Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

- On December 1st, 2002

Dilawar, a young Afghan taxi driver

took three passengers for a ride.

He never returned home.

- When the sun started to go down,

the sand started blowing, so it was

a like a big dust bowl and I'm thinking,

boy is it gonna be like this every night?

- I remember walking in there for the

first time and the smell, the smell's

the first thing that hit you.

I'm a man from DC, if you've ever been

to the National Zoo when you walk

into the elephant house there,

that's the best way to describe it.

There's a few of us that lived in

the prison and I was one of them.

They built it up to be a big scary place

to the prisoners.

- After then invasion of Afghanistan,

US forces occupied Bagram, an old Soviet air base

as a place to collect and interrogate

thousands of detainees, captured

throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan.

- These were suspected Taliban.

They were being caught by Special Forces

throughout the countryside, brought to Bagram

and be held, interrogated to determine

if they were a high value prisoner.

- These were not nice people at all.

They were very evil people who

definitely had violent intentions.

- On December 5, 2002,

Dilawar, the taxi driver, was brought

to Bagram, he was designated a PUC,

person under control, number 421.

- He was something to do with a trigger man

for a rocket attack and that's about all I know.

- Five days after his arrival, he was dead.

- I would say this was around 'bout 05:00 in the morning

and as I walked by, Dilawar, I think

that's his name, Dilawar, I walked by

Dilawar's cell and I noticed he was

just kinda hanging there with his head down

but he was being too still to be just

hanging there and sleeping.

- Sergeant Curtis opened up the door

and we went in and he was unresponsive

and we started CPR.

I was downstairs in general population

then I heard a call come in asking

for Cammack to come upstairs, he was a medic

and we carried him downstairs on the stretcher

and Cammack was still on top of him

while we were carrying him down,

still trying to get him back going

all the way down the stairs, got him

to the front door and they kept working on him

and kept working on him until the doctor

got there and pronounced him dead.

- I don't know whether there

was an injury that was aggravated by something

or whether he was just sick coming in.

- They're very frail people and I was surprised

that it had taken that long for one

of em to die in our custody.

- It was a sense of, definitely a sense of concern

because he was the second one.

- Just a week before Dilawar's death,

another detainee at Bagram had died.

- You know, you wonder, is it something

we did or did somebody kill him or something

but I just didn't know.

- According to the medical examiner,

the first detainee to die, Habibullah,

had a pre-existing pulmonary condition

but it was the beatings he sustained

in Bagram that led to the cause of his death

a blood clot that traveled to his lungs.

- When the second one died a week later

that's when it was like oh crap,

something was gonna happen now,

yes, two prisoners dying within a week

of each other, that's bad.

- A preliminary investigation

into Dilawar's death revealed deep bruises

all over his body, but did not conclude

that his treatment at Bagram was to blame.

- The next day, they said just draw out

how he was shackled up here and I made

that little crude drawing.

The ceiling of these isolation rooms

was just a simple metal grate and it was

thick enough you could put handcuffs

through the wires of that and you just

kind of chain em up like that,

out to the sides like this.

- Forced standing for long periods

had inflamed tissue damage from blows

to Dilawar's legs, but the initial Bagram

press release failed to mention

overhead shackling or beatings.

It declared that both detainees

had died of natural causes.

- My opinion is that the military

wanted to get this over and get this

done quickly, before it really got noticed.

- Soon after Dilawar's death,

the officer in charge of interrogation

at Bagram, Captain Carolyn Wood

was awarded the Bronze Star for Valor.

Following the Iraq invasion, Wood

and her intelligence unit were given

a new assignment, Abu Ghraib.

- The only thing I can really remember

about Abu Ghraib was the heat, it was like

a 148 degrees or so there and it was all concrete.

You know, Abu Ghraib also had that infamous

torture chambers and stuff left from Saddam's era.

I remember walking through those and seeing

fingernail marks on the walls and blood stains

and guillotines and stuff like that

it was a pretty surreal feeling.

We went to Abu Ghraib, I believe in July,

July August of 2003 to start that prison.

- You put people in a crazy situation

and people do crazy things

and Abu was getting mortared every night.

These 120mm mortars killing prisoners.

The first time that happened, they should

have evacuated those prisoners to somewhere else.

Because the prisoners weren't safe.

- People were being told to rough up Iraqis

that wouldn't cooperate, we were also told

they're nothing but dogs, then all of a sudden

you start looking at these people

as less than human and you start

doing things to em you would never dream of

and that's where it got scary.

- It was only the night shift,

there's always a few bad apples.

- It's been a body blow for all of us.

- This is clearly an isolated incident.

- The conduct of a very very small

number of our leaders and soldiers.

- In the wake of media attention

surrounding Abu Ghraib, the military

began a series of investigations.

- 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.

- 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 Military Intelligence or MI

ordered them to weaken, humiliate

and break the prisoners for interrogation purposes.

- Obviously 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.

- Just reading reports that was happening

in Afghanistan, 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 have never been breaking anybody.

- I can tell you we set the same policy

at Abu we set at Bagram, same exact rules.

Same thing was going on.

They wonder why it happened.

- In her sworn testimony

about Abu Ghraib, Captain Wood said

she felt pressured to produce intelligence

so she brought unauthorized techniques

dogs, nudity, sleep depravation and stress positions

to Abu Ghraib from Afghanistan.

Wood maintained that the Bagram model

had tacit approval from superiors

but US 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 worldwide system on detention and interrogation?

- I'm pretty sure that interrogators

were telling the guards, strip this guy naked

chain him up to the bed in an uncomfortable

position do whatever you can and then

they just decided to take it one step further

and have some fun with, and take pictures.

- 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 Marines and mud grunts, Infantry

is so that you can use those tools

to restrict this tendency in your soldiers.

When you have your friends dying

on your left and right, you can sometimes go

beyond the pail, 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 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 an 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 few, far more serious fashion

than the photographs we saw, 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 I say

murder's torture, murder's the ultimate torture.

In the case of Dilawar, he was subjected to

certainly cruel and unusual punishment

and ultimately, he was subjected

to torture because he died.

- It's not our intent for people

to die, especially when we're seeking

to get information from them.

- Did the treatment they received

in those rooms cause the death of these two men?

- First, we're not chaining

people to the ceiling, I think you asked

me that question before.

- 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.

- 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're 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 and it was in English

and it was a death certificate from

the American Military and it was signed by

a US Major who was the pathologist

and there were four boxes and she'd ticked

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.

In other words, did they receive

any trauma, any blunt injury trauma as we call it?

- Presently I have no indiction of that

but we will be looking as this investigation

continues to go down its due course.

- 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.

- 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.

- Part of what made this 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 in

to this system at the wrong time

and in the wrong way and this is what

happened to him.

- 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

from the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Army

finally stepped up the Dilawar investigation

and began charging soldiers with maltreatment

maiming and homicide.

- When you're working with the organization

like the military, they're gonna hold

somebody accountable, you can sweep

some things under the rug, but this was a death

it was two deaths and okay fine,

they're gonna charge people.

- It seemed like the military now,

after they got a black eye from Abu Ghraib

wanted to get a public opinion that they were

policing their soldiers and so they

said we had this incident that happened

a couple of years ago, we can still

prosecute some of them.

- I had nothing to do with the military

for two years and all of a sudden

I'm getting a call saying that

I'm being court-martialed, I mean

that was a huge surprise for me.

- From the defense perspective,

I immediately said this is a political show trial.

Willie Brand is a good soldier

good soldiers tend to obey orders,

good soldiers tend to be people

who do what they're trained to do.

- The interrogators on the ground

for the most part didn't know

what the rules were, they'd never been

interrogators before.

- My interrogation training consisted

of basically they taught us some approaches

how to get people to talk and then

here, go, go watch these guys interrogate

which were the people that we were replacing

for about five, six hours before

I did my first interrogation.

- Damien was picked for this job

because he's big, he's loud and he's scary

that was his qualification.

