Former senior Bush official on torture: 'I think what they did was wrong'

Philip Zelikow, top adviser to Condoleezza Rice, talks to the Guardian about his top secret 2006 memo on interrogation


Waterboarding and other 'enhanced interrogation techniques' were employed by the CIA and military interrogators at places like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.



A senior Bush administration official and former head of the 9/11 Commission has described CIA interrogation techniques used on alleged terrorists as torture and said he warned in a secret memo at the height of the "war on terror" that they breached the US's own war crimes laws.

Philip Zelikow, who was the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's most senior official, told the Guardian that he now regards what officials euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation", such as sleep deprivation and waterboarding, as torture – although he did not use that word at the time and is reluctant to use it now.

Zelikow, whose official position was counsellor to Rice, said he had her support on the issue. As the state department's representative on the National Security Council committee considering legal issues around violent interrogations, he expressed his concerns at the time in a top secret 2006 memorandum.

The memo, to other members of the committee who represented the justice and defence departments and intelligence services, warned that the CIA's use of waterboarding and other abuses were almost certainly in breach of US and international law. But the memo so alarmed the administration that it was immediately rejected and all copies were ordered destroyed.

A draft version of the memo, found at the state department, was released this week following a freedom of information request by the National Security Archive in Washington.

Zelikow told the Guardian in an email exchange that while he did not use the word torture in the memo, he believes that is what the CIA was using. "I do regard the interrogation practices and conditions of confinement, taken together, as torture – in the ordinary layman's use of this term. But … 'torture' is also a term with a carefully worded legal meaning and definition. So I tend to avoid talking about 'torture' because it would appear I'm accusing officials of criminal activity, which I'm not sure was the case," he said.

"I have sometimes just referred to 'physical torment' instead, which seems expressive and is accurate."

Zelikow said he is uncertain whether individuals in the CIA or other services are guilty of war crimes or have other criminal liability over the use of torture because they were told by the office of legal counsel, which provides legal advice to the president, that techniques such waterboarding, which causes the sensation of drowning, sleep deprivation and stress positions, were legal.

"For better or worse, but mainly better, to be a crime one must violate the law. To be an intentional crime … So the attorney general's legal position telling officials their conduct is legal really did matter," he said. "Had I been in the attorney general's or OLC's position in 2002, I would not have interpreted either the war crimes statute (as written then) or the torture statute in the way those officials interpreted them. But they made their choices and had the authority to make them."

But he said he has little doubt that the methods were unacceptable. "I think what they did was wrong," he said.

Zelikow said that a later supreme court ruling that the Geneva Conventions do apply to those deemed by the Bush administration to be "illegal combatants" reinforced his position that some of the CIA's interrogation methods were illegal. "If I was right, officials would be violating the federal War Crimes Act, a felony punishable by up to life imprisonment," he told the Guardian...

In his 2006 memorandum to other members of the National Security Council committee of deputies to cabinet secretaries, the highest level interagency committee considering the legality of "enhanced interrogations", Zelikow said that such methods were in breach of the Convention Against Torture as well as a recent US law that "extended the prohibition against cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment to all conduct worldwide".

Zelikow argued that US law on the issue applied the American constitution's own standard regarding "cruel and unusual punishment" and that there is a long history of case law that prevents techniques used by the CIA from use in the US.

"The techniques least likely to be sustained are the techniques described as "coercive", especially viewed cumulatively, such as the waterboard, walling, dousing, stress positions and cramped confinement," Zelikow wrote in the memo. "We are unaware of any precedent in World War II, the Korean war, the Vietnam war or any subsequent conflict for authorized, systematic interrogation practices similar to those in question here, even where the prisoners were presumed to be unlawful combatants."

Toward the end of the memo, part of a section has been blacked out by a censor. It refers to foreign governments abandoning several of the techniques Zelikow criticises. Asked if those governments include the UK, he said: "Yes."

Zelikow said his position as counselor to Rice did not entitle him to offer a legal opinion, but he felt obliged to put an alternative view before his colleagues at other agencies to warn them that the courts may take a different view.

Asked if Rice knew of and approved his memo, Zelikow said: "I kept her fully informed on what I was doing. She supported my work."

Zelikow said that after the office of legal counsel decided his memorandum "was not appropriate for further discussion", the order came from the White House to destroy all copies. "I don't know who suggested this or why. I ignored the suggestion since it seemed so obviously improper," he said.

The existence of the memo came to light when Zelikow gave testimony to the Senate judiciary committee two years ago in which he described the systematic physical abuses by the CIA as "unprecedented" and said that at least some of the legal opinions of justice department lawyers on the maltreatment of prisoners were "unsound, even unreasonable".

