BBC news reports that France's justice minister has met with Ashcroft; French citizens held at Guantanamo may be returned within several weeks (see April 30)
MSNBC legal analyst Tom Curry cites several legal experts in an article that adds to the growing speculation that the events of recent days will influence the Supreme Court to rule against the Administration on Guantanamo. According to Curry, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg specifically raised the issue of torture during the Rasul arguments on April 20th, asking what might happen if, the executive decides, 'Mild torture, we think, will help get this information.'
Curry notes that Clement's response insisting that "mild torture" was not an administration strategy and concluding, "you have to trust the executive" may be more difficult for the justices to accept in the wake of the Abu Ghraib events.
An article in the Miami Herald this morning details the Administration's continuing attempts to draw a distinctinction between Guantanamo interrogation practices and the incidents at Abu Ghraib. According to the Herald, a senior Bush official said that while interrogation techniques at Guantanamo are indeed sometimes aimed
at putting pressure on detainees' ''pride and ego,'' interrogators never abused the prisoners to the point of ridicule.
On the other hand, an article in the Independent today about an IRC (International Red Cross) report on Abu Ghraib says that prisoners at there were threatened with detention at Guantanamo while being pistol-whipped and stripped naked. This means that someone prisoners, interrogators, or both must think that prisoners in Guantanamo are even worse off than prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Several media outlets this morning are floating the suggestion that what has happened in Iraq might affect the Supreme Court decisions on Guantanamo. In an LA Times article David Savage quotes Harold Koh dean of the Yale Law school as saying "Their argument has been 'Trust us,' and that argument has been deeply undermined. To accept the government's argument in the face of what has been disclosed would be to condone a culture of indifference.
In a New York Times editorial, Paul Krugman also points to the damage done to the "trust us" argument, but notes that the Administration seems to have taken little heed of this damage. "Donald Rumsfeld has 'accepted responsibility," for the incidents, Krugman writes, "an action that apparently does not mean paying any price at all. And Dick Cheney says, 'Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had. . . . People should get off his case and let him do his job.' In other words: Just trust us."
The first two media venues for the now-ubiquitous photographs of torture victims at Abu Ghraib were the news program Sixty Minutes and a Seymour Hersch article in the May 1 online issue of the New Yorker. Hersch has followed this piece with a second titled Chain of Command in The New Yorker which details who should have been in the know about what happened in the prison. An excellent diagram of this command structure is at the diagramming blog site uggabugga (Thanks to Cursor for this information).
There's been so much information coming down the pipe about the relationship between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, about what's happened vis a vis abuse at Gitmo over the past few years, and about the general interrogation practices at both prisons, that it's been difficult to process. It seems at this point there two contradictory ways media accounts are framing the comparison:
1.) GUANTANAMO AS A MODEL PRISON: VERSION ONE
Immediately following revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the Pentagon dispatched investigators to Guantanamo to report on prison conditions there. Over the next few days, Col. David McWilliams of the U.S. Southern Command made the public announcement that two guards at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were disciplined for misuse of force against detainees in 2002 and 2003. Both these incidents were described as minor, and the fact that they were swiftly dealt with (by an internal investigation and with administrative leave) was cited as evidence that Guantanamo was and is a safe and humane facility. Reports of prisoners released from Guantanamo who have claimed they were abused are still described as "unsubstantiated."
2.) GUANTANAMO AS A MODEL PRISON: VERSION TWO
Somewhat paradoxically, another series of media accounts, also published over the past few days (and especially over the course of today) has described Guantanamo as another kind of "model" prison a prototype interrogation center where deeply controversial methods of questioning were set in place as a matter of procedure. According to a May 8 Washington Post article, for example, the Defense Department approved interrogation techniques last April that permitted reversing the normal sleep patterns of detainees and exposing them to heat, cold and "sensory assault," including loud music and bright lights.
"We wanted to find a legal way to jack up the pressure," the Post quoted one lawyer who helped write the guidelines as saying. "We wanted a little more freedom than in a U.S. prison, but not torture."
A day after Rumsfeld said he thought that closing down Abu Ghraib would be "a good idea," a BBC News article stated that the new head of Iraq prisons, Gen Geoffrey Miller, has said the US will continue to use Abu Ghraib jail, despite the abuse scandal there. Speaking to reporters on Saturday Gen Miller, the former commander of the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said that the problems at Abu Ghraib had now been resolved. He said all of the Iraqis in US custody were now being held in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and US army operating procedures.
