Bush administration officials have said the "enhanced interrogation" of those prisoners produced information that helped thwart attacks but have never provided specifics.(Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Jackie Frank)

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE53668720090407


Medics joined CIA 'torture' sessions: Red Cross

WASHINGTON (AFP)

US medical personnel took part in CIA torture sessions in a "gross breach of medical ethics," the Red Cross concludes in a confidential report leaked this week.Medical officers monitored and sometimes participated in waterboarding terror suspects, and were present when the detainees were slammed into walls, subjected to temperature extremes or deprived of food and sleep for days, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The allegations were featured in a February 2007 report partially leaked by the New York Review of Books last month and posted for the first time in its entirety on the magazine's website Monday.ICRC spokesman Bernard Barrett confirmed to AFP the authenticity of the leaked report, which had been intended only for high-ranking US government officials.A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the report.The 40-page document is based on ICRC interviews with 14 "high-value" detainees sent to the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2006, following spells at secret CIA detention centers abroad.In the interviews, detainees told the ICRC that medical workers took part in torture and fine-tuned the harshness of treatment.They at times "gave instructions to interrogators to continue, to adjust or to stop particular methods," detainees say in the ICRC report.One medical official told detainee Encep "Hambali" Nuraman: "I look after your body only because we need you for information," the report said.It said the health personnel's alleged participation "constituted a gross breach of medical ethics and, in some cases, amounted to participation in torture and/or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."Their main role was "to serve the interrogation process, and not the patient," the Red Cross noted. "In so doing, the health personnel have condoned, and participated in ill-treatment."Alleged 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said that his oxygen and pulse were monitored when he was waterboarded, and that the simulated drowning was stopped on several occasions at the request of a health person.Walid bin Attash, a detainee who had had one leg amputated, said a person he assumed to be a doctor checked his healthy leg for swelling while he was held with his arms shackled above his head.The medical attendant eventually ordered bin Attash to be allowed to sit on the floor.At least five copies of the report had been shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007, but were barred from public release by ICRC guidelines intended to preserve the organization's neutrality."We deplore that a confidential report was made public," Barrett said. "It was only intended to be shared with senior officials in the US government."The report is a new embarrassment for the former administration of president George W. Bush. It said that beyond the ill-treatment of the 14 prisoners interviewed, their detention amounted to "arbitrary deprivation of liberty and enforced disappearance, in contravention of international law."Shortly after taking office in January, President Barack Obama banned the use of torture and ordered the closure of all CIA detention facilities.Obama has so far been cool on calls for enquiries into alleged abuses under his predecessor, but he has not ruled out possible prosecutions.CIA spokesman George Little noted that the White House has ordered agents to "not use interrogation techniques outside the Army Field Manual."He also said that no one acting "on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time" faced investigation or punishment.


Call It Torture

by Dan Froomkin - 16 March 2009 - Washginton Post 1:20 PM ET

Here's another good reason to have some sort of authoritative public reckoning of the Bush administration's dark legacy: Until we deal with it once and for all, it will come back to haunt us time and time again. The latest reminder of horror is now upon us, from the mouths of brutalized detainees and in the form of a conclusion by the International Red Cross -- the world's authority on the subject -- that their treatment undeniably amounted to torture.

