Two days before he was killed, Rumsfeld authorized "aggressive interrogation techniques," leading to "interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials [that] conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody," the Senate Armed Services Committee report said.
"Shortly after Secretary Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002 approval of his General Counsel's [William Haynes] recommendation to authorize aggressive interrogation techniques, the techniques-and the fact the Secretary had authorized them--became known to interrogators in Afghanistan. A copy of the Secretary's memo was sent from GTMO to Afghanistan."
The Armed Services Committee report further added, "Captain Carolyn Wood, the Officer in Charge of the Intelligence Section at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, said that in January 2003 she saw a power point presentation listing the aggressive techniques that had been authorized by the Secretary."
Wood was singled out in an Army criminal investigative report as having lied to investigators by saying that the shackling of prisoners in prolonged standing positions was done to protect interrogators from being harmed. The Army's internal report said the technique--authorized by Rumsfeld--was used to inflict pain and sleep deprivation.
Wood went on to establish the interrogation and debriefing center at Abu Ghraib. Defense Department reports into the abuse at the prison said she was responsible for interrogation procedures there that went above and beyond those approved by Army commanders.
However, as the Armed Services Committee report makes clear it was Rumsfeld's interrogation directives and a Feb. 7, 2002 action memorandum signed by Bush suspending the Geneva Conventions for al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners that was directly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
According to a detailed account in 2005 in the New York Times, Dilawar, a taxi-driver, was apprehended Dec. 5 by U.S. Forces and taken to Bagram and interrogated about a rocket attack on American base.
Dilawar was chained by his wrists to the ceiling of his cell for four days and brutally beaten by Army interrogators on his legs for hours on end to the point where he could no longer bend them. He died on Dec. 10, 2002.
Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, an Air Force medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Dilawar, said Dilawar's leg was pummeled so badly that the"- tissue was falling apart and had basically been pulpified."
"Had Dilawar lived,"- Rouse told Army investigators in sworn testimony, "I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation. I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus."
According to the secret pages of the Church report released in February, "interrogations in both incidents involved the use of physical violence, including kicking, beating, and the use of "compliance blows" which involved striking the [prisoners] legs with the [interrogators] knees. In both cases, blunt force trauma to the legs was implicated in the deaths.
The Church report claimed that "none of these techniques have ever been approved in Afghanistan."
"Of these, three (marked with X) are alleged to have been employed during interrogations. These techniques--sleep deprivation, the use of scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family, and beating are alleged to have been used in the incidents leading to the two deaths at Bagram in December 2002, which are described at greater length later in this report."
However, the Church report, which said Dilawar and Habibullah's deaths were isolated incidents at the hands of a few rogue soldiers, failed to take into account Rumsfeld's directive to military officials at Bagram to get tougher with detainees and obtain "actionable intelligence" through "detainee exploitation" which, according to the Armed Services report, resulted in widespread abuse at Bagram, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
The Church report goes on to say that a criminal investigation concluded in October 2004 with the recommendation that criminal charges be filed "against 28 soldiers in connection with the deaths."
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