The New York Review of Books

SCT Jose Garcia, assigned to the Abu Ghraib Detainee Assessment Board, estimated that 85–90 percent of the detainees were of no intelligence value…. Large quantities of detainees with little or no intelligence value swelled Abu Ghraib’s population and led to a variety of overcrowding difficulties…. Complicated and unresponsive release procedures ensured that these detainees stayed at Abu Ghraib—even though most had no value.

Among the many disadvantages of these nighttime sweeps as a tactic for fighting an insurgency was that prisoners scooped up in this way soon flooded the system, inundating the very prisons where detainees were meant to be “exploited for actionable intelligence.” And having filled Abu Ghraib largely with Iraqis of “no intelligence value”—whose families in most cases had no way to confirm where they were—the overwhelmed American command could not devise a way to get them out again, especially when faced with the strong opposition of those who had arrested them in the first place:

Combat Commanders desired that no security detainee be released for fear that any and all detainees could be threats to co-alition forces…. The [chief of intelligence, Fourth Infantry Division] informed [Major General] Fast that the Division Commander did not concur with the release of any detainees for fear that a bad one may be released along with the good ones.

Major General Fast, the senior intelligence officer in Iraq, described the attitude of the combat commanders as, “We wouldn’t have detained them if we wanted them released.” A sensible attitude, one might think, but as General Fay points out, the combat soldiers, in their zeal to apprehend Iraqis who might conceivably be supporting those shadowy figures attacking American troops, neglected to filter out those who clearly didn’t belong in prison. The capturing soldiers

failed to perform the proper procedures at the point-of-capture and beyond with respect to handling captured enemy prisoners of war and detainees (screening, tactical interrogation, capture cards, sworn statements, transportation, etc.). Failure of capturing units to follow these procedures contributed to facility overcrowding, an increased drain on scarce interrogator and linguist resources to sort out the valuable detainees from innocents who should have been released soon after capture, and ultimately, to less actionable intelligence. [My emphasis.]

The system was self-defeating and, not surprisingly, “interrogation operations in Abu Ghraib suffered from the effects of a broken detention operations system.” Indeed, these reports are full of “broken systems” and “under-resourced” commands, from Abu Ghraib itself, a besieged, sweltering, stinking hell-hole under daily mortar attack that lacked interpreters, interrogators, guards, detainee uniforms, and just about everything else, including edible food, and that, at its height, was staggering under an impossible prisoner-to-guard ratio of seventy-five to one, all the way up to the command staff of Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, which lacked, among other vital resources, two thirds of its assigned officers. In Iraq, as the Schlesinger report puts it bluntly, “there was not only a failure to plan for a major insurgency, but also to quickly and adequately adapt to the insurgency that followed after major combat operations.” And though they don’t say so explicitly, it is clear that the writers of these reports put much of the blame for this not on the commanders on the ground but on the political leadership in Washington, who, rather than pay the political cost of admitting the need for more troops—admitting, that is, that they had made mistakes in planning for the war and in selling it to the public—decided to “tough it out,” at the expense of the men and women in the field and, ultimately, the Iraqis they had been sent to “liberate.” All told, the reports offer a vivid and damning picture of a war that is understaffed, undersupplied, underresourced, and, above all, undermanned.

In this sense Abu Ghraib is at once a microcosm of the Iraq war in all its failures and the proverbial canary in the mineshaft, warning of what is to come. In fighting a guerrilla war, the essential weapon is not tanks or helicopters but intelligence, and the single essential tool to obtain it is reliable political support among the population. In such a war, arresting and imprisoning thousands of civilians in murkily defined “cordon and capture” raids is a blatantly self-defeating tactic, and an occupying army’s resort to it means not only that the occupier lacks the political support necessary to find and destroy the insurgents but that it has been forced by the insurgents to adopt tactics that will further lessen that support and create still more insurgents. It is, in short, a strategy of desperation and, in the end, a strategy of weakness.

By late summer 2003—a time when Bush administration officials had expected to start “drawing down” American forces “in theater” until a stabilization force of no more than 30,000 Americans remained in Iraq—the US military, even with 130,000 troops, was losing the initiative to an insurgency that seemed to have come out of nowhere and, after carrying out its increasingly bloody IED attacks and suicide bombings, regularly managed to disappear back into the same place. Officials in Washington were growing worried and impatient, and intelligence officers in Iraq were feeling the pressure.