Mark Danner, one of the great chroniclers of the Bush administration, somehow obtained a copy of the international organization's confidential report based on its interviews with the 14 "high value detainees" who were held in the CIA's network of secret prisons for periods ranging from 16 months to almost four and a half years.His article in the New York Review of Books is harrowing, deeply disturbing -- and an absolutely essential read. He also published a shorter version as a New York Times op-ed yesterday.The report, which made the rounds of the CIA and the White House two years ago, offers a damning portrait of cruelty. From the statements of individual detainees who had never been allowed to speak to each other, a clear method emerges based on forced nudity, isolation, bombardment with noise and light, deprivation of sleep and food, forced standing, repeated beatings and countless applications of cold water including, of course, waterboarding.The ICRC's conclusion is inescapable: "The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."As Danner tells NPR: "Its determination that these activities were torture is absolutely definitive, absolutely authoritative. These activities were torture. The International Committee of the Red Cross says so, and they use the definitions in treaties the United States has signed on to."Compare this with, for instance, former president George W. Bush's September 6, 2006, speech, in which he for the first time publicly acknowledged the existence of the secret prisons and what he called the CIA's "alternative set of procedures" for interrogation. "These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations," he said. "The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful. I cannot describe the specific methods used -- I think you understand why -- if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary."Here is what Abu Zubaydah, the first al Qaeda operative to be captured and tortured, told the ICRC, via Danner: "'I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.'"The prisoner was then put in a coffin-like black box, about 4 feet by 3 feet and 6 feet high, 'for what I think was about one and a half to two hours.' He added: The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside.... They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.'"By the time al Qaeda operative Walid bin Attash was captured a year later, Danner writes, the CIA was instead using "a plastic collar, which seems to have been a refinement of the towel that had been looped around Abu Zubaydah's neck."Here is alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed describing his waterboarding: "I would be strapped to a special bed, which could be rotated into a vertical position. A cloth would be placed over my face. Cold water from a bottle that had been kept in a fridge was then poured onto the cloth by one of the guards so that I could not breathe.... The cloth was then removed and the bed was put into a vertical position. The whole process was then repeated during about one hour. Injuries to my ankles and wrists also occurred during the water-boarding as I struggled in the panic of not being able to breath. Female interrogators were also present...and a doctor was always present, standing out of sight behind the head of [the] bed, but I saw him when he came to fix a clip to my finger which was connected to a machine. I think it was to measure my pulse and oxygen content in my blood. So they could take me to [the] breaking point."And don't think these actions and many others can't be traced directly back to the White House. They can.In December 2007, FBI agent John Kiriakou, who participated in Zubaydah's capture and early questioning, told ABC News that every decision leading to the torture of CIA detainees was documented and approved in cables to and from Washington. And last April, ABC News reported that top Bush aides, including former vice president Cheney, micromanaged interrogation tactics from the White House basement."The high-level discussions about these 'enhanced interrogation techniques' were so detailed," ABC's sources said, "some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic." Those discussions started right after Zubaydah's capture in the spring of 2002. According to ABC, the CIA briefed the White House group on its plans to use aggressive techniques against Zubaydah and received explicit approval.Techniques that created damage short of "the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function" were later authorized in an August 2002 Justice Department memo, known as the Torture Memo.For his part, Danner traces it all back to the administration's message after 9/11 that the gloves were to come off. "It is no accident that two of the administration's most powerful officials, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, served as young men in very senior positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations. They had witnessed firsthand the gloves going on and, in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, they argued powerfully that it was those limitations — and, it was implied, not a failure to heed warnings — that had helped lead, however indirectly, to the country's vulnerability to attack."And so, after a devastating and unprecedented attack, the gloves came off. Guided by the President and his closest advisers, the United States transformed itself from a country that, officially at least, condemned torture to a country that practiced it. And this fateful decision, however much we may want it to, will not go away, any more than the fourteen 'high-value detainees,' tortured and thus unprosecutable, will go away. Like the grotesque stories in the ICRC report, the decision sits before us, a toxic fact, polluting our political and moral life."Danner writes about "the dark moral epic of the Bush administration, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still." And there are many such contradictions. Among them: "Consider the uncompromising words of Eric Holder, the attorney general, who in reply to a direct question at his confirmation hearings had declared, 'waterboarding is torture.' There is nothing ambiguous about this statement — nor about the equally blunt statements of several high Bush administration officials, including the former vice-president and the director of the CIA, confirming unequivocally that the administration had ordered and directed that prisoners under its control be waterboarded."Another major theme of Danner's piece is that, despite the repeated assertions of the Bush administration, there's no evidence that, at long last, any of this torture did us any good at all. That's another point I couldn't agree with more. "In the wake of the ICRC report one can make several definitive statements," Danner writes: "1. Beginning in the spring of 2002 the United States government began to torture prisoners. This torture, approved by the President of the United States and monitored in its daily unfolding by senior officials, including the nation's highest law enforcement officer, clearly violated major treaty obligations of the United States, including the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, as well as US law."2. The most senior officers of the US government, President George W. Bush first among them, repeatedly and explicitly lied about this, both in reports to international institutions and directly to the public. The President lied about it in news conferences, interviews, and, most explicitly, in speeches expressly intended to set out the administration's policy on interrogation before the people who had elected him."3. The US Congress, already in possession of a great deal of information about the torture conducted by the administration—which had been covered widely in the press, and had been briefed, at least in part, from the outset to a select few of its members—passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and in so doing attempted to protect those responsible from criminal penalty under the War Crimes Act."4. Democrats, who could have filibustered the bill, declined to do so — a decision that had much to do with the proximity of the midterm elections, in the run-up to which, they feared, the President and his Republican allies might gain advantage by accusing them of 'coddling terrorists.'..."5. The political damage to the United States' reputation, and to the 'soft power' of its constitutional and democratic ideals, has been, though difficult to quantify, vast and enduring. In a war that is essentially an insurgency fought on a worldwide scale—which is to say, a political war, in which the attitudes and allegiances of young Muslims are the critical target of opportunity—the United States' decision to use torture has resulted in an enormous self-administered defeat, undermining liberal sympathizers of the United States and convincing others that the country is exactly as its enemies paint it: a ruthless imperial power determined to suppress and abuse Muslims. By choosing to torture, we freely chose to become the caricature they made of us."Joby Warrick, Peter Finn and Julie Tate write in The Washington Post that "[a]t least five copies of the report were shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007..."Many of the details of alleged mistreatment at CIA prisons had been reported previously, but the ICRC report is the most authoritative account and the first to use the word 'torture' in a legal context. "The CIA declined to comment. A U.S. official familiar with the report said, 'It is important to bear in mind that the report lays out claims made by the terrorists themselves.'..."'These reports are from an impeccable source,' said Geneve Mantri, a counterterrorism specialist at Amnesty International. 'It's clear that senior officials were warned from the very beginning that the treatment that detainees were subjected to amounted to torture. This story goes even further and deeper than many us of suspected. The more details we find out, the more shocking this becomes.'"

