Admiral's report, document differ on detainee plans

WASHINGTON -- A Pentagon official told Congress yesterday that his investigation into detention operations found no evidence of written agreements between the military and the Central Intelligence Agency about ''ghost detainees" who were hidden from the Red Cross. But a military document released separately yesterday refers to the existence of such an agreement.

The apparent contradiction between the findings of Navy Vice Admiral Albert Church and the military document, one in a trove made public through a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union, underscored complaints by Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee that the admiral's investigation was not sufficiently thorough.

''Regrettably, Admiral Church's report falls short of the mark," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. ''Although it provides some useful information, it is notable more for what is absent than what it contains."

The Pentagon has touted Church's 368-page report, most of which remains classified, as the most comprehensive in a series of investigations launched after the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became public last spring.

The investigation concludes there was no official policy, ''written or otherwise," permitting interrogators to abuse detainees in Cuba, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Instead, Church attributed isolated instances of abuse to wartime stress and insufficient oversight.

An examination of 70 substantiated cases found that ''no approved interrogation techniques caused these criminal abuses," Church wrote. But Democrats on the committee were skeptical, and reiterated their calls for an outside investigation with full subpoena powers and a mandate to examine the actions of individual high-ranking officials.

''The Defense Department is not able to assess accountability at senior levels, particularly when investigators are in the chain of command of the officials whose policies and actions they are investigating," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and the committee's ranking member.

Much of the Church report apparently documents the evolution of official interrogation policy in 2002 and 2003. During the hearing yesterday, Kennedy focused on the role of the Defense Department's general counsel, William Haynes, President Bush's nominee for a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Questioned by Kennedy, Church said Haynes decided that the Pentagon would use a controversial Justice Department standard of law on torture, to which some members of a Pentagon detainee policy working group objected. The Bush administration repudiated that memo last year.

But Senator Jim Talent, Republican of Missouri, said Pentagon policy makers and interrogators in the field had the right priority: getting information that would prevent future attacks. ''If our guys want to poke somebody in the chest to get the name of a bomb maker so they can save the lives of Americans, I'm for it," Talent said. ''I don't need an investigation to tell me that there was no comprehensive or systematic use of inhumane tactics by the American military, because those guys and gals just wouldn't do it."

The Pentagon recently announced that it was tightening interrogation policies to tie them more closely to the Geneva Conventions. The Church report disclosed that General George W. Casey Jr., commander of the US-led force in Iraq, approved a new interrogation policy Jan. 27; the report offered few details.

''This policy approves a more limited set of techniques for use in Iraq, and also provides additional safeguards and prohibitions, rectifies ambiguities, and -- significantly -- requires commanders to conduct training on and verify implementation of the policy and report compliance" to Casey, according to the report.

Church also wrote that the military no longer allows ''ghost detainees" -- undocumented prisoners held without internment numbers and without notifying the International Committee of the Red Cross of their capture.

The practice has been one of the most deeply criticized elements of US detention operations since the Abu Ghraib scandal. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has acknowledged he agreed to a request from former CIA director George Tenet and authorized at least one detainee, suspected of being a member of the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, to be held as an undocumented ''ghost."

Church said his team found evidence of about 30 ghost detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, but said there were no official written ''memorandums of understanding" between the military and the CIA about holding such prisoners. ''This practice of holding 'ghost detainees' for the CIA was guided by oral, ad hoc agreements and was the result, in part, of the lack of any specific, coordinated interagency guidance," the report said.

Documents obtained by the ACLU and released yesterday conflict with that finding, however. Among numerous accounts of ghost detainees described in those papers is a document that describes Army Colonel Thomas Pappas, who commanded a military intelligence brigade at Abu Ghraib, signing an interagency agreement about the practice.

According to a sworn statement by a person whose name is redacted, Pappas met with officials of an OGA -- an ''other government agency," apparently a reference to the CIA -- and members of a military Special Operations task force that went after ''high-value" insurgent targets. At the meeting, ''the memorandum on procedures for dropping [off] ghost detainees was signed."