Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) - full transcript

On December 1st,

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