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UK abuses in Iraq

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BBC

5 November 2010

Iraqi civilians systematically abused, court hears

More than 220 Iraqi civilians were subjected to "systemic abuse", including torture, by British soldiers and interrogators in Iraq, the High Court was told on Friday.

Solicitors acting on behalf of the Iraqis submitted video evidence to support their claims.

They are appealing for a judical review of a refusal by Defence Secretary Liam Fox to order a wide-ranging public inquiry into allegations that abuse was widespread.

A Ministry of Defence (MoD) spokesman said a dedicated team had already been set up to investigate.

The Iraqi civilians complain the abuse occurred during the period from March 2003 to December 2008 in British-controlled detention facilities in Iraq following the war to oust Saddam Hussein.

Allegations of mistreatment include sexual abuse, food, water and sleep deprivation, prolonged solitary confinement, mock executions and being denied clothes.

The High Court application is being made by the Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) group.

Over the past few months, the lawyers have documented a mounting number of complaints.

Michael Fordham QC, appearing for the Iraqis, said: "There are credible allegations of serious, inhumane practices across a whole range of dates and facilities concerning British military detention in Iraq."

Referring to the prison which became notorious for allegations of torture and abuse against US soldiers, he asked: "Is this Britain's Abu Ghraib?"

Effective investigation

A MoD spokesman said: "These remain unproven allegations of mistreatment.

"The MoD takes all allegations seriously and has already set up the dedicated Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) to investigate them.

"The IHAT is the most effective way of investigating these unproven allegations rather than a costly public inquiry."

Two public inquiries have already been launched into similar claims.

The first inquiry into the death of 26-year-old hotel worker Baha Mousa in UK military custody in September 2003, began hearing evidence last July.

And last November, the MoD announced details of a second public hearing into allegations that 19-year-old Hamid Al-Sweady and up to 19 other Iraqis were unlawfully killed and others ill-treated at a British base in May 2004.

But the PIL group say the two inquiries only cover a fraction of the cases, and that examining the allegations piecemeal would mean that many cases would never see the light of day.

They also argue that the IHAT group - a mixed team of military police and civilian investigators led by a former senior police officer - lacks the necessary independence to carry out a proper investigation.

Speaking before the start of the hearing at London's Law Court, Phil Shiner, who is representing the Iraqis, said it was nonsense to suggest - as he said the MoD did - that abuse had been confined to a "few bad apples".

He added: "That is absolutely not the case. There are very serious allegations related to very troubling systemic abuse."

The hearing is expected to last three days.


Iraqi eyewitness: Mistreatment by UK troops

The High Court in London will is hearing allegations that 142 Iraqis were mistreated by British forces in Iraq between 2003 and 2008.

Ali Zaki Mousa is one of those who alleges he was mistreated by British forces in Iraq in 2006. He spoke to BBC World Service.

Ali Zaki Mousa, a former taxi driver who lives in Basra, Iraq.

At about 0200 in the morning, while I was asleep with my wife and my little baby daughter, I was woken by the sound of an explosion. British soldiers immediately started firing shots, and smoke and stun grenades, and capsules which looked like ammunition.

My father, he's 62, he'd been sleeping in the front room; he started screaming. I put my little daughter down and I looked around, and then the soldiers started hitting me in the chest and genitals.

The soldiers forced me to kneel facing the wall and tied my hands with plastic handcuffs. Then they started kicking me and swearing at me. They kept using the "f" word and telling me to shut up.

I was beaten heavily around the eyes and my face became all swollen. One soldier pointed his rifle at my mouth; then they beat me heavily in the back around my kidneys using their rifle butts. The following morning I noticed there was blood in my urine.

Later on I found out that while I was in detention, British soldiers carried out intrusive searches of our women, including my relatives. They also beat my elderly father and my brother.

Then they blindfolded me and pulled me outside in my sleeping clothes and barefoot, and forced me to get into a tank. Then we were taken to Basra airport.

During the investigation with me in Basra International Airport, they accused me and some of my neighbours of being affiliated with militias and they said our area was under the control of militias.

They pulled me out of the tank and forced me to kneel with my head down and my hands tied behind my back. It was incredibly painful.

The more I screamed the more they kicked me. They tightened the plastic handcuffs further, and honestly they were very painful.

The time must have been about 0330 to 0400 in the morning when the soldiers started to beat the detainees in Basra airport one after the other, and I was one of them; they then interviewed us individually in a tent.