In mid-August, a captain in military intelligence (MI) sent his colleagues an e-mail—recently shown to me—in which, clearly responding to an earlier request from interrogators, he sought to define “unlawful combatants,” distinguishing them from “lawful combatants [who] receive protections of the Geneva Convention and gain combat immunity for their warlike acts.” After promising to provide “an ROE”—rules of engagement—”that addresses the treatment of enemy combatants, specifically, unprivileged belligerents,” the captain asks the interrogators for “input…concerning what their special interrogation knowledge base is and more importantly, what techniques would they feel would be effective techniques.” Then, reminding the intelligence people to “provide Interrogation techniques ‘wish list’ by 17 AUG 03,” the captain signs off this way:

The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken. Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks. I thank you for your hard work and your dedication.

MI ALWAYS OUT FRONT!

On August 31 Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the US detention camp in Guantánamo, would arrive, ordered to Iraq “to review current Iraqi Theater ability to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence.” He and his team would bring with them news and advice drawn from the American government’s and the US military’s latest thinking on interrogation. For those at Abu Ghraib charged with “breaking” prisoners, help was on the way.

2.

“In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, CIA interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as “water-boarding,” in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.”⁵

—The New York Times,May 13, 2004

After apprehending suspects, US take-down teams—a mix of military special forces, FBI agents, CIA case officers and local allies—aim to disorient and intimidate them on the way to detention facilities.

According to Americans with direct knowledge and others who have witnessed the treatment, captives are “softened up” by MPs and US Army Special Forces troops who beat them up and confine them in tiny rooms. The alleged terrorists are commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep.⁷

We do know, finally, what “water-boarding” is, though it is not clear what version of this torture the Americans are applying. There is, for example, the version French policemen and soldiers used on prisoners during the Algerian War, as in this account from Bechir Boumaza, a thirty-one-year-old Algerian interrogated in Paris in 1958:

I was taken off the bar [on which he had been hung and subjected to electric torture] and my guards started their football again [beating and kicking him], perhaps for a quarter hour. Then they led me, still naked and blindfolded, into a neighboring room on the same floor. I heard: “We’ll have to kill him, the bastard.”

Then they laid me on a bench, flat on my stomach, head extending into the air, and tied my arms against my body with cords. Again the same question, which I refused to answer. By tilting the bench very slowly, they dipped my head into a basin filled with stinking liquid—dirty water and urine, probably. I was aware of the gurgling liquid reaching my mouth, then of a dull rumbling in my ears and a tingling sensation in my nose.

“You asked for a drink—take all you want.”

The first time I did drink, trying to appease an insupportable thirst. I wanted to vomit immediately.

“He’s puking, the bastard.”

And my head was pushed back into the basin….

From time to time one of them would sit on my back and bear down on my thighs. I could hear the water I threw up fall back into the basin. Then the torture would continue.⁸

The Latin American version, called el submarino, uses a wooden table, an oil drum filled with water, and a set of hooks linking the two, so that when the interrogators lift the table, the prisoner’s head is submerged. Here is the account of Irina Martinez, an Argentine student activist, who was arrested at her parents’ house in Buenos Aires in 1977, during the Dirty War:

She was immediately blindfolded. Her first torture session was in a basement full of soldiers, where she was stripped naked, tied, and beaten. “They slapped my face, pinched my breasts. ‘You have to talk, this is your last opportunity, and this is your salvation.’ And then they put me on a table. And I thought, ‘Well, if they are going to kill me, I hope they kill me pretty soon.’ They pushed my head underwater, so I could not breathe. They take you out, ask you things, they put you in, they take you out—so you cannot breathe all the time. ‘Who did you receive this from? Who do you know?’ Who can control anything when you cannot breathe? They pull you out, you try to grab for air, so they put you back in so you swallow water, and it is winter and you are very cold and very scared and they do that for a long time. Even if you are a good swimmer you cannot stand it anymore….”⁹

Water-boarding, as those Americans who used the method on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other “high value detainees” surely know, is very effective in inducing fear; as a Uruguayan army interrogator put it, “There is something more terrifying than pain, and that is the inability to breathe.” It is most effective, as these examples show, when combined with other techniques, including stress positions, sensory and sleep deprivation, and direct “physical coercion,” or beatings.