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Washington
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Truth about Torture
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
07 November 2005 Issue
A courageous soldier and a determined senator demand
clear standards.
Army Capt. Ian Fishback is plainly a very
brave man. Crazy brave, even. Not only has the 26-year-old West
Pointer done a tour in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, he has had the
guts to suggest publicly that his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, lied to
Congress. After making headlines a month ago for alleging that
systematic interrogation abuses occurred in Iraq-and that the
Pentagon was not forthright about it-the plain-spoken Fishback went
back to Fort Bragg, N.C. He is now practicing small-unit tactics in
the woods for a month as part of Special Forces training. After
that, he hopes to fight for his country once again overseas.
Fishback's courage in taking a lonely
stand may be paying off. Inspired by his example, "a growing
critical mass of soldiers is coming forward with allegations of
abuse," says Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch, the New
York-based activist group that first revealed Fishback's story. One
of them is Anthony Lagouranis, a Chicago-based Army specialist who
recently left the military. He supports Fishback's contention that
abuses in Iraq were systematic-and were authorized by officers in an
effort to pressure detainees into talking. "I think our
policies required abuse," says Lagouranis. "There were
freaking horrible things people were doing. I saw [detainees] who
had feet smashed with hammers. One detainee told me he had been
forced by Marines to sit on an exhaust pipe, and he had a
softball-sized blister to prove it. The stuff I did was mainly
torture lite: sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions,
hypothermia. We used dogs."
Fishback has also won a devoted and
powerful ally in Sen. John McCain, who says that the captain's tale
"is what I view as the tip of the iceberg in the military
today." Fishback's account has proved to be a prime exhibit in
McCain's long-running feud with Rumsfeld over conduct of the Iraq
war. In a long letter to Congress obtained by NEWSWEEK, Fishback
told McCain and others in Congress that when the Defense secretary
testified before Congress in the aftermath of the 2004 Abu Ghraib
abuse scandal, Rumsfeld did not accurately represent what was
occurring in Iraq.
Fishback said that many of the brutal
practices shown in the Abu Ghraib photos-which the Pentagon called
the work of a few rogue soldiers "on the night shift"-were
actually "in accordance with what I perceived as U.S.
policy." After he heard Rumsfeld testify in May 2004 that the
U.S. forces were following the Geneva Conventions in Iraq, Fishback
wrote: "I was immediately concerned that the Army was taking
part in a lie to the Congress, which would have been a clear
violation of the Constitution." Based on what he saw, Geneva
rules for prisoner treatment were not being followed, he says. And
for 17 months, a frustrated Fishback tried to get a clear answer
about what standards were being used- consulting his superior
officers, Army lawyers, even a professor of philosophy at West
Point, Col. Daniel Zupan. He says he never got an answer. A devout
Christian, Fishback held soul-searching discussions with fellow
officers in Bible class about what he should do. In the end he went
to Human Rights Watch for guidance.
Like Fishback, McCain has grown keenly
frustrated by the lack of clarity in the Bush administration's
interrogation policies. The Arizona senator, a former POW who was
tortured in Vietnam, is now battling the administration over an
amendment he has attached to the new defense appropriations bill. It
would set down, once and for all, what is allowed in interrogation
rooms. In simple, clear language, the two-and-a-half-page amendment
forbids cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment "regardless of
nationality or physical location"-and defines such treatment as
the same as that which is prohibited under the U.S. Constitution. In
a rebuke to President George W. Bush last month, the GOP-controlled
Senate voted 90-9 to approve the McCain amendment.
The Bush administration has consistently
maintained that it is not U.S. policy to abuse prisoners. But Bush
has threatened to veto the entire appropriations bill if it contains
McCain's language-all in an effort to preserve the right to treat
prisoners in whatever way the president decides is necessary. Last
week Vice President Dick Cheney, with CIA Director Porter Goss in
tow, met with McCain to try to persuade him to exclude the CIA from
any restrictions. The administration also sought to cut out the term
"regardless of physical location," McCain said in an
interview. The Washington Post, in a harsh editorial, later branded
Cheney "the vice president for torture." Cheney's
spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, said she had no comment on the McCain
meeting. CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Dyck also declined to talk about
it. But John Yoo, a former Justice Department official who drafted
an August 2002 memo that justified rough methods, said last week
that the administration should continue to treat terrorists
differently overseas because they "do not operate according to
the Geneva Conventions."
Critics, many of them inside the
military, say Yoo and other administration hawks have never
understood that U.S. observance of Geneva rules is not dependent on
what the enemy does. As McCain puts it: "This isn't about who
they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that
distinguish us from our enemies." He says the administration
could make things worse than they already are by putting a law on
the books that will, in effect, authorize abusive practices at
overseas facilities. "We aren't going to allow any weakening of
language," McCain told NEWSWEEK. If the present bill is vetoed
or watered down, he adds, "we will certainly put it on another
piece of legislation. I think we could get 90 votes tomorrow."
Even at senior levels of the Pentagon, some officials are uneasy
about the administration's opposition to the McCain amendment.
"The uniformed military is appalled by Cheney's stand,"
says a Pentagon official who would talk only if he were not
identified.
For a year and a half now, the
administration has sought to make the Abu Ghraib scandal go away.
When questioned about abuses, the Pentagon regularly cites the sheer
numbers of punishments it has administered to U.S. personnel-230
cases in all, including jail sentences, demotions and other
nonjudicial discipline.
But Defense officials rarely point out
that no senior officers or civilian officials have been charged
since Abu Ghraib. Other officers say they too are seething over the
lack of accountability at senior levels. Colonel Zupan, the West
Point philosophy teacher, says he himself should have acted when he
was deployed in Afghanistan and heard of similar abuses. "I
didn't raise my eyebrows about it," he said. "I think it
was wrong of me. And if I didn't, as a field officer, then how are
we going to be too harsh on an enlisted soldier?"
The Army has sought to paint Fishback as
a lone malcontent. Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, says the Army
Criminal Investigation Division was investigating the captain's
allegations. He calls Fishback's long letter "verbiage"
and says he had no comment on the questions raised about Rumsfeld's
veracity. But NEWSWEEK has obtained corroboration for Fishback's
central point in the Army's own files. According to papers released
by the Defense Department in September in response to a lawsuit by
the American Civil Liberties Union, supporting documents for an
inspector-general probe in July 2004 show that abuses were much more
widespread than the Army acknowledged. In one IG document, an Army
sergeant testifies that putting detainees in stressful positions and
pouring water on them "seemed to be something all
interrogators" in the Fourth Infantry Division were doing.
Before heading into the Fort Bragg woods
this week, Fishback told NEWSWEEK that he doesn't want to talk to
the media now. "I will just say: I support clear standards in
accordance with American values," he said. Judging from the
firestorm he started, he may someday get them.
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