British Arab Lawyers’ Association

April 22 (Bloomberg) — Forced nudity, stress positions and police dogs were commonly used by military interrogators to intimidate prisoners at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq, a Senate panel has concluded.

The newly declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report said coercive techniques, later described by military investigators as abuse, were authorized for military interrogations in Afghanistan and at Abu Ghraib, the prison made infamous by photos of naked prisoners standing near barking German shepherd dogs that first appeared in April 2004.

Officials in former President George W. Bush’s administration characterized prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib as misconduct by low-level military personnel. Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the abuse was perpetrated by “a few bad apples.”

The committee report, released last night in Washington, “represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies” and top officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse to “low-ranking soldiers,” Senator Carl Levin, the panel’s chairman, said in a statement. Levin is a Democrat from Michigan.

The report traced how U.S. military prison authorities in Afghanistan, and later in Iraq, adopted coercive interrogation methods after then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved their use on suspected terrorists held at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in December, 2002.

Rescinded Authority

Even after Rumsfeld issued an order on Jan. 15, 2003, to rescind blanket authority for Guantanamo interrogators to use the techniques, they were adopted by military intelligence officers at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and later at Abu Ghraib outside Baghdad, the report said.

The deputy staff judge advocate in Afghanistan told military interviewers that the “methodologies approved” for Guantanamo “would appear to me to be legal” because Rumsfeld and the Defense Department’s general counsel authorized them for use on suspected al-Qaeda operatives, the report said.

“It is fair to say the procedures approved for Guantanamo were legal for Afghanistan,” the lawyer told military interviewers, according to a summary of an interview cited in the report.

A month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, a team set up to run the military prison in Abu Ghraib after U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime obtained a list of the procedures used in Afghanistan, the report said. The task force “changed the letterhead, and adopted” them “verbatim,” the Senate report said.

‘Stress Positions’

These included “stress positions,” in which prisoners are contorted to put undue strain on a particular body part, “sleep deprivation, and the use of dogs,” the report said.

In September, 2003, a lawyer for the U.S. Central Command that oversees military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote that “many of these techniques appear to violate” the Geneva Conventions prohibition on torture of prisoners.

A month later procedures in Iraq were revised to eliminate techniques such as stress positions and the use of dogs without muzzles to induce fear.

Techniques that were labeled detainee abuse by an investigation conducted by Major General George Fay in 2004 “were also used by military interrogators conducting interrogations” at prisons outside Baghdad, the report said. “Removal of clothing was widely used for interrogations,” it said.

One military police commander, Colonel Jerry Philabaum, told investigators he saw “between 12-15 detainees naked in their own” cells, the report said.

Captain Donald Reese, another military police commander, said it was common “to walk the tier and see detainees without closing and bedding” because nudity as an interrogation tactic was “known by everybody,” the report said.

The 232-page report was approved unanimously by the Armed Services Committee in November. It has been under review by the Pentagon to declassify military secrets. An executive summary was released in December.