- Soldiers are dying, get the information.

That's all you're told, get the information.

- Soldiers said that when prisoners

like Dilawar came in to Bagram they were

immediately assaulted.

They blasted music at em, often

they had dogs barking at em and they

would use some of the most menacing

interrogators to create this sense of threat

one of those was Damien Corsetti.

- With the screening you're trying to instill

what's call shock of capture, when the person

first comes in, that's when they're most

apt to give you information because

they're just like holy crap, you know

what's going on. - It's not just that

the disorientation procedure, it's actually

a terrorizing procedure, it's designed

to terrify you into spilling the beans

as it were, being spat at, being sworn at

having the dogs barking around,

cameras flashing in your face.

- Keep in mind, in their culture

that dog's more shocking to them

than it is to us, kinda like a woman

telling em what to do, you know,

it's a cultural thing, so you get

more bang for your buck over there

with the dog. - And then to be re-shackled

completely naked, and to do what they call

the body search, the cavity search

and then to be questioned naked, shivering.

- After they're read their rules

and everything, they're taken to their cell

to where they're gonna be put in

sleep depravation for 24 hours, that's standard

for everybody, then from their MI direct us

that they can go to general population

or they have to stay in isolation

or if they are gonna stay in isolation

if they're gonna be allowed to sleep

and if they can, then when.

- To weaken the defenses

of detainees, interrogators ordered

military police to find ways of keeping

the prisoners awake. - You know, you're in that

room not saying anything, oh well you know

maybe he knows a little bit more

let's let him lose a little bit more sleep.

Which is the idea of keeping him like this

so he won't sleep, you'll stand, cause as soon

as you start to let your body go

all that pressure on your wrists

and your arms, you're gonna feel that with those cuffs on.

- The only time the MPs would ever help us

do anything would be to keep them

on a sleep schedule, you know, they're guaranteed

so much sleep, is that sleep consistent?

Is it uninterrupted?

You know, there's fifteen minutes here

fifteen minutes there, who knows.

That's how it was proposed to us.

- There'd be a board when you walk

in the room on this wall, you might see

an arrow going up to the ceiling

and it would be maybe a one by it

so that'd be an hour up, he's gotta stand up

for one hour, and then you may see a two

with an arrow pointing down, that means

he can sit down for two hours.

- The prisoners were kept in these big pens

downstairs and their numbers would be

scribbled on the door of the airlock

which was the little passageway

that they were taken out of when

they were brought up to the isolation cells upstairs.

- Detainees were actually chained

with their hands above their heads

in these airlocks, his number 421

was something that I could see often

because his back was towards me

in the airlock and the numbers

were written on the backs of the detainees

in black marker and we all had that

as well as on the front.

- What was your number?

- My number in Bagram was 180 but later it became 558.

- Thank you, it's great to be with ya

it's good to be here in Bagram of course.

- I'm sure, any high ranking officer

who toured would see the shackles.

Because you're gonna tour to look.

You know, they're curious just like

everybody else is.

- There are always officers coming

and going through the facility.

We kinda joked about it as being

the greatest show on Earth, everyone

wanted to come and look at the terrorists.

- Mr Rumsfeld's office called our office

frequently, very high commanders

would wanna be kept up to date

on a daily basis on certain prisoners there.

The Brass knew, they saw em shackled

they saw em hooded and they said right on

y'all are doing a great job.

- When the Red Cross toured Bagram

the sleep deprivation chart was erased

and the prisoners were unshackled.

- Traditional military procedure

did not allow you to shackle somebody

to a fixed object, certainly not

chaining their arms overhead.

Initially they were handcuffing people

into the airlock of the cells for punishment

and that was to be strictly limited

15 minutes, half an hour, but it quickly evolved

and when you walked in there, they just had

a pair of long handcuffs dangling

from the wire mesh ceiling of the cell

ready for whoever came in.

- The Army coroner who examined Dilawar

discovered massive tissue damage in his legs.

She later testified that his legs had been pulpified.

But what could have caused that kind of damage?

- This is not a hotel, this is a not

a place for them to get fat, and lazy and happy.

- In a video tape that surfaced

as part of the homicide investigation,

Colonel David Hayden, a top Army lawyer

for US forces in Afghanistan described

a Policy of shackling and striking detainees.

- There was an approved technique for the MPs

when somebody was a difficult prisoner

that you could hit em on the legs, it was

supposedly not considered not a lethal blow.

- I didn't actually hear a higher up say

go and kick em in the leg, if they do this

or do that, the higher ups said,

if, you know, in order to get control of em

that's an option what you can use.

- It's just your knee going into the side

of their thigh, bout midway up

supposed to be a pressure point right there

and it controls em really easy.

- Over two ays, everybody's hitting you

in the legs, it can cause some severe problems.

- Throughout the investigation and even

in the trials, a lot of the guards

and interrogators described Dilawar

as a very combative detainee, as a tough character

and that's just never been reconciled

with all the other evidence that

there was about this guy who weighed

122 pounds when he died.

The men who had been passengers

in Dilawar's taxi told us later

that he had just been absolutely terrified

at Bagram, that they heard him

through the walls of the isolation cells

screaming for his mother and father.

- He'd been in a very

uncomfortable position muttering things

sometimes praying, sometimes asking for help

or seemingly asking for help,

because I couldn't understand his language.

- A number of witnesses

remember the night before Dilawar died.

- Just that one night, he got kicked

in the leg maybe like 10 times.

- Some of the soldiers said they started

using the knee strikes essentially

to shut em up because he was yelling

and screaming. - The damage that was done

was done from multiple strikes and a lot

of that could have been avoided

had you known the person before you

had fought with them and used that exact technique.

- When they eventually came to take him

to an isolation cell, I believe

his body had become almost limp.

One of the reasons why they began punching him

was that they felt he was putting it on.

He was in the airlock, standing there

with a hood over his head, he had

his hands tied above his head and he was moaning.

- He just started to fight, right there

in the airlock and the airlock has

a front gate and a back gate but both

the sides are concertina wire, neither

of us officers wanted to get in

to the concertina wire, so we pulled him out

of the airlock and put him on the floor

and put him into restraints.

- What kind of force

did you have to use in order to subdue him?

- Physical force, he was struck.

- There's like four MPs on this guy

and one of the MPs just kept giving him

kidney shots, the other two, they'd slammed

him to the ground and then the fourth one

jumped on his back, he got a big gash on his nose.

- There was no reason to hit him,

let's remember he's shackled.

- Even when the control was an issue,

it became well I'm just gonna do this

to get mine in, and that's probably

why they got in trouble, because you really

couldn't justify kicking the guy

that much if he was just chained up.

- Dilawar was taken to

an isolation cell, where the knee strikes continued.

In her statement at trial, the Army coroner

said his lower limbs looked like

they had been run over by a bus.

Had he lived, it would have been

necessary to amputate his legs.

- Then it kinda raised the question of

this is what we did to him, it's not

just this is what I did to him

or this is what Cammack did to him

or Morden or anybody, it just this is

what we've done.

- It's almost hard to fathom now,

you had soldiers like Willie Brand

who seems like this very gentle

kind of soft spoken guy, but who testified

that he struck Dilawar so many times

in the leg that his knee got tired

and he had to switch to the other one.

- Sometimes I feel that I should have gone with

my own morality more then what was common.

- One MP testified that

the strikes became an amusement,

inflicted on Dilawar just to hear

him scream Allah. - Some would say well hey

you should have stopped this, you should

have stopped that, when you saw he was

injured or saw he was being kicked on his knees,

why didn't you do something?

That'd be a good question, my answer

would be well, it was us against them

I was over there, I didn't wanna appear

to be going against my fellow soldiers.

Which is that wrong, you could sit here

and say that was dead wrong,

go over there and say that.

- No one ever investigated

who set the rules at Bagram.

