[Reuters] Pentagon Clears Top Personnel, Policies in Abuses

A real shocker!!!!

Pentagon Clears Top Personnel, Policies in Abuses
Thu Mar 10, 2005 09:41 AM ET
By Vicki AllenWASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon said its policies and top officials did not cause the mistreatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, but in a report released on Thursday cited a series of missed opportunities to correct lapses that led to the abuses.

The latest and most wide-ranging abuse report, by Navy inspector general Vice Adm. Albert Church, largely tracks the Pentagon's previous contention that its leaders were not directly responsible for sexual and physical mistreatment of prisoners.

A 21-page unclassified summary of the report was to be released at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. The full 368-page report is classified.

The summary obtained by Reuters found "no single, over-arching explanation" for the abuses.

While it said authorized interrogation policies did not cause them, "We nevertheless identified a number of missed opportunities in the policy development process" to issue more specific guidelines and to learn from previous conflicts.

The abuses came to light in photographs of U.S. soldiers humiliating, hitting and threatening detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, embarrassing the Bush administration and undercutting U.S. credibility as it sought to stabilize Iraq after the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

The report reviewed 70 investigations of confirmed abuses out of 180 closed cases. It said 23 of those happened at the point of capture "at which passions often run high as servicemembers find themselves in dangerous situations."

Of the closed, substantiated cases of detainee abuses that included six deaths, it said just 20 were related to interrogations.

The report said U.S. servicemembers "may have at times permitted the enemy's treacherous tactics and disregard for the laws of war ... to erode their own standards of conduct."

It cited "a failure to react to early warning signs of abuse," particularly at Abu Ghraib prison, but said it could not provide details in the unclassified summary.

It also cited "a breakdown of good order and discipline at some units that could account for other incidents of abuse."

While the report did not look into pinpointing official responsibility, it found no direct pressure from high in the chain of command that led to abusive interrogations.

The summary said it found "no evidence to support the notion that the office of the secretary of defense, the National Security staff, Centcom (U.S. Central Command ) or any other organization applied explicit pressure for intelligence or gave 'back-channel' permission to forces in the field to use more aggressive interrogation techniques" than authorized in the Army's manual or by the command interrogation policy.

The summary also said despite "the highly publicized involvement of some contractors in abuse at Abu Ghraib," it found "very few instances of abuse involving contractors" who it said by and large were older and more experienced than military interrogators.

The summary broke little new ground, a Democratic aide said, although the full classified report addresses some specific instances of abuse.

This report also did not address a number of issues including the role of the CIA, or the practice of transferring prisoners to countries that allow torture in interrogations, the aide said.

Three additional reports are expected.

"There are some pretty big holes in this thing," the Democratic aide said.

But Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas in a statement said the report "like many others that preceded it, makes clear that the abuses that did occur took place, not as a result of administration policies, but rather in direct disregard for those policies and procedures.

© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

 

Senate Committee Holds Hearing on Prisoner Abuse
By DAVID STOUT

Published: March 10, 2005

WASHINGTON, March 10 - Some senators reacted with skepticism today as a high-ranking Navy officer told them that abuses in the questioning of prisoners captured in Iraq and Afghanistan were not the result of any policy decision, "written or otherwise."

Vice Adm. Albert T. Church, the service's inspector general, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that "the vast majority" of detainees had been treated "humanely and appropriately" by American military people serving under difficult and dangerous conditions.

Admiral Church, who conducted an exhaustive review of interrogation techniques used in Afghanistan and Iraq, said he had concluded that "there was no policy, written or otherwise, at any level that directed or condoned torture or abuse. There was no link between the authorized interrogation techniques and the abuses that, in fact, occurred."

The admiral did conclude that senior officials were to blame for not establishing clear interrogation policies, leaving lower-ranking commanders to develop some practices that were not appropriate.

But that finding did not seem to satisfy the committee's ranking Democrat, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan.

"In the end, I conclude that the Defense Department is not able to assess accountability at senior levels," Mr. Levin said, "particularly when investigators are in the chain of command of the officials whose policies and actions they are investigating."

Admiral Church's is the latest of several inquiries into the abuse of prisoners held by the American military. He said new procedures were now in place to clarify commanders' responsibilities for the handling of prisoners and to spell out prohibitions against tactics of intimidation, like the use of muzzled dogs in the presence of people to be questioned.

Another Democrat on the committee, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, said Admiral Church's findings did not amount to "the thorough, complete, no-holds-barred report that many of us expected."

The panel's chairman, Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, said he planned to hold at least one more hearing, and that the degree of blame to be assigned to high-level officials had yet to be determined. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has come under fire, and some lawmakers have said he should step down.

But a Republican panel member, Senator Jim Talent of Missouri, signaled that, as far as he is concerned, little if any blame rests on American shoulders. "If our guys want to poke somebody in the chest to get the name of a bomb maker so they can save the lives of Americans, I'm for it," Mr. Talent said. "If the Department of Defense wants to investigate me for that, and have 15 investigations and call me inhumane, fine."

A prominent Democrat on the committee, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, agreed with Admiral Church's conclusion that the incidents of abuse, however deplorable, were few, at least in terms of statistics. "Seventy cases out of 50,000 detainees is about one-tenth of 1 percent," the senator said.

Lawmakers in both parties have condemned the most flagrant abuses, at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and elsewhere, and have agreed that it has damaged the United States' standing in the world.

Responding to a question from Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, on whether he had found any evidence that some commanders "preferred to look the other way" rather than investigate possible abuse, Admiral Church said. "We did not find that."

But Senator Reed was clearly dissatisfied with the scope of Admiral Church's inquiry, particularly his decision not to interview L. Paul Bremer III, the former civilian administrator in Iraq, but to interview his military assistants instead.

"Admiral, that seems to be a stunning omission," Mr. Reed said. To interview Mr. Bremer's military aides instead "seems to be woefully inadequate, with all due respect," the senator said.

"I accept the criticism, sir," the admiral replied, explaining that his assignment was to try to determine how the interrogation techniques were developed and "I didn't need to interview Ambassador Bremer to determine that."

Later, at a Pentagon news conference, Matthew Waxman, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said United States forces "will continue to wage the war on terrorism aggressively, including capturing, detaining and interrogating enemy fighters."

"That said, we are also committed to the humane treatment of all individuals in our custody," Mr. Waxman said. "These two objectives - effective and aggressive pursuit of terrorists and the humane treatment of detainees - are not mutually exclusive, they're mutually reinforcing."