Prisoner abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere
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Torture, rendition, and other abuses against captives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere
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Additionally, MPs will say that the orders were coming directly from military intelligence. Sergeant Javal Davis, one of the MPs, later explains: �I witnessed prisoners in the MI hold section ... being made to do various things that I would question morally ... In Wing 1A we were told that they had different rules.� Military Intelligence reportedly told the MPs � �Loosen this guy up for us.� �Make sure he has a bad night.� �Make sure he gets the treatment.� � When the MPs did as they were told, MI would say things like, �Good job, they're breaking down real fast. They answer every question. They're giving out good information.� [The New Yorker, 5/10/2004; Washington Post, 5/8/2004 Sources: US Army Report on Iraqi Prisoner Abuse] A prisoner's account will also indicate that the orders were coming from above (see November 29, 2003-March 28, 2004).
Interrogations - The interrogations take place at two facilities within Abu Ghraib known as the Wood Building and the Steel Building. But it is unclear precisely who is in charge. In addition to the known involvement of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, there is evidence suggesting that CIA and SAP operatives (see (Mid-September 2003-October 2003)) are also involved. Two civilian contractors�Steven Stephanowicz, an interrogator working for Virginia-based CACI International, and John B. Israel who works for SOS Interpreting Ltd.�also play a leading part in the interrogations. Unlike their counterparts in MI, they are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, though they are required to obey civilian law (it is not clear whether they are bound by US or Iraq law). Little is known about the two civilians. [The New Yorker, 5/10/2004; The New Yorker, 5/17/2004; The Signal, 6/2/2004] After the torture scandal is revealed in the press, Stephanowicz is rumored to be CIA [Knight Ridder, 5/8/2004]
May 18, 2004
Sgt. Samuel Provance of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion tells ABC News that the US military is engaged in a cover-up of the Abu Ghraib abuses. �There's definitely a cover-up,� he says. �People are either telling themselves or being told to be quiet.� He also says the MPs seen in the photos with naked Iraqi prisoners at the prison were acting under orders from Military Intelligence. �Anything [the MPs] were to do legally or otherwise, they were to take those commands from the interrogators.... One interrogator told me about how commonly the detainees were stripped naked, and in some occasions, wearing women's underwear. If it's your job to strip people naked, yell at them, scream at them, humiliate them, it's not going to be too hard to move from that to another level.� [ABC News, 5/18/2004; The Washington Post, 5/20/2004] After his interview, Provance is stripped of his security clearance, transferred to a different platoon, and informed that he may be prosecuted for speaking out because his comments were �not in the national interest.� Additionally, his record is officially �flagged,� making him ineligible for promotion or receiving any awards or honors. [ABC News, 5/21/2004]
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Three civilian translators were named in a new report on military intelligence breaches at Abu Ghraib prison � although "named" isn't quite the right word.
All names were excised from the 177-page executive summary to the report on prisoner abuse, released Wednesday.
Was John B. Israel, a civilian translator from Canyon Country who was implicated in an earlier Army report, one of the three?
Army officials wouldn't say. Nor would they say if he was exonerated.
"We cannot � we don't have any names," said Anita Hodges, spokeswoman for Gen. Paul J. Kern, the top Army official overseeing the inquiry conducted by Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones and Maj. Gen. George R. Fay.
Hodges said civilian contractors' names weren't being released because some are subject to further investigation by the Justice Department. They could still face charges, she said.
A previous Army inquiry into military police activities at the prison, conducted by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, found that two military intelligence officers and two civilian contractors � including Israel � were "either directly or indirectly responsible" for the abuses.
Leon Worden
Signal newspaper of Santa Clarita, Calif. 26.Aug.04
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While in Iraq, all acts performed by Mr. Stefanowicz were appropriate, authorized, done with the knowledge of military superiors and taken pursuant to approved policies and procedures governing interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison.
The vague and unsubstantiated allegations in the Taguba Report against Mr. Stefanowicz implied that he was one of a very few individuals somehow responsible for the egregious abuses, photographed and otherwise, at Abu Ghraib prison.
August 26, 2004 Press Release On
Behalf of Steven A. Stefanowicz
Henry E. Hockeimer, Jr.
Hangley Aronchick Segal & Pudlin
Philadelphia, PA
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR [The Signal, Santa Clarita, Calif.]
