Top US officials, not a "few bad apples" of low rank, were behind harsh military interrogation tactics that spread from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan to Iraq, a new Senate report said.The Senate Armed Services Committee's 261-page report, the fruit of its investigation into US treatment of "war on terror" detainees, is likely to stoke the ongoing debate over US techniques widely seen as torture.
[...]
[ Democratic Senator Carl Levin, head of the panel,] said in a statement that the report showed that claims by top aides to then-president George W. Bush "that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorized acts of a 'few bad apples,' were simply false."
The report is "a condemnation of both the Bush administration's interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse -- such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan -- to low ranking soldiers," said Levin.
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The report also details repeated warnings from military and other experts, almost from the outset, that harsh questioning was likely to yield "less reliable" intelligence results than less aggressive approaches.
One July 2002 memo from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency that oversees the SERE program warned "if an interrogator produces information that resulted from the application of physical and psychological duress, the reliability and accuracy of this information is in doubt.
"In other words, a subject in extreme pain.
Imagine that. It's time for an accounting.
But news reports say Dennis Blair, Mr. Obama's national intelligence director, issued a memo last week stating the harsh interrogations yielded "high value information" about the al-Qaida terrorist network.
He would. I guess it finally works on the 183rd waterboarding in a month. Even NPR is still calling it “harsh interrogations that some people believe is torture.”
In the wake of the Senate Armed Services Committee's (SASC) report on detainee abuse, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is calling for the psychologists who justified, designed, and implemented torture for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Department of Defense (DoD), to lose their professional licenses and to face criminal prosecution.
Absolutely. And – physician, heal thyself.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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