All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Joshua E.S. Phillips.
He's the author of the book, None of Us Were Like This Before.
The website is noneofuswerelikethisbefore.com.
You can read all about him and all about the book there.
And the brand new piece in The Nation magazine is called Inside the Detainee Abuse Task Force.
And this is at thenation.com.
You can check it out.
It's from just the other day, May the 13th.
Welcome to the show, Joshua.
How are you?
I'm well, thanks.
Appreciate you joining us here.
It's a very important article talking about, I guess, the investigation into all the detainee abuse in Iraq except Abu Ghraib.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's more or less right.
I mean, this was a task force that was set up in 2004 in response to the fact that there was widespread detainee abuse and torture in Iraq.
And while there were other agents from the Army's Criminal Investigative Command that were on 13 other remote sites, this task force was specifically focused on detainee abuse.
They dealt with hundreds of cases in 2004, 2005, and they may have even bled a bit into 2006.
Okay.
Well, this is an extremely interesting piece, a very long and in-depth one.
And I think a lot of it really is told from the point of view of your sources here.
I was wondering if you could introduce us to some of these characters, starting with Susan Burke.
Susan Burke is a U.S. attorney.
She's actually the daughter of a U.S. Army colonel.
She's an American attorney or she's a U.S. attorney?
She's an American attorney.
Okay.
Yeah.
I wanted to get that straight.
Thank you, sir.
In any case, she's representing 337 former detainees who alleged that they were very badly abused and tortured while in U.S. military custody in Iraq.
And she met with two agents from the Detainee Abuse Task Force in July or June, I'm sorry, June of 2005.
And in the course of her meeting, she essentially relayed her detainees' accounts to the agents and over the course of a few days of meeting with them learned about all the systemic and operational problems that they faced trying to process their investigations.
Right.
Well, and there sure is a lot of that in here.
It seems like really no matter what, they were going to have a very steep hill to climb here trying to investigate crimes in that environment.
I guess you say the biggest hurdle that they faced was even just finding the tortured after they'd been released.
Well, there are so many problems.
I mean, it's just, it's kind of staggering how many problems they faced from not being able to locate detainees, to not even be, not even operating with a clear definition of what constitutes abuse in the first place, as well as not having an understanding of what so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were permissible.
So, you know, you have a system whereby the agents are charged with trying to investigate abuse without a clear understanding of what that even consists of.
And then you have people who aren't even referring allegations of abuse onto them because they may be operating under the belief that what they're doing is totally legitimate.
Right.
Well, and then also, as you detail, they have virtually no real authority or cooperation.
You have this DATF, Detainee Abuse Task Force, which apparently is full of at least a lot of cops.
I don't know if, you know, all of them were like this, but apparently these guys were really trying to do their job and they didn't seem to have much cooperation from above or below.
There was certainly an element of it.
I mean, they felt very frustrated.
The agents that I interviewed felt very frustrated with the fact that in certain circumstances, especially with black ops or special forces or special operations unit, military intelligence, whenever they received an allegation, they would circle back to the unit, try to get further information and receive virtually no cooperation.
They would get pseudonyms instead of real names.
And so those cases would wither on the vine and they would essentially die.
But then there were other problems as well.
I mean, there were even agents who allegedly had misgivings about the allegations themselves.
That is, they had a very steep sense of skepticism with respect to the allegations they heard.
And this took place, for example, within the meeting of the U.S. attorney that I just mentioned, Susan Burke.
That is to say, agents there purportedly told her that they heard outlandish claims about detainee abuse and torture.
And so they were deeply skeptical about them and often weren't very serious about pursuing them.
And now who's this guy, John, how do you say his last name?
Reneau.
John Reneau was a special agent in charge of the detainee abuse task force for the first part of 2005.
And he was, I think, very serious, very committed about trying to interview Susan Burke's clients, for example, none of whom she alleges were even interviewed at all.
And so those cases kind of faltered.
But John Reneau was, during his tenure as a special agent in charge, he would complain to his counterparts at Fort Belvoir, where the criminal investigative command is headquartered, that they were, according to him, sort of surreptitiously reopening cases.
And that would overwhelm the six agents that were investigating hundreds of these cases.
And as a result of being overwhelmed and understaffed and under-resourced, all these cases would falter.
And especially one of his gravest concerns was that that would even affect the cases for which they had very strong leads and serious allegations of abuse.
