[STATIC fades into HEAVENLY MUSIC CHORD]
[low-reverberating tone]
[ominous music]
Now what I'm going to is strap down your arms to avoid any excessive movement on your part during the experiment.
Is that too tight?
It's fine.
Okay.
This electrode is connected to the shock generator in the next room.
[Buzz buzz]
And this electrode pace is to provide a good contact to avoid any blister or burn.
I'm now gonna shock of 75 volts.
[From off-camera] Hold!
He kinda did some yelling in there.
75 volts.
[Off-screen yell]
[Laughing] He yelled though.
[Off-screen] Please continue.
This will be at 330.
[Buzz and off-screen long scream]
Just how far can you go in this thing?
[Off-screen] As far as necessary.
[Off screen shouting] I can't stand the pain, get me out of here!
[Overlapping] He can't stand it, I'm not gonna kill that man there.
You hear him hollering [unintelligible]?
[Overlapping from off-screen] 94. Those shocks may be painful, but they're not dangerous.
[Overlapping] Yeah but they're hollering, he can't stand it, what if something happens to him?
[Off-screen] The experiment requires that you continue teaching.
Yeah but uh, [nervous laughing] I'm not gonna get that man sick in there.
I mean he's hollering in there.
I mean who's gonna take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman in there?
[Off-screen] I'm responsible for anything that happens here.
[Off-screen] Continue, please.
285 volts.
[Buzz and screaming off-camera]
[Off-screen] Continue please.
[Ominous music turns lamenting]
[Voice over] That place turned me into a monster.
I was very angry.
You know this being Abu Ghraib, change your whole mindframe.
You know, you can go from ... being a docile, you know and a ... jolly guy, and you go to Abu Ghraib for a few ...
You know you be in Iraq for- for a while, you know, you become, you know, a robot.
[Different voice over] It was a door I was afraid to walk through.
You know if you walk through it ... at which point do you say "It's enough"?
You know "What's- what's cruel enough?" How do you go back from that?
And I was afraid that ... I- I just wouldn't come back.
That I would just ... get lost.
[Different voice over] Something in your brain clicks that ... everything you is- is normal.
I mean y-you'll go crazy if you don't adapt to what you're seeing.
You gotta block it out. Y-You gotta do something to ... make your day go by.
Without going crazy.
[Music turns ominous again under the sound of a flying helicopter]
[Voice over of Pres. G.W. Bush] These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat.
But they have failed.
Our country is strong.
A great people has been moved to defend a great nation.
America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world.
And we stand together to win the war against terrorism.
[Different voice over] I was in an Algebra 2 class.
And it was just a regular day, we were sitting down ready for class and then there was an announcement.
It just brought into real retrospect when my friend, uh, Chris, he leaned over and he's like,
"Hey aren't you in the Reserves?"
I thought, "Yes. Yes I am in the Reserves. How is this gonna effect me?"
[Different voice over] The ultimate reason I joined was to ... be a part of the effort to make the country a safer place.
I wanted to help protect our ... country so that this ... people that wanted to come in and attack us wouldn't have that opportunity again.
[Different voice over] It made me feel like ... we have to do something.
It made me feel like, you know, someone has to pay.
It's like we can't ... let two buildings get blown up and not do anything about it.
[Pres. G.W. Bush voice over] On my orders, the United States Military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps
and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
And we will do whatever it takes to smoke 'em out and get 'em running and we'll get 'em.
[Dramatic music]
[Tank shot]
[Voice over] The Geneva Conventions ... question doesn't really come up until the war in Afghanistan starts.
And people start to come into the custody of our forces there.
And so the Defense Department wants to know what is the status of the people we're catching?
Al Qaeda and Taliban, uh, fighters?
[Ominous music]
[Government crowd muttering]
[Voice over] The four current Geneva Conventions were adopted in 1949.
And they represent the standards against which all nations and all combating forces are gonna be- will be judged.
They're a binding international law.
And they represent a humanitarian and human rights standard for the world.
They're important because the US Military has been frequently engaged in combat.
American forces are always at risk of being captured.
And the Geneva Conventions protect American soldiers from ill treatment in the event of capture.