Investigators never asked Captain Wood

what senior officers had given orders

to treat detainees in ways that were

forbidden according to the Army Field Manual.

MP Captain Beiring was the only

officer prosecuted in the case.

His dereliction of duty charge was dismissed

when the judge determined that no one

had made clear what Captain Beiring's duty was.

In spite of repeated requests for proper training

rules of engagement for his soldiers

his superiors gave him neither.

- We were all worried about not having

that written guidelines, by they kept

reassuring us that it was coming.

- We knew exactly why we weren't getting

clear guidance, just in case something

like this happened.

- If I had to do it again, I'd probably say no

I just, I'd be like I'm not doing anything

until I see something in writing.

- And do you think,

looking back, do you think you were misled?

- I think we all were.

- A week after September 11th

Vice President Dick Cheney appeared

on Meet the Press to describe how

interrogation policies were about to change.

- I have to work the dark side, if you will

spend time in the shadows, in the

intelligence world, a lot of what

needs to be done here will have to be done

quietly without any discussion,

using sources and methods that

are available to our intelligence agencies

if we're gonna be successful, that's the world

these folks operate in and so it's gonna

be vital for us to use any means at our disposal,

basically, to achieve our objective.

- It's very clear that it starts

in the office of Vice President Cheney

he had a very strong view that we were not

as aggressive in dealing with people

in interrogations as we could or should be.

Taking the gloves off, being rough with detainees.

- If Dick Cheney was

the primary architect of a new policy,

John Yoo was the chief draftsman.

He wrote guiding opinions which argued

for a flexibly approach to treating suspected terrorists.

- United States used to treat terrorism

as a criminal justice problem.

The September 11th attacks showed that

the struggle with Al-Qaeda had moved

into warfare, I think when a sworn enemy

for political purposes can kill

three thousand Americans, cause billions

of dollars of damage and try to eliminate

the leaders of the American Government

that sounds like war to most people,

it doesn't sound like crime.

- President Bush declared

a war on terror, but he raised questions

about whether suspected terrorists

should be protected by the laws of war.

The Geneva Conventions.

Atrocities that shocked the conscience

of the world gave rise to the modern

Geneva Conventions, international treaties

meant to provide fundamental protections

for every human being captured in war time.

In effect for over 50 years, Geneva offered

legal protections and prohibited interrogators

from using torture, murder, or even

humiliating and degrading treatment.

After 9/11, John Yoo worked closely

with Dick Cheney's office and Alberto Gonzales

the Counsel to the President.

They wrote a series of memos arguing

that the Geneva Conventions did not apply

to suspected terrorists and they gave

legal cover for the CIA and Special Forces

to embark on a secret program

of previously forbidden interrogation techniques.

- More than 3000 suspected terrorists

have been arrested in many countries

many others have met a different fate

let's put it this way, they're no longer

a problem to the United States

and our friends and allies.

- The problem for the President,

Gonzalez warned, was that some

of the new interrogation techniques

were banned under US and international law.

- One of the points that he makes

is that we don't want the Geneva Conventions

to apply because if they do, these things

can be war crimes. - What's well known is

the principle of command responsibility.

This was established in the Nuremberg trials

after World War II and it established

the principle of international criminal law

that individuals who order illegal treatment

will be held accountable for the illegal

treatment even if they're not immediately

applying the kind of abusive treatment.

- To be certain that Americans

interrogating prisoners would not

be accused of torture, John Yoo co-authored

a memo that would clarify the meaning of the term.

- The only prohibited acts would be

extreme acts which are equivalent

to serious physical injury, such as organ failure

impairment of bodily functions or even death.

That's an illegal memo, that's the so-called torture memo.

- That was an arguable interpretation

of the law, I'm sure we had discussions about it

and ultimately it was accepted,

because it represent, that was the ultimate

decision and position of the Office of Legal Counsel.

- The Office of Legal Counsel memorandum

was unbounded, meaning nowhere did it state

that the application of cruel and inhuman

and degrading treatment was prohibited

and at one point, I asked John Yoo

can the President authorize torture

and his response was yes.

- I think the lawyers job is to tell

people what laws do or do not apply

so that they know what space they have

to make the policy decision.

- If the President deems that

he's got to torture somebody, including

by crushing the testicles of the person's child,

there is no law that can stop that?

That's what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.

- I think it depends on why the President

thinks he needs to do that.

- Military lawyers were outraged

by the implications of John Yoo's memo.

- My first involvement in this came

when I was visited by a group of senior

JAG officers, more than a year before

the first story about the Abu Ghraib broke

who were very troubled about what was going on

and the focus of their concern

was failing in the responsibilities

that the military leadership had,

to soldiers in the field, that was the

responsibility to provide fair,

clear guidance to them as to how

to behave in these difficult circumstances

and what they saw was an intentional

decision taken at the height of the Pentagon

to put out a fog of ambiguity coupled with

great pressure to bring results

to be prepared to be violent with the detainees

but you know, this violence with the detainees

is a criminal act.

- They may be Al-Qaeda, they may be Taliban

they may be the worst people in the world

and I'm sure that some of them are

but there are certain basic rules

and international agreements that the United states

has agreed to, that we will observe

you go ahead and please respond,

you wanted to. - Very quickly, let me clarify

the President's policy, "as a matter of policy

"the United States Armed Forces

"shall continue to treat detainees humanely

"and to the extent appropriate and consistent

"with military necessity in a manner

"consistent with the principles of Geneva."

- That is a legalistic statement and one

that is written with loopholes

and it's clear to me, the interrogators

did not understand that quote "humane treatment"

might be in the eye of the beholder.

- In the field in Afghanistan,

there was a great deal of confusion

about exactly what the rules were.

- They told us when dealing with the PUCs

as they called them, the persons under US custody

they don't fall under Geneva Conventions,

basically, the only thing that we weren't allowed

to do is beat em up.

- Person under control,

person under custody, something like that,

you know, they call them anything

to dehumanize em, so that you don't

look at them as people.

- I don't remember hearing anything

about Geneva Convention, 'course I'm familiar

with it, but they didn't go over that

in any kind of detail.

- I didn't know what the Field Manual

for interrogation, I didn't know

the proper nomenclature for it, I'd seen it,

there was a copy of it lying around

I'm sure somewhere, and if I had chosen to,

I could have picked it up and read it

but I was working 16 hour days

to sit down and read a field manual

was not top of my priorities over there.

- It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty

business out there and we have to operate

in that arena, I'm convinced we can do it

we can do it successfully but we need

to make certain that we have not

tied the hands, if you will, of our

intelligence communities in terms of

accomplishing their mission.

- These terrorists play by a whole

set of different rules, it's gonna force us

in your words, to get mean, dirty and nasty

in order to take em on? - Right.

- Guided by a legal opinion

from John Yoo, the Bush Administration

began shipping some high-value detainees

to the US Naval Base, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

- Initially I thought good, safe place.

Put them there, barbed wire all over.

Then it became apparent that the reason

we were doing it was because we were

going to argue that there's no law.

A Cuban law didn't apply, US law didn't apply

well that was a big step down the slippery slope.

- I think what the policy makers

were trying to do was to try to find a place

that was physically as close to

the unIted States so it could be well protected

but still would benefit from the rule

that the United states military,

is one who has ultimate say and control

over enemy prisoners who are held outside the country.

- One by one, the terrorists are learning

the meaning of American justice.

- In December 2001, a man named

Mohammed al-Qahtani was swept up

in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo.

After eight months in detention

the Army discovered that he may

have trained to be the 20th hijacker.

Suddenly, Qahtani became the most

important detainee in Guantanamo.

- Here we had a man who was supposed

to have been on that plane that was flown

into the Pennsylvania countryside

so I think there was a sense of urgency

to find out what this guy knew in order

to be able to prevent any future attacks.

- He successfully resisted standard

interrogation techniques at Guantanamo

for eight months and he is the genesis

for the request by the joint task force

at Guantanamo for more techniques

that might be able to get past his resistance training.