Well, and then I think you say in the article, too, that another part of how the cover-up worked was that information can't be released to those people suing because there's this ongoing criminal investigation.
We see this tactic a lot on the local police level in the daily paper, right?
Oh, sorry, we can't give any information because it's an ongoing investigation, or sometimes the feds will take a case from the locals in order to turn it into that, something like that, right?
Well, essentially, one of the questions that John Reneau and his superior, Angela Burt, and others in the task force observed was that he saw this correlation.
Reneau, in particular, saw a correlation between cases that his commanders at Fort Belvoir were asking them to reopen and a correlation between that and the requests by the ACLU for Freedom of Information Act requests to open or look at certain cases.
And based on that correlation, he believed, and other agents voiced similar skepticism, that essentially they were being asked to reopen cases that were under a FOIA request.
And if there's an open investigation, you can't release that.
So there were some agents there who thought that it was actually because CID wanted to do due diligence.
But in any case, it did have the effect of stalling the release of these cases.
And in general, the investigative agents that were charged with these cases just wondered why they were being tasked with reopening these cases surreptitiously.
And they complained that the ultimate impact was that these investigations faltered as a result of this, as a result of being overwhelmed.
Again, there were six agents that worked in 2005 and supposedly in 2004 as well.
And they're handling hundreds of cases.
And in fact, one of the things that they say as well is- All right, I'm sorry.
We'll have to hold it right there, Josh, and go out to this break.
But we can pick it right back up right there, hopefully, on the other side.
It's Joshua E.S. Phillips.
The new one is at thenation.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Joshua E.S. Phillips.
He's the author of- None of us were like this before.
A book I have, but haven't read yet.
Sorry about that.
And his new piece at thenation, thenation.com, on your newsstands as well, is called Inside the Detainee Abuse Task Force.
And when we were so rudely interrupted by the break there, Joshua, you were discussing how poorly manned they were, and how few cops were in charge of investigating the widespread torture and abuse in Iraq in 2004 and 5.
Yeah, and one of the things that I was starting to say before the break was that the agents actually admitted that given the various problems that they faced in terms of unit level investigations occurring that weren't referred to them, investigations known as 15-6s, the non-cooperation with military intelligence, covert forces, and so forth, the problems that whistleblowers faced trying to relay their accounts, the difficulty gaining access to detainees who alleged that they were abused, a whole host of other problems.
They believed that there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of allegations of detainee abuse that never even reached them.
And that also changes fundamentally our understanding about how widespread the detainee abuse and torture was in Iraq during that time.
Well, you know, Seymour Hersh wrote a whole book about it.
And it's funny because, well, it's not funny, but I'm glad to see, actually, part of your articles about Tony Lugaranis, I'm not sure if that's exactly how to pronounce it.
Lugaranis, yeah.
Well, I remember he was in the frontline documentary, The Torture Question, and he said something on the order of, forget Abu Ghraib, man, we tortured everybody all over the place, on the side of the road, in the living rooms.
And, you know, you wouldn't believe the things we did, such as A, B, C, D, and E.
And this was widespread everywhere.
We got the word from on high.
None of those old rules count.
Soften them up and get them ready for interrogation.
You know, it's really interesting that you're pointing out his case in particular.
I covered Tony Lugaranis in part in my book, in certain sections of it.
And one of the things that relates to his story and the article, in which he's also mentioned, is that he even admits, he corroborates what the investigative agents have said, in that they were using what they thought were totally permissible coercive interrogation techniques.
So why would they report them?
What incentive would they have?
You know, they would jeopardize their careers.
They would piss off and alienate their cohorts, possibly even endangering them.
And as you know, there were other whistleblowers in Iraq that were threatened, even officers who were threatened for trying to report on detainee abuse and torture.
So his story represents, it directly interfaces with this article and the problems that the investigative agents faced with just trying to get the reports of detainee abuse and torture.
Well, you know, just like there's a narrative that, oh, three guys were waterboarded.
And that's the extent of the entire torture program and whatever.
They also say that, and I think this narrative still probably more or less reigns if you had Gallup pull it for you, that what you see in the pictures at Abu Ghraib is what happened.
And it was this night shift at this one prison and that kind of thing.
But you really have quite a list here of details about cases that very well could have been prosecuted, it seems.
And I was wondering if you could give the audience, you know, obviously try to leave out any bad words, but, you know, go ahead.
