US interrogation policy condemned
A US Senate committee has condemned the US use of torture. The committee has heard from Pentagon lawyers who have testified that the methods they have been using were based on training given to US soldiers to resist torture techniques such as waterboarding.
And, of course, it is only under the macabre worldview of the Bush regime that a technique easily accepted as torture when used against Americans becomes somehow humane when used against other people.
"Abuse of detainees has never been, is not and will never be the policy of this government," spokesman Tony Fratto said.
"The policy of this government has been to take these detainees and to interrogate them, and get the information that we can get to help protect this country," he added.
Note the subtle undertone, the hint that if you object to these methods then you perhaps don't wish to "protect this country".
The Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (Sere) programme is based on the experiences of US prisoners of war in previous conflicts.
Sere trainers provided Mr Haynes with a list of techniques, including sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, water-boarding and stress positions.
Several were approved by the then Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in December 2002 despite objections by military lawyers.
Mr Haynes said he had been unaware of the legal objection from the military and that he had been doing the best he could to prevent further attacks.
And the important point here is that, far from being the work of a few rogue apples, these techniques had actually been approved by the then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, himself.
The committee also released details from previously classified minutes of a meeting in October 2002 in which a top military lawyer at Guantanamo said previously banned techniques such as sleep deprivation were being used secretly.
"Officially it is not happening," Lt Col Diane Beaver told the meeting, adding that commanders feared the Red Cross might find out.
The very fact that they feared that the Red Cross might find out what they were up to tells you all you need to know. Why would you fear the Red Cross finding out what you were doing if you actually believed that what you were doing was legal? They called it legal, they pretended that the justifications put forward by Yoo and others somehow validated what they were up to, but the fact that they attempted to hide their actions from the Red Cross speaks volumes.
John Fredman, then chief counsel to the CIA's counter-terrorism centre, argued during the meeting that torture "is basically subject to perception".
"If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong," he said.
Leaving aside the bizarre notion that an action only becomes torture if someone dies, Fredman is also wrong when he states that torture "is basically subject to perception". Torture is actually defined in international law. The United Nation Convention against Torture states that torture is "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession."
It's actually an almost textbook description of what the Bush administration have authorised.
There were many of us who said at the time that this did not look like the work of a few bad apples, it looked systemic. The photographs showed naked men being led around on their hands and knees on a dog leash. But what struck me was the number of uniformed legs in some of the pictures. These people were standing around as if waiting for a bus. They certainly weren't shocked by what was taking place a few feet away from them, which led me to assume that this behaviour had become routine.Discussing the testimony, Armed Services Committee chairman Sen Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, said such comments contradicted the White House's argument that the cause of the abuse scandals at US detention centres such as Abu Ghraib had been merely the result of a "few bad apples" acting on their own.
"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 authorised their use against detainees," he said.
Mr Rumsfeld's endorsement of harsh interrogation techniques, Sen Levin said, had "unleashed a virus which ultimately infected interrogation operations conducted by the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq".
"If we use those same techniques offensively against detainees, it says to the world that they have America's stamp of approval."
Republican Sen Lindsey Graham said the lawyers' guidance would "go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and short-sighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities".
And that's certainly the conclusion that the Senate Committee has come to. Carl Levin has stated that the administration "twisted the law to create the appearance of legality".
Put simply they started using techniques which they had always defined as torture when it was done to their captured soldiers and told themselves that it wasn't torture as long as they were doing it. Suddenly torture became "a matter of perception".
But, of course, it didn't. Which is why they sought to hide what they were doing from the Red Cross.
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