NYTimes: Der Weg zu Guantánamo Bay camp ! - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

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Ein Bericht in 2 Teilen über das Entstehen von Guantánamo Bay camp und die dazu durchgeführten Veränderungen des Militärrechtes.

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[/TABLE]October 24, 2004
After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law
By TIM GOLDEN

WASHINGTON - In early November 2001, with Americans still staggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, a small group of White House officials worked in great secrecy to devise a new system of justice for the new war they had declared on terrorism.

Determined to deal aggressively with the terrorists they expected to capture, the officials bypassed the federal courts and their constitutional guarantees, giving the military the authority to detain foreign suspects indefinitely and prosecute them in tribunals not used since World War II.

The plan was considered so sensitive that senior White House officials kept its final details hidden from the president`s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, officials said. It was so urgent, some of those involved said, that they hardly thought of consulting Congress.

White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. "We think it guarantees that we`ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve," said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy.

But three years later, not a single terrorist has been prosecuted. Of the roughly 560 men being held at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, only 4 have been formally charged. Preliminary hearings for those suspects brought such a barrage of procedural challenges and public criticism that verdicts could still be months away. And since a Supreme Court decision in June that gave the detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court, the Pentagon has stepped up efforts to send home hundreds of men whom it once branded as dangerous terrorists.

"We`ve cleared whole forests of paper developing procedures for these tribunals, and no one has been tried yet," said Richard L. Shiffrin, who worked on the issue as the Pentagon`s deputy general counsel for intelligence matters. "They just ended up in this Kafkaesque sort of purgatory."

The story of how Guantánamo and the new military justice system became an intractable legacy of Sept. 11 has been largely hidden from public view.

But extensive interviews with current and former officials and a review of confidential documents reveal that the legal strategy took shape as the ambition of a small core of conservative administration officials whose political influence and bureaucratic skill gave them remarkable power in the aftermath of the attacks.

The strategy became a source of sharp conflict within the Bush administration, eventually pitting the highest-profile cabinet secretaries - including Ms. Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld - against one another over issues of due process, intelligence-gathering and international law.

In fact, many officials contend, some of the most serious problems with the military justice system are rooted in the secretive and contentious process from which it emerged.
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A prisoner at the Guantánamo
Bay camp in February 2002.
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Military lawyers were largely excluded from that process in the days after Sept. 11. They have since waged a long struggle to ensure that terrorist prosecutions meet what they say are basic standards of fairness. Uniformed lawyers now assigned to defend Guantánamo detainees have become among the most forceful critics of the Pentagon`s own system.

Foreign policy officials voiced concerns about the legal and diplomatic ramifications, but had little influence. Increasingly, the administration`s plan has come under criticism even from close allies, complicating efforts to transfer scores of Guantánamo prisoners back to their home governments.

To the policy`s architects, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon represented a stinging challenge to American power and an imperative to consider measures that might have been unimaginable in less threatening times. Yet some officials said the strategy was also shaped by longstanding political agendas that had relatively little to do with fighting terrorism.

The administration`s claim of authority to set up military commissions, as the tribunals are formally known, was guided by a desire to strengthen executive power, officials said. Its legal approach, including the decision not to apply the Geneva Conventions, reflected the determination of some influential officials to halt what they viewed as the United States` reflexive submission to international law.

In devising the new system, many officials said they had Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda in mind. But in picking through the hundreds of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, military investigators have struggled to find more than a dozen they can tie directly to significant terrorist acts, officials said. While important Qaeda figures have been captured and held by the C.I.A., administration officials said they were reluctant to bring those prisoners before tribunals they still consider unreliable.

Some administration officials involved in the policy declined to be interviewed, or would do so only on the condition they not be identified. Others defended it strongly, saying the administration had a responsibility to consider extraordinary measures to protect the country from a terrifying enemy.

"Everybody who was involved in this process had, in my mind, a white hat on," Timothy E. Flanigan, the former deputy White House counsel, said in an interview. "They were not out to be cowboys or create a radical new legal regime. What they wanted to do was to use existing legal models to assist in the process of saving lives, to get information. And the war on terror is all about information."

As the policy has faltered, other current and former officials have criticized it on pragmatic grounds, arguing that many of the problems could have been avoided. But some of the criticism also has a moral tone.

"What several of us were concerned about was due process," said John A. Gordon, a retired Air Force general and former deputy C.I.A. director who served as both the senior counterterrorism official and homeland security adviser on President Bush`s National Security Council staff. "There was great concern that we were setting up a process that was contrary to our own ideals."

An Aggressive Approach

The administration`s legal approach to terrorism began to emerge in the first turbulent days after Sept. 11, as the officials in charge of key agencies exhorted their aides to confront Al Qaeda`s threat with bold imagination.

"Legally, the watchword became `forward-leaning,` `` said a former associate White House counsel, Bradford Berenson, "by which everybody meant: `We want to be aggressive. We want to take risks.` ``

That challenge resounded among young lawyers who were settling into important posts at the White House, the Justice Department and other agencies. Many of them were members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal fraternity. Some had clerked for Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia in particular. A striking number had clerked for a prominent Reagan appointee, Lawrence H. Silberman of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

One young lawyer recalled looking around the room during a meeting with Attorney General John Ashcroft. "Of 10 people, 7 of us were former Silberman clerks," he said.

Mr. Berenson, then 36, had been consumed with the nomination of federal judges until he was suddenly reassigned to terrorism issues and thrown into intense, 15-hour workdays, filled with competing urgencies and intermittent new alerts.

"All of a sudden, the curtain was lifted on this incredibly frightening world," he said. "You were spending every day looking at the dossiers of the world`s leading terrorists. There was a palpable sense of threat."

As generals prepared for war in Afghanistan, lawyers scrambled to understand how the new campaign against terrorism could be waged within the confines of old laws.

Mr. Flanigan was at the center of the administration`s legal counteroffensive. A personable, soft-spoken father of 14 children, his easy manner sometimes belied the force of his beliefs. He had arrived at the White House after distinguishing himself as an agile legal thinker and a Republican stalwart: During the Clinton scandals, he defended the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, saying he had conducted his investigation "in a moderate and appropriate fashion." In 2000, he played an important role on the Bush campaign`s legal team in the Florida recount.

In the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Flanigan sought advice from the Justice Department`s Office of Legal Counsel on "the legality of the use of military force to prevent or deter terrorist activity inside the United States,`` according to a previously undisclosed department memorandum that was reviewed by The New York Times.

The 20-page response came from John C. Yoo, a 34-year-old Bush appointee with a glittering résumé and a reputation as perhaps the most intellectually aggressive among a small group of legal scholars who had challenged what they saw as the United States` excessive deference to international law. On Sept. 21, 2001, Mr. Yoo wrote that the question was how the Constitution`s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure might apply if the military used "deadly force in a manner that endangered the lives of United States citizens."

Mr. Yoo listed an inventory of possible operations: shooting down a civilian airliner hijacked by terrorists; setting up military checkpoints inside an American city; employing surveillance methods more sophisticated than those available to law enforcement; or using military forces "to raid or attack dwellings where terrorists were thought to be, despite risks that third parties could be killed or injured by exchanges of fire."

Mr. Yoo noted that those actions could raise constitutional issues, but said that in the face of devastating terrorist attacks, "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties." If the president decided the threat justified deploying the military inside the country, he wrote, then "we think that the Fourth Amendment should be no more relevant than it would be in cases of invasion or insurrection."

The prospect of such military action at home was mostly hypothetical at that point, but with the government taking the fight against terrorism to Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, lawyers in the administration took the same "forward-leaning" approach to making plans for the terrorists they thought would be captured.

The idea of using military commissions to try suspected terrorists first came to Mr. Flanigan, he said, in a phone call a couple of days after the attacks from William P. Barr, the former attorney general under whom Mr. Flanigan had served as head of the Justice Department`s Office of Legal Counsel during the first Bush administration.

Mr. Barr had first suggested the use of military tribunals a decade before, to try suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Although the idea made little headway at the time, Mr. Barr said he reminded Mr. Flanigan that the Legal Counsel`s Office had done considerable research on the question. Mr. Flanigan had an aide call for the files.

"I thought it was a great idea," he recalled.

Military commissions, he thought, would give the government wide latitude to hold, interrogate and prosecute the sort of suspects who might be silenced by lawyers in criminal courts. They would also put the control over prosecutions squarely in the hands of the president.

The same ideas were taking hold in the office of Vice President Cheney, championed by his 44-year-old counsel, David S. Addington. At the time, Mr. Addington, a longtime Cheney aide with an indistinct portfolio and no real staff, was not well-known even in the government. But he would become legendary as a voraciously hard-working official with strongly conservative views, an unusually sharp pen and wide influence over military, intelligence and other matters. In a matter of months, he would make a mark as one of the most important architects of the administration`s legal strategy against foreign terrorism.

Beyond the prosecutorial benefits of military commissions, the two lawyers saw a less tangible, but perhaps equally important advantage. "From a political standpoint," Mr. Flanigan said, "it communicated the message that we were at war, that this was not going to be business as usual."

Changing the Rules

In fact, very little about how the tribunal policy came about resembled business as usual. For half a century, since the end of World War II, most major national-security initiatives had been forged through interagency debate. But some senior Bush administration officials felt that process placed undue power in the hands of cautious, slow-moving foreign policy bureaucrats. The sense of urgency after Sept. 11 brought that attitude to the surface.

Little more than a week after the attacks, officials said, the White House counsel, Alberto F. Gonzales, set up an interagency group to draw up options for prosecuting terrorists. They came together with high expectations.

"We were going to go after the people responsible for the attacks, and the operating assumption was that we would capture a significant number of Al Qaeda operatives," said Pierre-Richard Prosper, the State Department official assigned to lead the group. "We were thinking hundreds."

Mr. Prosper, then 37, had just been sworn in as the department`s ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. As a prosecutor, he had taken on street gangs and drug Mafias and had won the first genocide conviction before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Even so, some administration lawyers eyed him suspiciously - as more diplomat than crime-fighter.

Mr. Gonzales had made it clear that he wanted Mr. Prosper`s group to put forward military commissions as a viable option, officials said. The group laid out three others - criminal trials, military courts-martial and tribunals with both civilian and military members, like those used for Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

Representatives of the Justice Department`s criminal division, which had prosecuted a string of Qaeda defendants in federal district court over the previous decade, argued that the federal courts could do the job again. The option of toughening criminal laws or adapting the courts, as several European countries had done, was discussed, but only briefly, two officials said.

"The towers were still smoking, literally," Mr. Prosper said. "I remember asking: Can the federal courts in New York handle this? It wasn`t a legal question so much as it was logistical. You had 300 Al Qaeda members, potentially. And did we want to put the judges and juries in harm`s way?"

Lawyers at the White House saw criminal courts as a minefield, several officials said.

Much of the evidence against terror suspects would be classified intelligence that would be difficult to air in court or too sketchy to meet federal standards, the lawyers warned. Another issue was security: Was it safe to try Osama bin Laden in Manhattan, where he was facing federal charges for the 1998 bombings of American Embassies in East Africa?

Then there was a tactical question. To act pre-emptively against Al Qaeda, the authorities would need information that defense lawyers and due-process rules might discourage suspects from giving up.

Mr. Flanigan framed the choice starkly: "Are we going to go with a system that is really guaranteed to prevent us from getting information in every case or are we going to go another route?"

Military commissions had no statutory rules of their own. In past American wars, when such tribunals had been used to carry out battlefield justice against spies, saboteurs and others accused of violating the laws of war, they had generally hewed to prevailing standards of military justice. But the advocates for commissions in the Bush administration saw no reason they could not adapt the rules, officials said. Standards of proof could be lowered. Secrecy provisions could be expanded. The death penalty could be more liberally applied.

But some members of the interagency group saw it as more complicated. Terrorism had not been clearly established as a war crime under international law. Writing new law for a military tribunal might end up being more difficult than prosecuting terrorism cases in existing courts.

By late October 2001, the White House lawyers had grown impatient with what they saw as the dithering of Mr. Prosper`s group and what one former official called the "cold feet" of some of its members. Mr. Flanigan said he thought the government needed to move urgently in case a major terrorist linked to the attacks was apprehended.

He gathered up the research that the Prosper group had completed on military commissions and took charge of the matter himself. Suddenly, the other options were off the table and the Prosper group was out of business.

"Prosper is a thoughtful, gentle, process-oriented guy," the former official said. "At that time, gentle was not an adjective that anybody wanted."

A Secretive Circle

With the White House in charge, officials said, the planning for tribunals moved forward more quickly, and more secretly. Whole agencies were left out of the discussion. So were most of the government`s experts in military and international law.

The legal basis for the administration`s approach was laid out on Nov. 6 in a confidential 35-page memorandum sent to Mr. Gonzales from Patrick F. Philbin, a deputy in the Legal Counsel`s office. (Attorney General Ashcroft has refused recent Congressional requests for the document, but a copy was reviewed by The Times.)

The memorandum`s plain legalese belied its bold assertions.

It said that the president, as commander in chief, has "inherent authority`` to establish military commissions without Congressional authorization. It concluded that the Sept. 11 attacks were "plainly sufficient" to warrant applying the laws of war.
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The courtroom at Guantánamo Bay,
where some preliminary hearings have
taken place. Of the roughly 560 men
being held at the base, only 4 have
been formally charged.
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Opening a debate that would later divide the administration, the memorandum also suggested that the White House could apply international law selectively. It stated specifically that trying terrorists under the laws of war "does not mean that terrorists will receive the protections of the Geneva Conventions or the rights that laws of war accord to lawful combatants."

The central legal precedent cited in the memorandum was a 1942 case in which the Supreme Court upheld President Franklin D. Roosevelt`s use of a military commission to try eight Nazi saboteurs who had sneaked into the United States aboard submarines. Since that ruling, revolutions had taken place in both international and military law, with the adoption of the Geneva Conventions in 1949 and the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 1951. Even so, the Justice memorandum said the 1942 ruling had "set a clear constitutional analysis" under which due process rights do not apply to military commissions.

Roosevelt, too, created his military commission without new and explicit Congressional approval, and authorized the military to fashion its own procedural rules. He also established himself, rather than a military judge, as the "final reviewing authority`` for the case.

Mr. Addington seized on the Roosevelt precedent as a model, two people involved in the process said, despite vast differences. Roosevelt acted against enemy agents in a traditional war among nations. Mr. Bush would be asserting the same power to take on a shadowy network of adversaries with no geographic boundaries, in a conflict with no foreseeable end.

Mr. Addington, who drafted the order with Mr. Flanigan, was particularly influential, several officials said, because he represented Mr. Cheney and brought formidable experience in national-security law to a small circle of senior officials. Mr. Addington turned down several requests for interviews and a spokesman for the vice president`s office declined to comment.

"He was probably the only one there who would know what an order would look like, what it would say," a former Justice Department official said, noting Mr. Addington`s work at the Defense Department, the C.I.A., and Congressional intelligence committees. "He didn`t have authority over anyone. But he`s a persuasive guy."

