There’s been plenty of news and journalistic investigation on the torture enablers George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, David Addington, and a host of other Bush Administration figures. The CIA, too, has come in for its share of investigation and scrutiny. But while the Senate Armed Services Committee conducted a months-long investigation and published last April a 200+ page report on Department of Defense abuse of prisoners, including torture, very little public scrutiny of culpable military officials has occurred.
The spotlight has mainly fallen on the activities of former SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who together spearheaded the implementation of a prisoner "exploitation plan" that became known later as "enhanced interrogation techniques," and included a number of torture techniques, including isolation, sleep deprivation, stress positions, sensory deprivation and overload, forced nudity, waterboarding, and much more.
Recently, there was a spike of interest in the command responsibility Obama nominee for top military commander, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, might hold for the use of torture by Special Operations forces under his command in Iraq. But at the Senate Armed Services hearing for his nomination the other day, according to Spencer Ackerman, only Senator Levin even queried him on the subject, and no senator appeared opposed to his nomination.
But I want to look at the actions of two generals mentioned in the SASC report, "Inquiry on the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody." Both of them are singled out for actions related to the approval of torture under their commands. Both had command responsibility for these actions, and one of them, Air Force Special Operations Brigadier General Lyle Koenig, was specifically singled out for obloquy (although not by name). The other senior officer, Brigadier General Thomas Moore, was the Director of Operations and Plans (J3) for Joint Forces Command (JFCOM).
Both officers dropped out of sight after 2004, or, that is, an extensive web search on their activities turned up practically nothing. It was on September 24, 2004 that JFCOM finally withdrew official approval for use of SERE-like interrogation techniques, at least by SERE personnel (or rather, through SERE’s parent agency, Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, or JPRA). Earlier, BG Koenig and BG Moore had played crucial roles in the implementation of SERE torture, giving approval to the use of SERE techniques in interrogations.
The Role of Brigadier General Moore in the Origins of the SERE Torture Program
Sometime in late 2001, former SERE psychologist and contractor wannabe, James Mitchell, had received a copy of a purported Al Qaeda manual, which included instructions on how to withstand interrogation. According to an anonymous source who claims some knowledge of the individuals involved, and who has been credible on other matters pertaining to JPRA, Mitchell obtained the document from his superiors inside JPRA’s Personnel Recovery Academy (PRA). The manual initially surfaced in Great Britain, and may have made its way to JPRA via the CIA.
According to the SASC report, when SERE psychologist Bruce Jessen sent his draft interrogation plan, packaged as a "Al Qaeda Resistance Contingency Training," to his superior, Colonel John "Randy" Moulton in February 2002, Moulton passed it on up the chain of command at JFCOM for approval and dissemination. Jessen was then selling PRA instructors as executing an "’exploitation oriented’ approach. . . better than anyone." Moulton was enthusiastic. When, later, in August 2002, JPRA tops held a meeting to discuss "future JPRA support to [deleted word] actions to obtain actionable intelligence from Detained Unlawful Combatants," PRA was copied in on the email discussion.
Meanwhile, BG Moore was finessing the transfer of JPRA/SERE "expertise" to SOUTHCOM, the military command responsible for the new prison at Guanatanamo. Moore told the Operations Chief at SOUTHCOM that "JPRA was ‘prepared to support [SOUTHCOM] in any potential collaboration.’" Presumably, it was Moore who had gotten Jessen’s draft plan from Moulton. In any case, by even as early as mid-February 2002, Jessen’s paper and Moulton’s favorable recommendations were making the rounds from Moore’s JFCOM to Joint Staff and various Combatant Commands, "including those with responsibility for Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay." Things were moving fast.
(For those who like timelines, the spread of SERE’s torture program to various sectors of the military preceded the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, and was roughly contemporaneous with the Cheney-ordered waterboarding of Ibn Sheikh al-Libi. For those prone to speculate, the appearance of the Al Qaeda Resistance Manual in the hands of James Mitchell and the capture of al-Libi in mid-December 2001 seems awfully coincidental.)
Sometime in February 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency asked JFCOM if they could get a "crash course" on interrogation for the next team headed out to SOUTHCOM (Guantanamo). The request went to BG Moore, who approved it. Jessen and another JPRA instructor were tasked with the seminar.
