Timeline: Our Involvement with Torture since September 11, 2001
No2Torture Group
Dr. William Kumbier, Lead Author
May, 2006

October 2001 — President George W. Bush orders bombing of suspected terrorist sites in Afghanistan. War in Afghanistan begins.

November 13, 2001 — President Bush issues a military order calling for “individuals subject to this order” (i.e., suspected terrorists and terrorist supporters) to be detained and to be tried, when tried, by military tribunals, rather than in U.S. district courts. Many of those subsequently detained are held at the American base in Guantánamo, Cuba. (Danner 78-82). Eventually over 500 detainees are held there.

January 2002 — In memos to President Bush dated January 18 and 25, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales argues that the provisions governing prisoners of war in Geneva Convention II do not to apply to those captured who are, or who are suspected to be, linked to the Taliban or al Qaeda (Danner 83-87).

February 7, 2002 — President Bush decides to withhold protections offered by Geneva Convention III from captured al Qaeda and Taliban fighters and supporters. Bush states: “I . . . determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world” (quoted in Hersh 5). His decision is based on White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales’s contention that “the war against terrorism is a new kind of war . . . a new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions” (Danner 42).

NOTE: The key status-of-detainee documents that were exchanged at this time among the White House Counsel, the Department of Defense, the Department of State and the Department of Justice, including those quoted here, were not released until more than two years later, in June 2004.

August 2002 — A memorandum by Jay S. Bybee, head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice, to Alberto Gonzales “redefines” torture: “Certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within [a legal] proscription against torture. . . . For an act to constitute torture. . . it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure. Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death” (quoted in Hersh 4-5).

December 2, 2002 — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approves U.S. military use of interrogation techniques including “yelling at detainees, use of stress positions, use of isolation, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, use of hoods, use of twenty-hour interrogation, removal of clothing, use of mild physical contact, and “use of detainees’ individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress.” Rumsfeld rescinds these instructions six weeks later and convenes a “working group to recommend suitable methods for Guantánamo” (Danner 43-44). What this working group recommended is not clear.

March 2003 — President Bush orders bombing of sites in Iraq; war against Iraq begins.

May 2003 — President Bush declares “major combat” in Iraq to be over.

August 2003 — A military intelligence captain in Iraq seeks clarification to distinguish “unlawful combatants” from “lawful combatants,” who are subject to protection under Geneva Conventions. He requests an interrogation techniques ‘wish list’ by August 17 (Danner 33). Later that month, Major General Geoffrey Miller, then commander of the base at Guantánamo, and later commander of Abu Ghraib, visits Iraq to review “current Iraqi theater ability to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence” (Danner 20). Some contend that Miller visited Abu Ghraib for the purpose of “Gitmo-izing” Abu Ghraib (Hersh). According to reporter Seymour Hersh, it is in August 2003 that top secret intelligence acquisition strategies and techniques approved in 2001 by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for use in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the “war on terror” — known as a “special access program” (SAP) — are authorized for use in Iraq prisons (Danner 46).

At some indefinite point, the leading military intelligence battalion at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq began to use interrogation techniques derived from what is known as the Joint Task Force (JTF) 121 interrogation policy, which “included the use of stress positions during fear-up harsh interrogation approaches. As well as the presence of military working dogs, yelling, loud music, and light control. The memo also included sleep management and isolation approaches.”

October 2003 — On October 12, Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, overall commander in Iraq, issues a memorandum requiring interrogators at Abu Ghraib to work with military police guards to “manipulate our internees’ emotions and weaknesses” and to control the “lighting, heating . . . food, clothing, and shelter” of those they question” (Danner 12). It is later revealed that the subsequently widely publicized, scandalous abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib take place mainly in October and November 2003. Also, in its visits to Abu Ghraib in October 2003, the International Red Cross observes and eventually reports on abuses of internees.

November 6, 2003 — One of several reports by the International Red Cross, complaining of abuses at Abu Ghraib, is issued.

January 13, 2004 — Specialist Joseph Darby provides U.S. Army authorities with a “disk full of explicit images” of the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

January 21, 2004 — An anonymous Abu Ghraib prisoner, known as “Detainee-07,” makes a sworn statement to the U.S. military’s Criminal Investigation Division concerning abuses in his internment and interrogation. This statement was obtained by the Washington Post and included, along with 12 other such accounts from prisoners, on the Post’s website.

February 26, 2004 — Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who was appointed to conduct an investigation into the interrogation activities at Abu Ghraib, submitted his findings in a report (the Taguba report) to his superior officers (Hersh 41). Among other things, the report concludes that between October and December 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib, “perpetrated by soldiers of the 372^nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community” (Hersh 22, 41).

April 28, 2004 — CBS television network releases the first publicized photos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib on its 60 Minutes II broadcast. A story by journalist Seymour Hersh regarding the abuses is published shortly thereafter in the New Yorker (May 10), along with some of the photographs and quotations from the Taguba investigation.

May 2004 — As the Abu Ghraib scandal continues to unfold, the New York Times reports that top Iraqi commanders admitted they had learned “little about the insurgency” from Abu Ghraib interrogators. Later in May, the U.S. Senate holds hearings on Abu Ghraib.