To many officials outside the circle, the secrecy was remarkable.

While Mr. Ashcroft and his deputy, Larry D. Thompson, were closely consulted, the head of the Justice Department`s criminal division, Michael Chertoff, who had argued for trying terror suspects in federal court, saw the military order only when it was published, officials said. Mr. Rumsfeld was kept informed of the plan mainly through his general counsel, William J. Haynes II, several Pentagon officials said.

Many of the Pentagon`s experts on military justice, uniformed lawyers who had spent their careers working on such issues, were mostly kept in the dark. "I can`t tell you how compartmented things were," said retired Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, who was then the Navy`s senior military lawyer, or judge advocate general. "This was a closed administration."

A group of experienced Army lawyers had been meeting with Mr. Haynes repeatedly on the process, but began to suspect that what they said did not resonate outside the Pentagon, several of them said.

On Friday, Nov. 9, Defense Department officials said, Mr. Haynes called the head of the team, Col. Lawrence J. Morris, into his office to review a draft of the presidential order. He was given 30 minutes to study it but was not allowed to keep a copy or even take notes.

The following day, the Army`s judge advocate general, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Romig, hurriedly convened a meeting of senior military lawyers to discuss a response. The group worked through the Veterans Day weekend to prepare suggestions that would have moved the tribunals closer to existing military justice. But when the final document was issued that Tuesday, it reflected none of the officers` ideas, several military officials said. "They hadn`t changed a thing," one official said.

In fact, while the military lawyers were pulling together their response, they were unaware that senior administration officials were already at the White House putting finishing touches on the plan. At a meeting that Saturday in the Roosevelt Room, Mr. Cheney led a discussion among Attorney General Ashcroft, Mr. Haynes of the Defense Department, the White House lawyers and a few other aides.

Senior officials of the State Department and the National Security Council staff were excluded from final discussions of the policy, even at a time when they were meeting daily about Afghanistan with the officials who were drafting the order. According to two people involved in the process, Mr. Cheney advocated withholding the draft from Ms. Rice and Secretary Powell.

When the two cabinet members found out about the military order - upon its public release - Ms. Rice was particularly angry, several senior officials said. Spokesmen for both officials declined to comment.

Mr. Bush played only a modest role in the debate, senior administration officials said. In an initial discussion, he agreed that military commissions should be an option, the officials said. Later, Mr. Cheney discussed a draft of the order with Mr. Bush over lunch, one former official said. The president signed the three-page order on Nov. 13.

No ceremony accompanied the signing, and the order was released to the public that day without so much as a press briefing. But its historic significance was unmistakable.

The military could detain and prosecute any foreigner whom the president or his representative determined to have "engaged in, aided or abetted, or conspired to commit" terrorism. Echoing the Roosevelt order, the Bush document promised "free and fair" tribunals but offered few guarantees: There was no promise of public trials, no right to remain silent, no presumption of innocence. As in 1942, guilt did not necessarily have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and a death sentence could be imposed even with a divided verdict.

Despite those similarities, some military and international lawyers were struck by the differences.

"The Roosevelt order referred specifically to eight people, the eight Nazi saboteurs," said Mr. Shiffrin, who was then the Defense Department`s deputy general counsel for intelligence matters and had studied the Nazi saboteurs` case. "Here we were putting in place a parallel system of justice for a universe of people who we had no idea about - who they would be, how many of them there would be. It was a very dramatic measure."

Mounting Criticism

The White House did its best to play down the drama, but criticism of the order was immediate and widespread.

Civil libertarians and some Congressional leaders saw an attempt to supplant the criminal justice system. Critics also worried about the concentration of power: The president or his proxies would define the crimes (often after an act had been committed); set the rules for trial; and choose the judges, juries and appellate panels.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who was then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was among a handful of legislators who argued that the administration`s plan required explicit Congressional authorization. The Congress had just passed the Patriot Act by a huge margin, and Mr. Leahy proposed authorizing military commissions, but with some important changes, including a presumption of innocence for defendants and appellate review by the Supreme Court.

Critics seized on complaints from abroad, including an announcement from the Spanish authorities that they would not extradite some terrorist suspects to the United States if they would face the tribunals. "We are the most powerful nation on earth," Mr. Leahy said. "But in the struggle against terrorism, we don`t have the option of going it alone. Would these military tribunals be worth jeopardizing the cooperation we expect and need from our allies?"

Senators called for Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Ashcroft to testify about the tribunals plan. Instead, the administration sent Mr. Prosper from the State Department and Mr. Chertoff of the Justice Department - both of whom had questioned the use of commissions and were later excluded from the administration`s final deliberations.

But the Congressional opposition melted in the face of opinion polls showing strong support for the president`s measures against terrorism.

There was another reason fears were allayed. With the order signed, the Pentagon was writing rules for exactly how the commissions would be conducted, and an early draft that was leaked to the news media suggested defendants` rights would be expanded. Mr. Rumsfeld, who assembled a group of outside legal experts - including some who had worked on World War II-era tribunals - to consult on the rules, said critics` concerns would be taken into account.

But all of the critics were not outside the administration.

Many of the Pentagon`s uniformed lawyers were angered by the implication that the military would be used to deliver "rough justice" for the terrorists. The Uniform Code of Military Justice had moved steadily into line with the due-process standards of the federal courts, and senior military lawyers were proud and protective of their system. They generally supported using commissions for terrorists, but argued that the system would not be fair without greater rights for defendants.

"The military lawyers would from time to time remind the civilians that there was a Constitution that we had to pay attention to," said Admiral Guter, who, after retiring as the Navy judge advocate general, signed a "friend of the court" brief on behalf of plaintiffs in the Guantánamo Supreme Court case.

Even as uniformed lawyers were given a greater role in writing rules for the commissions, they still felt out of the loop.

In early 2002, Admiral Guter said, during a weekly lunch with Mr. Haynes and the top lawyers for the military branches, he raised the issue with Mr. Haynes directly: "We need more information."

Mr. Haynes looked at him coldly. "No, you don`t," he quoted Mr. Haynes as saying.

Mr. Haynes declined to comment on the exchange.

Lt. Col. William K. Lietzau, a Yale-trained Marine lawyer on Mr. Haynes`s staff, often found himself in the middle. "I could see how the JAGs were frustrated that the task of setting up the commissions hadn`t been delegated to them,`` he said, referring to the senior military lawyers. "On the other hand, I could see how some of their recommendations frustrated the leadership because they didn`t always appear to embrace the paradigm shift needed to deal with terrorism."

Some Justice Department officials also urged changes in the commission rules, current and former officials said. While Attorney General Ashcroft staunchly defended the policy in public, in a private meeting with Pentagon officials, he said some of the proposed commission rules would be seen as "draconian," two officials said.

On nearly every issue, interviews and documents show, the harder line was staked out by White House lawyers: Mr. Addington, Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Flanigan. They opposed allowing civilian lawyers to assist the tribunal defendants, as military courts-martial permit, or allowing civilians to serve on the appellate panel that would oversee the commissions. They also opposed granting defendants a presumption of innocence.

In the end, Mr. Rumsfeld compromised. He granted defendants a presumption of innocence and set "beyond a reasonable doubt" as a standard for proving guilt. He also allowed the defendants to hire civilian lawyers, but restricted the lawyers` access to case information. And he gave the presiding officer at a tribunal license to admit any evidence he thought might be convincing to a "reasonable person.``

One right the administration sought to deny the prisoners was the ability to appeal the legality of their detentions in federal court. The administration had done its best to decide the question when searching for a place to detain hundreds of prisoners captured in Afghanistan. Every location it seriously considered - including an American military base in Germany and islands in the South Pacific - was outside the United States and, the administration believed, beyond the reach of the federal judiciary.

On Dec. 28, 2001, after officials settled on Guantánamo Bay, Mr. Philbin and Mr. Yoo told the Pentagon in a memorandum that it could make a "very strong" claim that prisoners there would be outside the purview of American courts. But the memorandum cautioned that a reasonable argument could also be made that Guantánamo "while not part of the sovereign territory of the United States, is within the territorial jurisdiction of a federal court." That warning would come back to haunt the administration.

A Shift in Power

Some of the officials who helped design the new system of justice would later explain the influence they exercised in the chaotic days after Sept. 11 as a response to a crisis. But a more enduring shift of power within the administration was taking place - one that became apparent in a decision that would have significant consequences for how terror suspects were interrogated and detained.

At issue was whether the administration would apply the Geneva Conventions to the conflicts with Al Qaeda and the Taliban and whether those enemies would be treated as prisoners of war.

Based on the advice of White House and Justice Department lawyers, Mr. Bush initially decided on Jan. 18, 2002, that the conventions would not apply to either conflict. But at a meeting of senior national security officials several days later, Secretary of State Powell asked him to reconsider.

Mr. Powell agreed that the conventions did not apply to the global fight against Al Qaeda. But he said troops could be put at risk if the United States disavowed the conventions in dealing with the Taliban - the de facto government of Afghanistan. Both Mr. Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, supported his position, Pentagon officials said.

In a debate that included the administration`s most experienced national-security officials, a voice heard belonged to Mr. Yoo, only a deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel. He cast Afghanistan as a "failed state," and said its fighters should not be considered a real army but a "militant, terrorist-like group." In a Jan. 25 memorandum, the White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales, characterized that opinion as "definitive," although it was not the final basis for the president`s decision.

The Gonzales memorandum suggested that the "new kind of war" Mr. Bush wanted to fight could hardly be reconciled with the "quaint" privileges that the Geneva Conventions gave to prisoners of war, or the "strict limitations" they imposed on interrogations.

Military lawyers disputed the idea that applying the conventions would necessarily limit interrogators to the name, rank and serial number of their captives. "There were very good reasons not to designate the detainees as prisoners of war, but the claim that they couldn`t be interrogated was not one of them," Colonel Lietzau said. Again, though, such questions were scarcely heard, officials involved in the discussions said.

Mr. Yoo`s rise reflected a different approach by the Bush administration to sensitive legal questions concerning foreign affairs, defense and intelligence.

In past administrations, officials said, the Office of Legal Counsel usually weighed in with opinions on questions that had already been deliberated by the legal staffs of the agencies involved. Under Mr. Bush, the office frequently had a first and final say. "O.L.C. was definitely running the show legally, and John Yoo in particular," a former Pentagon lawyer said. "He`s kind of fun to be around, and he has an opinion on everything. Even though he was quite young, he exercised disproportionate authority because of his personality and his strong opinions."

Mr. Yoo`s influence was amplified by friendships he developed not just with Mr. Addington and Mr. Flanigan, but also Mr. Haynes, with whom he played squash as often as three or four times a week at the Pentagon Officers Athletic Club.

If the Geneva Conventions debate raised Mr. Yoo`s stature, it had the opposite effect on lawyers at the State Department, who were later excluded from sensitive discussions on matters like the interrogation of detainees, officials from several agencies said.

"State was cut out of a lot of this activity from February of 2002 on," one senior administration official said. "These were treaties that we were dealing with; they are meant to know about that."

The State Department legal adviser, William H. Taft IV, was shunned by the lawyers who dominated the detainee policy, officials said. Although Mr. Taft had served as the deputy secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, more conservative colleagues whispered that he lacked the constitution to fight terrorists.

"He was seen as ideologically squishy and suspect," a former White House official said. "People did not take him very seriously."

Through a State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, Mr. Taft declined to comment.

The rivalries could be almost adolescent. When field trips to Guantánamo Bay were arranged for administration lawyers, the invitations were sometimes relayed last to the State Department and National Security Council, officials said, in the hope that lawyers there would not be able to go on short notice.

It was on the first field trip, 10 days after detainees began to arrive there on Jan. 11, 2002, that White House lawyers made clear their intention to move forward quickly with military commissions.

On the flight home, several officials said, Mr. Addington urged Mr. Gonzales to seek a blanket designation of all the detainees being sent to Guantánamo as eligible for trial under the president`s order. Mr. Gonzales agreed.

The next day, the Pentagon instructed military intelligence officers at the base to start filling out one-page forms for each detainee, describing their alleged offenses. Weeks later, Mr. Haynes issued an urgent call to the military services, asking them to submit nominations for a chief prosecutor.

The first trials, many military and administration officials believed, were just around the corner.
Next: A Policy Unravels

Jack Begg contributed research for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Der 2.Teil

October 25, 2004
TOUGH JUSTICE
Administration Officials Split Over Stalled Military Tribunals
By TIM GOLDEN

WASHINGTON - When hundreds of prisoners arrived at the American naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in early 2002, the Bush administration laid out a straightforward plan: once the men were interrogated, the worst of the lot would be prosecuted before special military tribunals devised to bring terrorists to justice quickly.

A year later, with no trials yet in sight, some officials at the highest levels of the Bush administration began privately venting their frustration about both the slow pace of the Pentagon`s new courts and the soundness of their rules. Attorney General John Ashcroft was especially vocal.

"Timothy McVeigh was one of the worst killers in U.S. history," Mr. Ashcroft said at one meeting of senior officials, according to two of those present. "But at least we had fair procedures for him."
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Camp Delta at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay.
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The administration invoked extraordinary wartime powers to set up the new system of military justice, arguing that the Sept. 11 attacks and the continuing threat they exposed justified the use of legal authorities that had not been exercised since World War II. But as officials sought to apply those powers to a very different kind of conflict, they became mired in problems they are still struggling to solve.

Although White House lawyers said they rushed to devise a new judicial structure that could handle serious Qaeda terrorists, many of the detainees sent to Guantánamo turned out to be low-level militants, Taliban fighters and men simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Pentagon`s efforts to gather intelligence from more valuable prisoners were also deeply flawed, military intelligence officers said, complicating the prosecution of some detainees and nearly paralyzing efforts to release others.

Interviews with dozens of officials show that the myriad problems ignited an often fierce behind-the-scenes struggle that set the Pentagon and its allies in the White House against adversaries at the National Security Council, the State Department and Justice Department. The friction among officials like Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; and Mr. Ashcroft sheds new light on the internal dynamics of an administration that has shown a remarkably united public front.

In many cases, officials said, the battles were fueled by the discontent of military, foreign-policy and other officials who had been excluded from a role in shaping the policy after Sept. 11.

"Anytime you have a process which is not inclusive, you end up giving people a reason to be opposed to it," said Timothy E. Flanigan, a former deputy White House counsel who helped craft the legal strategy. "That was certainly the case here.``

The Pentagon continues to defend military commissions, as the tribunals are called, as an important tool against terrorism. But in several instances, military officials said, Mr. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, resisted moving forward with prosecutions, in part because they felt the cases were weak.

As prosecutors prepare for their first two trials, now scheduled for December and January, the commissions have been roiled by vigorous attacks from the uniformed lawyers assigned to the defendants. Defense challenges have prompted the removal of half of the officers appointed to hear the first cases, and have called into question the independence of the presiding officer.

On Monday, Oct. 25, a federal district court judge in Washington is expected to hear arguments in a lawsuit by one of the defense lawyers challenging the commissions as unconstitutional. Already, White House and Pentagon lawyers are considering ways to revise the tribunals after Election Day, administration officials said.

As the Sept. 11 attacks have receded, political and diplomatic opposition to the administration`s use of wartime powers has grown. Now, critics argue that the delays in moving forward with the commissions has weakened their legal justification as well.

"When commissions have been done in the past, they have either been authorized by Congress or done on the battlefield, typically during declared wars," said Neal K. Katyal, a Georgetown University law professor who will argue the case in federal court. "But here, you have a commission set up unilaterally by the president, at a time when war has not been declared, thousands of miles from a battlefield and now more than three years after the attacks."

Hunting for Defendants

With American military, intelligence and law-enforcement efforts focused on Al Qaeda, administration officials expected to corner many of its members in Afghanistan, sweep up others around the world and start prosecuting the terrorists within months.

Mr. Rumsfeld had not been intimately involved in developing the plan for prosecuting terrorist suspects. But once the prisoners started to arrive from Afghanistan, he took a strong interest in Guantánamo`s potential as a source of intelligence, officials said.

He was soon disappointed.

Experienced interrogators, analysts and interpreters were all in short supply. Few, if any, military intelligence officers had significant expertise on Al Qaeda or Afghanistan. Even plywood interrogation huts were scarce: One senior interrogator said he finally bribed some Navy Seabees with cases of beer to build two more.

"Guantánamo had been a backwater location for many years," said Gen. James T. Hill, who oversees the base as commander of the United States Southern Command. "Now, all of a sudden, we were involved in strategic intelligence-gathering from an enemy unlike any we`ve encountered on the battlefield before, in a Guantánamo environment that at the beginning was very austere. So all of this had to evolve."

It did not evolve fast enough for Mr. Rumsfeld, who ordered an overhaul of the intelligence effort in September 2002.

Three months later, he authorized the use of more coercive interrogation techniques, taking advantage of a decision by the White House that the detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions. Although Mr. Rumsfeld later disallowed some of the most severe methods, including the removal of clothing and the use of dogs to induce stress, disclosures about the harsh methods lent credence to charges of abuse leveled by former detainees.

But intelligence-gathering was only part of the problem. It quickly became apparent that few of the prisoners captured in Afghanistan were the sort of hardened terrorists the administration had hoped for.

"It became obvious to us as we reviewed the evidence that, in many cases, we had simply gotten the slowest guys on the battlefield,`` said Lt. Col. Thomas S. Berg, a member of the original military legal team set up to work on the prosecutions. "We literally found guys who had been shot in the butt.``

The reserve officer chosen by Mr. Rumsfeld to lead the intelligence operation at Guantánamo, Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, was told after his arrival there in February 2002 that as many as half of the initial detainees were thought to be of little or no intelligence value, two officers familiar with the briefings said. He also found that the prisoners included elderly and emotionally disturbed Afghan men, including one tribal elder so wizened that interrogators nicknamed him "Al Qaeda Claus."

Barely a month after taking command, General Dunlavey flew to Afghanistan and Kuwait to complain directly to military commanders there. But while the commanders acknowledged that prisoner screening could be improved, they said they had no other place to put suspects who might be of some intelligence value or threat, a senior officer familiar with the meetings recalled.

"Basically, they said, `General, please shut up and go home,` " the officer said.

The lack of solid information about the detainees undermined a basic premise of the administration`s legal plan. The order that established the military commissions on Nov. 13, 2001, authorized the Pentagon to hold and prosecute any foreigners designated by the president as suspected terrorists.

On Jan. 22, 2002, at the request of the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, Pentagon lawyers directed intelligence officers at Guantánamo to fill out a one-page form for each prisoner, certifying the president`s "reason to believe" their involvement with terrorism, officials said.

But within weeks, intelligence officers began reporting back to the Pentagon that they did not have enough evidence on most prisoners to even complete the forms, officials said. By March 21, Defense Department officials indicated they would hold the Guantánamo prisoners indefinitely and on different legal grounds - as "enemy combatants" in a war against the United States.

"We are within our rights, and I don`t think anyone disputes it, that we may hold enemy combatants for the duration of the conflict," William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon`s general counsel, said then. "And the conflict is still going and we don`t see an end in sight right now."

Emerging Divisions

As accounts of the problems at Guantánamo reached Washington in the spring of 2002, the question of how to deal with the detainees began to divide the Bush administration.

In public, the administration continued to maintain that the prisoners were both frighteningly dangerous and a likely font of vital intelligence. "They may well have information about future terrorist attacks against the United States," said Vice President Dick Cheney. "We need that information."

But at the State Department, diplomats were awash in complaints from foreign governments, many of them allies in the Afghan war, about the open-ended imprisonment of their citizens. F.B.I. agents and Justice Department officials were struck by how few strong prosecution cases there seemed to be, current and former officials said.

Officials said that C.I.A. officers who were trying to recruit some Guantánamo detainees as agents raised another fear: that the camp could become America`s madrasa, or Islamic school, radicalizing prisoners by its harsh conditions, the indoctrination of militant leaders and the detainees` focused study of the Koran - the only book they were initially given to read.

Officials on the National Security Council staff were particularly uneasy. The discussions that produced the president`s Nov. 13 military order had been dominated by a small circle of White House lawyers overseen by Mr. Cheney. Ms. Rice, like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, had been excluded, officials said, an embarrassing slight given her role as a mediator on national security issues.

Mr. Bush later brought the council staff back into the process, assigning it to draw up a broader strategy to deal with the thousands of prisoners in Afghanistan. Two senior aides, Elliott Abrams and John B. Bellinger III, convened an interagency group to study the issue.

The men made an odd team: Mr. Bellinger, the council`s legal adviser, was a measured former Justice Department official with a degree from Princeton and a taste for monogrammed dress shirts. Mr. Abrams, known as a bare-knuckled bureaucratic infighter, was making his return to government after being convicted of lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal and later pardoned by the first President Bush.

"They were very persistent," one senior administration official from another agency said of the National Security Council aides. "They kept pressing: Did all the detainees really belong there? What was the plan to start transferring them out?"

The council officials also worried what might happen after such transfers.

"There was real concern that if detainees were harshly treated and deprived of due process, they were going to end up turning against the United States, if they had not already," said retired Gen. John A. Gordon, a former deputy director of the C.I.A. who became President Bush`s deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism. "We were not making any converts."

The Defense Department was notably unresponsive to prodding by other agencies. Requests for information were answered slowly, if at all, officials said. Promised policy changes - new criteria to improve the screening of detainees being sent to Guantánamo, or proposed terms for their transfer home - were delayed repeatedly.

"We provided them with only the information that we, in our arrogance - or the arrogance of our leadership - thought they needed," one former Pentagon official said. He added that he and others went into interagency meetings on Guantánamo with a standard script, dictated by their superiors: "Back off - we`ve got this under control."

The National Security Council officials were notably unsuccessful in pushing for a major public diplomacy effort to counter the widely seen images of shackled detainees in orange jumpsuits.

Members of Congress, journalists and others were eventually allowed to visit the base on tightly controlled tours. But the Pentagon, citing security concerns, refused to release even basic information about the prisoners, or say publicly what they were accused of having done.

"Rumsfeld was very clear that he wanted the Department to be driving this bus," said a former Army secretary, Thomas E. White, who was closely involved in the Guantánamo policy. "He reigned supreme in the government. The vice president backed him up, and that was his power base."

Documenting the Problems

Stymied by the Pentagon, National Security Council aides eventually began playing their own game of hardball.

In August 2002, at what officials said was the council`s request, the C.I.A. dispatched a senior Arab-speaking intelligence analyst to assess the detainees and talk to intelligence officers at the base. He produced a top-secret report of about 15 pages that, according to several officials who read it, described many of the detainees as having no meaningful ties to Al Qaeda.

It also hinted that the harsh conditions, lack of reading materials and, in some cases, extended isolation bordered on abusive and might prove counterproductive, those officials said.

Back in Washington, administration officials said, the report made its way to Ms. Rice, who began building an alliance of dissenters within the administration`s national security team.

She turned first to Mr. Powell, officials said. Her staff also sought out the president`s Homeland Security adviser, Tom Ridge, and set up an off-the-record dinner at which he debriefed General Dunlavey, the Guantánamo commander, who was a friend of Mr. Ridge`s from his days as a lawyer in Erie, Pa.

Ms. Rice also found a powerful ally at the Department of Justice.

Early on, Justice had seemed firmly with the administration`s hard-liners. In December 2001, Attorney General Ashcroft defended the president`s military order before the Senate, going so far as to warn those who saw an assault on civil liberties, "Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve."

But by the fall of 2002, some senior Justice Department officials were uneasy with the Pentagon`s handling of the detainees, the slow progress of the military commissions and the seemingly improvised nature of decisions about how to prosecute suspected terrorists.

The administration had used the federal courts to convict John Walker Lindh, a young California man captured by the military in Afghanistan, but ordered the transfer to military custody of Jose Padilla, a young American arrested by the F.B.I. in Chicago. The Justice Department had insisted on trying Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-born member of Al Qaeda arrested in Minnesota. But the Pentagon had held onto Yaser E. Hamdi, an American-born Saudi captured in Afghanistan, eventually moving him from Guantánamo to join Mr. Padilla in a naval brig in South Carolina.

"There was not a real process for determining who was an enemy combatant," said Viet D. Dinh, a former Justice Department official who worked on terrorism issues under Mr. Ashcroft. "And the ad hoc nature of that process gave a lot of power to the Pentagon."

With the federal courts starting to consider cases involving detainees, a split developed over whether to allow Mr. Hamdi and Mr. Padilla, in particular, some access to lawyers. Behind the disagreement was a philosophical difference about how best to achieve the shared goal of strengthening presidential power. A more reasonable position, many argued, would avoid review and possible reversal by the courts. Others, led by the vice president`s influential counsel, David S. Addington, advocated taking the most aggressive stance they felt they could defend, officials said.

"Addington`s position was, `We think what we`re doing is right - why should we stop doing it?` " a former White House official said. "If the courts tell us we`re wrong, we`ll stop then."

A spokesman for the vice president`s office said Mr. Addington would not comment.

Officials of the Justice Department`s criminal division, who worked closely with the F.B.I., were grappling with other questions. They saw the Guantánamo detentions as a source of cascading problems: angry foreign allies, a tarnishing of America`s image overseas and declining cooperation in international counterterrorism efforts.

"This was an issue of basic fairness," one former senior official involved in the discussions said. "The never-ending detentions were creating a lot of animosity among our allies. We pushed hard for them to move quicker. The attorney general pushed hard for it. They didn`t, and there was an immense amount of frustration."

Dissenters Make Gains

Eventually, the critics began to gain ground. At Ms. Rice`s initiative, several officials said, members of the cabinet-level "principals` committee" on national security matters were called to a meeting about the Guantánamo situation on Friday, Oct. 18, 2002.

"We are not serving the president`s interest; we are not serving the interests of the country," one senior official quoted her as saying. "Security has got to be paramount, but we have got to work better with other countries, and we have got to have better procedures."

Mr. Powell echoed the call for the release or transfer of less-important detainees. "He wanted to get down to the hard-core element that needed to be detained," a senior official who attended the meeting said, "and he realized that there was a body of people we needed to move."

As for the most discussed of the elderly Afghans - Faiz Muhammad, or "Al Qaeda Claus" - Ms. Rice told the Pentagon: "Just get rid of this guy," one senior official said. A week after the meeting, Mr. Muhammad flew back to Afghanistan with three other detainees.

Several officials said Mr. Rumsfeld did not seem to appreciate his colleagues` growing involvement, but was also impatient with Guantánamo`s problems.

"Certainly Don was ambivalent," another senior administration official said. "That phrase, `I don`t want to be the world`s jailer,` that was one of the expressions he used."

The chief Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said the defense secretary grew tired of hearing "that at lower levels, there was this anxiety or that anxiety" about Guantánamo, and ordered a series of briefings to keep his cabinet-level counterparts informed about operations there.

But several officials said that with preparations for war in Iraq moving forward and the Guantánamo intelligence issues unresolved, Mr. Rumsfeld`s enthusiasm for the military commissions had waned.

By late 2002, officials said, secret plans for the tribunals cited prospective defendants including several men identified as high-level Qaeda figures and thought to be held by the C.I.A.: Abu Zubaydah, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. But with both the C.I.A. captives and more important Guantánamo detainees, interrogation was given priority over prosecution, officials said.

At a Pentagon briefing on Oct. 19, the day after the interagency gathering, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed his lawyers to clear their prosecution plans with other top national-security officials. While officials said the briefings were partly intended as a show of openness, it effectively postponed action on the tribunals for months.

At Ms. Rice`s urging, Mr. Rumsfeld also agreed to give comprehensive briefings on Guantánamo to cabinet-level national-security officials and their deputies. Officials said the higher-level presentation was delivered on Jan. 16, 2003, by Marshall S. Billingslea, a 31-year-old acting assistant secretary who was a favorite of Mr. Rumsfeld.

"It was basically a sales job: `What we are doing down there is valuable, it`s producing results,` " a former Pentagon official who viewed the briefing said. "They were factual reports, but they were also very much a public-relations job."

Tweaking the Policy

In late 2002, partly in response to the mounting pressure, the Pentagon began to make some significant changes in its detention policies. By the time they took effect, though, many of the difficulties at Guantánamo were becoming harder to solve.

According to Pentagon documents reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. Wolfowitz approved several new measures on Dec. 26, 2002, including revised criteria for sending prisoners to Guantánamo, a policy to transfer detainees back to their home countries and a requirement to periodically assess whether those who remained at Guantánamo should stay.

Oddly, the Defense Department made no mention of what it called the "combatant-commander review" process. Mr. Haynes, who had pushed for the procedure, touted it in a draft op-ed article dated March 16, 2003, saying it went "far beyond anything required by international law." But other officials objected to disclosing the review effort, and the article was never submitted for publication.

The internal struggle over the prisoners` fate began to play out in dysfunctional weekly meetings at which officials from across the government assembled by secure video link to consider individual detainees put forward by the Pentagon for outright release or transfer to the custody of their home governments.

At Mr. Rumsfeld`s insistence, the group tried to resolve the cases of at least 10 Guantánamo detainees a week, but that almost never happened. Information on the prisoners was often inconclusive. And while foreign-policy officials emphasized the diplomatic costs of the open-ended detentions, none of the officials wanted to take responsibility for releasing a potentially dangerous prisoner.

"There was tremendous concern in the interagency process about letting someone go who might come back to haunt us," Mr. White, the former Army secretary, recalled. The desire to release men who might be innocent, he added, "was a fairly small upside, compared to the possible downside of misjudging some guy who then goes out and commits some terrible act."

The process, some officials said, turned upside down not only any presumption of innocence but the American justice system`s traditional premise that it is preferable to free a guilty man than to wrongly convict one who is innocent. It was also ineffective: by early 2004, the Pentagon had managed to transfer only 13 prisoners overseas.

"We don`t want to be in a situation where we`re reckless,`` the under secretary of defense who oversaw detainee issues, Douglas J. Feith, said in an interview. "But if you`re unwilling to take risks, then you can`t transfer people and then you wind up creating other risks.``

Some other senior officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that was just what happened for the better part of a year.

"There were lots of factors that needed to be weighed - not just the risks," one administration official involved in the process said. "It can hurt us if we let the wrong guy out. But it can also hurt the country and hurt the president if people think we are holding people who should not be held, that we don`t have fair procedures, or that we are mistreating them."

Even when the Pentagon was willing to release prisoners, it had trouble persuading foreign governments to take over their custody because of its rigid rules. According to administration officials and diplomats, the Defense Department initially demanded that foreign governments adopt the Bush administration`s wartime legal framework, taking custody of the detainees as "enemy combatants," and promising to hold them "until the end of hostilities" by terrorists against the United States. It also insisted that Washington be able to retrieve the detainees at any subsequent time if they were needed for intelligence purposes.

"The rest of the world failed to see this as a real war, rather than a law-enforcement situation," said Lt. Col. William K. Lietzau, a war-crimes expert who worked in the Pentagon general counsel`s office. "When we went to another country and told them, `We need you to hold onto these people,` they looked differently at which laws applied."

Pressure for Action

At a White House meeting in late February 2003 - more than a year after the presidential order that created the commissions - Mr. Ashcroft finally lost his patience.

"When are those commissions going to get moving?" officials quoted him as demanding.

Pentagon officials pledged to get started by the end of March, and began a flurry of preparations that included hiring commission lawyers, fine-tuning procedures and even building a provisional courthouse at Guantánamo, officials said.

Defense Department officials had been searching for cases that would be easy to win in a system that still had kinks to be worked out. They did not expect that one kink would be public opinion overseas.

The officials settled on two British-born detainees at Guantánamo, in whom the Justice Department had taken a particular interest. The men, Feroz Abbasi and Moazzam Begg, spoke English, cooperated with interrogators and had ample dossiers in the data banks of British intelligence, several officials said. Neither ranked as a senior Qaeda operative, but both had enticing connections.

Mr. Abbasi, then 21, told his captors in Afghanistan that he had traveled there with a man whom the F.B.I. later identified as Earnest James Ujaama, an American convert to Islam who later pleaded guilty to illegally supporting the Taliban.

Officials said that Mr. Begg, 35, had drawn the interest of American and British counterterrorism officials since at least 1999, in part for what they said was his relationship with Abu Hamza al-Masri , a militant cleric at the Finsbury Park mosque in London..

Lawyers for both Mr. Abbasi and Mr. Begg denied that they were involved in terrorism and insisted that any confessions they were said to have made had probably been coerced.

In a letter dated Oct. 16, 2002, Michael Chertoff, the head of the Justice Department`s criminal division, asked the Pentagon to allow federal prosecutors to try the two British detainees or, after their trial by military commission, let them use the men as witnesses against Mr. Ujaama and Mr. Masri. Eight months later, Defense Department officials said, they won agreement from the British government on a series of secret terms for the military trials, including diplomatic access to the men and a promise that they would not be subject to the death penalty. On July 3, 2003, Mr. Bush designated the two men and four other defendants for the first set of tribunals.

News of the men`s prosecution became public in Britain just as Prime Minister Tony Blair was beginning a major public relations campaign to overcome his unpopular support for the Iraq war. Within days, he was under renewed attack in Parliament, this time over the detainees, and promising that any tribunals would follow "proper international law."

Mr. Blair`s critics saw his inability to regain custody of a total of nine British detainees at Guantánamo as proof of his subjugation to Washington. After meetings with Mr. Blair the next week, Mr. Bush agreed to negotiate.

Neither government has disclosed details of the talks that followed. According to the accounts of several officials involved, American representatives grew distressed as the talks dragged on for months with the chief British negotiator, Attorney General Peter Goldsmith. Officials said Lord Goldsmith, who was himself under fire in Britain for his support of the Iraq war, would not budge from a basic demand: that verdicts of the military commissions be reviewed by civilian courts.

Bush administration officials argued that such a change would have rendered the commissions unworkable. Instead, they made a remarkable counteroffer, promising to send any convicted British defendants home to serve their sentences - a step that would almost certainly set off a review of the cases by British courts.

"We knew what that meant," one United States official said. "They would be released as soon as they set foot back there."

Yet even that proposal was rejected by Lord Goldsmith, officials said. During a state visit to Britain in late November 2003, Mr. Bush finally agreed to shelve the cases of the two British suspects for the foreseeable future, American officials said.

Losing Control

As the commissions moved toward their first trial this year, the Defense Department`s control over the process began to falter.

The collapse of negotiations with the British government and a decision by the Supreme Court to hear a case challenging the detentions at Guantánamo prompted yet another push by the Pentagon to get the commissions going. A retired Army lawyer with a reputation for independence, Maj. Gen. John D. Altenburg Jr., was hired to supervise the tribunals process, and refinements to the rules continued.

What was more difficult to manage was the handful of scrappy military lawyers who had been appointed as defense counsel for the prisoners.

"They expected us to stay within the box they designed for us - accept the rules, accept the process and just fight on the facts," said Lt. Cmdr. Philip Sundel, a Navy lawyer who was hired in March 2003 as one of the first two members of the defense team. "That was never going to happen."

One of the lawyers` first moves was to file a "friend of the court" brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of the Guantánamo detainees. Another was to challenge the Defense Department on speaking to the news media. When their blistering brief drew wide attention, Commander Sundel said, "We made it clear that if they tried to keep us gagged, we would sue."

It worked. The Pentagon relented and the lawyers used their new platform to attack the commissions process as unfair, unconstitutional and worse. In April, another member of the defense team, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, filed suit in Federal District Court to block the commissions altogether.

While the defense was gaining momentum, the office of the commission prosecutors was in turmoil. The chief prosecutor, Col. Frederick L. Borch, left the commission and two prosecutors were reassigned after a dispute that officials said involved the supposed "hand-picking" of the commission panels.

Still, officials said, the resources of the prosecution team substantially outweighed those of the defense, and as the first hearings drew closer, the defense counsel complained that the deck was being further stacked against them.

While the defendants had a right to remain silent, they noted, information from coercive interrogations was determined to be admissible. The commissions were supposed to presume the innocence of the defendants, yet senior military officials had repeatedly branded the Guantánamo detainees as dangerous terrorists. And although the commissions were to judge guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt," the rules of evidence allowed for evidence that, as one of the lawyers put it, "would be laughed out of any other court."

General Altenburg said in an interview he understood that public perceptions of the fairness of the commissions would be vitally important. But when preliminary hearings for the first four cases began in late August, neither he nor the panel he chose seemed ready for the scrutiny.

The impartiality of the retired Army lawyer presiding over the trials, Col. Peter S. Brownback III, was impugned by the defense, which pointed to his long friendship with General Altenburg. Other military officers on the panel, which combines the functions of judge and jury, were challenged for conflicts of interest or inexperience. Even the court interpreters were criticized for mistranslating key statements into Arabic for some of the defendants.

Weeks later, with most of the lawyers in the prosecutors` office demanding Colonel Brownback`s removal, the chief prosecutor asked whether he could impartially continue. Colonel Brownback declined to step down, but General Altenburg removed two panel members and an alternate in response to the defense challenges.

That left only three members, the minimum needed to hold a commission - and two fewer than the number required to hear a felony case in a regular military court-martial.

An Uncertain Future

Nearly three years after Mr. Bush signed his military order, senior officials have begun to acknowledge privately that the fate of both Guantánamo and the military commissions is uncertain.

Military officials say construction is soon to begin at Guantánamo on a second permanent prison unit, a $24-million compound that will house 200 high-security detainees. Another, $31 million unit, able to hold 100 detainees in supermax security, opened in April.

Yet in Washington, a senior legal official acknowledged that the administration still had "a major decision" to make about the base`s future after the Supreme Court on June 28 upheld the right of the detainees to petition the federal courts for their freedom.

"Do we want to take them to Guantánamo?" the official asked in an interview. "Maybe not. Maybe Guantánamo is no longer a viable option."

In the meantime, the administration is redoubling efforts to broker agreements with foreign governments willing to take over custody of many of the roughly 560 prisoners still being held.

"We`re making an effort,`` said Mr. Feith. "We`re not eliminating the risks, we`re managing them."

But even after long and complex negotiations with an assortment of foreign governments, the outcome of some of the 56 transfers has so far been less than promising.

In June, Russian prosecutors abruptly freed seven former Guantánamo prisoners whom other Russian officials had promised to prosecute upon their return. United States officials said they did not receive so much as a warning.

In another case, a 31-year-old Dane was sent home last February after signing an agreement to refrain from further militant activity. But last month, he said in an interview that he was on his way to Chechnya to fight with other Muslims, and invited Americans to use his earlier pledge "as toilet paper." (The man later retracted those statements, and Danish officials promised to keep him under close watch.)

In recent days, Pentagon officials have also confirmed reports that at least nine Afghans and a Pakistani who were formerly held at Guantánamo have rejoined militant forces after being freed outright. After refusing for months to discuss such mistakes, Defense Department officials now cite them as a sobering justification for the security concerns that have dominated their approach at Guantánamo.

The Pentagon has also put in place its third successive system to evaluate the prisoners` continuing status as enemy combatants. Administration officials hope that the latest version - at which the detainees may plead their case with the help of a military aide, but without access to lawyers, witnesses or exculpatory information - will help to persuade the court that the men have been given adequate review.

But critics insist that the changes the Pentagon has made at Guantánamo and to the military commissions amount to half-measures that will not fix a system that is fundamentally at odds with the country`s legal values.

"As soon as the process was set up, it started to become something they never wanted it to be," said Commander Sundel. "But it is astounding that a small group of people could create an entirely new judicial process - without many of the due-process guarantees we expect - and think it could survive real challenges.``

Don Van Natta Jr. contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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Torture FOIA

March 7, 2005

Government Documents on Torture
Freedom of Information Act
http://www.aclu.org/International/International.cfm?ID=13962…

The ACLU filed a request on Oct. 7, 2003 under the Freedom of Information Act demanding the release of information about detainees held overseas by the United States. A lawsuit was filed in June 2004 demanding that the government comply with the October 2003 FOIA request.

Below are documents the government did not want the general public to read -- including an FBI memo (pdf) stating that Defense Department interrogators impersonated FBI agents and used " torture techniques" against a detainee at Guantanamo.

The public has a right to know.

(These documents can be viewed using Acrobat Reader)
> [urlDepartment of Defense,]http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/030905[/url] agencies agree on " ghost" detainees (3/9/05) | [urlPress]http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17692&c=206[/url]
> [urlArmy and Navy records,]http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/030705[/url] investigations of detainee abuse in Iraq (3/7/05) | [urlPress]http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17656&c=206[/url]
> [urlDefense Department Documents]http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/021605.html[/url] (2/18/05) | [urlPress]http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17515&c=206[/url]
> [urlArmy records]http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/012405.html[/url] (1/24/05) | [urlPress]http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17350&c=206[/url]
> [urlFBI,]http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/010505.html[/url] e-mails of McCraw inquiry into detainee abuse in Guantanamo (1/5/05) | [urlPress]http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17273&c=206[/url]
> [urlArmy,]http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/122104.html[/url] investigations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan (12/21/04) | [urlPress]http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17224&c=206[/url]
> [urlFBI,]http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/122004.html[/url] e-mails of FBI agents witnessing the use of " torture techniques" in Guantanamo (12/20/04) | [urlPress]http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17216&c=206[/url]
>Navy, investigations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan (12/14/04) | [urlPress]http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17206&c=206[/url]
> [urlDefense Intelligence Agency, State Department and FBI,]http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/120704.html[/url] detainee abuse by Task Force 626 in Iraq is reported, e-mails express concern about interrogation methods. (12/7/04) | [urlPress]http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=17156&c=206[/url]
> [urlDefense Department,]http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/101904.html[/url] Taguba report (10/19/04) | [urlPress]http://www.aclu.org/International/International.cfm?ID=16864&c=36[/url]
> [urlOffice of Information and Privacy, Defense Department, Army and FBI,]http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/101504.html[/url] the Ryder Report (10/15/04) |[urlPress]http://www.aclu.org/International/International.cfm?ID=16864&c=36[/url]

Einige Presseartikel:
Documents Describe U.S. Pact on Iraq Ghost Detainees
[urlPrisoners at Abu Ghraib included children, commander says]http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2005/03/10/nation/doc4230d8186b9d8265969234.txt[/url]
[urlThe Resort to Torture]http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/[/url]

[url]http://www.aclu.org/newface[/url]

[Joerver]

Man fragt sich, wie konnte so was geschehen?

Wie konnte es möglich sein, dass eine Nation, die sich sonst gerne als Wiege der Demokratie, der Menschenrechte und der Freiheit bezeichnet, sich so weit in den Sumpf von Folter und Mißachtung von allem, was den USA als Erbe ihrer Gründungsväter mitgegeben wurde, hineingeraten konnte.

Ich bin in den letzten Tagen auf ein Interview von Chalmers Johnson, sein Buch 'Blowback, The Costs and Consequences of American Empire' machte nach dem 9/11 Furore, gestoßen, der sehr gut beschreibt, wie es zu der Entwicklung kommen konnte.

Er beginnt mit der Warnung von Eisenhower vor dem Military-Industrial Complex.

Dieser entwickelte sich aus der Bedrohung durch die UDSSR und hatte sich nach einigen Jahren soweit verselbständigt, sodass nach dem Kollaps der UDSSR dieser Mechanismus nicht mehr zurückgefahren werden konnte.

Allein über 700 US-Militärbasen bestehen in der ganzen Welt. Die USA sah sich nicht in der Lage diese Hochrüstung abzubauen, obwohl die Rechtfertigung dafür weggefallen war.

Die Waffenproduktion war eine Art militärischer Keynesianismus und ein großer Teil der US-Wirtschaft basiert auf der Herstellung von Waffen.

Deshalb mußte eine neue Bedrohung her und nach den Anschlägen vom 9/11 hatte man eine neue Bedrohung.

Johnson erklärt das so:

Johnson: Part of empire is the way it's penetrated our society, the way we've become dependent on it. Empires in the past -- the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Japanese Empire -- helped to enrich British citizens, Roman citizens, Japanese citizens. In our society, we don't want to admit how deeply the making and selling of weaponry has become our way of life; that we really have no more than four major weapons manufacturers -- Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics -- but these companies distribute their huge contracts to as many states, as many congressional districts, as possible.

The military budget is starting to bankrupt the country. It's got so much in it that's well beyond any rational military purpose. It equals just less than half of total global military spending. And yet here we are, stymied by two of the smallest, poorest countries on Earth. Iraq before we invaded had a GDP the size of the state of Louisiana and Afghanistan was certainly one of the poorest places on the planet. And yet these two places have stopped us.