- In September 2002,

John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez traveled

to Guantanamo, soon after their visit,

and just before Dilawar's arrival at Bagram,

Donald Rumsfeld personally approved

a new menu of psychological interrogation

techniques for use on Mohammed al-Qahtani.

Exactly how the techniques would be applied

was often left to the imagination

of the interrogators.

- His interrogations are well-documented

in a log and from November 2002 in to

early January 2003, he was subjected to this regime.

It involved very severe sleep deprivation.

He was only permitted to sleep

four hours a day from seven o'clock in the morning

till 11 o'clock in the morning,

and that lasted for 50 days with one exception.

He was held in severe isolation and sensory deprivation.

There are a number of instances

in the log where you'll see the phrase

invasion of space by a female,

and that was actually an interrogation

tactic designed to break his faith.

- An interrogator approached detainee

from behind, rubbed his back, whispered

in his ear and ran fingers through his hair

that was authorized under the futility technique.

- He was subjected to what I would call

sexual assault by female interrogators.

- He was forced to wear women's lingerie

multiple allegations of homosexuality

and that his comrades were aware of that

he was forced to dance with a male interrogator

subject to strip searches for control measures

not for security, and he was forced

to perform dog tricks.

All this to lower his personal sense of worth.

- They tried to categorize it as individual

interrogators pushing the envelope

or starting to get quote creative.

♪ God bless America

♪ Land that I love

- The combination of his lack of food intake

and forcible hydration led him at one point

to actually, his heart slowed down

to 35 beats per minute and he was rushed

to the hospital to be revived.

- Mohammed al-Qahtani in many ways

that single interrogation, protected interrogation

contains within it, if you will,

the entire genealogy, the entire history

of CIA torture over the last 50 years.

The CIA launched a mind control project,

a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind

in the 1950s, in house, the CIA worked on

exotic techniques, hypnosis, and then

they worked on sodium penothal

then they worked on electro shock

and ultimately, they discovered LSD.

All of that drug stuff, in house, went nowhere

except to lawsuits, but what did work

was the CIA outsourced all of the dull

behavioral research to the most brilliant

behavioral scientists at the top

universities in the United States and Canada.

- At McGill, experiments

by famed psychologist Donald O. Hebb

caught the eye of CIA researchers.

- Doctor Hebb found that he could

induce a state akin to a acute psychosis

in 48 hours, all he did was he had

student volunteers sit in a very pleasant

air-conditioned cubicle with goggles,

gloves and ear muffs, actually, you know

what they looked just like?

The Guantanamo detainees, if you see

those outfits that the Guantanamo detainees

have where they have the gloves,

and the googles and the earmuffs?

Not everything's all about security,

no, no, no, that's sensory breakdown.

Within a day, there would be hallucinations

within two days, breakdown.

- I began to think while we were doing

our experiments, it's possible that something

that involves physical discomfort or even pain

might be more tolerable than simply

the deprivation conditions that we studied.

- The CIA was fascinated by this,

they jumped on it immediately.

- I had no idea what a potentially vicious

weapon this could be.

- They identified two key techniques.

They identified sensory disorientation

and they identified self-inflicted pain,

standing for days at a time while fluid

flowed to the legs and they put them together

in the Kubark Counterintelligence

Interrogation manual

and they propagated around the world

and through the US intelligence community.

Think about what al-Qahtani was subjected to, okay?

First of all, he's in dark, he's in light

he's in cold, he's in heat, what they're doing

is they're attacking his universal

sensory receptors, they're also scrambling

his time, so that's phase one.

In Guantanamo under the regime of General Miller

he turned Guantanamo into a veritable

behavioral scientific laboratory

and Donald Rumsfeld gave orders

for techniques beyond the field manual

and they percolated and they percolated

in ambiguous way that allowed people to

do what they thought needed to be done.

And they explored our male sensitivity

to gender and sexual identity, so that's the thing

about being homosexual, the underwear

on the head, all that sort of stuff.

- People were saying Arabs really

are very sensitive to sexual humiliation

well, who the hell isn't sensitive

to sexual humiliation, nobody wants

to be stripped down naked and forced

to masturbate with a hood over your head.

It's ridiculous.

- Then they created behavioral science

consultation teams where they had

military psychologists integrated

into the ongoing interrogation

to discover individual fears and phobias

and all of that was visited on al-Qahtani.

- You are aware of communications

between General Miller and Secretary Rumsfeld

specifically about this one prisoner?

- To our knowledge, there was considerable

manner of communication up and down the chain.

- As you know from General Schmidt's report

he concluded that these techniques

individually did not constitute torture

but he said that the sum of these techniques.

- The cumulative effects of simultaneous

applications of numerous authorized

techniques had abusive and degrading

impact on the detainee.

- And he recommended that General Miller be disciplined.

But he said it did not constitute torture.

- We made a distinction between

what torture and inhuman treatment

would be given the general guidelines

and then what might be abusive and degrading

something might be degrading but not

necessarily torture and it may not

be inhumane, it may be humiliating

but it may not be torture, no torture

no physical pain, injury, there was a safe

secure environment the entire time.

- And that, of course, is the genius

of the CIA's psychological paradigm.

Psychological torture is all a matter

of definitions and then it's a very slippery indeed.

- That sounds remarkably similar

to what occurred at Abu Ghraib,

people being led around in chains

people being forced to wear lingerie,

perhaps a coincidence, perhaps not.

- If you look at those Abu Ghraib photographs

again, it's always the same techniques.

First of all, there's the sexual activity

with the women's garments and the masturbation

and all the rest, that's the cultural sensitivity.

They're short shackled, they're long-shackled

they're shackled upside down.

These are stress positions.

The most famous of all Abu Ghraib photographs

of course of that hooded Iraqi standing

on a box arms outstretched, he's told

that if he steps off the box, if he moves,

he'll be electrocuted, that's the point

of the fake electrical wires, so it's the absolute

immobility for protract appearance

and then with arms extended, as we'd say

to viewers, don't they this at home

but do try it, just stand for 10 minutes

with your arms stretched out, not moving.

- Carolyn Wood was an example

of the way new techniques spread and mutated

like a virus, long before Wood took charge

of interrogation at Abu Ghraib, her unit

was involved with harsh techniques at Bagram

including stress positions, forced standing,

and sleep deprivation.

- One of the memorandums shows that in early

December 2002, the interrogators

at Bagram just looked on the internet

they're in touch with the guys

at Guantanamo and they leaned

that these guys at Guantanamo had gotten

new techniques from the Secretary of Defense

and they just started using them,

even though the techniques had clearly

been approved exclusively for use at Guantanamo.

- When General Miller himself traveled

from Guantanamo to Iraq in August 2003,

he brought with him a CD and a manual

on the advanced techniques they developed

at Guantanamo and he gave them

to General Sanchez's command.

So there are these multiple paths that you

can trace whereby these interrogation techniques

go through this global migration

through Afghanistan to Iraq from Guantanamo

directly to Iraq and that result is Abu Ghraib.

- Well before the abuses at Abu Ghraib

became public, Government officials

had been quietly raising concerns

about harsh techniques in use at Guantanamo.

- There were emails back to the Department

of Justice from FBI personnel down

at Guantanamo, saying you won't believe

what's going on down here, we've gotta

disassociate ourselves as FBI people

from what is going on here in Guantanamo.

This email says, "The DOD has their marching

"orders from the Secretary of Defense."

Marching orders from the Secretary of Defense.

"To engage in practices which the FBI

"finds to be deeply offensive and dangerous."

But the emails are what is called redacted

which means that there's big holes

in these emails, now some of the emails

are totally redacted, so we don't know

what they say at all, that's an example

a lot of the documents that we got here.

You know, you can't see anything on these documents.

One after another of where there's nothing.

- In early December 2002, I had heard

that there was detainee abuse going on.

