The Unlearned Lessons of Abu Ghraib
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The Unlearned Lessons of Abu Ghraib
By Christopher Graveline
The Washington Post
Thursday 19 October 2006
President Bush has signed into law Congress's latest attempt to
clarify our country's position on proper treatment of detainees and the
boundaries of legitimate interrogation techniques. Unfortunately, this
legislation demonstrates that both the administration and Congress have
failed to learn important lessons from what Bush described as the
"biggest mistake that's happened so far" in Iraq: the detainee abuses
at Abu Ghraib.
By dissociating potential criminal responsibility from overly
aggressive interrogation practices that could be classified as "minor"
breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and setting up a situation in which
different interrogation practices can be used by our military and the
CIA, our national leadership has ensured more abuse scandals.
As part of the Army judge advocate general team investigating and
prosecuting the Abu Ghraib soldiers, I crisscrossed the globe
interviewing witnesses, collecting documents and studying our national
policies, searching for went wrong at that prison. The evidence
demonstrated that most of the photographed abuse had little or nothing
to do with interrogation; it was done for sport by prison guards. But
we also found disturbing conduct by military and civilian
interrogators.
The interrogation abuses could be linked to three main areas of
breakdown: confusion in the military ranks about what was acceptable
behavior, given the conduct of civilian contractors and "other
governmental agencies"; migration of certain techniques within the
intelligence community without an understanding of how to implement
them properly; and exploitation of the ambiguity in apparently
innocuous interrogation tactics.
The new law does nothing to remedy these weaknesses.
First, our military and civilian intelligence agencies do not
operate in mutually exclusive bubbles. A great deal of interaction
occurs as military units capture suspected personnel, hand them over to
interested agencies and, often, witness the interrogations. Our service
members, especially Special Operations forces, will see the double
standard - the CIA's and the military's. This blurring was a main
complaint of Abu Ghraib prison guards.
Army Maj. Gen. George Fay, who investigated Abu Ghraib, wrote in
his report that "CIA detention and interrogation practices led to a
loss of accountability, abuse, reduced interagency cooperation, and an
unhealthy mystique that further poisoned the atmosphere." The power of
the CIA's mystique to influence our soldiers should not be
underestimated. Army guards reported seeing unknown men in civilian
clothes dropping prisoners off and telling the guards not to give the
detainees identification numbers, contrary to usual practices under the
Geneva Conventions. The civilians exuded an air of confidence that
suggested they knew exactly what they were doing and that this
departure from the norm was allowed. Similar issues were unearthed in
the interrogation booth, including one instance of a man dying during a
CIA interrogation at Abu Ghraib.
The CIA conducted its own internal abuse investigation but never
reported the results to any military authority in Iraq, creating
resentment, the impression of a double standard and confusion in the
military ranks as to what were acceptable practices. Having strict
controls over interrogations and the ability to hold individual
interrogators responsible for their actions is another important lesson
stemming from abuses seen in Iraq.
Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, an Army interrogator,
exploited the ambiguous language of the "harsh" interrogation approach
to wrap an Iraqi general in a sleeping bag, tie electrical cords around
the bag and sit on the man's chest in an attempt to scare him with
suffocation. The general died. (This was not at Abu Ghraib.) Welshofer
was convicted by the military of negligent homicide. But given the
language of the new law, it is unclear whether a civilian interrogator
performing the same actions would be prosecuted, since it would be
impossible to prove that the interrogator "specifically intended" to
torture or inflict "severe or serious physical or mental pain."
The new law grants too much latitude in an area where precision and
oversight are critical. If confusion reigned in Washington during the
past several weeks over whether waterboarding or other, "harsher"
techniques would be permissible under the legislation, imagine the
results when our agents and service members are faced with the same
question halfway around the world and years removed from this debate -
especially if the threat of criminal responsibility is gone.
The better route would have been to authorize mirror-image
interrogation techniques for both the CIA and the military and to
maintain the possibility of criminal prosecution if an interrogator
exceeds these authorized approaches. All interrogators would have more
than enough flexibility to obtain necessary information simply by using
the approaches recently rewritten into the new Army field manual that
governs interrogation.
Now we must wait to see what interrogation rules the president will
promulgate for the CIA. Given the administration's rhetoric, there
seems little hope for a cure for the systemic problems exposed at Abu
Ghraib.
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The writer, who served as an active-duty Army JAG officer for more
than seven years, participated in the prosecution of 10 soldiers for
detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.