Militarily, we've got an incoherent, not very intelligent budget. It becomes less incoherent only when you realize the ways it's being used to fund our industries or that one of the few things we still manufacture reasonably effectively is weapons. It's a huge export business, run not by the companies but by foreign military sales within the Pentagon.

This is not, of course, free enterprise. Four huge manufacturers with only one major customer. This is state socialism and it's keeping the economy running not in the way it's taught in any economics course in any American university. It's closer to what John Maynard Keynes advocated for getting out of the Great Depression -- counter-cyclical governmental expenditures to keep people employed.

The country suffers from a collective anxiety neurosis every time we talk about closing bases and it has nothing to do with politics. New England goes just as mad over shutting down the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as people here in San Diego would if you suggested shutting the Marine Corps Air Station. It's always seen as our base. How dare you take away our base! Our congressmen must get it back!

This illustrates what I consider the most insidious aspect of our militarism and our military empire. We can't get off it any more. It's not that we're hooked in a narcotic sense. It's just that we'd collapse as an economy if we let it go and we know it. That's the terrifying thing.

And the precedents for this should really terrify us. The greatest single previous example of military Keynesianism -- that is, of taking an economy distraught over recession or depression, over people being very close to the edge and turning it around -- is Germany. Remember, for the five years after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he was admired as one of the geniuses of modern times. And people were put back to work. This was done entirely through military Keynesianism, an alliance between the Nazi Party and German manufacturers.

Many at the time claimed it was an answer to the problems of real Keynesianism, of using artificial government demand to reopen factories, which was seen as strengthening the trade unions, the working class. Capitalists were afraid of government policies that tended to strengthen the working class. They might prove to be revolutionary. They had been often enough in that century. In this country, we were still shell-shocked over Bolshevism; to a certain extent, we still are.

What we've done with our economy is very similar to what Adolf Hitler did with his. We turn out airplanes and other weapons systems in huge numbers. This leads us right back to 1991 when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. We couldn't let the Cold War come to an end. We realized it very quickly. In fact, there are many people who believe that the thrust of the Cold War even as it began, especially in the National Security Council's grand strategy document, NSC68, rested on the clear understanding of late middle-aged Americans who had lived through the Great Depression that the American economy could not sustain itself on the basis of capitalist free enterprise. And that's how -- my god – in 1966, only a couple of decades after we started down this path, we ended up with some 32,000 nuclear warheads. That was the year of the peak stockpile, which made no sense at all. We still have 9,960 at the present moment.

Now, the 2007 Pentagon budget doesn't make sense either. It's $439.3 billion…

Das gesamte Interview in 2 Teilen:
[urlCold Warrior in a Strange Land]http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=70243[/url]
[urlWhat Ever Happened to Congress?]http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=70576[/url]

Nun hat sich die Situation nicht so entwickelt, wie man es erwartet hatte. Der Irak, ein Land mit dem GDP von Louisiana, leistet erbitterten Widerstand.

Die Versuche der USA diesen Widerstand durch Folter wie in Abu Graib und durch Internierung in Guantanamo, wie es mit Erfolg in Zeiten des Kalten Krieges im US-Hinterhof in Mittel-und Südamerika an anderen Orten praktiziert worden war, und der Einsatz von Napalm und Splitterbomben in Wohngebieten wie in Vietnam, hatten nicht den nötigen Erfolg, sondern haben fast die gesamte Welt in eine antiamerikanischen Rausch versetzt.

Nun stehen die USA vor diesem Scherbenhaufen, der immer weiter zu dem Ausverkaufes der ideellen und wirtschaftlichen Werten der USA führt. Dre Verkauf der wirtschaftlichen Werte ist in den letzten Wochen öfters verhindert worden, wird sich aber auf Dauer nicht vermeiden lassen.

Nur bei den ideellen Werten gibt es nicts mehr zu verkaufen. Da muß erst mal eine Neubewertung vorgenommen werden.

Hier nochmal die Bankrotterklärung des US-Idealismus:
http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction…

The Abu Ghraib files

279 photographs and 19 videos from the Army's internal investigation record a harrowing three months of detainee abuse inside the notorious prison -- and make clear that many of those responsible have yet to be held accountable.
http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction…

By Joan Walsh

Mar. 14, 2006 | The human rights scandal now known as "Abu Ghraib" began its journey toward exposure on Jan. 13, 2004, when Spc. Joseph Darby handed over horrific images of detainee abuse to the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID). The next day, the Army launched a criminal investigation. Three and a half months later, CBS News and the New Yorker published photos and stories that introduced the world to devastating scenes of torture and suffering inside the decrepit prison in Iraq.
[Table align=right]

[/TABLE]
Today Salon presents an archive of 279 photos and 19 videos of Abu Ghraib abuse first gathered by the CID, along with information drawn from the CID's own timeline of the events depicted. As we reported Feb. 16, Salon's Mark Benjamin recently acquired extensive documentation of the CID investigation -- including this photo archive and timeline -- from a military source who spent time at Abu Ghraib and who is familiar with the Army probe.

Although the world is now sadly familiar with images of naked, hooded prisoners in scenes of horrifying humiliation and abuse, this is the first time that the full dossier of the Army's own photographic evidence of the scandal has been made public. Most of the photos have already been seen, but the Army's own analysis of the story behind the photos has never been fully told. It is a shocking, night-by-night record of three months inside Abu Ghraib's notorious cellblock 1A, and it tells the story, in more graphic detail than ever before, of the rampant abuse of prisoners there. The annotated archive also includes new details about the role of the CIA, military intelligence and the CID itself in abuse captured by cameras in the fall of 2003.

The Bush administration, which recently announced plans to shut the notorious prison and transfer detainees to other sites in Iraq, would like the world to believe that it has dealt with the abuse, and that it's time to move on. But questions about what took place there, and who was responsible, won't end with Abu Ghraib's closure.

In fact, after two years of relative silence, there's suddenly new interest in asking questions. A CID spokesman recently told Salon that the agency has reopened its investigation into Abu Ghraib "to pursue some additional information" after having called the case closed in October 2005. Just this week, one of two prison dog handlers accused of torturing detainees by threatening them with dogs went on trial in Fort Meade, Md. Lawyers for Army Sgt. Michael J. Smith argue that he was only implementing dog-use policies approved by his superiors, and Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the former commander of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony at Smith's trial.

Meanwhile, as Salon reported last week, the Army blocked the retirement of Major Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former Guantánamo interrogation commander who allegedly brought tougher intelligence tactics to Abu Ghraib, after two senators requested that he be kept on active duty so that he could face further questioning for his role in the detainee abuse scandal. Miller refused to testify at the dog-handler trials, invoking the military equivalent of the Fifth Amendment to shield himself from self-incrimination, but Pappas has charged that Miller introduced the use of dogs and other harsh tactics at the prison. Also last week, Salon revealed that U.S. Army Reserve Capt. Christopher R. Brinson is fighting the reprimand he received for his role in the abuse. Brinson, currently an aide to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., supervised military police Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. and some of the other guards who have been convicted in the scandal. Now Brinson joins a growing chorus of Abu Ghraib figures who blame the higher command structure for what happened at the prison.

Against this backdrop of renewed scrutiny, we think the CID photo archive and related materials we present today merit close examination. In "The Abu Ghraib Files," Salon presents an annotated, chronological version of these crucial CID investigative documents -- the most comprehensive public record to date of the military's attempt to analyze the photos from the prison. All 279 photos and 19 videos are reproduced here, along with the original captions created by Army investigators. They have been grouped into chapters that follow the CID's timeline, and each chapter has been narrated with the facts and findings of the Taguba, Schlesinger, Fay-Jones and other Pentagon investigations (see sidebar).

But the documentation in "The Abu Ghraib Files" also draws from materials that have not been released to the public. Among these is the official logbook kept by those military soldiers who committed the bulk of the photographed abuse. Salon has also acquired an April 2005 CID interview with military police Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., one of the ringleaders of the abuse. (One hundred seventy-three of the 279 photos in the archive were taken with Graner's Sony FD Mavica camera.) The interview was conducted several months after Graner was court-martialed and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He received a grant of immunity against further prosecution for anything he revealed. The documentation also draws from the unpublished testimony of Brinson to the CIA's Office of Inspector General about the death of a prisoner at the hands of the CIA.

Thanks in part to that additional sourcing, "The Abu Ghraib Files" sheds new light on the 3-year-old prison abuse scandal. While many of the 279 photos have been previously released, until this point no one has been able to authenticate this number of images from the prison, or to provide the Army's own documentation of what they reveal. This is the Army's forensic report of what happened at the prison: dates, times, places, cameras and, in some though not all cases, identities of the detainees and soldiers involved in the abuse. (Salon has chosen to withhold detainee identities not previously known to the public, and to obscure their faces in photographs, to protect the victims' privacy.)

Some of the noteworthy revelations include:

# The prisoner in perhaps the most iconic photo from Abu Ghraib, the hooded man standing on a box with electrical wires attached to his hands, was being interrogated by the CID itself for his alleged role in the kidnapping and murder of two American soldiers in Iraq. As noted in Chapter 4, "Electrical Wires," a CID spokesman confirmed to Salon that a CID agent was suspended in fall 2004 pending an investigation and later found "derelict in his duties" for his role in prisoner abuse. Salon could not confirm whether the agent was punished for his role in the abuse of the hooded man connected to electrical wires, known to military personnel as "Gilligan."

# The CID documentation, as well as other reporting, confirmed that a March 11 New York Times article identifying the prisoner in the iconic photo as Ali Shalal Qaissi, a local Baath Party member under Saddam Hussein and now a prisoners' rights advocate in Jordan, was incorrect. The CID photo archive confirms that a prisoner matching Qaissi's description -- he has a deformed left hand -- and known by the nickname "The Claw" was held at the prison and photographed by military police on the same night as the mock electrocution, but he was not the one standing on the box and attached to wires. The CID materials say all five photos of the hooded man were the prisoner known as "Gilligan." It remains possible that Qaissi received similar treatment, but there is no record of that abuse.

# Chapter 5, "Other Government Agencies," tells the story behind photos of the mangled corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi, known as the "Ice Man," who died during interrogation by a CIA officer. No one at the CIA has been prosecuted, even though al-Jamadi's death was ruled a homicide. The chapter adds new detail about the CIA's role in the prison drawn from Christopher Brinson's testimony to CIA investigators.

# As explained in Chapter 1, "Standard Operating Procedure," some of the 279 photos and 19 videos in the archive depict controversial interrogation tactics employed in cellblock 1A. Among the examples of abuse on display in the photos were techniques sanctioned by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for use on "unlawful enemy combatants" in the "war on terror." These include forced nudity, the use of dogs to terrorize prisoners, keeping prisoners in stress positions -- physically uncomfortable poses of various types -- for many hours, and varieties of sleep deprivation. Some of these techniques migrated from Guantánamo and Afghanistan to Iraq in 2003. (The abuse depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos did not occur during interrogation sessions, but in some cases military guards allege they were encouraged to "soften up" detainees for interrogation by higher-ranking military intelligence officers.)

# Military intelligence personnel and civilian contractors employed by the military appear in some of the photographs with the military guards, and entries from a prison logbook captured in the archive show that in some cases military police believed their tough tactics were being approved by -- and in some cases ordered by -- military intelligence officers and civilian contractors. The logbook also documents prisoner rioting and the regular presence of multiple OGA (other government agency) detainees held in the military intelligence wing.

Three years and at least six Pentagon investigations later, we now know that many share the blame for the outrages that took place at Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003. The abuse took place against the backdrop of rising chaos in Iraq. In those months the U.S. military faced a raging insurgency for which it hadn't planned. As mortar attacks rained down on the overcrowded prison -- at one point there were only 450 guards for 7,000 prisoners -- its command structure broke down. At the same time, the pressure from the Pentagon and the White House for "actionable intelligence" was intense, and harsh interrogation techniques were approved to obtain it. Bush administration lawyers, including Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, had already created a radical post-9/11 legal framework that disregarded the Geneva Conventions and other international laws governing the humane treatment of prisoners in the "war on terror." Intelligence agencies such as the CIA were apparently given the green light to operate by their own set of secret rules.

But while the Pentagon's own probes have acknowledged that military commanders, civilian contractors, the CIA and government policymakers all bear some responsibility for the abuses, to date only nine enlisted soldiers have been prosecuted for their crimes at Abu Ghraib (see sidebar). An additional four soldiers and eight officers, including Brinson, Pappas and Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of military police at Abu Ghraib, have been reprimanded. (Pappas and Karpinski were also relieved of their posts.) To date no high-level U.S. officials have been brought to justice in a court of law for what went on at Abu Ghraib.

Our purpose for presenting this large catalog of images remains much the same as it was four weeks ago when we first published a much smaller number of Abu Ghraib photos that had not previously appeared in the media. As Walter Shapiro wrote, Abu Ghraib symbolizes "the failure of a democratic society to investigate well-documented abuses by its soldiers." The documentary record of the abuse has come out in the media in a piecemeal fashion, often lacking context or description. Meanwhile, our representatives in Washington have allowed the facts about what occurred to fester in Pentagon reports without acting on their disturbing conclusions. We believe this extensive, if deeply disturbing, CID archive of photographic evidence belongs in the public record as documentation toward further investigation and accountability.

While we want readers to understand what it is we're presenting, we also want to make clear its limitations. The 279-photo CID timeline and other material obtained by Salon do not include the agency's conclusions about the evidence it gathered. The captions, which Salon has chosen to reproduce almost verbatim (see methodology), contain a significant number of missing names of soldiers and detainees, misspellings and other minor discrepancies; we don't know if the CID addressed these issues in other drafts or documents. Also, the CID materials contain two different forensic reports. The first, completed June 6, 2004, in Tikrit, Iraq, analyzed a seized laptop computer and eight CDs and found 1,325 images and 93 videos of "suspected detainee abuse." The second report, completed a month later in Fort Belvoir, Va., analyzed 12 CDs and found "approximately 280 individual digital photos and 19 digital movies depicting possible detainee abuse." It remains unclear why and how the CID narrowed its set of forensic evidence to the 279 images and 19 videos that we reproduce here.

Although the photos are a disturbing visual account of particular incidents inside Abu Ghraib prison, they should not be viewed as representing the sum total of what occurred. As the Schlesinger report states in its convoluted prose: "We do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere." Also, the documentation doesn't include many details about the detainees who were abused and tortured at Abu Ghraib. While the International Committee of the Red Cross report from February 2004 cited military intelligence officers as estimating that "between 70 to 90 percent of persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake," much remains unknown about the detainees abused in the "hard site" where the Army housed violent and dangerous detainees and where much of the abuse took place.

