Pentagon OK'd harsh interrogation

By Dana Priest and Joe Stephens
The Washington Post

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Defense and intelligence officials said similar guidelines have been approved for use on "high-value detainees" in Iraq, those suspected of terrorism or of having knowledge of insurgency operations, and for prisoners detained in CIA-run detention centers.

It could not be learned whether similar guidelines were in effect at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad that has been the focus of controversy in recent days.

But legislators have said they want to know whether the misconduct reported at Abu Ghraib — which included sexual humiliation — was an aberration or whether it reflected an aggressive policy taken to inhumane extremes.

The classified list of roughly 20 techniques was approved at the highest levels of the Pentagon and Justice Department and represents the first known documentation of an official policy permitting interrogators to use physically and psychologically stressful methods during questioning.

Use of any of these techniques requires approval from senior Pentagon officials, and in some cases, the secretary of defense. Interrogators must justify that the harshest treatment is "militarily necessary," according to the document, parts of which were cited by an official who had the document.

Once approved, harsher treatment must be accompanied by "appropriate medical monitoring."

"We wanted to find a legal way to jack up the pressure," said one lawyer who helped write the guidelines. "We wanted a little more freedom than in a U.S. prison, but not torture."

A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment. Several officials interviewed for this article, including two lawyers who helped formulate the guidelines, declined to be identified because the subject matter is so sensitive.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. military and CIA have detained thousands of foreign nationals at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, facilities in Iraq and elsewhere as part of an effort to crack down on suspected terrorists and quell the insurgency in Iraq.

The Pentagon guidelines for Guantánamo Bay were designed to give interrogators the authority to get uncooperative detainees to provide information, though experts on interrogation say information submitted under such conditions is often unreliable.
 
The United States has stated publicly that it does not engage in torture or cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. Defense officials said yesterday that the techniques on the list were consistent with international law and contained safeguards such as legal and medical monitoring.

"The high-level approval is done with forethought by people in responsibility, and layers removed from the people actually doing these things, so you can have an objective approach," said one senior defense official familiar with the guidelines.

But Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said the tactics amount to cruel and inhumane treatment. "The courts have ruled most of these techniques illegal," he said. "If it's illegal here under the U.S. Constitution, it's illegal abroad. ... This isn't even close."

With the proper permission, the guidelines allow subjecting detainees to psychological techniques meant to open up, disorient or put them under stress. These include "invoking feelings of futility" and using female interrogators to question male detainees.

Some prisoners could be made to stand for four hours at a time. Questioning a prisoner without clothes was permitted if he were alone in his cell. Ruled out were such techniques as physical contact, even poking a finger in the chest, and smothering a detainee with towels to threaten suffocation. Placing electrodes on detainees' body "wasn't even evaluated, it was such a no-go," said one of the officials involved in the drawing up the list.

During the Pentagon debates, one participant drew on his memory of a scene from the movie "The Untouchables," in which a police officer bent the rules to persuade mobsters to provide evidence against Mafia kingpin Al Capone.

Much like the cop, the participant suggested, interrogators could shoot a dead body in front of a detainee, then suggest to him that's what they did to people who refused to talk. Pentagon lawyers declared the technique out of bounds, and it was discarded.

The guidelines were the product of three months of discussion between military lawyers, medical personnel and psychologists, and followed several incidents of abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo.

In late 2002, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, until recently commander of the detention operation at Guantánamo Bay, asked the Pentagon for more explicit rules for interrogation, four people involved in the process said.

"They don't want to be in the situation where we are making things up as we go along," said one lawyer involved in the sessions.

"We wanted to outline under what circumstances we could make them feel uncomfortable, a little distressed," another lawyer involved said.

During the discussions "the political people (at the Pentagon) were inclined toward aggressive techniques," the official said. Military lawyers, in contrast, were more conservative in their approach, mindful of how they would want U.S. military personnel held as prisoners to be treated.

Mark Jacobson, a former Defense Department official who worked on detainee issues while at the Pentagon, said that at Guantánamo and the Bagram facility in Afghanistan, military interrogators have never used torture or extreme stress techniques.