Bipartisan Report: Rumsfeld Responsible for Detainee Abuse
- From: rst0wxyz <rst0wxyz@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:23:12 -0800 (PST)
Bipartisan Report: Rumsfeld Responsible for Detainee Abuse
Senate Committee Finds Officials Made Decisions That Led to Offenses
Against Prisoners
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 11, 2008; 12:39 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/11/AR2008121101969.html?hpid=topnews
A bipartisan Senate report released today says that former Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration
officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charges that decisions by those officials
led to serious offenses against prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.
The Senate Armed Services Committee report accuses Rumsfeld and his
deputies of being the principal architects of the plan to use harsh
interrogation techniques on captured fighters and terrorism suspects,
rejecting the Bush administration's contention that the policies
originated lower down the command chain.
"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to
the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the panel
concludes. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States
government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques,
redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and
authorized their use against detainees."
The report, released by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain
(R-Ariz.) and based on a nearly two-year investigation, said that both
the policies and resulting controversies tarnished the reputation of
the United States and undermined national security. "Those efforts
damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save
lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral
authority," it said.
The panel's investigation focused on the Defense Department's use of
controversial interrogation practices, including forced nudity,
painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and
use of dogs. The practices, some of which had already been adopted by
the CIA at its secret prisons, were adapted for interrogations at
Guantanamo Bay and later migrated to U.S. detention camps in
Afghanistan and Iraq, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
"The Committee's report details the inexcusable link between abusive
interrogation techniques used by our enemies who ignored the Geneva
Conventions and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody,"
McCain, himself a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, said in a
statement. "These policies are wrong and must never be repeated."
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."
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