A Torture How-To.....

June 20, 2004
DISPATCHES
The Army and Torture: What the Rule Book Says
By MICHAEL R. GORDON,
International Herald Tribune

FORT HUACHUCA, Arizona — The pace is brisk at Fort Huachuca, the desert outpost where the army trains its human intelligence teams. The soldiers who graduate from the army's Humint Collector Course are taught to interrogate prisoners, exploit captured documents and develop sources in foreign battle zones. With the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the army expects more than 1,000 soldiers to graduate in fiscal 2006, a fourfold increase over 2003. But it is the content of the instruction, more than the quantity of it, that is receiving the most attention in light of the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison "What we have done is put a spotlight at what took place at Abu Ghraib," said Major General James Marks, the outgoing commander of the Army Intelligence Center here. "We don't train that. It is foreign to us. It is almost as if it popped in from outer space.

"We have taken those bad examples and put them in front of our soldiers and demonstrated to them what you must not do. You can't even get close to that." The fact is that U.S. military and civilian officials do not need to devise new rules to avoid the sort of abuses that have cropped up at Abu Ghraib.

The scandal could have been avoided by adhering to the old rules as they are laid down by FM 34-52, the 1992 field manual that serves as the basic primer for students and instructors at Fort Huachuca and that outlines the army's doctrine for conducting interrogations. The field manual makes all the right arguments about why mental and physical torture are illegal, morally wrong and counterproductive. It expressly forbids beatings or forcing an individual to sit, stand or kneel in an abnormal position for prolonged periods or tying prisoners up as a form of punishment. Threats, insults or inhumane treatment are not allowed.

The field manual makes several arguments against torture. First, torture is an unreliable technique since a prisoner will say anything to end his suffering. Second, it will undermine public and foreign support for the U.S. military efforts. Third, it will increase the risk that captured American and allied personnel will be abused. Lastly, it is against the Geneva conventions and U.S. policy.

Psychological ploys, verbal trickery and nonviolent ruses are allowed. The field manual offers a common-sense test for determining if interrogators have crossed the line: Imagine that a technique was being applied to American prisoners of war and ask yourself if it would be consistent with U.S. law. "If a doubt still remains as to the legality of a proposed actions, seek a legal opinion from your servicing judge advocate," it instructs.

"Experience indicates that the use of prohibited techniques is not necessary to gain the cooperation of interrogation sources." The Abu Ghraib abuses, in short, constituted not only an outrage that fanned already deep resentments in Iraq about the occupation and increased the danger to U.S. troops, but also represented a case in which the army ran afoul of fundamental tenets of its own long-established doctrine. What could lead to such an outcome? Poorly trained and motivated troops, for one. (The investigation by Major General Antonio Taguba portrayed the military police at the prison as a dysfunctional unit and also faulted Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade and a former official at Fort Huachuca, for having failed to supervise his soldiers and ensuring that they stayed faithful to the Geneva conventions.)

Another factor investigators need to assess is whether the responsibility needs to be shared by senior military commanders, who have been under tremendous pressure to obtain intelligence about an increasingly threatening insurgency. And what of the signals sent by the nation's civilian leaders? It is jarring, for example, that Justice Department lawyers seem to have taken a more tolerant attitude toward torture than the drafters of Army Field Manual 34-52. An August 2002 memo prepared by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for the White House essentially argued that some degree of physical and mental torture could be acceptable.

Physical pain that is induced in a prisoner must be comparable to the intense suffering associated with organ failure or death to be considered to be torture, the Justice Department lawyers argued.

To be considered torture, any mental anguish that is induced, the lawyers reasoned, must result in lasting psychological disorders that endure for months or even years. The lawyers at the Justice Department seemed to be doing what lawyers generally try to do: create a loophole for their client.

While there is no direct link between the memo and the problems at Abu Ghraib, the memo does appear to reflect an ends-justify-stretching-the-means attitude of some government officials. At Fort Huachuca, the soldiers in the Humint collection course are provided with a hypothetical war situation. (In the current one, renaming two Southwestern states as countries, the Republic of Arizona is fighting the Republic of New Mexico.)

Students conduct 12 three-hour interrogations, with instructors playing the role of enemy soldiers and insurgents. The goal is to elicit vital military information from recalcitrant subjects. The exercises are videotaped and the results analyzed. Violations of the Geneva conventions receive a failing grade. The whole art of the exercise is to obtain the information without breaching the convention.

Specialist Ken Anderson, a reservist from California, who was taking the course in preparation for a tour in Kosovo, said that the episode at Abu Ghraib had been discussed as an example of what can happen when the army's standards are not upheld. "We are taught, when we do see something like that, it is our responsibility to report that information," he said. It is hard to find saints in a war zone, but the 1992 field manual presciently lays out the stakes: "Revelation of use of torture by U.S. personnel will bring discredit upon the U.S. and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort."




Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |