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Generals told MPs to soften up prisoners { May 8 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4066303,00.htmlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4066303,00.html
General Told MPs to `soften Up' Prisoners
Saturday May 8, 2004 3:31 AM
By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - An American general recommended that Army prison guards in Iraq become more involved in ``softening up'' prisoners for interrogations shortly before abuses occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison last fall, according to an internal report at the heart of the controversy.
It is a role that military police are not trained to perform and are prohibited from doing, the Army says; that led members of Congress to press Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Friday, largely unsuccessfully, for details on what role MPs played at the troubled prison.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., asked Rumsfeld whether military intelligence or the MPs' direct commanders had authority over the military police prison guards at Abu Ghraib and what the MPs' instructions were.
Rumsfeld said authority over the guards had ``shifted over a period of time.''
U.S. military and civilian leaders have said repeatedly that the shocking acts depicted in widely circulated photographs of prisoners being sexually humiliated at the Abu Ghraib detention compound are gross violations of military regulations about the handling of prisoners.
They also say that even if MPs were led poorly and trained inadequately for the jobs they were assigned at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq, as an Army probe revealed as early as last fall, they should have known that inflicting physical and sexual abuse was wrong.
What remains to be explained is whether the abusive behavior was linked to pressure from military intelligence units responsible for prisoner interrogations to push the bounds of civilized behavior to make captives more compliant under questioning.
Full answers may not come until the Army completes an investigation into the culpability of military intelligence personnel. The probe began April 23.
In a report citing ``numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses'' inflicted on Iraqis held at Abu Ghraib between October and December 2003, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba said he found credible evidence that military police guards were improperly drawn into the role of setting ``physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation'' of prisoners.
Taguba did not spell out conditions being set, but the implication was that it included actions that would put such stress on prisoners that they would have been more apt to break psychologically.
Taguba's report says the practice of using MPs to help break down prisoners may have been imported from the Guantanamo Bay prison complex and possibly others in Afghanistan used to hold terrorist suspects.
The Guantanamo Bay prison complex was run by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller. In late August 2003, Miller conducted an inquiry on interrogation and detention procedures in Iraq and suggested that prison guards could help set conditions for the interrogation of prisoners, according to the Taguba report.
Most of the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib took place from October to December 2003.
A November 2003 report by Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, the Army's provost marshal, concluded that the Army Reserve's 800th Military Police Brigade, which was running Abu Ghraib, was not given official orders to get involved in setting conditions for interrogations.
Taguba, however, offered a different view.
``It is obvious,'' he wrote, that at least some at lower levels of the 800th did get involved.
Interrogators from military intelligence and other government agencies, believed to include the CIA, actively requested that MPs guarding prisoners at Abu Ghraib set the conditions for interrogations, Taguba reported. This is in violation of Army Regulation 190-8, he said.
That regulation states: ``All persons captured, detained, interned or otherwise held in U.S. armed forces custody during the course of conflict will be given humanitarian care and treatment from the moment they fall into the hands of U.S. forces until final release or repatriation.''
It also runs counter to the MPs' intended mission of maintaining a safe and orderly prison, he said.
The Army's top officer, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, confirmed that on Wednesday.
``It's a misstatement to say that the military police are trained to soften everybody up,'' he said. ``Their job is to provide a safe and secure environment for those that we detain.''
Taguba, however, received sworn statements from MPs who said they were involved in such activities.
Spc. Sabrina Harman of the 372nd Military Police Company said a detainee was placed on a box and had wires attached to his fingers, toes and other extremities, and her task was to keep the detainee awake.
Military intelligence, she said, ``wanted to get them to talk.''
In an interview by e-mail from Baghdad, Harman told The Washington Post that she was assigned to break down prisoners for interrogation, although she and other members of her MP unit had never been trained to perform such a job.
``They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time already hooded and cuffed,'' said Harman, according to an article on the Post Web site Friday night. ``The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk.'' She said the ``person who brought them in would set the standards on whether or not to `be nice'.''
As a result of the Taguba report, which the Pentagon still classifies secret, the Army has begun a separate probe of military intelligence.
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