[They] accused me of being a member of the militias and that is not true. They threatened to remove my nails using pincers, and they threatened to remove my underwear and to force me to sexually assault myself using a bottle.

I was eventually released after I'd been in detention for 12 months.

[I was never charged,] except the accusation that me and my brothers were linked to the militias.

My father died recently and his body carried the marks of wounds as a result of beatings and punches from British soldiers.

I have my daughter, she was born before the detention. Now, 5 years on, I can't have any more children, and I still have the marks of the beatings on my back, around my kidneys and on my genitals.

Psychologically, I can't cope with any pressure from my wife or my child; if my wife talks to me about things I can't manage, I lose my temper and I beat her. All this is caused by the beating and the abuse I was subjected to by the British forces.

When the British forces first came into Iraq, the Iraqi people were so delighted at the defeat of Saddam the dictator, but then when British forces started behaving so badly, not only me, but all the Iraqi people, changed their view of the British troops.

We used to look at them as people who had come to help us, but they completely turned against us - with their tanks shooting in the streets, and the continued arrests without any legitimate or legal cause or proof. To us now they are no more than a pack of savage wolves.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11696329
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Torture the Dark Side

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Two articles by Professor Danner:

1. Tales from Torture's Dark World
2. Torture and Truth

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15 March 2009

ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody


Tales from Torture's Dark World

By: Professor Mark Danner, University of California, Berkeley.

ON a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

“In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

At these places, Mr. Bush said, “the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures.” He added: “These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.” This speech will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush’s most important: perhaps the only historic speech he ever gave. In his fervent defense of his government’s “alternative set of procedures” and his equally fervent insistence that they were “lawful,” he set out before the country America’s dark moral epic of torture, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still.

At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, Mr. Bush made it possible that day for those on whom the alternative set of procedures were performed eventually to speak. For he announced that he would send 14 “high-value detainees” from dark into twilight: they would be transferred from the overseas “black sites” to Guantánamo. There, while awaiting trial, the International Committee of the Red Cross would be “advised of their detention, and will have the opportunity to meet with them.”

A few weeks later, from Oct. 6 to 11 and then from Dec. 4 to 14, 2006, Red Cross officials — whose duty it is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war — traveled to Guantánamo and began interviewing the prisoners.

Their stated goal was to produce a report that would “provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in the C.I.A. detention program,” periods ranging “from 16 months to almost four and a half years.”

As the Red Cross interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, “to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities,” to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them — in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on Feb. 14, 2007.

The result is a document — labeled “confidential” and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials — that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.

A short time ago, this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.

Indeed, since the detainees were kept strictly apart and isolated, both at the black sites and at Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely. As its authors state in their introduction, “The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds particular weight to the information provided below.”

Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page — “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box” — the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination: “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

•
Perhaps one should start with the story of the first man to whom, according to news reports, the president’s “alternative set of procedures” were applied:

“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4 meters by 4 meters. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can’t remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next two to three weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket.

“I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

“The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting-type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.

“The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.”

So begins the story of Abu Zubaydah, a senior member of Al Qaeda, captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002. The arrest of an active terrorist with actionable information was a coup for the United States.

After being treated for his wounds — he had been shot in the stomach, leg and groin during his capture — Abu Zubaydah was brought to one of the black sites, probably in Thailand, and placed in that white room.

It is important to note that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators, that everyone in that white room — guards, interrogators, doctor — was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. “It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m going to slap him. Or I’m going to shake him,’” said John Kiriakou, a C.I.A. officer who helped capture Abu Zubaydah, in an interview with ABC News.

Every one of the steps taken with regard to Abu Zubaydah “had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He’s uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’”

He went on: “The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific…. No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard.”

Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, C.I.A. officers briefed the National Security Council’s principals committee, including Vice President Dick Cheney, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, in detail on the interrogation plans for the prisoner. As the interrogations proceeded, so did the briefings, with George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, bringing to senior officials almost daily reports of the techniques applied.

At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, Justice Department officials, led by John Yoo, were working on a memorandum, now known informally as “the torture memo,” which claimed that for an “alternative procedure” to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort “that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.” The memo was approved in August 2002, thus serving as a legal “green light” for interrogators to apply the most aggressive techniques to Abu Zubaydah:

“I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck; they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room.”

The prisoner was then put in a coffin-like black box, about 4 feet by 3 feet and 6 feet high, “for what I think was about one and a half to two hours.” He added: The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…. They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.”

After this beating, Abu Zubaydah was placed in a small box approximately three feet tall. “They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about three months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box; I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

“I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly, and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.

“The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless.”

After being placed again in the tall box, Abu Zubaydah “was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before.

“I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.

This went on for approximately one week.”

