Top Bush advisers said to have enthusiastically endorsed torture

An article in the May edition of Vanity Fair reports that torture at Guantánamo was sanctioned by the most senior advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense, according to international lawyer and professor of law at University College London, Philippe Sands, who has conducted a forensic examination of the chain of command leading from the top of the administration to the camp at Guantánamo. The article directly contradicts the administration's account to Congress, which placed responsibility on military commanders and interrogators on the ground for the practices banned by the Geneva Conventions. A delegation of the Bush administration's senior lawyers, including Vice President Dick Cheney's chief counsel (later his chief of staff) David S. Addington, White House counsel (later attorney general) Alberto Gonzales, Pentagon general counsel Jim Haynes, and the CIA's John Rizzo arrived at Guantánamo on Sept. 25, 2002. "They wanted to know what we were doing to get this guy [Mohammed al-Qahtani, allegedly a member of the 9/11 conspiracy and the so-called 20th hijacker]," Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who ran Joint Task Force 170, which oversaw military interrogations, tells Sands, "and Addington was interested in how we were managing it.… They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in DC. They came down to observe and talk." Throughout this period, says Dunlavey, ex-US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was "directly and regularly involved." Sands reports that Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, who was charged with writing a document providing legal authority for harsh interrogation, confirms new details of the crucial meeting that took place at Guantánamo, and she tells Sands she "kept minutes" at other brainstorming sessions in which new techniques were discussed. The younger men would get particularly excited, she says: "You could almost see their d***s getting hard as they got new ideas." Beaver also notes that ideas arose from other sources, such as the television show 24. Jack Bauer, the main character, had many friends at Guantánamo, says Beaver: "He gave people lots of ideas." It was clear to Sands that Beaver believed that Washington was directly involved in the interrogations, and her account confirms what others tell Sands–that Washington's views were being fed into the process by people physically present at Guantánamo.