Senate Report Blames White House for Detainee 'Abuse'
Contradicting Bush administration claims that harsh prisoner interrogation techniques were sought by front-line military officers in the war against terrorism, a bipartisan U.S. Senate committee report released yesterday in redacted form says White House officials, including former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are to blame for the policy underlying mistreatment of detainees.
The report by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is headed by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., says both this White House policy and the prisoner mistreatment it encouraged harmed national security and the reputation of the United States, reports the Washington Post. The committee reached its conclusions after an investigation that lasted more than a year.
“The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own,” the report states. “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.”
A 29-page summary of the committee’s report (PDF) is provided by the New York Times, which notes that much of the report remains classified.
Keith Urbahn, a spokesman for Rumsfeld, said earlier investigations have not found any such connection and described the report as “unfounded allegations against those who have served our nation.”
As the Times article points out, McCain was tortured, as a prisoner, during his service in the Vietnam War. In a press release yesterday, he called some of the interrogation methods used by the U.S. on detainees “inexcusable,” the Times writes.
Related ABAJournal.com coverage:
Top White House Officials Discussed Harsh Interrogations in 2002