•
Walid bin Attash, a Saudi involved with planning the attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998 and on the Navy destroyer Cole in 2000, was captured in Pakistan on April 29, 2003:

“On arrival at the place of detention in Afghanistan I was stripped naked. I remained naked for the next two weeks…. I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural.”

This forced standing, with arms shackled above the head, seems to have become standard procedure. It proved especially painful for Mr. bin Attash, who had lost a leg fighting in Afghanistan:

“After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my wrists.”

Cold water was used on Mr. bin Attash in combination with beatings and the use of a plastic collar, which seems to have been a refinement of the towel that had been looped around Abu Zubaydah’s neck:

“On a daily basis during the first two weeks a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room. It was also placed around my neck when being taken out of my cell for interrogation and was used to lead me along the corridor. It was also used to slam me against the walls of the corridor during such movements.

“Also on a daily basis during the first two weeks I was made to lie on a plastic sheet placed on the floor which would then be lifted at the edges. Cold water was then poured onto my body with buckets…. I would be kept wrapped inside the sheet with the cold water for several minutes. I would then be taken for interrogation.”

•
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the key planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003.

After three days in what he believes was a prison in Afghanistan, Mr. Mohammed was put in a tracksuit, blindfold, hood and headphones, and shackled and placed aboard a plane. He quickly fell asleep — “the first proper sleep in over five days” — and remains unsure of how long the journey took. On arrival, however, he realized he had come a long way:

“I could see at one point there was snow on the ground. Everybody was wearing black, with masks and army boots, like Planet X people. I think the country was Poland. I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me without the label removed. It had [an] e-mail address ending in ‘.pl.’”

He was stripped and put in a small cell. “I was kept for one month in the cell in a standing position with my hands cuffed and shackled above my head and my feet cuffed and shackled to a point in the floor,” he told the Red Cross.

“Of course during this month I fell asleep on some occasions while still being held in this position. This resulted in all my weight being applied to the handcuffs around my wrist, resulting in open and bleeding wounds. [Scars consistent with this allegation were visible on both wrists as well as on both ankles.] Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.”

For interrogation, Mr. Mohammed was taken to a different room. The sessions lasted for as long as eight hours and as short as four.

“If I was perceived not to be cooperating I would be put against a wall and punched and slapped in the body, head and face. A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall. The beatings were combined with the use of cold water, which was poured over me using a hose-pipe.”

As with Abu Zubaydah, the harshest sessions involved the “alternative set of procedures” used in sequence and in combination, one technique intensifying the effects of the others:

“The beatings became worse and I had cold water directed at me from a hose-pipe by guards while I was still in my cell. The worst day was when I was beaten for about half an hour by one of the interrogators. My head was banged against the wall so hard that it started to bleed. Cold water was poured over my head. This was then repeated with other interrogators. Finally I was taken for a session of water boarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention of the doctor.”

Reading the Red Cross report, one becomes somewhat inured to the “alternative set of procedures” as they are described: the cold and repeated violence grow numbing. Against this background, the descriptions of daily life of the detainees in the black sites, in which interrogation seems merely a periodic heightening of consistently imposed brutality, become more striking.

Here again is Mr. Mohammed:

“After each session of torture I was put into a cell where I was allowed to lie on the floor and could sleep for a few minutes. However, due to shackles on my ankles and wrists I was never able to sleep very well…. The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell, which I could use on request” — he was shackled standing, his hands affixed to the ceiling — “but I was not allowed to clean myself after toilet during the first month…. I wasn’t given any clothes for the first month. Artificial light was on 24 hours a day, but I never saw sunlight.”

•
Abu Zubaydah, Walid bin Attash, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — these men almost certainly have blood on their hands. There is strong reason to believe that they had critical parts in planning and organizing terrorist operations that caused the deaths of thousands of people. So in all likelihood did the other “high-value detainees” whose treatment while secretly confined by the United States is described in the Red Cross report.

From everything we know, many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished — to be “brought to justice,” as President Bush vowed they would be. The fact that judges, military or civilian, throw out cases of prisoners who have been tortured — and have already done so at Guantánamo — means it is highly unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon.

For the men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which “torture doesn’t work.” The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed.

As I write, it is impossible to know definitively what benefits — in intelligence, in national security, in disrupting Al Qaeda — the president’s approval of use of an “alternative set of procedures” might have brought to the United States. Only a thorough investigation, which we are now promised, much belatedly, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, can determine that.

What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact. We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away.

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2004 Article:


Torture and Truth

By: Professor Mark Danner, University of California, Berkeley.


