Mary Walker, the former Air Force general counsel, received an urgent memo click here from the Pentagon's top attorney on Jan. 17, 2003.
Attached to the classified document was a set of directives click here drafted two days earlier by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"Establish a working group within the Department of Defense to assess the legal, policy and operational issues relating to the interrogations of detainees held by the U.S. Armed Forces in the war on terrorism," a copy of the memo said. "The working group should address and make recommendations as warranted on the following issues: legal considerations raised by detainees held by U.S. Armed Forces. Policy considerations with respect to the choice of interrogation techniques, including, contribution to intelligence collection, effect on treatment of captured U.S. military personnel, effect on detainee prosecutions, historical role of U.S. armed forces in conducting interrogations, recommendations for employment of particular interrogation techniques by [Department of Defense] interrogators."
Earlier this week, the Defense Department turned over an 81-page document to the American Civil Liberties Union in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that provides further insight into the extraordinary executive branch powers granted to President George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks. John Yoo, a former deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who had also written the August 2002 legal opinion widely referred to as the “Torture Memo”, drafted the document, dated March 14, 2003. The August 2002 memo provided CIA interrogators with the legal authority to use long-outlawed tactics, such as waterboarding, when interrogating so-called high-level terrorist detainees.
Yoo's March 14, 2003 memo, declassified Tuesday, essentially provided military interrogators with legal cover in the event that they resorted to brutal and violent methods to extract information from prisoners. It is virtually identical to the memo he prepared for CIA interrogators.
"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote. "In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."
But the legal opinion, rescinded in early 2004, was not entirely the work of Yoo.
In early January 2003, commanders stationed at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba complained to Rumsfeld that military officials were unable to glean information from prisoners about alleged terrorist plots in the US and abroad using conventional interrogation methods. Following his conversation with military officials, on Jan. 15, 2003, Rumsfeld sent William Haynes II, the Pentagon's general counsel, a memo requesting that he form a "working group" to determine what methods military interrogators could use to extract information from a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. Haynes asked the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel for guidance and selected Walker to chair a "working group" to write a report on legally permissible interrogation techniques. The members of the group included former Undersecretary of Defense for policy Douglas Feith, officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency officials, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and judge advocate generals (JAG's) from all four branches of the military.
But by the time the Walker's group had settled in for its first meeting, interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had already begun to violate the Geneva Convention.
"People were trying like hell how to ratchet up the pressure," and used techniques that ranged from drawing on prisoners' bodies, placing women's underwear on prisoners heads -- a practice that later reappeared in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison -- to telling subjects, "I'm on the line with somebody in Yemen and he's in a room with your family and a grenade that's going to pop unless you talk," a military official, who took part in discussions with Mary Walker's "working group," told the Wall Street Journal in June 2004. "We'd been at this for a year-plus and got nothing out of them."
Immediately following 9/11, the United Nations Committee Against Torture reaffirmed the policies in the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment stating that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." Moreover, the convention says that individuals who resort to torture cannot defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from superiors and that orders from superiors. It was this policy signed by 142 nations that Walker and members of the "working group" sought to bypass. The report added that interrogators accused of torture should be advised that they could defend their actions by saying Justice Department lawyers told them their methods were legal.
While Walker's report was being drafted, the group discussed 35 different interrogation techniques that could be used to obtain information from prisoners. The group settled on 24 of the 35 methods. 17 of which appeared in Army field manuals. Early drafts of the report advocated intimidating prisoners with dogs, removing prisoners' clothing, shaving their beards, slapping prisoners in the face and waterboarding. Still, the final set of methods, which included isolation, and "attacking or insulting the ego of a detainee", referred to as "pride and ego down" violated the Geneva Convention.
Still, more extreme interrogation methods that made it into the final draft of the report rankled some of the JAG's who participated in the working group. The military lawyers feared the methods would put U.S. soldiers in danger if they were captured and would tarnish the reputation and image of the U.S. abroad.
"Will the American people find we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values. How would such perceptions affect our ability to prosecute the Global War on Terrorism," wrote http://balkin.blogspot.com/jag.memos.pdf Rear Adm. Michael Lohr, a member of the "working group," in a February 2003 letter to Walker. Lohr was so upset with the draft report and the advice provided by the DOJ that he requested Walker include a sentence in the final report making it clear that the legal findings were based exclusively attorneys in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.
Lohr was not alone. Maj. Gen. Jack Rives, who at the time was judge advocate general of the Air Force, also wrote a letter to Walker warning that the interrogation techniques in the report would violate military law.
"Several of the exceptional techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law and the [Uniform Code of Military Justice]," Rives wrote. "Treating detainees inconsistently with the [Geneva] Convention arguably "lowers the bar" for the treatment of U.S. POW's in future conflicts."
