From: Blunderov (squooker@mweb.co.za)
Date: Thu May 13 2004 - 03:07:12 MDT
[Blunderov] Fresh red wrigglers. US policy is that Guantanemo Bay prisoners
are not PoWs and that Iraqi prisoners are.
Best Regards
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/politics/13MILL.html?th
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General Took Guantánamo Rules to Iraq for Handling of Prisoners
By TIM GOLDEN and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: May 13, 2004
When Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller arrived in Iraq last August with a team of
military police and intelligence specialists, the group was confronted by
chaos.
In one prison yard, a detainee was being held in a scorching hot shipping
container as punishment, one team member recalled. An important
communications antenna stood broken and unrepaired. Prisoners walked around
barefoot, with sores on their feet and signs of untreated illness. Garbage
was everywhere.
Perhaps most important, with the insurgency raging in Iraq, there was no
effective system at the prisons for wringing intelligence from the
prisoners, officials said.
"They had no rules for interrogations," a military officer who traveled to
Iraq with General Miller said. "People were escaping and getting shot. We
tried to offer them some very basic recommendations."
According to information from a classified interview with the senior
military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib prison, General Miller's
recommendations prompted a shift in the interrogation and detention
procedures there. Military intelligence officers were given greater
authority in the prison, and military police guards were asked to help
gather information about the detainees.
Whether those changes contributed to the abuse of prisoners that grew
horrifically more serious last fall is now at the center of the widening
prison scandal.
General Miller's recommendations were based in large part on his command of
the detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he won praise from the
Pentagon for improving the flow of intelligence from terrorist suspects and
prisoners of the Afghanistan war.
In Iraq, General Miller's team gave officers at the prisons copies of the
procedures that had been developed at Guantánamo to interrogate and punish
the prisoners, according to the officer who traveled with him. Computer
specialists and intelligence analysts explained the systems they had used in
Cuba to process information and report it back to the United States.
General Miller also recommended streamlining the command structure at the
prisons, much as was done when military intelligence and military police
units were merged when he took command of Joint Task Force Guantánamo in
November 2002.
But to at least a few of the officers who met General Miller in Iraq, the
Abu Ghraib crisis was partly rooted in what they described as his
determination to apply his Guantánamo experience in Iraq. Senators raised
similar concerns on Tuesday at the Armed Services Committee.
General Miller and some of his former aides have dismissed the notion that
his visit to Iraq helped unleash the abuses. They argue that if his
prescriptions had any link to the problems there, it was because they were
misinterpreted by ineffective commanders in a chaotic environment.
"When you don't have rules and you let lower-level people decide things on
an arbitrary and capricious basis, you're going to have problems," the
officer who accompanied General Miller said. "Our reference to techniques
was to say, `You need a policy.' "
A Democratic Senate aide who reviewed General Miller's report on the Iraqi
prisons said he had sought to revamp the intelligence apparatus in Iraq
primarily to improve the collection and transmission of broader, strategic
information about the insurgency that was particularly important to senior
military officials.
To those officials, the work at Guantánamo by General Miller, a former
paratrooper from Menard, Tex., made him an obvious candidate for Iraq.
By the time he took over in Cuba, most of the detainees there had been in
custody for nearly a year. Still, General Miller was credited by Pentagon
officials with using interrogations there to produce a valuable historical
account of the workings and financing of terrorist training camps in
Afghanistan, among other subjects, officials said.
His hard-charging attitude has also raised questions that go beyond
interrogation methods. He was the official most responsible for pressing a
case last year against a Muslim chaplain at the base, Capt. James J. Yee,
that was initially billed as a major episode of espionage. In March, the
military announced that it would drop all charges.
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