Levin committee releases torture report

The Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, has released its final report (PDF) tracing the development of the Bush administration’s policies and practices of abusing and torturing detainees after 2001. The report is based on over 200,000 classified and unclassified documents, memos and communications from within the Bush administration and interviews with more than 70 people with direct involvement in the matter. The report begins by asserting:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

The report also notes that what the Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation” techniques were based upon the training program used in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training in the military, techniques that were “based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions.” They were used during SERE training to teach soldiers how to withstand them should they ever be captured.

Among the interesting revelations contained in this report is the fact that the military tended to be opposed to using abuse and torture to get information from detainees, arguing that it was not effective. One memo sent early on in 2002 from a lieutenant colonel at the U.S. Army Special Operations Command said, “If individuals are put under enough discomfort, i.e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain. This will increase the amount of information they will tell the interrogator, but it does not mean the information is accurate. In fact, it usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain.”

Maj. Paul Burney, an Army psychiatrist who was asked to evaluate whether the techniques being considered would help or hurt, wrote in a 2002 memo: “Experts in the field of interrogation indicate the most effective interrogation strategy is a rapport-building approach. Interrogation techniques that rely on physical or adverse consequences are likely to garner inaccurate information and create an increased level of resistance…There is no evidence that the level of fear or discomfort evoked by a given technique has any consistent correlation to the volume or quality of information obtained…The interrogation tools outlined could affect the short term and/or long term physical and/or mental health of the detainee. Physical and/or emotional harm from the above techniques may emerge months or even years after their use. It is impossible to determine if a particular strategy will cause irreversible harm if employed.”

Burney shows up again when the report discusses a trip by Army psychologists and psychiatrists to Ft. Bragg in September, 2002 to learn how to use those SERE techniques to elicit information from detainees. Burney said that the administration was concerned that they weren’t getting enough information out of the detainees at Gitmo, particularly information tying Al Qaeda to Iraq as the administration was trying to build a case for invading that country, which is what drove the pressure to use “enhanced” techniques:

Burney testified to the Army Inspector General later, saying, [T]his is my opinion, even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”