Last November in Iraq, I traveled to Fallujah during the early days of what would become known as the “Ramadan Offensive”—when suicide bombers in the space of less than an hour destroyed the Red Cross headquarters and four police stations, and daily attacks by insurgents against US troops doubled, and the American adventure in Iraq entered a bleak tunnel from which it has yet to emerge. I inquired of a young man there why the people of that city were attacking Americans more frequently each day. How many of the attacks, I wanted to know, were carried out by foreign fighters? How many by local Islamists? And how many by what US officers called “FRL’s”— former regime loyalists?[1]

The young man—I’ll call him Salih —listened, answered patiently in his limited but eloquent English, but soon became impatient with what he plainly saw as my American obsession with categories and particulars. Finally he interrupted my litany of questions, pushed his face close to mine, and spoke to me slowly and emphatically:

For Fallujans it is a shame to have foreigners break down their doors. It is a shame for them to have foreigners stop and search their women. It is a shame for the foreigners to put a bag over their heads, to make a man lie on the ground with your shoe on his neck. This is a great shame, you understand? This is a great shame for the whole tribe.
It is the duty of that man, and of that tribe, to get revenge on this soldier—to kill that man. Their duty is to attack them, to wash the shame. The shame is a stain, a dirty thing; they have to wash it. No sleep—we cannot sleep until we have revenge. They have to kill soldiers.
He leaned back and looked at me, then tried one more time. “The Americans,” he said, “provoke the people. They don’t respect the people.”


I thought of Salih and his impatience as I paged through the reports of General Taguba and the Red Cross, for they treat not just of “abuses” or “atrocities” but the entire American “liberation” of Iraq and how it has gone wrong; they are dispatches from the scene of a political disaster. Salih came strongly to mind as I read one of the less lurid sections of the Red Cross report, entitled “Treatment During Arrest,” in which the anonymous authors tell how Iraqis they’d interviewed described “a fairly consistent pattern… of brutality by members of the [Coalition Forces] arresting them”:

Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property. They arrested suspects, tying their hands in the back with flexi-cuffs, hooding them, and taking them away. Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people…pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles.
Of course, this is war; those soldiers had intelligence to gather, insurgents to find, a rebellion to put down. However frightening such nighttime arrests might be, Iraqis could at least expect that these soldiers were accountable, that they had commanding officers and a clear chain of command, that there were bases to which one could go and complain. These were, after all, Americans. And yet:

In almost all instances…, arresting authorities provided no in formation about who they were, where their base was located, nor did they explain the cause of arrest. Similarly, they rarely informed the arrestee or his family where he was being taken and for how long, resulting in the de facto “disappearance” of the arrestee…. Many [families] were left without news for months, often fearing that their relatives were dead.
We might pass over with a shiver the word “disappearance,” with its unfortunate associations, and say to ourselves, once again, that this was war: insurgents were busy killing American soldiers and had to be rooted out, even if it meant one or two innocent civilians were sucked up into the system. And then one comes upon this quiet little sentence:

Certain [Coalition Forces] military intelligence officers told the ICRC that in their estimate between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake. [emphasis added]
Abu Ghraib contained within its walls last fall—as the war heated up and American soldiers, desperate for “actionable intelligence,” spent many an autumn evening swooping down on Iraqi homes, kicking in doors, and carrying away hooded prisoners into the night—well over eight thousand Iraqis. Could it be that “between 70 percent and 90 percent” of them were “arrested by mistake”? And if so, which of the naked, twisted bodies that television viewers and news paper readers around the world have been gazing at these last weeks were among them? Perhaps the seven bodies piled up in that great coil, buttocks and genitals exposed to the camera? Or the bodies bound one against another on the cellblock floor? Or the body up against the bars, clenched before the teeth of barking police dogs?

Consider the naked body wearing only the black hood, hands clasped above its head: Pfc Lynndie England, she of the famous leash, frames the body like a car salesman displaying next year’s model, grinning back at the camera, pointing to its genitals with her right hand, flashing a thumbs-up with her left. This body belongs to Hayder Sabbar Abd, a thirty-four-year-old Shiite from Nasi riya, also known as Abu Ghraib Prisoner Number 13077. Last June, at a military checkpoint in the south, according to The New York Times, Mr. Abd “tried to leave the taxi he was riding in.” Suspicious behavior, rendered more suspicious by the fact that Mr. Abd had served eighteen years in the Iraqi army, part of that time in the Republican Guard. The Americans took him to a detention center at Baghdad airport, and from there to the big military prison at Um Qasr, and finally, after three months, to Abu Ghraib. A strange odyssey through Occupied Iraq, made stranger by the fact that during that time, Mr. Abd says, “he was never interrogated, and never charged with a crime.” “The truth is,” he told Ian Fisher of The New York Times, “we were not terrorists. We were not insurgents. We were just ordinary people. And American intelligence knew this.”

