July/August 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Timeline of US Torture in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq

Alan Shapiro works for Educators for Social Responsibility Metro Area (www.esrmetro.org). This timeline is part of two lesson plans designed to help teachers create discussions about the prisoner of war torture revelations available at www.teachablemoment.org.

October 2001

A month after the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the US invaded Afghanistan. The US's stated purpose was (1) to capture or kill as many Al Qaeda fighters as possible and (2) to overthrow the Taliban government in Afghanistan that supported Al Qaeda. Soon the US had hundreds of Afghan prisoners.

January 2002

On January 29, 2002, John Yoo of the US Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel co-authored an advisory memo. Its chief conclusion: neither the laws of war nor the Geneva Convention applied to the war in Afghanistan.

White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in a memo advised President Bush to declare the prisoners in the "war on terror" to be outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions (for a description of the Geneva Conventions, please see the report at www.teachablemoment.org, American Treatment of Iraqi and Afghan Prisoners: An Introduction). "As you have said," he wrote to the President, "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians...."

This new situation, he concluded, "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." Gonzales also argued that declaring that the Geneva Conventions did not apply would avoid the possibility of American officials being subject to war crimes prosecution. A 1996 US law forbids "war crimes," which are defined to include "any grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions.

February 2002

The White House announced that the US would apply the Geneva Conventions to the Afghan prisoners but that they would not be given prisoner-of-war status. Administration officials called these prisoners "unlawful combatants." From the Pentagon's point of view Al Qaeda followers have no rights under the Geneva Conventions that it is bound to follow. But Geneva Convention III states: "Should any doubt arise," all fighters are covered by the rules of the Geneva Conventions until "a competent tribunal" decides they are not. To date, no tribunal has been created because the Bush administration "insists that there is no doubt that those it has detained are not entitled to prisoner-of-war status." (Ronald Dworkin, "Terror and the Attack on Civil Liberties," The New York Review, 11/6/03)

The Pentagon decision, however, "set the stage for the new interrogation procedures ungoverned by international law," according to Newsweek Magazine (5/24/2004). Some time after February 7, Bush "signed a secret order granting new powers to the CIA. According to knowledgeable sources, the President's directive authorized the CIA to set up a series of secret detention facilities outside the United States, and to question those held in them with unprecedented harshness.... The administration also began...delivering terror suspects to foreign governments for interrogation." Newsweek says it was informed by "Congressional sources" that CIA Director George Tenet had suggested, "It might be better sometimes for such suspects to remain in the hands of foreign authorities, who might be able to use more aggressive methods."

Newsweek charged that the new policy allowed the administration to "sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war.... and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliations - methods that the Red Cross concluded were 'tantamount to torture.'"

March 2003 - May 2003

In a March 2003 legal memorandum, Bush administration lawyers wrote: "In order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign" the prohibition against torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority." This memorandum also discussed how torture is to be defined: "...a defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control," and the use of the adjective "severe" "makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture...." If an interrogator "has a good faith belief his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture...." and an interrogator who uses techniques that cause pain might be immune from prosecution if he "believed at the moment that his act is necessary and designed to avoid greater harm."

On March 20, the US launched its invasion of Iraq. On May 1 Bush declared "major combat operations" over. During this period and in the following weeks, American troops captured and imprisoned thousands of Iraqis.

Despite overall US control of Iraq, by the summer of 2003 American troops were being ambushed, hit by rocket-propelled grenades, and surprised by roadside bombs that exploded under army vehicles. A growing resistance seemed to include a number of Iraqi militias that had not been disarmed, loyalists to Saddam Hussein, and a small number of foreign fighters.

September 2003

The US Defense Department and the military were eager to get more information from prisoners to help the military in its continuing conflict with Iraqi fighters. A decision was made to send Guantanamo commander Major General Geoffrey Miller to Iraq in September 2003. His job was "to review Iraqi Theater ability to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence," according to Major General Antonio Taguba, who was charged by the Army with investigating "detention and internment operations" by the 800th Military Police Brigade (which had been assigned to the Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad).

According to the Taguba report, Miller stressed, "Detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation." Miller also briefed military commanders in Iraq on interrogation methods used at Guantanamo: sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in "stress positions for agonizing lengths of time." (Seymour Hersh, "Chain of Command," The New Yorker, 5/17/04)

November 2003

Colonel Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th Intelligence Brigade, took charge of interrogations of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib during November. He "was under enormous pressure from his superiors to extract more information from prisoners there, according to senior army officers." (New York Times, 5/19/04)

Taguba's investigatory report included evidence from sworn statements to Army investigators, one of whom stated, "he had heard MI [military intelligence] insinuate to the guards to abuse the prisoners. When asked what MI said he stated: 'Loosen this guy up for us.' 'Make sure he has a bad night.' 'Make sure he gets the treatment.'" (Seymour Hersh, "Torture at Abu Ghraib," The New Yorker, 5/10/04)

Since the publication of the photos from Abu Ghraib in the spring of 2004, there has been intense discussion about who was responsible.

"The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal," Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker, "lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.... According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation...encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq."

The chief spokesman for the Pentagon, Lawrence Di Rita responded to such charges: "No responsible official in this department, including Secretary Rumsfeld, would or could have been involved in sanctioning the physical coercion or sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners." (New York Times, 5/16/04)

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, told Hersh: "Since September 11th...the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees.... 'We're giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.'" ("The Gray Zone," The New Yorker, 5/24/04). President Bush, however, gave Secretary Rumsfeld strong praise, saying he has done "a superb job."

"We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," said the Red Cross's director of operations, Pierre Krahenbuhl, in a Geneva news conference. The Army Times, the weekly trade journal of the uniformed military wrote: "This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential-even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war." (Both quotes are cited in The New Yorker, 5/24/04)

A number of investigations by US officials, both military and legislative, are underway. The New York Times reports, however, "No investigation completely independent of the Pentagon exists to determine what led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison." (June 6, 2004). John D. Hutson, who was the Navy's judge advocate general from 1997 to 2000, said of the current investigations: "I think in a very narrow sense we'll see that justice was done for the seven low-level soldiers, or whatever number it ends up being. Whether justice is done for the more senior people implicated remains to be seen. I don't hold out great hope that any of these investigations are going to result in that." (New York Times, 6/6/04)

Who's Responsible?

So who is responsible for the abuse and torture of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners? The New York Times declared in an editorial (5/14/04): "Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld should...stop trying to dump the blame on the shoulders of America's enlisted men and women. The entire chain of command in Iraq must be part of the investigation." That chain of command includes:

Colonel Thomas Pappas, commander of a Military Intelligence Brigade. Pappas was put in charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib in November 2003 and supervised those who questioned prisoners

Major General Geoffrey Miller, the Guantanamo commandant and advisor on Iraqi prisoners

Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, Commander, Combined Joint Task Force Seven (in Iraq)

General John Abizaid, Commander, United States Central Command (Middle East)

General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, who said that he was "accountable" and takes "full responsibility" for the treatment of prisoners

George Bush, President of the United States, and, according to the Constitution, the commander-in-chief of the nation's armed forces.

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