Thousands of Pages of Evidence and a Quarter Million Signatures: What Will It Take For Attorney General to Prosecute Torture Crimes?

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted April 24, 2009.

The tortured case for invading Iraq

The night that the Senate Armed Services Committee report came out, McClacthy reporter Jonathan S. Landay published a story reporting that "harsh methods" were rolled out specifically to extract a fictitious connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, according to excerpts from an interview with a former military psychologist that was included in the report. "A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under 'pressure' to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq," Landay wrote.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

"I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," Senate Armed Services Chair Carl Levin told reporters in a conference call Tuesday. "They made out links where they didn't exist."

Landay also quoted a former intelligence official, who said, "There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used."

"The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

As Landay pointed out, "It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly -- Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 -- according to a newly released Justice Department document."

Knowingly seeking false confessions?

News of the Bush administration's use of torture to extract intelligence that would suit its war is especially troubling given what the Senate Armed Services Committee report reveals about the background of the interrogation techniques it devised. The report provides the detailed story of how, as early as December 2001 -- more than a month before President George W. Bush signed a memorandum declaring that those who could be linked to the terror attacks of September 11th would be stripped of the rights traditionally given to prisoners of war -- "the Department of Defense General Counsel's Office had already solicited information on detainee 'exploitation' from the Joint Personal Recovery Agency, an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions."

As the report explains:

The JPRA is the Pentagon agency that oversees the now famous Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training, which teaches U.S. military personnel to withstand "physical and psychological pressures" using methods that, according to one JPRA instructor, is "based on illegal exploitation (under the rules listed in the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War) of prisoners over the past 50 years."

The techniques used in SERE school, based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions, including stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. It can also include face and body slaps and until recently, for some who attended the Navy's SERE school, it included waterboarding.

Crucially, the report points out that the SERE methods were never designed to obtain reliable information, noting that "typically, those who play the part of interrogators in SERE school neither are trained interrogators nor are they qualified to be."

See more stories tagged with: iraq, 9/11, cia, torture, al qaeda, al qaeda, new york times, dick cheney, donald rumsfeld, condoleezza rice, john yoo, prosecutions, jay bybee, carl levin, eric holder, torture memos, jonathan landay

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