I called the Army General Counsel and asked

him whether he had any information,

I said I'm receiving reports that some detainees

are being abused in Guantanamo,

do you know anything about this?

And his response back was I know a lot

about it, come on down to my office.

They pushed a stack of documents

across the desk, top document was a memorandum

from the General Counsel to Department

of Defense to Secretary Rumsfeld

and it was that cover memo that requested

the authorization for the application

of certain interrogation techniques

and the top memo gave Secretary Rumsfeld's

approval for the application of

some of those techniques.

It's the memo with Secretary Rumsfeld's

handwritten notations on the bottom

that he stands 8-10 hours a day,

how come these detainees are only

required to stand up to four hours a day.

I was astounded, but my first reaction was

that this was a mistake, somebody just

didn't read the documents carefully enough.

- I think people in the Pentagon thought of

Alberto Mora as a loyal Republican

political appointee, he would never

have been considered a rabble rouser

or a liberal, he said he expected

that he would raise these issues

and people in positions of authority

would say oh, thanks for letting us know

and that would be the end of it.

- I wanted to ask you about a memo

that was written by Alberto Mora.

Do you recall in this memo that you wrote

a little notation at the bottom about

standing more than four hours.

- I do. - Because you stand at your

desk. - I do.

- This attorney argued that that could be

interpreted as some by a wink and a nod

that it would be okay to go beyond the

techniques that were prescribed in the memo.

- No, no no, it did, there's no wink and a nod

about anything, there was one provision

in there that they would have people stand

for several hours and it was a semi-humorous

remark that a person in his seventies

stands all day long, I just mused that

and maybe it shouldn't have gone out

but it did and I wrote it, and life goes on.

- But his point was that you should

have gotten much better advice from

your legal staff. - I heard your question

the first time. - What was of concern to me

was the techniques either individual

or in combination could rise to the level or torture.

Okay, you're permitting certain interrogation

techniques but certainly there must be

some limit which is set upon the severity

of the techniques, light deprivation could mean

placing the detainee in a dark room

for 15 minutes or it could mean a month

or two months or three months until he goes blind.

Detainee specific phobia techniques.

The snakes, the bats, the rats, lock somebody

up in a coffin, you're limited only

by your imagination, any one of these techniques

individually could yield the results of torture

certainly in combination, you could

reach that fairly quickly.

- See, if you put a person into this procedure

and keep em there for more than the six

or eight days that I would think might be

the maximum tolerability, then the price

is pretty high. - The price is someone's

sanity. - Presumably it could be.

- The medical literature had a phenomenon

known as force drift that made it

almost inevitable that the interrogators

would continue applying greater and greater

increments of force to achieve their desired results.

- For example, take Secretary Rumsfeld's memo

then to say that well look, he said

that dogs have to be mizzled, well that's a man

who doesn't understand the military on the ground

because when that E-6 is sitting there

with that muzzled dog and there's absolutely

no impact on that person being interrogated

he's gonna take that muzzle off.

That's reality, that's human nature.

- Alberto Mora threatened

to go on record with his concerns

unless the techniques were rescinded.

- When after the fact it turns out

that there's concern about it that

concerns me then I'm happy to rescind it

and take another fresh look at it

and talk to more people about it

and see what ought to be done.

- To his credit, Secretary Rumsfeld

did rescind the interrogation techniques

and then for over a year and a half

I heard no reports from any quarter

about detainee abuse anywhere.

When Abu Ghraib hit, my first thought was

have I been circumvented, have their been

authorizations for the abuse of prisoners

that I had not learned about?

- Had the orders really been rescinded?

According to interrogators, the use

of shackling, dogs, stress positions

and sensory assault continued to be widespread.

Tony Lagouranis was an interrogator

who arrived in Iraq after the military

became aware of the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

- Among the interrogation guidelines

they gave us it said that dogs are authorized

to be used on detainees, you know,

stress positions, sleep deprivation,

all of those things that I did that

I would consider harsh techniques

were violating the Geneva Conventions

I was told to do, we were told to do that

to these people by our superiors.

- The spine of the United States Armed Forces

is the chain of command, what starts

at the top of the chain of command

drops like a rock down the chain of command

and that's why Lynndie England knew

what Donald Rumsfeld was thinking

without actually talking to Donald Rumsfeld.

- In the wake of Abu Ghraib,

journalists began to look harder

at previous cases of abuse to try

to understand what had caused them

and who was responsible.

- People like Tim Golden at the New York Times

got a hold of it and started looking

at the case of Dilawar in particular,

the taxi driver, it became at least

plausible to me that this man

wasn't even guilty of anything

other than being there when the sweep occurred

and here was a guy who was murdered in detention.

- Pay tribute to those whose lives

were taken and those who daily give

unselfishly of themselves.

Four years ago, our nation came under attack.

- 9/11 was very much in the air and I think

the officers tried to keep it in the air

they tried to remind these kids

that these people are our enemies.

But it's hard to see how these young soldiers

could have been expected to figure out

who the real enemies were among a bunch

of militia men and farmers in a society

that was completely foreign to them.

- If I remember correctly, his story

had something to do with the rocket attack

on a military base and he was supposed

to be the driver of the getaway car.

- He had taken his new car, which he

was obviously excited about and driven

to Khost, the provincial capital where

he went to look for taxi passengers

and he in fact found these three men

in Khost at the market place who were headed

back to Yakubi. - Yakubi, Yakubi!

- You have to imagine that Dilawar

was driving home from this provincial capital

which was about as far as his world stretched

he is stopped at Fire Base Salerno

by a group of Afghan militia men

and the men apparently found an

electric stabilizer in the trunk

of the car, at least they claimed to.

Camp Salerno had been rocketed

from some distance earlier in the day

and the Afghan militia men immediately

arrested the four guys on suspicion

of having had some involvement in that attack.

He's taken to Bagram, this great distance away.

You get a bunch of guys who are back

at this detention site and they're told

we have evidence that they have been

involved in a rocket attack on American forces

so I think that kinda tripped a wire in them.

- You're in this atmosphere, you're with

nothing but military people and you feel

sort of morally isolated and you lose

your moral bearings and you're frustrated

because you're not getting intelligence

from a prisoner that you believe is guilty

and has intelligence to give you

and so of course you wanna start

pushing the limits and you wanna see

how far you can go.

- A lot of the pressure came from the fact that

we had a few high value detainees

that gave a lot of good information and

when we started to lose those detainees

due to going to Guantanamo Bay,

that they expected this to come from everybody.

- We would interrogate some of these guys

just to interrogate em and it was ridiculous

I meant you'd get some of these guys in

and you're like this is the wrong man

this is not who we're supposed to have

especially being a screener, you could tell

from the moment you got em in, you're like

we're not supposed to have em.

- We had one prisoner came in, he was mentally

challenged and Sergeant Loring kept saying

that you know, this is a cover,

this is Al-Qaeda's cover, it's what they do

and I went in there and talked to him and

basically they had this guy in a diaper

he ate his own feces but Loring

kept saying it was an act.

- They'd be like hey, we want you

go yell at this guy, so I'd grab

my box of Frosted Flakes that I was

eating for breakfast that morning

I'd go into the room and I'd be like

all right, I have to yell at you today

so I'd be like, dyhoginated salt substitute

and just start yelling that at him

and they'd look at me all crazy

and I'd be like yeah, it's your fault

they put that in my cereal now.

Or I'd yell at him if Elvis was really

the King of Rock or if he was dead

or stuff like that and I'd write that

in my interrogation summaries and I'd send

that up to higher that that's what I did

for that two hours.

- you really can't get a feel for a person

till after you talk to em a couple of times.

So on the first three times I talked

to him it was just verifying his story

looking for loops, looking for holes.

After the third time I talked to him

and his story was still consistent

I kept telling em I thought he was innocent.

- And they wanted these people

to be guilty because that would

look better for their unit.

They could say that we arrested

60 people this month and they were all terrorists.