First of all, the company is saddened and disturbed over the photographs that appeared in the media concerning abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The company was also saddened by the tragic pictures of people jumping out of the windows of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And the company was further saddened by the horrible pictures of the American contractors' charred and mutilated bodies hung from the bridge girders in Fallujah. All of these photographs and images, sadly, are part of the war on terrorism.
Secondly, there are some aspects of your article for which we would like to provide additional factual information. We believe the following information adds perspective to CACI's work in Iraq.
The military did not have available interrogators needed to gather and analyze field source intelligence data and information in Iraq. CACI provides IT solutions and technology services to the U.S. Intelligence community. CACI interrogation services business is an extension of CACI's tactical intelligence and field services line of business for information collection, data analysis and decision support. CACI performs these contract services because of its commitment to its U.S. Army clients at war in the mid-East.
[...]
CACI is aware of multiple investigations underway but knows at this time of allegations only against one employee as set forth in the illegally released (leaked) classified (SECRET/NO-FOREIGN] Taguba report (one report in a number of reports conducted as part of an ongoing investigation that has not been concluded), which has not been publicly confirmed.
Mr. John Israel was incorrectly identified as a CACI employee in the leaked sections of the report issued by Major General Antonio M. Taguba regarding allegations of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Mr. Israel is not now and never has been an employee of CACI.
Jody Brown
Senior Vice President, Public Relations
CACI International Inc.
Arlington, VA
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"We don't know who he is, who he was working for, or what he was doing there."
Beneath his employment contract � which SOS officials won't discuss � are more questions.
No criminal charges are known to have been filed against Israel, and no known evidence links him to a foreign government.
Nor has it been positively ascertained that the U.S. government is following up on Taguba's recommendation for a formal inquiry to determine the extent of Israel's culpability.
Nonetheless, Israel's high-profile defense attorney, onetime O.J. Simpson prosecutor Christopher A. Darden, has thus far maintained a low profile, shunning questions about Israel's citizenship or background.
A spokesman for the Office of Homeland Security said Israel's citizenship and immigration status are protected under the Privacy Act, while a CIA spokeswoman said it is agency policy not to identify current or past employees.
According to The New York Times, which obtained Israel's brief written reply to Army investigators, the translator was born in Baghdad in 1955 and is an Iraqi-American Christian, referring to Iraq's Christian minority group.
His emigration date isn't known. His wife said the family moved to Santa Clarita in 1988. They had three daughters, all born in the interim. Public records show Israel owned what may have been an out-of-town picture framing business called Fancy Frame when he filed for bankruptcy protection in 1993. He paid cash for his $220,000 home in 1996 or was given it by the builder. A neighbor said she knew him as "a computer guy" prior to his deployment at Abu Ghraib in October.
[...]
Paul Bergrin is the stateside attorney for Sgt. Javal "Sean" Davis, one of the seven guards charged with prisoner abuse.
To determine who was giving orders inside Abu Ghraib last fall, and to discover what Taguba meant when he referred in his report to the presence of "third-country nationals" among the intelligence personnel, Bergrin said one need look not only "up" at superiors, but "over" geographically.
"The intelligence community were trained in intelligence acquisition from foreign agents who had experience in dealing with Arab and Muslim prisoners. This had to come from Israeli intelligence personnel as well as CIA-trained agents who knew how to induce these types of detainees to speak," Bergrin said.
He said the intelligence gathering tactics used at Abu Ghraib were consistent with those used by agencies such as Shin Bet, the Israeli counter-intelligence and internal security service.
[...]
The newspaper said interrogation techniques such as "hooding, sleep deprivation, time disorientation and depriving prisoners (of) dignity" are "all techniques long employed by Israel."
CACI President J.P. "Jack" London's visit to Jerusalem in January further piqued critics' interest.
CACI said in a press release that members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees accompanied London on the trip, where Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz presented him with a prestigious information technology award.
[...]
"The purpose of the mission was to promote opportunities for strategic partnerships and joint ventures between U.S. and Israeli defense and homeland security companies," CACI's press release said. "Participants also attended high-level briefings and demonstrations on innovative technologies and their application to homeland security, counter-terrorism and national defense."
Shin Bet sources in Tel Aviv have disavowed the idea of Israeli participation or influence at Abu Ghraib.
Under the heading "All evidence refutes claims of Israeli involvement in Iraqi prison affair," the Haaretz Daily commented on John Israel's connection to Titan Corp., the intelligence firm that contracted the prison translation work to SOS, his employer.
