The U.S. released hundreds more prisoners from Abu Ghraib Monday.

The release - the fifth major one since the scandal broke - came one day after the U.S. military pledged that as many as 1,400 detainees will either be released or transferred to Iraqi authorities by the June 30 handover of power. The Americans will continue to hold between 4,000 and 5,000 prisoners deemed a threat to the coalition.

The U.S. also announced today it will be changing its procedures at Afghan prisons, after a review for abuse.

The Washington Post has obtained the August 1, 2002 Justice Department memo that suggests torture of detainees may be justified. You can read it here (pdf).

The March 6, 2003 Pentagon memo made available last week is here (html).

The August 1 memo is titled "Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. 2340-2340A," and is from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to President Bush. It was prepared at the request of the CIA, which at the time was unhappy with the progress and fruitfulness of interrogations of al Qaeda prisoners being held outside the U.S.

Congress asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to release the memos last week, and he refused. A transcript of that hearing is here.

Background on the memos and legal issues involved is here. More on Ashcroft's refusal is here.

Update: Law Prof Michael Froomkin has an analysis at Discourse.Net.

The New York Times reports that interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison began reporting prisoner abuse last November:

Beginning in November, a small unit of interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison began reporting allegations of prisoner abuse, including the beatings of five blindfolded Iraqi generals, in internal documents sent to senior officers, according to interviews with military personnel who worked in the prison. The disclosure of the documents raises new questions about whether senior officers in Iraq were alerted about serious abuses at the prison before January. Top military officials have said they only learned about abuses then, after a soldier came forward with photographs of the abuse.

The Red Cross previously has said it told the U.S. of the abuse charges last November.

The Red Cross has issued an ultimatum to President Bush on Saddam Hussein: Charge him by June 30 or release him.

Saddam Hussein must either be released from custody by June 30 or charged if the US and the new Iraqi government are to conform to international law, the International Committee of the Red Cross said last night. Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the ICRC, told the Guardian: "The United States defines Saddam Hussein as a prisoner of war. At the end of an occupation PoWs have to be released provided they have no penal charges against them."

....The occupation officially ends on June 30 and US forces will be in Iraq at the invitation of its sovereign government. "There are all these people kept in a legal vacuum. No one should be left not knowing their legal status. Their judicial rights must be assured," Ms Doumani said.

[link via Atrios.]

Captain Sensible has found a new set of diary entries for Abu Ghraib interrogator Joe Ryan. They cover March 7th - 18th. Some points of interest:

• On March 7th, CACI were still using untrained and unqualified interrogators at Abu Ghraib (according to Ryan)

"In reviewing our manning document with LTC Faust this evening, I noticed that we have three people doing interrogations that are not school trained or certified. This is a rather large problem. LTC Faust stated that Tom Howard, one of our CACI higher ups working at the C2, told him that we could use analysts that showed promise and turn them into junior interrogators. After recovering from my convulsions, I explained that I would like my next stop to be home, not Ft. Leavenworth."

• Ryan claims that the International Red Cross were banned from Abu Ghraib on March 18th for distributing 'anti-American propaganda'

• Ryan reveals a lot about tensions with "another government agency" (code for CIA I think), and that the OGA had "already burned bridges here by coming in and removing a couple detainees without authorization".

• Ryan reveals there were video cameras in the interrogation booths (something that's been speculated about but not proven).

To summarize, there are now three sets of Joe Ryan diary entries:

The Washington Post reports that the torture history of the C.I.A. goes back 40 years.

A CIA handbook on coercive interrogation methods, produced 40 years ago during the Vietnam War, shows that techniques such as those used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a long history with U.S. intelligence and were based on research and field experience. Declassified 10 years ago, the training manual carries in its title the code word used for the CIA in Vietnam, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation -- July 1963." Used to train new interrogators, the handbook presents "basic information about coercive techniques available for use in the interrogation situation."

The specific coercive methods it describes echo today's news stories about Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At Abu Ghraib, for example, photographs and documents have shown that detainees were hooded, blindfolded, dressed in sloppy garb and forced to go naked.

So much for the "few bad apples" theory.

