Report Links CIA to Military Harsh Interrogations

Senate report details the history of harsh interrogation techniques during the Bush administration and directly links the CIA's interrogation program to the military's use of aggressive tactics.

WASHINGTON -- A detailed history of harsh interrogation techniques during the Bush administration directly links the CIA's interrogation program to the military's use of aggressive tactics, dismissing the notion that the brutal treatment of terror detainees and prisoners was the work of a few low-ranking soldiers.

The 232-page report released Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee came less than a week after President Barack Obama released Bush-era memos that justified the use of harsh tactics by the CIA.

The report documents the Bush administration's growing reliance on harsh interrogations that began just two months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. It also ties those unyielding interrogation policies to the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison by U.S. military authorities as well as to interrogations at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said the report shows that abuse of terror detainees and combat prisoners was systematic.

"Authorizations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody," Levin said.

The Senate investigation has been in a Pentagon security review since Nov. 21, 2008. Its findings were drawn from more than 70 interviews, 200,000 pages of classified and unclassified documents and included nearly 1,800 footnotes and written responses to questions from more than 200 people.

"In my judgment," Levin said, "the report represents 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."

According to the report, the road to the abuses that spilled out in graphic photos from Abu Ghraib began in December 2001. The Pentagon's general counsel office reached out that month to a military agency that trains American personnel in how to endure enemy interrogations.

The legal office wanted information about how the training unit, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, conducted its mock interrogations and detention operations. The agency trains U.S. armed forces personnel to endure questioning that includes harsh techniques adapted from methods used by North Korean, Communist Chinese and Vietcong interrogators. The training is meant to help American troops mentally prepare for the possibility of capture and brutal treatment.

In February 2002, President George W. Bush declared that the United States would not extend full Geneva Convention protections to al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners. He replaced a detailed and long-accepted 60-year-old law on the treatment of prisoners with a new, untested standard that vaguely required only "humane treatment."

A month later, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah, an alleged top Al Qaeda organizer in Pakistan. Zubaydah proved resistant to traditional interrogation techniques. During the first half of 2002, CIA interrogators began to subject Zubaydah to waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning taught by survival school trainers to CIA personnel sometime in the first half of 2002.

In July 2002, the Pentagon general counsel's office followed up its December request to get more information about JPRA interrogation methods. In their July 2002 response, JPRA officials detailed the methods used in survival training.

But the training officials warned the Pentagon lawyers that harsh physical techniques could backfire by making prisoners more resistant. And they warned that if the use of physical methods on prisoners were discovered, the public and political backlash would be "intolerable."

They also warned that harsh techniques cast into doubt the reliability of the information gleaned during the interrogation.

"A subject in extreme pain may provide an answer, any answer or many answers in order to get the pain to stop," the training officials said in their memo.

Less than a week later, the Justice Department issued two legal opinions that sanctioned the CIA's harsh interrogation program. The memos, one of which remained classified top secret until it was released by the Obama administration last week, appeared to draw deeply on the survival school data to show that the CIA's methods would not cross the line into torture, which was also newly defined.

The opinion concluded that the harsh interrogation methods would be acceptable for use on terror detainees because the same techniques did not cause severe physical or mental pain to U.S. military students who were tested in the government's carefully controlled training program.

Several people from the survival program objected to the use of their mock interrogations in battlefield settings. In an October 2002 e-mail, a senior Army psychologist told personnel at Guantanamo Bay that the methods are inherently dangerous and students are sometimes injured, even in a controlled setting.

"The risk with real detainees is increased exponentially," he said.

Nevertheless, for the next two years, the CIA and military officials received interrogation training and direct interrogation support from JPRA trainers.

By October 2002, military officials in the Pentagon and at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base had decided they needed tougher interrogations at the island prison. They crafted a plan that adopted some of the survival school methods-- stress positions, food deprivation, shaving heads and beards, stripping prisoners naked, hooding them, exposing prisoners to extremes of heat and cold, and slamming them up against walls.

In December, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved 15 of those methods.

A month later, Rumsfeld's approvals for Guantanamo interrogations were put on hold while the matter underwent review inside the Pentagon. The delay was caused in large part because of the strenuous objections of the military services' top lawyers.

But according to the Senate report, the Rumsfeld memo had already made its way into the hands of special operations units based in Afghanistan. Military lawyers there saw the memo as permission to use the 'advanced techniques' on potential high-value prisoners. The Guantanamo methods were not supposed to be used at the island jail -- but they were now deemed fair game in Afghanistan.

By February 2003, a special military unit preparing for the Iraq invasion obtained a copy of the Afghanistan interrogation policy that incorporated the techniques approved by Rumsfeld for Guantanamo. They changed the letterhead and adopted it wholesale for their own use in Iraq.

Subsequently, the interrogation officer in charge of Abu Ghraib obtained a copy of the special military unit's Iraq interrogation policy. She made minor changes -- adding sensory deprivation and constraining sleep deprivation to 72 hours at a time -- and submitted it through her chain of command.

Many of the procedures were adopted Iraq-wide in a memo issued in September 2003 by the Iraq war commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

According to the Senate report, lawyers for U.S. Central Command raised immediate concerns that the policy violated the Geneva Conventions which applied to Iraq.

It would be a month, however, before the policy was brought back under Geneva Convention guidelines. Despite the revision, within weeks abuses at Abu Ghraib had begun.

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