The Washington Post restates a claim that was made earlier this year in Slate or Salon (I can’t remember which, but it was a huge piece that examined the legal documents, etc.), that Maj. Gen. Geoff Miller is the connection between the out of control practices early on at Gitmo and then later at Abu Ghraib:
The report’s findings are the strongest indication yet that the abusive practices seen in photographs at Abu Ghraib were not the invention of a small group of thrill-seeking military police officers. The report shows that they were used on Qahtani several months before the United States invaded Iraq.
The investigation also supports the idea that soldiers believed that placing hoods on detainees, forcing them to appear nude in front of women and sexually humiliating them were approved interrogation techniques for use on detainees.
A central figure in the investigation, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and later helped set up U.S. operations at Abu Ghraib, was accused of failing to properly supervise Qahtani’s interrogation plan and was recommended for reprimand by investigators. Miller would have been the highest-ranking officer to face discipline for detainee abuses so far, but Gen. Bantz Craddock, head of the U.S. Southern Command, declined to follow the recommendation.
Miller traveled to Iraq in September 2003 to assist in Abu Ghraib’s startup, and he later sent in “Tiger Teams” of Guantanamo Bay interrogators and analysts as advisers and trainers. Within weeks of his departure from Abu Ghraib, military working dogs were being used in interrogations, and naked detainees were humiliated and abused by military police soldiers working the night shift.
Military investigators wanted the former prison commander at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, reprimanded over the treatment of one terror suspect, but a top general rejected their call, according to a congressional aide.
Looking into FBI reports of abuse, the investigators found multiple instances at the prison, including the use of duct tape on at least one prisoner’s face, a threat to kill another prisoner’s family, and inappropriate touching by female interrogators, according to this aide, who was familiar with the findings.
But the Pentagon investigators decided interrogators’ behavior did not reach the level of torture or inhumane treatment, said the aide, who discussed the findings on condition of anonymity because the Defense Department has not released them.
BTW- the report does also show that torture was not the norm at Gitmo, and that the complaints reported by FBI agents do not bear out (at least according to this investigation):
A high-level military investigation into complaints by F.B.I. agents about the abuse of detainees at Guant