UPDATED / modified to include the Washington Post article.
Vice Admiral Church, the Navy's Inspector General, is scheduled to report to Congress today on his findings regarding treatment of detainees by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq. The NYT has an article up this morning ahead of his appearance, as does the WaPo. (h/t Kevin McCullough, who says a Pentagon report will also probably be out today.)
According to the Washington Post:
The Pentagon's widest-ranging examination of prisoner abuse at U.S. detention facilities has concluded that there was no deliberate high-level policy that led to numerous cases of mistreatment, and instead blames inept leadership at low levels and confusion over changing interrogation rules, according to government and defense officials who have read the report.
Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III's inquiry, which included reviews of several earlier military investigations, found there is "no single overarching explanation" for the abuse and that many of them occurred when soldiers came in contact with detainees on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than in U.S. detention facilities. It also found that interrogators, for the most part, followed U.S. and international standards for treating detainees humanely and that "there is no link between approved interrogation techniques and detainee abuse."
The NYT takes a different stance, opening its article with a battlefield incident in Afghanistan. Even the Times admits, however, that the military are taking this matter seriously (see below). I'd like to read the full report to see first-hand what Church's investigation found.
Some excerpts from the NYT:
Admiral Church's report is the sixth major inquiry into the abuse and detention operations. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld directed the inquiry 10 months ago to examine the interrogation techniques in Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq, and to identify any gaps among the various investigations.The report was based on more than 800 interviews with personnel who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba as well as thousands of pages of documents and a review of all the other investigations and reviews on detainee abuse and detention operations. Its statistical conclusions derived mainly from 71 completed cases of substantiated detainee abuse as of Sept. 30, 2004, including 20 that involved mistreatment during interrogations.
The Church report contrasted the rigorous review of interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay with a much more haphazard process in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it noted the interrogation techniques migrated from one area to another in the absence of adequate oversight from high-level Pentagon officials. "We consider it a missed opportunity that no specific guidance on interrogation techniques was provided to the commanders responsible for Afghanistan and Iraq," the report summary said.
The inquiry found, for instance, that by January 2003, military interrogators in Afghanistan were using techniques similar to those that Mr. Rumsfeld had approved for use only at Guantánamo Bay. Those techniques included stress positions and sleep and light deprivation.
As a result of the military inquiries and individual criminal investigations into detainee abuse, the Army said last week that it had taken 120 actions against 109 soldiers so far. That includes 32 courts-martial, and 88 other forms of punishment, including reprimands and dismissal from the service.
Leave a comment
Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:
*This* puts text in bold.
_This_ puts text in italics.
bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.
To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.