[DEBATE] : Officer cites abusive US interrogations in Iraq

[tony roshan samara]

				Officer cites abusive US interrogations in Iraq				
				
									
					

					
						
							
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer1 hour,  47 minutes ago

							
						
The Iraqi prisoner had valuable intelligence, U.S. special forces
believed, and they desperately wanted it. They demanded that expert
American military trainers teach them the same types of abusive
interrogation techniques that North Korea and Vietnamese forces once
used against U.S. prisoners of war.
The trainers resisted, according to testimony prepared for a Senate
hearing Thursday; the methods were intended to elicit confessions for
propaganda use, rather than gather intelligence. They were overruled
and ordered to demonstrate on the prisoner in September 2003, early in
the war.
The interrogation went ahead before a lead trainer stepped in and stopped it. He and his team were sent home shortly thereafter.
The written testimony of two military officers troubled by the use
of unconventional interrogation techniques was obtained Wednesday by
The Associated Press ahead of the Senate Armed Forces Committee
hearing. According to the testimony, the military invaded Iraq and took
control without expert interrogators or well-reasoned polices for
dealing with prisoners, and was flailing for information however it
could get it.
The hearing is the committee's second on the origins of the
Pentagon's harsh interrogation program. The review fits into a broader
picture of the government's handling of detainees, which includes FBI
and CIA interrogations in secret prisons.
"In far too many cases, we simply erred in pressing interrogation
and interrogators beyond the edge of the envelope; as a result,
interrogation was no longer an intelligence collection method; rather,
it had morphed into a form of punishment for those who wouldn't
cooperate," Col. Steven Kleinman said in his prepared testimony.
He headed the small team of military trainers from the Joint
Personnel Recovery Agency sent to Iraq in September 2003 to help
special forces get more information from stubborn and resistant
detainees.
"When presented with the choice of getting smarter or getting tougher, we chose the latter," Kleinman stated.
The agency runs the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE)
training program, which includes stressful mock interrogations intended
to prepare soldiers to withstand and resist abusive interrogations in
the event they are ever taken prisoner. The program uses methods
derived from American prisoners of war real-life experiences. The
techniques include forced nudity, stress positions, exposure to
extremes in weather and waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning.
The program was once known as the Communist Interrogation Model. It
was designed to "physically and psychologically debilitate an
individual's ability to resist, with the primary objective of forcing
compliance," according to Kleinman's testimony.
The special forces task force asked Kleinman's team to teach them
the interrogation methods used in the SERE course. Kleinman refused. He
was overruled by the task force's lawyers.
They then demanded that Kleinman's team demonstrate the techniques
on an Iraqi prisoner. Kleinman again refused and again was overruled,
according to testimony from retired Air Force Col. John Moulton II,
Kleinman's commander at the time as the head of the Joint Personnel
Recovery Agency.
The interrogation went forward. Kleinman stopped it. He and his team
subsequently were sent home by the task force, according to Moulton.
Kleinman said the special forces team was ill-served by the
military's failure to train and prepare for interrogation operations.
"Pressed to find a solution to a critical intelligence shortfall,
special operators followed their professional instincts. They could not
wait for the intelligence community to respond," he stated.
The special forces team was not the first to seek SERE techniques
for use in interrogations. In June, the Senate committee released a
trail of documents that showed the Pentagon in June 2002 was collecting
information about SERE interrogation techniques for use against
detainees. The U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved several of those
techniques, including stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sleep
disruption, for use at Guantanamo Bay in December 2002, despite the
objections of military lawyers who warned they might be illegal.
The military in 2006 rewrote the rules on interrogations,
specifically prohibiting many of the harsh techniques approved by
Rumsfeld.
The committee on Wednesday also released documents showing
then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her top lawyer John
Bellinger were briefed on SERE interrogation methods at the White House
in 2002 or 2003.
"I recall being told...that these techniques had been deemed
not to cause significant physical or psychological harm," Rice wrote.
Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said in an interview
Wednesday that Rice and Bellinger's statements show the White House was
aware that the harsh techniques under consideration for use by American
interrogators were were adapted from those used by former enemies who
regularly violated the Geneva Conventions.
"These discussion about the use of these tactics took place at
the highest level of our government, at the White House," Levin said.
Levin contends that the high-level endorsement paved the way
for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and elswhere in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
						
										
					
				

				
			
		
		

		
		

    
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