Top US officials shaped torture policy

[DarkStar]

Obama pressed to back torture investigation
By Demetri Sevastopulo and Andrew Ward in Washington

Published: April 22 2009 16:47

President Barack Obama on Wednesday came under increased pressure to back an investigation into use of torture by the US, after a Senate report accused the military of systematic abuse of detainees under George W. Bush’s administration.

The findings, by the Senate armed services committee, were released hours after Mr Obama for the first time raised the possibility of prosecution for Bush officials responsible for authorising torture.

The 232-page report released on Tuesday night concluded that Bush administration officials should be held more accountable for the kind of abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. It followed a two-year investigation into abusive detention and interrogation practices by the military.

Donald Rumsfeld, the former defence secretary, has repeatedly insisted that abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were the work of a “few bad apples” – but the Senate report concluded otherwise.

“The report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan to low-ranking soldiers” said Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the committee.

The findings promised to fuel growing debate over how aggressively the Obama administration and Congress should investigate the Bush administration’s use of torture and possibly punish the people responsible for authorising it.

The issue was catapulted back towards the top of the political agenda last week when the Obama administration declassified the so-called “torture memos” written by Bush administration officials to authorise use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The release of the memos, which include detailed accounts of the techniques used against detainees, increased pressure from left-leaning Democrats for a criminal investigation into the issue.

Mr Obama had previously signalled opposition to prosecution of Bush administration officials, saying he preferred to look forward not back. He repeated that view on Tuesday but, in an apparent shift, said it was up to Eric Holder, the attorney-general, to decide whether anyone should be prosecuted.

The president insisted that operatives who carried out torture, under legal advice from the Bush administration, should not be held accountable. But he left open the possibility of punishment for those who crafted the legal advice.

Mr Obama faces a balancing act between appeasing Democrats who want an investigation and avoiding a partisan battle with Republicans that could imperil his legislative agenda.

Republicans have harshly criticised the White House decision to release the controversial memos, mainly on the grounds that it provides US enemies the ability to train to resist interrogation techniques.

Dick Cheney, the former vice-president who was instrumental in pushing the harsh methods, lambasted the White House for not releasing other top-secret documents that he said would prove that “enhanced interrogation techniques” had yielded important intelligence. Michael Hayden and three other former CIA heads also urged the Obama team not to release the memos.

The New York Times reported that, on the same day Mr Obama released the memos, Dennis Blair, his national intelligence director, told his staff in an internal memo that the harsh techniques had generated “high value information” that helped provide a better understanding of al-Qaeda.

Following the disclosure of his memo, Mr Blair put out a statement saying that while the techniques were valuable “in some instances”, it was impossible to know whether the same information could have been gleaned by other methods.

“The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world. The damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security,” said Mr Blair.

Mr Obama banned the harsh techniques – including waterboarding, which his attorney-general has called torture – on his second day in office. But he appeared to concede this week that releasing the memos would complicate operations for the CIA, saying “yes, you’ve got a harder job”.

FT.com / US / Politics & Foreign policy - Obama pressed to back torture investigation

 

[DarkStar]

Top US officials shaped ‘torture’ policy

* Senate report reveals officials readied for ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques soon after 9/11
* Tactics included ‘religious disgrace’

WASHINGTON: Top US officials, not a “few bad apples” of low rank, were behind harsh military interrogation tactics that spread from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan to Iraq, a new Senate report said Tuesday.

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s 261-page report, the fruit of its investigation into US treatment of “war on terror” detainees, is likely to stoke the ongoing debate over US techniques widely seen as torture. The panel, led by Democratic SeNATOr Carl Levin, released its chief conclusions in December 2008, but its detailed findings had been kept under wraps during US Defence Department declassification proceedings.

Levin said in a statement that the report showed that claims by top aides to then-president George W Bush “that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorised acts of a ‘few bad apples,’ were simply false.” The report is “a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse - such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan - to low ranking soldiers,” said Levin.

Preparation: The report says US officials began preparing for what came to be known as “enhanced interrogation” techniques just a few months after the September 11, 2001 attacks and before a series of memos declaring such practices legal. The approach harnessed a US military programme known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which aims to train US military personnel to resist questioning by foes who do not follow international bans on torture.

Tactics: The resulting programme included tactics like stripping a detainee, slapping, as well as “waterboarding,” a notorious kind of near-drowning. The report also says that one suspected terrorist was forced “to bark and perform dog tricks” while another was “forced to wear a dog collar and perform dog tricks” in a bid to break down their resistance. Interrogation tactics also included “religious disgrace” and “invasion of space by a female.”

One of the officials quoted in the report says some of the harsh tactics were used before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq amid frustration in Washington at the lack of evidence linking Al Qaeda and Baghdad. “Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq,” the report quoted US Army psychiatrist Major Paul Burney as saying of some Guantanamo Bay interrogations.

“We were not being successful in establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results,” said Burney. Others did not recall such pressure, the report said. The report also details repeated warnings from military and other experts, almost from the outset, that harsh questioning was likely to yield “less reliable” intelligence results than less aggressive approaches. afp