À Abou Ghraib, les mauvais traitements étaient « codifiés », estime une experte

Le procès du lieutenant-colonel Steven Jordan s'ouvre aujourd'hui à Fort Meade

Le procès du lieutenant-colonel Steven Jordan, le seul officier américain poursuivi après le scandale des sévices infligés à des prisonniers à la prison d’Abou Ghraib en Irak, doit s’ouvrir aujourd’hui devant une cour martiale à Fort Meade (Maryland, Est).

Plus de trois ans après la publication des photos montrant des prisonniers irakiens humiliés par leurs gardiens américains, seulement une poignée de soldats ont été jugés (et condamnés à des peines allant de quelques heures de travaux d’intérêt général à 10 ans de prison), et aucun des hauts responsables civils et militaires de la défense n’a été poursuivi. Mais parmi les gradés de haut rang, seule la commandante des prisons américaines en Irak à l’époque, l’ex-général Janis Karpinski, a été sanctionnée par une rétrogradation, sans passer devant la justice militaire.

Retournée à la vie civile, elle a expliqué dans un livre paru fin 2005 que les sévices « étaient le résultat d’ordres contradictoires et de règles confuses venant des commandants militaires en Irak jusqu’au sommet du pouvoir civil à Washington ».

Selon les différents rapports d’enquête de l’armée sur le scandale, le lieutenant-colonel Jordan, 51 ans, a participé à cette confusion. Officiellement responsable du centre des interrogatoires, il s’est consacré uniquement à l’amélioration des conditions de vie des soldats affectés à la prison. Cet officier de réserve spécialisé dans l’analyse du renseignement, et non dans sa collecte, n’a pas cherché à superviser les interrogatoires, livrant à eux-mêmes des soldats en sous-effectifs, mal formés, et soumis à une forte pression de la hiérarchie pour obtenir des résultats.

Devant la justice militaire, il est accusé d’avoir, au cours d’une nuit, forcé des prisonniers à se dénuder et de les avoir menacés avec des chiens d’attaque, un incident qui n’a pas été photographié, et d’avoir ensuite menti aux enquêteurs en affirmant qu’il n’avait pas été témoin de sévices ni vu de prisonniers nus.

Certains abus ont toutefois été photographiés. Les clichés qui ont été publiés, sur lesquels on voit, entre autres, des détenus nus, empilés sur le carrelage de la prison devant des gardiennes américaines, ont définitivement coupé l’élan de sympathie internationale envers les États-Unis suscité par les attentats du 11-Septembre.

Le ministre de la Défense d’alors, le controversé Donald Rumsfeld, a assuré avoir présenté sa démission à deux reprises au plus fort du scandale, tout en maintenant que les sévices n’étaient le fait que de « quelques pommes pourries » au sein d’une armée de centaines de milliers de soldats.

Toutefois, selon Tara McKelvey*, chercheuse à l’Université de New York interrogée par l’AFP, les excès d’Abou Ghraib étaient « codifiés », et non pas le fait de quelques soldats mal encadrés. D’où la nécessité, pour elle, de voir les conseillers juridiques du gouvernement Bush répondre de leurs actes.

Q : Qui est responsable de ce qui s’est passé à Abou Ghraib ?

« C’est la question à un million de dollars. Les gens accusent (le président George W.) Bush, ils accusent (le vice-président Dick) Cheney, ils accusent (l’ancien ministre de la Défense Donald) Rumsfeld. S’il y a quelqu’un qui a quelque chose à se reprocher, je pencherais pour John Yoo (un ancien conseiller juridique du ministère de la Justice). Il a reconnu être l’un des auteurs du document d’août 2002 qui a redéfini la torture et autorisé toutes sortes de techniques d’interrogatoire abusives. Les gens disent souvent qu’il y a eu de la torture et des excès dans toutes les guerres. C’est vrai, mais la différence c’est qu’aujourd’hui ces choses sont codifiées. »

Q : Que peut-on attendre du procès du colonel Steven Jordan ?

