No guidelines on interrogation

WASHINGTON: The US military units holding and interrogating prisoners in Iraq did not get a specific list of techniques permitted during questioning and were expected to follow long-standing limitations in the Geneva Conventions, a senior Pentagon official said yesterday. Yet to be determined is whether US soldiers, including those facing courts-martial for abuses committed at the Abu Ghraib prison, were encouraged by commanders to use more aggressive practices intended to elicit more information more quickly from prisoners.

Bryan Whitman, a spokesman for Defence Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld, said in an interview that the abuses of Iraqi prisoners that have outraged the world and raised calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation were beyond the bounds of authorised practices. “The policies of the United States and the Defence Department are consistent, in that we do not permit activities or interrogation procedures that are torturous or cruel and that all the techniques that are approved for use are within the law,” Whitman said. Whitman said that for security reasons he could not comment on any specific interrogation techniques. Not applied to Iraqi detainees were the techniques approved by the Pentagon in April 2003 for use at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, where suspected al Qaeda terrorists are held, according to a senior Pentagon official who discussed the matter on condition of anonymity.

Instead, guards and interrogators in Iraq were expected to follow the Geneva Conventions and other international rules against cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners. Army investigations have found that military police were given little or no training in such legal issues. The techniques approved for use in Cuba were reported in yesterday’s Washington Post. Newsweek magazine reported in this week’s issue that some senior members of Congress have gotten briefings indicating, in the words of one official, that US interrogators were not necessarily “going to stick with the Geneva Conventions” in Iraq or elsewhere. The approved interrogation techniques for Guantanamo Bay included sleep deprivation and exposure to bright lights, but not the forced disrobing of prisoners, the Pentagon official said. No such specific guidelines were drawn up for Iraq, he said.

The reported abuses in Iraq, including sexual humiliation and physical mistreatment, occurred in October and November. That was shortly after Major General Geoffrey Miller, who was running the Guantanamo Bay detention compound for terrorist suspects, went to Iraq to review detention and interrogation procedures. Miller concluded that military police who were guarding the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq should be more actively engaged in “setting the conditions” for successful “exploitation” of detainees, according to an Army report that documented the prisoner abuses. At issue is whether that meant applying techniques that went beyond what the Geneva Conventions allow. Miller, now in charge of the Iraq detention system, said Saturday that he had not recommended that military police participate in interrogations. Rather, he believed they could be more useful to interrogators in a passive role of relaying information they picked up from prisoners’ conversations. Miller said in his earlier report it was “essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions” for more fruitful interrogations of what he called Iraqi “internees.”

An Army investigative report by Major General Antonio Taguba, which he based in part on Miller’s assessment of the situation in Iraq in September, took issue with Miller’s approach to the challenges in Iraq. Taguba suggested that Miller was wrong to use the situation at Guantanamo Bay - where the prisoners are suspected terrorists with possible links to those who carried out the September 11 attacks - as a template for Iraq, where the prisoners are Saddam Hussein loyalists and common criminals. Some lawmakers say there are clear indications from the widely published photos of Army MPs abusing Iraqi prisoners that even if such acts were not ordered or condoned by US commanders, the soldiers thought they were at least condoned. “All the guards are smiling, they’re taking all these pictures, because they know that nobody above them is going to object. They have to know that somebody up there is agreeing to it,” Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, said on ABC television yesterday.

Legal guidelines provided by the US Army Intelligence Centre say soldiers are not to use physical torture, such as beating, food deprivation or electric shock. Mental stresses - such as mock executions, abnormal sleep deprivation or chemically induced psychosis - also are forbidden. Meanwhile, lawmakers called on the British government yesterday to publish an International Committee of the Red Cross report which detailed allegations that coalition troops had abused Iraqi prisoners, and Amnesty International said it told British officials about reports of violence and torture a year ago. Amnesty says it has been documenting “patterns of torture” by coalition troops in Iraq for more than a year. The human rights group said yesterday it first warned the government last May that prisoners had been tortured, and at least one killed, in British custody. The group said it had held a series of meetings with Foreign Office and defence ministry officials over the past year. “They said they would look into it and get back to us,” said Amnesty’s Middle East spokeswoman, Nicole Choueiry. “Since then, they did not get back to us.”
 
She said the group had made six fact-finding missions to Iraq since the war, documenting myriad abuses. Amnesty is due to publish a new report tomorrow detailing civilian deaths at the hands of British troops and armed groups in Basra. The Red Cross also has said it warned American officials of prisoner abuse in Iraq more than a year ago. On Saturday, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office said it had been shown the Red Cross report in February. The Ministry of Defence said it acted on the report’s recommendations, but would not say what action was taken.