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Rumsfeld’s soulmate at the heart of culture of brutality - [Scottish Sunday]

Private First Class Lynndie R England and the Culture of Brutality

When Private First Class Lynndie R England put a leash round an Iraqi’s neck and dragged him like a dog she knew exactly what she was doing. When she engaged in consensual sex with other soldiers in front of Iraqi detainees (according to the latest evidence of even grosser misbehaviour from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison) the diminutive reservist in the US Army’s 372nd Military Police Company was not pandering to a perverse whim. She was simply doing something which soldiers always say they were doing when caught out: acting on orders.

The Role of Military Intelligence

Although her plea has a lousy history – Nazi soldiers accused of atrocities invariably responded “befehl ist befehl, [orders are orders]’’ – there is mounting evidence that US prison guards in Iraq and Afghanistan were ordered by military intelligence officers to “loosen up” detainees ahead of interrogation. It is also clear the orders came from the top of the chain of command and that the trail leads to the office of beleaguered defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Major-General Geoffrey Miller: From Guantanamo to Iraq

During his away-day visit to Baghdad last week, Rumsfeld was in typically bullish mood, telling cheering soldiers that he had given up reading the newspapers as he wanted to keep his sanity. With him was General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But it was Major-General Geoffrey Miller who caught the eye as the official party dismounted from their air force helicopter. Miller is the deputy commanding general for detainee operations for the multinational forces in Iraq, reporting directly to Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, commanding US forces in Iraq, and through him to General John Abizaid of Central Command and on to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and defense secretary Rumsfeld.

The Rise of Miller: Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib

A tough Texan with degrees from Ohio State and the University of Southern California, Miller trained as an artilleryman and, after staff college, served as an assistant chief of staff for operations in Korea. Following a stint in personnel management at the Pentagon, he was plucked from relative obscurity in November 2002 to take command of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay. He was charged with bringing order and discipline to the Camp X-Ray detention facility in Cuba at a time when President George Bush’s administration wanted faster results from the interrogation of terrorist suspects from Afghanistan. Miller’s predecessor, Brigadier-General Rick Baccus, was dismissed after being accused of being too soft on his charges.

The Controversial Methods

Although Miller had no experience of dealing with prisoners, he proved to be a quick learner and quickly put Camp X-Ray on a strict military footing. Soon he was able to report to the Pentagon that two-thirds of the 600 inmates were providing him with “actionable intelligence”. Amongst the approaches he introduced were “softening-up” techniques including sleep deprivation, extended isolation, simulated drowning and forcing detainees to stand or crouch in “stress positions”. The methods, since outlawed by the US army, attracted criticism from the International Committee of the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch which claimed they were “tantamount to torture” but Miller argued he was operating within guidelines agreed by the Pentagon, the US Justice Department, and the CIA, and that the results spoke for themselves.

The Fallout and Court Martial

On Wednesday, the first court martial hearings begin in Baghdad when two military police guards go on trial for their part in the abuses. Rumsfeld and his team hope they will be condemned as bad apples. But those involved, reservists from the Appalachians, are not taking it lying down. Trained as traffic cops, used to issuing speeding tickets, they found themselves obeying a different and more horrifying set of commands. Specialist Sabrina Harman was photographed smiling behind a pile of naked Iraqi bodies and she insists that it was not done for fun but for a known purpose: “The job of the MP [military police] was to keep them awake, make it hell, so they would talk.” Like the others arrested for their part in the Abu Ghraib atrocities and those about to lose their jobs, she was only obeying orders.

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