The "Ghosts" that Haunt the CIA
New FOIA disclosures show the agency may have used a loophole in the Geneva Convention to justify stashing "ghost" prisoners in Abu Ghraib
What role did the CIA play in the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq?
That question has hovered at the edges of the detainee abuse scandal ever since Manadel al-Jamadi, the Ice Man, died in November 2003 during CIA interrogation in the prison’s shower room.
Jamadi was one of the CIA’s “ghost” prisoners. These prisoners were kept away from the Red Cross, the organization responsible for ensuring that detainees were being treated humanely, as required by the Geneva Conventions.
The official military inquiry into the abuses at Abu Ghraib, led by Major General Antonio Taguba, found that the practice of of ghosting was “deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law.”
At the CIA, however, it was a different story. A never-before-seen CIA Inspector General report suggests that agency lawyers found a legal loophole in the Geneva Convention to justify ghost prisoners. Under the CIA’s reading of the Geneva Conventions, spies, saboteurs, and members of underground groups like Jamadi could be held incognito for up to two weeks.
In 2005, the CIA Inspector General’s office completed an internal investigation into ghost prisoners. With help of the team at the Chicago law firm of Loevy & Loevy, I sued the agency for the report of its investigation.
Last week, the CIA produced a heavily redacted copy of its investigation titled “CIA’s Role in the Nonregistration of Detainees [Redacted].” (click link for document)
Almost all of the 104 pages produced by the CIA are blank. That means we don’t know whether the Inspector General found that ghosting prisoners played a role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. We also don’t know what measures, if any, the CIA took to hold its personnel accountable.
What we do know from the handful of pages that were released was that the Geneva Conventions was a focus of the Inspector General’s inquiry.
The Geneva Conventions of 1949, drafted in the wake of the horrors of World War II, required humane treatment of detainees in cases of armed conflict or occupation.
In his investigation of ghost prisoners, CIA Inspector General John Helgerson looked closely at Article Four of the Geneva Conventions, which governed treatment of civilians in a time of war.
“A number of Articles of Geneva IV are relevant to this investigation,” the Inspector General’s report states.
Geneva IV required that all civilians held in military custody had be treated humanely. It forbid “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” Under the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross was to be notified of all civilians held in military custody.
Helgerson’s report points out that the Geneva IV made several exceptions to the rules in the case of “a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power.”
Jamadi, like many of the people the CIA was hunting in the fall of 2003, qualified as someone under definite suspicion of hostile activity. Jamadi was suspected in the October 2003 bombing of the offices of the Red Cross in Baghdad that killed 12. Under Geneva IV, insurgents like Jamadi forfeited the right to communicate with the outside world but only as a matter of military necessity. He still had to be “treated with humanity.”
Helgerson’s report also noted that the Geneva Convention required the United States, as the occupying power in Iraq, to notify the Red Cross of all Iraqi civilians—even the spies and saboteurs—”who are kept in custody for more than two weeks.”
The basis for the CIA’s interpretation of the Geneva Conventions was laid out in a legal memo sent to Helgerson. The memo, which was obtained under FOIA by the Center for Constitutional Rights, provided a “working summary relating the geneva convention to the matter of ghost detainees.”
The Geneva Convention gave “some latitude” in the case of spies and saboteurs, the memo states, quoting from the official commentaries to the Geneva Conventions.
“There may of course be occasions when it is desirable to keep the fact of an arrest secret in the hope of capturing a whole organization or spy ring,” the memo states. The memo highlighted the language requiring the names of detained persons be transmitted to the Red Cross “if they are kept in custody for more than two weeks.”
“One can see that this leaves a margin, which will, in the majority of cases, meet any legitimate security requirements,” the memo goes on to state.
The unnamed author who compiled this analysis included a revealing caveat about the CIA’s interpretation of the Geneva Conventions that allowed ghost prisoners. “It may not stand up to scrutiny as more facts are developed, understanding increases, and the positions of the [CIA’s Office of General Counsel] and the rest of the US government become more clear,” the unnamed author who compiled the analysis wrote to Helgerson in October 2004.
But the fact that it stood up at all suggests that it may have been the legal loophole that helped turn Abu Ghrab into a small corner of hell.
“The CIA’s detention and interrogation practices contributed to a loss of accountability and abuse at Abu Ghraib,” Army General George Fay wrote in his report of his investigation into Abu Ghraib. “The lack of [CIA] adherence to the practices and procedures established for accounting for detainees eroded the necessity in the minds of soldiers and civilians for them to follow Army rules.”
The Army MPs at Abu Ghraib came up with special procedures to hide ghost prisoners from the Red Cross. MPs moved about six to eight of the CIA’s ghost detainees around Abu Ghraib to hide them from a visiting Red Cross survey team. Sometimes, a special marking would be made outside the cell of a detainee who could not be allowed to speak with the Red Cross. On another occasion, the Red Cross reported finding detainees in cells labeled “OGA 1, OGA 2, OGA 3.” (The guards referred to the CIA’s prisoners as OGAs, which stood for “Other Government Agency.”)
