Military manual bans torture of prisoners

Good-cop/bad-cop allowed
Sixteen of the manual’s 19 interrogation techniques were covered in the old manual and three new ones were added on the basis of lessons from the counter-terror war, Kimmons said.

The additions are that interrogators may use the good-cop/bad-cop tact with prisoners, they may portray themselves as someone other than an American interrogator, and they may use “separation,” basically keeping prisoners apart from each other so enemy combatants can’t coordinate their answers with each other.

The last will be used only on unlawful combatants, not POWS, only as an exception and only with permission of a high-level commander, Kimmons said.

The Pentagon also on Wednesday released a new policy directive on detention operations that says the handling of prisoners must — at a minimum — abide by the standards of the Geneva Conventions and lays out the responsibilities of senior civilian and military officials who oversee detention operations.

“The revisions ... took time,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Cully Stimson said at the briefing. “It took time because it was important to get it right, and we did get it right.”

Abu Ghraib led to changes
He said the directive pulls together policy changes recommended in a dozen investigations done after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. “By publishing this document and the Army Field Manual, we will have addressed over 95 percent of the recommendations from those 12 major investigations since Abu Ghraib,” Stimson said.

Amnesty International USA’s director, Larry Cox, said he was “pleased to see a direct repudiation of tactics previously approved for use against detainees such as hooding, the use of dogs,” as well as the acknowledgment that the Geneva Conventions apply.

Among members of Congress briefed on the manual Wednesday, Democrats praised it as a step in the right direction and potentially helpful in preventing future prisoner abuse.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said he was concerned that, because the techniques are unclassified, information from the manuals could be used by terrorists to resist interrogations.

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