The Bush Administration has long maintained that the overtly cruel and abusive treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was the conduct of a few "bad apples."
But a Senate investigation is tracking the rot to its source. And its findings add to the mounting evidence that the sometimes systematic torture of detainees at American hands was the result of decisions made at the highest levels of government -- and particularly within the office of the vice president.
Warren P. Strobel writes for McClatchy Newspapers: "A senior Pentagon official in July 2002 sought the advice of military psychologists to help design aggressive detainee interrogation techniques that would later be linked with prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq, a Senate investigation has found.
Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, released new documentary evidence on the origins of the techniques at a hearing this morning.
In his opening statement, Levin asked: "[H]ow did it come about that American military personnel stripped detainees naked, put them in stress positions, used dogs to scare them, put leashes around their necks to humiliate them, hooded them, deprived them of sleep, and blasted music at them. Were these actions the result of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own? It would be a lot easier to accept if it were. But that's not the case. The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. In the process, they damaged our ability to collect intelligence that could save lives."
The investigation appears to refute a key aspect of the administration's story.
Joby Warrick writes in The Washington Post that the investigation "has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.
"The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.
"The reported evidence . . . also shows that military lawyers raised strong concerns about the legality of the practices as early as November 2002, a month before Rumsfeld approved them. The findings contradict previous accounts by top Bush administration appointees, setting the stage for new clashes between the White House and Congress over the origins of interrogation methods that many lawmakers regard as torture and possibly illegal. . .
"The new evidence challenges previous statements by William J. 'Jim' Haynes II, who served as Defense Department general counsel under Rumsfeld and is among the witnesses scheduled to testify at today's hearing. . . .
"Haynes and other senior administration officials also visited Guantanamo Bay in September 2002 to 'talk about techniques,' said one congressional official. Also on the trip was David S. Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney."
The Senate investigation seems to dovetail with the narrative human rights lawyer Phillippe Sands laid out in his book and May Vanity Fair article.
Sands writes: "The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a 'trickle up' explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration--by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense."
Addington's Man
Haynes is turning out to be a key figure in all this. But it probably would be a mistake to see him as much more than a pliant tool in the service of Addington, Cheney's cutthroat enforcer. As
As Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker in February 2006: "In 1989, when Cheney was named Secretary of Defense by George H. W. Bush, he hired Addington as a special assistant, and eventually appointed him to be his general counsel. Addington, in turn, hired Haynes as his special assistant and soon promoted him to general counsel of the Army.
"After George W. Bush took office, Addington came to the White House with Cheney, and Haynes took his boss's old job at the Pentagon. Addington has played a central part in virtually all of the Administration's legal strategies, including interrogation and detainee policies. The office of the Vice-President has no statutory role in the military chain of command. But Addington's tenacity, willingness to work long hours, and unalloyed support from Cheney made him, in the words of another former Bush White House appointee, 'the best infighter in the Administration.' One former government lawyer described him as 'the Octopus'-his hands seemed to reach into every legal issue.
"Haynes rarely discussed his alliance with Cheney's office, but his colleagues, as one of them told me, noticed that 'stuff moved back and forth fast' between the two power centers. Haynes was not considered to be a particularly ideological thinker, but he was seen as 'pliant,' as one former Pentagon colleague put it, when it came to serving the agenda of Cheney and Addington."
Here's more from Mayer in her July 2006 New Yorker profile of Addington: "Addington created a system to insure that virtually all important documents relating to national-security matters were seen by the Vice-President's office. The former high-ranking Administration lawyer said that Addington regularly attended White House legal meetings with the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency. He received copies of all National Security Council documents, including internal memos from the staff. And, as a former top official in the Defense Department, he exerted influence over the legal office at the Pentagon, helping his protégé William J. Haynes secure the position of general counsel. A former national-security lawyer, speaking of the Pentagon's legal office, said, 'It's obvious that Addington runs the whole operation.'"
Mora Speaks
In his prepared statement for today's hearing, former Navy general counsel Alberto J. Mora, who fought a private battle within the Pentagon to maintain longstanding interrogation rules, writes that "our Nation's policy decision to use so-called 'harsh' interrogation techniques during the War on Terror was a mistake of massive proportions. . . . This interrogation policy -- which may aptly be labeled a 'policy of cruelty' -- violated our founding values, our constitutional system and the fabric of our laws, our over-arching foreign policy interests, and our national security."
Mora reminds us: "The United States was founded on the principle that every person -- not just each citizen -- possesses certain inalienable rights that no government, including our own, may violate."
And he says the cost has been paid in American lives: "[T]here 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."
The McClatchy Detainee Series
In the third part of a major McClatchy Newspapers series on detainees, Tom Lasseter writes: "A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam -- thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them -- and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists. . . .
"Guantanamo became a school for jihad, complete with a council of elders who issued fatwas, binding religious instructions, to the other detainees."
Time for impeachment!!
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