Released yesterday, a U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Report states that “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 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 U.S. Senate report said that it was a Presidential Order signed by George W. Bush on 7 February 2002 that opened the door to “aggressive techniques” for interrogations — or, to what became torture.
The report continues:
“President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to the conflict with al-Qaeda and concluding that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or the legal protections afforded by the Third Geneva Convention. The President’s order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatement, to al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees“. The report also shows that more than a month earlier, “the Department of Defense (DoD) had already solicited information …. from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions”.
And, the U.S. Senate report states that “The techniques used … based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confession, include stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatutres. It can also include face and body slaps and until recently … it included waterboarding”.
The U.S. Senate report, divided into two parts, can be read, 1.) here, and 2.) here.
The Executive Summary of the U.S. Senate report begins with a quotation from remarks made on 10 May 2007 by General David Petraeus: “What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight… is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings”.
Time Magazine wrote that “The irony is that the U.S. military appears to have … [taken] … a training program that had been designed to prepare American soldiers to withstand torture by communist regimes seeking to extract false confessions, and twisting it into a highly controversial interrogation manual. The story of that mutation emerges in disquieting detail in a new report by the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. It shows how U.S. interrogators at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and camps in Afghanistan based some of their interrogations on techniques taken from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program”.
There were dissident voices, Time reported, but they were not able to stop what was happening: “Jerald Ogrisseg, an Air Force SERE psychologist, warned the JPRA chief of staff Daniel Baumgartner that waterboarding detainees was illegal. In Oct 2002, Lt. Col Morgan Banks, an Army SERE psychologist, warned officials at Gitmo of the risks of using SERE techniques for interrogation, pointing out that even with the Army’s careful monitoring, injuries and accidents did happen. ‘The risk with real detainees is increased exponentially’, he wrote. But by then, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) had already issued two legal opinions, signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, declaring that the techniques did not amount to torture. JPRA training for Gitmo interrogators was stepped up. In December, with Rumsfeld’s authorization, officials of the Joint Task Force at Gitmo devised a standard operating procedure for the use of many SERE techniques to interrogate detainees. Rumsfeld would rescind his authorization in a manner of weeks, after the Navy General Counsel, Alberto Mora, raised concerns about many techniques, arguing that they violated U.S. and international laws and constituted, at worst, torture … But even after Rumsfeld in January 2003 rescinded the authority for the use of SERE techniques at Gitmo, they remained in use in Afghanistan, and later in Iraq. Since Rumsfeld never declared these techniques illegal, military lawyers down the line were able to cite his original authorization as Pentagon policy. JPRA instructors would eventually travel to Iraq to train military interrogators there.”
Time reports, in its story, that ” While much of the controversy over interrogation and detention practices at Guantanamo has centered on the CIA, the SASC report puts the spotlight firmly on the Pentagon – specifically on former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his DoD lawyer Jim Haynes, his policy chief Douglas Feith, Guantanamo commanders Maj. Gen. Michael Dunleavy and Maj Gen Geoffrey Miller, and a raft of other DoD officials”.
This article can be read in full on Time.com here.