On December 1st, 2002
Dilawar, a young Afghan taxi driver
took three passengers for a ride.
He never returned home.
When the sun started to go down,
the sand started blowing, so it was
a like a big dust bowl and I'm thinking,
boy is it gonna be like this every night?
I remember walking in there for the
first time and the smell, the smell's
the first thing that hit you.
I'm a man from DC, if you've ever been
to the National Zoo when you walk
into the elephant house there,
that's the best way to describe it.
There's a few of us that lived in
the prison and I was one of them.
They built it up to be a big scary place
to the prisoners.
After then invasion of Afghanistan,
US forces occupied Bagram, an old Soviet air base
as a place to collect and interrogate
thousands of detainees, captured
throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan.
These were suspected Taliban.
They were being caught by Special Forces
throughout the countryside, brought to Bagram
and be held, interrogated to determine
if they were a high value prisoner.
These were not nice people at all.
They were very evil people who
definitely had violent intentions.
On December 5, 2002,
Dilawar, the taxi driver, was brought
to Bagram, he was designated a PUC,
person under control, number 421.
He was something to do with a trigger man
for a rocket attack and that's about all I know.
Five days after his arrival, he was dead.
I would say this was around 'bout 05:00 in the morning
and as I walked by, Dilawar, I think
that's his name, Dilawar, I walked by
Dilawar's cell and I noticed he was
just kinda hanging there with his head down
but he was being too still to be just
hanging there and sleeping.
Sergeant Curtis opened up the door
and we went in and he was unresponsive
and we started CPR.
I was downstairs in general population
then I heard a call come in asking
for Cammack to come upstairs, he was a medic
and we carried him downstairs on the stretcher
and Cammack was still on top of him
while we were carrying him down,
still trying to get him back going
all the way down the stairs, got him
to the front door and they kept working on him
and kept working on him until the doctor
got there and pronounced him dead.
I don't know whether there
was an injury that was aggravated by something
or whether he was just sick coming in.
They're very frail people and I was surprised
that it had taken that long for one
of em to die in our custody.
It was a sense of, definitely a sense of concern
because he was the second one.
Just a week before Dilawar's death,
another detainee at Bagram had died.
You know, you wonder, is it something
we did or did somebody kill him or something
but I just didn't know.
According to the medical examiner,
the first detainee to die, Habibullah,
had a pre-existing pulmonary condition
but it was the beatings he sustained
in Bagram that led to the cause of his death
a blood clot that traveled to his lungs.
When the second one died a week later
that's when it was like oh crap,
something was gonna happen now,
yes, two prisoners dying within a week
of each other, that's bad.
A preliminary investigation
into Dilawar's death revealed deep bruises
all over his body, but did not conclude
that his treatment at Bagram was to blame.
The next day, they said just draw out
how he was shackled up here and I made
that little crude drawing.
The ceiling of these isolation rooms
was just a simple metal grate and it was
thick enough you could put handcuffs
through the wires of that and you just
kind of chain em up like that,
out to the sides like this.
Forced standing for long periods
had inflamed tissue damage from blows
to Dilawar's legs, but the initial Bagram
press release failed to mention
overhead shackling or beatings.
It declared that both detainees
had died of natural causes.
My opinion is that the military
wanted to get this over and get this
done quickly, before it really got noticed.
Soon after Dilawar's death,
the officer in charge of interrogation
at Bagram, Captain Carolyn Wood
was awarded the Bronze Star for Valor.
Following the Iraq invasion, Wood
and her intelligence unit were given
a new assignment, Abu Ghraib.
The only thing I can really remember
about Abu Ghraib was the heat, it was like
a 148 degrees or so there and it was all concrete.
You know, Abu Ghraib also had that infamous
torture chambers and stuff left from Saddam's era.
I remember walking through those and seeing
fingernail marks on the walls and blood stains
and guillotines and stuff like that
it was a pretty surreal feeling.
We went to Abu Ghraib, I believe in July,
July August of 2003 to start that prison.
You put people in a crazy situation
and people do crazy things
and Abu was getting mortared every night.
These 120mm mortars killing prisoners.
The first time that happened, they should
have evacuated those prisoners to somewhere else.
Because the prisoners weren't safe.
People were being told to rough up Iraqis
that wouldn't cooperate, we were also told
they're nothing but dogs, then all of a sudden
you start looking at these people
as less than human and you start
doing things to em you would never dream of
and that's where it got scary.
It was only the night shift,
there's always a few bad apples.
It's been a body blow for all of us.
This is clearly an isolated incident.
The conduct of a very very small
number of our leaders and soldiers.
In the wake of media attention
surrounding Abu Ghraib, the military
began a series of investigations.
The people who engaged in abuses
will be brought to justice, the world
will see how a free system, a democratic system
functions and operates transparently with no cover ups.
The Secretary and others have said
well, you know, we've conducted
12 investigations, each and all of which
were geared to looking downward,
Down toward Lynndie England and Graner
and not looking up.
The soldiers in the photos
are Military Police, or MPS, whose job
it was to guard and protect the prisoners.
In their statements, the MPs claimed
that Military Intelligence or MI
ordered them to weaken, humiliate
and break the prisoners for interrogation purposes.
Obviously what they were doing
in those pictures was not sanctioned
by the interrogation rules of engagement
and they weren't interrogators,
so yes, I did think that they were bad apples.
However, I also think that they were
taking cues from Intel.
Just reading reports that was happening
in Afghanistan, I mean humiliation
trying to break people came from somewhere.
MPs didn't think of it, MPs were not
ever trained in such things.
We should have never been breaking anybody.
I can tell you we set the same policy
at Abu we set at Bagram, same exact rules.
Same thing was going on.
They wonder why it happened.
In her sworn testimony
about Abu Ghraib, Captain Wood said
she felt pressured to produce intelligence
so she brought unauthorized techniques
dogs, nudity, sleep depravation and stress positions
to Abu Ghraib from Afghanistan.
Wood maintained that the Bagram model
had tacit approval from superiors
but US Central Command had never
responded to her requests for authorization
so the mystery remained, was Abu Ghraib
the work of a few bad apples or evidence
of a new worldwide system on detention and interrogation?
I'm pretty sure that interrogators
were telling the guards, strip this guy naked
chain him up to the bed in an uncomfortable
position do whatever you can and then
they just decided to take it one step further
and have some fun with, and take pictures.
You've always got people in the military
who are just this side of the Marquis de Sade
and one of the reasons you want rules
and this code of conduct to help you lead
mud Marines and mud grunts, Infantry
is so that you can use those tools
to restrict this tendency in your soldiers.
When you have your friends dying
on your left and right, you can sometimes go
beyond the pail, so a Lieutenant, a Captain
down where the rubber meets the road
needs these tools and he needs
to be able to punish people who cross the line.
When the Secretary walked through
my door into my office about the time
the photos of Abu Ghraib were getting ready
to come out and we had rumor they were
coming out, he said to me I need to know
what happened and why, and so then
I began to build both an open source
and an inside the government, classified
and unclassified document file and I began
to see legal arguments as to why
the President could pretty much do anything
he wanted to in the name of security
and the Secretary of Defense and others
beneath him were actually looking for
the twin pressures that they put on people
that is to say the pressure to produce
intelligence and the fact that
they were saying the gloves are off
created the environment in the field
that we later saw reflected in
the photographs from Abu Ghraib
and in my few, far more serious fashion
than the photographs we saw, 98 deaths
of people in detention, which I understand now
from my Army colleagues is up to some
25 of which have been declared officially
by the Army as homicides.
People say well these photographs
from Abu Ghraib, they weren't real torture
I look back at those people and I say
murder's torture, murder's the ultimate torture.
In the case of Dilawar, he was subjected to
certainly cruel and unusual punishment
and ultimately, he was subjected
to torture because he died.
It's not our intent for people
to die, especially when we're seeking
to get information from them.
Did the treatment they received
in those rooms cause the death of these two men?
First, we're not chaining
people to the ceiling, I think you asked
me that question before.
First, we're not chaining
people to the ceiling, that's what he says.
Carlotta Gall is a New York Times
journalist based in Kabul.
Unsatisfied with the military's explanation
of the two deaths at Bagram, she set out to investigate.
