Bush Administration CIA Decided on Torture Techniques w/o Understanding Origin Possibly Due To Pressure by CIA For Rapid Approval. Obama Says May Prosecute Officials in Who Promoted Torture

The interrogation methods used in the military SERES program were adapted into the Bush administration's harsh program because none of the leaders deciding on it bothered to find out where the techniques in the program had come from.  (They were adaptions of the tortures that North Korean and Chinese used on American troops) according to New York Times report "In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use ", a report that sounds a little too pat, and depends on people believing that those in the Bush administration Americans are stupid, lazy, and uncaring.

I'm not complaining that this sweeps up supposed Clinton nominee CIA chief George Tenet since Tenet was a name worked out through careful negotiations with the Republican who controlled Congress in the mid to late 90s.  Tenet was the Congress's choice, an acceptable nominee to replace Anthony Lake who was the man former president Clinton wanted for the job (according to Richard A. Clark "Against all Enemies, IIRC)(and the CIA chief was still smarter than most of the Bush administration).

But, as revealed by Ron Suskind last year, the tactics were considered torture when communists used them.  (While promoting his book "The Way of the World" Suskind revealed the origins of the techniques leaving mainstream to run around trying to refute or verify the facts.)

Excerpt above linked report:

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

But the claims of a failure to investigate the background of the torture techniques would be more believable if the CIA  was in a rush to use them, and apparently that was the case according to a Washington Post piece "Harsh Tactics Readied Before Their Approval " 

Excerpt:

Previously secret memos and interviews show CIA and Pentagon officials exploring ways to break Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees in early 2002, up to eight months before Justice Department lawyers approved the use of waterboarding and nine other harsh methods, investigators found.

if ( show_doubleclick_ad && ( adTemplate & INLINE_ARTICLE_AD ) == INLINE_ARTICLE_AD && inlineAdGraf ) { placeAd('ARTICLE',commercialNode,20,'inline=y;',true) ; }

The findings are contained in a Senate Armed Services Committee report scheduled for release today that also documents multiple warnings -- from legal and trained interrogation experts -- that the techniques could backfire and might violate U.S. and international law.

One Army lieutenant colonel who reviewed the program warned in 2002 that coercion "usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain," according to the Senate report. A second official, briefed on plans to use aggressive techniques on detainees, was quoted the same year as asking: "Wouldn't that be illegal?"

Once they were accepted, the methods became the basis for harsh interrogations not only in CIA secret prisons, but also in Defense Department internment camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan and Iraq, the report said.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the committee, said the new findings show a direct link between the early policy decisions and the highly publicized abuses of detainees at prisons such as Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

And the Post and ABC among others are reporting that the Obama administration holds open the possibility that Bush administration officials will be prosecuted for the harsh interrogation techniques they promoted.

Ha ha.  Looking around I see Slate has a hard time swallowing the NY Times pablum about Bushies forgetting to look into the background of their little interrogation techniques like I did.   And yeah, the Post says CIA wanted to rush, but the Bushies took 8 months to get the plans to them.

What were they doing?  Praying?  Checking the cupboards in the WH to see if there was any hidden gold? Maybe Cheney was looking into his bank account every hour or something to see if he could will it to rise, like a political David Blane.

This could be the politcal equivalent of dark matter.  WTF, did the Bush administration spend their time doing that kept them from having enough time to effect due diligence before making decisions?

tags: torture  water boarding  harsh interrogation  cia  military interrogations  abu ghraib  guantanemo bay  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit