Senate Blames White House
For abuses, not individual soldiers. I’m more inclined to blame al Qaeda for the uncomfortable circumstances in which detainees find themselves. The global jihad/worldwide terror campaign was their idea in the first place. But here’s the news, via NYT. Yeah, it’s meant to be a gotcha:
The Senate Armed Services Committee report concludes that harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA and the U.S. military were directly adapted from the training techniques used to prepare special forces personnel to resist interrogation by enemies that torture and abuse prisoners. The techniques included forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, and until 2003, waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning.
The report is the result of a nearly two-year investigation that directly links President Bush’s policies after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, legal memos on torture, and interrogation rule changes with the abuse photographed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq four years ago. Much of the report remains classified. Unclassified portions of the report were released by the committee Thursday.
Administration officials publicly blamed the abuses on low-level soldiers– the work ”of a few bad apples.” Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., called that ”both unconscionable and false.”
”The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees,” Levin said.
…
Lawrence Di Rita, a senior aide to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at the time the Abu Ghraib and other abuses took place, disputed the report.
”This oddly timed report provides no evidence that contradicts more than a dozen other investigations that found that there was no systematic or widespread detainee mismanagement,” Di Rita told The AP. ”A relatively small number of people abused detainees, and they were brought to justice in criminal or civil proceedings.”
I guess it depends what you call abuse. In any case, it’s a rearview. They needed to be put somewhere, they needed to be encouraged to talk. There were some excesses. It’s Obama’s problem now. He’s the one who has to decide whether he has any better ideas than Guantanamo, and to what extent he wants to tie interrogators’ hands. If they aren’t supposed to torture, it isn’t meant to be a pleasant chat, either. Indications are the decisions aren’t as easy as some people would like them to be. There’s been some transition team ambivalence about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The war’s not exactly over. As the Belgians just found out.
SkyNews: 14 AQ nabbed, one of whom was headed on a one-way mission, just in time a big EU summit.
More re the Senate report from the Washington Post:
White House officials have maintained the measures were approved in response to demands from field officers who complained that traditional interrogation methods weren’t working on some of the more hardened captives. But Senate investigators, relying on documents and hours of hearing testimony, arrived at a different conclusion.
The true genesis of the decision to use coercive techniques, the report said, was a memo signed by President Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the Geneva Convention’s standards for humane treatment did not apply to captured al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. As early as that spring, the panel said, top administration officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, participated in meetings in which the use of coercive measures was discussed. The panel drew on a written statement by Rice, released earlier this year, to support that conclusion.
In July 2002, Rumseld’s senior staff began compiling information about techniques used in military survival schools to simulate conditions that U.S. airmen might face if captured by an enemy that did not follow the Geneva conditions. Those techniques — borrowed from a training program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE — included waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and were loosely based on methods adopted by Chinese communists to coerce propaganda confessions from captured U.S. soldiers during the Korean war.
The SERE program became the template for interrogation methods that were ultimately approved by Rumsfeld himself, the report says. In the field, U.S. military interrogators used the techniques with little oversight and frequently abusive results, the panel found.
“It is particularly troubling that senior officials approved the use of interrogation techniques that were originally designed to simulate abusive tactics used by our enemies against our own soldiersand that were modeled, in part, on tactics used by the Communist Chinese to elicit false confessions from U.S. military personnel,” the report said.
Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that “SERE training techniques were designed to give our troops a taste of what they might be subjected to if captured by a ruthless, lawless enemy so that they would be better prepared to resist. The techniques were never intended to be used against detainees in U.S. custody.”
Defenders of the techniques have argued that such measures were justified because of al-Qaeda’s demonstrated disregard for human life. But the panel members cited the views of Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, who in a May, 2007 letter to his troops said humane treatment of prisoners allows Americans to occupy the moral high ground.
“Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right,” wrote Petraeus, who at the time was the top U.S. commander in Iraq. “Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy.”
There was also a CIA interrogator who, while he didn’t like waterboarding, claims it helped thwart plots and potetnially saved thousands of lives.
Topics: GWOT, Guantanamo
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:35 pm Comments (2) on Thursday, December 11, 2008
2 Responses to “Senate Blames White House”
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December 12th, 2008 at 11:33 pm
‘”The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees,” Levin said.’
Spare me. When you liberal Democrats are running things, it’s acceptable to drop high explosives, napalm and atomic bombs on population centers, killing hundreds of thousands of CIVILIANS, but when the Republicans are running things it isn’t acceptable to make captured TERRORISTS feel uncomfortable.
Donnez-moi une break.
December 14th, 2008 at 7:30 am
All I know is that Bush has a 7 year track record of no attacks on US soil. When the Democrats match that we can talk.