Finally, it's critical to recognize that this set of images from Abu Ghraib is only one snapshot of systematic tactics the United States has used in four-plus years of the global war on terror. There have been many allegations of abuse, torture and other practices that violate international law, from holding prisoners without charging them at Guantánamo Bay and other secretive U.S. military bases and prison facilities around the world to the practice of "rendition," or the transporting of detainees to foreign countries whose regimes use torture, to ongoing human rights violations inside detention facilities in Iraq. Abu Ghraib in fall 2003 may have been its own particular hell, but the variations of individual abuse perpetrated appear to be exceptional in only one way: They were photographed and filmed.

Read Chapter 1: Oct. 17-22, 2003 -- [url"Standard operating procedure"]http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/chapter_1/index.html[/url]

-- By Joan Walsh

[Joerver]

Es wird nur wenige geben, die sich für diese Aufarbeitung der Vorgeschichte des Irak-Krieges interessieren, aber es ist ein Dokument, das zeigt, welchen Illusionenen sich Saddam hingegeben hat.
Zuerst noch eine Vorbemerkung aus der Times, um näher zu erklären, um was es geht.
Man kann es auch so ausdrücken, Saddam hatte Schwierigkeiten, seine Unschuld zu beweisen und das hat ihn in den Augen der US-Hardliner noch schuldiger gemacht.
Das ist das gleiche Spiel, was auch jetzt wieder im Iran abläuft.

April 30, 2006
The Reading File
Saddam Hussein, Misunderstood
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/weekinreview/30reading.htm…

In the months leading up to the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein did try to cooperate with United Nations inspectors, a decision that, paradoxically, helped convince the West that he was hiding weapons of mass destruction. That is one conclusion in "Saddam's Delusions: The View From the Inside," by Kevin Woods, James Lacey and Williamson Murray, an article in Foreign Affairs (www.foreignaffairs.org) based on material from the Iraqi Perspectives Project, a postwar examination by the American armed forces into the character of Mr. Hussein's regime.

By late 2002, Saddam finally tilted toward trying to persuade the international community that Iraq was cooperating with the inspectors of Unscom (the United Nations Special Commission) and that it no longer had W.M.D. programs. Saddam was insistent that Iraq would give full access to United Nations inspectors "in order not to give President Bush any excuses to start a war."

Ironically, it now appears that some of the actions resulting from Saddam's new policy of cooperation actually helped solidify the coalition's case for war. Over the years, Western intelligence services had obtained many internal Iraqi communications, among them a 1996 memorandum from the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service directing all subordinates to "insure that there is no equipment, materials, research, studies or books related to manufacturing of the prohibited weapons (chemical, biological, nuclear and missiles) in your site." And when United Nations inspectors went to these research and storage locations, they inevitably discovered lingering evidence of W.M.D.-related programs.

In 2002, therefore, when the United States intercepted a message between two Iraqi Republican Guard corps commanders discussing the removal of the words "nerve agents" from "the wireless instructions," or learned of instructions to "search the area surrounding the headquarters camp and [the unit] for any chemical agents, make sure the area is free of chemical containers, and write a report on it," United States analysts viewed this information through the prism of a decade of prior deceit. They had no way of knowing that this time the information reflected the regime's attempt to ensure it was in compliance with United Nations resolutions.

What was meant to prevent suspicion thus ended up heightening it. The tidbit about removing the term "nerve agents" from radio instructions was prominently cited as an example of Iraqi bad faith by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in his Feb. 5, 2003, statement to the United Nations.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Ich stelle diesen Artikel in einen alten Thread, um nicht für einen Artikel einen neuen aufzumachen. Der Titel passt nicht ganz, aber er hat doch einen direkten Bezug.

Noch eine letzte Bemerkung, der [urlRheinische Merkur]http://www.rheinischer-merkur.de/393.0.html[/url] veröffnentlicht regelmäßig Übersetzungrn aus Foreign Affairs. Wer an einer deutschen Fassung diese Artikels interessiert ist, sollte dort in den nächste Wochen ab und zu mal nachsehen.

Herausgeber von "Saddam's Delusions" ist das Pentagon.




Saddam's Delusions: The View From the Inside
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060501faessay85301/kevin-woo…

By Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006
Summary: A special, double-length article from the upcoming May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, presenting key excerpts from the recently declassified book-length report of the USJFCOM Iraqi Perspectives Project.

Kevin Woods is a defense analyst in Washington, D.C. James Lacey is a military analyst for the U.S. Joint Forces Command. Williamson Murray is Class of 1957 Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at the U.S. Naval Academy. Along with Mark Stout and Michael Pease, they were the principal participants in the USJFCOM Iraqi Perspectives Project.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The fall of Baghdad in April 2003 opened one of the most secretive and brutal governments in history to outside scrutiny. For the first time since the end of World War II, American analysts did not have to guess what had happened on the other side of a conflict but could actually read the defeated enemy's documents and interrogate its leading figures. To make the most of this unique opportunity, the U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) commissioned a comprehensive study of the inner workings and behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime based on previously inaccessible primary sources. Drawing on interviews with dozens of captured senior Iraqi military and political leaders and hundreds of thousands of official Iraqi documents (hundreds of them fully translated), this two-year project has changed our understanding of the war from the ground up. The study was partially declassified in late February; its key findings are presented here.

New on March 24, 2006: Today the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) released the 230-page report of the Iraq Perspective Project (IPP) on which "Saddam's Delusions" is based. Essay authors Woods, Lacey, and Williamson were the principal authors of the IPP report. You may download [urlthe full IPP report]http://www.foreignaffairs.org/special/iraq/ipp.pdf[/url] from the Foreign Affairs Website as an Adobe Acrobat file (.pdf, 7.2 MB).

STRATEGIC CALCULUS

Throughout the years of relative external peace for Iraq after Operation Desert Storm, in 1991, Saddam Hussein continued to receive and give credence to optimistic assessments of his regime's prospects dished up by his top military officers. Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz described the dictator as having been "very confident" that the United States would not dare to attack Iraq, and that if it did, it would be defeated. What was the source of Saddam's confidence?

Judging from his private statements, the single most important element in Saddam's strategic calculus was his faith that France and Russia would prevent an invasion by the United States. According to Aziz, Saddam's confidence was firmly rooted in his belief in the nexus between the economic interests of France and Russia and his own strategic goals: "France and Russia each secured millions of dollars worth of trade and service contracts in Iraq, with the implied understanding that their political posture with regard to sanctions on Iraq would be pro-Iraqi. In addition, the French wanted sanctions lifted to safeguard their trade and service contracts in Iraq. Moreover, they wanted to prove their importance in the world as members of the Security Council -- that they could use their veto to show they still had power."

Ibrahim Ahmad Abd al-Sattar, the Iraqi army and armed forces chief of staff, claimed that Saddam believed that even if his international supporters failed him and the United States did launch a ground invasion, Washington would rapidly bow to international pressure to halt the war. According to his personal interpreter, Saddam also thought his "superior" forces would put up "a heroic resistance and . . . inflict such enormous losses on the Americans that they would stop their advance." Saddam remained convinced that, in his own words, "Iraq will not, in any way, be like Afghanistan. We will not let the war become a picnic for the American or the British soldiers. No way!"


When the coalition assault did come, Saddam stubbornly clung to the belief that the Americans would be satisfied with an outcome short of regime change. According to Sattar, "No Iraqi leaders had believed coalition forces would ever reach Baghdad." Saddam's conviction that his regime would survive the war was the primary reason he did not have his forces torch Iraq's oil fields or open the dams to flood the south, moves many analysts predicted would be among Iraq's first in the event of an invasion. In the words of Aziz, "[Saddam] thought that this war would not lead to this ending." Saddam realized that if his strategic calculus was correct, he would need the oil to prop up the regime. Even with U.S. tanks crossing the Iraqi border, an internal revolt remained Saddam's biggest fear. In order to quell any postwar revolt, he would need the bridges to remain intact and the land in the south to remain unflooded. On this basis, Saddam planned his moves.

Some senior Iraqi military officers did not share their leader's assumptions, taking a more pessimistic view. The director of military intelligence, Zuhayr Talib Abd al-Sattar al-Naqib, commented that except for Saddam and the inner circle, most knowledgeable Iraqis secretly believed that the war would continue all the way to an occupation. The commander of the First Republican Guard Corps admitted, "There was nothing that could have been done to stop the Americans after they began." Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai, the minister of defense, recalled that "Iraqi military professionals were not surprised at U.S. actions at all. We knew what preparations were required, and what would happen if those preparations were not done properly. . . . Even if we had a real defense, we wouldn't have stopped the Americans, but we would have made the price exaggerated."

As late as the end of March 2003, Saddam apparently still believed that the war was going the way he had expected. If Iraq was not actually winning it, neither was it losing -- or at least so it seemed to the dictator. Americans may have listened with amusement to the seemingly obvious fabrications of Muhammad Said al-Sahaf, Iraq's information minister (nicknamed "Baghdad Bob" by the media). But the evidence now clearly shows that Saddam and those around him believed virtually every word issued by their own propaganda machine.

For example, during the first ten days of the war, Iraq asked Russia, France, and China not to support cease-fire initiatives because Saddam believed such moves would legitimize the coalition's presence in Iraq. As late as March 30, Saddam thought that his strategy was working and that the coalition offensive was grinding to a halt. On that day, Lieutenant General Abed Hamid Mahmoud, Saddam's principal secretary, directed the Iraqi foreign minister to tell the French and Russian governments that Baghdad would accept only an "unconditional withdrawal" of U.S. forces because "Iraq is now winning and . . . the United States has sunk in the mud of defeat." At that moment, U.S. tanks were a hundred miles south of Baghdad, refueling and rearming for the final push.

MILITARY EFFECTIVENESS

By 2003, the Iraqi military was reeling from 13 years of almost continuous engagement with U.S. and British air forces, the accumulating effects of sanctions, and the insidious impact of the regime's dysfunctional policies. These pressures had all helped drive the Iraqi military into a state of chronic decline. The Iraqi military's main mission was to ensure the internal security of the Baathist dictatorship. Concerned about everything except fighting wars, the Iraqi military, which had once aspired to a Western-like profession of arms, became focused on militarily irrelevant -- but nonetheless life-and-death -- issues.

The best example of this focus is the prewar condition of the Iraqi air force, which did not launch a single sortie against the coalition during the invasion. According to the commander of Iraq's air force and air defense force, Hamid Raja Shalah, Saddam simply decided two months before the war that the air force would not participate. Apparently, Saddam reasoned that the quality and quantity of the Iraqi air force's equipment would make it worse than useless against coalition air forces. Consequently, he decided to save the air force for future needs and ordered his commanders to hide their aircraft. This decision was yet another indication that Saddam did not believe coalition ground forces would ever reach into the heart of Iraq. He was sure his regime would survive whatever conflict ensued.

To implement Saddam's decision to preserve the air force, the Iraqis moved most of their aircraft away from operational airfields. To hide them from prowling coalition air forces, they camouflaged planes in palm groves or buried them in the sand, from which coalition forces dug them up after the war. Saddam's refusal to use the Iraqi air force is reminiscent of his behavior during Desert Storm, when he ordered a significant portion of the air force to flee to Iran. In 2003, Saddam ruled out Iranian sanctuary, telling aides, "The Iranians are even stronger than before; they now have [part of] our air force." Even with his regime under dire threat, Saddam's thoughts were never far from the regional power balance.

When it came to weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Saddam attempted to convince one audience that they were gone while simultaneously convincing another that Iraq still had them. Coming clean about WMD and using full compliance with inspections to escape from sanctions would have been his best course of action for the long run. Saddam, however, found it impossible to abandon the illusion of having WMD, especially since it played so well in the Arab world.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons on Kurdish civilians in 1987, was convinced Iraq no longer possessed WMD but claims that many within Iraq's ruling circle never stopped believing that the weapons still existed. Even at the highest echelons of the regime, when it came to WMD there was always some element of doubt about the truth. According to Chemical Ali, Saddam was asked about the weapons during a meeting with members of the Revolutionary Command Council. He replied that Iraq did not have WMD but flatly rejected a suggestion that the regime remove all doubts to the contrary, going on to explain that such a declaration might encourage the Israelis to attack. [See Footnote #1 below]

By late 2002, Saddam finally tilted toward trying to persuade the international community that Iraq was cooperating with the inspectors of UNSCOM (the UN Special Commission) and that it no longer had WMD programs. As 2002 drew to a close, his regime worked hard to counter anything that might be seen as supporting the coalition's assertion that WMD still remained in Iraq. Saddam was insistent that Iraq would give full access to UN inspectors "in order not to give President Bush any excuses to start a war." But after years of purposeful obfuscation, it was difficult to convince anyone that Iraq was not once again being economical with the truth.

Ironically, it now appears that some of the actions resulting from Saddam's new policy of cooperation actually helped solidify the coalition's case for war. Over the years, Western intelligence services had obtained many internal Iraqi communications, among them a 1996 memorandum from the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service directing all subordinates to "insure that there is no equipment, materials, research, studies, or books related to manufacturing of the prohibited weapons (chemical, biological, nuclear, and missiles) in your site." And when UN inspectors went to these research and storage locations, they inevitably discovered lingering evidence of WMD-related programs.

In 2002, therefore, when the United States intercepted a message between two Iraqi Republican Guard Corps commanders discussing the removal of the words "nerve agents" from "the wireless instructions," or learned of instructions to "search the area surrounding the headquarters camp and [the unit] for any chemical agents, make sure the area is free of chemical containers, and write a report on it," U.S. analysts viewed this information through the prism of a decade of prior deceit. They had no way of knowing that this time the information reflected the regime's attempt to ensure it was in compliance with UN resolutions.

What was meant to prevent suspicion thus ended up heightening it. The tidbit about removing the term "nerve agents" from radio instructions was prominently cited as an example of Iraqi bad faith by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in his February 5, 2003, statement to the UN.

Another factor reduced Iraq's military effectiveness: sanctions. For more than a dozen years, UN sanctions had frayed the fiber of the Iraqi military by making it difficult for Baghdad to purchase new equipment, procure spare parts, or fund adequate training. Attempts to overcome the effects of the sanctions led Saddam to create the Military Industrial Commission as a means to sustain the military. The commission and a series of subordinate organizations steadily promised new capabilities to offset the effects of poor training, poor morale, and neglected equipment. Saddam apparently waited for the delivery of wonder weapons that would reverse the erosion of his military strength.

A captured Military Industrial Commission annual report of investments made in 2002Ð3 showed more than 170 research projects with an estimated budget of about 1.5 percent of Iraq's GDP. The commission divided projects among areas such as equipment, engineering, missiles, electronics, strategic weapons, artillery, and air forces. One senior Iraqi official alleged that the commission's leaders were so fearful of Saddam that when he ordered them to initiate weapons programs that they knew Iraq could not develop, they told him they could accomplish the projects with ease. Later, when Saddam asked for updates on the nonexistent projects, they simply faked plans and designs to show progress.

