May 24 issue - It's not easy to get a member of Congress to stop talking. Much less a room full of them. But as a small group of legislators watched the images flash by in a small, darkened hearing room in the Rayburn Building last week, a sickened silence descended. There were 1,800 slides and several videos, and the show went on for three hours. The nightmarish images showed American soldiers at Abu Ghraib Prison forcing Iraqis to masturbate. American soldiers sexually assaulting Iraqis with chemical light sticks. American soldiers laughing over dead Iraqis whose bodies had been abused and mutilated. There was simply nothing to say. "It was a very subdued walk back to the House floor," said Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "People were ashen."

The White House put up three soldiers for court-martial, saying the pictures were all the work of a few bad-apple MPs who were poorly supervised. But evidence was mounting that the furor was only going to grow and probably sink some prominent careers in the process. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner declared the pictures were the worst "military misconduct" he'd seen in 60 years, and he planned more hearings. Republicans on Capitol Hill were notably reluctant to back Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And NEWSWEEK has learned that U.S. soldiers and CIA operatives could be accused of war crimes. Among the possible charges: homicide involving deaths during interrogations. "The photos clearly demonstrate to me the level of prisoner abuse and mistreatment went far beyond what I expected, and certainly involved more than six or seven MPs," said GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former military prosecutor. He added: "It seems to have been planned."
 

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Indeed, the single most iconic image to come out of the abuse scandal—that of a hooded man standing naked on a box, arms outspread, with wires dangling from his fingers, toes and penis—may do a lot to undercut the administration's case that this was the work of a few criminal MPs. That's because the practice shown in that photo is an arcane torture method known only to veterans of the interrogation trade. "Was that something that [an MP] dreamed up by herself? Think again," says Darius Rejali, an expert on the use of torture by democracies. "That's a standard torture. It's called 'the Vietnam.' But it's not common knowledge. Ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them."

Who might have taught them? Almost certainly it was their superiors up the line. Some of the images from Abu Ghraib, like those of naked prisoners terrified by attack dogs or humiliated before grinning female guards, actually portray "stress and duress" techniques officially approved at the highest levels of the government for use against terrorist suspects. It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques, and late last week Defense spokesman Larry DiRita said that "no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses." But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers—and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation—methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture."

The Bush administration created a bold legal framework to justify this system of interrogation, according to internal government memos obtained by NEWSWEEK. What started as a carefully thought-out, if aggressive, policy of interrogation in a covert war—designed mainly for use by a handful of CIA professionals—evolved into ever-more ungoverned tactics that ended up in the hands of untrained MPs in a big, hot war. Originally, Geneva Conventions protections were stripped only from Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. But later Rumsfeld himself, impressed by the success of techniques used against Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay, seemingly set in motion a process that led to their use in Iraq, even though that war was supposed to have been governed by the Geneva Conventions. Ultimately, reservist MPs, like those at Abu Ghraib, were drawn into a system in which fear and humiliation were used to break prisoners' resistance to interrogation.
 

