Our intelligence officers hid their identities. Why? And what's this about "corporate" people directing interrogations?!!!! Shades of Halliburton! Is that what Cheney really wants with moving so many military/government jobs to private oversight? So he and his cabal of neocons can circumvent our Constitutiona AND our American values? This sort of action is that of fascist nazi agents. It leads all the way up to the President and his wishes to dump the Geneva Convention. What example does this tell the Iraq people? But even worse what kind of monsters are we breeding within our own ranks from this failure of strong, moral and intelligent leadership?

Interrogators hid identities

Fri May 28, 6:41 AM ET

By Toni Locy, USA TODAY

Efforts to determine who orchestrated the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison may be complicated by the ways in which many military intelligence officials, covert U.S. agents and civilian contractors obscured their identities.

Intelligence officers, agents and interrogators at the prison did not wear name tags or display insignia indicating rank, according to testimony at an April 7 hearing for Sgt. Javal Davis, one of seven military police officers accused of abuse. Dressed in desert camouflage uniforms or casual clothes, military and civilian intelligence operatives blended in with other soldiers, and some of them responded coyly when MPs asked their names, says Paul Bergrin, a Newark, N.J., lawyer who represents Davis.

In an interview, Bergrin quoted Davis, 26, as saying that when he asked some of the mysterious agents and interrogators for their names, they would say, " 'I'm Special Agent John Doe,' or 'I'm Special Agent in Charge James Bond.' "

Some of the MPs have been able to identify civilian and military interrogators who they say encouraged the abuse, and photos that MPs took of detainees being abused have allowed investigators to zero in on several other suspects. But as the defense strategies begin to take shape for Davis and other reservists charged with maltreatment of detainees, dereliction of duty and other offenses, Bergrin says he is struggling to identify many of the shadowy covert operatives he claims directed the abuse from October to December.

Davis' defense also is hampered by the decisions of three of his supervisors to invoke their right to remain silent under the military's version of the Fifth Amendment.

The supervisors - including Capt. Donald Reese, commander of the 372nd Military Police Company - refused to testify at Davis' hearing to avoid potentially incriminating themselves.

Bergrin says he is concerned about Davis' ability to get a fair trial if the defense can't call such key witnesses because Davis doesn't know their names or they refuse to testify. Like attorneys for other accused MPs, Bergrin plans to argue that military intelligence officials, CIA officers and civilian interrogators manipulated Davis and other MPs into "softening up" prisoners for interrogations.

But showing that the responsibility for the abuse goes up the chain of command could be difficult if defense attorneys cannot determine the identities of intelligence officers and interrogators who worked with the MPs.

"This is a major problem," Bergrin says. "They refused to provide their identities."

Prison logs haphazard

It is common for intelligence officers to shield their identities from prisoners, military analysts say. However, the prison's records should contain such information.

But sign-in logs were kept haphazardly at Abu Ghraib. Without such documentation or photos, defense attorneys and military investigators could have trouble finding evidence - besides someone's memory - to link individual intelligence officers and interrogators to specific acts of abuse.

In an April 15 report recommending that Davis face a court-martial, military investigating officer Maj. John Coughlin said that several civilian contract workers' "present whereabouts (are) unknown." He also said that "James Bond" appeared on a prison log and is an "agent not known, and believed to be a fictitious name."

Meanwhile, military prosecutors appear to be developing a theory of the case that dovetails with the stance taken by top officials at the Pentagon: that the abuse was not systemic and was the work of a small group of low-level soldiers. The seven charged so far are from the 372nd MP Company, based near Cumberland, Md.

The battle lines between the soldiers and their prosecutors are being drawn over whether defense attorneys should have access to records that they believe could show that superior officers knew about the abuses at Abu Ghraib and looked the other way.

Among the documents that Davis' attorneys want: records of activities within the prison last year as it prepared for a visit by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of military forces in Iraq, and reports produced after he left.

In their first skirmish with prosecutors, Davis' attorneys tried to call more than 30 witnesses to testify at an Article 32 hearing, which is the military's version of a civilian grand jury proceeding and a preliminary hearing. Four testified.

Several of the witnesses sought by the defense were from the 372nd MP Company and the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, based in Germany. They had been redeployed, and the military refused to bring them back to Baghdad to testify at Davis' hearing.

