Rice Directed Torture from White House
BY SHEILA CASEY / RCFP
In December 2005, Condoleezza Rice testified to Congress “The United States does not permit, tolerate or condone torture under any circumstances.”
But ABC News has now revealed that during 2002 and 2003, Rice led dozens of meetings to discuss specific torture techniques with the National Security Council Principals Committee in the White House Situation Room. The committee included Vice President Dick Cheney and former Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, CIA Director George Tenet, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell. They approved using the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of sleep deprivation, waterboarding, sexual assault, pushing and slapping.
Comedian Jon Stewart has joked that waterboarding sounds fun, as in “I’m going to hop in my Chevy Tahoe, get a six pack, and head out for some waterboarding.” But until recently the United States considered waterboarding to be torture, and prosecuted Japanese officers for subjecting prisoners to waterboarding in World War II. In waterboarding, a prisoner is strapped to a board with his head lower than his feet, while water is poured steadily over his nose and mouth, until his lungs fill with water. Prior to death, the process is stopped and the victim revived, often to endure it yet again. It can leave victims with lung damage, brain damage and death, if they cannot be revived.
Waterboarding was designated as illegal by US generals in the Vietnam War. On January 21, 1968, The Washington Post published a controversial photograph of two US soldiers and one South Vietnamese soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese POW near Da Nang. The photograph led to the soldier being court-martialled by a U.S. military court within one month of its publication, and he was discharged from the army. Former Navy instructor Malcolm Nance testified before Congress that “Waterboarding is misnamed. That’s just the device that we use. It should be called the drowning torture, and has been called the drowning torture in the past.”
“The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law,” says John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.
Rice has made many public statements disavowing any use of torture by the United States. In January 2005, she said “[the president] has made very clear to American personnel that we will not condone torture,” and “let me be very clear. The United States doesn’t and can’t condone torture.” In December 2005, Rice testified that “Torture and conspiracy to commit torture are crimes under US law.”
According to ABC News, in the summer of 2004, Rice told the CIA, regarding the “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “This is your baby; go do it.” According to ABC, one top official said that John Ashcroft asked out loud after one of the Situation Room meetings, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”
Prior to airing the story, ABC reporter Jan Crawford Greenburg contacted all of the committee members. She couldn’t reach John Ashcroft, and all others replied with “no comment” through their spokespersons.
George Tenet sought to receive approval for the techniques from the highest levels so that the CIA agents conducting the interrogations would be protected. He has stated that the interrogation techniques were legal because they were approved by the Attorney General.
At some meetings with Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, CIA officers physically acted out the tactics to make sure the group fully understood what the al-Qaida suspects would undergo. “Discussions were so detailed that the interrogations were almost choreographed,” said one source. Tenet asked the group for permission to combine several interrogation methods at a time, (such as waterboarding an already severely sleep deprived prisoner). Several in the group, including Dick Cheney, gave the okay.
The group then asked the Justice Department to examine whether using these methods would break domestic or international laws. “No one at the agency wanted to operate under a notion of winks and nods and assumptions that everyone understood what was being talked about,” said a former senior intelligence official. “People wanted to be assured that everything that was conducted was understood and approved by the folks in the chain of command.”
The Office of Legal Counsel issued at least two opinions on interrogation methods. In one, dated August 1, 2002, then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee defined torture as covering “only extreme acts” causing pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure. A second, dated March 14, 2003, justified using harsh tactics on detainees held overseas so long as military interrogators did not specifically intend to torture their captives. Both legal opinions since have been withdrawn.
In his book the The Terror Presidency, Bybee’s successor, Jack Goldsmith, writes that the torture memos had “no foundation” in any “source of law.” Yet they were prized by the administration as offering a “golden shield” against prosecution of CIA agents who used torture.
A senior intelligence official said rescinding the memos caused the CIA to seek even more detailed approvals for the interrogations. The department issued a memo in October, 2001 that sought to outline novel ways the military could be used domestically to defend the country in the face of an impending attack. The Justice Department has so far refused to release it, citing attorneyclient privilege, and Attorney General Michael Mukasey declined to describe it at a Senate panel where Democrats characterized it as a “torture memo.”
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, DMass., lambasted what he described as “yet another astonishing disclosure about the Bush administration and its use of torture.”
“Who would have thought that in the United States of America in the 21st century, the top officials of the executive branch would routinely gather in the White House to approve torture?” Kennedy said in a statement. “Long after President Bush has left office, our country will continue to pay the price for his administration’s renegade repudiation of the rule of law and fundamental human rights.” The American Civil Liberties Union called on Congress to investigate.
“With each new revelation, it is beginning to look like the torture operation was managed and directed out of the White House,” ACLU legislative director Caroline Fredrickson said. “This is what we suspected all along.”
As of this writing, the most watched video in the News and Politics section of YouTube is a two minute film by Robert Greenwald called Condi Must Go that contrasts clips of Rice making repeated statements to Congress that “we do not torture,” with the recent expose of her role by ABC News. It was viewed almost 300,000 times in the first 24 hours.
Sheila Casey is a DC area journalist. Her work has appeared in The Progressive Populist, Common Dreams and The Denver Post. She blogs at sheilacasey.com.