As I write, we know nothing of what “American intelligence knew”—apart from a hint here or there, this critical fact is wholly absent from both reports, as it has been from the public hearings of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other officials. General Taguba, following his orders, concentrates instead on the activities of the military police, hapless amateurs who were “tasked” to “set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses” and whose work, thanks to digital photography, has now been displayed so vividly to the citizens of the world. It is this photography that has let us visualize something of what happened to Mr. Abd one night in early November, following a fight among prisoners, when he and six other men were brought to what was known as “the hard site” at Abu Ghraib, the wing for the most dangerous prisoners:

The seven men were all placed in hoods, he said, and the beating began. “They beat our heads on the walls and the doors,” he said. “I don’t really know: I couldn’t see.” He said his jaw had been broken, badly enough that he still has trouble eating. In all, he said, he believes that he received about 50 blows over about two hours.
“Then the interpreter told us to strip,” he said. “We told him: ‘You are Egyptian, and you are a Muslim. You know that as Muslims we can’t do that.’ When we refused to take off our clothes, they beat us and tore our clothes off with a blade.”
It was at this moment in the interview…that several pages of the photographs made public last week were produced…. He quickly and unemotionally pointed out all his friends—Hussein, Ah med, Hashim—naked, hooded, twisted around each other.
He also saw himself, as degraded as possible: naked, his hand on his genitals, a female soldier, identified in another report as Pvt. Lynndie England, pointing and smiling with a cigarette in her mouth. Mr. Abd said one of the soldiers had removed his hood, and the translator ordered him to masturbate while looking at Private England….
“She was laughing, and she put her hands on her breasts,” Mr. Abd said. “Of course, I couldn’t do it. I told them that I couldn’t, so they beat me in the stomach, and I fell to the ground. The translator said, ‘Do it! Do it! It’s better than being beaten.’ I said, ‘How can I do it?’ So I put my hand on my penis, just pretending.”
All the while, he said, the flash of the camera kept illuminating the dim room that once held prisoners of Mr. Hussein….[2]
Such scenes, President Bush tells us, “do not represent America.” But for Iraqis, what does? To Salih and other Iraqis they represent the logical extension of treatment they have seen every day under a military occupation that began harshly and has grown, under the stress of the insurgency, more brutal. As another young Iraqi man told me in November,

The attacks on the soldiers have made the army close down. You go outside and there’s a guy on a Humvee pointing a machine gun at you. You learn to raise your hands, to turn around. You come to hate the Americans.
This of course is a prime goal of the insurgents; they cannot defeat the Americans militarily but they can defeat them politically. For the insurgents, the path to such victory lies in provoking the American occupiers to do their political work for them; the insurgents ambush American convoys with “improvised explosive devices” placed in city neighborhoods so the Americans will respond by wounding and killing civilians, or by imprisoning them in places like Abu Ghraib.[3] The insurgents want to place the outnumbered, overworked American troops under constant fear and stress so they will mistreat Iraqis on a broad scale and succeed in making themselves hated.

In this project, as these reports make clear, the methods used at Abu Ghraib played a critical part. For if Americans are learning about these “abuses” for the first time, news about what has been happening at Abu Ghraib and other prisons has been spreading throughout Iraq for many months. And if the Iraqis, with their extensive experience of Abu Ghraib and the purposes it served in the national imagination, do not regard such methods as “abuses,” neither do the investigators of the Red Cross:

These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information or other forms of co-operation from persons who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an “intelligence value.” [emphasis added]
What, according to the Red Cross, were these “methods of physical and psychological coercion”?

• Hooding, used to prevent people from seeing and to disorient them, and also to prevent them from breathing freely. One or sometimes two bags, sometimes with an elastic blindfold over the eyes which, when slipped down, further impeded proper breathing. Hooding was sometimes used in conjunction with beatings thus increasing anxiety as to when blows would come. The practice of hooding also allowed the interrogators to remain anonymous and thus to act with impunity. Hooding could last for periods from a few hours to up to two to four consecutive days…;
• Handcuffing with flexi-cuffs, which were sometimes made so tight and used for such extended periods that they caused skin lesions and long-term after-effects on the hands (nerve damage), as observed by the ICRC;
• Beatings with hard objects (including pistols and rifles), slapping, punching, kicking with knees or feet on various parts of the body (legs, sides, lower back, groin)...;
• Being paraded naked outside cells in front of other persons deprived of their liberty, and guards, sometimes hooded or with women’s underwear over the head…;
• Being attached repeatedly over several days…with handcuffs to the bars of their cell door in humiliating (i.e. naked or in underwear) and/or uncomfortable position causing physical pain;
• Exposure while hooded to loud noise or music, prolonged exposure while hooded to the sun over several hours, including during the hottest time of the day when temperatures could reach…122 degrees Fahrenheit…or higher;
• Being forced to remain for prolonged periods in stress positions such as squatting or standing with or without the arms lifted.
The authors of the Red Cross report note that when they visited the “isolation section” of Abu Ghraib in mid-October 2003, they “directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation” of prisoners, among them “the practice of keeping [prisoners] completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness….” When the Red Cross delegates “requested an explanation from the authorities…the military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was ‘part of the process.’”