- When was the last time you saw Osama Bin Laden

when was the last time you saw Mullah Omar

now this was a standard question

that was asked of every detainee.

- It's very hard to go into an interrogation

with very little evidence and we almost never

had evidence on these guys, end elicit

a confession, you can go in and get intelligence

but if you're asking this guy to completely

incriminate himself, it's very difficult

so you have to start using harsher

and harsher techniques in order

to elicit that confession.

- I was yelled at for being too nice to him

by Sergeant Loring, that i needed

to put more pressure on him, or as he liked

to say, I need to take him out of his comfort zone.

- After a while, particularly in the fourth

and fifth interrogations, as the sleep deprivation

that he was being subjected to really started

to knock him out, the interrogations got more intense.

Sergeant Salcedo who was an inexperienced

interrogator but a can-do soldier

had this man who refused to look at her

because she was a woman, she said she got

very frustrated by this and grabbed him

by the sides of face and turned him

to face her and look at her and take her

seriously but of course, he was a Afghan man

from a tribal, conservative culture

who didn't look at strange women.

- Sergeant Salcedo's getting a little aggravated

so I kinda stepped between em

and that's when I grabbed him by the shirt

and I brought him over to the wall.

- They tried to make him stand up

against the wall and he was sliding down

they pushed him back against the wall.

- He wasn't making any kinda sounds

most of it seemed to just be rambling.

The interpreter was telling me that

his wife came to visit him in his cell

which of course didn't happen.

- If you've ever seen anybody

sleep depped, past two days they begin

to just be bumbling idiots.

Three days they're just worthless.

- I knew something was wrong.

The next thing I heard was that he'd died.

- Not long after Dilawar was killed

we learned that the Afghan guerrilla commander

who's men had arrested Dilawar and the others

had in fact been detained by the Americans himself

and it turned out that he was rocketing

their base and then picking up

innocent Afghans and turning them over

to the Americans, essentially to try

to ingratiate himself with the US Forces.

The three passengers were sent to Guantanamo

and they didn't get out until March of 2004

which was 15 months after they had been captured

riding in the taxi.

It's hard to know what reason the Americans

would have had to send these guys on

when they had quite clearly concluded

that Dilawar at least was an innocent man

when he was killed.

It certainly makes you wonder about

whether they just sent these guys on to cover their butts.

- These are not mere innocents

these are among the worst of the worst.

These are among the most dangerous

best trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth.

- They're terrorists, they're bomb makers

their facilitators of terror, they're members

of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban.

- And if they were free, they would

engage in murder once again.

- The only thing I know for certain

is that these are bad people.

- Despite Rumsfeld and Cheney's

and President BUsh's allegations that

these guys are the worst of the worst

that they were all captured on the battlefield

recent studies of the whole compendium

of Government's documents show that only 5%

of these people were picked up by the United States.

- Here search him. - Only 8% of them

are accused of being members of the Al-Qaeda.

Over 90% of them were picked up

by Northenalized or Pakistani forces

in exchange for bounties.

- We have large rewards out.

We have leaflets that are dropping like snowflakes

in December in Chicago. - Mr Secretary,

not a question. - An analysis of de-classified

government documents reveal that only

7% of Guantanamo detainees were captured

by US and Coalition forces.

The other 93% like Dilawar and his passengers

were turned over by Afghan warlords

and Pakistanis, sometimes for cash payments

of thousands of dollars.

- The military's not interested

in spending whatever it is, $40,000 a year

detaining people who are not members

of Al-Qaeda in Guantanamo Bay, it has as much interest

as everyone else does in making sure

the people who are detained are actually

members of Al-Qaeda rather than wasting

resources and time detaining innocent people.

- I think it's natural in times of war

to pick up people, you wanna pick up

anyone you suspect of being dangerous.

What's different here is the Government

for the first time in our history

didn't follow its own regulations

which require that a hearing be held

promptly after capture if there's any doubt.

- In the war in Afghanistan back in 2001

the US military was prepared to follow

the Geneva Conventions and conduct

those tribunals, unfortunately

the civilian leadership within the

Department of Defense told them to stop.

Once somebody in Afghanistan might have

said okay this person's a high value target

for whatever reason, whether it was based

on some other Afghani who hated

that person and wanted him out

so he could take over his opium crop

then that began the road to Gitmo

and there was no way for that person

to challenge it and there still hasn't been.

- Moazzam Begg, a British subject

suspected of ties to Al-Qaeda operatives

was picked up by local intelligence

agents in Pakistan.

- I was in my house in Islamabad at the time

when I was abducted, a hood was placed

over my head, my hands and legs were shackled

and I was physically carried into

the back of the vehicle.

I didn't see my family again after that point.

I was sent to Kandahar and then to Bagram

and when I was put onto the transport plane

to Guantanamo, I had already been covered

almost from head to toe in some sort

of a covering, face mask, earmuffs,

blackened goggles and then just in case

I could see anything, a hood to cover it with.

Being seated on the aircraft was

excruciatingly painful, they'd already

used now the three-piece-suit and that is

the shackle that goes around the waist

and is padlocked at the back.

It was impossible to move and impossible

to breathe properly, impossible to hear anything

and so I managed to scream and pleaded

with one of the guards to give me

a needle to put me to sleep.

- We fought for two and a half years

for just the right to go see the prisoners

and then fought for months year to get

security clearance so the military

would let you in there, I mean this is bizarre

it never occurred to me that when I went

to law school in America that we'd be

sitting around talking about whether

we could have access to our clients

and whether our clients had been tortured.

- Habeas corpus is really the essence

of the rule of law, not giving people

a basic hearing when you take away

their liberty is one of the reasons

we fought the Revolution, that the King

can't deprive somebody of liberty

without a hearing.

- In 2004, two and a half years

after the first detainees had arrived

in Guantanamo, the Supreme Court

rejected the Bush Administration's claims

that it could hold detainees indefinitely

without allowing them to challenge

their detention in the courts.

After the decision, the military

installed special new tribunals

to judge whether detainees should remain

in Guantanamo. - The Combatant Status

Review Tribunals, which the Government

hurriedly put in place, nine days

after we won before the Supreme Court, are a joke.

- You have no rights, you have no right

to a lawyer, you have no meaningful right

to witnesses, you don't really know

what the charges are and you certainly

don't know what the secret evidence is against you.

- They may not ever know it but that doesn't

that doesn't eliminate the opportunity

they have to make a case for why

if they were returned in the future

why they would not continue to pose a threat.

- My clients are found not guilty

at the CSRT tribunals and then

the military thinks that doesn't sound

so good, they were being called

Not Enemy Combatants, NEC, but now

they're NLEC, which means no longer

enemy combatant because we want

to say that they were guilty to begin with

but now they've had a change of heart

so they're not guilty anymore, but we

were right in the first place.

- These men aren't necessarily innocent men

that's not an accurate characterization.

You are more accurate in their long title,

no longer identified as an enemy combatant.

They are being held separate from

the remainder of the detainees until

the United States Government can find

a country they can be returned to.

- Some of these guys were policed off

the battlefield and if they weren't here

they would probably be on the battlefield

killing American soldiers.

They're here for a reason and it's our job

to ensure that they stay here until

such time as it's deemed they don't need

to be here any longer.

- Guantanamo is hiding the fact that

the really bad dudes, Mullah Omar

and of course, Osama Bin Laden

have never been captured, so you have

Guantanamo Bay as here are 750 really evil guys

as a PR stunt effectively to say

look, we're really achieving something

in the war on terror.

♪ Come along with me

♪ To my little corner of the world ♪

♪ Dream - And that is the main

entrance to Camp X-Ray.

It would be extremely difficult

for anybody to make an escape out of here.

♪ You'll soon forget - Each one is eight by eight

by eight, one individual per cell.

If you member the individual in orange jump suits

there's three or four kneeling facing that way

and three or four kneeling, facing that way

if you take a shot from right here

you're gonna have the same image.