The newspaper noted that former CIA Director James Woolsey was a Titan board member and said Woolsey "is considered a close friend of (the nation of) Israel."
[...]
An unnamed Shin Bet source told Haaretz, "We did not operate (in Iraq) and did not assist the United States in running the interrogations. This is baseless slander."
"When one reads all the American documents and reports," another former senior Shin Bet official said, "it is clear that the Americans did not need us to conduct interrogations. The reports and the pictures of the torture, abuse and humiliation from the prison in Iraq portray a reality compared to which the interrogations of the Palestinians by us are really child's play."
Leon Worden
Signal City Editor
Thursday, June 3, 2004
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Facility 1391
State prosecutors initially told the court that the prison was no longer in use.
Facility 1391 has been airbrushed from Israeli aerial photographs and purged from modern maps. Where once a police station was marked there is now a blank space. Sometimes even the road leading to it has been erased. But Israel's secret prison, inside an army intelligence base close to the main road between Hadera and Afula in northern Israel, is real enough. For 20 years or more it has been housed in a large, imposing, single-storey building designed by a British engineer, Sir Charles Taggart, during the 1930s as one of a series of garrison forts designed to contain growing unrest in Palestine. Today, the thick concrete walls and iron gates are themselves protected by a double fence overseen by watchtowers and patrolled by attack dogs.
The prison has held Lebanese abducted by the Israeli army as hostages, Iraqi defectors and a Syrian intelligence officer who tried to defect but was accused of spying and chose to remain in another prison rather than return home and face a firing squad. More recently, scores of Palestinians were incarcerated in 1391 for interrogation, which finally led to the almost accidental disclosure of a prison the state decreed did not exist.
Those who have been through its gates know it is no illusion. One former inmate has filed a lawsuit alleging that he was raped twice - once by a man and once with a stick - during questioning. But most of those who emerge say the real torture is the psychological impact of solitary confinement in filthy, blackened cells so poorly lit that inmates can barely see their own hands, and with no idea where they are or, in many cases, why they are there.
Chris McGreal/Guardian UK 14.Nov.04
OK. Now. This is from October 2002, I haven't been back along that stretch of US101 since March 2003, when the signs were still up, and the new warehouse-like building was still there, and the old military barracks were still there, with their windows boarded up, but everything looking relatively well-maintained, and, as I tried to make clear when I first wrote about it, something pretty sinister about being advised to "NOT PICK UP HITCHIKERS" on either side of the camp perimeter, when that same highway passes within a mile of the state hospital for the criminally insane, Atascadero State Hospital, where the most dangerous population of lunatics in the state prison system are kept. No signs. Just up the road from there, Soledad State Prison, the "Gladiator School", filled with hardcore hardassed bad men. No signs. Folsom, no signs. San Quentin, no signs.
Camp Roberts, a disused, inoperative, non-functioning, virtually abandoned military base, miles from nowhere, large non-official colored warning signs that say "DO NOT PICK UP HITCHIKERS NEXT 13 MILES".
You tell me.
Here's the original piece:
There's a army base north of here a ways. Abandoned mostly or so it appears, or appeared anyway. Within the last couple months signs have appeared at either end of the strip of 101 that you pass by the base on. The signs say "DO NOT PICK UP HITCHIKERS NEXT 13 MILES" it's funny cause the signs are in non-standard colors. non-standard for around here anyway. I was thinking today when I drive by maybe it's from back east that color, kind of a dirty orange. The army base still has boarded up windows and stuff, though across the highway is a brand new sort of Xfiley beige warehouse, with humvees and stuff. It's too far away to see very clear. it was a big base at one time there's like churches with plywooded windows and lots of barracks and other army-type buildings, all looking pretty well abandoned.
The only live human I've mentioned this to said she knew the area and there was a prison nearby and a state mental hospital. Which on paper is true. But the fact is the mental hospital though housing the criminally deranged and dangerous is further down the highway, a good 20-30 miles and very close to a town and there's no signs of the type we're speaking of anywhere near it. The prison is miles away and though a road goes right along within spitting distance of it there are no signs of warning there. So.
We have a mental hospital whose inmates are deemed too dangerous to society to be anything but locked up, and a state prison, and neither of them have any warning signs on the major thoroughfares they sit near. And we have an abandoned(sorta) army base and at least three signs each direction warning the unwary. Do not. Pick up. Hitchikers. From whence might those hikers be hitching one wonders. And from what?
