Retired General: "The Current Administration Has Committed War Crimes"

By Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now!. Posted June 23, 2008.

Last Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held an eight-hour hearing that exposed the role of top Bush administration officials in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques. Meanwhile, Retired Major General Antonio Taguba, the Army general who first investigated the abuse at Abu Ghraib, has accused the Bush administration of committing war crimes. "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," Taguba said.

Juan Gonzalez: Retired General Antonio Taguba, who led the U.S. Army's investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses, has accused the Bush administration of "a systematic regime of torture" and war crimes. Taguba's accusations appear in the preface to a new report released by Physicians for Human Rights. The report uses medical evidence to confirm first-hand accounts of eleven former prisoners who endured torture by U.S. personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.

Taguba writes, "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Amy Goodman: The report was published in the midst of two days of congressional hearings on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held an eight-hour hearing that exposed the role of top Bush administration officials in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques. The committee released a series of previously classified documents detailing how the Pentagon and the CIA transformed the military's SERE resistance training program into a blueprint for interrogating terrorist suspects. Committee Chair Senator Carl Levin explained the timeline of implementing the SERE, or Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, techniques and the role of military psychologists in devising these routines.

Sen. Carl Levin: On October 2, 2002, a week after John Rizzo, the acting CIA general counsel, visited Gitmo, a second senior CIA lawyer, Jonathan Fredman, who was chief counsel to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, went to Guantanamo, attended a meeting of Gitmo staff and discussed a memo proposing the use of aggressive interrogation techniques. That memo had been drafted by a psychologist and psychiatrist from Gitmo, who a couple of weeks earlier had attended that training given at Fort Bragg by instructors by the SERE school.

While the training -- excuse me, while the memo remains classified, minutes from the meeting where it was discussed are not. Those minutes clearly show that the focus of the discussion was aggressive techniques for use against detainees.

When the Gitmo chief of staff suggested at the meeting that Gitmo "can't do sleep deprivation," Lieutenant Colonel Beaver, Gitmo's senior lawyer, responded, "Yes, we can -- with approval." Lieutenant Beaver added that Gitmo, quote, "may need to curb the harsher operations while the International Committee of the Red Cross is around."

Mr. Fredman, the senior CIA lawyer, suggested that it's, quote, "very effective to identify detainee phobias and to use them" and described for the group the so-called "wet towel" technique, which we know as waterboarding. Mr. Fredman said, quote, "It can feel like you're drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you're suffocating, but your body will not cease to function," close-quote.

And Mr. Fredman presented the following disturbing perspective of our legal obligations under our anti-torture laws, saying, quote, "It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."

"If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong." How on earth did we get to the point where a senior U.S. government lawyer would say that whether or not an interrogation technique is torture is, quote, "subject to perception" and that if, quote, "the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong"? The Gitmo senior JAG officer Lieutenant Colonel Beaver's response was: "We will need documentation to protect us."

Juan Gonzalez: The Pentagon's former general counsel William Haynes was repeatedly questioned at Tuesday's hearing about his role in authorizing the interrogation techniques. During two hours of testimony, Haynes responded to dozens of questions by saying he could not recall or remember details about the process of approving the interrogation techniques. Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island blasted Haynes's role in authorizing torture.

Sen. Jack Reed: You said the Geneva Convention doesn't apply, and they honestly ask, "What does apply?" And the only thing you sent them was: these techniques apply -- no conditions, nothing. So don't go around with this attitude of you're protecting the integrity of the military. You degraded the integrity of the United States military.

Juan Gonzalez: A major McClatchy newspaper series investigating the detention of terrorist suspects names Haynes as one of a group of five lawyers at the White House, Pentagon and Justice Department who called themselves the "War Council" and reinterpreted U.S. and international laws about accountability and the treatment of prisoners. Other members of the War Council included Vice President Cheney's former legal adviser and current chief of staff, David Addington; former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo; and former deputy to Gonzales, Timothy Flanigan.

See more stories tagged with: torture, geneva conventions, abu ghraib, donald rumsfeld, waterboarding, william haynes, guantánamo bay, sere, carl levin, war on terrror, antonio taguba, mark benjamin, alberto mora

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

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