WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 (UPI) -- The U.S. military's new field manual on interrogation rejects three techniques that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally approved three years ago for use on prisoners taken in the war on terror.
The 384-page Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations describes 19 legal interrogation techniques, including 16 traditional approaches and three newer ones -- "good cop/bad cop," "false flag" and the separation of a prisoner from other prisoners for up to 30 days at a time.
Those three new techniques were approved by Rumsfeld during two rewrites of the interrogation rules since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But the field manual, delayed for months because of legal wrangling, debate over appropriate techniques and classification issues, repudiates three interrogation methods Rumsfeld had approved: dietary manipulation, environmental manipulation, and sleep adjustment.
The field manual governs the interrogation of all prisoners held by the military. It rejected more than a dozen interrogation techniques suggested by a Pentagon working group and military officials at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base that ranged from stripping prisoners, menacing them with dogs, and prolonged interrogation to sleep deprivation, prolonged "stress positions," physical assault and forced head shaving.
Several of those techniques had been used on prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, according to government memos and investigations.
Prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. military operated under standard field manual rules for interrogation that employed proven techniques that comported with the Geneva Conventions.
The simplest of the techniques is the most successful -- according to the field manual, in World War II 90 percent of intelligence garnered during interrogations came from asking direct questions. In the Vietnam War, that rose to 95 percent. The power of the direct question interrogation comes from the prisoner's gradual realization that he is not going anywhere until he tells what he knows, and at the same time develops a rapport with his inquisitor.
The adjustments to the old interrogation procedures came in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush administration officials decided the terrorist enemy embodied in al-Qaida warranted a new playbook with more latitude for interrogators to get physical and step up the intimidation and threats, all of which are banned by the Geneva Conventions.
To get around that ban, the White House opened a legal Pandora's Box: it decreed that prisoners captured in the war on terror were "unlawful enemy combatants" and therefore not privileged to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, as they were neither a party to them nor abided by them.
But just exempting enemy combatants from Geneva protections was not enough to get around a host of civilian and military laws which independently prohibit torture, abuse and coercion both inside the United States and overseas.
So the Bush administration had to find a place to interrogate prisoners that would be outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts -- to shield it from domestic prohibitions on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and allow coerced confessions to be used in prosecutions. At the same time it needed a location that would still be considered sovereign territory to avoid meeting the extraterritorial definition of torture. It believed it found such a place at Guantanamo, which is technically sovereign U.S. territory but is leased from the government of Cuba.
Determining itself free of the requirements of the U.S. Constitution at Guantanamo, in November 2001 the White House devised a special, separate military court system to prosecute the new class of prisoners.
A year later, military commanders at Guantanamo sought new latitudes of their own. Desperate to break down recalcitrant prisoners, they asked Rumsfeld to approve 18 harsh new interrogation techniques not permitted by the Geneva Conventions or the Army field manual. The list included waterboarding, threats of death or serious pain to prisoners or their families, sensory deprivation, forced nudity and the use of dogs to scare detainees into talking.
In December 2002, Rumsfeld granted most of the requests but denied permission to threaten death or injury, to expose prisoners to cold weather or water, and to waterboard, a technique that simulates the experience of nearly drowning.
All of these, plus forced nudity, sensory deprivation, and the use of dogs, are now expressly forbidden by the new Army field manual.
Within weeks of Rumsfeld's approval of the techniques, Navy and other officials raised alarms that interrogators were abusing prisoners with their new powers.
One prisoner, Mohamed Qatani -- the so-called 20th hijacker -- was interrogated 18 to 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 days, lead around on a dog leash, menaced with dogs, stripped naked and forced into sexual positions, blasted with loud music and heard his family threatened, according to a Pentagon report.
Rumsfeld rescinded his approval in January 2003, and convened a working group on detainee interrogations to make recommendations on what new techniques to use.
In April 2003, the working group issued a nearly 100-page report that detailed 35 possible interrogation techniques. It also suggested that interrogators could use the harsher techniques without fear of legal repercussions "because the U.S. Constitution did not protect individuals who are not U.S. citizens and who are outside the sovereign territory" of the United States. Guantanamo and its prisoners were believed to fit that bill.
Rumsfeld considered the 35 and approved 24 of the techniques. The original 17 traditional approaches made the list along with dietary manipulation, or replacing hot meals with meals-ready-to eat; making interrogation rooms uncomfortably hot or cold or introducing a foul smell; forcibly switching detainees' sleep cycles from night to day; allowing interrogators to impersonate officials from countries that practice torture to cause fear and insecurity; and isolating prisoners for up to 30 days.
He rejected the working group's more extreme suggestions -- hooding prisoners during interrogation, physically assaulting prisoners, threatening to transfer prisoners to countries that torture, prolonging interrogation to 20 hours at a stretch, prolonged standing, forced grooming and others.
Despite the ban, some of those abuses had already occurred at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and had migrated to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, according to 12 government investigations undertaken in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
In response, Congress last year passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibits torture and cruel and inhumane treatment of military prisoners.
The operation at Guantanamo was reined in further last spring when the Supreme Court's decided in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that most Geneva Convention protections should apply to prisoners taken in the war on terror. It also rejected the White House's military tribunal system.
President George W. Bush on Wednesday submitted legislation to Congress to codify the military tribunal process, demanding swift passage to allow prosecutions to go forward. Bush also asked Congress to grant U.S. personnel immunity from war crimes charges that may yet be lodged by detainees who allege their Geneva Convention rights have been violated.
