Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

After the torture photos were turned over to army criminal investigators, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior military commander in Iraq, appointed Major General Antonio M. Taguba to investigate the situation at Abu Ghraib. Given army standards of inspecting itself that prevailed in Iraq at that time, General Taguba conducted an unusually thorough and unbiased examination. He documented numerous incidents between October and December 2003 of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton abuses.”¹⁰² General Myers, who was both Sanchez’s and Taguba’s superior, reacted to the investigation by, first, trying to prevent details of the torture at Abu Ghraib from being released to the American public and then claiming that he had simply been too busy to get around to reading Taguba’s report. In April 2004, Myers called Dan Rather, the CBS News anchorman, and persuaded him not to break the story of the Abu Ghraib tortures for at least two weeks, and in May, four months after Taguba’s report had been completed, Myers told Fox News that he had still not read it.¹⁰³

General Myers was certainly aware of another January 2004 internal army report of abuses committed by the army’s 101st Airborne Division in December in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The army kept this document secret until March 25, 2005, when it was released under a Freedom of Information Act suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The 101st Airborne’s behavior is important because it demonstrates that the acts of abuse and torture going on at Abu Ghraib were not—in one of General Myers’s favorite phrases—the work of a few “bad apples.” The January 2004 report is also among the few internal documents that directly charge the military with using torture. It says, “There is evidence that suggests 311th MI [the 311th Military Intelligence Battalion] personnel and/or translators engaged in physical torture of the detainees.” The investigating officer, whose name was blacked out of the released documents, wrote that the guards at the Mosul facility came from three infantry units of the 101st Airborne and “were poorly trained and encouraged to abuse prisoners.”¹⁰⁴ No one in the division was punished for the abuses over which General Myers held command responsibility, as he did for the cover-up that lasted until the ACLU intervened.

Given his overall command of the armed forces, General Myers was also directly responsible for setting up the torture regime at the Guantanamo prison and then exporting it to Iraq. The first commandant at Guantanamo after 9/11 was Brigadier General Rick Baccus, an officer in the Rhode Island National Guard. He ran the facility as a conventional prisoner-of-war camp, which irritated Pentagon civilian officials, who wanted to implement a whole list of aggressive new interrogation techniques.¹⁰⁵ In October 2002, General Myers removed General Baccus, allegedly for “coddling” detainees, and replaced him with Major General Geoffrey Miller, a former artillery officer who had never before held a post connected in any way to intelligence work; and yet Miller was now ordered to increase the flow of “actionable intelligence” from Guantanamo.

In pursuit of this, General Miller introduced direct assaults on prisoners, prolonged shackling in uncomfortable positions, loud music, sexual humiliation, the threat of dogs, and many other forms of torment. FBI agents who were assigned to Guantanamo were alarmed by what they witnessed there and reported back to Washington via classified e-mails (some of which the ACLU was able to have declassified):” ‘On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water,’ the FBI agent wrote on August 2, 2004. ‘Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.’ In one case, the agent continued, ‘the detainee 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.’ “¹⁰⁶

The result was that the inspectors of the International Committee of the Red Cross accused the U.S. military of using tactics “tantamount to torture” on captives held at Guantanamo Bay.¹⁰⁷ At the same time, these methods failed to produce good intelligence. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Christino, an intelligence officer at the Pentagon with twenty years’ experience, told David Rose, author of Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights, “Most of the information derived from interrogations at Guantanamo appears to be very general in nature; so general that it is not very useful.” According to Christino, Guantanamo had not helped to prevent a single terrorist attack.¹⁰⁸

In August 2003, the Pentagon sent General Miller to conduct a ten-day review of prison facilities in Iraq. While there, he talked directly to junior commanders and gave them copies of a manual of procedures used at Guantanamo. Although he has repeatedly claimed that he instructed American officers in charge of the Iraqi prisons that the Geneva Conventions did apply there, even if not in Guantanamo, much harsher procedures began to be implemented at Abu Ghraib soon after his departure. According to Brigadier General Janis L. Karpinski, then commandant at Abu Ghraib, “Miller came up there and told me he was going to ‘Gitmoize’ the detention operations.”¹⁰⁹

On September 14, 2003, a month after General Miller had returned to Cuba, General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq, signed a memo putting Miller’s program at Guantanamo into general practice. Sanchez authorized twenty-nine interrogation techniques, including twelve that exceeded limits in the army’s own field manual and four that he admitted probably violated international law, the Geneva Conventions, and accepted standards on the humane treatment of prisoners. Sanchez’s highly classified memo was released to the public only after a Freedom of Information suit by the ACLU. On the basis of this memo, the ACLU formally asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to investigate Sanchez—whom Hispanic magazine had just named as 2004’s “Hispanic of the Year”—for perjury. In an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 19, 2004, General Sanchez had said under oath, “I never approved any of those measures to be used ... at any time in the last year.”¹¹⁰

Needless to say, nothing came of the ACLU’s request and the army soon exonerated General Sanchez of all responsibility for the horrors of Abu Ghraib. Nonetheless, on May 2, 2006, the ACLU released a new document it had obtained from the inspector general of the Defense Intelligence Agency under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Dated May 19, 2004, the same day as Sanchez’s Senate testimony, and marked “secret,” the document reports an earlier official investigation into General Sanchez’s role in the Abu Ghraib abuses. It says that he had ordered military inter- rogators to “go to the outer limits” to extract information from prisoners, adding that “HQ [headquarters] wanted the interrogators to break the detainees.”¹¹¹

On March 22, 2004, after seventeen months at Guantanamo, General Miller was put in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He did not stay there long, however, because on November 24, 2004, he was reassigned to be assistant chief of staff for installation management for the army, a desk job back in the Pentagon. On July 1, 2004, the Pentagon also relieved General Sanchez after fifteen months as the top general in Iraq and returned him to his old assignment as commander of the army’s Fifth Corps in Germany. He was replaced in Baghdad by a four-star general, George Casey. In June 2005, the New York Times reported that army superiors believed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal had blown over and were thinking about promoting Sanchez to four stars and giving him the Southern Command in Latin America.¹¹² However, the possibility of a clash with Congress prevented any further promotions for Sanchez.¹¹³ Meanwhile, General Taguba, who had done the initial investigating at Abu Ghraib, was shunted aside, being transferred to the Pentagon and made deputy assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs.

Since the publication of the first photos from Abu Ghraib, the Pentagon has conducted at least ten high-level investigations of itself. In April 2005, the army’s inspector general issued a report that was intended to be the military’s final word on the responsibility of the senior leadership. The entire high command, civilian and military, was exonerated except for Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, a woman and a reserve officer, who was briefly in charge of U.S. prisons in Iraq in late 2003 and early 2004. She received an administrative reprimand and was demoted to colonel.¹¹⁴ As of the summer of 2006, only seven low-ranking soldiers had been charged with anything.