[Ppnews] Rice Admits She Led High-Level White House Talks About Torture

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Rice Admits She Led High-Level White House Talks About Torture

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:53:00
By Jason Leopold
<http://www.pubrecord.org>Visit The Public Record!

(The Intelligence Daily) -- Secretary of State 
Condoleezza Rice has admitted for the first time 
that she led high-level discussions beginning in 
2002 with other senior Bush administration 
officials about subjecting suspected al-Qaeda 
terrorists detained at military prisons to the 
harsh interrogation technique known as 
waterboarding, according to documents released 
late Wednesday by Carl Levin, the Democratic 
chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee.

Responding in writing to questions by Levin, who 
will convene a hearing today on the 
administration’s interrogation program, John B. 
Bellinger, Rice’s legal adviser at the State 
Department, said they recalled participating in 
meetings with Ashcroft and then-Defense Secretary 
Donald Rumsfeld in July 2002 about an Army and 
Air Force survival training program called 
Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) 
meant to prepare U.S. soldiers for abuse they 
might suffer if captured by an outlaw regime.

Bellinger, who also worked with Rice at the NSC, 
the then National Security Adviser “expressed 
concern that the proposed CIA interrogation 
techniques comply with applicable U.S. law, 
including our international obligations” and that 
Rice asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to 
"personally review the legal guidance" of specific interrogation techniques.

In April, President George W. Bush told an ABC 
News reporter during an interview that he 
approved of meetings of a National Security 
Council's Principals Committee, whose advisers 
included Vice President Dick Cheney, former 
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary 
of State Colin Powell, former CIA Director George 
Tenet and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, 
where these officials discussed specific 
interrogation techniques the CIA could use against detainees.

Waterboarding­or simulated drowning--has been 
regarded as torture since the days of the Spanish Inquisition.

“I recall being told that U.S. military personnel 
were subjected in training to certain physical 
and psychological interrogation techniques and 
that these techniques had been deemed not to 
cause significant physical or psychological 
harm,” Rice wrote in response to a question about the SERE techniques.

But those techniques were meant to prepare U.S. 
soldiers for abuse they might suffer if captured 
by a brutal regime, not as methods for U.S. 
Interrogations, which is what Rice said the 
discussions at the White House centered on. 
Moreover, the SERE methods were first designed by 
the communist government of China to be used against U.S. soldiers.

The hearing Wednesday before the Senate Armed 
Services Committee will focus on the genesis of 
the SERE techniques used during the interrogations of suspected terrorists.

Rice has denied that the U.S. tortured or abused 
prisoners. But in declaring the U.S. does not 
engage in torture, appears to be relying on a 
narrower U.S. definition of torture than that is 
accepted under international law, such as the 
1984 Convention Against Torture that was signed 
by the Reagan administration in 1988 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1994.

“The threshold for torture is lower under 
international law: acts that do not amount to 
torture under U.S. law may do so under 
international law,” wrote Philippe Sands, law 
professor at University College London, in a 
column published in the Dec. 9, 2005, edition of The Financial Times.

“Waterboarding – strapping a detainee to a board 
and dunking him under water so he believes that 
he might drown – plainly constitutes torture 
under international law, even if it may not do so under U.S. law. 


“When the U.S. joined the 1984 convention it 
entered an ‘understanding’ on the definition of 
torture, to the effect that the international 
definition was to be read as being consistent 
with the U.S. definition The administration relies on the ‘understanding.’

“So, when Ms. Rice says the U.S. does not do 
torture or render people to countries that 
practice torture, she does not rely on the 
international definition. That is wrong: the 
convention does not allow each country to adopt 
its own definition, otherwise the convention's 
obligations would become meaningless. That is why 
other governments believe the U.S. 
‘understanding’ cannot affect U.S. obligations under the convention.”

There is ongoing debate as to whether the brutal 
interrogation techniques first used against a 
suspected terrorists predated an Aug. 1, 2002 
legal opinion, widely called the “Torture Memo,” 
that provided CIA interrogators with the legal 
authority to use long-outlawed tactics, such as 
waterboarding, when interrogating so-called high-level terrorist suspects.

Neither Rice nor Bellinger provided dates about 
the discussions Rice led regarding interrogation 
methods. Additionally, Levin did not ask Rice 
whether Bush or Cheney participated in the talks.

In his book, "At the Center of the Storm", former 
CIA Director George Tenet wrote that he attended 
a meeting with Rice in May 2001 where Tenet 
discussed how Abu Zubaydah, the alleged 
high-level al-Qaeda operative, planned to attack the US and Israel.

"For my regularly scheduled meeting with Condi 
Rice on May 30, [2001], I brought along [deputy 
CIA director] John McLaughlin, [then director of 
the CIA's counterterrorist center] Cofer Black, 
one of Cofer's top assistants, Rich B. (Rich 
can't be further identified here). Joining Condi 
were [former White House counterterrorism czar 
Richard] Clarke and [former CIA official] Mary 
McCarthy," Tenet wrote. "Rich ran through the 
mounting warning signs of a coming attack. They 
were truly frightening. Among other things, we 
told Condi that a notorious al-Qa'ida operative 
named Abu Zubaydah was working on attack plans."

Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan less than a 
year later and was whisked to a secret CIA prison 
site in Thailand, where he was interrogated and 
subjected to waterboarding­believed to have taken 
place sometime in July 2002 based on the 
discussions about interrogation methods Rice 
participated in with other White House officials.

FBI officials objected to the methods CIA 
interrogators used against Abu Zubaydah, 
according to previously released documents and testimony.

However, Rice wrote in response to a question 
from Levin that she did “not recall any specific 
discussions about withdrawing FBI personnel from 
the Abu Zubaydah interrogation.”

The Abu Zubaydah case was the first time that 
waterboarding was used against a prisoner in the 
“war on terror,” according to Pentagon and 
Justice Department documents, news reports and 
several books written about the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.

In his book “The One Percent Doctrine,” author 
Ron Suskind reported that President George W. 
Bush had become obsessed with Zubaydah and the 
information he might have about pending terrorist 
plots against the United States.

"Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell 
us the truth," Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one 
CIA briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"

The waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah was videotaped, 
but that record was destroyed in November 2005 
after the Washington Post published a story that 
exposed the CIA's use of so-called "black site" 
prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects.

John Durham, an assistant US attorney in 
Connecticut, was appointed special counsel 
earlier this year to investigate the destruction 
of that videotape as well as destroyed film on other interrogations.

The latest disclosures by Rice undercut 
assertions by President George W. Bush, Vice 
President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and other senior 
administration officials who have blamed cruel 
treatment of detainees on "a few bad apples" who acted on their own.

In June, Levin released dozens of pages of 
documents that detailed a pattern of humiliation, 
abuse and even torture inflicted on detainees was 
a deliberate policy of the Bush administration – 
debated by mid-level lawyers at the CIA and the 
Pentagon, given legal cover at the Justice 
Department and approved at the highest levels of government.

The Armed Services Committee’s 18-month 
investigation, which generated 38,000 pages of 
documents, singled out Rumsfeld and William “Jim” 
Haynes II, the Pentagon’s former general counsel, 
as the officials who sought guidance on 
implementing more aggressive interrogation methods.

The committee is expected to release a full 
report later this year. So far, the probe has 
found that Rumsfeld and Haynes solicited input 
from military psychologists in July 2002, months 
earlier than they had previously acknowledged, 
about developing harsh methods interrogators 
could use against detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

The documents Levin released in June states that 
as early as July 2002, Rumsfeld, Haynes and other 
officials queried military psychologists about 
the use of waterboarding and other brutal methods 
to extract information that might not be gained 
through more conventional interrogations methods.

The questions from Rumsfeld and Haynes were 
raised one month before John Yoo, a deputy in the 
Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, 
issued two memos that authorized interrogators to 
use stress positions, military dogs and other 
still unknown methods against terror suspects at Guantanamo.

Bellinger said, in a separate memo to Levin, that 
Yoo participated in the meetings led by Rice and 
gave the CIA oral guidance on interrogation techniques.

The June documents did not square with previous 
statements made by Haynes, who testified in 2006 
that the impetus for the harsh tactics came from 
below, from lower-level military personnel who 
asked the Pentagon in October 2002 about using 
more aggressive techniques against detainees.

Richard Shiffrin, Haynes' former deputy on 
intelligence issues, told the Senate committee 
that in July 2002 Haynes became interested in 
using the SERE techniques, such as waterboarding 
and sleep deprivation, as a form of interrogation against detainees.

According to one document, Jonathan Fredman, 
chief counsel to the CIA’s Counterterrorism 
Center, discussed with U.S. military officials 
how interrogators could use the “wet towel” 
technique, also known as waterboarding, against 
detainees to extract information.

“It can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic 
system will react as if you’re suffocating, but 
your body will not cease to function,” Fredman 
said on Oct. 2, 2002, during a meeting where 
specific techniques were reviewed and debated, 
according to the meeting minutes.

Fredman added that the “wet towel” technique 
would only be defined as torture “if the detainee dies.”

“It is basically subject to perception,” Fredman 
said. “If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong.”








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