We are all Prisoners in Iraq

May 17, 2004
PRISONERS
Some Iraqis Held Outside Control of Top General
By DOUGLAS JEHL

ASHINGTON, May 16 — About 100 high-ranking Iraqi prisoners held for months at a time in spartan conditions on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport are being detained under a special chain of command, under conditions not subject to approval by the top American commander in Iraq, according to military officials.

The unusual lines of authority in the detainees' handling are part of a tangled network of authority over prisoners in Iraq, in which the military police, military intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, various military commanders and the Pentagon itself have all played a role. Congressional investigators who are looking into the scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners say those arrangements have made it difficult to determine where the final authority lies.

At least as of February, many of the 100 or so prisoners categorized by American officials as "high value detainees" because of the special intelligence they are believed to possess, had been held since June 2003 for nearly 23 hours a day in strict solitary confinement in small concrete cells without sunlight, according to a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

While not tantamount to the sexual humiliation and other abuses inflicted on Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, the conditions have been described by the Red Cross as a violation of the Geneva Conventions, the international treaty that the Bush administration has said it regards as "fully applicable" to all prisoners held by the United States in Iraq.

Under arrangements in effect since October, military officials said at a Pentagon briefing on Friday, explicit authorization from the American commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, has been required in each of about 25 cases in which prisoners have been subjected to isolation for longer than 30 days. But on Sunday, a senior military officer said that statement did not apply to the prisoners being held at the airport, because "we were not the authority" for the high-value detainees.

The officer referred questions about the high-value Iraqi prisoners to the United States Central Command, in Tampa, Fla., where a spokesman said he could not answer them on Sunday.

Defense Department officials said the principal responsibility for the high-value prisoners and their treatment belonged to the Iraq Survey Group, which is headed by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group was formed last June, principally to take charge of the hunt for Iraq's illicit weapons, although its mandate has also included gathering information about Iraqi war crimes. The survey group falls under the overall authority of the Central Intelligence Agency, under George J. Tenet, for matters related to the illicit weapons hunt. But on other matters it reports to the Central Command, under Gen. John P. Abizaid.

The so-called high-value Iraqi detainees said by military officials to be held at Camp Cropper on the airport's outskirts do not include Saddam Hussein, who was not captured until December and is being held by the Federal Bureau of Investigation elsewhere in Iraq, American government officials have said. These officials say Mr. Hussein has also been held in isolation.

The group does, however, include Tariq Aziz, a top Hussein aide, and other former senior officials depicted on a deck of cards created by the Pentagon to represent a 55-member most wanted list.

The designation of a "high value detainee" was described by military officials as subjective, assigned to prisoners based on an assessment of the intelligence information they might have about matters like illicit weapons, the anti-American insurgency or the conduct of Mr. Hussein's government.

In the report that it completed in February, the Red Cross committee said it had written to American officials last October recommending an end to the isolation imposed on the high-value prisoners. "The internment of persons in solitary confinement for months at a time in cells devoid of daylight for nearly 23 hours a day is more severe than the forms of internment provided for" under the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross said in the report.

But there has been no indication that the United States has called a halt to the procedure. On Friday, military officials in Washington who announced that harsher forms of treatment would no longer be available to interrogators and guards in Iraq also said that General Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, was leaving open the option of continuing to authorize the isolation of prisoners.

The question of whether harsh treatment of the detainees was authorized by senior Pentagon officials is among the main topics of the Congressional inquiries into prison abuse. An article by Seymour Hersh in the May 24 issue of The New Yorker says the tone for the abuse reflected secret directives from the Pentagon that were initially intended to give Special Operations troops and intelligence operatives a freer hand in pursuing Al Qaeda members.

In a statement on Saturday, the Pentagon described that article as "outlandish" and "filled with error."

"No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos," it said.

However, Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a commencement address on Sunday that in light of the allegations, his committee would look "up and down and sideways in the chain of command and get to the bottom of this," said a spokesman for the senator.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, appearing on the CBS News program "Face the Nation," said, "The question is: do we have an out-of-control prison or an out-of-control system?"

In response to questions, Senator Graham, Senator Warner and other lawmakers who spoke publicly on Sunday said they had not yet been able to determine whether The New Yorker account was accurate.

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said that if The New Yorker article was accurate, "it raises this issue a whole new level."

"The question," he said, "is whether there was this kind of a secret program, which authorized this additional level of abuse."

A report in this week's Newsweek quotes a memo written Jan. 25, 2002, by Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell saying that "this new paradigm of terrorism renders obsolete" the "strict limitation on questioning of enemy prisoners" spelled out in the Geneva accords.

Asked about it on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," Mr. Powell said he could not recall the specific memo but said he had always argued that the Bush administration should comply with the provisions of the Geneva accords — "either by the letter, if it's appropriate to those individuals in our custody that they are really directly under the Geneva Convention, or if they're illegal noncombatants and not directly under the convention, we should treat them nevertheless in a humane manner in accordance with what is expected of by international law and the Geneva Convention."

To date, military and intelligence officials have declined to describe the conditions under which the senior Iraqi officials have been held in Iraq.

Mr. Hussein had been in the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency in the early weeks after his capture in December, intelligence officials have said, but has been transferred to the F.B.I. in anticipation of his being transferred in turn to the Iraqi authorities to stand trial in Iraq, probably next year.

All of the American-run detention centers in Iraq, including the Abu Ghraib prison and the high-value detention site at Camp Cropper, are run by the military and guarded by the military police, military and Congressional officials said. In general, the military has been assigned the leading role in the questioning of Iraqi detainees, to the extent that military intelligence officials are supposed to sit in even on interrogations conducted by C.I.A. officers, a senior intelligence official said.

But the exact role played by officers from the C.I.A. and D.I.A. is not clear, and neither is the role played by members of the covert task forces run by the military that have taken the lead in the hunt for weapons in Iraq and for Mr. Hussein.

The task forces, which include C.I.A. officers and elite Special Operations troops including members of the Army's Delta Force and Navy Seals, have been given different names over time. But one of them, Task Force 121, played a leading role in the capture of Mr. Hussein, and a successor unit is still operating in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Intelligence officials have acknowledged that the C.I.A. played a role in interrogating about two dozen prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and that one prisoner died there during questioning in November, in a case that is being investigated by the agency's inspector general as a possible criminal homicide.

They also say that C.I.A. interrogators have questioned prisoners held at the site at the airport, and they have acknowledged that agency employees for a time enlisted military guards at Abu Ghraib to try to hide "ghost detainees" from the Red Cross.

That latter practice — intended "to keep the capture of a small number of terrorists quiet for some time" — was discontinued in January, a senior intelligence official said on Sunday.

In practice, however, Bush administration officials have also acknowledged that some of the overall direction has come from senior civilians at the Pentagon, including Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, military officials said.

In testimony last week before Congress, Mr. Cambone acknowledged that it was he, among others, who encouraged Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was then running the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to head a delegation that traveled to Iraq last summer to seek recommendations on improving the interrogation process there.

Mr. Cambone has said that he was never briefed about that trip by General Miller himself, but received only a secondhand briefing from his own top deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, the deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence.

Mr. Cambone has said the trip resulted in some important organizational changes, including the establishment under General Sanchez of a new "fusion cell" aimed at integrating intelligence information from a wide variety of sources.

Over breakfast with reporters last November, before the problems at Abu Ghraib had begun to surface, Mr. Cambone referred broadly to a trip made to Iraq last August by a delegation that he said "included people from the C.I.A." that made recommendations for "an increased level of intelligence support."

"They came back with a list of somewhere close to 80 or 90 recommendations on some of the changes and adjustments that needed to be made," Mr. Cambone said of the group. "Some were small: make sure you have the proper software down at a certain level of command and so forth. Others were rather larger."


Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Washington for this article.



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