It took a long time to find the family
because the military didn't tell us
who they were and we started calling around
Governors, they're very simple farming family
they don't speak English, but they
showed me a paper that was given to them
with the body and that's when I opened it up
and read it and it was in English
and it was a death certificate from
the American Military and it was signed by
a US Major who was the pathologist
and there were four boxes and she'd ticked
the box for homicide.
I said my god they've killed him and we then
had to tell the family do you know
what's written here and they said no
it's in English we don't understand
and I think maybe the Red Cross
who helped return the body had explained
but they hadn't taken it in and then
the pathologist had said it was this blunt
force trauma to the legs.
In other words, did they receive
any trauma, any blunt injury trauma as we call it?
Presently I have no indiction of that
but we will be looking as this investigation
continues to go down its due course.
Presently have no indication of that
you know, there's been a death certificate
signed by his people and he says
presently I have no indication of any
blunt force trauma and it's written
on the death certificate, which I've seen.
The story probably would have gone away
had it not been for my colleague, Carlotta Gall
who tracked down Dilawar's family
and found the knife in the back clue
that told everyone that this incident
had been something other than the military portrayed.
Tim Golden picked up
the trail of the story and obtained
a confidential file of the Army investigation
including hundreds of pages of testimony
from the soldiers involved.
Part of what made this story
compelling to me was that you had
these young soldiers with very little training
or preparation, thrown into this situation
in the aftermath of 9/11 just as the rules
were changing and they weren't told
what the new rules were and you had
this young Afghan man who came in
to this system at the wrong time
and in the wrong way and this is what
happened to him.
I saw his picture in the New York Times article
before that picture, I couldn't have
picked his face out, you know, my memory
of him was chained up with the hood on,
no sleeping.
Following questions raised
by the New York Times and under scrutiny
from the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Army
finally stepped up the Dilawar investigation
and began charging soldiers with maltreatment
maiming and homicide.
When you're working with the organization
like the military, they're gonna hold
somebody accountable, you can sweep
some things under the rug, but this was a death
it was two deaths and okay fine,
they're gonna charge people.
It seemed like the military now,
after they got a black eye from Abu Ghraib
wanted to get a public opinion that they were
policing their soldiers and so they
said we had this incident that happened
a couple of years ago, we can still
prosecute some of them.
I had nothing to do with the military
for two years and all of a sudden
I'm getting a call saying that
I'm being court-martialed, I mean
that was a huge surprise for me.
From the defense perspective,
I immediately said this is a political show trial.
Willie Brand is a good soldier
good soldiers tend to obey orders,
good soldiers tend to be people
who do what they're trained to do.
The interrogators on the ground
for the most part didn't know
what the rules were, they'd never been
interrogators before.
My interrogation training consisted
of basically they taught us some approaches
how to get people to talk and then
here, go, go watch these guys interrogate
which were the people that we were replacing
for about five, six hours before
I did my first interrogation.
Damien was picked for this job
because he's big, he's loud and he's scary
that was his qualification.
Soldiers are dying, get the information.
That's all you're told, get the information.
Soldiers said that when prisoners
like Dilawar came in to Bagram they were
immediately assaulted.
They blasted music at em, often
they had dogs barking at em and they
would use some of the most menacing
interrogators to create this sense of threat
one of those was Damien Corsetti.
With the screening you're trying to instill
what's call shock of capture, when the person
first comes in, that's when they're most
apt to give you information because
they're just like holy crap, you know
- what's going on. - It's not just that
the disorientation procedure, it's actually
a terrorizing procedure, it's designed
to terrify you into spilling the beans
as it were, being spat at, being sworn at
having the dogs barking around,
cameras flashing in your face.
Keep in mind, in their culture
that dog's more shocking to them
than it is to us, kinda like a woman
telling em what to do, you know,
it's a cultural thing, so you get
more bang for your buck over there
- with the dog. - And then to be re-shackled
completely naked, and to do what they call
the body search, the cavity search
and then to be questioned naked, shivering.
After they're read their rules
and everything, they're taken to their cell
to where they're gonna be put in
sleep depravation for 24 hours, that's standard
for everybody, then from their MI direct us
that they can go to general population
or they have to stay in isolation
or if they are gonna stay in isolation
if they're gonna be allowed to sleep
and if they can, then when.
To weaken the defenses
of detainees, interrogators ordered
military police to find ways of keeping
- the prisoners awake. - You know, you're in that
room not saying anything, oh well you know
maybe he knows a little bit more
let's let him lose a little bit more sleep.
Which is the idea of keeping him like this
so he won't sleep, you'll stand, cause as soon
as you start to let your body go
all that pressure on your wrists
and your arms, you're gonna feel that with those cuffs on.
The only time the MPs would ever help us
do anything would be to keep them
on a sleep schedule, you know, they're guaranteed
so much sleep, is that sleep consistent?
Is it uninterrupted?
You know, there's fifteen minutes here
fifteen minutes there, who knows.
That's how it was proposed to us.
There'd be a board when you walk
in the room on this wall, you might see
an arrow going up to the ceiling
and it would be maybe a one by it
so that'd be an hour up, he's gotta stand up
for one hour, and then you may see a two
with an arrow pointing down, that means
he can sit down for two hours.
The prisoners were kept in these big pens
downstairs and their numbers would be
scribbled on the door of the airlock
which was the little passageway
that they were taken out of when
they were brought up to the isolation cells upstairs.
Detainees were actually chained
with their hands above their heads
in these airlocks, his number 421
was something that I could see often
because his back was towards me
in the airlock and the numbers
were written on the backs of the detainees
in black marker and we all had that
as well as on the front.
What was your number?
My number in Bagram was 180 but later it became 558.
Thank you, it's great to be with ya
it's good to be here in Bagram of course.
I'm sure, any high ranking officer
who toured would see the shackles.
Because you're gonna tour to look.
You know, they're curious just like
everybody else is.
There are always officers coming
and going through the facility.
We kinda joked about it as being
the greatest show on Earth, everyone
wanted to come and look at the terrorists.
Mr. Rumsfeld's office called our office
frequently, very high commanders
would wanna be kept up to date
on a daily basis on certain prisoners there.
The Brass knew, they saw em shackled
they saw em hooded and they said right on
y'all are doing a great job.
When the Red Cross toured Bagram
the sleep deprivation chart was erased
and the prisoners were unshackled.
Traditional military procedure
did not allow you to shackle somebody
to a fixed object, certainly not
chaining their arms overhead.
Initially they were handcuffing people
into the airlock of the cells for punishment
and that was to be strictly limited
15 minutes, half an hour, but it quickly evolved
and when you walked in there, they just had
a pair of long handcuffs dangling
from the wire mesh ceiling of the cell
ready for whoever came in.
The Army coroner who examined Dilawar
discovered massive tissue damage in his legs.
She later testified that his legs had been pulpified.
But what could have caused that kind of damage?
This is not a hotel, this is a not
a place for them to get fat, and lazy and happy.
In a video tape that surfaced
as part of the homicide investigation,
Colonel David Hayden, a top Army lawyer
for US forces in Afghanistan described
a Policy of shackling and striking detainees.
There was an approved technique for the MPs
when somebody was a difficult prisoner
that you could hit em on the legs, it was
supposedly not considered not a lethal blow.
I didn't actually hear a higher up say
go and kick em in the leg, if they do this
or do that, the higher ups said,
if, you know, in order to get control of em
that's an option what you can use.
It's just your knee going into the side
of their thigh, bout midway up
supposed to be a pressure point right there
and it controls em really easy.
Over two ays, everybody's hitting you
in the legs, it can cause some severe problems.
Throughout the investigation and even
in the trials, a lot of the guards
and interrogators described Dilawar
as a very combative detainee, as a tough character
and that's just never been reconciled
with all the other evidence that
there was about this guy who weighed
122 pounds when he died.
The men who had been passengers
in Dilawar's taxi told us later
that he had just been absolutely terrified
at Bagram, that they heard him
through the walls of the isolation cells
screaming for his mother and father.
He'd been in a very
uncomfortable position muttering things
sometimes praying, sometimes asking for help
or seemingly asking for help,
because I couldn't understand his language.
A number of witnesses
remember the night before Dilawar died.
Just that one night, he got kicked
in the leg maybe like 10 times.
