WaPo: Pentagon Blamed Military for Own Torture Policy

The Washington Post is reporting that a Senate investigation -- parts of which are expected to be made public Tuesday -- has concluded that high-ranking Pentagon officials researched "harsh interrogation techniques" including "stress positions, sleep deprivation and the hooding of detainees during questioning" and waterboarding, as early as summer 2002.  Further, the Pentagon falsely attributed the development of these techniques to requests from "commanders in the field" when in fact the techniques were initially investigated by the top officials themselves.

Report Questions Pentagon Accounts

Officials Looked Into Interrogation Methods Early On

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 17, 2008; Page A01

A Senate 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 Post does not go to the trouble of adding 2 and 2, here: does not, that is, raise the possibility that the Pentagon asked "the commanders at the detention facility in Cuba" to request "permission" to use the very techniques that the Pentagon was already investigating.  This would be an obvious question to ask: Did Rumsfeld instruct Gitmo to ask Rumsfeld for permission to engage in torture, thus providing CYA for Rumsfeld?

The reported evidence -- some of which is expected to be made public at a Senate hearing today -- 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.

"Some have suggested that detainee abuses committed by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantanamo were the result of a 'few bad apples' acting on their own. It would be a lot easier to accept if that were true," Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote in a statement for delivery at a committee hearing this morning. "Senior officials in the United States government sought out information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."

Note Levin's words here.  He is asserting that Senior officials "twisted the law to create the appearance of legality."  This indicates that Levin is satisfied that the government was violating the spirit of the law, at the very least.  So it is depressing (but hardly unexpected) that the next move from Congress will be to ask the Justice Department to determine whether the "twisting" was successful.

A group of 56 Congressional Democrats last week asked the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate whether any Bush administration officials may have broken laws in approving the use of harsh interrogation techniques for suspected terrorists.

Apparently, the game here, as far as some Democrats in Congress are concerned, is not to aggressively pursue violations of the Constitution, but gingerly to check whether the White House successfully created a veneer of legality by "twisting the law."  I am getting tired of this.  That is not why we have a government -- so that people can play this game with each other, to see whether they can find clever ways to keep torture legal.