And no detainee has ever died at Gitmo

from anything, and I think the docs'll

give you an update we performed

well over 100 surgeries, so one good thing

for them being here is they are quite healthy

and they're getting everything fixed

they need to get fixed.

♪ I always knew that I'd find someone like you ♪

- We've introduced some new sports-type

activities here in Camp Four, we recently

built this half basketball court

and off to the left of that, you will see

a soccer court, it is a privilege

to live in Camp Four, they are compliant

with the camp rules in order to live here.

And we have introduced things like cake

on Wednesday nights, Pepsi on Monday nights

ice cream on Sunday nights.

Let's go in and take a look at the Bay.

- On the bed they have the so-called CIs

or comfort items which include toothbrush

but also include a game of Checkers

and I did ask them who's my client

meant to play Checkers with, he's in

solitary confinement by himself.

♪ And with. - What is the problem

with the press photographing them,

talking with them, observing them?

- Desire to not provide a platform

to have the men we're holding espouse

a vile, Islamic rhetoric, a violent,

vile, Islamic rhetoric. ♪ Find someone like you

♪ So we'll go to our little corner of the world ♪

- This is a tactic of Al-Qaeda.

Hunger strike to elicit media attention

and to bring pressure on the United States Government.

When these numbers went up significantly,

you guys start talking about it,

you guys start asking about it, so

they understand that.

- Camp Five is a 100 bed maximum security

segregation and interrogation facility.

- If they're held in Camp Five,

an average day is always the same.

Which is, you're held 24 hours

in solitary confinement.

- Here in the cell, was eight foot

by six foot and I couldn't physically

take three steps in any direction.

I certainly believed that I was going to

spend the greater part of my life

and perhaps even face execution,

which was what I was told quite often.

- What's particularly pernicious in Guantanamo Bay

is there is no sense of when it's gonna end

or if it's gonna end and the reason

that prisoners go on a hunger strike

for example and may starve themselves

to death is in the words of Omar Deghayes

"I'm dying slowly here in Guantanamo

"as it is, so I may as well take

"my life into my own hands."

- I have no intention of holding somebody here

any longer than he is a threat to our country

or that he has intelligence or information

that could be valuable to us in

the global war on terror.

We continue to collect information

of value from the men we're holding today.

- One of the reasons why I was held

in isolation was to do with this issue

of witnessing these deaths in Bagram

and they asked me which soldiers

had been involved and were around at the time

so they brought in photographs of the people

from the unit and I pointed out

to who I believed was involved.

They asked me one of the strangest things

requests I've ever had during the time

I was in incarceration and that was

would I be willing to stand up as a witness

for the prosecution in a trial against

these soldiers and I thought how ironic this is

you know, is this the only court

that I'm going to get to see after

all these years in incarceration?

- The cruel ironies

of the Dilawar story echoed in ongoing

debate in the halls of Congress

about detainee abuse, national security

and the rule of law.

For one Senator, John McCain, a former

prisoner of war, the matter of

detainee abuse was both political and personal.

- I would just like to tell

my wife I'm going to get well

I love her, and I hope to see her soon

and I'd appreciate if if you tell her that.

That's all.

- If this man, after six and a half

or seven years of torture says that it's not

efficient, it's inhumane, and it breeds

contempt for the United States,

he can stand up and be a moral voice

on this issue. - We sent them to fight

for us in Afghanistan and Iraq,

we placed extraordinary pressure on them

to extract intelligence from detainees

but then we threw out the rules

that our soldiers had trained on

and replaced them with a confusing

and constantly changing array of standards

and when things went wrong, we blamed them

and we punished them.

I believe we have to do better than that.

I strongly urge you to do justice

to your men and women in uniform

give them clear standards of conduct

that reflect the ideals they risk their lives for.

- On October 5th, 2005

as increasing numbers of detainee abuse cases

came to trial, Senator John McCain

proposed the Detainee Treatment Act.

The bill sought a total US ban on torture

as well as cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment

and it sparked a national debate,

one in which the devil was in the details.

- Is it still permissible to use

a wet towel and dripping water

to induce the misperception of suffocation?

- The use of the wet towel, dripping water

to induce misperceptions of suffocation

was one of the techniques requested

by the JTF in their laundry list

given up, it was never approved,

it has never been a technique approved.

- One of the techniques that made

the transition from the regime of the physical

to the psychological, in fact the only one

really was waterboarding, because in

the medieval era under the Inquisition,

it was done because of its horrible

physical aspects, it was done to purge

and punish the heretic, you forced

water down the throat of the victim

the victim thinks that he's drowning,

it's horrible, your body tells you that you're dying.

Right after 9/11, the CIA

got approval from the White House for waterboarding.

- An early test case involving

the interrogation of Ibn Shaikh al-Libi

A man suspected of being the Amir

of an Al-Qaeda training camp.

Initially, the FBI was in charge

of his interrogation but the Administration

was impatient with the slow results

of the FBIs law enforcement techniques

so they turned al-Libi over to the CIA.

- He is secured, he was either duck taped

or hooded and he was gonna be put in

to a box, plywood box, for his own protection

for transfer to the airport.

- They threw him on an aircraft

and they rendered him through extraordinary

rendition to Egypt.

They later subjected him to two weeks

of brutal torture involving all these techniques

including waterboarding and they got

information from al-Libi stating

that Saddam Hussain's regime had trained

Al-Qaeda in chemical and biological warfare.

- One of the things we know about torture

is that someone who is tortured

will tell his interrogator what he thinks

the interrogator wants to hear.

- The moment al-Libi was waterboarded

he started blurting things out,

well rather than questioning what

he was saying and going into it in detail

to see if what he was saying could be corroborated

they immediately stopped and ran off

to report what al-Libi had said

and ended the torture and bang,

it gets up to the highest decision makers

and all of a sudden Colin Powell is told

hey, you don't have to worry about

your doubts anymore because we've just gotten

confirmation that there were

contacts between Al-Qaeda and Baghdad.

- In February 2003,

then Secretary of State Colin Powell

went before the United Nations

to make the case for the war in Iraq.

- I can trace the story of a senior

terrorist operative telling how

Iraq provided training in these weapons

to Al Qaeda, fortunately, this operative

is now detained and he has told his story.

- A year later, the CIA branded al-Libi

a fabricator, rescinded all the intelligence

reports with that information in it.

So in other words, you will get information

but you'll get false information.

- I think Colin Powell has said

that was the most embarrassing day

of his entire life.

- All the experts say that torturing people

is not the best way to get information.

Breaking down the barriers between

you and them gaining their confidence

is the best way to get it.

It takes some experience, it takes

some talent, it takes some patience

and then they might actually tell you

something that is worthwhile and then

if you wanna prosecute them and execute em, go ahead.

- You wanna be able to build a rapport

with somebody, you are their salvation

because their life as they know it is over.

Is there something I can do for your kids?

You concerned about them?

You want them educated, I'll get them educated.

What do you want, tell me what you want,

script for me your exit strategy

how do you extricate yourself from this

terrible situation, by the way, that you

put yourself in, now you can't go back home.

Can you, no, so let's make peace with that.

Let me help you find the strategy

to give you a life, and that's the way it worked.

The amount of information that they

were able to provide us pre-9/11

to me, it was extremely valuable.

Who else was gonna tell us about how

you joined Al-Qaeda, what did bayat mean?

How did they communicate?

Did they use Inmarsat satellite phones?

Did bin Laden use a body double?

So when we got all that information

we were able to do certain operations.

Cumbersome though it may be, it still

to me was the way to do it and we

don't have to apologize to anybody.

We don't know what revenge is coming

down the road, and if I wanted to

insight the faithful, I'd just take one

picture with a dog collar on and just

point into that and look at the young brothers

and say you're duty bound now to get revenge.

- The advocates of torture generally

focus on the hypothetical, they have

this ticking bomb center they talk about.

