The Longbow Papers

WASHINGTON, May 14 -- An American-run detention center outside Baghdad known as Camp Cropper was reportedly the site of numerous abuses of Iraqi prisoners several months before the mistreatment of prisoners unfolded last fall at Abu Ghraib prison, according to documents and interviews.

The detention facility, on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport, appears to have served as an incubator for the acts of humiliation that were inflicted months later on Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. At both sites, the mistreatment has been linked to interrogations overseen by the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, based in Wiesbaden, Germany.

The alleged abuses at Camp Cropper last May and June were severe enough to have prompted formal complaints to American commanders from visiting officials of the International Committee for the Red Cross. After several visits to Camp Cropper, where they interviewed Iraqi prisoners, officials of the I.C.R.C. in early July 2003 cited at least 50 incidents of abuse reported to have taken place in a part of the prison under the control of military interrogators.

In one example cited to American officers in Baghdad that month by the committee officials, a prisoner said he had been beaten during interrogation, as part of an ordeal in which he was hooded, cuffed, threatened with being tortured and killed, urinated on, kicked in the head, lower back and groin, "force-fed a baseball which was tied into the mouth using a scarf and deprived of sleep for four consecutive days."

A medical examination of the prisoner by the committee's doctors "revealed hematoma in the lower back, blood in urine, sensory loss in the right hand due to tight handcuffing with flexi-cuffs, and a broken rib," said a final report by the Red Cross panel, which was presented to American officials in February 2004.

"Sometimes they treated them good, and sometimes they didn't treat them so good," Staff Sgt. Floyd Boone, a military policeman, said of the military intelligence interrogators from the 205th Brigade at Camp Cropper.

He and other members of the military police were not permitted to watch the interrogations, he says, but he remembers "all the noise, yelling and screaming" from trailers where interrogators from the 205th Brigade took Iraqi prisoners for questioning before returning them to the custody of the military police.

After the I.C.R.C. complaints, the military interrogation site at Camp Cropper where the abuses took place was closed down, senior military officials said, though they declined to discuss the committee's report or to say whether it had prompted that move. "A decision was made to close the camp and consolidate at Abu Ghraib," a senior military officer said. ...

The brigade commander, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who took command at the end of June 2003, was later put in charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib and was implicated by the Army's investigation of abuses as being "either directly or indirectly responsible" for the actions of those who mistreated and humiliated Iraqi prisoners there. ...

The 205th Military Intelligence Brigade is now the principal focus of an internal Army inquiry that is expected to shed new light on the abuses, according to senior military officers.

In November, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq, elevated the brigade to an even more prominent role, assigning it to overall responsibility for Abu Ghraib, over the 800th Military Police Brigade, an Army Reserve unit headed Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski.

At Camp Cropper, as at most American-run prisons in Iraq, the military intelligence brigade, which was responsible for interrogations, operated in a structure parallel to the military police, who were in charge of the prison and its prisoners. ...

[B]y July 2003, alleged abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Camp Cropper were among problems that had prompted loud and repeated warnings, not just from the I.C.R.C. officials, but from others focused on human rights, including Amnesty International, and a top deputy to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.

In May of 2003, according to the I.C.R.C. report, officials from that organization hand-delivered to officers of the United States Central Command in Doha, Qatar, a memorandum "based on over 200 allegations of ill-treatment of prisoners of war during capture and interrogation" during the period of major combat that followed the American invasion in March.

But it remains unclear how seriously those complaints were taken by American officials, and to what extent they were even addressed by American commanders in Iraq, by the American civilian authorities there, or by their superiors at the Central Command, the Pentagon and the State Department.

The Whistle-Blower: Accused Soldier Paints Scene of Eager Mayhem at Iraqi Prison

When a fresh crop of detainees arrived at Abu Ghraib prison one night in late October, their jailers set upon them.

The soldiers pulled seven Iraqi detainees from their cells, "tossed them in the middle of the floor" and then one soldier ran across the room and lunged into the pile of detainees, according to sworn statements given to investigators by one of the soldiers now charged with abuse. He did it again, jumping into the group like it was a pile of autumn leaves, and another soldier called for others to join in. The detainees were ordered to strip and masturbate, their heads covered with plastic sandbags. One soldier stomped on their fingers and toes.

"Graner put the detainee's head into a cradle position with Graner's arm, and Graner punched the detainee with a lot of force, in the temple," Specialist Jeremy C. Sivits said in his statements to investigators, referring to another soldier charged, Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. "Graner punched the detainee with a closed fist so hard in the temple that it knocked the detainee unconscious."

"He was joking, laughing," Specialist Sivits said. "Like he was enjoying it."

"He went over to the pile of detainees that were still clothed and he put his knees on them and had his picture taken," Specialist Sivits said. "I took this photo." ...

Specialist Graner, meanwhile, was having the other detainees make a tower, all of them in a kneeling position like a formation of cheerleaders.

"Frederick and Graner then tried to get several of the inmates to masturbate themselves," Specialist Sivits recounted.