The presentation on detainee "exploitation" described phases of exploitation and included instruction on initial capture and handling, conducting interrogations, and long term exploitation… The exploitation presentation also included slides on "isolation and degradation," "sensory deprivation," "physiological pressures," and "psychological pressures… At SERE school, each of these terms has special meaning.
Another four months passed, and in July 2002, DoD’s General Counsel office approached JPRA for information on SERE techniques, and in particular, waterboarding. Marcy Wheeler has done a superlative job in dissecting that particular episode, showing how this request was intricately tied up in the construction of the second Bybee memo,which would supposedly legitimate the "enhanced interrogation" torture techniques built out of the reverse-engineered SERE courses, and other assorted torture programs, such as the CIA’s old KUBARK interrogation protocol. Before JPRA Chief of Staff, Lt. Col. Daniel Baumgartner, felt comfortable giving General Counsel Jim Haynes the information he requested, he first asked permission from Col. Moulton and Brigadier General Moore. Permission was granted. JFCOM had blessed the attempt by DoD to assist the Office of Legal Counsel attorneys in their illegitimate attempt to legally baptize the torture program.
A Special Operations General Submarines Pro-Geneva Intervention
BG Moore left his position as Director of Plans for JFCOM in August 2003, but not before he played a small but significant role in an event that also introduces us to our other general. That summer, the commander of a Special Mission Unit (SMU) Task Force in Iraq called up Col. Moulton at JPRA and asked for assistance on interrogations. The SMU was actually a Special Operations unit, famously known as Task Force 121, though it goes by other names as well (Task Force 6-26). A 2006 New York Times article describes the horrors of this TF’s torture interrogations in their "Black Room" at Camp Nama.
Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.
The commander at Camp Nama and of TF 121 was Brigadier General Lyle Koenig. His name is never mentioned in the SASC report, but Senator Levin managed to get Col. Moulton to reveal the name during testimony before the SASC on September 25, 2008. Because of the classified nature of much of Special Operations activity, the anonymity, and therefore, the freedom from accountability or notoriety of these individuals is usually guaranteed. But not today, not here. (Koenig likely reported to his superior, Lt. Gen. McChrystal.)
On August 27, the request for JPRA/SERE support for Task Force 121 went to JFCOM’s Operations Directorate (J3), whose director was BG Moore. Once again, the request was granted, and within a matter of days, JPRA sent off a team of two instructors and one JPRA contractor to the Black Room prison at Camp Nama. Interestingly, the contractor, Lenny Miller, was requested by name by the Special Operations team. It seems likely someone in TF 121 knew him personally, and Miller was possibly ex-SO.
When the JPRA team got there, dissention arose when an experienced interrogator and reserve officer, Lt. Col. Steven Kleinman, saw what was going on and tried to shut down the torture interrogations. This is a story I’ve told before. Suffice it to say that Kleinman was met with hostility by Special Forces personnel on site, and near-mutiny by his JPRA associates, who participated in abusive interrogations (torture sessions) even though Kleinman had forbid them to do so. Kleinman got on the phone with superiors back at JPRA (Col. Moulton), and with the commander at Nama (or whatever Special Forces site it was actually at — it’s just assumed it was Nama), BG Koenig.
According to Kleinman’s testimony, Koenig heard Kleinman’s assertions that the techniques being used violated the Geneva Conventions, and this, apparently, on more than one occasion. But somehow, nothing was ever done about it. The torture continued, and a manual of SERE-like techniques was written up for TF 121 use, a project in which Kleinman refused to participate (although he did recommend another JPRA associate for the job). Kleinman told the Senate Armed Services Committee:
And when I went back to the task force commander with concerns—but, I’ll tell you, Mr. Chairman, there was—it falls into a void. I would brief the task force commander very clearly, and he very clearly agreed with my assessment of it, but there was no orders ever issued—when I’d go over to the interrogation center, they never got—their senior interrogator, not—never got any guidance about that—
When the SASC got around to issuing its executive summary on its investigation, they wrote (emphasis added):
JPRA Commander Colonel Randy Moulton’s authorization of SERE instructors, who had no experience in detainee interrogations, to actively participate in Task Force interrogations using SERE resistance training techniques was a serious failure in judgment. The Special Mission Unit Task Force commander’s failure to order that SERE resistance training techniques not be used in detainee interrogations was a serious failure in leadership that led to the abuse of detainees in Task Force custody. Iraq is a Geneva Convention theater and techniques used in SERE school are inconsistent with the obligations of U.S. personnel under the Geneva Conventions…. Combatant Command requests for JPRA "offensive" interrogation support and U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) authorization of that support led to JPRA operating outside the agency’s charter and beyond its expertise.