« Des réponses sur ce qui s’est passé à Abou Ghraib. Ces procès devant des cours martiales ont été très utiles parce qu’ils ont permis aux gens de poser des questions. C’est l’une des rares occasions où cela se passe au grand jour. Le colonel Jordan n’est pas poursuivi pour les faits qui ont été photographiés, mais il peut donner un aperçu de ce qui se passait là-bas. C’est vrai que l’on peut dire que le scandale existe parce qu’il y a eu des photos, mais ce que vous avez vu sur les photos ne représente qu’une fraction de ce qui s’est passé. Et certainement pas le pire. »

Q : Le scandale ne représente-t-il alors que la partie émergée de l’iceberg ?

« Je ne doute pas une seconde que les exactions étaient bien plus répandues que ce que l’armée a reconnu à l’époque où les photos sont apparues. En décembre 2003, il y avait environ 12 000 prisonniers en Irak, sans compter les milliers de détenus qui n’ont pas été enregistrés parce qu’ils sont restés moins de 15 jours dans des prisons provisoires. Un poste de police à Samarra, un gymnase scolaire ou un préfabriqué près de l’aéroport de Bagdad... Certains des pires sévices ont eu lieu dans ces prisons provisoires. Aujourd’hui, les sondages montrent qu’un nombre important de soldats disent que la torture est justifiée dans certains cas et qu’ils ne dénonceront pas les éventuels excès. Et je pense que la triste réalité est que ces excès continuent mais que la différence entre maintenant et avril-mai 2004, c’est que les gens ne prennent pas de photos. »

*Tara McKelvey est l’auteur de Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War (Au cœur de la politique américaine d’interrogatoires secrets et de torture dans la guerre contre le terrorisme), sorti en juin aux États-Unis.
Source : http://www.lorient-lejour.com.lb/page.aspx?page=article&id=350038

Six Questions for Tara McKelvey on Detainee Abuse
Ken Silverstein, Washington Babylon, Harpers’S magazine, May 9, 2007

Tara McKelvey is the author of the new book Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War, which tells the story of the Abu Ghraib scandal and, more broadly, examines the pattern of detainee abuse in Iraq. McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect and a research fellow at the NYU School of Law’s Center on Law and Security, lives in Washington, D.C. I recently asked her six questions about what she learned while researching her book.
1. The general story of the abuses at Abu Ghraib has by now been well covered. What has the media missed?

The media only focused on the photographs. They missed the fact that the abuse was systematic and that the worst things were not even shown in the pictures. That’s what my book is about: what happened beyond the frame of the Abu Ghraib photos. Thousands of detainees have gone through U.S.-run facilities in Iraq, but thousands more—anyone held for less than fourteen days—were never registered or tracked. Human-rights reports and interviews I conducted show that some of the worst abuses took place at short-term facilities—a police station in Samarra, a school gymnasium, a trailer, and places like that, where individuals were held for up to two weeks. It’s also important to remember that reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as numerous military documents, show that 70 to 90 percent of the detainees had no information that would have been useful to the troops.
2. Who is ultimately responsible for the abuses?

If there’s a smoking gun, it’s in the hands of John C. Yoo. He worked at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and he’s the guy behind the August 1, 2002, memo that said interrogators could do what they wanted as long as the intensity of pain inflicted was less than “that which accompany serious physical injury such as death or organ failure.” It created conditions that allowed for almost any sort of physical abuse. So guys like Yoo and Timothy Flanagan, who was deputy White House counsel under Alberto R. Gonzales, discussed techniques like stress positions and sleep deprivation that were approved for high-level Al Qaeda suspects—and those techniques were used on Iraqi civilians. I had a heartfelt conversation with Flanagan and told him what I had heard from Iraqis: that these techniques had been used on men, women and children in Iraq. He feels bad about it; I know he does. But the fact is that he and Yoo and some of these other people from the best law schools and universities in this country were the ones who came up with the legal definitions that allowed for the abuse to happen.
“When [Lynndie England] told me she’d quit her job over the conditions at the plant, I was surprised. She had stood up to what she thought was wrong.”
3. What was Donald Rumsfeld’s role?