PFC Lynndie England's defense team has submitted a list of 100 witnesses it wants to call at her Article 32 hearing on charges of abusing Abu Ghraib prisoners. The list includes Vice President Cheney.

By putting top government officials like Vice President Dick Cheney on their witness list, England's attorneys are serving notice that in defending their client, they will attempt to put on trial the Bush administration's policies on intelligence gathering from detainees. Like most other military police reservists charged in the abuse scandal, England has claimed military intelligence officers ordered the MPs to "soften up" the detainees prior to interrogations.

Don't hold your breath. It's the military investigating officer in charge of the hearing who gets to decide which witnesses are relevant enough to call. Since the hearing is the equivalent of a probable cause hearing, to decide whether there is enough evidence to initiate a court-martial, it's unlikely such higher-ups will be called. Who else is on the wish list?

....Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone; Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and other high-ranking Army officers; White House General Counsel Alberto Gonzales; and Justice Department officials.

US News and World Report says there is now evidence that Gen. Richard Sanchez was directly involved in hiding prisoners from the Red Cross:

The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, issued a classified order last November directing military guards to hide a prisoner, later dubbed "Triple X" by soldiers, from Red Cross inspectors and keep his name off official rosters. The disclosure, by military sources, is the first indication that Sanchez was directly involved in efforts to hide prisoners from the Red Cross, a practice that was sharply criticized by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in a report describing abuses of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

....The disclosure of Sanchez's involvement may focus more attention on him. There have been reports that his top Army lawyers sought to curb Red Cross access to Abu Ghraib, only weeks after the humanitarian agency uncovered abuses and sexual humiliation at the prison late last year. Some Army officers, including Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the commander of the 800th MP Brigade, have blamed Sanchez's staff for refusing to release security detainees from Abu Ghraib even when they were believed to pose no threat to coalition forces.

The Washington Post has statements from dog handlers at Abu Ghraib. The handlers say they were ordered to use unmuzzled dogs to scare the prisoners.

U.S. intelligence personnel ordered military dog handlers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to use unmuzzled dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees during interrogations late last year, a plan approved by the highest-ranking military intelligence officer at the facility, according to sworn statements the handlers provided to military investigators.

A military intelligence interrogator also told investigators that two dog handlers at Abu Ghraib were "having a contest" to see how many detainees they could make involuntarily urinate out of fear of the dogs, according to the previously undisclosed statements obtained by The Washington Post.

Human rights groups charge such use of the dogs violate the Geneva Conventions and our own prohibitions against torture:

by TChris

Remember Sean Baker, the soldier at Guantanamo who was brutally beaten while playing the role of a detainee during a training exercise? The Army had been claiming that his medical discharge was unrelated to the traumatic brain injury he sustained while the trainees were learning how to abuse prisoners. Now the Army admits that the discharge was "partly" related to that injury.

Is there any part of the executive branch of government that ever tells the truth the first time?

David Finley on the Torture Memo.

The March 6, 2003 "torture memo" is such a shoddy piece of work that anybody with minimal English skills, a copy of the Constitution, and access to Supreme Court decisions can trivially refute any of the bogus arguments that the committee of leading GOP legal lights put together.

Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton has spent the past year training 200,000 Iraqis to be army, police and civil defense troops. He's leaving next week, and says the mission has been a flop:

Misguided U.S. training of Iraqi police contributed to the country's instability and has delayed getting enough qualified Iraqis on the streets to ease the burden on American forces, the head of armed forces training said Wednesday.
"It hasn't gone well. We've had almost one year of no progress," said Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who departs Iraq next week after spending a year assembling and training the country's 200,000 army, police and civil defense troops.

This will be a problem with our hand-over of power to Iraq:

A credible, well-equipped national security force is crucial to America's plans to pull its 138,000 troops out of Iraq, along with the 24,000 soldiers from Britain and other coalition countries. As U.S. occupation leaders prepare to hand power to an Iraqi government in less than three weeks, Iraq's own security forces won't be ready to take a large role in protecting the country. A U.N. Security Council resolution approved Tuesday acknowledges Iraq's lack of a developed security force and provides a continued multinational troop presence until 2006.

Here's an example of a test that failed: