Enhanced interrogation techniques
[38][39] They declined to prosecute CIA, US Department of Defense, or Bush administration officials who authorized the program, while leaving open the possibility of convening an investigatory "Truth Commission" for what President Obama called a "further accounting".
Officials including Justice Department lawyer John Yoo recommended classifying them as "detainees" outside the protection of the Geneva Conventions or any other domestic or military law, and incarcerating them in special prisons instead of the barracks-like "prisoner-of-war camp you saw in Hogan's Heroes or Stalag 17.
[43] In late 2001, the first detainees including men like Murat Kurnaz and Lakhdar Boumediene, later established to be innocent and arrested on flawed intelligence or sold to the CIA for bounties, were brought to hastily improvised CIA/military bases such as Kandahar, Afghanistan.
[50] Later that April, Mitchell proposed a list of additional tactics, including locking people in cramped boxes, shackling them in painful positions, keeping them awake for a week at a time, covering them with insects, and waterboarding, a practice which the United States had previously characterized in war crimes prosecutions as torture.
[67][69][70] Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side,[71] quotes Zelikow as predicting that "America's descent into torture will in time be viewed like the Japanese internments", in that "(f)ear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.
[75][76][77] The SERE program, which Mitchell and Jessen would reverse engineer, was used to train pilots and other soldiers on how to resist "brainwashing" techniques assumed to have been employed by the Chinese to extract false confessions from captured Americans during the Korean War.
[71][86] Many of the interrogation techniques used in the SERE program, including waterboarding, cold cell, long-time standing, and sleep deprivation were previously considered illegal under U.S. and international law and treaties at the time of Abu Zubaydah's capture.
[88] In 1983, Texas Sheriff James Parker "was charged, along with three of his deputies, for handcuffing prisoners to chairs, placing towels over their faces, and pouring water on the cloth until they gave what the officers considered to be confessions.
According to the 2008 U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee report on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody, the DIA began drawing up the list of techniques with the help of its civilian employee, a former Guantanamo Interrogation Control Element (ICE) Chief David Becker.
[116] Karpinski stated that the "methods consisted of making prisoners stand for long periods, sleep deprivation ... playing music at full volume, having to sit uncomfortably" and that "Rumsfeld authorized these specific techniques.
The FBI agents wrote in memorandums that were never meant to be disclosed publicly that they had seen female interrogators forcibly squeeze male prisoners' genitals, and that they had witnessed other detainees stripped and shackled low to the floor for many hours.
"[118] On July 12, 2005, members of a military panel told the committee that they proposed disciplining prison commander Major General Geoffrey Miller over the interrogation of Mohammed al Qahtani, who was forced to wear a bra, dance with another man, and threatened with dogs.
Unable to get satisfaction from the army commanders running the detainee camp, they took their concerns to David Brant, director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), who alerted Navy General Counsel Alberto J.
[122] In response, on January 15, 2003, Rumsfeld suspended the approved interrogation tactics at Guantánamo Bay until a new set of guidelines could be produced by a working group headed by General Counsel of the Air Force Mary Walker.
[125][126] Porter Goss, the Director of Central Intelligence, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 17, 2005, described waterboarding as falling into the area of "professional interrogation techniques", differentiating them from torture.
[143] On December 9, 2014, United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released a 525-page document containing the key findings and an executive summary, of their report into the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program.
[148] The executive summary lists 20 key findings:[149] The Senate Report examined in detail specifically whether torture provided information helpful in locating Osama Bin Laden, and concluded that it did not, and that the CIA deliberately misled political leaders and the public in saying it had.
[150][151] The three former CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden, who had supervised the program during their tenure, objected to the Senate Report in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, calling it poorly done and partisan.
"[153] Republican Senator John McCain, citing Obama Administration CIA Director Leon Panetta (who did not join with the others in the Wall Street Journal Op-ed) had previously said that brutality produced no useful information in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden; leads were "obtained through standard, noncoercive means".
"[172] A bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report,[106] released in part in December 2008 and in full in April 2009, concluded that the legal authorization of "enhanced interrogation techniques" led directly to the abuse and killings of prisoners in US military facilities at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and elsewhere.
[174][175] The report concludes that some authorized techniques including "use of stress positions and sleep deprivation combined with other mistreatment" caused or were direct contributing factors in the cases of several prisoners who were tortured to death.
[178] The legal memos condoning "enhanced interrogation" had "redefined torture",[173] "distorted the meaning and intent of anti-torture laws, [and] rationalized the abuse of detainees",[178] conveying the message that "physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment.
"[173]: xxix The report accused Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputies of being, according to The Washington Post, directly responsible as the "authors and chief promoters of harsh interrogation policies that disgraced the nation and undermined U.S.
[181] The letter was addressed to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey observing that: information indicates that the Bush administration may have systematically implemented, from the top down, detainee interrogation policies that constitute torture or otherwise violate the law. ...
[181]According to The Washington Post the request was denied because Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey felt that "officials acted in 'good faith' when they sought legal opinions, and that the lawyers who provided them used their best judgment.
It also cites a number of warnings against torture, including statements by President Bush and a then-new Supreme Court ruling "which raises possible concerns about future US judicial review of the [interrogation] Program."
[220][221] The cumulative effect of Bush administration legal memos and exemption from prosecution had been to create a "law free zone" according to the former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo, where civilian politicians expected the military to use torture "against our will and judgment".
[231]President George W. Bush has said in a BBC interview he would veto such a bill[231][232] after previously signing an executive order that allows "enhanced interrogation techniques" and may exempt the CIA from Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
[17] A dozen lower-ranking Defense Department personnel were prosecuted for abuses at Abu Ghraib; one CIA contractor who beat Abdul Wali to death in Afghanistan was convicted of felony assault.
[246] In an interview, Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor under Obama, commented on the difficult political problems that torture prosecutions would have created, both in distracting from the administration's response to the Great Recession and potentially alienating the president from his own agencies.
