Word: namo
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Within a few months, as the invasion of Afghanistan reached its climax, hundreds of captured al-Qaeda fighters and irregulars fighting for the Taliban regime were shipped to the naval base at Guant??namo Bay for interrogation. Gonzales wrote a memo to Bush in January 2002 that described aspects of the Geneva protocols as "quaint" and "obsolete." A few weeks later, Bush signed an order deeming al-Qaeda combatants "unlawful" and thus not deserving of prisoner-of-war status or the protections Geneva provided. "The war on terrorism," wrote Bush, "... ushered in not by us but by terrorists, requires...
Initially it meant that prisoners at Guant??namo were not going to be spending any time with appointed lawyers or international counselors who might be interested in obtaining their release. They were stuck in Cuba, some indefinitely, literally outside the law. That alone was an incentive for the prisoners to talk. For a time, the military followed Army field manual rules, which allowed for 17 interrogation techniques, such as the use of the good cop--bad cop routine; the we-know-everything gambit; the use and removal of incentives; emotional and psychological pressure; and silence...
...months later, when officers at Guant??namo, frustrated by the lack of usable intelligence they were getting from prisoners, asked Washington to approve the use of more aggressive techniques than the 17 methods in the manual, the legal groundwork had already been prepared for a new age of harsher--and now legal--interrogation. In December 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed off on 16 additional measures for use at Gitmo, including stress positions, such as standing for long periods; isolation for up to a month; hooding during transportation and questioning; removal of clothing; and "exploiting individual phobias, e.g., dogs...
...owing to concerns from the Navy's top lawyer, Rumsfeld abruptly rescinded his December order, pending a study, and ordered that the tougher measures could only be applied with his approval. Three months later, the study group recommended the use of some of the new interrogation techniques at Guant??namo. Dropped from the list were hooding, nudity and use of phobias. Left in place or added were isolation, giving detainees rations instead of hot meals, sleep deprivation and the use of rapid-fire questions...
Just about everything. ??Rules that were intended for Guant??namo, where the prisoner-to-guard ratio was 1 to 1, "migrated" during 2003 to Iraq's biggest prison, where the ratio was 75 to 1. Those rules were applied to a prison population that, according to the Schlesinger report, was made up "all too often" of Iraqis who were not valuable targets but bystanders caught in random roundups. Add to that the facts that the Army's intelligence units were poorly trained and badly managed, and the military police units assigned to Abu Ghraib were filled with reservists who showed...