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    04/22/2009: More to Add to the Stove-Pipe

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    Some new info for the ... Stove-Pipe . . .

    McClatchy: Bush Admin Used Torture To Look For Saddam-Qaida Link

    Citing an anonymous intel source and a new Senate report, McClatchy reports the Bush Admin strongly pressured interrogators to use torture to find a Qaida-Saddam link.

  • Read McClatchy Piece
  • Senate Report: Torture Policies Went All The Way to the Top
  • Read Senate Report (pdf)
  • Was The CIA Always Acting Within Authorization?



  • Read McClatchy Piece

    Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link

    WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

    Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

    The use of abusive interrogation -- widely considered torture -- as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

    Former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation and stress positions and waterboarding, which simulates drowning, insist that they were legal.

    A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

    "There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

    "The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

    It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly -- Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 -- according to a newly released Justice Department document.

    "There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

    "Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies."

    Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

    A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

    "While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

    Excerpts from Burney's interview appeared in a full, declassified report on a two-year investigation into detainee abuse released on Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

    Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., called Burney's statement "very significant."

    "I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist."

    Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

    The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

    A senior Guantanamo Bay interrogator, David Becker, told the committee that only "a couple of nebulous links" between al Qaida and Iraq were uncovered during interrogations of unidentified detainees, the report said.

    Others in the interrogation operation "agreed there was pressure to produce intelligence, but did not recall pressure to identify links between Iraq and al Qaida," the report said.

    The report, the executive summary of which was released in November, found that Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and other former senior Bush administration officials were responsible for the abusive interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Rumsfeld approved extreme interrogation techniques for Guantanamo in December 2002. He withdrew his authorization the following month amid protests by senior military lawyers that some techniques could amount to torture, violating U.S. and international laws.

    Military interrogator, however, continued employing some techniques in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.

    Bush and his top lieutenants charged that Saddam was secretly pursuing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in defiance of a United Nations ban, and had to be overthrown because he might provide them to al Qaida for an attack on the U.S. or its allies.

    (John Walcott and Warren P. Strobel contributed to this article.)

    ON THE WEB

    Senate report, part 1

    Senate report, part 2


    From the NYT:

    Senate Report: Torture Policies Went All The Way to the Top

    Report Gives New Detail on Approval of Brutal Techniques

    By BRIAN KNOWLTON
    Published: April 21, 2009


    WASHINGTON -- A newly declassified Congressional report released Tuesday outlined the most detailed evidence yet that the military's use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration.


    The report focused solely on interrogations carried out by the military, not those conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency at its secret prisons overseas. It rejected claims by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others that Pentagon policies played no role in harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or other military facilities.

    The 232-page report, the product of an 18-month inquiry, was approved on Nov. 20 by the Senate Armed Services Committee, but has since been under Pentagon review for declassification. Some of the findings were made public in a Dec. 12 article in The New York Times; a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld dismissed the report at the time as "unfounded allegations against those who have served our nation."

    The Senate report documented how some of the techniques used by the military at prisons in Afghanistan and at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq -- stripping detainees, placing them in "stress positions" or depriving them of sleep -- originated in a military program known as Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape, or SERE, intended to train American troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations.

    According to the Senate investigation, a military behavioral scientist and a colleague who had witnessed SERE training proposed its use at Guantánamo in October 2002, as pressure was rising "to get 'tougher' with detainee interrogations." Officers there sought authorization, and Mr. Rumsfeld approved 15 interrogation techniques.

    The report showed that Mr. Rumsfeld's authorization was cited by a United States military special-operations lawyer in Afghanistan as "an analogy and basis for use of these techniques," and that, in February 2003, a special-operations unit in Iraq obtained a copy of the policy from Afghanistan "that included aggressive techniques, changed the letterhead, and adopted the policy verbatim."

    Months later, the report said, the interrogation officer in charge at Abu Ghraib obtained a copy of that policy "and submitted it, virtually unchanged, through her chain of command." This ultimately led to authorization by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez of the use of stress positions, "sleep management" and military dogs to exploit detainees' fears, the report said.

    "The paper trail on abuse leads to top civilian leaders, and our report connects the dots," Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said on Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. "This report, in great detail, shows a paper trail going from that authorization" by Mr. Rumsfeld "to Guantánamo to Afghanistan and to Iraq," Mr. Levin said.


    ~OGD~

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