Top US officials shaped torture policy: report

WASHINGTON (Agencies) - Top US officials, not a few bad apples of low rank, were behind harsh military interrogation tactics that spread from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan to Iraq, a new Senate report said Tuesday.
Despite warnings from military personnel that the use of these on Guantanamo detainees could backfire, 15 specific techniques were sanctioned by then Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld on December 2, 2002, says the Senate Armed Services Committees 263-page report entitled: 'Inquiry into the treatment of detainees in US custody.
What followed as an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely, it said, adding that these techniques had been endorsed became known by US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, setting the stage for the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, it said. The panel, led by Democratic Senator Carl Levin, released its chief conclusions in December 2008, but its detailed findings had been kept under wraps during US Defence Department declassification proceedings.
Levin said in a statement that the report showed that claims by top aides to then-president George W Bush that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorised acts of a 'few bad apples, were simply false.
In my judgment, the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administrations interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse - such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan - to low-ranking soldiers, said Senator Carl Levin, the Committee Chairman.
The report says US officials began preparing for what came to be known as enhanced interrogation techniques just a few months after the September 11, 2001 attacks and before a series of memos declaring such practices legal.
The approach harnessed a US military programme known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which aims to train US military personnel to resist questioning by foes who do not follow international bans on torture.
The resulting programme included tactics like stripping a detainee, slapping, as well as waterboarding, a notorious kind of near-drowning.
The report also says that one detainee was forced to bark and perform dog tricks while another was forced to wear a dog collar and perform dog tricks in a bid to break down their resistance.
Interrogation tactics also included religious disgrace and invasion of space by a female, the report says.
One of the officials quoted in the report says some of the harsh tactics were used before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq amid frustration in Washington at the lack of evidence linking Al-Qaeda and Baghdad.
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, the report quoted US Army psychiatrist Major Paul Burney as saying of some Guantanamo Bay interrogations.
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, said Burney.
Others did not recall such pressure, the report said.
One July 2002 memo from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency that oversees the SERE programme warned if an interrogator produces information that resulted from the application of physical and psychological duress, the reliability and accuracy of this information is in doubt. In other words, a subject in extreme pain may provide an answer, any answer, or many answers in order to get the pain to stop, it said.