The Aftermath
In the end, the Colonel takes the heat (and rightly so), but those higher up the chain of command are protected by anonymity and wag-of-the-finger censure. On a more suspicious note, as I mentioned before, both Moore and Koenig drop off the map after 2004. After an assiduous search, I discovered that Moore assumed command of the 116th Air Control Wing in March 2007.
Koenig, on the other hand, disappears from our story entirely. Unlike Thomas Moore, Koenig is Special Ops, so he could be on a classified mission somewhere. One website, which I won’t link to because of unconfirmed salacious material, claims he retired after a sex scandal, and that the Air Force has scrubbed his story from its historical files.
Whatever fortune pursued these two, I present them here as exemplary examples of how the military tops have gotten off scot-free over the torture scandal. Their names unknown. No cameras chasing them down, or interviews showing up on YouTube. The Pentagon is like a giant club, and if you have a high-status membership, it appears that you are immune from even the worst crimes, and the mainstream press has shown a tremendous aversion to doing much to track this aspect of the story down. Even Congress, mandated with oversight, and hamstrung by Executive Branch obstructionism, when it has managed to reveal part of the truth, manages to sweep the accountability of senior Pentagon officials under the rug of benign fulmination.
The entire secret world of military and intelligence operations, especially special forces operations, should be open to complete societal re-examination. It was precisely out of such a secretive world, in combination with a shadowy bizarro world of complementary contracting companies, that the EIT/SERE/torture program arose. It may have been ordered forth by Cheney and Bush, but the soldiers who stood ready to implement those commands continue on in their posts — dissembling, unrepentant, unknown– ready for the next go-round.
Related posts:
- Expanding the Investigation into SERE Torture
- FDL Exclusive: SERE Psychologists Still Used in Special Ops Interrogations and Detention
- Experiment in Terror: The Psychological Evaluation of Abu Zubaydah and Its Role in Designing Torture
- Smoking Gun on CIA Torture Conspiracy? Human Experimentation Central to EIT Program
- Roger Aldrich, the Al Qaeda Manual, and the Origins of Mitchell-Jessen
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Jeff, this is a terrific post.
Thank you.
Chilling in its detail … thank you Sir !
Excellent post.
But I think it is premature to think that anyone is skirting accountability yet. The more that folks think they are skirting accountability the more careless they become with what they admit. And the more frequently war stories come up that provide details of who was doing what.
As time goes on there is becoming less and less need for a truth commission; indeed, its only purpose now, and why Rick Sanchez advocates for it, would be to grant immunity.
Your post adds to the record of things to investigate. Don’t think that investigators don’t know how to Google.
Just for context (and admitting that this particular attempt by Republican flacks has seemingly drifted from view, I presume because it is so preposterous), a few talking heads tried to suggest that SERE methods could not be torture because that would mean the SERE trainers were guilty of torture. I guess they will try anything to undermine themselves.
Whoops.
whoa .. that’s a lot of good work …
How likely is it that we are going to get anywhere close to the truth or get accountability when we have Senators like Graham and Lieberman pushing bills to cover it all up
http://www.salon.com/opinion/g…..index.html
like The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009.
I don’t think it is the photos that they are protecting. I think it is the people you describe in your diary.
wow. this is an awesome post jeff. thank you for this. ya know there has to be more than these two future felons out there
Thanks Jeff for adding so much valuable information on this critical issue!
Thanks to all who passed on the kind words.
As for the Lieberman-Graham bill, it’s an abomination. But I don’t know if the Senate voted for it with such a large margin because they knew it wouldn’t pass in the House, or what.