“1 OGA Brought in,” the Army prison guards noted in their log book on November 4, 2003 when Manadel al-Jamadi entered the prison via a back entrance nude from the waist down, shivering the pre-dawn cold. His death under CIA interrogation shattered any hope of keeping the program a secret.
It was subsequently revealed that one ghost prisoner was held in secret for months. Donald Rumsfeld agreed to a personal request from CIA Director George Tenet to “temporarily” house a CIA detainee in Iraq. The detainee, a suspected Ansar al Islam terrorist known as “Triple-X,” was held for at least seven months incommunicado in a canvas tent at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport. Rumsfeld conceded that was far too long, but insisted that the prisoner had been treated humanely.
There were “dozens perhaps as many 100” CIA ghost prisoners in Iraq, according to the Congressional testimony of two Army generals who investigated the matter. The precise number remained in doubt because the CIA refused to cooperate with the Army’s investigation.
The Taguba report noted that CIA and military interrogators “actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses.” Specialist Sabrina Harman testified that it was the job of two other enlisted men to “do things” for military intelligence and the CIA and “get these people to talk.”
Were these allegations investigated by the CIA Inspector General? We don’t know the answer to that question. It’s classified.
The presence of the CIA in the prison created what General Fay called an “unhealthy mystique.” The mystique permeated the ranks from the highest-ranking officer at the prison, down to the Army privates on the night shift. “Once they confronted the ‘professionals’—including the CIA and people like SEALs or Army Rangers or other special operating forces—they stood in awe of them,” Larry Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, told me. “With little exception, they went along with whatever it was they were directed to do by these people. Whether it was ignoring them and looking the other way. Or whether it was actually participating in the events. That’s what happened.”
The Abu Ghraib scandal, which exploded in the press in April 2004, revealed that prisoners were beaten, sodomized, and terrorized by military working dogs. The Taguba report found numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” committed by low-level Army reservists. The MPs committing the abuse documented it all in hundreds of photos and videos. Some are so awful that, nearly two decades later, they still have not been seen by the public. Eleven soldiers were eventually convicted in 2006 of the crimes at Abu Ghraib.
The scandal was the result of many factors: immoral behavior by soldiers, poor morale, lack of discipline, the shambolic occupation of Iraq, and, as I’ve noted before, the problems that resulted from the CIA working with military.
It was also the fruit of the tree that had been poisoned by the Bush White House’s efforts to rewrite the rules of war.
President Bush declared in 2002 that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to members of al Qaida. That declaration helped pave the way to the agency’s “enhanced” interrogation program that almost everyone outisde the CIA (and some dissidents inside the agency) viewed as torture. It also gave rise to the joint-breaking techniques carried out in CIA black prisons by the agency’s chief of interrogations, Charlie Wise.
Iraq, however, was a different matter. Both the United States and Iraq had agreed to abide by the Geneva Conventions. Nevertheless, the Bush White House, however, pushed to exempt Iraqi terrorists like Jamadi from the protections afforded by the Geneva Convention.
In October 2003, Alberto Gonzales, the White House’s top lawyer, put in an urgent request to the Justice Department requesting a legal opinion on whether the Geneva IV applied to terrorists in Iraq. Jack Goldsmith, the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, ruled that the Convention protected all Iraqis, including those who were members of al Qaida or any other terrorist group.
Goldsmith noted that lawyers the Bush White House had never been told no before and they were furious. “The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,” David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s counsel said, according to Goldsmith’s memoir The Terror Presidency. “You cannot question his decision.” But Goldsmith held firm and the decision stood.
As the case of the Ice Man shows, the CIA ignored Goldsmith’s ruling. Agency personnel conducted brutal interrogations of Iraqi detainees captured by Navy SEALs in Iraq. Detainees were slapped, choked, subjected to terrifying mock assaults, doused with cold water, and had their joints stretched in painful ways, according to classified testimony from the SEALs who worked closely with the agency in the fall of 2003. One former SEAL told me that a CIA interrogator had used a large wooden mallet to frighten Jamadi by smashing it into the plywood wall near his outstretched hand.
The treatment of the CIA’s ghost prisoners like Jamadi may explain why they were kept hidden from International Committee of the Red Cross. Jamadi certainly was not treated “humanely” as required by the Geneva Conventions. Jamadi died in a position the world recognizes as torture and US law forbid “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions such as torture.
It may also help explain why 20 years later the spy agency won’t come clean about the role it played in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
If you want torture, come live in my home. Seems no one can do anything about it. It may stem also from adrenochrome, and the sick ones involved in that, Henneous torture of children for money and others for whatever they get from this evil drug. Hell is a real place.