Here is more from that terrific
speech retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington gave on the disastrous recent
history of American interrogation operations. The talk, given at Fort
Leavenworth late last year, was sponsored by the CGSC Foundation, which plans
to publish the speech in a book this spring about ethics and law in
contemporary conflict. I am quoting from the speech with the CGSC Foundation's
permission.
The U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was
worse than a crime in his view, it was a blunder. "Guantanamo was the
diametric opposite of how I would have set up a facility," said Herrington, a
seasoned interrogator who advocates treating prisoners with respect and
decency -- not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the
most effective way to gather intelligence.
"Iraq was worse," he continued. He arrived there in December
2003 on an official trip to review U.S. military intelligence operations in the
new war there. He was shocked by what he found. "I reported, in writing, that
the Special Operations Task Force was brutalizing detainees at their Camp Nama
facility before turning them in to the Baghdad Airport confinement facility."
He was surprised to have his warning disregarded:
"I expected a major investigation
of rogue activity, but a feeble attempt to investigate was quickly dropped.
Investigations into Camp Nama were unwelcome, because, we know now, the
excesses that I and others reported were sanctioned at very high levels of the
U.S. government . . . .
He also inspected the Abu Ghraib prison and
reported that it was a disastrous mess, "a squandered and lost opportunity." So
it was no surprise, he said, a few months later when the news of the abuses
broke, with "the sheer depravity of mistreatment, [and] the idea that American
soldiers would descend to such depths of conduct," that the global media seized
on it.
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