In "From Bagram to Abu Ghraib," her March/April 2005 article,
Slate senior editor Emily Bazelon -- one of 22 scholars, journalists, former prisoners, advocates, lawyers, and organizers chosen as
Soros Justice Media Fellows -- reports:
[Chris] Mackey [a former interrogator at Bagram] says ... "[T]here was horrible incompetence at the leadership and oversight level. [The prison] was practically a Disney ride, with lots of higher-ups and officials coming through. But the common response we got was, Aren't you kind of babying them?"
The "babying" stopped after Capt. Carolyn Wood rewrote interrogation techniques.
[F]our months after Wood and the 519th took over at Bagram, two detainees died .... One was Mullah Habibullah, a 30-year-old man ... the other was a 22-year-old taxi driver ... who was married and had a 2-year-old daughter. The men had been hung by their arms from the ceiling and beaten so severely that, according to a report by Army investigators later leaked to the Baltimore Sun, their legs would have needed to be amputated had they lived.
::: details below the fold :::
Out of Bazelon's March/April 2005
Mother Jones article, we glean these observations:
- "it was at Bagram" -- a desolate desert U.S. air base in Afghanistan -- "that interrogators devised and tested the methods that would shame the United States in Iraq"
- "Captain Carolyn Wood, a 34-year-old officer and 10-year Army veteran ... rewrote the interrogation policy set by [the previous interrogation] group, adding to it nine techniques not approved by military doctrine or included in Army field manual"
- "instead of disciplining those involved" in the abuses at Bagram air base, "the Pentagon transferred key personnel from Afghanistan" to Abu Ghraib
- had the abuses at bases in Afghanistan (there are many Bagrams there) been investigated promptly, the abuses at Abu Ghraib might have been prevented
- "with the attention of the media and Congress focused on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the problems in Afghanistan seem to be continuing
Bazelon -- interviewed last evening by Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder in the last hour of the
Majority Report on
Air America -- "traveled to Jordan as a
Soros Justice Media Fellow to report on the treatment of prisoners captured in Afghanistan. "
In Jordan, Ms. Bazelon interviewed former U.S. detainees and listened in on the interview of former prisoners by human rights attorney Clive Stafford Smith.
As I've written, and read, several diaries about detainees -- past and current -- the Bagram air base comes up time after time. "Bagram" is rather like a Broadway play that first opens in the hinterlands, where the kinks are worked out and parts are excised or erased, after which the successful acts hit the big time.
"[Moazzam Begg's] ordeal, beginning at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, included being shackled and dragged, having a 'suffocating hood'" placed on his head and being struck in the head several times. ... He also said he had witnessed two fatal beatings during interrogations by US officials in Afghanistan. "
Detainees 'beaten to death'," Herald Sun, Jan. 30, 2005
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#1: "it was at Bagram" -- a desolate desert U.S. air base in Afghanistan -- "that interrogators devised and tested the methods that would shame the United States in Iraq"
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... it was at Bagram that interrogators devised and tested the methods that would shame the United States in Iraq. Documents and witness accounts from both detainees and soldiers starkly portray how an initially disciplined interrogation effort deteriorated, in a climate of lawlessness and pressure to produce intelligence, to the point where officers and soldiers first bent the rules, and finally broke them.
Bazelon article
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#2: "Captain Carolyn Wood, a 34-year-old officer and 10-year Army veteran ... rewrote the interrogation policy set by [the previous interrogation] group, adding to it nine techniques not approved by military doctrine or included in Army field manual"
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IN AUGUST 2002, Mackey and his team turned over the detention unit in Bagram to the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion from Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The new head of the interrogation unit was Captain Carolyn Wood, a 34-year-old officer and 10-year Army veteran. Wood rewrote the interrogation policy set by Mackey's group, adding to it nine techniques not approved by military doctrine or included in Army field manuals. Her expanded list included "the use of dogs, stress positions, sleep management, [and] sensory deprivation," according to an internal Pentagon investigation known as the Fay-Jones report; the report noted that other techniques, such as "removal of clothing and the use of detainee's phobias," were also used at Bagram.
In December 2002, four months after Wood and the 519th took over at Bagram, two detainees died in custody at the base. ... Bazelon article
Since Ms. Bezalon's article mentions, only in passing, Capt. Wood's testimony in the Lynndie England case, I looked it up.
(August 7, 2004)
Fort Bragg, North Carolina--Fresh testimony Thursday tied Private Lynndie England to alleged abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, but other conflicting details also emerged portraying an out-of-control jail.
In day three of England's hearing at Fort Bragg, ...
Capt. Carolyn Wood, a military intelligence officer, said she "was outraged" by such graphic images.
Wood said she signed a sworn statement in May, partly identifying three military intelligence officers shown in a photograph abusing a detainee.
She said she signed her statement for Gen. George Fay, who is probing military intelligence operations at the jail. Fay's report has yet to be released.
Wood also told the court that Col. Thomas Pappas, the commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, visited Tier 1, where much of the abuse was allegedly meted out around the clock. ... AFP
So, Capt. Wood confirms what Mackey had contended: That higher-ups regularly visited and witnessed the interrogations and the abuses.