And I mean, they're kind of in there.
But if you could, you know, describe some of these things, some of these cases that people have never heard that are, you know, absolutely horrific, that demand prosecutions of somebody somewhere.
Well, you know, I would say a few things.
First of all, before I get into the details, the military itself has admitted, you know, the DOD, the Department of Defense, in 2006, they've said that they opened 842 criminal investigations and inquiries into detainee abuse.
So it wasn't just a night shift at Abu Ghraib.
It was a fairly pervasive and serious problem during the early part of the war on terror.
Now, one of the things that we cite in the article are some of the investigations of Susan Burke, the attorney that we mentioned, the American attorney, who's running a class action suit against military contractors.
She has former detainees who alleged that they were raped, they were sodomized, they were electrocuted, they were very badly beaten.
Some were forced to pick up feces, you know, all kinds of degradation and humiliation and very serious allegations of physical abuse.
And I've, in the course of my own independent work, you know, I traveled through the Middle East and Afghanistan, and I've interviewed other detainees who've filed very similar allegations and for whom I've found corroboration.
So one of the things that I would routinely find is that, just like Susan Burke's clients, very few of these men that I interviewed said that the military even investigated them.
Now, in Susan Burke's case, as I said, here's an American attorney who's representing 337 former detainees who've made very serious allegations of abuse.
And she's had an Iraqi-based researcher and a private investigator and a staff that have gone through their documentation, who have found corroboration, who have done due diligence on their claims.
Their clients have, in some cases, been examined by physicians.
And she has repeatedly gone to the military and to the Department of Justice, and not one of her clients, she alleges, has been interviewed by the U.S. government, by representatives of the U.S. government.
And so who knows?
I mean, this is just one American attorney, and it could be symptomatic of many other cases of abuse that simply haven't been investigated.
Right.
Well, and, you know, if you take your reporting and what you're talking about here, and you combine it with what we also know from so much other work that's been done by so many other great journalists, too, about how it got this way and how they, you know, they brought General Miller from Guantanamo to Gitmo-ize Iraq.
They, as the other Scott Horton, heroic anti-torture human rights lawyer from Harper says, and I think this is in Jane Mayer's book, The Dark Side, too, that the torture methods kind of were imported to Iraq from Afghanistan in one direction and from Guantanamo Bay in the other.
And what everyone was told was the gloves are off.
They're, you know, these people are all terrorists if they're resisting us.
And the Geneva Conventions don't apply for whatever made up reason and plenary powers and all these David Addington theories.
And so, really, we come up to the pragmatic question, you know, how many decades in a row would we have to hold trials in order to hold Bush and his entire chain of command responsible for what they did to so many, at least thousands and thousands of Iraqis?
Yeah, well...
Afghans, too.
Right, right.
I mean, I think you nailed the observation about Geneva because I think, for me, that's where most of my sources, military up and down the ladder in terms of grunts to military intelligence, the generals have complained, you know, in terms of undoing Geneva really set the ball in motion for a lot of this abuse and torture.
And as for accountability, yeah, I mean, I think that's a very serious concern because not just in terms of meting out justice for these detainees, which I think is a worthy and important goal in and of itself, but I think just in terms of a preventative measure, in terms of ensuring that we don't lurch back into this serious, widespread use of detainee abuse and torture, trials and accountability are important up and down the ladder.
Right.
Well, and, you know, we can see right now in real time, there's been pretty good reporting here and there about the wink, wink, elbow in the ribs, real Bagram prison and black sites all over Afghanistan.
And, of course, our puppet dictatorships in the Middle East still torture their own people if and we don't know if they're still doing extraordinary renditions or not.
But all Obama ever said was I banned torture, meaning not that he recognized that the law already banned torture, but that he gets to decide.
And of course, there's Appendix M of the Army Field Manual that's still within the rules and still amounts to sleep deprivation and cold water and all that kind of thing.
Right.
That's right.
I mean, I think that there are still vestiges of policy remaining from the Bush administration that still need redress.
I think that's part of the reason why accountability is so important.
I mean, the whole basis of Obama saying he wants to look forward and not backwards because he believes that there has been accountability and that these things have been addressed.
But as you point out, you know, there's still work to be done.
Indeed.
All right, everybody, that's Joshua E. S.
Phillips, the nation dot com.
Thanks.
