Senate committee report blames top Bush officials for abuses against detainees...

Senate committee report blames top Bush officials for abuses against detainees...
By Roy Gutman

WASHINGTON _ The Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday singled out former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, former Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. Richard Myers and other top aides for approving inhumane interrogation techniques that were used on detainees at Guantanamo, sites in Afghanistan and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

U.S. abuses against detainees led to attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, according to testimony by the former general counsel of the Navy, Alberto Mora. "There are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq _ as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat _ are, respectively, the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo," Mora testified.

The long-awaited report said the techniques used were "based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to elicit false confessions" from captured American prisoners and adapted for use against U.S. detainees.

Instructors from the Pentagon agency that trains soldiers in resisting such treatment were sent to Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq to assist in adopting the methods, it said.

The abusive techniques _ water boarding, nudity, stress positions, exploiting phobias and treating detainees "like animals" _ were "at odds with the commitment to humane treatment of detainees in U.S. custody" and inconsistent with the goal of collecting accurate information, the report concluded.

It traced the abusive practices to President George W. Bush's written determination in February 2002 that the 1949 Geneva Conventions didn't apply to suspected al-Qaida and Taliban detainees. Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, and other Cabinet officers took part in meetings where specific interrogation techniques were discussed, the report said.

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