But, Ms. Bezalon fails -- in my opinion -- to go up the chain of command in her investigative piece. Perhaps that wasn't her purpose, but her article focuses strongly on Capt. Wood and not on her superiors.
I wanted to find out more about Col Thomas Pappas -- who, Capt. Wood said in her testimony at the England hearing, had "visited" Tier 1 where much of the abuses were "allegedly meted out around the clock."
Colonel Thomas M. Pappas assumes command of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade after having graduated from the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island in June 2003. Prior to attending the War College, COL Pappas was assigned as the Chief of Concepts, Requirements and Architectures Division, Futures Directorate, United States Army Intelligence Center, Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
205th Military Intelligence Brigade site
NOTE: The intelligence center at Fort Huachuca -- where Pappas is now "Chief of Concepts, Requirements and Architectures Division, Futures Directorate" [What on earth is that position?] -- is the same facility that is now being overrun by private companies:
It actually begins right here in the United States in southern Arizona in a place called Fort Huachuca ... set up to hunt Geronimo 120 years ago. That base is where all military intelligence is trained. ... today ... all that instruction or much of that instruction, rather, is provided by private companies. A company called Anteon in Virginia [trains] what are called 97-Es. Those are interrogators.
Democracy Now! interview,
Corpwatch's investigative journalist Pratap Chatterjee
-- From the "Muckraking" section of my Monday diary, TORTURE WATCH: News, Muckraking, and Views
I'm tracking the appearance of Pratap Chatterjee's new article on Anteon and Fort Huachuca, and will bring it to you.
ALSO OF NOTE: CooperativeResearch.org cites media report after media report of Pappas's knowledge of, and approval of, torture and abuse. Here are two short examples of Cooperative Research's damning reports:
Army Col. Thomas Pappas tells Army Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, a soldier overseeing interrogations at Abu Ghraib, that the White House wants interrogators to "pull the intelligence out" of the detainees. Pappas tells him at least twice "that some of the [intelligence] reporting was getting read by (Secretary of Defense Donald) Rumsfeld, folks out at Langley, some very senior folks." [USA Today, 6/17/2004]
- People and organizations involved: Steven Jordan, Thomas M. Pappas
Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, is interviewed by investigator, Major General Antonio M. Taguba, and admits that intelligence officers had instructed the military police at Abu Ghraib to shackle and strip naked detainees prior to interrogation. He also says that the Military Intelligence Brigade had no formal mechanisms in place to prevent abuses. [New York Times, 5/18/2004]
- People and organizations involved: Antonio M. Taguba, Thomas M. Pappas
Returning to the Bazelon article:
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#3: "instead of disciplining those involved" in the abuses at Bagram air base, "the Pentagon transferred key personnel from Afghanistan" to Abu Ghraib
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By the summer of 2003, it was the 519th's turn to leave Bagram. Despite Gall's report and the ongoing criminal investigation, they were redeployed to run another prison--Abu Ghraib. There, Wood proceeded to implement new interrogation rules that, as a Pentagon report later noted, were "remarkably similar" to those she had developed at Bagram. In September 2003, the Army probed tips from other military police officers that members of the 519th had beaten prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but the investigators found the allegations unsubstantiated. Members of the 519th have not been directly implicated in the photographed abuses that set off the scandal.
Bazelon article
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#4: Had the abuses at bases in Afghanistan (there are many Bagrams there) been investigated promptly, the abuses at Abu Ghraib might have been prevented
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"Had the investigation and prosecution of abusive interrogators in Afghanistan proceeded in a timely manner," Human Rights Watch executive director Brad Adams noted in an open letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last fall, "it is possible that...many of the abuses seen in Iraq could have been avoided."
Bazelon article
With all respect to Mr. Adams, I seriously doubt that any revelations would have stopped any of the abuses from occurring elsewhere, in fact anywhere.
Have the revelations in Abu Ghraib stopped abuses in Afghanistan? No.
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#5: "with the attention of the media and Congress focused on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the problems in Afghanistan seem to be continuing
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Even now, with the attention of the media and Congress focused on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the problems in Afghanistan seem to be continuing. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, created in 2002 during the early stages of the transition to Afghan self-governance, has collected a total of 120 reports of abuse by coalition forces;
50 of them were made just since last May. Many of the complaints involve excessive force by soldiers during the course of an arrest. But others come from former detainees who say that soldiers stripped them naked and sexually abused them. The Afghan commission and Human Rights Watch, as well as a smaller group, the Washington, D.C.-based Crimes of War Project, have also gathered evidence on detainee abuse at American "forward operating bases" near Kandahar, Gardez, Khost, Orgun, Ghazni, and Jalalabad. Investigators estimate that in each of these places, between 5 and 20 prisoners are held at a time, compared to as many as 200 at Bagram.
Bazelon article
I have not included the personal stories about former detainees and her observations of famed human rights attorney Clive Stafford Smith that Bazelon relates in From Bagram to Abu Ghraib, and encourage you to read the entire article.