"Staff Sergeant Frederick would take the hand of the detainee and put it on the detainee's penis, and make the detainee's hand go back and forth, as if masturbating. He did this to about three of the detainees before one of them did it right."

After five minutes, they told him to stop. Specialist Graner then had them pose against the wall, and made one kneel in front of the other, Specialist Sivits said, "So that from behind the detainee that was kneeling, it would look like the detainee kneeling had the penis of the detainee standing in his mouth, but he did not.

Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations

WASHINGTON, May 12 -- The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.

At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said.

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.

Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees. Interrogators were trying to find out whether there might be another attack planned against the United States.

The methods employed by the C.I.A. are so severe that senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have directed its agents to stay out of many of the interviews of the high-level detainees, counterterrorism officials said. The F.B.I. officials have advised the bureau's director, Robert S. Mueller III, that the interrogation techniques, which would be prohibited in criminal cases, could compromise their agents in future criminal cases, the counterterrorism officials said. ...

The C.I.A. detention program for Qaeda leaders is the most secretive component of an extensive regime of detention and interrogation put into place by the United States government after the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan that includes the detention facilities run by the military in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

There is now concern at the agency that the Congressional and criminal inquiries into abuses at Pentagon-run prisons and other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan may lead to examinations of the C.I.A's handling of the Qaeda detainees. That, in turn, could expose agency officers and operations to the same kind of public exposure as the military now faces because of the Iraq prison abuses.

So far, the agency has refused to grant any independent observer or human rights group access to the high-level detainees, who have been held in strict secrecy. Their whereabouts are such closely guarded secrets that one official said he had been told that Mr. Bush had informed the C.I.A. that he did not want to know where they were.

The authorized tactics are primarily those methods used in the training of American Special Operations soldiers to prepare them for the possibility of being captured and taken prisoners of war. The tactics simulate torture, but officials say they are supposed to stop short of serious injury.

Counterrorism officials say detainees have also been sent to third countries, where they are convinced that they might be executed, or tricked into believing they were being sent to such places. Some have been hooded, roughed up, soaked with water and deprived of food, light and medications.

Many authorities contend that torture and coercive treatment is as likely to provide information that is unreliable as information that is helpful.

Concerns are mounting among C.I.A. officers about the potential consequences of their actions. "Some people involved in this have been concerned for quite a while that eventually there would be a new president, or the mood in the country would change, and they would be held accountable," one intelligence source said. "Now that's happening faster than anybody expected."

In the interrogation of Mr. Mohammed, C.I.A. officials became convinced that he was not being fully cooperative about his knowledge of the whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden. Mr. Mohammed was carrying a letter written by Mr. bin Laden to a family member when he was captured in Pakistan early in 2003. The C.I.A. officials then authorized even harsher techniques, according to officials familiar with the interrogation.

The C.I.A. has been operating its Qaeda detention system under a series of secret legal opinions by the agency's and Justice Department lawyers. Those rules have provided a legal basis for the use of harsh interrogation techniques, including the water-boarding tactic used against Mr. Mohammed.

One set of legal memorandums, the officials said, advises government officials that if they are contemplating procedures that may put them in violation of American statutes that prohibit torture, degrading treatment or the Geneva Conventions, they will not be responsible if it can be argued that the detainees are formally in the custody of another country.

The Geneva Conventions prohibit "violence to life and person, in particular . . . cruel treatment and torture" and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."

Regarding American anti-torture laws, one administration figure involved in discussions about the memorandums said: "The criminal statutes only apply to American officials. The question is how involved are the American officials."

The official said the legal opinions say restrictions on procedures would not apply if the detainee could be deemed to be in the custody of a different country, even though American officials were getting the benefit of the interrogation. "It would be the responsibility of the other country," the official said. "It depends on the level of involvement."

Like the more numerous detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the high-level Qaeda prisoners have also been defined as unlawful combatants, not as prisoners of war. Those prisoners have no standing in American civilian or military courts.

The Bush administration began the program when intelligence agencies realized that a few detainees captured in Afghanistan had such a high intelligence value that they should be separated from the lower-level figures who had been sent to a military installation at Guantánamo Bay, which officials felt was not suitable.

There was little long-term planning. The agency initially had few interrogators and no facilities to house the top detainees. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency began to search for remote sites in friendly countries around the world where Qaeda operatives could be kept quietly and securely.

"There was a debate after 9/11 about how to make people disappear," a former intelligence official said.

The result was a series of secret agreements allowing the C.I.A. to use sites overseas without outside scrutiny.

So far, the Bush administration has not said what it intends to do over the long term with any of the high-level detainees, leaving them subject to being imprisoned indefinitely without any access to lawyers, courts or any form of due process.

Some officials have suggested that some of the high-level detainees may be tried in military tribunals or officially turned over to other countries, but counterterrorism officials have complained about the Bush administration's failure to have an "endgame" for these detainees. One official said they could also be imprisoned indefinitely at a new long-term prison being built at Guantánamo.