Washington – The Army is preparing to issue a new interrogations manual that expressly bars the harsh techniques disclosed in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and incorporates safeguards devised to prevent such misconduct, Army officials said Wednesday.
The manual’s first revision in 13 years will prohibit practices like stripping prisoners, keeping them in stressful positions for a long time, imposing dietary restrictions, employing dogs to intimidate prisoners during interrogations and using sleep deprivation to get them to talk, the officials said.
Those practices were not included in the manual in use when the bulk of the abuses occurred at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in the fall of 2003, but neither were they specifically banned, giving commanders and individual interrogators wide latitude to decide what was appropriate.
Military investigations have faulted senior officials – including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq – for adding to the confusion by approving, and then rescinding approval, for limited use of harsh techniques that went beyond what was allowed in the manual.
Accompanying the new manual will be a classified training document that will provide dozens of interrogation scenarios.