Some of the soldiers said they started
using the knee strikes essentially
to shut em up because he was yelling
- and screaming. - The damage that was done
was done from multiple strikes and a lot
of that could have been avoided
had you known the person before you
had fought with them and used that exact technique.
When they eventually came to take him
to an isolation cell, I believe
his body had become almost limp.
One of the reasons why they began punching him
was that they felt he was putting it on.
He was in the airlock, standing there
with a hood over his head, he had
his hands tied above his head and he was moaning.
He just started to fight, right there
in the airlock and the airlock has
a front gate and a back gate but both
the sides are concertina wire, neither
of us officers wanted to get in
to the concertina wire, so we pulled him out
of the airlock and put him on the floor
and put him into restraints.
What kind of force
did you have to use in order to subdue him?
Physical force, he was struck.
There's like four MPs on this guy
and one of the MPs just kept giving him
kidney shots, the other two, they'd slammed
him to the ground and then the fourth one
jumped on his back, he got a big gash on his nose.
There was no reason to hit him,
let's remember he's shackled.
Even when the control was an issue,
it became well I'm just gonna do this
to get mine in, and that's probably
why they got in trouble, because you really
couldn't justify kicking the guy
that much if he was just chained up.
Dilawar was taken to
an isolation cell, where the knee strikes continued.
In her statement at trial, the Army coroner
said his lower limbs looked like
they had been run over by a bus.
Had he lived, it would have been
necessary to amputate his legs.
Then it kinda raised the question of
this is what we did to him, it's not
just this is what I did to him
or this is what Cammack did to him
or Morden or anybody, it just this is
what we've done.
It's almost hard to fathom now,
you had soldiers like Willie Brand
who seems like this very gentle
kind of soft spoken guy, but who testified
that he struck Dilawar so many times
in the leg that his knee got tired
and he had to switch to the other one.
Sometimes I feel that I should have gone with
my own morality more then what was common.
One MP testified that
the strikes became an amusement,
inflicted on Dilawar just to hear
- him scream Allah. - Some would say well hey
you should have stopped this, you should
have stopped that, when you saw he was
injured or saw he was being kicked on his knees,
why didn't you do something?
That'd be a good question, my answer
would be well, it was us against them
I was over there, I didn't wanna appear
to be going against my fellow soldiers.
Which is that wrong, you could sit here
and say that was dead wrong,
go over there and say that.
No one ever investigated
who set the rules at Bagram.
Investigators never asked Captain Wood
what senior officers had given orders
to treat detainees in ways that were
forbidden according to the Army Field Manual.
MP Captain Beiring was the only
officer prosecuted in the case.
His dereliction of duty charge was dismissed
when the judge determined that no one
had made clear what Captain Beiring's duty was.
In spite of repeated requests for proper training
rules of engagement for his soldiers
his superiors gave him neither.
We were all worried about not having
that written guidelines, by they kept
reassuring us that it was coming.
We knew exactly why we weren't getting
clear guidance, just in case something
like this happened.
If I had to do it again, I'd probably say no
I just, I'd be like I'm not doing anything
until I see something in writing.
And do you think,
looking back, do you think you were misled?
I think we all were.
A week after September 11th
Vice President Dick Cheney appeared
on Meet the Press to describe how
interrogation policies were about to change.
I have to work the dark side, if you will
spend time in the shadows, in the
intelligence world, a lot of what
needs to be done here will have to be done
quietly without any discussion,
using sources and methods that
are available to our intelligence agencies
if we're gonna be successful, that's the world
these folks operate in and so it's gonna
be vital for us to use any means at our disposal,
basically, to achieve our objective.
It's very clear that it starts
in the office of Vice President Cheney
he had a very strong view that we were not
as aggressive in dealing with people
in interrogations as we could or should be.
Taking the gloves off, being rough with detainees.
If Dick Cheney was
the primary architect of a new policy,
John Yoo was the chief draftsman.
He wrote guiding opinions which argued
for a flexibly approach to treating suspected terrorists.
United States used to treat terrorism
as a criminal justice problem.
The September 11th attacks showed that
the struggle with Al-Qaeda had moved
into warfare, I think when a sworn enemy
for political purposes can kill
three thousand Americans, cause billions
of dollars of damage and try to eliminate
the leaders of the American Government
that sounds like war to most people,
it doesn't sound like crime.
President Bush declared
a war on terror, but he raised questions
about whether suspected terrorists
should be protected by the laws of war.
The Geneva Conventions.
Atrocities that shocked the conscience
of the world gave rise to the modern
Geneva Conventions, international treaties
meant to provide fundamental protections
for every human being captured in war time.
In effect for over 50 years, Geneva offered
legal protections and prohibited interrogators
from using torture, murder, or even
humiliating and degrading treatment.
After 9/11, John Yoo worked closely
with Dick Cheney's office and Alberto Gonzales
the Counsel to the President.
They wrote a series of memos arguing
that the Geneva Conventions did not apply
to suspected terrorists and they gave
legal cover for the CIA and Special Forces
to embark on a secret program
of previously forbidden interrogation techniques.
More than 3000 suspected terrorists
have been arrested in many countries
many others have met a different fate
let's put it this way, they're no longer
a problem to the United States
and our friends and allies.
The problem for the President,
Gonzalez warned, was that some
of the new interrogation techniques
were banned under US and international law.
One of the points that he makes
is that we don't want the Geneva Conventions
to apply because if they do, these things
- can be war crimes. - What's well known is
the principle of command responsibility.
This was established in the Nuremberg trials
after World War II and it established
the principle of international criminal law
that individuals who order illegal treatment
will be held accountable for the illegal
treatment even if they're not immediately
applying the kind of abusive treatment.
To be certain that Americans
interrogating prisoners would not
be accused of torture, John Yoo co-authored
a memo that would clarify the meaning of the term.
The only prohibited acts would be
extreme acts which are equivalent
to serious physical injury, such as organ failure
impairment of bodily functions or even death.
That's an illegal memo, that's the so-called torture memo.
That was an arguable interpretation
of the law, I'm sure we had discussions about it
and ultimately it was accepted,
because it represent, that was the ultimate
decision and position of the Office of Legal Counsel.
The Office of Legal Counsel memorandum
was unbounded, meaning nowhere did it state
that the application of cruel and inhuman
and degrading treatment was prohibited
and at one point, I asked John Yoo
can the President authorize torture
and his response was yes.
I think the lawyers job is to tell
people what laws do or do not apply
so that they know what space they have
to make the policy decision.
If the President deems that
he's got to torture somebody, including
by crushing the testicles of the person's child,
there is no law that can stop that?
That's what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
I think it depends on why the President
thinks he needs to do that.
Military lawyers were outraged
by the implications of John Yoo's memo.
My first involvement in this came
when I was visited by a group of senior
JAG officers, more than a year before
the first story about the Abu Ghraib broke
who were very troubled about what was going on
and the focus of their concern
was failing in the responsibilities
that the military leadership had,
to soldiers in the field, that was the
responsibility to provide fair,
clear guidance to them as to how
to behave in these difficult circumstances
and what they saw was an intentional
decision taken at the height of the Pentagon
to put out a fog of ambiguity coupled with
great pressure to bring results
to be prepared to be violent with the detainees
but you know, this violence with the detainees
is a criminal act.
They may be Al-Qaeda, they may be Taliban
they may be the worst people in the world
and I'm sure that some of them are
but there are certain basic rules
and international agreements that the United states
has agreed to, that we will observe
you go ahead and please respond,
- you wanted to. - Very quickly, let me clarify
the President's policy, "as a matter of policy
"the United States Armed Forces
"shall continue to treat detainees humanely
"and to the extent appropriate and consistent
"with military necessity in a manner
"consistent with the principles of Geneva."
That is a legalistic statement and one
that is written with loopholes
and it's clear to me, the interrogators
did not understand that quote "humane treatment"
might be in the eye of the beholder.
In the field in Afghanistan,
there was a great deal of confusion
about exactly what the rules were.
They told us when dealing with the PUCs
as they called them, the persons under US custody
they don't fall under Geneva Conventions,
basically, the only thing that we weren't allowed
to do is beat em up.
