General promised quick results if Gitmo plan used at Abu Ghraib

By Blake Morrison and Peter Eisler

The general who pushed for more aggressive interrogation tactics at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison predicted better intelligence within a month if his strategies were adopted, according to a copy of his classified plan obtained by USA TODAY.

In the plan, sent in early September to top military officials in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller promised that "a significant improvement in actionable intelligence will be realized within 30 days." His strategy involved having military police acting as prison guards "setting the conditions to exploit internees to respond to questions."

The recommendations in Miller’s 12-page report were based on the interrogation operation he supervised at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where suspected members of al-Qaeda are held. The report lists a roster of the 17-person team culled entirely from the Guantanamo operation. The team spent 10 days at Abu Ghraib with Miller in late summer, before he submitted the plan. Several interrogation teams from Guantanamo subsequently trained those at Abu Ghraib.

By Oct. 12, the Army moved ahead with Miller’s strategy to team guards and interrogators, an approach at odds with long-established military doctrine. But commanders were slow to implement other aspects of Miller’s plan that might have helped prevent misconduct.

Those recommendations called for increasing the number of guards and interrogators, improving their training and assigning a legal adviser to Abu Ghraib who was dedicated to monitoring the intelligence-gathering operation.

Miller’s plan, disclosed publicly for the first time, underscores the urgency top officials felt last fall about finding both Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction and quelling an increasingly deadly Iraqi insurgency. It also raises questions about whether the Army cut corners in its quest for intelligence and created pressures that may have contributed to the abuses.

By late October, guards began abusing prisoners and taking humiliating photos of them. Prisoners say guards stripped them naked, forced them to masturbate and put hoods over their heads. One of the six soldiers who still face courts-martial for misconduct, Sgt. Javal Davis, told Army investigators that interrogators encouraged guards to "loosen this guy up" or "make sure he gets the treatment" before interrogations. A seventh has pleaded guilty.

Miller’s plan was not among documents released Tuesday by the White House. Rather, it is part of the classified section of the report prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who conducted the Army’s internal investigation into abuses at Abu Ghraib. Miller, who was not interviewed in that investigation, was subsequently put in charge of all detention and interrogation operations in Iraq.

Guantanamo was viewed as a success

The interrogation tactics used at Guantanamo were viewed as highly successful by the Pentagon. This month, Gen. James Hill, who heads the U.S Southern Command and oversees Guantanamo, noted that interrogators there continue to get useful intelligence, including information on al-Qaeda cells and insights into the organization and its finances.

That’s why U.S. military officials turned to Miller, who had taken charge of interrogation operations at Guantanamo, to help pull better information from detainees in Iraq. According to the report Miller sent Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Miller used the interrogation procedures at Guantanamo as "baselines" for his recommendations.

Many of Miller’s findings focused on the lack of a "unified strategy" for detaining and interrogating prisoners in Iraq. There was no system, he said, for communicating to interrogators what sort of intelligence commanders needed, or for coordinating the information interrogators gleaned.

He also noted that the analysis of that information was weak, hampered in part by a substandard database that did not allow intelligence officers to check the statements of detainees against information that commanders already had.

More involvement by MPs

But much of Miller’s report dwelled on the interrogations themselves — and their lack of success. It was in this context that he urged far more involvement by military police guards in eliciting intelligence from prisoners.

In his report to Sanchez, Miller urged that commanders at Abu Ghraib "dedicate and train a detention guard force ... that sets the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees." That guard force, Miller said, should be joined with interrogators under a single commander from military intelligence.

The plan violated long-established military doctrine, which stipulates that military police "do not participate in military-intelligence-supervised interrogation sessions." But Miller told Congress that, with his report, he provided top military officials a list of procedures used at Guantanamo that set limits on the role of MPs in interrogations.

"The recommendation was that the MPs conduct passive intelligence gathering ... to observe the detainees, to see how their behavior was, to see who they would speak with, and then to report that to the interrogators," Miller testified.

Officials who helped set up the operation at Guantanamo, nicknamed "Gitmo" by the military, say there would have been no problems at Abu Ghraib if the plan had been managed as well as it had been at the facility in Cuba.

"Had the policies that were in place at Gitmo from detention to interrogation been fully implemented with proper oversight, none of this likely would have happened," says Mark Jacobson, a former Pentagon adviser on interrogations.

Abu Ghraib was different

But the conditions at Abu Ghraib differed dramatically from those at Guantanamo.

In his report, Taguba said "there is a strong argument that the intelligence value of detainees held" at Guantanamo "is different than that of the detainees/internees held at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq. Currently, there are a large number of Iraqi criminals held at Abu Ghraib. These are not believed to be international terrorists or members of Al Qaida, Anser Al Islam, Taliban and other international terrorist organizations."

The officer overseeing detention facilities in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, also says she warned Miller in September that Abu Ghraib lacked enough military police to emulate the operation at Guantanamo.

"At Guantanamo, they had 800 MPs for 640 prisoners," or more than a guard for each inmate, Karpinski says. "At Abu Ghraib, we had about 300 MPs for about 6,600 prisoners," or one for every 22 prisoners. That meant MPs at Abu Ghraib, unlike those at Gitmo, would not be able to devote special attention to detainees, their diets, their sleep habits and their moods. In fact, the MPs there had trouble controlling the riots that periodically erupted.

In addition, the chaotic environment at Abu Ghraib, an overcrowded prison that came under frequent mortar attack, was nothing like the quiet, tightly controlled, well-equipped detention center in Cuba.

Karpinski says Miller didn’t seem interested in her concerns. He told her he had been given the go-ahead from Sanchez to remake the prison as he saw fit.

"He said, ’Look, we can do this my way or we can do this the hard way,’ " Karpinski says. "The communication was, ’This was a done deal. And because he set the tenor of this from the beginning, I was not about to argue with Miller. He had Sanchez’s endorsement."

Karpinski says she never saw Miller’s written plan until months later, after the abuses occurred. Even so, Karpinski says, she pledged her support.

Miller and other top military officials told Congress last month that the interrogation plan and the abuse were not related. They testified that rogue guards, poorly trained and supervised by Karpinski and her officers, were responsible.

Karpinski blames Miller for the well-documented abuses at Abu Ghraib. She says his pledge to produce intelligence fast could not be kept "without aggressive techniques."

"What became the catalyst for those things to take place? Miller’s visit and his efforts to Gitmo-ize the operation," she says. "It is the only explanation for the abuses we’ve seen."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-06-22-abuse-usat_x.htm