2009-07-03 03:09:01 -

WASHINGTON (AP) - Newly released Defense Department documents and memos about the first years of operation of the jail at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base portray a chaotic and sometimes violent operation that its own commanders described as dysfunctional.
President Barack Obama has ordered the island facility closed next year. After nearly eight years of operation, it still holds more than 200 prisoners who are being reviewed for release, prosecution or potentially continued confinement.
The documents were turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The ACLU has sued for release of all documents related to the government's interrogation program after Sept. 11, 2001.
«These documents provide further evidence of the widespread and systemic abuse of prisoners conducted at Guantanamo Bay and other overseas locations. They further underscore the need for a congressional select committee to examine the roots of the torture program as well as an independent prosecutor to investigate issues of criminal responsibility,» said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU.
One of the newly released documents from 2005 is the statement of one of the first commanders of Guantanamo to another general who was investigating allegations of prisoner abuse lodged by the FBI.
The now retired Maj. Gen. Michael Dunleavy commanded the Guantanamo interrogation operation in 2002.
Dunleavy described the chaos he found when he arrived: a lack of security and control over detainees who would riot and throw food and turned items like spoons, magnets and welding rods into weapons.
He said his interrogators were virtually inexperienced and the military linguists «were worthless.
He said was brought in to bring «a commonsense way on how to do business.» Dunleavy had experience with more than 3,000 interrogations going back 35 years.
He said he was initially told that he would be reporting to U.S. Southern Command, but that quickly changed.
«I got my marching orders from the president of the United States,» he said. The president was George W. Bush.
Dunleavy also complained about FBI officials who went to Guantanamo every two weeks and «could not decide what to do» and never built up a rapport.
«The mission was to get intelligence to prevent another 9/11,» Dunleavy said.
He said physical torture would not produce intelligence, but instead they needed to build rapport and create a «dependency relationship» with prayer beads and the Quran. He said he treated detainees «as human beings, but not like soldiers» and denied there was any torture.
But he said one interrogators had to be removed after he «physically mishandled» a detainee, belting and handcuffing him to an eyebolt on the floor. An FBI agent was removed after «he went across the desk at a detainee» after the detainee threatened to kill his family. He said his «best interrogator» was prosecuted and another officer was removed after it became apparent he was an alcoholic who secretly drank in his room every night.
He said loud music and yelling were used to disrupt detainees' thought processes. He said chaining a detainee in a fetal position was «not a normal procedure» but may have been used to secure a prisoner who leapt at an interrogator.
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded Guantanamo from late 2002 to March 2004, said in another newly released document that he had rejected a proposal to use the harsh techniques employed by survival trainers to prepare American troops for combat. He said some of the techniques «went beyond what I felt comfortable with.» Some of the same harsh techniques had already been secretly adopted by the CIA with White House approval.
Another set of memos, dated 2004, describe how a detainee was knocked unconscious for several minutes by guards while he was being forcibly removed from his cell.
The memos were apparently written in response to State Department inquiries about a prisoner's treatment at the military-run jail.

«Please assure (redacted) that their detainees have never been subjected to torture or systematic abuse,» wrote Matthew Waxman, then the director of detainee affairs for the U.S. Defense Department, in an October 2004 memo to an undisclosed recipient. «Additionally, while he has some mental health issues, these are not the result of any physical abuse at Guantanamo.
Waxman did not mention in that letter that the detainee had been knocked unconscious.
The detainee's identity was redacted from the memo.
In another memo, a Marine officer recommended an investigation into a report by «one of the most, if not the most, cooperative and influential detainees» at Guantanamo, who alleged he was tortured at the facility between August and October 2003 by methods involving women, sleep deprivation and exposure to cold.
Most of the details of the detainee's account were blacked out. But he said he once was forced to stay awake for 70 days, that interrogators put ice all over his body directly against his skin inside his clothes, and that there was a room that the detainees called the «freezer.» He said he made a false confession while being tortured to something he did not do.
Another document details «troubling» interrogation techniques used against the detainee during that period, including a thread that if he did not talk he would «soon disappear down a very dark hole» and that his «very existence would be erased.
The same document, undated, noted that at the time 40 percent of the abuse allegations in Iraq were being substantiated by investigations.