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Senate probe links Pentagon official to abusive tactics

post #1 of 13
6/17/08 at 10:30am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — A senior Pentagon official in July 2002 sought the advice of military psychologists to help design aggressive detainee interrogation techniques that would later be linked with prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq, a Senate investigation has found.

The revelation, part of a probe by the Senate Armed Services Committee that is to be unveiled during hearings Tuesday, provides dramatic new evidence that the use of the aggressive techniques was planned at the top levels of the Bush administration and were not the work of out-of-control, lower-ranking troops.

A person familiar with the contents of the probe said that William Haynes, then the Defense Department's general counsel, asked a special agency within the Pentagon for help devising the techniques. The agency, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, normally designs programs to help captured U.S. military personnel resist interrogation and plot to escape.

The person familiar with the investigation asked not to identified because the investigation is not complete.

"These guys were reaching out early on" to find aggressive techniques, the person said.

Haynes is expected to testify at Tuesday's hearing.

So is former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora, who objected to the administration's policies for the treatment of detainees.

Committee investigators have discovered that the uniformed military's top lawyers objected to the harsh measures in 2002, before they were approved by then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
More at McClatchy (a site worthy of your RSS feed)

Here's another related story at McClatchy: Wrongly jailed detainees found militancy at Guantanamo
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post #2 of 13
6/17/08 at 10:34am
I heard about this on NPR during my drive to work this morning, and as much as I hate to say it, I was not in the least bit surprised that this was coming out. Annoyed and dismayed, yes, but not at all surprised.
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post #3 of 13
6/17/08 at 11:33am
Thread Starter 
Agree. It was so obvious when Lynndie England and the other grunts were being prosecuted that they were scapegoats for a heinous, corrupt policy. When this stuff happens so gradually one becomes somewhat inured to the utter depravity of this administration. It's hard to believe all this is happening.
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post #4 of 13
6/17/08 at 11:42am
What? You mean the Bush Admin was just making stuff up when they said it was just a few bad apples? Who knew? Who knew?
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post #5 of 13
6/17/08 at 2:06pm
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post #6 of 13
6/17/08 at 4:58pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
CIA advised military on questioning at Guantanamo

By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The CIA, which had authority to use harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorist detainees, advised U.S. military officials at Guantanamo in 2002 on how far they could go in extracting information from captives there, documents released at a Senate hearing Tuesday show.

"If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong," Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, told a meeting of officials on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes from the meeting.

That meeting came a week after a delegation of senior Bush administration officials visited the Guantanamo Naval base, where the Bush administration has set up a prison camp for suspected terrorists. In addition to Fredman, attendees at the meeting included Lt. Col. Jerald Phifer, who was in charge of Guantanamo's Joint Task Force 170, and Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, who was Task Force 170's legal officer.

The officials who had visited Guantanamo the week before were David Addington, counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon’s top lawyer; acting CIA counsel John Rizzo; and Michael Chertoff, head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, and now President Bush's Homeland Security secretary.

The CIA involvement clearly bothered some at Guantanamo. "This looks like the kinds of stuff Congressional hearings are made of," Mark Fallon, deputy commander of the Criminal Investigation Task Force at Guantanamo, wrote in an Oct. 28, 2002 e-mail to his headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Va. "Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.”

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is investigating the origin of techniques that resulted in abuse at Guantanamo, Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, and elsewhere, said the documents show that the abuse was not the result of "a few bad apples" within the military _ as the White House has claimed.

"The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees," said Levin, a Michigan Democrat.
The rest at McClatchy.

The world's papers are reporting the Senate investigation as big news. The US corporate media not so much. Check out the Google news results.
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post #7 of 13
6/17/08 at 5:03pm
Thread Starter 
ps. The hearings are streaming live on C-Span.
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post #8 of 13
6/17/08 at 5:05pm
Thread Starter 
OMG, watching Haynes talk reminds me (as WAY TOO MANY people do these days) of Nathan Thurm!!!!
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post #9 of 13
6/18/08 at 3:02am
Thread Starter 
And the hits just keep on comin'...

Quote:
Documents confirm U.S. hid detainees from Red Cross

By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday.

"We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques," Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who's since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture. Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting that were made public Tuesday. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility — Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — were using sleep deprivation to "break" detainees well before then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved that technique. "True, but officially it is not happening," she is quoted as having said.

A third person at the meeting, Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, disclosed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the ICRC, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world.

"In the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD (Defense Department) has 'moved' them away from the attention of the ICRC," Fredman said, according to the minutes.

The document, along with two dozen others, shows that top administration officials pushed relentlessly for tougher interrogation methods in the belief that terrorism suspects were resisting interrogation.

It's unclear from the documents whether the Pentagon moved the detainees from one place to another or merely told the ICRC they were no longer present at a facility.
More at McClatchy.
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post #10 of 13
6/21/08 at 2:11pm
Thread Starter 

Taguba: "Bush administration committed war crimes"

Quote:
General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes

By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," he wrote.

A White House spokeswoman, Kate Starr, had no comment.

Taguba didn't respond to a request for further comment relayed via a spokesman.

The group Physicians for Human Rights, which compiled the new report, described it as the most in-depth medical and psychological examination of former detainees to date.

Doctors and mental health experts examined 11 detainees held for long periods in the prison system that President Bush established after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. All of them eventually were released without charges.

The doctors and experts determined that the men had been subject to cruelties that ranged from isolation, sleep deprivation and hooding to electric shocks, beating and, in one case, being forced to drink urine.

Bush has said repeatedly that the United States doesn't condone torture.
More at McClatchy.

Plus, Joe Galloway's editorial.
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post #11 of 13
6/23/08 at 2:56pm
Thanks for the info yt. I hope something comes of this. The editorial link does make me wonder how many hours Bush has set aside to sign pardons on Jan. 19th.
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post #12 of 13
6/23/08 at 3:42pm
Protecting foreigners because of some perceived social nicety is 9/10 thinking. That's not what keeps us safe.
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post #13 of 13
6/23/08 at 3:49pm
I think he ordered the code red.
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