Hearing Concludes for Chief of POW Camp

Marine guards did not treat Iraqi prisoners any worse than Marine recruits are treated when they arrive at boot camp, lawyers for a Marine officer accused of permitting brutality at a prisoner-of-war camp argued at a court hearing that concluded Friday.

Attorneys for Maj. William Vickers said prisoners arriving at the Whitehorse detention facility in Nasiriyah, Iraq, were treated much like recruits: told to shut up, yelled at and forced to stand for long periods.

The goal, the lawyers insisted, was the same in both cases: to leave the new arrivals, be they prisoners or recruits, exhausted, intimidated and ready to follow orders.

“We were told in boot camp to stand for hours,” testified prosecution witness Lance Cpl. Angel Flores, a guard at the Whitehorse camp, when asked if he thought the policy of forcing prisoners to stand while waiting to be interrogated was brutal.

Vickers, 36, a reservist, is accused of dereliction of duty for allowing Marines to give the prisoners the “50-10” treatment, in which they were required to stand for 50 minutes of every hour as they waited, sometimes for hours, to be interrogated. Prisoners were handcuffed and had burlap bags placed over their heads.

Vickers, an infantry officer, was in charge of Whitehorse for six weeks.

Chief Warrant Officer Matthew Carlisle, who interrogated Iraqi prisoners to determine if they were dangerous, said exhaustion and disorientation are effective devices for gaining control of someone. “Just like in boot camp,” he said.

Carlisle said the Marine Corps always takes its recruits to boot camp late at night and then deprives them of sleep in their first few hours. The same tactic was used with prisoners, he said.

Although it wasn’t offered as evidence, a recruiting poster on an office wall just a few doors from the courtroom demonstrates the Marines’ belief in the salutary effects of exhaustion and stress: “We promise you sleep deprivation, mental torment, and muscles so sore you’ll puke.”

Vickers’ lead attorney, Jane Siegel, a retired Marine colonel, told the hearing officer that the charge against her client was based on a flawed and biased investigation by Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents.

The hearing officer, Col. William Gallo, will now make a recommendation to Maj. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, on whether Vickers should stand trial. At Thursday’s session, Gallo said he leaned toward recommending that the charge against Vickers be dropped.

Seven other Marines who served at Whitehorse also face charges ranging from making false statements to negligent homicide. Their hearings are set for January.

To bolster their case that Marine guards at the facility had overstepped their bounds, prosecutors presented written statements from guards and a Navy medic that described cases in which Marines slapped or punched prisoners. But the medic, in testimony, protested that his statement had been twisted by the investigators. And a second Navy medical specialist said he had never seen bruises or injuries on the prisoners.

Capt. Jamie McCall, the lead prosecutor, told Gallo that Vickers was guilty of dereliction for allowing Marines under his command to violate the military policy against inflicting “undue pain on the body or mind” of prisoners. But defining what constitutes undue pain is difficult, scholars agree.

Eugene Fidell, the Washington lawyer who founded the National Institute of Military Justice, said there is little military case law to help a hearing officer like Gallo determine what constitutes brutality. “You know it when you see it,” Fidell said in a telephone interview.

McCall said Marines at Whitehorse had posted a sign referring to the site as the “225 Terrordome,” an indication, he said, that members of the 2nd Battalion, 25th Regiment, were bent on terrorizing prisoners. (The term “terrordome” comes from a song by the rap group Public Enemy.)

Lt. Col. Ralph Dengler, executive officer of the battalion, said the “Terrordome” sign might have been the Marines’ reaction to other things scrawled on the walls, including a large mural of Saddam Hussein as a bodybuilder stomping on a weakling labeled “U.S.A.”