Major General Geoffrey Miller, Donald Rumsfeld, Ricardo Sanchez and Interrogation Techniques

General Geoffrey Miller was the general at Guantanamo Bay who would go to the extremes to get results. He didn’t care about past tradition, or newly implemented laws. All General Miller wanted was answers that would be worth good results. General Miller would go on to turn Guantanamo Bay from a conventional prison, to somewhat of an “ad hoc” system that would develop some of the harshest interrogation techniques to date. Some of the techniques used were to have detainees chained in the fetal position, no food or water, and left alone for 18 to 24 hours after having urinated on themselves. In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld approved of the techniques being used by General Miller which were “solitary confinement, noise, light, and darkness. Also stress positions such as standing for long periods of time were used, as well as exploitation of phobias, and removal of clothes.

In August of 2003, General Miller was sent to Iraq to help gather more intelligence. Upon his arrival in Iraq, the General came to the conclusion that the detainees were treated to well, and that they needed to be treated like dogs to know who’s in charge. His assessment was that if the detainees didn’t know who was in charge that control of interrogations would be lost. After the assessment this prompted General Ricardo Sanchez to come up with a memorandum that would implement the harsh interrogation techniques such as dietary manipulation, isolation, sleep management, presence of military working dogs, and stress positions. However due to some confusion, a month later General Sanchez would then issue another memorandum rescinding his previous one, and now the techniques for interrogation were to be done another way. This lead to confusion and no one knew what to do. Every time a question would be asked, the answers were to the effect of “I don’t know, figure it out.”