Memo points to Iraq abuse cover-up

From a classified report five months ago, one of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s closest advisers learned of allegations that a cla...

From a classified report five months ago, one of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s closest advisers learned of allegations that a clandestine military task force in Iraq was beating detainees, ordering trained Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) debriefers out of the room during questioning, confiscating evidence of the abuse and intimidating the debriefers when they complained. The June 25 report—sent by the DIA director to Undersecretary of Defence for Intelligence Stephen Cambone—is among dozens of documents made public on Tuesday that allege brutal and sometimes illegal interrogation methods employed against prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

In the documents, government witnesses describe the regular use of violence—much of it inflicted on prisoners by a top secret task force devoted to capturing ‘‘high-value targets’’ in Iraq—more than seven months after a fact-finding mission reported to senior defence officials that the unit was beating prisoners. There is no record, among the documents made public, that makes clear whether the abuses—separate and apart from the highly publicised incidents at Abu Ghraib—have stopped or whether anyone has been held responsible for them.

The Bush administration, which continues to portray prisoner abuses as isolated events and the Pentagon’s response as swift, fought vigorously to keep the new documents from public view.The American Civil Liberties Union released 43 of them after compelling the Bush administration to provide them—many still heavily censored—in a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

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The two-page ‘‘Info Memo’’ of the DIA director, Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, is the most significant, because he is the highest-ranking official now known to have complained about prisoner mistreatment. His allegations are also notable because the agency he runs works closely in the field with the elite special operations unit about which he writes.

The Washington Post reported last week that a fact-finding mission for Army generals in December 2003 had warned that the same unit—then called Task Force 121, and more recently renamed Task Force 6-26, still active in Iraq—was beating detainees and using a secret facility to hide its interrogations.

Jacoby told Cambone that a supervisor in the secret military unit seized photographic evidence after a civilian DIA intelligence officer watched task force members ‘‘punch a prisoner in the face’’ That DIA officer, and another who worked with him, reported that prisoners arrived at the unit’s headquarters with ‘‘burn marks on their backs,’’ ‘‘bruises’’ and other signs of violence. Jacoby wrote that officers of the elite military unit ‘‘threatened’’ the DIA civilians—Jacoby did not elaborate—and warned them not discuss what they saw.

Other documents describe heated battles in which the FBI and some DIA intelligence officers objected to harsh interrogation methods in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. One FBI agent, reporting on May 10 to superiors about an earlier conversation with Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and Maj. Gen. Michael Dunleavey at Guantanamo Bay, said the two men cited Rumsfeld as the source of their authority to use techniques that the FBI regarded as potentially illegal . —LAT-WP

US soldiers grill Rumsfeld

		• Camp Buehring (Kuwait): Disgruntled American troops waiting in the Kuwaiti desert to go into Iraq on Wednesday challenged US Defence Secretary Donald Rumfeld about their safety and how long they would be in the country. ‘‘Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up to three years, a lot of us are getting ready to move north (Iraq) pretty soon,’’ said one soldier, who was cheered by the some 2,000 troops gathered in a hangar.He said soldiers were digging up scrap metal to armour-plate their vehicles. Rumsfeld was also questioned by other troops about what would happen to the US force in Iraq after the planned January 30 election, about missing pay, and other worries over conditions. —AFP/PTI

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