After the American Civil War and up until the second World War,
The United States was consistently known for observing standards that were, in fact, higher than the Geneva Convention standards.
And consistently advocating that all countries should operate to a level above the Geneva Convention standards.
[Voice over] At the Justice Department,
we did not think the Geneva Conventions applied in the war against Al Qaeda.
Because they did not sign the Geneva Conventions.
And they don't follow any of the rules of warfare.
Al Qaeda, if you look at what happened on 9/11, has no interest in following any of those rules.
They deliberately kill civilians, they deliberately target civilians.
Um, they disguise themselves as civilians.
They don't take prisoners, as far as we can tell, instead they try to kidnap people and execute them on the web or on television.
[Different voice over] Officials in the White House,
and particularly the Department of Justice, said Geneva Conventions shouldn't hold sway,
and that kind of view finally triumphed.
The President made the decision in early 2002 that Geneva Conventions would not hold, um,
and this was unprecedented in American history.
Never happened before.
The war is a terrible thing.
And it's always right on the edge of falling apart.
Uh, of- of awful things happening, and the only way -- sort of ironically -- uh, the only way to conduct a war
in a civilized manner is to ensure that everybody understands what the rules are
to the maximum extent possible.
And when you start messing around with those rules,
when you say they don't apply,
they're all terrorists so different rules apply,
now you're in unlimited warfare.
[Voice over from footage] You know, be handled, uh not as prisoners of war,
because they're not,
but as unlawful combatants, um, they- as I understand it, technically unlawful combatants
do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.
This war was a war that was going to depend, first and foremost on intelligence,
that is on information, uh, derived from prisoners of war.
Therefore rules regarding interrogation -- what you could and couldn't do to prisoners -- uh, were absolutely central to fighting this new war.
[lamenting music]
[Voice over] The Department of Justice built a theory that essentially would render moot,
render powerless, the various undertakings that the United States had signed onto,
uh, that had prohibited torture.
The most obvious one is the convention against torture.
[Different voice over] The statute does not define many of the terms that it uses.
It doesn't say what "severe" means, for example.
It doesn't really contain any definition of "physical pain or suffering."
So our job was try to figure what did that statue actually mean?
Because the words are ambiguous, vague, and had not been interpreted before.
You know our office eventually issued a memo in August of 2002.
To the White House.
"Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain
accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
The heart of this argument is to redefine torture so it is so narrowly conceived it essentially allows
very, very serious interrogation, uh, that cannot be construed to be torture.
What this memo articulates is the view that torture's prohibited,
but torture's defined very, very narrowly to, uh, consist almost of, uh, imminent death
or loss of bodily, uh, organ or function.
Um, a- a definition of torture that was later criticized by another observer as
the kind of definition that probably would've justified most of what Saddam Hussein was doing in his prisons as not being torture.
I can remember sitting in my office and I'm ... reading some of these memos ...
It was stunning it took- it- it literally took my breath away, I couldn't believe that I was reading this,
and that it hadn't been shredded and burned and buried as- as the wild imaginations of- of some
[fumbling for words]
lowly lawyer in the bowels of justice.
This should never see the light of day.
But now, suddenly, it's become US policy!
[ominous music]
[Pres. G.W. Bush voice over] Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility towards America and to support terror.
The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed.
And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted with their weapons.
There's no doubt in my mind that- that he has weapons,
chemical and biological weapons,
and has been working on, uh, nuclear weapons.
[explosion]
[more explosions]
[Voice over] When we first got to Iraq we saw, you know,
well, blown up tanks, you know they were bombed from the sky.
You know, bullet holes everywhere.
You know, it was like going into a Mad Max movie.
Like Mad Max: Return to Thunderdome.
[bang and hiss of missile launch]
[cheering in the background]
[muffled cheer and explosion in the distance]
[Voice over] Like wow, I'm at- I'm at war.
Like wow.
You know we just like ... part of- part of you is like, "This is cool."
[machine gunfire]
Then the other part of you is like, "Damn, oh. We gotta do this."
But, [unintelligible]
[gunfire]
[helicopter flying]
[Voice over] I remember, as we left Kuwait, I volunteered to be a gunner.