The appetite to keep the lid on is one way to think of the theme of my post today. After all the good work the SASC did identifying many of the whos and whats of the SERE torture program, in the end, they flinched from actually identifying those at the top who criminally assisted or sponsored these crimes (or at least, that’s the way it seems in the redacted version we have available).
As for the photos, it seems possible that some of them might come from Special Forces atrocities. Certainly, there’s practically a news black-out on the actions of Special Forces, who when they are allowed, must always be in heroic terms. That was part of the issue behind the Tillman scandal.
Anyway, I suspect this posting seemed downbeat in the light of Obama’s big speech today.
The BG Moore is most likely retired Major General Thomas L. Moore Jr., USMC, whose official biography shows him assigned as JFCOM/J-3/4 from July, 2001 to August, 2003 just prior to his promotion to Major General.
The commander of the 116th Air Control Wing is an Air National Guard (USAF) Brigadier General Thomas R. Moore whose official biography shows he was promoted to Brigadier General in March, 2007, long after the time frame in question. His biography does not list any assignment to Joint Forces Command.
USAF Brig Gen Koenig retired as a Colonel several years ago for reasons unrelated to any operations.
Most of our police and firefighters and security guards come from ex-military. In 20 years, will we be facing this in our hometowns?
Forget the Gitmo detainees – I don’t want THESE people in my police department, tazing my grandma!
Thanks for the new info, Jeff.
The specialness of special forces is the core problem. The love affair between politicians and SpecOps that began with Reagan is rotting the services. Almost by definition, special forces operate outside the normal chain of command and thus outside the historically developed system of checks and balances that keeps western armies under a semblance of control when under extreme pressure. Special forces doctrine attacks the foundation of military morale and discipline: the knowledge that a lawful order will be obeyed and that the person giving the order will bear the full responsibility for its consequences, not the the one who obeys. Let that break that down by confusing provenance of lawful orders and hiding responsibility for issuing them, and you have a rabble rather than an army.
Traditionally, military organizations have been suspicious of special forces and have sought to eliminate or severely restrict their scope once the immediate wartime need that gave rise to them had passed. Witness America’s first special unit, the Rangers. The Rangers were formed early in WW2 as the counterpart of Britain’s Commandos. They were a small-unit raiding and ireegular warfare force. But regular officers viewed the whole special forces premise as a threat to good discipline. In the post-war years, the Army quickly transformed them into a much more conventional elite airborne force, much as Britain did when it returned the Commandos to the traditional duties of the Royal Marines. When Eisenhower wanted his own commandos for work with the CIA, he had to reinvent them in the form of the Green Berets.
Special forces created hostility in the traditional officer corps for the same reasons that they appealed to politicians like Eisenhower: they give the executive branch the illusion of eating its cake–fighting wars–and having it too–in the form of minimal casualties, low costs, little or no bad publicity, little or no accountability, and little or no legislative oversight. Honest officers know that the negatives of war cannot be eliminated–there are no violent shortcuts through complex geopolitical realities. The unglamorous and politically unpalatable parts of war-fighting, from logistics and drafts to slaughter, chaos, and madness are what war is about. Military organization and discipline are about holding some form of civilized behavior together under horrible circumstances while achieving some sort of realistic objective. Since the consequences of mistakes are severe and the likelihood of making them is high in wartime, the chain of command is designed so that no one has deniability. Real soldiers want to know what the objective is and what they are supposed to do. And when the objective is wrong or the orders lead to disaster, they want to see a career ruined, a court martial, or an election lost.
The tradtional marginalization of special forces started to change during Vietnam and vanished completely in the Reagan MisAdministration. John Kennedy wanted to draw the line against China in Vietnam, but, given his own war service, he was unwilling to accept the kind of casualties that a Korean War-style intervention would involve. Traditionalist, WW2-era generals resisted however, and while they held sway, special-operations doctrine did could not get more than a foothold in policy. Lyndon Johnson followed military advice and relied on massive intervention by conventional forces.
