Link to Full Declassified Senate Armed Services Committee Report Released 4/22

[tekisui]

Follow the link to the full, 262 page report, documenting detainee interrogation techniques. From Gitmo to Abu Ghraib:

http://armed-services.senate.gov/Publications/Detainee%20Report%20Final_April%2022%202009.pdf

[tekisui]

1. This looks to be a good report.

It starts with Petraus quoted as saying we treat all detainees with respect. Then, Bush's order saying the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to Al-Qaeda.

The timeline is laid out, and that is important. The DoD had already begun "exploring" interrogation techniques 2 months before bush's order.

[tekisui]

2. Rice, Tenet, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld all gave their apporval.

[EFerrari]

6. But we know the power was with Cheney/Rumsfeld.

They others were window dressing.

[tekisui]

8. Certainly.

What strikes me about this report is how clear it was to all involved that they were breaking the law. They were going back and forth looking for cover. When they found none, they created their own. Even that was later withdrawn, as their is no legal justification.

It is a conspiracy. They could all be tried.

[EFerrari]

10. Office of Professional Responsibility is working up a report

on how those memos were produced. Very important because their production was a crime, imho:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=5508911&mesg_id=5508911

[tekisui]

12. The memos were a crime, absolutely.

The OLC had to withdraw it later. Conveniently, they failed to inform the interrogators.

[EFerrari]

13. Do you know when? Holy cow, I didn't know that.

Today is going to be an extra heavy duty spin cycle. Cheney seems to be going for broke.

[tekisui]

14. December 2003.

According to the Report.

[EFerrari]

17. I better go hit that timeline. But that seems to mean,

the torture began in April 2002 and continued to somewhere in 2008 but there was only nominal legal cover between August 2002 and December 2003.

Another thing to keep in mind: Prisoner abuse started right after 9/11/01. It only took Bush/Cheney 6-7 months to go from that to torture by 4/2002.

[bigtree]

3. thanks, tekisui

:kick:

[tekisui]

4. The Army, the Navy, the FBI, the DoD's Legal Counsel and the Joint Chief's

Legal Counsel questioned the legality of the newly approved techniques. Jane Dalton, the legal counsel of the Joint Chief's starting an investigation into the legality, and it was quashed.

The DoD working group ignored the military lawyers and relied on Yoo.

This is serious shit. Conspiracy to commit torture seems obvious to me. Rummy even signed a memo rescinding the authority to use the techniques when someone else was going to release that it amounted to torture.

[Supersedeas]

31. do you get the sense that William 'Jim' Haynes has some 'credibility' issues?

[Supersedeas]

32. That was a key link in the affair, Gen. Myers alleged instruction to Capt. Dalton

See p. 71 and 72 of the report.

P 102/103 of the PDF file

[tekisui]

5. The OLC withdrew the Bybee and Yoo memos.

In late Dec. 2003 the OLC told the DoD they could no longer rely on the Yoo and Bybee memos, but nothing changed in the practice of torture.

It seems clear to me that any of the techniques used after that date were not in legal 'good faith'.

[Supersedeas]

22. Condi Rice had meeting with NSC Principles to discuss concerns, Alberto Mora took ACTION

[havocmom]

7. to the Greatest page with you and your important link

Thanks for posting.

[merh]

9. this article provides a timeline with links to the memos

COMPLETE COVERAGE
A Guide to the Memos on Torture
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have disclosed memorandums that show a pattern in which Bush administration lawyers set about devising arguments to avoid constraints against mistreatment and torture of detainees. Administration officials responded by releasing hundreds of pages of previously classified documents related to the development of a policy on detainees.

Additional documents were released in December and January by the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a civil lawsuit seeking to discover the extent of abuse of prisoners by the military. Those papers are posted at aclu.org.

2002

JANUARY A series of memorandums from the Justice Department, many of them written by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the department, provided arguments to keep United States officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated. The memorandums, principally one written on Jan. 9, provided legal arguments to support administration officials' assertions that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the war in Afghanistan.

RELATED SITES
• Yoo's Memo on Avoiding Geneva Conventions (PDF document)
Gonzales

JAN. 25 Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in a memorandum to President Bush, said that the Justice Department's advice in the Jan. 9 memorandum was sound and that Mr. Bush should declare the Taliban and Al Qaeda outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. That would keep American officials from being exposed to the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law that carries the death penalty.

RELATED SITES
• Gonzales's Memo to Bush (PDF document)
Powell

JAN. 26 In a memorandum to the White House, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the advantages of applying the Geneva Conventions far outweighed their rejection. He said that declaring the conventions inapplicable would "reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions and undermine the protections of the laws of war for our troops." He also said it would "undermine public support among critical allies."

RELATED SITES
• Powell's Memo to White House (PDF document)

FEB. 2 A memorandum from William H. Taft IV, the State Department's legal adviser, to Mr. Gonzales warned that the broad rejection of the Geneva Conventions posed several problems. "A decision that the conventions do not apply to the conflict in Afghanistan in which our armed forces are engaged deprives our troops there of any claim to the protection of the conventions in the event they are captured." An attachment to this memorandum, written by a State Department lawyer, showed that most of the administration's senior lawyers agreed that the Geneva Conventions were inapplicable. The attachment noted that C.I.A. lawyers asked for an explicit understanding that the administration's public pledge to abide by the spirit of the conventions did not apply to its operatives.

RELATED
• Taft's Memo on Rejection of Geneva Conventions (PDF document)

FEB. 7 In a directive that set new rules for handling prisoners captured in Afghanistan, President Bush broadly cited the need for "new thinking in the law of war." He ordered that all people detained as part of the fight against terrorism should be treated humanely even if the United States considered them not to be protected by the Geneva Conventions, the White House said. Document released by White House.

RELATED SITES
• Bush's Directive on Treatment of Detainees (PDF document)
Bybee

AUGUST A memorandum from Jay S. Bybee, with the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, provided a rationale for using torture to extract information from Qaeda operatives. It provided complex definitions of torture that seemed devised to allow interrogators to evade being charged with that offense.

RELATED SITES
• Justice Dept. Memo on Torture (PDF document)
• Letter by Author of Memo on Torture to White House Counsel

Dec. 2 Memo from Defense Department detailing the policy for interrogation techniques to be used for people seized in Afghanistan. Document released by White House.

RELATED SITES
• Defense Dept. Memo on Afghanistan Detainees (PDF document)

2003

MARCH A memorandum prepared by a Defense Department legal task force drew on the January and August memorandums to declare that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal anti-torture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security. The memorandum also said that executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons, including a belief by interrogators that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful.'

APRIL A memorandum from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to Gen. James T. Hill outlined 24 permitted interrogation techniques, 4 of which were considered stressful enough to require Mr. Rumsfeld's explicit approval. Defense Department officials say it did not refer to the legal analysis of the month before.

RELATED SITES
• Rumsfeld's Memo on Interrogation Techniques (PDF document)

DEC. 24 A letter to the International Committee of the Red Cross over the signature of Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski was prepared by military lawyers. The letter, a response to the Red Cross's concern about conditions at Abu Ghraib, contended that isolating some inmates at the prison for interrogation because of their significant intelligence value was a "military necessity," and said prisoners held as security risks could legally be treated differently from prisoners of war or ordinary criminals.

Other Memorandums

Some have been described in reports in The Times and elsewhere, but their exact contents have not been disclosed. These include a memorandum that provided advice to interrogators to shield them from liability from the Convention Against Torture, an international treaty and the Anti-Torture Act, a federal law. This memorandum provided what has been described as a script in which officials were advised that they could avoid responsibility if they were able to plausibly contend that the prisoner was in the custody of another government and that the United States officials were just getting the information from the other country's interrogation. The memorandum advised that for this to work, the United States officials must be able to contend that the prisoner was always in the other country's custody and had not been transferred there. International law prohibits the "rendition" of prisoners to countries if the possibility of mistreatment can be anticipated.

Neil A. Lewis contributed to this report. Online Document Sources: Findlaw.com and National Security Archive, George Washington University (gwu.edu)

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/international/24MEMO-GUIDE.html

[tekisui]

11. Great! Thanks.

That saves some time.

[merh]

19. Thank you for posting the report.

I've bookmarked it and K&R of course.

[dalaigh lllama]

15. Page 72 - they were torturing to get backup for their Iraq invasion

snip/

...At the time, there was a view by some at GTMO that interrogation operations had not yielded the anticipated intelligence. MAJ Burney testified to the Army IG regarding interrogations:

This is my opinion, even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results...

/snip


Words fail me.:mad:

[KittyWampus]

18. IMO, that is the most salient point of this entire sorry situation. and thanks for teasing it out

of the whole Memo.

[merh]

20. Go read the 9/11 report again

they relied on KSM's confessions.

Now we know for certain that those confessions were as a result of torture. The veracity is in doubt -

Former CIA official John Brennan, who now serves as Obama's White House counterterrorism adviser, told the Daily News then that Mohammed was "quite creative, and threw out a lot of seeds to see if they would actually germinate."

"They didn't have the people or capability to do all of those," Brennan said of the 30 plots KSM claimed to have conceived of.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/04/22/2009-04-22_dick_cheney_full_of_crap_official.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3843628

[dalaigh lllama]

23. What makes it more horrifying -- they didn't even know what the FUCK they were doing

They were like sadistic children surrounding some hapless beast. Earlier in the report they say not only were they lacking professional interrogators, but they only had one who spoke Arabic. So, when they tortured, they weren't even up to snuff on how to get information efficiently. And, if someone were to die under "questioning," it was because "they were doing it wrong." So much of this must have devolved into just random abuse -- my mind can't even go there.

[lunatica]

16. kick

[Supersedeas]

21. NSC Condi Rice got the ball started by requesting a briefing and legal review of techniques in

spring of 2002. p.XV of the Report.

[derby378]

24. Page 3, footnote 16

One recipient of the 10/24/02 minutes has been redacted. There are three possible candidates for the unidentified operative who are listed here:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torturingdemocracy/documents/20021002.pdf

[Supersedeas]

25. Long footnote #10, on page 2 regarding Alberto Gonzalez's recommendations to the President

[Supersedeas]

26. the redaction of Footnote 30 and references to that memo is also interesting

p. 6 of the Report or page 37 of the PDF file.

[derby378]

27. My guess is that they're protecting the location of a SERE training site

There are two Navy SERE level C training sites whose locations are more or less available to the public: NAS Brunswick, Maine at the Navy Remote Training Site, Rangeley; and NAS North Island, California at the Navy Remote Training Site, Warner Springs.

Maybe this is a secret third site that hasn't been made public yet?

[derby378]

28. Page 23-24 - CIA contractor redacted, but revealed

In July 2002, after the JPRA training for __________, the senior SERE psychologist, Dr. Bruce Jessen was detailed to _____ for several days. At the conclusion of this assignment, Dr. Jessen retired from the Department of Defense and began working as an independent contractor to MJ&A.

"MJ&A" was redacted from the Committee report. But Democracy Now! has helped blow the lid on Mitchell Jessen & Associates, which helped develop the Bush administration's torture program:

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/21/the_story_of_mitchell_jessen_associates

Their address and phone number is available on Google, if you should wish to call them up with questions.

[dalaigh lllama]

29. page 78 -- Torture doesn't work

...Despite the apparent instruction on physical pressures, MAJ Burney told the Army IG that instructors at Fort Bragg believed that the techniques used in SERE training should not be brought back for use at GTMO and that "interrogation tactics that rely on physical pressures or torture, while they do get you information, do not tend to get you accurate information or reliable information...In a written statement provided to the Committee, MAJ Burney reiterated that point, stating that "it was stressed time and time again that psychological investigations have proven that harsh interrogations do not work. At best it will get you information that a prisoner thinks you want to hear to make the interrogation stop, but that information is strongly likely to be false..."

[dalaigh lllama]

30. snips from page 84 (torture really, really doesn't work)

"The use of physical pressures brings with it a large number of potential negative side effects... When individuals are gradually exposed to increasing levels of discomfort, it is more common for them to resist harder. That is one of the reasons we use it - to increase the resistance posture of our soldiers. If individuals are put under enough discomfort, i.e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain. This will increase the amount of information they tell the interrogator, but it does not mean the information is accurate. In fact, it usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain. Now, there are certain exceptions, like with all generalizations, but they are not common. Bottom line: The likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low. The likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the level of resistance in a detainee is very high...

"It is important to remember that SERE instructors use these techniques(physical pressures) because they are effective at increasing resistance. ...Because of the danger involved, very few SERE instructors are allowed to actually use physical pressures...everything that is occurring (in SERE school) is very carefully monitored and paced... Even with all these safeguards, injuries and accidents do happen. The risk with real detainees is increased exponentially.

"My strong recommendation is that you do not use physical pressures ...(If GTMO does decide to use them) you are taking a substantial risk, with very limited potential benefit."