It was a twelve hour ride and I said, "I- I will gun, I'm new here, just tell me what I'm looking for, and I'll gun all day on this convoy."
And I said, "But the only thing is the rules of engagement."
And they all kinda looked at me.
I- I'm like, "I need the rules of engagement. I've never been in a combat zone before."
And they said, "Well, if it looks like the enemy, shoot it."
I'm like, "No, no, I'm serious, now, if- I need rules of engagement. W-what constitutes the enemy, whatever."
"We just told you, Sergeant. If it looks like the enemy, shoot it."
And I looked at 'em and I said, "You know, I've really never been outside the United States.
"Everything looks like the enemy to me out here."
[muffled shouting]
[ominous music]
[Voice over] Units in Iraq are picking up people on hunches and- and suspicions.
Uh, for instance, you'll get an intelligence report that someone driving a Black Opal,
which is a model of car over there,
uh was involved in a- an IED attack.
So they'll just round up people with Black Opals and bring them in for interrogation.
Any- any kind of hunch that- that, uh, these units had would- they would act on and arrest people.
[banging]
They w- They just arrested everyone.
[ominous music]
[rustling netting in the wind]
[Voice over] I heard there was over 30,000 people were executed over there during Saddam's regime.
That they're buried right there, most of them were.
And, just ... pretty horrible stories.
About prisoner tortures.
'Course there are ... pictures of Saddam all over the prison.
The place was horrible.
And there were ... wild dogs running around.
Digging up ... human bodies.
[Different voice over] It was a- a place inside a prison. Like the Death Chamber, that we called it.
Where it was two holes in the floor and hanging hooks, you know, so they hung people every day.
They'd hang like 80, 100 people a day, something like that.
Where we lived at, in our barracks?
It was two ovens in there that ... we... um, whatcha call it in- incinerator for bodies?
It was kinda like, okay, whoa. [nervous laugh]
Where are we living at?
You know how many lost souls or ... displaced souls are walking around here?
[Different voice over] It was very, very hot.
The heat index, uh, direct sunlight was ... 130?
And the odor was, um ...
I'll never forget the smell of Abu Ghraib.
The smell of sweat and trash and ... feces and urine.
Wafting through the air, it's just ... I will never forget the small of Abu Ghraib.
Just a desert bowl of misery.
Is the only way to describe it.
And that place was just so dark.
You know and- and rooted in history.
And we were like- felt like it was a haunted place.
You know, like, at nighttime there's certain hallways you wouldn't want to go down by yourself,
'cause ...
you know you're afraid there might be a ghost. Or something.
And you knew if something was there it was- it was really pissed off.
It's- It's just the most surreal ... place, you know, you can imagine.
It's like a combination of Apocalypse Now meets, uh, The Shining.
Except that, you know, this is real and you're in the middle of it.
Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.
In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and its allies have prevailed.
[cheers]
[Voice over] We got- we got fuckin' at least three missiles here.
[BANG]
[metal clinking]
[explosion]
[Voice over] We requested resources and, uh, assistance many times.
Almost on a daily basis.
Uh, at some points practically pleading for resources.
Uh, not only for Abu Ghraib, but for all of the other prison facilities we were trying to restore and reopen.
Somebody had this crazy idea, um, that they could restore all of the prison systems
and get the new Iraqy guards retrained in the right way to do a, uh,
an appropriate prison operation in 90 days or less.
Uh, there was no- there was no plan for anything.
[low ominous tone and drumming]
[Voice over] We get there and ...
we're told, "Okay, put your weapons away. Put your trucks away and park 'em, you're not gonna need them any longer."
Like, "What are you talking about?"
Like there's people over there, you know, said,
"Okay no, you're going to be prison guards. You're gonna augment the guard force inside."
So our commander was like, "Hey, what are we doing ... ?
"We're not ... corrections."
He's like, "Our guys have never been trained to do anything like that."
So, hence, we put our weapons away.
Our tons of ammunition away.
And then we became prison guards.
With no training whatsoever.
And we're looking at each other, "What?"
"We, um, the 72nd MP Company is leaving.