But the next generation of general officers were far more politicized than their predecessors, less professional, and more careerist. They were anxious to provide politicians that could help their careers with whatever was wanted. Special units proliferated as each service strove to outdo the others in what it could offer the politicians. A succession of disastrously incompetent Republican administrations siezed on them and used them in a vast number of poorly hidden “secret” wars around the globe. As so often in American politics (witness the banking scandals), bad outcomes and secrecy bred more of the same. Special forces grew in stature and emerged as a separate command, a virtual separate branch of service that is now seen as the keystone of defense and foreign policy. What’s more, they have to be–now that the little secret wars have, inevitably, blossomed into big ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, the wastage of trained troops in regular units has become so high that rebuilding regular units in the near term is probably impossible.
Those of us outside the DC beltway have seen the results of deregulation in the financial industry. We are now seeing the results of deregulation in war-fighting: Abu Ghraib and the rest. To save our military, we have to end the specialness, stop exempting soldiers from the rules, disband the special forces and place their members under normal military discipline. We have to assign blame at the top, where it belongs, end careers, ruin reputations, and then start over.
A fascinating comment and summary of some of the history of Special Forces, and how overreliance on this kind of military organization has distorted the normal modes of military command and accountability. I thank you.
You may be interesting in the following from the statement Kleinman gave to the SASC (emphasis added):
I also wish to direct readers to an article by Marcy Wheeler not very long ago that covered the SMU/Kleinman episode, and in some greater detail, but with a different emphasis, than this article: see A Bush EO on Torture?
The question of who authorized the torture is still not completely known. Did SMU Commander Koenig take it upon himself, or did McChrystal give the okay. Or, as MW speculates, was there a Bush Executive Order giving such authorization, which the generals were aware of?
Answering my own comment here: as for who gave the okay for torture at the SMU, I don’t remember what the SASC report says, but the Kleinman/Moulton testimony makes it clear that Moulton went to JFCOM (where Brigadier Thomas Moore was Director of Operations and Plans), and they said to vet it through legal office at Central Command (CENTCOM) or the local task force JAG. I think Moulton is fibbing about the CENTCOM business, in any case, Kleinman went to the TF JAG, who agreed with him. Then he went to the TF Commander (Koenig), who also agreed. And then there was no further follow-up, as this routine went on at least a couple of times.
Bottom line, Joint Forces Command is the highest level of military authority we currently have on record as giving authority (although it was supposedly to be vetted first through CENTCOM legal). What this all means is that no one was supposed to be on the record as giving approval. It was all to happen off the books. This had to be designed. Hence, I don’t think there was an EO, at this point, or why the need for deniability and CYA. This was run as a kind of black op, and any traceability was designed to lead the investigator into a blind alley.
Your close-reading of the paper trail is fascinating. Your conclusions are almost certainly correct:
“The question of who authorized the torture is still not completely known … What this all means is that no one was supposed to be on the record as giving approval. It was all to happen off the books. This had to be designed. Hence, I don’t think there was an EO, at this point, or why the need for deniability and CYA.”
But “who authorized the torture” is not really the relevant question, at least not from the military command-authority point of view. The question is “who SHOULD have authorized the torture before it could happen?” To put it another way, “who was derelict in his or her duties?”
The traditional service chain of command is designed to make deniability impossible. Orders have to be traceable. You ahve to be ab le to follow them up the chain of command. If they aren’t traceable, if the chain just stops at some point, this fact is in itself evidence. The officer that should given an order or approved an action and did not is culpable. The officer that did not know what his subordinates were doing is doubly culpable. There just isn’t any way out.
The missing Presidential finding is, I suspect, an instance of the above. I suspect that you are right and there is no finding–or if there is, it was concocted recently. But I expect it is only the tip of iceberg. Start checking equipment requisitions, travel authorizations, TDYs, and all the other things that have to be approved and documented in service life, and clear patterns of responsibility will emerge. The Tagouba report on Abu Ghraib started down this path. No doubt consientious officers also wrote scads of memos-to-file documenting what they were told to do and by whom.
If the President and Congress want to do it, this can all be unravelled. But, for that matter, if they wanted to, they have enough to act on now. All currently serving flag officers who have in any way touched Iraq or Afghanistan could–and I think should–be forced into retirement just for what they claim to NOT know.