- Which is imagine that there's a ticking

time bomb in Times Square, it's about

to go off, we've got the guy in custody

he says he wants a lawyer, do we respect

his right to a lawyer, or to save a million lives,

do we apply the electrodes to his testicles?

- 24 week after week has on-camera displays

of brutal torture. - Just tell me

what's your connection to terrorists?

- Designed to stop some terrorist

with a ticking bomb from killing

hundreds of thousands if not millions

of Americans. - You're talking about

torturing this man? - I'm talking about

doing what is necessary to stop

this warhead from being used against us.

- It's just nonsense though, because

then you ask, hey, name me one time

in the last five hundred years

when we've had someone in custody

with a ticking time bomb.

- The likelihood of that ever happening

is so remote, even if you're in that situation

who's to say that if you beat em up

that you're gonna get that information?

If a guy's that committed, I think he'll die

before he gives it up.

- Right after the release of the Abu Ghraib

photos in mid-2004, 35% of Americans polled

believed that torture was acceptable

under some circumstances, even after

the Abu Ghraib phots, and I think that shows

the way that this kind of popular culture

has built a constituency for torture

which allows the Bush White House

to get away with the way it twists

laws and treaties and doesn't spark popular outrage.

- On a conservative radio show

Vice President Dick Cheney openly defended

the practice of waterboarding.

- Would you agree a drunk in water

is a no-brainer if it can save lives?

- Well, it's a no-brainer for me

but for a while there I was criticized

as being the Vice President for torture.

- We do not condone torture.

- We do not torture, footnote,

as we define torture, which means exactly

what we wish it to mean and nothing else.

- In the elections of 2006, the Bush Administration

openly campaigned for harsh techniques

the rest of the world defined as torture.

Bush and Cheney played on the fears

of voters and politicians, if Congress

didn't give them the power to do

whatever was necessary, how could Americans be safe?

- In addition to the terrorists held

at Guantanamo, a small number of suspected

terrorist leaders and operatives captured

during the war have been held and questioned

outside the United States in a separate program

operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some ask why are you acknowledging this program now?

Some believe our military and intelligence

personnel involved in capturing and questioning

terrorists could now be at risk

of prosecution under the War Crimes Act

simply for doing their jobs in a thorough

and professional way, this is unacceptable.

- The President was forced

to disclose his secret CIA program

when the Supreme Court acted to limit

his war time powers, in the historic

Handam Decision, the court ruled

that interrogations and trials of terrorists

would be governed by the Geneva Conventions.

- This debate is occurring because of

the Supreme Court's ruling that said

that we must conduct ourselves under

the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.

And that Common Article 3 says

that there will be no outrages upon human dignity.

It's very vague, what does that mean?

- Do you believe that the use of testimony

which is obtained through techniques

such as waterboarding, stress positions

intimidating use of military dogs,

sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation,

forced nudity would be consistent

with Common Article 3?

- Well sir, I think most importantly

I can't imagine that such testimony

would be reliable. - Mr Attorney General

do you believe that statements obtained

through illegal, inhumane treatment

should be admissible?

- Senator, I.

Well, again, I'll say this, the concern

that I would have about such a prohibition

is what does it mean how you define it?

- And who define it?

The Bush Administration introduced

a new law that would elude the restrictions

of the Supreme Court.

- In a legal sense, I think they wanted

to discard the Constitution and they wanted

to write a new one, but you can't do that

so what you do is you throw a new

interpretation on the old one and the new

interpretation is the Executive in War Time

and perhaps this war is gonna last forever

is all powerful.

- Congress gave the President

most of what he wanted, he would agree

to abide by the Geneva Conventions

so long as he could define their meaning

and application.

A few detainees at Guantanamo might be

put on trial, but the rest would no longer

have access to habeas corpus, the fundamental

legal right to challenge their detention.

Planning a run for President,

even Senator McCain voted for the Bill.

Soon after the Bush Administration threatened

to discredit him with conservative voters.

- Buried deep inside this legislation

is a provision that will pardon President Bush

and all the members of his Administration

of any possible crimes connected with

the torture and mistreatment of detainees

dated all the way back to September 11th, 2001

at least President Nixon had Gerald Ford

to do his dirty work, President Bush

is trying to pardon himself.

- The pardon did not extend

to front line soldiers.

- The trial was a very confusing time for me

because I've never been through trial before

I didn't know what was really going on.

I kinda just understood that I was facing

a lot of time in jail, that's the only

thing I really understood about the whole thing.

- Well I was sent to jail, to a military

correctional facility, I have lost

my full time job, I have a bad conduct discharge

which has hindered me in getting a new job

in the same field.

I have financially, it's just devastated me.

- I'm just glad it's over, that's it.

I can get on with my life.

- I had to plead guilty to assault

and two counts of dereliction of duty

in exchange, they'd say that I could

go to jail for no more than four months.

- Rather than spend the money that was

being spent for that trial, I think

it could have been better spent

in working on Army doctrine to make sure

that other people go into battle

properly equipped, properly led,

and with a full understanding as to what

their new rules and responsibilities are.

- When a detainee is abused

or a detainee claims abuse, they want

somebody to take the fall for it

and it's not gonna be the person

with Eagles or Stars on their shoulder.

- No officer was ever convicted

in the Dilawar case.

Following her service at Abu Ghraib,

Captain Carolyn Wood wast given a staff position

at the Army Interrogation School

in Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

- What does that reflect in terms of

senior leadership's intentions?

Not to eradicate the abuse, but to

perpetuate the abuse.

- I think the probability exists

that there will be other terrorist attacks

and more Americans will die and the argument

that we have to apply abuse to detainees

in order to protect American lives

I find to be violative of our deepest values

and to the very safety of our country.

We fight not only to protect lives,

we fight to protect our principles.

- If you say over the course

of Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq we've detained

50,000 people, I'd say less than 1%

were terrorists.

Were some of them insurgents?

Probably, were almost all of em in Iraq

in particular gonna become insurgents

after their treatment, yes .

- I was kidnapped, abducted, falsely imprisoned

tortured and threatened with further torture

without charge, without trial.

Even many soldiers had said to me afterwards

was that hell, if you weren't a terrorist

when you came in here, by the time

you leave, I'm sure you would be

because of the way you've been treated.

- We think there's a certain

level of prejudice that this religion

and the people who have hijacked it

have such a disregard for life

that we turn around and say if they think

so very little of life, and clearly 9/11

exemplified that, screw them, anything goes.

- It's not surprising that at the end

of all this, Dilawar the victim was really lost.

I mean Dilawar was almost invisible

in the trials, I mean you never

saw pictures of him, nobody ever mentioned

this man's wife and child who were left

without a husband and father.

He was not part of the picture at all.

- There's a lot of other people out there

who are gonna run into this system

unless it's fixed and you only need one

to sort of remind yourself of what it's capable of.

- American values are premised

upon the notion of human dignity

and the sanctity of the individual.

To allow for cruelty to be applied

as a matter of official policy is to say

that our forefathers were wrong

about this inalienable rights.

- Americans obviously wanna believe

that we're somehow more moral than

the rest of the world, that for some reason

we have a real strong desire to feel that way

and I think that's eroding, I don't really know

what effect that's gonna have on us

and I think a lot of people have just decided

well, you know, it's different now.

After 9/11, we can't be good anymore

we have to get tough and so we'll have

to see what that does to us.

- What do you think? - I think that's bullshit,

frankly, I mean I think that we still need

to try and be as good as we can be.

- I find it utterly inconceivable

that the highest officials, Rumsfeld,

Bush and Cheney would not only countenance torture

but would actually advocate it period

is has really destroyed my faith

in the American Government because through

World War II and the Korean War

where I also served, we had the sense that

we were on the side of the good guys.

You would always get justice in

the United States of America

you would get, people would get decent treatment

that there was a rule of law, we never

forgot that, that behind the facade

of wartime hatreds, there was a central

rule of law which people abided by.

It was something we believed,

it was what made America different.