Senate holds hearings on interrogation methods; Physicians for Human Rights issues report on torture of detainees

On Tuesday, June 17th, the Senate Armed Services Committee began a series of hearings seeking the origins of the harsh interrogation techniques used in Guantanamo and Iraq. In particular, this past week’s hearing focused on how interrogation techniques used by the Pentagon to train military personnel to withstand the rigors of captivity were reverse engineered for use against detainees in American custody. These techniques (known as SERE for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) were specifically designed so that American forces could survive an interrogation that violated the Geneva Convention. Trained interrogators have said that SERE techniques are not meant to reflect effective methods of gaining information. But in 2002, the Department of Defense began investigating reverse-engineering these techniques for use on the detainees held at Guantanamo.

In his opening remarks, Senator Carl Levin summarized the timeline of events leading to the use of the harsh interrogation methods and subsequent cover-up. His summation makes it clear that the use of methods of torture and brutal questioning was not just the work of a few rogue operatives, but a systematic approach to gaining intelligence that filtered its way through the entire armed services. The evidence also demonstrates that even from the beginning, there was an awareness from military lawyers that the techniques being used could amount to torture, and there was significant pushback from within the armed services and the FBI. Many of the memos disclosed at the hearings were new to the public.

As someone who has been following the torture issue for awhile, the panelists at the hearings were of great interest to me, including Alberto Mora, former general counsel for the Navy, who by late 2002 was objecting to the interrogation methods being used by the Pentagon, Diane Beaver, the DoD lawyer whose memo outlined potential interrogation techniques and who to some extent has been scape-goated for the decisions of her superiors to use her suggestions without oversight, and William Hayes, the Pentagon General Counsel. Hayes in particular was singled out by senators for authorizing the use of these techniques. Beaver’s work was the subject of a recent Vanity Fair article that took apart the Bush Administration’s “trickle up” theory of interrogation techniques to demonstrate how lawyers for the Pentagon systematically sought out the potential for harsh techniques. The New York Times wrote recently about the post-9/11 confusion on interrogation techniques.

The complete hearings for both the morning and the afternoon can be found in the C-Span archives, along with the House Judiciary Committee hearings on Guantanamo techniques. Supporting documents to the hearings are here. Many of those who testified submitted their opening statements in advance, which are found on the Armed Services Committee website.

In other news, Physicians for Human Rights has issued a report detailing evidence of abuse in 11 former U.S. detainees held in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Iraq. The report concludes that the detainees, who were never charged with any crimes, were tortured, including beatings, electric shock, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sodomy and scores of other abuses. The report is prefaced by retired U.S. Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led the Army's investigation into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in 2003. "There is no longer any doubt that the current administration committed war crimes," Taguba states. "The only question is whether those who ordered torture will be held to account."