This constant stream of false reporting undoubtedly accounts for why many of Saddam's calculations on operational, strategic, and political issues made perfect sense to him. According to Aziz, "The people in the Military Industrial Commission were liars. They lied to you, and they lied to Saddam. They were always saying that they were producing or procuring special weapons so that they could get favors out of Saddam -- money, cars, everything -- but they were liars. If they did all of this business and brought in all of these secret weapons, why didn't [the weapons] work?"

Members of the Military Industrial Commission were not the only liars. Bending the truth was particularly common among the most trusted members of Saddam's inner circle -- especially when negative news might reflect poorly on the teller's abilities or reputation. According to one former high-ranking Baath Party official, "Saddam had an idea about Iraq's conventional and potential unconventional capabilities, but never an accurate one because of the extensive lying occurring in that area. Many reports were falsified. The ministers attempted to convey a positive perspective with reports, which were forwarded to Saddam's secretary, who in turn passed them up to Saddam." In the years before Operation Iraqi Freedom, everyone around Saddam understood that his need to hear only good news was constantly growing and that it was in their best interest to feed that hunger.

A 1982 incident vividly illustrated the danger of telling Saddam what he did not want to hear. At one low point during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam asked his ministers for candid advice. With some temerity, the minister of health, Riyadh Ibrahim, suggested that Saddam temporarily step down and resume the presidency after peace was established. Saddam had him carted away immediately. The next day, pieces of the minister's chopped-up body were delivered to his wife. According to Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaysh, the head of the Military Industrial Commission and a relative of the murdered minister, "This powerfully concentrated the attention of the other ministers, who were unanimous in their insistence that Saddam remain in power."

Within the Iraqi military and the Iraqi regime more generally, rumors circulated that summary execution awaited anyone who dared contradict the dictator. Officers remembered the story of the brigadier general who once spent over a year in prison for daring to suggest that U.S. tanks might be superior to those of the Iraqi army. One senior minister noted, "Directly disagreeing with Saddam Hussein's ideas was unforgivable. It would be suicide." Nor was Saddam alone in his distaste for bad news. According to Major General Hamid Ismail Dawish al-Rubai, the director general of the Republican Guard's general staff, "Any commander who spoke the truth to [Saddam's son] Qusay would lose his head."

Fear of Saddam's reaction to bad news was not limited to his ministers and soldiers. Its pernicious effects reached even into Saddam's immediate family. One former high-level official related the following story about Qusay: "At the end of 2000, it came to Saddam's attention that approximately seventy military vehicles were immobile. Saddam told Qusay to resolve the problem. Republican Guard mechanics claimed they could repair the vehicles if the funds were made available. Qusay agreed to the work, and funds were provided for the task. Once the work was completed, Qusay sent a representative to inspect the vehicles and he found them lined up on a vehicle park, thirty-five vehicles on each side. The vehicles looked like new, having been freshly painted and cleaned".

"After Qusay's representative inspected them, a second inspection was conducted to verify that they were now operational. The staff was told to supply drivers to move all [the] vehicles to the opposite side of the vehicle park to ensure they were in working order. None of the seventy vehicles would start. When this was reported to Qusay, he instructed that Saddam not be informed, as Qusay had already told Saddam that the vehicles were operational. "In the end, Qusay did not order mechanics to fix the vehicles -- it appears that he was eager only to hide this failure from his father.

Besides outright lying, there were further impediments to the flow of information within the regime. One was the requirement to embellish even the simplest message with praise for Saddam, as evidenced by the minister of defense's memo following a training exercise called Golden Falcon: "In reference to your Excellency's instructions regarding the large exercises at the Public Center, having strong faith in the only God of our hearts, and God's permanent support to the believers, the faithful, the steadfast, and with great love that we have for our great homeland and our Great Leader, our Great Leader has won God's favor and the love of his dear people in the day of the grand homage.

"Your enthusiastic soldiers from our courageous armed forces have executed Golden Falcon Exercise number 11. In this exercise we have tested our readiness and confrontation plans against any who attempt to make impure the lands of civilization and the homeland of missions and prophets. This exercise is the widest and most successful in achieving the required results. Soldiers from the III and IV Corps have participated in this exercise. "There is no indication that the two corps actually conducted any significant exercise during this period.

This kind of bureaucratic embellishment extended to every level of military organization. While this type of flowery language is not unknown in the region, it was taken to such extremes in Iraq that it often replaced all substance in reports and orders. For example, a March 9, 2003, instruction from the Imam al Hussein Brigade to one of its combat groups read, "The Third Group, al Quds Army . . . and other formations attached to it are fighting valiantly, placing their trust in God Almighty, until the end that He prescribes, which God willing will be the enemy's defeat and his withdrawal, and a victory for us that will please our friends and grieve our enemies."

After the war, several of the more capable military commanders commonly noted four other factors that seriously affected military readiness: the mostly irrelevant military guidance passed from the political leadership to the lowest level of military operations, the creation of "popular" militias, the tendency of Saddam's relatives and sycophants to rise to the top national security positions, and the combined effects of the onerous security apparatus and the resulting limitations on military authority. Many senior Iraqi military officers blamed this "coup-proofing" of the regime for most of what befell the Iraqi army during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

IRRELEVANT GUIDANCE

A close associate once described Saddam as a deep thinker who lay awake at night pondering problems at length before inspiration came to him in dreams. These dreams became dictates the next morning, and invariably all those around Saddam would praise his great intuition. Questioning his dictates brought great personal risk. Often, the dictator would make a show of consulting small groups of family members and longtime advisers, although his record even here is erratic. All of the evidence demonstrates that he made his most fateful decisions in isolation. He decided to invade Iran, for example, without any consultation with his advisers and while he was visiting a vacation resort. He made the equally fateful decision to invade Kuwait after discussing it with only his son-in-law.

In a wide-ranging discussion with his closest advisers in the fall of 1990, Saddam provided an insight into his "unique" abilities: "America is a complicated country. Understanding it requires a politician's alertness that is beyond the intelligence community. Actually, I forbade the intelligence outfits from deducing from press and political analysis anything about America. I told them that [this] was not their specialty, because these organizations, when they are unable to find hard facts, start deducing from newspapers, which is what I already know. I said I don't want either intelligence organization [the Iraqi Intelligence Service or the General Military Intelligence Directorate] to give me analysis -- that is my specialty. . . . We agree to continue on that basis . . . which is what I used with the Iranians, some of it out of deduction and some of it through invention and connecting the dots, all without having hard evidence."

After 1991, Saddam's confidence in his military commanders steadily eroded, while his confidence in his own abilities as a military genius strengthened. Like a number of other despots in history who dabbled in military affairs, Saddam began to issue a seemingly endless stream of banal instructions. He could not resist giving detailed training guidance.

Dozens of surviving memoranda echo the style and content of a 2002 top-secret document titled "Training Guidance to the Republican Guard." These documents all hint at the kind of guidance military officers received from Saddam on a regular basis. One chapter of the "training guidance" document, called "Notes and Directions Given by Saddam Hussein to His Elite Soldiers to Cover the Tactics of War," charged officers to do the following: "Train in a way that allows you to defeat your enemy; train all units' members in swimming; train your soldiers to climb palm trees so that they may use these places for navigation and sniper shooting; and train on smart weapons."

In the aftermath of the 1991 war, the Iraqi military made extensive efforts to "learn" from its experiences during Desert Storm. These attempts were hampered by Saddam's conviction that his ground forces had performed well in the fighting. This certainty forced officers compiling Iraqi lessons-learned analyses to avoid issues that might involve Saddam's prestige or question the Iraqi forces' fighting abilities. Instead, they focused on peripheral issues that were almost totally irrelevant to winning wars. These restrictions led to some perverse claims, such as that the Republican Guard had actually performed well in the war by avoiding annihilation: "If it were not for these precautions, we would have suffered great loss, but when we compare our losses with the large number of fighter aircraft, missiles, and artillery bombing that the Iraqi army was subject to we find these losses trifling. That proved that the Republican Guards and the armed forces managed to reduce the danger from air strikes." Such briefings drove home the point that Iraq had done well in Desert Storm (at least on the issues that mattered most to the regime). In a short time, the constant praise for Iraq's tactics during the war -- digging deep bunkers and dispersing and hiding the Iraqi army -- made them into de facto operational doctrine.

Little evidence exists that any of the politicized Iraqi generals understood the advantages in maneuverability, speed, command and control, or training that the U.S. forces enjoyed. By the time the military was ready to brief Saddam on the lessons of the Persian Gulf War, however, they did fully understand the danger of presenting him with claims other than those he already believed. Truthful analyses therefore gave way to belittlement of the U.S. victory and denials that the United States had any advantage over Iraq other than in military technology. One comment made by an Iraqi general during a mid-1990s conference was typical: "After the liberation of our land in Kuwait, and despite the fact that more than 30 countries headed by the occupation forces of the U.S. rushed madly upon our Republican Guard, our performance was heroic."

THE RISE OF PARAMILITARY FORCES

It is hard to overestimate the effects that the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings of 1991 had on Saddam's outlook. After that point, the threat of another uprising consistently remained his top security concern. One of the precautions he took to prevent and, if necessary, quell a future disturbance was to create private armies made up of politically reliable troops: the Saddam Fedayeen, the al Quds Army, and the Baath Party militia. Ironically, these organizations actually worsened national security by making army recruitment more difficult and by stripping the military of needed equipment. And when they eventually went to battle against the onrushing coalition forces, they were obliterated in short order.

Most Western analysts have argued that Saddam created these militias to help defend Iraq from external attack. Documents obtained after Operation Iraqi Freedom, however, indicate that the original and primary purpose of the paramilitary forces had little to do with protecting Iraq from invasion. The militias were indeed charged with that task -- but only later on, after Saddam became fascinated with the success of the Palestinian intifadas and with the U.S. experience in Somalia. The original and primary purpose of the paramilitary groups was to defend Iraq from internal enemies, not external ones.

The al Quds Army ("al Quds" is Arabic for "Jerusalem") was a regional militia created to control particular areas of Iraq and crush as rapidly as possible any disturbance that occurred. The best evidence suggests that close to 500,000 Iraqis joined the al Quds force, albeit with widely varying degrees of commitment. As to its value as a military force in times of war, the minister of defense best expressed the view of his colleagues when he said, "The Quds force was a headache, they had no equipment for a serious war, and their creation was a bad idea. The Ministry of Defense was required to give them weapons that were taken from the real army. But the army had no control of them. Their instructions came only from the president's office and not from normal military channels."

According to another senior Iraqi general, the al Quds Army was not a serious combat force: "It never had anything to do with the liberation of Jerusalem or fighting the Zionists, and was merely another organ of regime protection." Nonetheless, once the war began, Saddam's flattery machine cranked out boasts, half-truths, and outright lies about the abilities and performance of the al Quds force. Saddam fully expected the militia's members to fight like lions and to bleed the Americans dry, and no one was courageous enough to tell him when they failed to do so. Reports such as this one, from a public release by the Iraqi army's general command, were typical: "A hostile force backed by jet fighters and helicopters attempted to approach the outskirts of the al Muthanna Governate. Our unrivaled men of the al Quds Army confronted it and forced it to stop and then retreat. They inflicted on it huge human and equipment losses. This included the destruction of seven vehicles of various types. Congratulations to the al Quds Army on its absolute victory over the allies of the wicked Zionists." That this event never happened as described was immaterial to the Baathist command. The reality that Saddam's inner circle refused to tell him was that the al Quds force started dissolving as soon as U.S. tanks approached. By the time coalition forces arrived at many of the militia's defensive positions, Saddam's vaunted warriors had vanished.

Whereas the al Quds Army was a part-time territorial defense force meant for use in times of crisis, the Saddam Fedayeen was a permanent force tasked with a number of state security missions. Before the war, coalition planners believed that the Saddam Fedayeen was a paramilitary group with wide-ranging missions including counterinsurgency, domestic direct action, and surveillance. They also understood that it would serve as a backup to the regular army and the al Quds Army in case of a local uprising. Such assessments were generally correct but somewhat out of focus.

It is now clear that Saddam created the Fedayeen in October 1994 in reaction to the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings of March 1991. Those revolts had revealed the potentially fatal flaws in Saddam's internal security apparatus: the local Baath Party organs were not capable of putting down uprisings without external support, the Iraqi armed forces were unable or unwilling to suppress rebellions with sufficient speed and ruthlessness, and the tribes of Iraq still represented a significant threat to Baghdad's control, even after more than 25 years of pan-Arabic socialist indoctrination. The fanatically loyal Saddam Fedayeen was created to remedy such problems and ensure that any future revolt would be rapidly crushed.

According to Saddam Fedayeen planning documents captured by the coalition, the mission of this militia was to protect Iraq "from any threats inside and outside." Meticulous Saddam Fedayeen records list numerous operations conducted in the decade after the militia's creation: "extermination operations" against saboteurs in Muthanna, an operation to "ambush and arrest" car thieves in Anbar, the monitoring of Shiite civilians at the holy places of Karbala, and a plan to bomb a humanitarian-aid outpost in Erbil, which the Iraqi secret police suspected of being a Western intelligence operation.

The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for "special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan]." Preparations for "Blessed July," a regime-directed wave of "martyrdom" operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

In a typical Iraqi pattern, corruption soon worked its way into the Saddam Fedayeen. Despite enjoying regular showers of cash, on-the-spot bonuses for successful missions, educational benefits, military privileges if injured, martyr privileges if killed, and free land just for volunteering, a number of Saddam Fedayeen paramilitaries still joined the growing underground economy. In 2001, reports surfaced that members of the organization were smuggling weapons to the Saudi border, where they sold them for cash, and were establishing roadblocks in order to shake down travelers.

These failures of discipline elicited a harsh response from the regime. Punishments of errant militiamen included having one's hands amputated for theft, being tossed off a tower for sodomy, being whipped a hundred times for sexual harassment, having one's tongue cut out for lying, and being stoned for various other infractions. It was only a matter of time before military failure also became punishable as a criminal offense.

In typical Iraqi bureaucratic fashion, a table of specific failures and their punishments was created and approved. In 1998, the secretariat of the Saddam Fedayeen issued the following "regulations for when an execution order against the commanders of the various Fedayeen" units should be carried out: "Any section commander will be executed, if his section is defeated; any platoon commander will be executed, if two of his sections are defeated; any company commander will be executed, if two of his platoons are defeated; any regiment commander will be executed, if two of his companies are defeated; any area commander will be executed, if his Governate is defeated; any Saddam Fedayeen fighter, including commanders, will be executed, if he hesitates in completing his duties, cooperates with the enemy, gives up his weapons, or hides any information concerning the security of the state." No wonder that members of the Saddam Fedayeen often proved to be Iraq's most fanatical fighters during the 2003 war. On numerous occasions, Fedayeen forces hurled themselves against the coalition's armored columns as they rushed past the southern cities of Samawah, Najaf, and Karbala, and they even tried to block the coalition from entering Baghdad itself -- long after the Republican Guard had mostly quit the field. In the years preceding the coalition invasion, Iraq's leaders had become enamored of the belief that the spirit of the Fedayeen's "Arab warriors" would allow them to overcome the Americans' advantages. In the end, however, the Fedayeen fighters proved totally unprepared for the kind of war they were asked to fight, and they died by the thousands.