Person under control,
person under custody, something like that,
you know, they call them anything
to dehumanize em, so that you don't
look at them as people.
I don't remember hearing anything
about Geneva Convention, 'course I'm familiar
with it, but they didn't go over that
in any kind of detail.
I didn't know what the Field Manual
for interrogation, I didn't know
the proper nomenclature for it, I'd seen it,
there was a copy of it lying around
I'm sure somewhere, and if I had chosen to,
I could have picked it up and read it
but I was working 16 hour days
to sit down and read a field manual
was not top of my priorities over there.
It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty
business out there and we have to operate
in that arena, I'm convinced we can do it
we can do it successfully but we need
to make certain that we have not
tied the hands, if you will, of our
intelligence communities in terms of
accomplishing their mission.
These terrorists play by a whole
set of different rules, it's gonna force us
in your words, to get mean, dirty and nasty
- in order to take em on? - Right.
Guided by a legal opinion
from John Yoo, the Bush Administration
began shipping some high-value detainees
to the US Naval Base, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Initially I thought good, safe place.
Put them there, barbed wire all over.
Then it became apparent that the reason
we were doing it was because we were
going to argue that there's no law.
A Cuban law didn't apply, US law didn't apply
well that was a big step down the slippery slope.
I think what the policy makers
were trying to do was to try to find a place
that was physically as close to
the unIted States so it could be well protected
but still would benefit from the rule
that the United states military,
is one who has ultimate say and control
over enemy prisoners who are held outside the country.
One by one, the terrorists are learning
the meaning of American justice.
In December 2001, a man named
Mohammed al-Qahtani was swept up
in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo.
After eight months in detention
the Army discovered that he may
have trained to be the 20th hijacker.
Suddenly, Qahtani became the most
important detainee in Guantanamo.
Here we had a man who was supposed
to have been on that plane that was flown
into the Pennsylvania countryside
so I think there was a sense of urgency
to find out what this guy knew in order
to be able to prevent any future attacks.
He successfully resisted standard
interrogation techniques at Guantanamo
for eight months and he is the genesis
for the request by the joint task force
at Guantanamo for more techniques
that might be able to get past his resistance training.
In September 2002,
John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez traveled
to Guantanamo, soon after their visit,
and just before Dilawar's arrival at Bagram,
Donald Rumsfeld personally approved
a new menu of psychological interrogation
techniques for use on Mohammed al-Qahtani.
Exactly how the techniques would be applied
was often left to the imagination
of the interrogators.
His interrogations are well-documented
in a log and from November 2002 in to
early January 2003, he was subjected to this regime.
It involved very severe sleep deprivation.
He was only permitted to sleep
four hours a day from seven o'clock in the morning
till 11 o'clock in the morning,
and that lasted for 50 days with one exception.
He was held in severe isolation and sensory deprivation.
There are a number of instances
in the log where you'll see the phrase
invasion of space by a female,
and that was actually an interrogation
tactic designed to break his faith.
An interrogator approached detainee
from behind, rubbed his back, whispered
in his ear and ran fingers through his hair
that was authorized under the futility technique.
He was subjected to what I would call
sexual assault by female interrogators.
He was forced to wear women's lingerie
multiple allegations of homosexuality
and that his comrades were aware of that
he was forced to dance with a male interrogator
subject to strip searches for control measures
not for security, and he was forced
to perform dog tricks.
All this to lower his personal sense of worth.
They tried to categorize it as individual
interrogators pushing the envelope
or starting to get quote creative.
# God bless America
# Land that I love
The combination of his lack of food intake
and forcible hydration led him at one point
to actually, his heart slowed down
to 35 beats per minute and he was rushed
to the hospital to be revived.
Mohammed al-Qahtani in many ways
that single interrogation, protected interrogation
contains within it, if you will,
the entire genealogy, the entire history
of CIA torture over the last 50 years.
The CIA launched a mind control project,
a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind
in the 1950s, in house, the CIA worked on
exotic techniques, hypnosis, and then
they worked on sodium penothal
then they worked on electro shock
and ultimately, they discovered LSD.
All of that drug stuff, in house, went nowhere
except to lawsuits, but what did work
was the CIA outsourced all of the dull
behavioral research to the most brilliant
behavioral scientists at the top
universities in the United States and Canada.
At McGill, experiments
by famed psychologist Donald O. Hebb
caught the eye of CIA researchers.
Doctor Hebb found that he could
induce a state akin to a acute psychosis
in 48 hours, all he did was he had
student volunteers sit in a very pleasant
air-conditioned cubicle with goggles,
gloves and ear muffs, actually, you know
what they looked just like?
The Guantanamo detainees, if you see
those outfits that the Guantanamo detainees
have where they have the gloves,
and the googles and the earmuffs?
Not everything's all about security,
no, no, no, that's sensory breakdown.
Within a day, there would be hallucinations
within two days, breakdown.
I began to think while we were doing
our experiments, it's possible that something
that involves physical discomfort or even pain
might be more tolerable than simply
the deprivation conditions that we studied.
The CIA was fascinated by this,
they jumped on it immediately.
I had no idea what a potentially vicious
weapon this could be.
They identified two key techniques.
They identified sensory disorientation
and they identified self-inflicted pain,
standing for days at a time while fluid
flowed to the legs and they put them together
in the Kubark Counterintelligence
Interrogation manual
and they propagated around the world
and through the US intelligence community.
Think about what al-Qahtani was subjected to, okay?
First of all, he's in dark, he's in light
he's in cold, he's in heat, what they're doing
is they're attacking his universal
sensory receptors, they're also scrambling
his time, so that's phase one.
In Guantanamo under the regime of General Miller
he turned Guantanamo into a veritable
behavioral scientific laboratory
and Donald Rumsfeld gave orders
for techniques beyond the field manual
and they percolated and they percolated
in ambiguous way that allowed people to
do what they thought needed to be done.
And they explored our male sensitivity
to gender and sexual identity, so that's the thing
about being homosexual, the underwear
on the head, all that sort of stuff.
People were saying Arabs really
are very sensitive to sexual humiliation
well, who the hell isn't sensitive
to sexual humiliation, nobody wants
to be stripped down naked and forced
to masturbate with a hood over your head.
It's ridiculous.
Then they created behavioral science
consultation teams where they had
military psychologists integrated
into the ongoing interrogation
to discover individual fears and phobias
and all of that was visited on al-Qahtani.
You are aware of communications
between General Miller and Secretary Rumsfeld
specifically about this one prisoner?
To our knowledge, there was considerable
manner of communication up and down the chain.
As you know from General Schmidt's report
he concluded that these techniques
individually did not constitute torture
but he said that the sum of these techniques.
The cumulative effects of simultaneous
applications of numerous authorized
techniques had abusive and degrading
impact on the detainee.
And he recommended that General Miller be disciplined.
But he said it did not constitute torture.
We made a distinction between
what torture and inhuman treatment
would be given the general guidelines
and then what might be abusive and degrading
something might be degrading but not
necessarily torture and it may not
be inhumane, it may be humiliating
but it may not be torture, no torture
no physical pain, injury, there was a safe
secure environment the entire time.
And that, of course, is the genius
of the CIA's psychological paradigm.
Psychological torture is all a matter
of definitions and then it's a very slippery indeed.
That sounds remarkably similar
to what occurred at Abu Ghraib,
people being led around in chains
people being forced to wear lingerie,
perhaps a coincidence, perhaps not.
If you look at those Abu Ghraib photographs
again, it's always the same techniques.
First of all, there's the sexual activity
with the women's garments and the masturbation
and all the rest, that's the cultural sensitivity.
They're short shackled, they're long-shackled
they're shackled upside down.
These are stress positions.
The most famous of all Abu Ghraib photographs
of course of that hooded Iraqi standing
on a box arms outstretched, he's told
that if he steps off the box, if he moves,
he'll be electrocuted, that's the point
of the fake electrical wires, so it's the absolute
immobility for protract appearance
and then with arms extended, as we'd say
to viewers, don't they this at home
but do try it, just stand for 10 minutes
with your arms stretched out, not moving.
Carolyn Wood was an example
of the way new techniques spread and mutated
like a virus, long before Wood took charge
of interrogation at Abu Ghraib, her unit
was involved with harsh techniques at Bagram
including stress positions, forced standing,
and sleep deprivation.
