Taxi to the Dark Side Page #2

[Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Abu Ghraib, 2004] The people who engaged in abuses will be brought to justice.

The world will see how a free system, a democratic system,

functions and operates transparently with no cover-ups.

[Rear Admiral John Hutson, (ret) Judge Advocate General] The Secretary and others have said,

"Well, you know, we've conducted 12 investigations"...

Each and all of which were geared to looking downward,

Down toward Lynndie England and Graner, and not looking up.

The soldiers in the photos are military police, or MPs, whose job it was to guard and protect the prisoners.

In their statements, the MPs claimed that Mil-Intel, or MI,

Ordered them to weaken, humiliate, and break the prisoners for interrogation purposes.

[SPC. Tony Lagouranis, Mil-Intel, Iraq] Obviously, you know, what they were doing, in those pictures,

was not sanctioned by the Interrogation Rules of Engagement.

And they weren't interrogators. So yes, I did think that they were bad apples.

However, I also think that they were taking cues from Intel.

[SGT. Ken Davis, 372nd MP Company, Abu Ghraib] This reading report said it was happening in Afgan.

I mean, humiliation, trying to break people came from somewhere.

MPs didn't think of it. MPs were not ever trained in such things.

We should never have been "breaking" anybody.

[PFC. Damien Corsetti, Mil-Intel, Bagram & Abu Ghraib] I can tell you, we set the same policies in Abu as we set at Bagram.

The same exact rules.

The same thing was going on.

And they wonder why it happened.

In her sworn testimony about Abu Ghraib,

Capt. Wood said she felt pressured to produce intelligence,

So she brought unauthorized techniques:

Dogs, nudity, sleep deprivation and stress positions to Abu Ghraib from Afgan.

Wood maintained that the Bagram model had tacit approval from superiors.

But U.S. Central Command had never responded to her requests for authorization.

So the mystery remained. Was Abu Ghraib the work of a few bad apples?

Or evidence of a new world-wide system of detention and interrogation?

[SPC. Tony Lagouranis, Mil-Intel, Iraq] I'm pretty sure that interrogators were telling the guards:

"Strip this guy naked, chain him up to the bed in an uncomfortable position,

You know, do whatever you can." And then they decided to take it one step further

And have some "fun," and take pictures.

[Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to Colin Powell 2002-2005, 31 years in the Military]

You've always got people in the military who are just this side of the Marquis De Sade,

And one of the reasons you want rules

And this code of conduct to help you lead mud rings and mud runs infantry...is

is so that you can use those tools to restrict this tendency in your soldiers.

When you have your friends dying on you left and right,

You can sometimes go beyond the pale.

So a lieutenant, a captain down where the rubber meets the road, needs these tools.

And he needs to be able to punish people who cross the line.

When the secretary walked through my door into my office

About the time the photos of Abu Ghraib were getting ready to come out

And we had rumor that they were coming out,

He said to me, "I need to know what happened and why."

And so then I began to build both an open source

And inside the government, classified and unclassified, document file.

And I began to see legal arguments as to why the President

could pretty much do anything he wanted to in the name of Security.

And the Secretary of Defense, and others beneath him,

were actually looking for the twin pressures that they put on people.

That is to say, the pressure to produce intelligence.

And the fact that they were saying "the gloves are off,"

Created the environment in the field that we later saw reflected in the photographs from Abu Ghraib.

And in my view, far more serious fashion than the photographs we saw,

Were 98 deaths of people in detention,

Which I understand now from my army colleagues is up to some 25

of which have been declared officially by the Army as homicides.

People say, "Well, these photographs from Abu Ghraib, they weren't real torture."

I look back at those people and say, "Murder is torture. Murder is the ultimate torture."

In the case of Dilawar, he was subject to certainly cruel and unusual punishment,

And ultimately, he was subject to torture because he died.

[Carlotta Gall] "First, we're not chaining people to the ceiling." That's what he says.

Carlotta Gall is a New York Times journalist based in Kabul.

Unsatisfied with the Military's explanation of the two deaths at Bagram,

She set out to investigate.

[Carlotta Gall] It took a long time to find the family because the Military didn't tell us who they were.

And we started calling around: Governors.

They are a very simple farming family. They don't speak English.

But they showed me a paper that was given to them with the body.

And that's when I opened it up and read it. It was in English.

And it was signed by a U.S. Major who was the pathologist.

And of the four boxes, she checked the box for Homicide.

I said, "My God, they've killed him."

And we then had to tell the family, "Do you know what's written here?"

And they said, "No, it's in English. We don't understand."

And I think maybe the Red Cross who helped return the body had explained, but they hadn't taken it in.

And then the Pathologist had said it was this blunt force trauma to the legs.

[Carlotta Gall] "Presently have no indication of that." You know,

There's been a death certificate signed by his people and he says,

"Presently I have no indication of any blunt force trauma."

And it's written on the death certificate which I've seen.

[Tim Golden, New York Times Reporter] The story probably would have gone away had it not been for my colleague, Carlotta Gall,

Who tracked down Dilawar's family and found the knife-in-the-back clue

That told everyone that this incident had been something other than the Military portrayed.

Tim Golden picked up the trail of the story

And obtained a confidential file of the Army investigation,

Including hundreds of pages of testimony from the soldiers involved.

[Tim Golden, New York Times Reporter] Part of what made the story compelling to me was that

You had these young soldiers with very little training or preparation,

thrown into this situation in the aftermath of 9/11, just as the rules were changing.

And they weren't told what the new rules were.

And you had this young Afghan man who came into this system

at the wrong time, in the wrong way. And this is what happened to him.

[SGT. Thomas Curtis, Mil-Pol, Bagram] I saw his picture in the New York Times article.

Before that picture, I couldn't have picked his face out, you know.

My memory of him was chained up, with the hood on, no sleeping.

Following questions raised by the New York Times,

And under scrutiny about the Abu Ghraib scandal,

The Army finally stepped up the Dilawar investigation,

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