RELATIVES AND SYCOPHANTS

Saddam truly trusted only one person: himself. As a result, he concentrated more and more power in his own hands. No single man could do everything, however; forced to enlist the help of others to handle operational details, Saddam used a remarkable set of hiring criteria. As one senior Iraqi leader noted, Saddam selected the "uneducated, untalented, and those who posed no threat to his leadership for key roles." Always wary of a potential coup, Saddam remained reluctant to entrust military authority to anyone too far removed from his family or tribe.

Western observers may have considered the Republican Guard to be a bulwark of the regime, but Saddam saw it as the military force best positioned to overthrow him. As a result, in 2001 he placed Qusay at its head, making his youngest son the commander of Iraq's most elite combat units -- even though Qusay's military experience was limited to a short stint at the Iranian front in 1984, where he had experienced little if any real combat. The minister of defense described the situation this way: "My working for Qusay Hussein was a mistake; Qusay knew nothing -- he understood only simple military things like a civilian. We prepared information and advice for him and he'd accept it or not. As the ultimate commander of the Republican Guard, Qusay could take advice from professional military officers in the Ministry of Defense and the Republican Guard or ignore it to make decisions." Qusay had the final say on significant military decisions unless Saddam himself chose to intervene. Qusay's purview included such fundamental matters as what key terrain to defend and, during the war, when and how to shift Iraq's remaining forces. Several senior officers privately questioned many of his decisions, but few were willing to do so in an open forum.

After the war, senior military officers constantly remarked on Qusay's lack of military knowledge and his unwillingness to take their "good" advice. But even these flaws were not sufficient to explain everything that went wrong. The evidence shows that many of Qusay's advisers were also unqualified, while those who were qualified often kept silent even when given an opportunity to speak.

Major General Barzan Abd al-Ghafur Sulayman Majid, commander of the Special Republican Guard, was fairly representative. Before the war, coalition planners generally assumed that the quality of Iraqi military officers improved as one moved up the military hierarchy, from the militias to the regular army, to the Republican Guard, and then to the Special Republican Guard. It stood to reason that the commander of the Special Republican Guard -- Iraq's most elite fighting force -- would be highly competent and loyal. In fact, after the war, Barzan's peers and colleagues were all openly derisive of his abilities. Saddam had selected Barzan, one general noted, because Barzan had several qualities that Saddam held dear. "He was Saddam's cousin, but he had two other important qualities which made him the best man for the job," this general said. "First, he was not intelligent enough to represent a threat to the regime, and second, he was not brave enough to participate in anyone else's plots."

Barzan himself was well aware of the tenuous nature of his position. In an interview after the war, he described his appointment: "I was called to Baghdad from holiday and told that I would be taking command of the Special Republican Guard. I was on a probationary status for the first six months. I was ordered by Saddam to take the command; I had no choice. I was sick at the idea of being the Special Republican Guard commander. It was the most dangerous job in the regime." This general, the man who was to command the last stand of Saddam's most impressive military forces, spent most of the war hiding.

General Tai, the minister of defense, was a striking exception to this rule. Here, by all accounts, was a competent military commander. His elevation to minister of defense apparently changed him, however. The specific reasons for his change are no doubt complex, but his actions during the meetings and planning conferences prior to the coalition invasion suggest an explanation. In one telling event during the final planning, he remained silent when more junior officers voiced concerns over Saddam's new plan for the defense of Iraq. As one corps commander who was there later noted, "Some of the senior military leaders present only competed to please Saddam. The Minister of Defense was an honorable man but he gave up his strategic vision in order to keep Saddam's favor."

At the end of 2002, Saddam once again asserted himself, putting into place his own operational concept for Iraq's defense -- a concept that would ultimately hasten the destruction of the Iraqi armed forces. On December 18, the chief of staff of the Republican Guard gathered his commanders together and told them of the new plan. It was both original and bold -- and totally impractical. In a postwar interview, the commander of the Second Republican Guard Corps told how the new plan was announced: "The Republican Guard chief of staff called all the commanders to meet at the Republican Guard Command Center. When I asked why, I was told that they had a new plan for the defense of Baghdad. I thought to myself that we were supposed to be defending all of Iraq, not just Baghdad. When we got there, we found that Qusay Hussein was also present.

"The Republican Guard chief of staff briefed us in front of a large wall map that covered just the central portion of Iraq. The map showed Baghdad in the center with four rings. Every ring had a color. The center ring was red. Approximately ten kilometers out from the red ring was a blue ring. Then approximately seven kilometers out from that one was a black ring. Finally, the last circle was marked in yellow, which was designated for reconnaissance forces only. The Republican Guard chief of staff explained the plan in a very crude and ugly way. Things like 'the Republican Guard Hammurabi Division defends in the north of the city, the Republican Guard Medina Division in the south, the Republican Guard al Nida Division in the east, and special forces and the Special Republican Guard in the west.'

"When the Americans arrived at the first ring, on the order from Saddam, the forces would conduct a simultaneous withdrawal. The units would then repeat this 'procedure' until reaching the red circle. Once in the red circle, the remaining units would fight to the death.

"With this incredible simplicity and stupidity, the assembled Republican Guard officers were told that this was the plan for the defense of our country. Qusay said that the plan was already approved by Saddam and 'it was you who would now make it work.' I disagreed and told Qusay that a proud army with an 82-year history cannot fight like this. We were not using our experience. I was told by Qusay that there would be no changes because Saddam had signed the plan already."

Compared to previous defense arrangements drawn up by professional military staffs, this new plan was amateurish. It paid no attention to basic military factors, such as geography, nor did it explain how all the units would be able to retreat simultaneously from one ring to the next while being engaged on the ground and assaulted from the air. Even after Qusay and the Republican Guard's chief of staff briefed their officers on the concept, the senior military leadership did little to arrange for it to be implemented. For Saddam, issuing a decree was considered enough to make the plan work.

SECURITY AND COMMAND LIMITATIONS

While most of Iraq's senior military leaders fell prey to the corrupting influences of the regime's inner circle, other factors combined to undermine the effectiveness of subordinate leaders and units. The commander of the Baghdad Division of the Republican Guard provided an example of how hard it was to function: "In the Republican Guard, division and corps commanders could not make decisions without the approval of the staff command. Division commanders could only move small elements within their command. Major movements such as brigade-sized elements and higher had to be requested through the corps commander to the staff command. This process did not change during the war and in fact became more centralized."

Every senior commander interviewed after hostilities emphasized the psychological costs of being forced to constantly look over his shoulder. At any one time, each of these military commanders had to contend with at least five major security organizations, including the Special Security Office, the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the General Military Intelligence Directorate, and various security service offices within the Republican Guard bureaucracy. Moreover, the number of security personnel in each of these organizations increased dramatically after 1991. In many cases, new spies were sent to units to report on the spies already there.

The Second Republican Guard Corps commander described the influence of the internal security environment on a typical corps-level staff meeting: "First a meeting would be announced and all the corps-level staff, the subordinate division commanders, and selected staff, as well as supporting or attached organizations and their staffs, would assemble at the corps headquarters. The corps commander had to ensure then that all the spies were in the room before the meeting began so that there would not be any suspicions in Baghdad as to my purpose. This kind of attention to my own internal security was required. I spent considerable time finding clever ways to invite even the spies I was not supposed to know about." The target of all of this internal spying, the corps commander, was forced to coordinate the surreptitious activities of the various persons spying on him. If he accidentally excluded any of these spies from a "secret" meeting, it could provoke intense, quite possibly dangerous, suspicion in Baghdad.

Such a lack of trust had a direct effect not only on the ability of commanders to lead their units, but also on the ability of units to take advantage of their knowledge of the ground to prepare optimal defenses. In many cases, staff officers in Baghdad who had never visited particular areas still were the ones who gave precise deployment directions for even the smallest units.

The commander of the Second Republican Guard Corps echoed the problems described by the commander of the Baghdad Division: "I had to ask for permission from the Republican Guard staff in Baghdad to move brigade-size units and was still doing so up until April 2 and 3 [2003]." By then, coalition forces were making their final drive toward Baghdad.

Not quite every commander had to endure such restrictions. Leaders of the al Nida Division, for example -- an armored division of the Republic Guard -- enjoyed unusual liberty. Tasked with defending Baghdad's eastern approaches against possible attacks from Iran, the al Nida Division was considered by both Iraqi and coalition intelligence organizations to be the best of the best. According to the division's chief of staff, its materiel readiness was the best in the Iraqi military, and its commander planned and conducted training virtually independent of any higher authority. Such autonomy was unheard of elsewhere, including in al Nida's sister unit, the Baghdad Division. When asked in a postwar interview to explain the disparity between the authority he exercised and that exercised by other divisional commanders, al Nida's commander answered in an incredulous tone, "I am a Tikriti [from Saddam's hometown] and other commanders were not."

Yet constant surveillance was the rule. As one officer explained, "All phones in the Republican Guard office were monitored and all meetings were recorded. High-ranking officers were subjected to constant technical monitoring and surveillance in and out of their homes. The Republican Guard Security Office monitored all aspects of senior Republican Guard officers' lives, including their financial affairs and diet. Republican Guard Security Office personnel even questioned the guards at senior officers' houses to see what they could learn about the officers' lifestyles. The Special Security Office knew how many times I went to the bathroom. Republican Guard commanders were not trusted to conduct any movement or even so much as start a tank without permission. Requesting retirement was impossible because the regime would assume one opposed them politically, and one would be arrested and jailed."

There were two common reactions to the pervasive security apparatus. The first was to work through the fog of suspicion and maintain as open a process as possible, while still attempting to command a military unit on the brink of war. Operating in this manner often required extreme precautions. The commander of the Second Republican Guard Corps, for instance, held most of his private meetings in the walled garden of a private home where he could be relatively sure that the regime's spies could not eavesdrop on him. The second reaction, more common among senior leaders, was to avoid any actions, activities, or circumstances that might invite suspicion from the various "eyes" of the regime.

The net effect of such reactions was that corps-level operational command and control disappeared from the battlefield. The restrictions imposed on Iraq's officers during peacetime and the general atmosphere of fear made it impossible to coordinate action during war. By consistently sacrificing military effectiveness for the supposedly more important needs of internal security, the regime effectively neutered its military, which ultimately proved incapable of standing up to the disciplined and competent coalition forces.

LAST DAYS

In the end, Saddam determined that the most important factor for military success lay in the sprit of the warrior. Saddam considered instilling ideological commitment to the Baathist cause to be the best way to prepare Iraq's soldiers for war. Saddam told his officers that Allah wanted to insult the United States by giving his strongest personal abilities to the materially weak Iraqis. Because Saddam perceived the Baathist spirit of the Iraqi warrior to be far superior to anything American soldiers were capable of bringing to the battlefield, he overlooked the many factors eroding the foundation of his military's effectiveness.

The conclusion of an Iraqi training manual sums up the regime's attitude. "Military power," it reads, "is measured by the period in which difficulties become severe, calamities increase, choices multiply, and the world gets dark and nothing remains except the bright light of belief and ideological determination. . . . If [a soldier] ignores [his] values, principles, and ideals, all military foundations [will] collapse. He will be defeated, shamed, and [his] military honor will remain in the same place together with the booty taken by the enemy. The President, the Leader Saddam Hussein asks, 'Would men allow for their military honor to be taken by the enemy as booty from the battle?' "Iraq's was not the first army to place "spirit" over the reality of firepower and steel, and it is unlikely to be the last.

Much of the debate on the origins of the postwar insurgency in Iraq has centered on the question of whether Saddam's regime placed munitions around the country to support a future guerrilla war against an external foe. There is no significant documentary evidence to suggest it did so. Rather, what is clear is that the regime ordered the distribution of ammunition in order to preserve it for a prolonged war with coalition forces.

As far as can be determined from the interviews and records reviewed so far, there was no national plan to embark on a guerrilla war in the event of a military defeat. Nor did the regime appear to cobble together such a plan as its world crumbled around it. Buoyed by his earlier conviction that the Americans would never dare enter Baghdad, Saddam hoped to the very last minute that he could stay in power. And his military and civilian bureaucrats went through their daily routines until the very end.

Only slowly did Saddam and those around him finally seem to realize that they were suffering a catastrophic military defeat. In the regime's final days, the only decisive actions those at the top seemed capable of were attempts to stem the flow of bad news. For instance, a Ministry of Defense memorandum dated April 6 told subordinate units, "We are doing great," and reminded all staff officers to "avoid exaggerating the enemy's abilities." By that point, Iraq's military forces had already collapsed or were collapsing. Coalition attacks had destroyed almost all of the corps and division headquarters, and the few that remained had been rendered ineffective by the furious pace of the U.S. advance. Although some isolated Iraqi units continued to fight, they were no longer connected to a coherent military organization.

According to Deputy Prime Minister Aziz, by then even Saddam had finally accepted that the end was near. On that day, he called a meeting of the Iraqi leadership at a house in central Baghdad. During the meeting, according to Aziz, Saddam's tone was that of a man "who had lost his will to resist" and "knew the regime was coming to an end." Later that day, Saddam traveled to another safe house a few miles away (he changed locations every three to six hours). There he met with his personal secretary, his two sons, the minister of defense, and the chiefs of staff of the al Quds Army, the Republican Guard, and the Saddam Fedayeen. It was almost midnight, and according to those present, the combination of some accurate battlefield reports and Western satellite news broadcasts had finally made it impossible to ignore their dire predicament.

Yet Saddam began giving orders to deploy and maneuver formations that had ceased to exist. His attention focused on plans to have the Republican Guard enter Baghdad and join with the Saddam Fedayeen in "preparing" for urban warfare. Late the next day, Saddam met again with his closest advisers and, according to a participant, accepted that "the army divisions were no longer capable of defending Baghdad, and that he would have a meeting with the Baath Regional Commanders to enlist them in the final defense of the regime." A subsequent meeting on the same day produced an unexecuted plan to divide Baghdad into four quadrants. Saddam placed loyal Baath Party stalwarts in command of each sector and charged them with defending the city to their last drops of blood.

By the time Saddam spoke to his military staff, however, a U.S. armored brigade had already captured Baghdad's airport. As he discussed the plan for the final defense of the city, another brigade of U.S. armor was busily chewing up the manicured lawn in front of his central palace.

[Footnote #1] For many months after the fall of Baghdad, a number of senior Iraqi officials in coalition custody continued to believe it possible that Iraq still possessed a WMD capability hidden away somewhere (although they adamantly insisted that they had no direct knowledge of WMD programs). Coalition interviewers discovered that this belief was based on the fact that Iraq had possessed and used WMD in the past and might need them again; on the plausibility of secret, compartmentalized WMD programs existing given how the Iraqi regime worked; and on the fact that so many Western governments believed such programs existed.

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