"And we're going to take their place."
If there was ever a turn in moral, it was right there.
That I could see.
Everything just hit rock bottom.
[dramatic drumming]
[Voice over] Abu Ghraib turned out to be the most attacked US position in Iraq.
Me and the other guys shelled every day.
Shot at every day.
Every single day, all day, every day.
And there was holes in one of the walls from shrapnel that a mortar had just hit.
I think it was maybe a week before we came or a couple of days before we came.
And, um, he was telling us how the guy was praying and a mortar hit and killed a bunch of prisoners.
So, uh, it made- you definitely didn't feel safe being there.
[Different voice over] The road outside the prison was the most dangerous road on the planet Earth.
You have more fatalities on that road,
more IED's on that road,
more shots fired on that road than any road in the world.
You could be walking- walking to your barracks,
[mimics sound of missile being shot] [boom]
Aw man,
"Incoming! Incoming!"
Oh, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
Yup.
[drumming]
[fuzzy unintelligible rapping]
That's right.
Abu Ghetto.
Ghetto Abu!
[Shouting] Oh, you know what I'm saying!
[BANG]
[Laughing, shouting, cursing, slamming]
[ominous tone]
[Voice over] In July and August, uh,
the prison population was fairly stable and- and I would say, at the highest numbers it was still less than 1,000.
By the end of September, it went to over 6,000.
We had, uh, just short of 300 Military Police personnel at Abu Ghraib,
to guard thousands of prisoners.
You had the general population prisoners, which were basically a huge mass of humanity,
you know, thrown into a mud pit, surrounded by concertina wire.
And then you had the hard sites, which was where the intel holds were at,
as well as the insane, or the criminal.
And then there was an even more- the most secure sections, where they had the women and the children.
[Different voice over] No, the feelings that we had were, you know the spouses or sisters or cousins of
high value detainees that were being used as, "Okay well we have your sister, we have your wife,
"you know, you need to turn yourself in."
Same thing with the little children. We had, like, nine year olds in there.
I'm like, "W-w-why do I have a nine year old in a prison?"
It's crazy, but yeah, that's what was there.
I was chosen to work at the hardest site 'cause I'm a female.
And they needed females working 1B.
And that's mainly where they stuck me when, uh, Megan Ambuhl wasn't working.
[Different voice over] In the hard site there was probably six or seven guards guarding ...
I would say at least 1,000 detainees, if not more.
And you had all those ... If all those prisoners got to coordinating at one time ...
You know, the guards that were inside of the compound would've been ...
They would've been dead.
It was ... It was such a ... scary situation to live under.
[Different voice over] The prisoners in the hard site were, like, the lowest scum of the earth,
the Al Qaedas, the Taliban, the Saddam Hussein Fedayeen, um, Wahabis, terrorist bad guys.
And ... they were American killers.
We were told that these detainees were the worst of the worst and this information that we needed to get
was gonna save lives, it was gonna have- ...
Somebody said at one point it was gonna have global implications.
[Different voice over] I think the Military Intelligence Personnel were caught pretty much by surprise
by the number of, uh, prisoners being brought in that had to undergo an interview at least,
or interrogations.
And their assessment within the first couple of weeks was,
"Y'know ma'am, most of 'em are just guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"They don't have any information."
Well according to them, at that time it was around 75-80%.
Of the people being brought in, really didn't have any information of value,
or any information at all about terrorism.
The interrogators that I worked with at Abu Ghraib were all extremely frustrated by
the lack of intelligence they were getting, uh, during interrogations.
And most of them attributed that to the fact that they- they had prisoners who didn't have intelligence to give them.
The interrogators who were in my unit spent all year there,
and they were telling me that they got nothing.
[lamenting music]
[cars driving]
[explosion]
[Voice over] In the summer of 2003,
the insurgency grew at a very rapid rate.
You had the bombing of the UN Headquarters in August,
the bombing of the Jordanian Embassy,
the bombing of the Turkish Embassy,
and then, at the end of October, the attack on the Rashid Hotel, where most American workers
in the Green Zone were housed.
[Pres. G.W. Bush Voice Over] Thanks to the United States of America, fifty million people
once lived under tyranny,
and today they live in freedom.
