Chaos Reigned in Guantanamo’s Early Days, Documents Show

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Chaos Reigned in Guantanamo’s Early Days, Documents Show
Prison Commanders Paint Alarming Picture of Detainee Treatment
By Spencer Ackerman


Guards search detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. (Zuma Press)


Statements declassified just before the July 4 holiday from the former commanders of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility paint an alarming picture of the camp’s early years, as interrogators’ and guards’ competence and discipline were frequently in doubt, befitting one commander’s assessment that the facility’s command was “an ad hoc organization that started from a cold start.”

Released late on July 2 as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU for Defense Department documents related to the Bush administration’s interrogation and detention policies, the assessments from two former commanders, Majs. Gen. Michael Dunlavey and Geoffrey Miller, have received little notice because of the holiday weekend. Dunlavey and Miller made their statements in 2005 to an Air Force lieutenant general named Randall Schmidt, who co-authored an inquiry into detainee abuse allegations at Guantanamo the same year.

“The documents are a reminder that the abuse that took place at Guantanamo Bay was not the result of rogue soldiers and rogue interrogators,” said Jameel Jaffer, head of national security for the ACLU, “but policies made by the most senior officials {in the Bush administration}, both military and civilian.” In particular, the statements of the two generals — both of whom are now retired from the U.S. Army — shed additional light on how Guantanamo Bay was far from the professional and efficient intelligence-processing apparatus portrayed by the Bush administration. The ACLU obtained their statements as part of a series of Freedom of Information Act suits brought in 2003 and 2004, and it asked the Obama administration earlier this year to “reprocess” these and other documents withheld by the Bush administration; less complete versions of the generals’ statements have been previously obtained and released by the ACLU, although they have garnered little press attention.

Dunlavey, an experienced military interrogator, told Schmidt that when he took over the facility in February 2002, the military linguists interacting with the detainees were “worthless,” barely able to “order coffee” in detainees’ native languages. He said there were “60 outstanding Inspector General complaints” stemming from actions occurring in January 2002, the single month of the facility’s operation before Dunlavey took over. Interrogators and guards were not capable of even determining which detainees possessed influence over their fellow inmates.

That same month, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters in Washington, “Let there be no doubt the treatment of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay is proper, it’s humane, it’s appropriate and it is fully consistent with international conventions.” Although Rumsfeld in 2002 referred to the Guantanamo detainees as the “worst of the worst” terrorists in U.S. custody, Dunlavey told Schmidt, “There was simply no process in place to assess who the real leaders were” in the facility’s early days.

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http://washingtonindependent.com/49728/chaos-reigned-in-guantanamos-early-days-documents-show