MSNBC has made available the complete text of Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th
Military Police Brigade by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. This Army report on Iraqi prisoner abuse, made public over the past several days, links a visit by the former head of the Guantanamo detention facility to Abu Ghraib to abuses of prisoners in Iraq over the following months (see postings below).
According to a May 5 Associated Press article the military acknowledged today thatthat two guards at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had been disciplined over allegations of prisoner abuse. The two guards were given administrative punishments, which often range from letters of reprimand to base restrictions, Arellano told The Associated Press. It is not clear what type of abuse allegedly occurred or whether any of the three guards were still at Guantanamo.
The following exchange is excerpted from a Pentagon posting of an interview with Major General Geoffrey Miller, former head of the Guantanamo detention center and now head of detention operations in Iraq (see posting below, GITMO PRISON HEAD SENT TO IRAQ). The questioner is an unnamed official investigating abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.
OFFICIAL: When I talked with Brigadier General Janis Karpinski of the Army Reserve on Saturday, she talked about -- she told me about your August and September visit from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, sir. And I think the word she used was "Gitmo-ized," that you had come over, in a way, to Gitmo-ize or to make more like Guantanamo the confinement and also interrogation practices at Abu Ghraib. But she was telling me this in the context that you reported that the MPs there were really, really pushed and pressured and, you know, pushed towards making, you know, the interrogation procedures very conducive to eliciting useful intelligence information, which was obviously only a short period before the abuses occurred.
GEN. MILLER: I was requested to bring a team of about 30 specialists, who were specialists in detention and interrogation, over to this theater to do an assessment about how these two missions were going and how that they worked in parallel towards success. And so we brought our interrogation specialist -- superintendent of our camp, Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, who in his -- he's a reservist; in his other life is a superintendent of the largest maximum security prison in the state of Indiana, and a national award-winner for penitentiary operations. And so those are the kind of experts that we brought over to help.
As you know, we had just started doing the transition from major combat operations. And so these experts were to come over here and to help this transition see how we could do this better. We also brought a number of those who were expert in the interrogation methodologies and how that we would go about doing that. And so they worked with all the interrogator staff about how that you interrogate, and validated what the interrogation authorities were, and talked about methods and procedures, and how that interrogation teams work together to more successfully use those authorities to be able to garner intelligence as rapidly as possible.
I'll be frank with you. Every recommendation that we made was in the bounds of what was authorized by the theater and was within standard practices. We're enormously proud of what we had done at Guantanamo, to be able to set that kind of environment where we were focused on gaining the maximum amount of intelligence. But we detained the people in a humane manner, in accordance with the 3rd and 4th Geneva Conventions.
So that's what we were bringing expertise into the theater about doing that. And we made a number of recommendations, the vast majority of which were implemented following the visit.
An article in today's New York Times details the continuing tension between the Bush administration and the government-appointed lawyers set to defend Guantanamo detainees. According to the Times, the tribunals have taken an unexpected turn: the Administration had expected that the lawyers would simply advise their prisoners to plead guilty, but this has NOT been the case. The lawyers have not simply proclaimed their clients are innocent: they have denounced the tribunal system as rigged. Their extent to which they have made their disapproval public has apparently surprised even Michael Ratner of the Center For Constitutional Law, the group challenging the Guantanamo detentions in federal court. The lawyers themselves seem to be daring the Administration to censure them for their actions they identify themselves as "defenders of the Constitution."
Today's Washington Post has a long, detailed investigative piece on Guantanamo, based on three month's worth of research by a pool of reporters. The article traces in detail the history of the choice to situate prisoners in Guantanamo: according to Post reporters, the detention center resulted from "a cascading series of decisions, made on the fly in the face of tremendous pressure."
Overall, the Post article is a valuable addition to the Guantanamo story, with one caveat it seems markedly skittish about the possible mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. The reporters suggest that, at least at present, interrogators seem to be practicing the "good cop" approach, and they identify various accusations of abuse as unsubstantiated. As evidence of how good it gets down in Gitmo, they repeat the by-now famous tale of the young detainees from Camp Iguana who allegedly became enamored of their American captors. Any mention of these Iguana boys should be framed by a discussion of the way in which their situation was exceptional, not exemplary: using them as an example of fair treatment of detainees is a troubling indicator that the Post reporters were searching for a way to write a "neutral" story about the treatment of prisoners in the wake of recent events in Iraq.