Tortured to Death (Silverstein / Harpers)

February 11, 11:17 PM, 2009
Washington Babylon
By Ken Silverstein

While Bush Administration torture-apologists continue to plead that the evidence cannot conclusively establish links between Rumsfeld Pentagon policies and the torture of detainees, the Senate Armed Services Committee concluded otherwise. It also noted that the most damning evidence had been classified as secret to keep it out of the reach of the public. (Yet again, we see that consistent tactic: use national security classifications to cloak evidence of criminal conduct.) That report has been held up as the Defense Department declassifies sensitive evidence the committee reviewed in reaching its unanimous findings. I’d heard that the review process was almost certain to lead to disclosure of highly incriminating internal documents, but that they would not be released before the Bush team left Washington. Jason Leopold suggests that process has now begun, with a Freedom of Information Act disclosure to the ACLU:

Newly declassified Defense Department documents describe a pattern of “abusive” behavior by U.S. military interrogators that appears to have caused the deaths of several suspected terrorists imprisoned at a detention center in Afghanistan in December 2002, just two days after former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorized the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques against prisoners in that country. The previously secret pages were part of a wide-ranging report into detainee abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay known as the Church Report, named after Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, the former Naval inspector general, who conducted the investigation at the request of Rumsfeld. That report, released in March 2004, said there was “no policy that condoned or authorized either abuse or torture,” which critics of the Bush Administration believed was a cover-up.

But the declassified Pentagon documents, coupled with a report issued last December by the Senate Armed Services Committee, tell a different story and lend credence to claims by civil libertarians and critics of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that refusal to release a fully classified version of the Church Report several years ago amounted to a cover-up. The two pages from the Church Report obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Bush Administration and the Pentagon were released Wednesday. The documents state that the interrogation and deaths of detainees held at Bagram Air base in Afghanistan was “clearly abusive, and clearly not in keeping with any approved interrogation policy or guidance” ...

http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004387

Declassified DoD Documents Suggest Detainees Were Tortured to Death
Written by Jason Leopold
Wednesday, 11 February 2009 14:51

Newly declassified Defense Department documents describe a pattern of “abusive” behavior by U.S. military interrogators that appears to have caused the deaths of several suspected terrorists imprisoned at a detention center in Afghanistan in December 2002, just two days after former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorized the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques against prisoners in that country.

The previously secret pages were part of a wide-ranging report into detainee abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay known as the Church Report, named after Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, the former Naval inspector general, who conducted the investigation at the request of Rumsfeld. That 360-page report, delivered to Congress in March 2004, said there was "no policy that condoned or authorized either abuse or torture," which critics of the Bush administration believed was a cover-up.

But the declassified Pentagon documents, coupled with a report issued last December by the Senate Armed Services Committee, tell a different story ...

The two-pages from the Church Report obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Bush administration and the Pentagon were released Wednesday. The documents state that the interrogation and deaths of detainees held at Bagram Air base in Afghanistan was “clearly abusive, and clearly not in keeping with any approved interrogation policy or guidance” ...

http://www.pubrecord.org/torture/677.html?task=view