The ICRC medical delegate examined persons…presenting signs of concentration difficulties, memory problems, verbal expression difficulties, incoherent speech, acute anxiety reactions, abnormal behavior and suicidal tendencies. These symptoms appeared to have been caused by the methods and duration of interrogation.
This “process” is not new; indeed, like so many of the news stories presented as “revelation” during these last few months, it has appeared before in the American press. After the arrest in Pakistan more than a year ago of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the al-Qaeda operations chief, “senior American officials” told The New York Times that “physical torture would not be used against Mr. Mohammed’:

They said his interrogation would rely on what they consider acceptable techniques like sleep and light deprivation and the temporary withholding of food, water, access to sunlight and medical attention.
American officials acknowledged that such techniques were recently applied as part of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the highest-ranking Qaeda operative in custody until the capture of Mr. Mohammed. Painkillers were with held from Mr. Zubaydah, who was shot several times during his capture in Pakistan.[4]

In the same article, published more than a year ago, a number of American officials discussed the “methods and techniques” applied in interrogations at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, at Guantanamo, and at other secret prisons now holding the thousands who have been arrested and confined by American and allied forces since the attacks of September 11:

Routine techniques include covering suspects’ heads with black hoods for hours at a time and forcing them to stand or kneel in uncomfortable positions in extreme cold or heat…. In some cases, American officials said, women are used as interrogators to try to humiliate men….
Disorientation is a tool of interrogation and therefore a way of life. To that end, the building—an unremarkable hangar—is lighted twenty-four hours a day, making sleep almost impossible, said Mu hammad Shah, an Afghan farmer who was held there for eighteen days.
Colonel King said it was legitimate to use lights, noise and vision restriction, and to alter, without warning, the time between meals, to blur a detainee’s sense of time. He said sleep deprivation was “probably within the lexicon….”
Two former prisoners said they had been forced to stand with their hands chained to the ceiling and their feet shackled in the isolation cells.
The “methods of physical and psychological coercion” that the Red Cross delegates witnessed at Abu Ghraib were indeed, as the “military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation” told them frankly, “part of” a “process” that has been deployed by American interrogators in the various American-run secret prisons throughout the world since September 11. What separates Abu Ghraib from the rest is not the “methods of physical and psychological coercion used” but the fact that, under the increasing stress of the war, the pressing need for intelligence, and the shortage of available troops and other resources in Iraq, military policemen like Pfc England, who had little or no training, were pressed into service to “soften up” the prisoners and, as the Taguba report puts it, set “the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.” And so when Specialist Sabrina Harman was asked about the prisoner who was placed on a box with electric wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis, in an image now famous throughout the world, she replied that “her job was to keep detainees awake,” that “MI [military intelligence] wanted to get them to talk,” and that it was the job of her and her colleagues “to do things for MI and OGA [Other Government Agencies, a euphemism for the CIA] to get these people to talk.” The military police, who, General Taguba notes, had “no training in interrogation,” were told, in the words of Sergeant Javal S. Davis, to “loosen this guy up for us.” “Make sure he has a bad night.” “Make sure he gets the treatment.”

As for the unusual methods used—”breaking of chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees,” “using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees,” “beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair,” “threatening male detainees with rape,” “sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick,” and the rest of the sad litany General Taguba patiently sets out Sergeant Davis told investigators that he “assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something. Also the wing belongs to MI and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.”

Many of the young Americans smiling back at us in the photographs will soon be on trial. It is unlikely that those who ran “the process” and issued the orders will face the same tribunals. Iraqis will be well aware of this, even if Americans are not. The question is whether Americans have traveled far enough from the events of September 11 to go beyond the photographs, which show nothing more than the amateur stooges of “the process,” and look squarely at the process itself, the process that goes on daily at Abu Ghraib, Guant�namo, Bagram, and other secret prisons in Iraq and around the world.

To date the true actors in those lurid scenes, who are professionals and no doubt embarrassed by the garish brutality of their apprentices in the military police, have remained offstage. None has testified. The question we must ask in coming days, as Specialist Jeremy Sivits and other young Americans face public courts-martial in Baghdad, is whether or not we as Americans can face a true revelation. We must look squarely at the photographs and ask: Is what has changed only what we know, or what we are willing to accept?

—May 12, 2004

markdanner.com


Notes
[1] See my “Delusions in Baghdad,” The New York Review, December 18, 2003.

[2] See “Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by US Troops,” The New York Times, May 5, 2004, p. A1.

[3] See my “Iraq: The New War,” The New York Review, September 25, 2003.

[4] See Don Van Natta Jr., “Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World,” The New York Times, March 9, 2003.

see also:

ARTICLE 15-6 INVESTIGATION OF THE 800th MILITARY POLICE BRIGADE (The Taguba Report)
by Major General Antonio M. Taguba.

REPORT OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS (ICRC) ON THE TREATMENT BY THE COALITION FORCES OF PRISONERS OF WAR AND OTHER PERSONS PROTECTED BY THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS IN IRAQ DURING ARREST, INTERNMENT AND INTERROGATION
by Delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross, February 2004

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