A US army general who oversees the Guantanamo Bay detention camp has been chosen as Nato's next military head. General Bantz Craddock, chief of US Southern Command, has been picked to be Supreme Allied Commander, Europe.
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Gen Craddock has normally defended the controversial camp against criticism, although he has ordered investigations into some claims of abuse of suspects.
In one case, he blocked attempts to get a Guantanamo commander reprimanded over abuse claims, insisting the officer had done nothing wrong.
From VOA, June 2005:
A military investigation into FBI allegations of detainee abuse at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has found two unauthorized cases where prisoners were subjected to abusive interrogation. However, the head of the U.S. Southern Command overruled the report's recommendations that an Army general be reprimanded for failing to properly oversee the interrogations.
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The senior investigating officer, Air Force Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt, said his investigation confirmed two cases of abusive interrogations that were not authorized.
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According to General Schmidt, one case of unauthorized abuse occurred when a naval officer communicated a death threat to a high value detainee. He said that case had been referred to the Navy Criminal Investigative Service for further review.
The second case of unauthorized abuse involved a second high value detainee, a man by the name of Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi citizen captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan.
According to the report, al-Qahtani resisted all standard interrogation techniques, which lead interrogators to request permission to use harder techniques. General Schmidt described some of the techniques, designed to attack the detainee's sense of self worth, in testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Wednesday.
"The mother and sister of the detainee were [called] whores. He was forced to wear women's lingerie. Multiple allegations of homosexuality and that his comrades were aware of that," he said. "He was forced to dance with a male interrogator. He was subjected 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."
General Schmidt concluded that the "cumulative effect" of these techniques had an "abusive and degrading impact on the detainee."
General Schmidt's report recommended that Army Major General Geoffrey Miller, who was in charge of detainee operations at Guantanamo Bay when the abuse occurred, be reprimanded for his failure to oversee the interrogation of al-Qahtani.
However, Army General Bantz Craddock, commander of U.S. Southern Command, testified that he had overruled this recommendation and instead had referred the matter to the Army Inspector General. General Craddock said the harsh interrogation tactics used on al-Qahtani did not violate U.S. law or policy so General Miller did not deserve to be punished.
"Again, of particular importance to my decision, is the fact there was no finding that the interrogation of ISN063 (Mohamed al-Qahtani), albeit characterized as creative, aggressive, and persistent, violated U.S. law or policy," General Craddock explained.
TIME Magazine has more about these 'creative, aggressive, and persistent' techniques:
They strip-search him and briefly make him stand nude. They tell him to bark like a dog and growl at pictures of terrorists. They hang pictures of scantily clad women around his neck. A female interrogator so annoys al-Qahtani that he tells his captors he wants to commit suicide and asks for a crayon to write a will.
And this:
Five days later, Rumsfeld’s harsher measures are revoked after military lawyers in Washington raised questions about their use and efficacy, TIME reports.
The Geneva Conventions prohibit sexually degrading tactics but the Bush administration has said the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the Guantanamo detainees, saying that they are suspected terrorists rather than prisoners of war. link
This was Craddock's reaction to the 3 recent suicides at Gitmo:
General Craddock speculated that the suicides may have been timed to affect the Supreme Court decision on the Hamdan case.
"This may be an attempt to influence the judicial proceedings in that perspective," he told reporters, according to a transcript of his comments during a brief visit to Guantánamo on Sunday.
The old 'political ploy' talking point.
This is the new NATO Supreme Commander.
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