Rumsfeld has had a very lackadaisical attitude towards the Geneva Conventions. On February 8, 2002, he said, “The reality is that the set of facts that exist today with respect to Al Qaeda and Taliban were not necessarily the kinds of facts that were considered when the Geneva Conventions were fashioned.” On May 4 of 2004, after the pictures from Abu Ghraib were published, he told a journalist that the Geneva Conventions “did not precisely apply” in Iraq. There has also been testimony from people who say Rumsfeld got nightly briefings about what was gathered during interrogations.
4. Have those guilty of detainee abuse been held accountable?

More than 260 soldiers have faced punishment for detainee-related incidents since October 2001. Of those, nine individuals, all except one below the rank of captain, have been sentenced to time behind bars. Keep in mind, that’s just the military; meanwhile, there are about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, almost as many as there are troops. But only one contractor has been punished for a detainee-related crime, and that was in Afghanistan. Not a single contractor in Iraq has been punished. I doubt all those contractors are angels; we know, for instance, that several were implicated in the Abu Ghraib scandal—but those cases never went anywhere. This is not just a prison scandal. It’s a huge blow to America’s image and it’s something we’ll be dealing with for generations.
5. What do you think of former CIA director George Tenet’s recent comments in which he defended the use of tough tactics against detainees?

Tenet has said in interviews that we didn’t employ torture, that everything was authorized, and that the attorney general told us the techniques did not amount to torture. This goes back to John Yoo, who along with others broadened the definition of what was allowable. Some of the stuff, like “stress positions,” seems benign. But it covers a lot of ground. It means you can be kept crouching and not allowed to move for 45 minutes, but then they can move you into another stress position. There’s one stress position, called a “Palestinian Hanging,” which was apparently pretty common at Abu Ghraib. Your arms are pulled behind your back, and you’re hung from your arms. I interviewed a ghost detainee who was put in that position and he said it was incredibly painful. One detainee, al-Jamadi, died after being put in that position. We don’t know if these techniques are still allowed. Officially they say “no,” but we have no idea.
“This is not just a prison scandal. It’s a huge blow to America’s image and it’s something we’ll be dealing with for generations.”
6. You got an exclusive print interview with Lynndie England. What was your impression of her?

Part of her defense was that she was a compliant personality but in fact, as I discovered, she’d been a whistleblower. She had worked at a chicken processing plant in Moorefield, West Virginia, and had walked off the job to protest lousy assembly line practices. Less than a year later, a PETA investigator went into the plant undercover and filmed incredibly horrific acts of animal abuse. It made it into the national media, which called it a “mini Abu Ghraib.” When she told me she’d quit her job over the conditions at the plant, I was surprised. She had stood up to what she thought was wrong. Lynndie England—and all of the people at Abu Ghraib—had the option to say “no” to the abuse. There was a combination of events that allowed the detainee abuses to happen, it wasn’t just administration policy or Lynndie’s psychopathic boyfriend, or any one thing. I was so shocked about the abuse when I first heard about it from Iraqis, and I wondered how such horrible things could happen. But by the time I’d finished the book and saw how everything had come together, the abuse seemed almost inevitable.

Any Means Necessary
By JONATHAN MAHLER, The New York Times, July 29, 2007
Ugly things happen during wartime. This is self-evident, but worth repeating in the context of any discussion of the Abu Ghraib scandal. There is a simple reason military commanders from Sun Tzu to George Washington to Colin Powell have recognized the need for placing limits on battlefield behavior: otherwise, all hell will break loose.

MONSTERING Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War. By Tara McKelvey. 300 pp. Carroll & Graf Publishers. $25.95.

In “Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War,” Tara McKelvey sets out to describe, in fresh and unremitting detail, exactly what can, and did, happen in the absence of those limitations. McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect, had her work cut out for her. The images of Abu Ghraib — Hooded Man, Leashed Man, the Naked Human Pyramid, to name a few of the most notorious — have long since been seared into the world’s consciousness. Since the scandal broke in the spring of 2004, the question of United States policy on torture has been widely debated, and Abu Ghraib itself has already been the subject of several books, including “Chain of Command,” by Seymour M. Hersh of The New Yorker, the first journalist to get his hands on the Taguba report, the military’s initial probe into American conduct at the prison. There have also been countless newsmagazine articles and at least two documentary films.
McKelvey worked hard to break new ground, interviewing, among many others, Samuel Provance, one of the scandal’s key whistle-blowers; the infamous Lynndie England (“the lady with a leash,” as Mick Jagger refers to her in the song “Dangerous Beauty”); and more than 20 Iraqis who say they were abused. The sweep of her reporting is impressive, and she would have been better off letting it speak for itself rather than hyping it with prose that feels out of place in a serious work of nonfiction: “Much has been reported on the criminal behavior of soldiers at Abu Ghraib. But until now few — if any — detailed, documented accounts of sexual relations among soldiers and between soldiers and female prisoners have appeared in the press.”
The administration began by dismissing the misconduct at Abu Ghraib as the work of what President Bush called “a few American troops.” The bad-apple defense quickly crumbled, though, with the leak of government memorandums authorizing the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” These new methods were specifically sanctioned for members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda being held at Guantánamo Bay, who the administration determined were not entitled to Geneva Conventions protections. But it is not difficult to draw a line from Camp Delta to Abu Ghraib. In August 2003, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the joint task force at Guantánamo, was dispatched to the Iraqi prison — formerly Saddam Hussein’s favorite torture chamber — to make it a more effective laboratory for producing intelligence that might help defeat the insurgency. In Iraq, the use of harsh interrogation techniques required the signature of a superior officer, though that was apparently not much of a deterrent. “I never saw a sheet that wasn’t signed,” McKelvey quotes one interrogator as saying.
The book is constructed not as a narrative of the scandal, but as a series of dispatches centered on her meetings with various firsthand participants, including a compelling, if ultimately unsatisfying, jailhouse interview with England. (“Why she committed the crimes is still not clear — even to her,” the author concedes.) McKelvey opts not to examine the motivations of her characters, though she does mine her notebook for every last morsel from her various reporting trips — the song playing on the radio in her rental car after she pulls into England’s hometown (“Dust in the Wind”), a quotation from an elderly woman who thinks she remembers England’s “pretty smile,” the fact that a human rights lawyer working on behalf of some of the detainees enjoys Arabic-style lamb chops. Sometimes these details enrich her story. Often they feel indiscriminate and irrelevant.
“Monstering” is a book of reportage. This is not to say that McKelvey makes an effort to conceal her own outrage at what went on at Abu Ghraib, but rather that she is less interested in exploring how this great moral and institutional failure came to pass — the toxic mix of fatally misguided policy and undisciplined soldiers and interrogators — than in depicting what, precisely, went on behind the prison’s cinder-block walls. In describing such scenes, she uses her rigorous reporting to fine effect, drawing on her interviews with detainees to reconstruct their haunting accounts in straightforward, lucid prose. McKelvey also manages to advance her well-covered story by illuminating the deranged culture that obtained among the soldiers posted to the prison, some of whom evidently battled the stress and boredom by “Robotripping” — chasing tablets of Vivarin with eight-ounce bottles of Robitussin for a cheap high.
As McKelvey points out, only a handful of soldiers have been punished for their behavior in Iraq, and there have still been no independent investigations of the Abu Ghraib scandal. This is, in other words, a story with a conspicuous lack of heroes. The most intriguing character in “Monstering” is the whistle-blower, Provance. A former Bible college student who has since left the military and is now apparently dabbling in Satanism, he nevertheless had a clearer understanding of the meaning of American values than many of the architects of American policy in the global war on terror. If the United States still has a chance of winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world, then we have people like Provance to thank.
Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine, is the author of “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning.” He is at work on a book about Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a Supreme Court case involving presidential power and the war on terror.
Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/books/review/Mahler-t.html?ex=1343361600&en=56f9647b765a1ac6&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss