By Jason Leopold
The Public Record
Jun 21, 2008

June 19, 2008 - A retired Army general who spent 10 months in Iraq and led an investigation into the atrocities at the Abu Ghraib prison there accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing war crimes and called for those responsible to be held accountable.

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account,"wrote Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in a preface to a stunning new report, Broken Laws, Broken Lives, released by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which claims medical evidence proves 11 prisoners who participated in intensive, clinical evaluations were systematically tortured by U.S. interrogators.

The organization convened a team of doctors and psychologists to to conduct evaluations of the 11 former detainees held in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay. The men were later released and were never charged with any crimes.

"The poignant case studies focus on the profound and lasting consequences of cruelty at the hands of US personnel," said Farnoosh Hashemian, MPH, PHR Research Associate and lead author of the report. "The detainees suffer permanent hearing loss, persistent and debilitating pain in limbs and joints, major depressive disorder, severe post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety disorders, such as panic attacks."

An executive summary of the report says the study was conducted "using internationally accepted standards,...to document the severe, long-term physical and psychological consequences that have resulted from the torture and ill-treatment. The evaluations provide evidence of violation of criminal laws prohibiting torture and of the commission of war crimes by US personnel. Four of the men evaluated were either arrested in or brought to Afghanistan between late 2001 and early 2003 and later sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they were held for an average of three years before release without charge. The other seven were detained in Iraq in 2003 and released without charge later that year or in 2004, with an average period of detention of six months. All of the former detainees evaluated by PHR reported having been subjected to multiple forms of torture or ill-treatment that often occurred in combination over a long period of time.

"The medical evaluations were based in each case on intensive two-day clinical interviews that included diagnostic testing and, in two cases, review of medical records,"the report says. "With this evidentiary record, this report provides the most detailed account available thus far of the experience of detainees in US custody who suffered torture — a war crime — at the hands of US personnel. Additionally, this report provides further evidence of the role health professionals played in facilitating detainee abuse by being present during torture and ill-treatment, denying medical care to detainees, providing confidential medical information to interrogators, and failing to stop or document detainee abuse.

"Methods of torture experienced by the former detainees evaluated by PHR included interrogation and detention practices such as isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, severe humiliation and degradation, and sensory deprivation that were officially authorized by military and civilian officials during certain periods when these men were incarcerated,"the report continues."Additional practices recounted by the interviewees including beatings and other forms of severe physical and sexual assault that, while not officially authorized by government documents now part of the public record, came to be part of a regime of brutality at the facilities where the detainees were held. This report demonstrates that the permissive environment created by implicit and explicit authorizations by senior US officials to "take the gloves off"encouraged forms of torture even beyond the draconian methods approved at various times between 2002 and 2004. In an environment of moral disengagement that countenances authorized techniques designed to humiliate and dehumanize detainees, it is not surprising that other forms."

The report was released Tuesday, the same day documents made public by the Senate Armed Services Committee showed during a hearing on the administration’s interrogation policies showed a pattern of humiliation, abuse and even torture inflicted on detainees was a deliberate policy of the Bush administration – debated by mid-level lawyers at the CIA and the Pentagon, given legal cover at the Justice Department and approved at the highest levels of government.

According to one document, Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, discussed with U.S. military officials how interrogators could use the "wet towel"technique, also known as waterboarding, against detainees to extract information.

"It can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating, but your body will not cease to function,"Fredman said on Oct. 2, 2002, during a meeting where specific techniques were reviewed and debated, according to the meeting minutes.

Fredman added that the "wet towel"technique would only be defined as torture "if the detainee dies."

"It is basically subject to perception,"Fredman said. "If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong."

Fredman’s comments prompted Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, then the chief military lawyer at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to respond: "We will need documentation to protect us."

Beaver also discussed hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which visited Guantanamo to ensure interrogators were complying with the Geneva Conventions.

Beaver urged interrogators to "curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around," according to the meeting minutes.

"Officially it is not happening," Beaver is quoted as saying. "It is not being reported officially. The ICRC is a serious concern. They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave. This would draw a lot of negative attention."

Two weeks ago, House Democrats sent a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey Friday requesting that he appoint a special prosecutor to investigate whether White House officials, including President Bush, violated the War Crimes Act when they allowed interrogators to use brutal interrogation methods against detainees suspected of ties to terrorist organizations.

The letter, signed by 56 Congressional lawmakers, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, who is leading an investigation into the administration’s interrogation practices, says the International Committee of the Red Cross conducted an independent investigation of interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay and "documented several instances of acts of torture against detainees, including soaking a prisoner’s hand in alcohol and lighting it on fire, subjecting a prisoner to sexual abuse and forcing a prisoner to eat a baseball."

"We believe that these events alone warrant action, but within the last month additional information has surfaced that suggests the fact that not only did top administration officials meet in the White House and approve of the use of enhanced techniques including waterboarding against detainees, but that President Bush was aware of, and approved of the meetings taking place,"the letter, dated June 6, says. "This information indicates that the Bush administration may have systematically implemented, from the top down, detainee interrogation policies that constitute torture or otherwise violate the law. We believe that these serious and significant revelations warrant an immediate investigation to determine whether actions taken by the President, his Cabinet, and other Administration officials are in violation of the War Crimes Act, the Anti-Torture Act, and other U.S. and international laws."

in the preface to the PHR report, Taguba wrote that the 11 men who were evaluated by doctors and psychologists "deserve justice as required under the tenets of international law and the United States Constitution."

In March 2004, Taguba issued a classified report on prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. His three-month investigation found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees” committed by U.S. soldiers between October and December 2003.

He said after his report was released Pentagon officials forced him to retire for being "overzealous."

Months before the worldwide condemnation of the treatment of the Abu Ghraib prisoners, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller to Baghdad from Guantanamo Bay to "hit back at the [Iraqi] insurgents...through unorthodox means,” according to a May 10, 2004, front-page story in the Washington Post.

"He came up there and told me he was going to 'Gitmoize' the detention operation," turning it into a hub of interrogation, said Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, then commander of the military prison system in Iraq, according to the Post.

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker’s May 24, 2004, issue that "the roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year [2003] 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.

"The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. … Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, [bringing] unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. … The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.