Officer: Military Demanded Torture Lessons

Republican Gov. Scott Walker casts his ballot, June 5, 2012, in Wauwatosa, Wis. Walker faces Democratic challenger Tom Barrett in a special recall election. / AP

The Iraqi prisoner had valuable intelligence, U.S. special forces believed, and they desperately wanted it. They demanded that expert American military trainers teach them the same types of abusive interrogation techniques that North Korea and Vietnamese forces once used against U.S. prisoners of war.

The trainers resisted, according to testimony prepared for a Senate hearing Thursday; the methods were intended to elicit confessions for propaganda use, rather than gather intelligence. They were overruled and ordered to demonstrate on the prisoner in September 2003, early in the war.

The interrogation went ahead before a lead trainer stepped in and stopped it. He and his team were sent home shortly thereafter.

The written testimony of two military officers troubled by the use of unconventional interrogation techniques was obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press ahead of the Senate Armed Forces Committee hearing. According to the testimony, the military invaded Iraq and took control without expert interrogators or well-reasoned polices for dealing with prisoners, and was flailing for information however it could get it.

The hearing is the committee's second on the origins of the Pentagon's harsh interrogation program. The review fits into a broader picture of the government's handling of detainees, which includes FBI and CIA interrogations in secret prisons.

"In far too many cases, we simply erred in pressing interrogation and interrogators beyond the edge of the envelope; as a result, interrogation was no longer an intelligence collection method; rather, it had morphed into a form of punishment for those who wouldn't cooperate," Col. Steven Kleinman said in his prepared testimony.

He headed the small team of military trainers from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency sent to Iraq in September 2003 to help special forces get more information from stubborn and resistant detainees.

"When presented with the choice of getting smarter or getting tougher, we chose the latter," Kleinman stated.

The agency runs the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program, which includes stressful mock interrogations intended to prepare soldiers to withstand and resist abusive interrogations in the event they are ever taken prisoner. The program uses methods derived from American prisoners of war real-life experiences. The techniques include forced nudity, stress positions, exposure to extremes in weather and waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning.

The program was once known as the Communist Interrogation Model. It was designed to "physically and psychologically debilitate an individual's ability to resist, with the primary objective of forcing compliance," according to Kleinman's testimony.

The special forces task force asked Kleinman's team to teach them the interrogation methods used in the SERE course. Kleinman refused. He was overruled by the task force's lawyers.

They then demanded that Kleinman's team demonstrate the techniques on an Iraqi prisoner. Kleinman again refused and again was overruled, according to testimony from retired Air Force Col. John Moulton II, Kleinman's commander at the time as the head of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency.

The interrogation went forward. Kleinman stopped it. He and his team subsequently were sent home by the task force, according to Moulton.

Kleinman said the special forces team was ill-served by the military's failure to train and prepare for interrogation operations.

"Pressed to find a solution to a critical intelligence shortfall, special operators followed their professional instincts. They could not wait for the intelligence community to respond," he stated.

The special forces team was not the first to seek SERE techniques for use in interrogations. In June, the Senate committee released a trail of documents that showed the Pentagon in June 2002 was collecting information about SERE interrogation techniques for use against detainees. The U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved several of those techniques, including stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sleep disruption, for use at Guantanamo Bay in December 2002, despite the objections of military lawyers who warned they might be illegal.

The military in 2006 rewrote the rules on interrogations, specifically prohibiting many of the harsh techniques approved by Rumsfeld.

The committee on Wednesday also released documents showing then-national Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her top lawyer John Bellinger were briefed on SERE interrogation methods at the White House in 2002 or 2003.

"I recall being told...that these techniques had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm," Rice wrote.

Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said in an interview Wednesday that Rice and Bellinger's statements show the White House was aware that the harsh techniques under consideration for use by American interrogators were were adapted from those used by former enemies who regularly violated the Geneva Conventions.

"These discussion about the use of these tactics took place at the highest level of our government, at the White House," Levin said.

Levin contends that the high-level endorsement paved the way for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and elswhere in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[billarynfl]

allowed and performed these acts that killed without any hearing or trial. Bush wants to pass a law to protect all of these folks who interrogate, even the ones the caused death by approved methods

Posted by Impeach__w

The problem is all the text your pumping out is just taken from who knows where, you can make anything support your idea at any time. The subject matter is just too much to for the average reader to assimilate without trying to find out where you got it and how you pieced it together. Especially since you have to take anything a lib says with a grain of salt as they are very prone to not telling the truth or making exaggerations, so it has to be checked and double checked. Liberals are good at that, besides, the forum should be for the visitors not cbs workers or obama camp people to be invading with your propaganda BS. It''s obvious by the times your in here and how much text you''ve copied and pasted and the layout of it is a dead give-away.

[billarynfl]

Billary, I think I set you straight @ 7:50 AM today, go back and read it please.

Posted by Impeach__W

I doubt you could ever set anybody straight, you have to tell the truth or have some facts in order to do that.

[billarynfl]

Check you facts before you post and don''''t belive the propoganda you have been taught your entire life

Posted by Impeach__W

Liberals don''t care about facts, it''s been common knowledge for many years that liberals never let the facts ruin a perfectly good story.

[surinbasebal]

Whats the point in saying to send him to trial when you mention he should be imprisioned. You''ve already condemned him in your mind. War crimes were committed by U.S. forces in WWI & II, Korea, and Vietnam because it is inevitable that you''ll have the rare occassion where a servicemember won''t follow the rules. Should we raise Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and Nixon up from the dead and condemn them to hell too? I don''t have a party either, I like to call myself a democratic republican. Thanks for the history lesson, I honestly didn''t know who Tojo was till I looked it up on the internet after you mentioned him.

[ajayvee]

The British legal system tried Ariel Sharon for War Crimes in anstentia, found him guilty and handed him a life sentence. Sharon himself admitted that regardless how much he would love to visit the UK he didn''t want to spend the rest of his life in a British prison. So, it is not a matter of "handing over our president" to the Europeans because no one handed Sharon over to the British system. As I mentioned earlier, The Hague has no jurisdiction over Americans and Israelis (period, not just armed forces personnel) but Britain and Germany having standing laws that permit anyone in the world to be charged with war crimes AFTER they are no longer heads of state. This, I believe, is the reason the UN recommended we initiate war crimes proceedings in an American court because a nudge-nudge, wink-wink would be easier between Americans than among foreigners.

[surinbasebal]

In the Nanking massacre alone, tens of thousands of women were raped, about 300,000 people brutally killed, some buried alive...a full up massacre with specific approval for Tojo. How can you compare President Bush to this guy and say he deserve''s the same fate because a few insurgents have died from interrogations? Are you from the United States? Do you think our President called the interrogators of the insurgents, who you mentioned died unfortunately, and said "We need you all to kill these guys so we can get some vital information from their corpses?" President Bush hasn''t had a trial in the U.S., but seems you would be happy if he were handed over to the Europeans. We won''t hand over our President to another country because the Europeans or UN told us to. If he is so bad and like Tojo, then why hasn''t our Democratic controlled congress impeached him? Maybe because you liberal views are far more extreme.

[impeach__w]

That IS why tojo was executed. If Bush or those in his administration approved it , they are responsible for any legal consequences, deaths, etc. It was an is a criminal act especially in Iraq where all detainees have POW status and this is grounds for impeachment, imprisonment, or possible execution. The US forces are not subject to Hague war crimes tribunals.

[surinbasebal]

Interrogation methods have been practiced and implemented from the historical beginnings of warfare to present, including our country since the American revolution; so, the country cannot be restored to your so-called "civil society" because it never existed. Do you think the president should be imprisoned or executed because someone in our military snaps, then disrards rules and regulations and ends up killing an innocent person? If that were the case, then I imagine all of our past Presidents would have been imprisoned; because, you get a few bad apples in the military, just like you do in every town in America, that commit crimes not only in war but in peaceful times too. With over a million active duty personnel in the military, you are going to have a couple that are bad and slipped through the cracks or snap because they cannot handle the emotional stress of war. Those that disobeyed the rules should be punished and anyone that was PRESENT and could have prevented it but did not. In Parris Island, a recruit drowned during combat swimming training due the wreckless disregard of his drill instructors...should they take swimming out of boot camp all together or imprison the President, or should they punish those responsible and seek preventive methods to improve the safety of combat swimming training? Better training and supervision of interrogations is the key; maybe it''s be a good idea to have a physician present for routine, non-urgent interrogations.

[ajayvee]

To impeach_w: It would have to be the next administration to bring war crimes charges against Bush and Cheney. The UN has already said that there is more than sufficient evidence to proceed with charges and went so far as to recommend that we do it in an American court before someone else gets the ball rolling in Europe -- Germany and England both have laws setting jurisdiction. The problem is that if McBush is elected he will start where Bush left off rather than authorize charges, and if Obama is elected, he would not want to be seen as "exacting revenge". The result: Bush and Cheney will never see a day in court unless ACLU move their collective ar$e$ in Europe.

[ajayvee]

surinbasebal wrote: Maybe in these particular cases the people performing the interrogations were not trained to do so, i.e. navy seals(not counter-intelligence specialists), they may have stepped out of the bounds of interrogation regulations, or maybe the insurgent had a pre-existing medical condition that was not obvious, even through prior medical testing, which I believe is standard before interrogations.
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OK, in which case let''s charge these Navy Seals with war crimes and find out during the trials if this is indeed the case. On the other hand, during the trials they might offer up some bigger fish who actually authorized them.