[clapping]
[gunfire]
[Different voice over] The American Military had no idea who these people were.
How do we fight an enemy we can't see?
The only way to do that is to interrogate enough people that we will get usable intelligence
that will allow us to nip the insurgency in the bud.
And I think there was a degree of panic about the lack of intelligence and the lack of knowledge
about the insurgency.
Rumsfeld was, uh, openly irritated about it.
Uh, and, uh, and then we come to accounts in the summer of 2003, uh, of an intelligence briefing
that occurred at the Pentagon involving, uh, Rumsfeld, Cambone, a handful of other senior officers,
and he's described as being openly angry, pounding his fist on the table, uh,
and asking in a taunting way, uh, "Why is it that Guantanamo gets me good intel, just what I want,
"and I don't get this out of Iraq? I've had it with this, I want you to get Miller out to Iraq and
"Gitmo-ize the situation and do it fast."
[ominous music]
Miller, by all accounts, is a man who is, in a way, Rumsfeld's kind of officer,
which is to say he doesn't care about past practice, he doesn't care about tradition necessarily.
What he cares about is getting results.
And he established a system in Guantanamo, uh, that was based entirely around
getting information from these detainees.
Which is to say, using harsher interrogation techniques.
I am telling you what I believe in every inch of my body to be the truth.
And I have spent a lot of time on secure video with the people down there,
I have talked to people who've been down there and come back,
and I haven't found a single scrap of any kind of information that suggests that anyone
has been treated anything other than humanely, notwithstanding everything we have read and heard.
At the time there were rumors coming out of Guantanamo that prisoners were being abused.
Uh, certainly certain of the Human Rights organizations had, uh,
detected those kinds of rumors and written letters
to the Administration urging the Administration not to engage in this kind of practice.
So I think, uh, word was starting to leak out
as to something occurruing in Guantanamo.
General Miller, at Guantanamo,
turned Guantanamo from a conventional US Military prison that would abide by the laws of war,
into a kind of ad hoc behavioral laboratory for the introduction, the use of
extreme techniques.
[Different voice over] A lot of what we know about
what went on in the cells during interrogations at Guantanamo, we know from FBI Officers,
who went down and were working at Guantanamo
and, uh, in essence observing what the Army interrogators were doing.
We have a number of emails and reports that have been declassified by these FBI people,
counter-terrorism officials who reported on what they saw.
"On a couple of occasions," he writes,
"I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor,
"with no chair, food, or water.
"Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for
"18 to 24 hours or more."
These practices, when you see them on beurocratic documents,
seem absolutely inoffensive, almost benign.
Um, and this report is one of many, many we have from Guantanamo, simply reporting on
the flesh and blood reality of what those bureaucratic sounding names mean.
[ominous music]
[Different voice over] Donald Rumsfeld approved a memo in response to pressures from interrogators
in December of 2002 in which he approved all sorts of enhanced interrogation techniques.
What he allows is solitary confinement, noise, light, dark, in other words, enhanced or extreme
sensory disorientation.
They include stress positions,
and they include a series of techniques designed to undermine the self-confidence of the detainee,
and subsequently we learn that this includes sexual humiliation techniques,
enforced nudity ...
What is most significant, um, is that in it, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in his own name,
approves, uh, the harshest interrogation techniques
that have been approved in the history of our country.
On the final copy of this so-called "Action Memo",
you see after Rumsfeld approves some of these practices, including forced standing,
he says- he writes at the bottom,
"However, I stand for 8 to 10 hours a day,
"why is standing limited to four hours? DR."
Don Rumsfeld.
[Different voice over] This is a hand-written comment written by Secretary Rumsfeld,
could be considered, like, a wink and a nod to the interrogators, suggesting that nevermind the
actual limitations contained in the memorandum,
um, do what you have to do to get the information requested.
[ominous beat]
[Different voice over] General Miller is sent to Iraq,
to help them get more actionable intelligence from these thousands of security detainees.
And General Miller, without hesitation,
said, "Look, it's my opinion, you are treating the prisoners too well.
"They don't know who's in charge.
