Wall Street Journal - May 10, 2004
Red Cross Cited Detainee Abuse Over a Year Ago Agency Filed Complaints About Abu Ghraib Prison Months Before U.S. Probe
By DAVID S. CLOUD Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Even before the war in Iraq ended a year ago, and well before U.S. officials have generally acknowledged it, the Red Cross began periodically lodging complaints about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners in allied custody, according to a confidential report by the organization.
In particular, the report says the Red Cross complained last October about the interrogations of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, site of the photographs of prisoner abuse that have erupted into an international scandal in recent days. Those Red Cross complaints came more than three months before a U.S. soldier complained to his superiors about the treatment of prisoners there, setting off an American inquiry.
Although Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. military and civilian officials have insisted that their first real indication of trouble came when a low-ranking soldier stepped forward in January, the Red Cross report indicates that the organization had been issuing warnings for months prior to that. It isn't always clear to whom and how high up those warnings went. The complaints, the first of which was lodged in March 2003, included a formal complaint to senior officers of the U.S. Central Command last summer.
The Red Cross report indicates that some complaints brought an allied response, while others didn't. More than a year ago, on April 1, 2003, officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross complained at coalition forces headquarters in Qatar about treatment of detainees at a British-run internment camp in the Iraqi port town of Umm Qasr, the report says.
A meeting with the political adviser to the senior British commander in Qatar appears to have brought quick results. It "had the immediate effect [of stopping] the systematic use of hoods and flexi-cuffs in the interrogation section of Umm Qasr," according to the ICRC report, which details the results of its inspections in Iraq.
But during the next year, the ICRC encountered far more resistance when it raised concerns about the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, especially those in the custody of military intelligence, the report says. The U.S. military was sometimes slow to respond to Red Cross complaints and ignoredthem in a few cases.
In addition, commanders often took months to initiate their own investigations into prisoner abuse, even after the Red Cross brought allegations to their attention, according to the report and recent testimony by senior Pentagon officials.
The February report, which the Red Cross provided to U.S. officials, hasn't been released publicly, but a copy was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The first of seven U.S. soldiers charged with abusing detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison is scheduled to be court martialed later this month in a public trial, the Pentagon said yesterday. Specialist Jeremy Sivits, age 24 and a member of the 800th Military Police Brigade, is charged with conspiracy to maltreat detainees; dereliction of duty for failing to protect detainees from abuse, cruelty and maltreatment; and maltreatment of detainees. There have been demands by lawmakers and others that commanders be held responsible as much as the guards.
For much of 2003, as the U.S. scoured Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and for Saddam Hussein, the U.S. military's major concern was finding ways to make prisoners more cooperative in interrogations -- not improving conditions for detainees. In late August of 2003, for instance, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller conducted an inquiry of interrogation and detention procedures in Iraq. That report suggested that military police, in addition to safeguarding prisoners, also could help create conditions that would make them more likely to cooperate with interrogators, an internal Army report has found.
Both before and after that suggestion, according to the Red Cross, military police guards supervised by intelligence officers subjected prisoners to "ill-treatments ranging from insults and humiliation to both physical and psychological coercion that in some cases might amount to torture." The report adds that "several military-intelligence officers confirmed" that holding prisoners "naked in a completely dark and empty cell" was "standard operating procedure" to extract information.
In May, the Red Cross said it sent a memo describing more than 200 allegations of mistreatment during capture and interrogation of prisoners. The memo was given to Rear Adm. James Robb at coalition headquarters in Qatar, the report says. In response, non-Iraqi detainees were no longer forced to wear wristbands with the notation "terrorist," the report says. But no other improvements are mentioned as a result of the memo.
Beginning last June, more than a hundred prisoners deemed to be "high-value detainees" were held in windowless concrete cells for nearly 23 hours a day, the report said. They were given the Koran but no newspapers or magazines, and except for when they were under interrogation, they were in complete isolation. "Most had been subjected to this regime for the past five months," the report noted.
The Red Cross wrote to coalition officials last October recommending that the approach be discontinued because it was a "serious violation" of the Geneva Conventions governing treatment of prisoners of war.
But as of February this year, when the report was sent to the U.S., apparently no changes had been made. U.S. officials told the Red Cross that solitary confinement was necessary to prevent exchange of information among prisoners.
Sometimes the U.S. was responsive. Last July, the organization said it sent a letter to coalition commanders describing 50 allegations of ill-treatment by detainees in the custody of military intelligence at a detention facility at Baghdad airport known as Camp Cropper.
Shortly afterward, that section of the camp was closed and the prisoners were transferred to a facility under command of a military-police unit. From that time on, abuse "declined significantly and even stopped, while their interrogation continued."
Camp Cropper also took seriously Red Cross demands that prison guards stop opening fire on unarmed prisoners as a way to quell disturbances, the report notes. But at other camps, including Camp Bucca in the south, shootings of rioting prisoners continued at least through September, the report claims.
In the case of Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, military officials didn't take action until a U.S. soldier came forward on Jan. 13 with allegations of abuse at the prison.
That was more than three months after ICRC officials complained that they had visited the prison in October and witnessed prisoners being held naked in cells and forced to wear women's underwear. These prisoners were being interrogated by military intelligence in Unit 1A, the same unit where the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib allegedly occurred.
The New Yorker magazine published a new photo yesterday showing a dog being used to intimidate a cringing, naked Iraqi detainee at Abu Ghraib prison on Dec. 12, 2003.
Prisoners under military-intelligence interrogation were routinely held naked in empty cells at Abu Ghraib and "were drip-fed with new items (clothing, bedding, hygiene articles, lit cell, etc.) in exchange for their cooperation," the report said. In one case an ICRC medical official examined a prisoner in the isolation section of the prison whose heart rate was 120 beats a minute and who was "unresponsive to verbal and painful stimuli." It said he was diagnosed as suffering from a mental disorder, "most likely due to the ill-treatment he was subjected to during the interrogation."
The Red Cross also complained in the report that "nine months into the present conflict, there is still no satisfactorily functioning system of notification to the families of captured or arrested persons, even though hundreds continued to be arrested every week." The report notes that "the ICRC has raised this issue repeatedly with the detaining authorities since March 2003, including at the highest level of the [coalition forces] in August 2003."
But U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer III in a speech last month said he was still hearing complaints from many Iraqis that they had no information about family members who had been arrested.
In addition to the Bush administration, the Red Cross's February report could embarrass the British government, which already is under intense political pressure due to the unpopularity of the Iraq war among many Britons. While the report doesn't specify the nationalities of troops accused of abuse, it is clear from the locations of some of the incidents that British, rather than U.S., soldiers probably were involved. These cases took place in the southern Iraqi cities of Basra and Umm Qasr, which the British control.
A British Ministry of Defense spokeswoman yesterday said the agency has opened investigations into 33 deaths of Iraqi civilians allegedly at the hands of British troops. Of those, 21 investigations have been completed, the spokesman said, and in 15, Britain's Royal Military Police found there was no evidence of misconduct. In six cases, the military is considering whether to press charges, while a further 12 investigations are continuing.
--Steve Stecklow and Marc Champion contributed to this article.