Senate probe blames top Bush officials for abuses

Top officials–including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff–were responsible for the use of "abusive" interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a bipartisan Senate report concluded Thursday. The long-awaited Senate Armed Services Committee report bluntly refuted the Bush administration's repeated claims that the abuses, which helped fuel the Iraq insurgency and damaged America's reputation around the world, were the work of a few low-level "bad apples." "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," said the report's 19-page unclassified executive summary. "Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority." "Attempts by senior officials to pass the buck to low-ranking soldiers while avoiding any responsibility for abuses are unconscionable," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the panel's chairman, who released the executive summary with Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the committee's top Republican. The report "details the inexcusable link between abusive interrogation techniques used by our enemies in violation of the Geneva Convention and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody. These policies are wrong and must never be repeated," said McCain, a former prisoner of war in North Vietnam. The report is the most direct refutation to date of the administration's rationale for using aggressive interrogation tactics -- that inflicting humiliation and pain on detainees was legal and effective, and helped protect the country. The 25-member panel, without one dissent among the 12 Republican members, declared the opposite to be true. The report outlines how senior U.S. officials, including Rumsfeld, Myers and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice shaped the policy decisions that led to the use of interrogation techniques that the administration insists were legal but that numerous legal authorities and some former military officers have denounced as torture and war crimes. Detainee abuses led to attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, according to testimony to the committee by a former Navy general counsel, Alberto Mora. "There are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq–as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat–are, respectively, the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo," he said. The administration's policies and the resulting controversies, the panel concluded, "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority." The panel's investigation focused on the Defense Department's employment of controversial interrogation practices, including forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and the use of dogs. The practices, some of which had already been adopted by the CIA at its secret prisons, were adapted for interrogations at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and later migrated to U.S. detention camps in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. The report's executive summary, made public by the committee's Democratic chairman Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and its top Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said Rumsfeld contributed to the abuse by authorizing aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay on December 2, 2002. He rescinded the authorization six weeks later. But the report said word of his approval continued to spread within U.S. military circles and encouraged the use of harsh techniques as far away as Iraq and Afghanistan. The report concluded that Rumsfeld's actions were "a direct cause of detainee abuse" at Guantanamo and "influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq." "The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own," the executive summary said. Rice, as national security adviser, and other Cabinet officers participated in meetings where specific interrogation techniques were discussed, the report said. The report said that Rumsfeld's authorization of the techniques at Guantanamo "was a direct cause of detainee abuse there." By approving a memo from Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes, Rumsfeld "contributed to the use of abusive techniques," including using military dogs, forced nudity and stress positions in Afghanistan and Iraq, it said. Myers' decision to cut short a legal and policy review of the techniques sparked by the concerns of military legal authorities was "inappropriate and undermined the military's review process," the report said. "Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at (Guantanamo)." The detainee scandal at Abu Ghraib and later revelations of aggressive U.S. interrogations such as "waterboarding" led to an international outcry and charges that the United States allowed prisoners to be tortured, a claim denied by the Bush administration. The Bush administration has since recanted the policies under pressure from Congress, while President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. The report found that the military derived the techniques from a Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape program, or SERE, which trains U.S. soldiers to resist enemy interrogation that does not conform to the Geneva Conventions or international law. "These policies are wrong and must never be repeated," McCain, who last month ended an unsuccessful bid for the White House, said in a statement released with the executive summary. McCain said the report revealed an "inexcusable link between abusive interrogation techniques used by our enemies who ignored the Geneva Conventions and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody." The full report, billed as the most thorough examination of U.S. military detainee policy by Congress, remains classified. Committee staff said the full report was approved on November 20 in a unanimous voice vote by 17 of the panel's 25 members. The panel consists of 13 Democrats and 12 Republicans. The executive summary also traces the erosion of detainee treatment standards to a Feb,. 7, 2002, memorandum signed by President George W. Bush stating that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or legal protections. "The president's order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment," the summary said. "It is particularly troubling that senior officials approved the use of interrogation techniques that were originally designed to simulate abusive tactics used by our enemies against our own soldiers," the report said, "and that were modeled, in part, on tactics used by the Communist Chinese to elicit false confessions from U.S. military personnel." Instructors from the Pentagon agency that trains soldiers to resist such treatment were sent to Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq to assist in adapting the Chinese methods, it said. The abusive techniques–waterboarding, nudity, stress positions, exploiting phobias, and treating detainees "like animals"–were "at odds with the commitment to humane treatment of detainees in U.S. custody" and inconsistent with the goal of collecting accurate information, the report concluded. Human rights and constitutional law organizations have urged further action, ranging from an independent commission to prosecutions of those involved in authorizing the interrogations. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has helped defend detainees at Guantanamo, said the committee report is valuable because "it's official, it's bipartisan." "It's open and explicit, going right to Rumsfeld and having Rice involved," Ratner said. "It breaks new ground in saying that the SERE techniques basically don't work . . . that they're actually designed to elicit false confessions." --Army Col. Randy Moulton, the commander of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which trains soldiers to resist abusive interrogations. The report said that Moulton, "who had no experience in detainee interrogations," had authorized instructors in the Army's "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape," or SERE, program to actively participate in interrogations using abusive tactics. This "was a serious failure in leadership that led to the abuse of detainees" in U.S. custody. --Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who introduced the techniques. It said that Miller ignored warnings from Pentagon and FBI investigators that the techniques were "potentially unlawful" and that their use would strengthen detainee resistance. Miller, it said, also helped to bring harsh interrogation methods to Iraq during visits in August and September 2003. --Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq. Sanchez committed a "serious error in judgment" by approving the use of military working dogs and stress positions, which it said were "a direct cause of detainee abuse in Iraq."