The commander of Guantánamo Bay, sacked amid charges from the Pentagon that he was too soft on detainees, said he faced constant tension from military interrogators trying to extract information from inmates.
Brigadier General Rick Baccus was removed from his post in October 2002, apparently after frustrating military intelligence officers by granting detainees such privileges as distributing copies of the Koran and adjusting meal times for Ramadan. He also disciplined prison guards for screaming at inmates.
In one of the general’s first interviews since his dismissal, he told The Guardian: ”I was mislabelled as someone who coddled detainees. In fact, what we were doing was our mission professionally.”
Gen Baccus’s unceremonious departure offers a rare insight into how the Pentagon rewrote the rules of warfare to suit the Bush administration’s view of a radically changed world following the terror attacks of September 11 2001.
It also suggests what can happen to military personnel slow to sign on to the Pentagon’s changed view of the world. Eighteen months after being removed from Guantánamo, General Baccus (51), and a commander of the Rhode Island National Guard, is still waiting for a new military assignment.
Meanwhile, the systems set in place at Guantánamo following his departure have come to govern detention facilities in Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
The connection between Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib grew clearer this month when General Baccus’s successor at the camp, Major General Geoffrey Miller, was put in charge of the US military’s prisons in Iraq. General Miller’s recommendations for Abu Ghraib — merging the functions of prison guard and interrogator as he did at Guantánamo — were cited in the Pentagon’s internal report on abuse at the now notorious prison.
On Tuesday, new evidence emerged that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was systematic, part of a policy instituted at US military detention centres from Guantánamo and Afghanistan to Iraq, and not restricted to the seven low-ranking soldiers charged so far in connection with the scandal.
Colonel Thomas Pappas, who commanded the military intelligence brigade at the prison, said interrogators sometimes instructed the military police to strip detainees and shackle them before they were questioned, a report in the New York Times said.
Colonel Pappas said the practice was among the changes recommended by General Miller — and among those resisted by General Baccus.
”There is a dynamic tension that exists in that kind of situation,” General Baccus said. ”Often times, those kind of approaches led to questions as to why am I doing that. Am I trying to coddle the detainees? Am I trying to bend to their desires?” he said.
The Pentagon’s frustration with Gen Baccus is well documented — although officially denied. Officially, he was unceremoniously relieved of his duties as part of a general re-organisation of the camp, which called for a commander of higher rank.
General Baccus insists that he did his job honourably. ”In no way did I ever interfere in interrogations, but also at that time the interrogations never forced anyone to be treated inhumanely, certainly not when I was there.”
Although the detainees at Guantánamo were not given the protections of the Geneva Convention, General Baccus says he took steps to ensure they were not subjected to abuse.
”We had instances of individuals that used verbal abuse, and any time that that was reported we took action immediately and removed the individual from contact with detainees.” General Baccus said there were fewer than 10 instances of abuse during his seven months in command.
After his departure, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, gave military intelligence control over all aspects of Guantánamo, including the MPs, and General Miller was appointed commander.
Under his watch, Guantánamo instituted a ”72-point matrix for stress and duress”, which the Washington Post said set out a guide for the levels of force that could be applied to detainees. These included hooding or keeping prisoners naked for more than 30 days, threatening by dogs, shackling detainees in positions designed to cause pain, and extreme temperatures.
Human rights organisations say the directive shows that practices exposed at Abu Ghraib took place on a far wider scale than the Pentagon is willing to admit. ”The pattern of abuse and disregard for fundamental human rights has been set by the continuing indefinite detentions at Guantánamo bay, and at other undisclosed locations around the world,” said Sarah Green, of Amnesty Internation. ”Detainees are already denied their basic rights in these locations, and the context has been set for abuse at Abu Ghraib.”
Former inmates at Guantánamo have levelled the same charge. Last week, two British men who were held at Guantánamo claimed their US guards had inflicted abuse similar to that perpetrated at Abu Ghraib. In an open letter to President George Bush, Britons Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal described a prison regime that included assaults, prolonged shackling in uncomfortable positions, strobe lights, loud music and being threatened with dogs.
Guantánamo formally came to Abu Ghraib last August, shortly before the abuse reportedly began, when the Pentagon dispatched General Miller to Iraq on a mission to improve the intelligence being extracted from prisoners held by the US military.
He recommended that prison guards become ”actively engaged” in helping to gather intelligence from detainees at Abu Ghraib.
Major General Antonio Taguba’s report on Abu Ghraib said General Miller’s instructions to military police to ”set the conditions” for interrogation ”would appear to be in conflict” with army regulations.
In the wake of the prisoner abuse scandal, General Baccus is loth to criticise the entire corps of military police at Abu Ghraib. ”They were in a war zone. They were under constant attack so I hesitate to make comments as to what or did not happen over there, but there were military police involved, and they were trained not to do the kind of things that we have seen,” he said. – Guardian Unlimited