June 2004 — Key documents are released to the press detailing the “struggles among senior officials within the executive branch [of the U.S. government] . . . over how to treat those prisoners captured in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, and what methods to use to interrogate them” (Danner 73). William Haynes, Pentagon general counsel, and other Administration spokespersons assure reporters that “no prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Cuba had been tortured” (Hersh 11). Also in June, the “U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen held for more than two years in military custody without charge or trial as an “enemy combatant” [rather than “prisoner of war”] was entitled to due process and habeas corpus review of his detention by the U.S. courts” (Amnesty International).

August 2004 — Final report by the Independent Panel to review Department of Defense investigations of Detention Operations (known as the Schlesinger report) is issued. The panel was headed by former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, appointed to the panel by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

November 2004 — On November 8, U.S. district court judge James Robertson rules that military commissions used to try detainees must be halted because the commissions were in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The so-called “commissions” are one of “three types of legal bodies created by the military to deal with detainees at Guantánamo” (New York Times: “Ruling Lets U.S. Restart Trials”). Judge Robertson’s decision was later to be reversed by a federal appeals court in July 2005.

May 2005 — Amnesty International releases a report citing the United States for human rights abuses against detainees at Guantánamo, in detention facilities in Iraq and elsewhere. It opens with this summary of human rights abuses by the U.S. In 2004:

Hundreds of detainees continued to be held without charge or trial at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Thousands of people were detained during US military and security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and routinely denied access to their families and lawyers.

Military investigations were initiated or conducted into allegations of torture and ill-treatment of detainees by US personnel in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and into reports of deaths in custody and ill-treatment by US forces elsewhere in Iraq, and in Afghanistan and Guantánamo. Evidence came to light that the US administration had sanctioned interrogation techniques that violated the UN Convention against Torture. Pre-trial military commission hearings opened in Guantánamo but were suspended pending a US court ruling.

President Bush criticizes the report as “absurd” in a press conference on May 31.

June 2005 — The New York Times (“Psychologists Warned”) reports that former interrogators at Guantánamo stated that psychiatrists and/or psychologists “counseled them on how to use a detainee’s fears and longings to increase distress.” A few weeks later, the American Psychological Association issued a report “telling its members of the ethical dangers of such activities.”

July 2005 — On July 14, the New York Times reports that a “high-level military investigation into complaints by FBI agents about the abuse of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, concluded . . . that their treatment was sometimes degrading but did not qualify as inhumane or as torture” (“Report Discredits”). Then, on July 14, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the U.S. military could “resume war crimes trials of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo.” The trials had been suspended by a district court decision in November 2004, which ruled that the military trials violated the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. Constitution and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (“Ruling Lets U.S. Restart Trials”).

August, 2005 — Approximately 520 detainees at Guantanamo begin a hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention and abuse. The military orders force feedings to counter what they claim to be “a form of suicide.” Medical groups protest saying that it is a violation of medical ethics to administer forced feeding.

September 9, 2005 — The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the government has the right to hold a US citizen, Jose Padilla, in indefinite military detention without accusing him of any crime. Before this ruling could be appealed to the Supreme Court, Padilla was indicted in civil court and transferred from military custody to federal custody in Miami, thus avoiding a ruling on the legality of suspending habeas corpus protections for US citizens.

September, 2005 — Human Rights Watch issues a report with first hand accounts by members of the 82^nd Airborne detailing the routine torture of detainees held near Fallujah. Capt. Ian Fishback's letter to Sen. John McCain protesting the practices helps to fuel Congressional efforts to restrain and define interrogation practices in what will come to be known as the McCain amendment.

October, 2005 — PBS airs a significant documentary “The Torture Question.”

November 2, 2005 — An article in the Washington Post by Dana Priest sparks international outrage over the practice of extraordinary rendition by the US. Extraordinary rendition involves capturing suspected terrorists and secretly transporting them for interrogation to third countries known to use abusive interrogation techniques. Priest's article alleges that some of these detainees are being held in secret prisons in Europe, setting off public outrage and official investigations.

December, 2005 — The McCain amendment is passed overwhelmingly by both the Senate and the House in spite of the threat of the first veto of the Bush administration. In response, President Bush drops his veto threat, however, in a signing statement, he claims the right to bypass the law. In addition, the law is weakened by amendments. Confessions obtained through torture may now be used in proceedings against the detainees, a first in US history. Further, access to US courts through habeas corpus is denied to the detainees.

May 18, 2006 — The UN Committee Against Torture publishes its list of conclusions and recommendations that are highly critical of US treatment of detainees, extraordinary renditions, secret detentions, etc.

May 18, 2006 — Judge T.S. Ellis 3rd of U.S. District Court dismissed a suit by Khaled al-Masri in which he sought redress for being abducted in Afghanistan by the CIA; Ellis ruled that "in the present circumstances, al- Masri's private interests must give way to the national interest in preserving state secrets."

Sources:
Amnesty International, “United States of America,” Amnesty International Report 2005. Available at http://web.amnesty.org .

Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, The New York Review of Books, New York, 2004.

Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. Harper Perennial, New York, 2005.

Neil A. Lewis, “Psychologists Warned on Role in Detentions,” The New York Times, July 6, 2005.

Neil A. Lewis, “Report Discredits F.B.I. Claims of Abuse at Guantánamo Bay,” The New York Times, July 14, 2005.

Neil A. Lewis, “Ruling Lets U. S. Restart Trials at Guantánamo,” The New York Times, July 16, 2005.