The Torture Files

(3 of 4)

DID EVERYONE GO ALONG?

No. ??Lawyersat the State Department and attorneys representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military services opposed abandoning the strict reliance on Geneva, chiefly because it might endanger U.S. troops who could be captured and denied the Conventions' protection. In January 2003, owing to concerns from the Navy's top lawyer, Rumsfeld abruptly rescinded his December order, pending a study, and ordered that the tougher measures could only be applied with his approval. Three months later, the study group recommended the use of some of the new interrogation techniques at Guant??namo. Dropped from the list were hooding, nudity and use of phobias. Left in place or added were isolation, giving detainees rations instead of hot meals, sleep deprivation and the use of rapid-fire questions.

WHAT WENT WRONG AT ABU GHRAIB?

Just about everything. ??Rules that were intended for Guant??namo, where the prisoner-to-guard ratio was 1 to 1, "migrated" during 2003 to Iraq's biggest prison, where the ratio was 75 to 1. Those rules were applied to a prison population that, according to the Schlesinger report, was made up "all too often" of Iraqis who were not valuable targets but bystanders caught in random roundups. Add to that the facts that the Army's intelligence units were poorly trained and badly managed, and the military police units assigned to Abu Ghraib were filled with reservists who showed poor judgment--and some of whom are now the subject of courts-martial. (See above.)

IS GUANTANAMO A PROBLEM?

Yes. ??According to a July 2004 memo signed by a top FBI official, FBI agents reported that they had seen prisoners subjected to physical mistreatment, loud music, extreme temperatures and a lack of food, water and furniture. An FBI agent there observed that one detainee who had been left in a cell where the temperature had climbed above 100?? "was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

And last week brought another development that will undoubtedly be probed: the New England Journal of Medicine reported that military medical personnel in Iraq and Guant??namo were providing interrogators with information about detainees' medical conditions and helping craft interrogation strategies.

WHAT ABOUT THE CIA?