Bush: "I Was Aware" of Harsh Tactics
I have never bought the bad apple theory, the notion that some US army personnel simply got carried away and acted on their own steam when prisoners were tortured. The stories coming in from different places all included the same basic ingredients: hot and cold techniques, forced nudity, prolonged standing, etc etc,.
It was too uniform for it not to have been approved and co-ordinated. Now we discover that it was not only approved at the highest levels of the administration but that Bush knew about this and that he also approved of it.
President Bush says he knew his top national security advisors discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.
"Well, we started to connect the dots, in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC New s White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And, yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."
And the level of detail that Bush administration officials went into is incredible.
The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed - down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects - whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news.
The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.
The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques - using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time - on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.
Here we have some of the most senior members of the Bush administration signing off on techniques which are banned by the Geneva conventions and considered to be illegal under international law.
They may never be prosecuted in the US, but many of them would be advised to think very carefully about any future travel plans as there are many places where warrants would be sought for their arrest as war criminals.
And, at long last, we can put to bed the notion that the orders to engage in these techniques did not come from the very top. As we now know, there were bad apples, but the bad apples were at the very top of the political structure, not at the bottom.
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