One of the memorandums shows that in early
December 2002, the interrogators
at Bagram just looked on the internet
they're in touch with the guys
at Guantanamo and they leaned
that these guys at Guantanamo had gotten
new techniques from the Secretary of Defense
and they just started using them,
even though the techniques had clearly
been approved exclusively for use at Guantanamo.
When General Miller himself traveled
from Guantanamo to Iraq in August 2003,
he brought with him a CD and a manual
on the advanced techniques they developed
at Guantanamo and he gave them
to General Sanchez's command.
So there are these multiple paths that you
can trace whereby these interrogation techniques
go through this global migration
through Afghanistan to Iraq from Guantanamo
directly to Iraq and that result is Abu Ghraib.
Well before the abuses at Abu Ghraib
became public, Government officials
had been quietly raising concerns
about harsh techniques in use at Guantanamo.
There were emails back to the Department
of Justice from FBI personnel down
at Guantanamo, saying you won't believe
what's going on down here, we've gotta
disassociate ourselves as FBI people
from what is going on here in Guantanamo.
This email says, "The DOD has their marching
"orders from the Secretary of Defense."
Marching orders from the Secretary of Defense.
"To engage in practices which the FBI
"finds to be deeply offensive and dangerous."
But the emails are what is called redacted
which means that there's big holes
in these emails, now some of the emails
are totally redacted, so we don't know
what they say at all, that's an example
a lot of the documents that we got here.
You know, you can't see anything on these documents.
One after another of where there's nothing.
In early December 2002, I had heard
that there was detainee abuse going on.
I called the Army General Counsel and asked
him whether he had any information,
I said I'm receiving reports that some detainees
are being abused in Guantanamo,
do you know anything about this?
And his response back was I know a lot
about it, come on down to my office.
They pushed a stack of documents
across the desk, top document was a memorandum
from the General Counsel to Department
of Defense to Secretary Rumsfeld
and it was that cover memo that requested
the authorization for the application
of certain interrogation techniques
and the top memo gave Secretary Rumsfeld's
approval for the application of
some of those techniques.
It's the memo with Secretary Rumsfeld's
handwritten notations on the bottom
that he stands 8-10 hours a day,
how come these detainees are only
required to stand up to four hours a day.
I was astounded, but my first reaction was
that this was a mistake, somebody just
didn't read the documents carefully enough.
I think people in the Pentagon thought of
Alberto Mora as a loyal Republican
political appointee, he would never
have been considered a rabble rouser
or a liberal, he said he expected
that he would raise these issues
and people in positions of authority
would say oh, thanks for letting us know
and that would be the end of it.
I wanted to ask you about a memo
that was written by Alberto Mora.
Do you recall in this memo that you wrote
a little notation at the bottom about
standing more than four hours.
- I do. - Because you stand at your
- desk. - I do.
This attorney argued that that could be
interpreted as some by a wink and a nod
that it would be okay to go beyond the
techniques that were prescribed in the memo.
No, no no, it did, there's no wink and a nod
about anything, there was one provision
in there that they would have people stand
for several hours and it was a semi-humorous
remark that a person in his seventies
stands all day long, I just mused that
and maybe it shouldn't have gone out
but it did and I wrote it, and life goes on.
But his point was that you should
have gotten much better advice from
- your legal staff. - I heard your question
- the first time. - What was of concern to me
was the techniques either individual
or in combination could rise to the level or torture.
Okay, you're permitting certain interrogation
techniques but certainly there must be
some limit which is set upon the severity
of the techniques, light deprivation could mean
placing the detainee in a dark room
for 15 minutes or it could mean a month
or two months or three months until he goes blind.
Detainee specific phobia techniques.
The snakes, the bats, the rats, lock somebody
up in a coffin, you're limited only
by your imagination, any one of these techniques
individually could yield the results of torture
certainly in combination, you could
reach that fairly quickly.
See, if you put a person into this procedure
and keep em there for more than the six
or eight days that I would think might be
the maximum tolerability, then the price
- is pretty high. - The price is someone's
- sanity. - Presumably it could be.
The medical literature had a phenomenon
known as force drift that made it
almost inevitable that the interrogators
would continue applying greater and greater
increments of force to achieve their desired results.
For example, take Secretary Rumsfeld's memo
then to say that well look, he said
that dogs have to be mizzled, well that's a man
who doesn't understand the military on the ground
because when that E-6 is sitting there
with that muzzled dog and there's absolutely
no impact on that person being interrogated
he's gonna take that muzzle off.
That's reality, that's human nature.
Alberto Mora threatened
to go on record with his concerns
unless the techniques were rescinded.
When after the fact it turns out
that there's concern about it that
concerns me then I'm happy to rescind it
and take another fresh look at it
and talk to more people about it
and see what ought to be done.
To his credit, Secretary Rumsfeld
did rescind the interrogation techniques
and then for over a year and a half
I heard no reports from any quarter
about detainee abuse anywhere.
When Abu Ghraib hit, my first thought was
have I been circumvented, have their been
authorizations for the abuse of prisoners
that I had not learned about?
Had the orders really been rescinded?
According to interrogators, the use
of shackling, dogs, stress positions
and sensory assault continued to be widespread.
Tony Lagouranis was an interrogator
who arrived in Iraq after the military
became aware of the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
Among the interrogation guidelines
they gave us it said that dogs are authorized
to be used on detainees, you know,
stress positions, sleep deprivation,
all of those things that I did that
I would consider harsh techniques
were violating the Geneva Conventions
I was told to do, we were told to do that
to these people by our superiors.
The spine of the United States Armed Forces
is the chain of command, what starts
at the top of the chain of command
drops like a rock down the chain of command
and that's why Lynndie England knew
what Donald Rumsfeld was thinking
without actually talking to Donald Rumsfeld.
In the wake of Abu Ghraib,
journalists began to look harder
at previous cases of abuse to try
to understand what had caused them
and who was responsible.
People like Tim Golden at the New York Times
got a hold of it and started looking
at the case of Dilawar in particular,
the taxi driver, it became at least
plausible to me that this man
wasn't even guilty of anything
other than being there when the sweep occurred
and here was a guy who was murdered in detention.
Pay tribute to those whose lives
were taken and those who daily give
unselfishly of themselves.
Four years ago, our nation came under attack.
9/11 was very much in the air and I think
the officers tried to keep it in the air
they tried to remind these kids
that these people are our enemies.
But it's hard to see how these young soldiers
could have been expected to figure out
who the real enemies were among a bunch
of militia men and farmers in a society
that was completely foreign to them.
If I remember correctly, his story
had something to do with the rocket attack
on a military base and he was supposed
to be the driver of the getaway car.
He had taken his new car, which he
was obviously excited about and driven
to Khost, the provincial capital where
he went to look for taxi passengers
and he in fact found these three men
in Khost at the market place who were headed
- back to Yakubi. - Yakubi, Yakubi!
You have to imagine that Dilawar
was driving home from this provincial capital
which was about as far as his world stretched
he is stopped at Fire Base Salerno
by a group of Afghan militia men
and the men apparently found an
electric stabilizer in the trunk
of the car, at least they claimed to.
Camp Salerno had been rocketed
from some distance earlier in the day
and the Afghan militia men immediately
arrested the four guys on suspicion
of having had some involvement in that attack.
He's taken to Bagram, this great distance away.
You get a bunch of guys who are back
at this detention site and they're told
we have evidence that they have been
involved in a rocket attack on American forces
so I think that kinda tripped a wire in them.
You're in this atmosphere, you're with
nothing but military people and you feel
sort of morally isolated and you lose
your moral bearings and you're frustrated
because you're not getting intelligence
from a prisoner that you believe is guilty
and has intelligence to give you
and so of course you wanna start
pushing the limits and you wanna see
how far you can go.
A lot of the pressure came from the fact that
we had a few high value detainees
that gave a lot of good information and
when we started to lose those detainees
due to going to Guantanamo Bay,
that they expected this to come from everybody.
We would interrogate some of these guys
just to interrogate em and it was ridiculous
I meant you'd get some of these guys in
and you're like this is the wrong man
this is not who we're supposed to have
especially being a screener, you could tell
from the moment you got em in, you're like
we're not supposed to have em.
