The Pentagon has concluded its official inquiry into the scandalous abuses at Abu Ghraib: Human-rights violations were the work of a few untrained and undersupervised soldiers, and confusing orders came from superior officers on conducting interrogations. With better leadership and mission preparation, according to the Defense Department, such atrocities will be avoided in the future.
But the Abu Ghraib scandal is part of a long pattern of flagrant disregard for the value of human rights in U.S. foreign policy. The historical record recalls multiple examples of U.S. forces engaging in atrocities, as well as advocating and condoning human-rights crimes committed by allies with American support. From Indochina to Latin America to the Middle East, U.S. officials have repeatedly given a green light to regimes renowned for their “dirty wars.” The documents excerpted below, drawn from collections at the National Security Archive, are but a brief sampling of the declassified paper trail leading up to, and through, the gates of Iraqi prisons where the United States is now engaged in its own version of a dirty war in the name of counterterrorism.
Guatemala, 1968
In 1968, a lone U.S. diplomat named Viron Vaky raised a moral objection to the conduct of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Central America. After witnessing the wanton atrocities of the U.S.-trained and supplied Guatemalan military, Vaky filed a report arguing that the ongoing human-rights abuses were injurious to Guatemalan society, created an image problem for the United States, and had “a corrosive effect on our own judgments and conceptual values.” His March 29, 1968, memorandum, classified “Secret,” is titled “Guatemala and Counter-Terror.”
Vietnam, 1969
The same month that Vaky wrote about Guatemala, U.S. military forces in Vietnam carried out a search and destroy mission in the village of My Lai in Vietnam. Three-hundred defenseless women, children, and elderly men were executed -- shot or bayoneted. The Pentagon kept the massacre a secret until reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story in November 1969, and photographs were published in The Cleveland Plain-Dealer. At that point, President Richard Nixon ordered his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to call Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and discuss a strategy to control the scandal. Their discussion, which resonates today during the Abu Ghraib scandal, was recorded in a classified memorandum of a conversation by an assistant to Kissinger on November 21, 1969.
Chile, 1976
In the early 1970s, the United States supported the advent of violent military regimes in the Southern Cone. In September 1973, Chilean General Augusto Pinochet took power in a bloody coup; his regime immediately became notorious for human-rights atrocities and was condemned around the world, including in the United States. Despite protests from other State Department officials that “in the minds of the world at large, we are closely associated with the junta, ergo with fascists and torturers,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met privately with Pinochet in Santiago, Chile, during an Organization of American States (OAS) meeting in June 1976. A transcript of their conversation, originally classified “Secret/No Distribution,” reveals that Kissinger commiserated with Pinochet about the pressure that Congress was bringing against Chile for human-rights violations. (This document can be found in The Pinochet File.)
In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here. I think that the previous government was heading toward communism. We wish your government well. … I want to see our relations and our friendship improve. I encouraged the OAS to have its General Assembly here. I knew it would add prestige to Chile. I came for that reason. We have suggestions. We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing [Salvador] Allende.
Honduras, 1983
In the early 1980s, the CIA drafted and distributed an interrogation instruction book titled Human Resource Exploitation Manual -- 1983. The secret manual specified “coercive questioning” and the use of both psychological and physical interrogation techniques. It was used throughout Latin America by CIA and Green Beret military trainers until 1988, when Congress learned that it advocated abuses of detainees. After Congress began investigating atrocities by Honduran forces, the CIA hand-edited the manual to alter the offending passages. The original text, for example, stated that “we will be discussing two types of techniques, coercive and non-coercive. While we do not stress coercive techniques, we do want to make you aware of them.” The later, hand-edited version read: “while we deplore the use of coercive techniques, we do want to make you aware of them so that you may avoid them.”
Guatemala, 1994
The Reagan administration maintained particularly close relations with the brutal military regimes in Central America -- Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras -- where U.S. personnel actively advised, trained, and equipped counterinsurgency forces. In Guatemala, the CIA collaborated with the Directorate of Intelligence (D-2), putting key officers on the payroll -- a liaison that continued into the 1990s. A major scandal ensued after one such officer, Colonel Julio Alpirez, was identified as responsible for the death by torture of an American innkeeper and for overseeing the torture and disappearance of a guerrilla leader married to an American lawyer in 1995. The scandal forced the CIA to conduct a “scrub” of nonessential assets known to be involved in human-rights abuses. In April 1994, the Defense Intelligence Agency filed a comprehensive cable, classified “Secret/No Foreign Distribution/Warning Notice: Intelligence Sources and Methods Involved,” on human-rights atrocities committed by the D-2 at the height of the U.S.-supported counterinsurgency campaign between 1984 and 1986.
Guantanamo Bay, 2002
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the launch of the war on terrorism, the U.S. Army sought legal cover for expanding “counter-resistance techniques” of interrogation to be used on recalcitrant prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In an October 11, 2002, “Legal Brief on Proposed Counter-Resistance Strategies,” classified “Secret/No Foreign Disclosure,” the staff judge advocate ruled that techniques including sensory deprivation, hooding, stress positions such as forced standing, and threats of deadly violence were legal.
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Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave final approval for stepped-up interrogation techniques, but advised lengthening the stress-position time. “I stand for 8-10 hours a day,” he wrote in the margin. “Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”
Iraq, 2004
In mid-2003, the military commander at Guantanamo Bay, General Geoffrey Miller, traveled to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and recommended using the enhanced interrogation techniques on prisoners there. Systemic abuses began in the fall. A comprehensive investigation by Major General Antonio Taguba, classified “Secret," and dated in February 2004, provided the following conclusions:
Peter Kornbluh is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive and the author of THE PINOCHET FILE: A DECLASSIFIED DOSSIER ON ATROCITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY, published this month in paperback.
