Guantanamo Gen. Miller recomended Iraq Survey Group adopt torture to get WMD info
May 16th, 2009
Now that the question of the relationship of US torture to false evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link has come to the fore, Salon reporter Mark Benjamin reminds us that Maj Gen Geoffrey Miller, the “torture general” of Guantanamo, recomemended getting tough to the Iraq Survey Group who were valliantly hunting the non-existent WMD in Iraq. Gen. Miller, you may recall, was on his way at the time to Abu Ghraib, where he successfully recomended “Gitmoizing” the prion, thus contributing to one of trhe greatest strategic defeats in US history. As Benjamin tells the story:
In August and early September of 2003, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the man in charge of the Pentagon’s torture laboratory at Guantanamo Bay, was dispatched to Iraq, allegedly to Gitmoize operations there.
It seems to have worked, at least in one place. Soon after Miller visited with officials in charge of Abu Ghraib, guards there began to use working dogs, stress positions, extremely lengthy interrogations, isolation, yelling and nudity in order to try to wring information from prisoners — all techniques that had been used at Guantanamo and that the world would later see in photos released from an investigation in to what had gone on at the prison.
But according to the Senate committee’s report, before Miller met with the Abu Ghraib officials, he first made a little-known visit to the Iraq Survey Group, which was in charge of the hunt for WMDs in Iraq after the invasion.
Miller told the ISG they were “running a country club” by not getting tough on detainees, Chief Warrant Officer Brian Searcy, the ISG interrogation chief, told the Senate committee. Searcy said Miller suggested shackling detainees and forcing them to walk on gravel. Mike Kamin, another ISG official, told committee investigators that Miller recommended temperature manipulation and sleep deprivation.
Miller also told the ISG’s Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton that Dayton’s unit was “not getting much out of these people,” and complained that the ISG had not “broken” their detainees psychologically. Miller offered to send along suggested techniques, Dayton recalled, that would “actually break” the prisoners.
Dayton demurred, saying his unit wasn’t changing anything and that lawyers would have to carefully vet anything Miller suggested. The ISG generally balked. One of its debriefers threatened to resign if Miller got his way. After the cool reception, Miller appears to have dropped the effort with respect to the ISG.
On his return from Iraq, Miller was sent directly to the Pentagon to personally brief then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Steven Cambone. [emphasis added.]
Followers of this blog may recall that Col. Larry James, a BSCT at Guantanamo under Gen. Miller, is full of wonderful words on the humane tretment of detainees under Miller’s command:
Col. James has a long and honorable association with Behavioral Science Consultation Teams and Guantanamo. “In 2003, my commander made it very clear that he wanted the BSCT to work with interrogators on how to develop rapport-building strategies and techniques with detainees,” said James.
That commander, of course, was Miller. And we know the nature of those “rapport-building” techniques Miller encouraged: isolation, sleep deprivation, hypothermia, nudity, sexual humiliation by females, and visious “stress positions.” And the goal, as Miller reminds us, was to “break” the detainees. We should remember that the torture of Al-Qahtani begins, according to p. 1 of the interrogation log, with a “rapport-builing session.”
Entry Filed under: Guantanamo, Interrogation, Iraq, Psychological Torture, Psychology, Torture