But witnesses who testified filled in more detail about several incidents of abuse that have been frozen in time by photographs that captured soldiers forcing prisoners into sexually provocative poses, supposedly to try to extract information about Iraqi insurgents.

According to a military summary of Davis' hearing obtained by USA TODAY, witnesses also revealed that military intelligence and "OGA" operatives - people from "other government agencies" who the MPs believed to be CIA officers - argued for at least two days over who should dispose of the body of a badly beaten prisoner who died during questioning in a shower room. While the unidentified intelligence officers bickered, the body was kept packed in ice.

Other witnesses testified that as the abuses escalated in an Abu Ghraib cellblock known as Tier 1, the MPs' supervisors - commissioned and non-commissioned officers - avoided the area, especially during the night shift. If supervisors showed up at all, according to testimony, it was only for a few minutes - sometimes seconds - at a time.

Against this backdrop, families of the accused soldiers say they are increasingly concerned that many superior officers will escape courts-martial and that the accused MPs will take the fall for a scandal that has damaged the USA's reputation as a proponent and protector of human rights.

"You have officers who were very close to these enlisted persons," Bergrin says. "They essentially slept in the same area. You can't tell me they didn't know what was going on."

'Sadistic, blatant' abuses

When the 372nd MP Company arrived in Iraq last spring, it was a close-knit group of men and women, most of them from small towns near Cresaptown, Md.

The 372nd initially was assigned to provide security for military convoys. By October, the unit's mission changed dramatically when it was assigned to guard captives at Abu Ghraib.

In mid-January, one of the unit's own, Spc. Joseph Darby, 24, went to commanders with a CD-ROM of graphic pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused.

An investigation began, and Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba documented "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" of prisoners by MPs. The Pentagon also began a separate criminal investigation into alleged wrongdoing by military intelligence officers.

(The CIA also has asked the Justice Department to examine at least two deaths of Iraqi prisoners. And Justice officials, at the Pentagon's request, are probing alleged abuse by a civilian contractor.)

In the wake of those probes, Spc. Jeremy Sivits, one of the seven accused reservists from the 372nd, pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against his friends.

Soldiers testified at Davis' hearing that the 372nd received two days of on-the-job training from the 72nd MP Company, which was leaving Abu Ghraib.

There were no "SOPs" - standard operating procedures - for handling detainees, the soldiers testified. There was no training on how to deal with the Arab culture. And there were no written instructions provided by commanders on the treatment of prisoners of war under the internationally accepted Geneva Conventions.

Very little, it turns out, was put in writing at the prison, Taguba concluded. When it was, the information often was wrong or incomplete, according to testimony.

Unprofessional behavior was the norm at the prison, Taguba found. Soldiers didn't salute superiors. They wore civilian clothes at times, and they wrote personal messages on their helmets and caps.

Tensions rise

At first, the Maryland reserve unit guarded fewer than 200 prisoners. But the number soared to up to 1,600 as the Iraqi insurgency movement stepped up deadly roadside bombings.

Military intelligence officials were placed in charge of the MPs at Abu Ghraib on Oct. 12, not long after the Pentagon sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, commander of the military's prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Iraq to assess the quality of intelligence-gathering efforts at the U.S.-controlled prisons.

Two MPs with experience as civilian corrections officers - Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, 37, of Buckingham, Va., and Spc. Charles Graner, 35, of Uniontown, Pa. - took the lead in preparing prisoners for interrogation, according to testimony at Davis' hearing.

By Nov. 8, tensions inside and outside Abu Ghraib had escalated. That week 27 U.S. troops were killed in Iraq. The abuse on cellblocks 1A and 1B entered a new phase of cruelty amid pressure to learn more about the insurgency.

It began when seven prisoners suspected of starting a riot at another prison, Camp Ganci, were brought to Abu Ghraib, according to testimony at Davis' hearing.

The prisoners' hands were bound by plastic cuffs, and sandbags were put over their heads. "It is a long walk from in-processing to Tier 1," Spc. Matthew Wisdom testified. "The escorts were leading them into walls and cell bars as they walked with them."

At first, the prisoners, who were still clothed, were placed in a "dog pile" on the floor. Davis allegedly jumped on the prisoners and stomped on their hands and feet. Unlike Graner and Frederick, Davis is not charged with sexually humiliating prisoners.

By the time the night shift ended the next morning, the seven suspected riot leaders had been stripped, arranged in a human pyramid and ordered to masturbate.

One prisoner was forced to stand on a box of military meals, with a wire attached to his penis, and threatened with electrocution if he lost his balance. Photos taken that night by the soldiers became worldwide symbols of the abuse.

According to testimony at Davis' hearing, a platoon sergeant, Shannon Snider, was nearby when Davis jumped on the prisoners. But Sivits told investigators that Snider stuck around for "two minutes or less" after admonishing Davis and that Snider missed the worst abuse. Taguba recommended that Snider be relieved of duty and reprimanded for not reporting Davis.

Another supervisor, Staff Sgt. Robert Elliot, brought the seven suspected leaders of the Ganci riot to Abu Ghraib. But Elliot, a squad leader, left the tier after about "20 seconds or so," Sivits said.

Snider and Elliot invoked their rights against self-incrimination and refused to testify at Davis' hearing. Spc. Jason Kenner, another MP, testified that he rarely saw superior officers in the prison, checking up on underlings. "If they didn't walk the tier, they wouldn't see the nakedness," he said.

Capt. Scott Dunn, Davis' military lawyer in Baghdad, is asking prosecutors to turn over evidence that documents what superior officers and enlisted supervisors did or didn't do at Abu Ghraib.

Dunn wants all prisoner logs and written authorizations from up the chain of command for "unusual or different treatment of detainees." He also is demanding that the military provide names of all military intelligence officials, CIA officers, FBI agents and civilian contract interrogators who questioned prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor, has refused. He said the requests for records on superior officers' activities and Sanchez's visit are "overly vague and non-specific." A military judge will mediate the dispute before trial, just as a judge would in a civilian court.

In court papers, McCabe also said the defense knows as much as he does about the identities of government agents and contract workers who were at the prison.

The pursuit of higher-ups

To show that Davis was doing what he was told, his lawyers face the daunting task of identifying the specific order and the person who gave it, says retired Marine lieutenant colonel Gary Solis, a former military prosecutor who teaches the laws of war at Georgetown University in Washington.

Then, Solis says, they must show that the order was "lawful." Under military law, following an order cannot be used as a defense to a charge of criminal wrongdoing if it was unlawful.

But Solis says the defense is on the right track in pursuing superior officers and other supervisors who failed to spot the abuse and stop it.

In his report, Taguba recommended reprimands and reassignments for several higher-ranking MP and military intelligence personnel, including Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th MP Brigade, who was in charge of the prison.

Taguba also found that two military intelligence officials and two civilian contract workers were "either directly or indirectly responsible for abuses at Abu Ghraib." They are: Col. Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th MI Brigade; Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, former director of the military's Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center in Iraq; Steven Stephanowicz, a civilian interrogator employed by CACI International Inc.; and John Israel, a civilian interpreter employed by CACI.

Stephanowicz was accused in Taguba's report of instructing MPs in "setting conditions" for interrogations, knowing that his suggestions "equated to physical abuse." Stephanowicz's attorney, Henry Hockeimer of Philadelphia, says Stephanowicz no longer is in Iraq but is still employed by CACI.

Taguba recommended that Pappas' failures be examined in the Pentagon's military intelligence probe and that Jordan be relieved of duty for lying to investigators.

Solis says the military must do more. "This crap about career-ending reprimands doesn't get it," he says. "Officers have to go to court-martial." If they aren't charged, Solis says, "that adds a new layer of injustice to the wrongs that have been committed."

Bill Lawson, Frederick's uncle, says that "my nephew will take his licks, but they need to prosecute everybody else" involved in the abuse scandal.

At Davis' hearing, two prosecution witnesses and four soldiers called by the defense sounded a similar theme: The MPs wanted to please the military intelligence officers and civilian interrogators and did not question them.

Sgt. Hydrue Joyner of the 372nd said that like the others, he also did not challenge Graner and Frederick, the MPs with civilian prison guard experience.

"I am not a corrections officer," Joyner testified. "I'm just an MP, on the road fighting the forces of evil."



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