Constitutional Law

Senate Committee Ties Top Bush Officials To Severe Treatment of Detainees

A report from the Senate Armed Services Committee maintains that top Bush administration officials are largely responsible for the severely harsh treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The New York Times says the report issued late yesterday by the committee’s leaders, Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) “represents the most thorough review by Congress to date of the origins of the abuse of prisoners in American military custody, and it explicitly rejects the Bush administration’s contention that tough interrogation methods have helped keep the country and its troops safe.”

The committee’s report also blasts the administration for its hand in the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The abuses of Abu Ghraib, GTMO and elsewhere cannot be chalked up to the actions of a few bad apples,” Levin said in a press statement about the report. “Attempts by senior officials to pass the buck to low ranking soldiers while avoiding any responsibility for abuses are unconscionable. The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees. Our investigation is an effort to set the record straight on this chapter in our history that has so damaged both America’s standing and our security. America needs to own up to its mistakes so that we can rebuild some of the good will that we have lost.”

The report, the result of an 18-month congressional investigation, notes that administration officials met in the White House in early 2002 to sign off on the use of the abusive interrogation methods and that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s staff culled information about the interrogation techniques from a Cold War era military training program dubbed Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE). SERE training, as the committee’s report notes, was designed to help American troops prepare for methods they could be subjected to if they were captured by the Soviet Union or China.

“It is particularly troubling that senior officials approved the use of interrogation techniques that were originally designed to simulate abusive tactics used by our enemies against our own soldiers and that were modeled, in part, on tactics used by the Communist Chinese to elicit false confessions from U.S. military personnel.”

SERE techniques “were never intended to be used against detainees in U.S. custody,” Levin said. See the committee’s full report here.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on December 12, 2008 (boomark / email).