US torture tactics condemned

2008-06-18 07:18

Washington - Military officials tasked with training US troops to evade enemy interrogations helped Pentagon lawyers devise a list of abusive tactics that could be used in prisons like Guantanamo Bay, a top Senate Democrat said on Tuesday.

Senator Carl Levin, chairperson of the Armed Services Committee, said the harsh techniques were pursued despite strong objections in November 2002 by the military's uniformed lawyers.

"If we use those same techniques offensively against detainees, it says to the world that they have America's stamp of approval," Levin said at the start of a committee hearing.

"That puts our troops at greater risk of being abused if they're captured.

"It also weakens our moral authority and harms our efforts to attract allies to our side in the fight against terrorism."

The hearing was the committee's first look at the origins of the harsher methods used in Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq and how policy decisions on interrogations were vetted across the Defence Department.

Its review fit into a broader picture of the government's handling of detainees, which includes FBI and CIA interrogations in secret prisons.

'Irresponsible and short-sighted'

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, said the administration's legal analysis on detainees and interrogations following the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States 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".

The Pentagon's top civilian lawyer at the time, chief counsel William "Jim" Haynes, was expected to testify. Also present were Richard Shiffrin, Haynes's former deputy on intelligence matters, as well as legal advisers at the time to the chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Guantanamo Bay prison.

According to the Senate committee's findings, Haynes became interested in using harsher interrogation methods as early as July 2002 when his office inquired into a military programme that trained Army soldiers on how to survive enemy interrogations and deny foes valuable intelligence.

Shiffrin said Haynes and other officials wanted to know if the programme, known as "Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape" (SERE) training, could be used to develop more effective interrogation methods.

Shiffrin said his interest was not so much in trying to reverse engineer the tactics to be used against the enemy but rather tapping military expertise in interrogations.

Techniques approved by Rumsfeld

In response, the head of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which ran the SERE programme, offered that resistance training included sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, stress positions, waterboarding and slapping.

Several of those techniques, including stress positions, were later approved by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a December 2002 memo.

Levin said these techniques were approved despite fierce objections a month earlier by the military services' lawyers.

In separate memos the lawyers told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the techniques warranted further study and could be illegal.

The committee also released previously secret and privately held memos dating from the 2002 inception of the harsh interrogation programme at Guantanamo.

Prisoners hidden from Red Cross

In one of these memos the top military lawyer at Guantanamo, Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, explained that the Defence Department had made a practice of hiding prisoners who were being treated harshly, even abusively, from the International Committee of the Red Cross, a non-governmental body empowered to monitor compliance with Geneva Convention rules for the treatment of military prisoners.

Beaver also confirmed that the military was secretly using previously forbidden techniques, such as sleep deprivation, but hiding them so as not to draw "negative attention", according to minutes of the meeting.

"Officially it is not happening," Beaver said, according to minutes from the meeting.

Beaver was speaking at an October 2 2002 meeting between CIA and military lawyers and military intelligence officials on how to counter the resistance of Guantanamo detainees to military interrogation.

Beaver's comments suggest that the CIA's practice of hiding unregistered "ghost detainees" from the ICRC at military jails may have been as much in service to the Pentagon's interrogation programme as it was to the CIA's.

A senior CIA lawyer at the meeting, John Fredman, explained that whether harsh interrogation amounted to torture "is a matter of perception".

"If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong," Fredman said.

- AP