From Joby Warrick in today's Washington Post:
A Senate investigation has
concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh
interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantánamo Bay
and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to
suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command,
according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.
The
sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry
show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory
deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from
commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to
use those measures on suspected terrorists.
The reported evidence--some of which is expected to be made public at a Senate hearing
today--also shows that military lawyers raised strong concerns about
the legality of the practices as early as November 2002, a month before
Rumsfeld approved them. The findings contradict previous accounts by
top Bush administration appointees, setting the stage for new clashes
between the White House and Congress over the origins of interrogation methods that many lawmakers regard as torture and possibly illegal.
What puzzles me is why the administration felt the need to mislead Congress and the public about this. It seems unlikely many people would object to the Pentagon conducting research into the question of which interrogation techniques are acceptable and which ones cross the line: It wouldn't have taken a genius to predict, in the summer of 2002, that we might want to try to goad some uncooperative detainees into talking. The problem, rather, is that the White House ignored the conclusions that were reached by military lawyers and decided instead to permit the use of techniques which shouldn't have been allowed, like waterboarding. To pretend that high-ranking officials had no interest whatsoever in harsh interrogation techniques until interrogators at Guantánamo asked for them, in addition to not being credible, is another instance of the administration's penchant for deception and secrecy even in cases where candor would suit their purposes just as well.
--Josh Patashnik