Abu Ghraib Prison Abuse: A Who's Who • PFC. LYNNDIE ENGLAND | 372d MILITARY POLICE COMPANY • CPL. CHARLES GRANER JR. | 372d MILITARY POLICE COMPANY • SPC. SABRINA HARMAN | 372d MILITARY POLICE COMPANY • SGT. JAVAL DAVIS | 372d MILITARY POLICE COMPANY • SPC. JEREMY SIVITS | 372d MILITARY POLICE COMPANY • S/SGT. VAN FREDERICK II | 372d MILITARY POLICE COMPANY • SPC. MEGAN AMBUHL | 372d MILITARY POLICE COMPANY • A MAN OF CONSCIENCE: SPC. JOSEPH DARBY | 372d MILITARY POLICE COMPANY AP She is the grinning, pixieish face of the current scandal, the anti-Jessica Lynch who, by coincidence, grew up in another small town in a different part of the same state. And until last week, Ft. Ashby, W.Va., was equally proud of England, who had bagged groceries and worked in a chicken plant before joining the Reserves to earn money for college. (Her dream, reportedly, was to become a storm-chasing meteorologist.) Her parents fled the onslaught of reporters, but at a press conference her best friend, Destiny Goin, described England as "a caring person" who adopted a stray cat in Iraq. She was also, at 21, divorced after a two-year marriage to a high-school boyfriend, and four months pregnant by another soldier who has been charged in the case, Cpl. Charles Graner Jr. (below). England's lawyer acknowledged a "relationship" with Graner but, under questioning, refused to call it a romance--and reminded reporters that Graner was her supervisor. England's sister, Jessica Klinestiver, insists that in her guard work she "was following orders, and that's what people in the military are supposed to do." AP Abu Ghraib Prison was an unlikely setting for a love affair, but Graner, 35, managed to conduct a "relationship" with England; the two posed arm in arm, grinning, behind a heap of naked Iraqi prisoners, for one of the more notorious photos to emerge from the scandal. In civilian life, Graner, of Uniontown, Pa., is a guard at one of the state's toughest prisons, in Waynesburg; he and his wife, with whom he had two children, 11 and 13, separated in 1997 and later divorced. Graner's lawyer, Guy Womack, told reporters last week that his client's "spirits are high," and asserted that Graner was "following orders" from military and civilian interrogators. Said Womack: "He knows he didn't do anything wrong." Washington Post Determined to follow her father and brother into the police force, Harman, 26, of Lorton, Va., sought training in the Army Reserves. As soon as she graduated from boot camp, though, she was shipped off to Iraq and the former pizzeria manager became a prison guard--and now, her mother, Robin, fears, a scapegoat. Investigators say Harman took several of the photographs of naked prisoners as they were abused and humiliated, and she has been charged with attaching electrodes to the fingers, toes and penis of a hooded prisoner, who was warned he would be electrocuted if he fell asleep. She told The Washington Post in an e-mail last week that her job was to "make it hell so they would talk." AP He's 26, married to a woman in the Navy and the father of a 4-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter. The New Jersey-born Davis was a star on his high-school track team and later competed at Morgan State University in Baltimore. "I witnessed prisoners in the [military intelligence] hold section being made to do various things that I would question morally," he told investigators. "We were told that [military intelligence] had different rules." His family insists he's innocent, noting that he doesn't appear in any of the photographs published last week. AP He was trained, according to his father, to fix trucks, and his civilian work experience was mostly at McDonald's, but the 24-year-old Sivits found himself inside Abu Ghraib Prison, and was allegedly present when some of the notorious pictures were taken. His father, Daniel, a career military man, told The Baltimore Sun that he had counseled his son never to snitch on a fellow soldier--advice that Jeremy seems to have followed, although according to his mother, Freda, he knew that something was wrong. "Jeremy said, 'Mom, if I would have said something, what would have happened to me?' He was damned if he did and damned if he didn't." AP The senior enlisted man among those charged, Frederick, 37, is a prison guard in Virginia, as is his wife, Martha. He wrote his family about a prisoner "stressed" by interrogators until he died; the body, he said, was packed in ice and given a fake IV to simulate a medical emergency. When he brought up his concerns about conditions at Abu Ghraib to a senior officer, the response, he said, was not to worry about it: military intelligence was pleased with the results. Little is known about Ambuhl, 29, who lives in Centreville, Va. AP He was an unlikely, even a reluctant, hero--an auto mechanic from rural Pennsylvania, a background that hardly set him apart from the other soldiers of the 372d. When he was identified as the whistle-blower, his friend Doug Ashbrook's first thought was "That doesn't sound like Joe." But when Darby first saw the now infamous pictures of Iraqi prisoners being punished after a brawl, he was troubled enough to slip an anonymous letter to Army investigators. He later provided evidence in a sworn statement. Now his family worries about the label of "whistle-blower." As his sister-in-law explains: "There are bad people who might think this brings the U.S. bad publicity."   Source: Newsweek • Print this

 

"There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11," as Cofer Black, the onetime director of the CIA's counterterrorist unit, put it in testimony to Congress in early 2002. "After 9/11 the gloves came off." Many Americans thrilled to the martial rhetoric at the time, and agreed that Al Qaeda could not be fought according to traditional rules. But it is only now that we are learning what, precisely, it meant to take the gloves off.

The story begins in the months after September 11, when a small band of conservative lawyers within the Bush administration staked out a forward-leaning legal position. The attacks by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, these lawyers said, had plunged the country into a new kind of war. It was a conflict against a vast, outlaw, international enemy in which the rules of war, international treaties and even the Geneva Conventions did not apply. These positions were laid out in secret legal opinions drafted by lawyers from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and then endorsed by the Department of Defense and ultimately by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, according to copies of the opinions and other internal legal memos obtained by NEWSWEEK.