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Attached to the classified document was a set of directives click here drafted two days earlier by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"Establish a working group within the Department of Defense to assess the legal, policy and operational issues relating to the interrogations of detainees held by the U.S. Armed Forces in the war on terrorism," a copy of the memo said. "The working group should address and make recommendations as warranted on the following issues: legal considerations raised by detainees held by U.S. Armed Forces. Policy considerations with respect to the choice of interrogation techniques, including, contribution to intelligence collection, effect on treatment of captured U.S. military personnel, effect on detainee prosecutions, historical role of U.S. armed forces in conducting interrogations, recommendations for employment of particular interrogation techniques by [Department of Defense] interrogators."
Earlier this week, the Defense Department turned over an 81-page document to the American Civil Liberties Union in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that provides further insight into the extraordinary executive branch powers granted to President George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks. John Yoo, a former deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who had also written the August 2002 legal opinion widely referred to as the “Torture Memo”, drafted the document, dated March 14, 2003. The August 2002 memo provided CIA interrogators with the legal authority to use long-outlawed tactics, such as waterboarding, when interrogating so-called high-level terrorist detainees.
Yoo's March 14, 2003 memo, declassified Tuesday, essentially provided military interrogators with legal cover in the event that they resorted to brutal and violent methods to extract information from prisoners. It is virtually identical to the memo he prepared for CIA interrogators.
"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote. "In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."
But the legal opinion, rescinded in early 2004, was not entirely the work of Yoo.
In early January 2003, commanders stationed at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba complained to Rumsfeld that military officials were unable to glean information from prisoners about alleged terrorist plots in the US and abroad using conventional interrogation methods. Following his conversation with military officials, on Jan. 15, 2003, Rumsfeld sent William Haynes II, the Pentagon's general counsel, a memo requesting that he form a "working group" to determine what methods military interrogators could use to extract information from a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. Haynes asked the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel for guidance and selected Walker to chair a "working group" to write a report on legally permissible interrogation techniques. The members of the group included former Undersecretary of Defense for policy Douglas Feith, officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency officials, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and judge advocate generals (JAG's) from all four branches of the military.
But by the time the Walker's group had settled in for its first meeting, interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had already begun to violate the Geneva Convention.
"People were trying like hell how to ratchet up the pressure," and used techniques that ranged from drawing on prisoners' bodies, placing women's underwear on prisoners heads -- a practice that later reappeared in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison -- to telling subjects, "I'm on the line with somebody in Yemen and he's in a room with your family and a grenade that's going to pop unless you talk," a military official, who took part in discussions with Mary Walker's "working group," told the Wall Street Journal in June 2004. "We'd been at this for a year-plus and got nothing out of them."
Immediately following 9/11, the United Nations Committee Against Torture reaffirmed the policies in the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment stating that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." Moreover, the convention says that individuals who resort to torture cannot defend their actions by saying they were acting on orders from superiors and that orders from superiors. It was this policy signed by 142 nations that Walker and members of the "working group" sought to bypass. The report added that interrogators accused of torture should be advised that they could defend their actions by saying Justice Department lawyers told them their methods were legal.
While Walker's report was being drafted, the group discussed 35 different interrogation techniques that could be used to obtain information from prisoners. The group settled on 24 of the 35 methods. 17 of which appeared in Army field manuals. Early drafts of the report advocated intimidating prisoners with dogs, removing prisoners' clothing, shaving their beards, slapping prisoners in the face and waterboarding. Still, the final set of methods, which included isolation, and "attacking or insulting the ego of a detainee", referred to as "pride and ego down" violated the Geneva Convention.
Still, more extreme interrogation methods that made it into the final draft of the report rankled some of the JAG's who participated in the working group. The military lawyers feared the methods would put U.S. soldiers in danger if they were captured and would tarnish the reputation and image of the U.S. abroad.
"Will the American people find we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values. How would such perceptions affect our ability to prosecute the Global War on Terrorism," wrote http://balkin.blogspot.com/jag.memos.pdf Rear Adm. Michael Lohr, a member of the "working group," in a February 2003 letter to Walker. Lohr was so upset with the draft report and the advice provided by the DOJ that he requested Walker include a sentence in the final report making it clear that the legal findings were based exclusively attorneys in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.
Lohr was not alone. Maj. Gen. Jack Rives, who at the time was judge advocate general of the Air Force, also wrote a letter to Walker warning that the interrogation techniques in the report would violate military law.
"Several of the exceptional techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law and the [Uniform Code of Military Justice]," Rives wrote. "Treating detainees inconsistently with the [Geneva] Convention arguably "lowers the bar" for the treatment of U.S. POW's in future conflicts."
Go to page 2.
1 comment:
New defence for murder. Look for that to be used when an American is killed overseas. We can give it out but boy we can't take it.
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