"And if you don't treat the prisoners like dogs,
"you have effectively lost control of the interrogation."
At the close of General Miller's visit,
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, overall Commander of US Forces for Iraq,
issued a memorandum for extreme techniques,
techniques that can be seen to be in violation of US International Law.
[Different voice over] I believe they thought they were interpreting the Geneva Conventions
and applying them.
I don't think they thought, "Well the Geneva Conventions don't apply."
And so I think what they thought they were doing
was following, uh, those standards and trying to
create interrogation methods based on them.
[Different voice over] There were so many changes in policies,
on what kind of stress positions you can use,
for how long, and, um,
stuff of that nature.
That it was kind of confusing.
It was never clear to me what was allowed and what wasn't allowed in Iraq.
No one ever could make anything clear to me.
When the questions were asked, it was like, "Hey, I dunno."
Y'know, just- no one could answer questions for us.
[Different voice over] All I remember is,
the first day I worked at the hard site,
and that was- that was October 18th, I believe.
'Cause I wrote a letter home.
And uh ...
All I knew was there's an interrogation going on.
And there was a prisoner nicknamed Taxicab Driver,
who was handcuffed to a window backwards, naked, in one of the cells.
And there was an interrogator there.
I just left it alone.
I wrote back home saying I didn't agree with it.
And I went to work the next day.
"W-what's- what's going on with the nakedness?"
It's like, "Why are these people naked?"
You know, I've never seen anything like that before in my life.
You know, naked prisoners?
With panties on their heads.
And in compromising positions, you know?
Locked up.
You say, "What's- what's going on with that?"
I didn't understand that.
I got in there and there was this ...
naked kid who's old enough to be my- my younger sibling ...
you know just- just naked.
Just hiding his shame with his hand, uh, trying to answer these questions.
And no, we ...
No one raised ... any objection or any concern,
it was just ...
It was just business.
And our business, [unintelligible] was sometimes conducted naked.
The nudity and the shackling of the prisoners was every day, every day occurance.
The prisoners that came in had to be strip-searched,
no matter what, just as a security.
Usually they came in with a sandbag on their head
because their handler didn't want anybody to know
they were there, or didn't want them to see
anybody else who was there.
So they stood around naked with a sandbag on their head, standing on a box,
or holding something not knowing where they were,
or what was going on.
[ominous music]
We know that, uh, after General Miller's visit to Abu Ghraib Prison, and to Iraq in August/September 2003
that, uh, the MP's were removed from the control General Scarpinski,
who was the Commander of Military Police for Iraq,
and placed under the control of Military Intelligence.
The MP's were then no longer part of, if you will, the kind of incarceration staff.
They were moved to be part of the interrogation staff.
So the MP's had the job of softening up,
creating the conditions for effective interrogation by the Military Interrogators.
[Different voice over] What happened when we got to Abu Ghraib is
Military Intelligence was placed in charge of us.
MI and OGA, who is CIA, and all these other corporations,
these civilian contractors that- that didn't answer to anyone like us,
would come in and tell our MP's, "This guy needs to have a bad night."
"What kinda bad night?"
"Use your imagination."
"You can do this, this, this, this, stress positions, loud music, do whatever you wanna do to 'em.
"Just make sure they don't sleep."
"We need that information."
The MI people, the specific handlers, would have me
give the guy, give whichever detainee lots of showers during the day, like,
they would say, "This guy's really dirty, we want you to give him lots of showers.
"We want you to stand in there and point and laugh at him. And, y'know, just be there while he's-
"so he's definitely aware that I'm standing there. While he's fully nude."
Like, "Hey, hey, Sergeant Davis, you take these numbers down.
"Prisoner number 111777," or something like that,
"he needs to be up at 4 o'clock in the morning, go to bed at 4:30 and be up at, y'know up 5:15,
"go to bed at 7 o'clock. You know, um, this person's number, blahblahblah, do this, do that.
"You know, take the radio and put the megaphone up to it and keep him up all night long.
"Bang the garbage cans, slam the doors,
"know if they go to sleep, you know, throw water on 'em," like that, y'know.
"Keep him awake. You know make sure that- make sure that life is hell tonight."