We had one prisoner came in, he was mentally
challenged and Sergeant Loring kept saying
that you know, this is a cover,
this is Al-Qaeda's cover, it's what they do
and I went in there and talked to him and
basically they had this guy in a diaper
he ate his own feces but Loring
kept saying it was an act.
They'd be like hey, we want you
go yell at this guy, so I'd grab
my box of Frosted Flakes that I was
eating for breakfast that morning<,
I'd go into the room and I'd be like
all right, I have to yell at you today
so I'd be like, dyhoginated salt substitute
and just start yelling that at him
and they'd look at me all crazy
and I'd be like yeah, it's your fault
they put that in my cereal now.
Or I'd yell at him if Elvis was really
the King of Rock or if he was dead
or stuff like that and I'd write that
in my interrogation summaries and I'd send
that up to higher that that's what I did
for that two hours.
you really can't get a feel for a person
till after you talk to em a couple of times.
So on the first three times I talked
to him it was just verifying his story
looking for loops, looking for holes.
After the third time I talked to him
and his story was still consistent
I kept telling em I thought he was innocent.
And they wanted these people
to be guilty because that would
look better for their unit.
They could say that we arrested
60 people this month and they were all terrorists.
When was the last time you saw Osama Bin Laden
when was the last time you saw Mullah Omar
now this was a standard question
that was asked of every detainee.
It's very hard to go into an interrogation
with very little evidence and we almost never
had evidence on these guys, end elicit
a confession, you can go in and get intelligence
but if you're asking this guy to completely
incriminate himself, it's very difficult
so you have to start using harsher
and harsher techniques in order
to elicit that confession.
I was yelled at for being too nice to him
by Sergeant Loring, that i needed
to put more pressure on him, or as he liked
to say, I need to take him out of his comfort zone.
After a while, particularly in the fourth
and fifth interrogations, as the sleep deprivation
that he was being subjected to really started
to knock him out, the interrogations got more intense.
Sergeant Salcedo who was an inexperienced
interrogator but a can-do soldier
had this man who refused to look at her
because she was a woman, she said she got
very frustrated by this and grabbed him
by the sides of face and turned him
to face her and look at her and take her
seriously but of course, he was a Afghan man
from a tribal, conservative culture
who didn't look at strange women.
Sergeant Salcedo's getting a little aggravated
so I kinda stepped between em
and that's when I grabbed him by the shirt
and I brought him over to the wall.
They tried to make him stand up
against the wall and he was sliding down
they pushed him back against the wall.
He wasn't making any kinda sounds
most of it seemed to just be rambling.
The interpreter was telling me that
his wife came to visit him in his cell
which of course didn't happen.
If you've ever seen anybody
sleep depped, past two days they begin
to just be bumbling idiots.
Three days they're just worthless.
I knew something was wrong.
The next thing I heard was that he'd died.
Not long after Dilawar was killed
we learned that the Afghan guerrilla commander
who's men had arrested Dilawar and the others
had in fact been detained by the Americans himself
and it turned out that he was rocketing
their base and then picking up
innocent Afghans and turning them over
to the Americans, essentially to try
to ingratiate himself with the US Forces.
The three passengers were sent to Guantanamo
and they didn't get out until March of 2004
which was 15 months after they had been captured
riding in the taxi.
It's hard to know what reason the Americans
would have had to send these guys on
when they had quite clearly concluded
that Dilawar at least was an innocent man
when he was killed.
It certainly makes you wonder about
whether they just sent these guys on to cover their butts.
These are not mere innocents
these are among the worst of the worst.
These are among the most dangerous
best trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth.
They're terrorists, they're bomb makers
their facilitators of terror, they're members
of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban.
And if they were free, they would
engage in murder once again.
The only thing I know for certain
is that these are bad people.
Despite Rumsfeld and Cheney's
and President BUsh's allegations that
these guys are the worst of the worst
that they were all captured on the battlefield
recent studies of the whole compendium
of Government's documents show that only 5%
of these people were picked up by the United States.
- Here search him. - Only 8% of them
are accused of being members of the Al-Qaeda.
Over 90% of them were picked up
by Northenalized or Pakistani forces
in exchange for bounties.
We have large rewards out.
We have leaflets that are dropping like snowflakes
- in December in Chicago. - Mr. Secretary,
- not a question. - An analysis of de-classified
government documents reveal that only
7% of Guantanamo detainees were captured
by US and Coalition forces.
The other 93% like Dilawar and his passengers
were turned over by Afghan warlords
and Pakistanis, sometimes for cash payments
of thousands of dollars.
The military's not interested
in spending whatever it is, $40,000 a year
detaining people who are not members
of Al-Qaeda in Guantanamo Bay, it has as much interest
as everyone else does in making sure
the people who are detained are actually
members of Al-Qaeda rather than wasting
resources and time detaining innocent people.
I think it's natural in times of war
to pick up people, you wanna pick up
anyone you suspect of being dangerous.
What's different here is the Government
for the first time in our history
didn't follow its own regulations
which require that a hearing be held
promptly after capture if there's any doubt.
In the war in Afghanistan back in 2001
the US military was prepared to follow
the Geneva Conventions and conduct
those tribunals, unfortunately
the civilian leadership within the
Department of Defense told them to stop.
Once somebody in Afghanistan might have
said okay this person's a high value target
for whatever reason, whether it was based
on some other Afghani who hated
that person and wanted him out
so he could take over his opium crop
then that began the road to Gitmo
and there was no way for that person
to challenge it and there still hasn't been.
Moazzam Begg, a British subject
suspected of ties to Al-Qaeda operatives
was picked up by local intelligence
agents in Pakistan.
I was in my house in Islamabad at the time
when I was abducted, a hood was placed
over my head, my hands and legs were shackled
and I was physically carried into
the back of the vehicle.
I didn't see my family again after that point.
I was sent to Kandahar and then to Bagram
and when I was put onto the transport plane
to Guantanamo, I had already been covered
almost from head to toe in some sort
of a covering, face mask, earmuffs,
blackened goggles and then just in case
I could see anything, a hood to cover it with.
Being seated on the aircraft was
excruciatingly painful, they'd already
used now the three-piece-suit and that is
the shackle that goes around the waist
and is padlocked at the back.
It was impossible to move and impossible
to breathe properly, impossible to hear anything
and so I managed to scream and pleaded
with one of the guards to give me
a needle to put me to sleep.
We fought for two and a half years
for just the right to go see the prisoners
and then fought for months year to get
security clearance so the military
would let you in there, I mean this is bizarre
it never occurred to me that when I went
to law school in America that we'd be
sitting around talking about whether
we could have access to our clients
and whether our clients had been tortured.
Habeas corpus is really the essence
of the rule of law, not giving people
a basic hearing when you take away
their liberty is one of the reasons
we fought the Revolution, that the King
can't deprive somebody of liberty
without a hearing.
In 2004, two and a half years
after the first detainees had arrived
in Guantanamo, the Supreme Court
rejected the Bush Administration's claims
that it could hold detainees indefinitely
without allowing them to challenge
their detention in the courts.
After the decision, the military
installed special new tribunals
to judge whether detainees should remain
- in Guantanamo. - The Combatant Status
Review Tribunals, which the Government
hurriedly put in place, nine days
after we won before the Supreme Court, are a joke.
You have no rights, you have no right
to a lawyer, you have no meaningful right
to witnesses, you don't really know
what the charges are and you certainly
don't know what the secret evidence is against you.
They may not ever know it but that doesn't
that doesn't eliminate the opportunity
they have to make a case for why
if they were returned in the future
why they would not continue to pose a threat.
My clients are found not guilty
at the CSRT tribunals and then
the military thinks that doesn't sound
so good, they were being called
Not Enemy Combatants, NEC, but now
they're NLEC, which means no longer
enemy combatant because we want
to say that they were guilty to begin with
but now they've had a change of heart
so they're not guilty anymore, but we
were right in the first place.
These men aren't necessarily innocent men
that's not an accurate characterization.
You are more accurate in their long title,
no longer identified as an enemy combatant.
They are being held separate from
the remainder of the detainees until
the United States Government can find
a country they can be returned to.
Some of these guys were policed off
the battlefield and if they weren't here
they would probably be on the battlefield
killing American soldiers.
They're here for a reason and it's our job
to ensure that they stay here until
such time as it's deemed they don't need
to be here any longer.
Guantanamo is hiding the fact that
the really bad dudes, Mullah Omar
and of course, Osama Bin Laden
have never been captured, so you have
Guantanamo Bay as here are 750 really evil guys
as a PR stunt effectively to say
look, we're really achieving something
in the war on terror.
# Come along with me
# To my little corner of the world #
- # Dream - And that is the main
entrance to Camp X-Ray.
It would be extremely difficult
for anybody to make an escape out of here.
- # You'll soon forget - Each one is eight by eight
by eight, one individual per cell.
If you member the individual in orange jump suits
there's three or four kneeling facing that way
and three or four kneeling, facing that way
if you take a shot from right here
you're gonna have the same image.
And no detainee has ever died at Gitmo
from anything, and I think the docs'll
give you an update we performed
well over 100 surgeries, so one good thing
for them being here is they are quite healthy
and they're getting everything fixed
they need to get fixed.
# I always knew that I'd find someone like you #
We've introduced some new sports-type
activities here in Camp Four, we recently
built this half basketball court
and off to the left of that, you will see
a soccer court, it is a privilege
to live in Camp Four, they are compliant
with the camp rules in order to live here.
And we have introduced things like cake
on Wednesday nights, Pepsi on Monday nights
ice cream on Sunday nights.
Let's go in and take a look at the Bay.
On the bed they have the so-called CIs
or comfort items which include toothbrush
but also include a game of Checkers
and I did ask them who's my client
meant to play Checkers with, he's in
solitary confinement by himself.
- # And with. - What is the problem
with the press photographing them,
talking with them, observing them?
Desire to not provide a platform
to have the men we're holding espouse
a vile, Islamic rhetoric, a violent,
vile, Islamic rhetoric. # Find someone like you
# So we'll go to our little corner of the world #
This is a tactic of Al-Qaeda.
Hunger strike to elicit media attention
and to bring pressure on the United States Government.
When these numbers went up significantly,
you guys start talking about it,
you guys start asking about it, so
they understand that.
Camp Five is a 100 bed maximum security
segregation and interrogation facility.
If they're held in Camp Five,
an average day is always the same.
Which is, you're held 24 hours
in solitary confinement.
Here in the cell, was eight foot
by six foot and I couldn't physically
take three steps in any direction.
I certainly believed that I was going to
spend the greater part of my life
and perhaps even face execution,
which was what I was told quite often.
What's particularly pernicious in Guantanamo Bay
is there is no sense of when it's gonna end
or if it's gonna end and the reason
that prisoners go on a hunger strike
for example and may starve themselves
to death is in the words of Omar Deghayes
"I'm dying slowly here in Guantanamo
"as it is, so I may as well take
"my life into my own hands."
I have no intention of holding somebody here
any longer than he is a threat to our country
or that he has intelligence or information
that could be valuable to us in
the global war on terror.
We continue to collect information
of value from the men we're holding today.
One of the reasons why I was held
in isolation was to do with this issue
of witnessing these deaths in Bagram
and they asked me which soldiers
had been involved and were around at the time
so they brought in photographs of the people
from the unit and I pointed out
to who I believed was involved.
They asked me one of the strangest things
requests I've ever had during the time
I was in incarceration and that was
would I be willing to stand up as a witness
for the prosecution in a trial against
these soldiers and I thought how ironic this is
you know, is this the only court
that I'm going to get to see after
all these years in incarceration?
The cruel ironies
of the Dilawar story echoed in ongoing
debate in the halls of Congress
about detainee abuse, national security
and the rule of law.
For one Senator, John McCain, a former
prisoner of war, the matter of
detainee abuse was both political and personal.
I would just like to tell
my wife I'm going to get well
I love her, and I hope to see her soon
and I'd appreciate if if you tell her that.
That's all.
If this man, after six and a half
or seven years of torture says that it's not
efficient, it's inhumane, and it breeds
contempt for the United States,
he can stand up and be a moral voice
- on this issue. - We sent them to fight
for us in Afghanistan and Iraq,
we placed extraordinary pressure on them
to extract intelligence from detainees
but then we threw out the rules
that our soldiers had trained on
and replaced them with a confusing
and constantly changing array of standards
and when things went wrong, we blamed them
and we punished them.
I believe we have to do better than that.
I strongly urge you to do justice
to your men and women in uniform
give them clear standards of conduct
that reflect the ideals they risk their lives for.
On October 5th, 2005
as increasing numbers of detainee abuse cases
came to trial, Senator John McCain
proposed the Detainee Treatment Act.
The bill sought a total US ban on torture
as well as cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment
and it sparked a national debate,
one in which the devil was in the details.
Is it still permissible to use
a wet towel and dripping water
to induce the misperception of suffocation?
The use of the wet towel, dripping water
to induce misperceptions of suffocation
was one of the techniques requested
by the JTF in their laundry list
given up, it was never approved,
it has never been a technique approved.
One of the techniques that made
the transition from the regime of the physical
to the psychological, in fact the only one
really was waterboarding, because in
the medieval era under the Inquisition,
it was done because of its horrible
physical aspects, it was done to purge
and punish the heretic, you forced
water down the throat of the victim
the victim thinks that he's drowning,
it's horrible, your body tells you that you're dying.
Right after 9/11, the CIA
got approval from the White House for waterboarding.
An early test case involving
the interrogation of Ibn Shaikh al-Libi
A man suspected of being the Amir
of an Al-Qaeda training camp.
Initially, the FBI was in charge
of his interrogation but the Administration
was impatient with the slow results
of the FBIs law enforcement techniques
so they turned al-Libi over to the CIA.
He is secured, he was either duck taped
or hooded and he was gonna be put in
to a box, plywood box, for his own protection
for transfer to the airport.
They threw him on an aircraft
and they rendered him through extraordinary
rendition to Egypt.
They later subjected him to two weeks
of brutal torture involving all these techniques
including waterboarding and they got
information from al-Libi stating
that Saddam Hussain's regime had trained
Al-Qaeda in chemical and biological warfare.
One of the things we know about torture
is that someone who is tortured
will tell his interrogator what he thinks
the interrogator wants to hear.
The moment al-Libi was waterboarded
he started blurting things out,
well rather than questioning what
he was saying and going into it in detail
to see if what he was saying could be corroborated
they immediately stopped and ran off
to report what al-Libi had said
and ended the torture and bang,
it gets up to the highest decision makers
and all of a sudden Colin Powell is told
hey, you don't have to worry about
your doubts anymore because we've just gotten
confirmation that there were
contacts between Al-Qaeda and Baghdad.
In February 2003,
then Secretary of State Colin Powell
went before the United Nations
to make the case for the war in Iraq.
I can trace the story of a senior
terrorist operative telling how
Iraq provided training in these weapons
to Al Qaeda, fortunately, this operative
is now detained and he has told his story.
A year later, the CIA branded al-Libi
a fabricator, rescinded all the intelligence
reports with that information in it.
So in other words, you will get information
but you'll get false information.
I think Colin Powell has said
that was the most embarrassing day
of his entire life.
All the experts say that torturing people
is not the best way to get information.
Breaking down the barriers between
you and them gaining their confidence
is the best way to get it.
It takes some experience, it takes
some talent, it takes some patience
and then they might actually tell you
something that is worthwhile and then
if you wanna prosecute them and execute em, go ahead.
You wanna be able to build a rapport
with somebody, you are their salvation
because their life as they know it is over.
Is there something I can do for your kids?
You concerned about them?
You want them educated, I'll get them educated.
What do you want, tell me what you want,
script for me your exit strategy
how do you extricate yourself from this
terrible situation, by the way, that you
put yourself in, now you can't go back home.
Can you, no, so let's make peace with that.
Let me help you find the strategy
to give you a life, and that's the way it worked.
The amount of information that they
were able to provide us pre-9/11
to me, it was extremely valuable.
Who else was gonna tell us about how
you joined Al-Qaeda, what did bayat mean?
How did they communicate?
Did they use Inmarsat satellite phones?
Did bin Laden use a body double?
So when we got all that information
we were able to do certain operations.
Cumbersome though it may be, it still
to me was the way to do it and we
don't have to apologize to anybody.
We don't know what revenge is coming
down the road, and if I wanted to
insight the faithful, I'd just take one
picture with a dog collar on and just
point into that and look at the young brothers
and say you're duty bound now to get revenge.
The advocates of torture generally
focus on the hypothetical, they have
this ticking bomb center they talk about.
Which is imagine that there's a ticking
time bomb in Times Square, it's about
to go off, we've got the guy in custody
he says he wants a lawyer, do we respect
his right to a lawyer, or to save a million lives,
do we apply the electrodes to his testicles?
24 week after week has on-camera displays
- of brutal torture. - Just tell me
what's your connection to terrorists?
Designed to stop some terrorist
with a ticking bomb from killing
hundreds of thousands if not millions
- of Americans. - You're talking about
- torturing this man? - I'm talking about
doing what is necessary to stop
this warhead from being used against us.
It's just nonsense though, because
then you ask, hey, name me one time
in the last five hundred years
when we've had someone in custody
with a ticking time bomb.
The likelihood of that ever happening
is so remote, even if you're in that situation
who's to say that if you beat em up
that you're gonna get that information?
If a guy's that committed, I think he'll die
before he gives it up.
Right after the release of the Abu Ghraib
photos in mid-2004, 35% of Americans polled
believed that torture was acceptable
under some circumstances, even after
the Abu Ghraib phots, and I think that shows
the way that this kind of popular culture
has built a constituency for torture
which allows the Bush White House
to get away with the way it twists
laws and treaties and doesn't spark popular outrage.
On a conservative radio show
Vice President Dick Cheney openly defended
the practice of waterboarding.
Would you agree a drunk in water
is a no-brainer if it can save lives?
Well, it's a no-brainer for me
but for a while there I was criticized
as being the Vice President for torture.
We do not condone torture.
We do not torture, footnote,
as we define torture, which means exactly
what we wish it to mean and nothing else.
In the elections of 2006, the Bush Administration
openly campaigned for harsh techniques
the rest of the world defined as torture.
Bush and Cheney played on the fears
of voters and politicians, if Congress
didn't give them the power to do
whatever was necessary, how could Americans be safe?
In addition to the terrorists held
at Guantanamo, a small number of suspected
terrorist leaders and operatives captured
during the war have been held and questioned
outside the United States in a separate program
operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Some ask why are you acknowledging this program now?
Some believe our military and intelligence
personnel involved in capturing and questioning
terrorists could now be at risk
of prosecution under the War Crimes Act
simply for doing their jobs in a thorough
and professional way, this is unacceptable.
The President was forced
to disclose his secret CIA program
when the Supreme Court acted to limit
his war time powers, in the historic
Handam Decision, the court ruled
that interrogations and trials of terrorists
would be governed by the Geneva Conventions.
This debate is occurring because of
the Supreme Court's ruling that said
that we must conduct ourselves under
the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.
And that Common Article 3 says
that there will be no outrages upon human dignity.
It's very vague, what does that mean?
Do you believe that the use of testimony
which is obtained through techniques
such as waterboarding, stress positions
intimidating use of military dogs,
sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation,
forced nudity would be consistent
with Common Article 3?
Well sir, I think most importantly
I can't imagine that such testimony
- would be reliable. - Mr. Attorney General
do you believe that statements obtained
through illegal, inhumane treatment
should be admissible?
Senator, I.
Well, again, I'll say this, the concern
that I would have about such a prohibition
is what does it mean how you define it?
And who define it?
The Bush Administration introduced
a new law that would elude the restrictions
of the Supreme Court.
In a legal sense, I think they wanted
to discard the Constitution and they wanted
to write a new one, but you can't do that
so what you do is you throw a new
interpretation on the old one and the new
interpretation is the Executive in War Time
and perhaps this war is gonna last forever
is all powerful.
Congress gave the President
most of what he wanted, he would agree
to abide by the Geneva Conventions
so long as he could define their meaning
and application.
A few detainees at Guantanamo might be
put on trial, but the rest would no longer
have access to habeas corpus, the fundamental
legal right to challenge their detention.
Planning a run for President,
even Senator McCain voted for the Bill.
Soon after the Bush Administration threatened
to discredit him with conservative voters.
Buried deep inside this legislation
is a provision that will pardon President Bush
and all the members of his Administration
of any possible crimes connected with
the torture and mistreatment of detainees
dated all the way back to September 11th, 2001
at least President Nixon had Gerald Ford
to do his dirty work, President Bush
is trying to pardon himself.
The pardon did not extend
to front line soldiers.
The trial was a very confusing time for me
because I've never been through trial before
I didn't know what was really going on.
I kinda just understood that I was facing
a lot of time in jail, that's the only
thing I really understood about the whole thing.
Well I was sent to jail, to a military
correctional facility, I have lost
my full time job, I have a bad conduct discharge
which has hindered me in getting a new job
in the same field.
I have financially, it's just devastated me.
I'm just glad it's over, that's it.
I can get on with my life.
I had to plead guilty to assault
and two counts of dereliction of duty
in exchange, they'd say that I could
go to jail for no more than four months.
Rather than spend the money that was
being spent for that trial, I think
it could have been better spent
in working on Army doctrine to make sure
that other people go into battle
properly equipped, properly led,
and with a full understanding as to what
their new rules and responsibilities are.
When a detainee is abused
or a detainee claims abuse, they want
somebody to take the fall for it
and it's not gonna be the person
with Eagles or Stars on their shoulder.
No officer was ever convicted
in the Dilawar case.
Following her service at Abu Ghraib,
Captain Carolyn Wood wast given a staff position
at the Army Interrogation School
in Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
What does that reflect in terms of
senior leadership's intentions?
Not to eradicate the abuse, but to
perpetuate the abuse.
I think the probability exists
that there will be other terrorist attacks
and more Americans will die and the argument
that we have to apply abuse to detainees
in order to protect American lives
I find to be violative of our deepest values
and to the very safety of our country.
We fight not only to protect lives,
we fight to protect our principles.
If you say over the course
of Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq we've detained
50,000 people, I'd say less than 1%
were terrorists.
Were some of them insurgents?
Probably, were almost all of em in Iraq
in particular gonna become insurgents
after their treatment, yes.
I was kidnapped, abducted, falsely imprisoned
tortured and threatened with further torture
without charge, without trial.
Even many soldiers had said to me afterwards
was that hell, if you weren't a terrorist
when you came in here, by the time
you leave, I'm sure you would be
because of the way you've been treated.
We think there's a certain
level of prejudice that this religion
and the people who have hijacked it
have such a disregard for life
that we turn around and say if they think
so very little of life, and clearly 9/11
exemplified that, screw them, anything goes.
It's not surprising that at the end
of all this, Dilawar the victim was really lost.
I mean Dilawar was almost invisible
in the trials, I mean you never
saw pictures of him, nobody ever mentioned
this man's wife and child who were left
without a husband and father.
He was not part of the picture at all.
There's a lot of other people out there
who are gonna run into this system
unless it's fixed and you only need one
to sort of remind yourself of what it's capable of.
American values are premised
upon the notion of human dignity
and the sanctity of the individual.
To allow for cruelty to be applied
as a matter of official policy is to say
that our forefathers were wrong
about this inalienable rights.
Americans obviously wanna believe
that we're somehow more moral than
the rest of the world, that for some reason
we have a real strong desire to feel that way
and I think that's eroding, I don't really know
what effect that's gonna have on us
and I think a lot of people have just decided
well, you know, it's different now.
After 9/11, we can't be good anymore
we have to get tough and so we'll have
to see what that does to us.
- What do you think? - I think that's bullshit,
frankly, I mean I think that we still need
to try and be as good as we can be.
I find it utterly inconceivable
that the highest officials, Rumsfeld,
Bush and Cheney would not only countenance torture
but would actually advocate it period
is has really destroyed my faith
in the American Government because through
World War II and the Korean War
where I also served, we had the sense that
we were on the side of the good guys.
You would always get justice in
the United States of America
you would get, people would get decent treatment
that there was a rule of law, we never
forgot that, that behind the facade
of wartime hatreds, there was a central
rule of law which people abided by.
It was something we believed,
it was what made America different.