"The US government adopted an unprecedented programme of coolly calculated dehumanising abuse and physical torment to extract information. This was a mistake, perhaps a disastrous one," he said.

Zelikow said he became concerned while serving as executive director of the 9/11 Commission, which investigated the circumstances of the terrorist attacks, because of the CIA's unwillingness to disclose information about the interrogation of detainees and its refusal to permit access to them.

The commission made a recommendation that captured prisoners, even if defined as illegal combatants, should be treated to a standard that fits with the Geneva Conventions. The Bush administration rejected it. He finally discovered the details of the CIA programme when he was appointed to the NSC committee.

Zelikow said the policy was shaped in an "understandably merciless" atmosphere after the 9/11 attacks. "The feeling of being at war was real, at least in the White House. Almost every morning, President Bush himself received nerve-jangling briefings just on the latest threats," he told the Senate.

Zelikow described an atmosphere in which policymakers fell under the spell of the intelligence community and became deferential "in a time of seemingly endless alarms". But, he added, the CIA had no real experience of interrogating enemy captives and so "improvised an unprecedented elaborate, systematic programme of medically monitored physical torment to break prisoners and make them talk".

"The intelligence community's position in 2005, and later, was that a substantial programme of intense physical coercion was uniquely necessary to protect the nation," he said.

But Zelkow said there were other, more established means of interrogation well known to law enforcement and the military.

"The point is not whether the CIA programme produced useful intelligence. Of course it did. Quite a lot. The CIA had exclusive custody of a number of the most important al-Qaeda captives in the world, for years. Any good interrogation effort would produce an important flow of information from these captives," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/05/bush-official-torture-condoleezza-rice?newsfeed=true

Should have got Rule 303.

Most Guantanamo detainees are innocent: ex-Bush official

Many detainees locked up in Guantanamo Bay were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday.

"There are still innocent people there," Republican Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then-secretary of state Colin Powell, told the Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."

Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a "mosaic" of intelligence.

"It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance," Wilkerson wrote in the blog.

He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather "sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified."

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said vetting on the battlefield during the early stages of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan was incompetent with no meaningful attempt to discriminate "who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation."

Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to comment on Wilkerson's specific allegations but noted that the military has consistently said that dealing with foreign fighters from a wide variety of countries in a wartime setting was a complex process. The military has insisted that those held at Guantanamo were enemy combatants and posed a threat to the United States.

In his posting for The Washington Note blog, Wilkerson wrote that "U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released."

Former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former vice-president Dick Cheney fought efforts to address the situation, Wilkerson said, because "to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."

Wilkerson told the AP in a telephone interview that many detainees "clearly had no connection to al-Qaeda and the Taliban and were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Pakistanis turned many over for $5,000 a head."

240 detainees held, including Omar Khadr

Some 800 men have been held at Guantanamo since the prison opened in January 2002, and 240 remain. Wilkerson said two dozen are considered terrorists, including confessed Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was transferred to Guantanamo from CIA custody in September 2006.

"We need to put those people in a high-security prison like the one in Colorado, forget them and throw away the key," Wilkerson said. "We can't try them because we tortured them and didn't keep an evidence trail."

But the rest of the detainees need to be released, he said.

Wilkerson, who flew combat missions as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and left the government in January 2005, said he did not speak out while in government because some of the information was classified.

He said he feels compelled to talk now because Cheney has claimed in recent media interviews that President Barack Obama is making the U.S. less safe by reversing Bush administration policies toward terror suspects, including ordering Guantanamo closed.

"I'm very concerned about the kinds of things Cheney is saying to make it seem Obama is a danger to this republic," Wilkerson said. "To have a former vice-president fearmongering like this is really, really dangerous."

Obama's administration is now evaluating what to do with the prisoners who remain at the U.S. military base in Cuba.

Among the detainees is Canadian Omar Khadr, 22, who is accused of killing a U.S. medic during a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002. Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured, has been held in Guantanamo for more than six years.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2009/03/19/guantanamo-detainee-innocent.html

‘Bush, Blair must stand trial for committing war crimes’

George W. Bush and Tony Blair have committed international conspiracy to launch an aggressive war, subject to a future Nuremberg prosecution, says an analyst.


In a recently surfaced memo from the George W. Bush’s White House, former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow states that techniques used by American-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan amount to ‘torture’ according to international law and domestic law.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Webster Griffith Tarpley, author and historian in Washington, to further discuss the issue. The following is a transcription of the interview.

Press TV: [The previous guest speaker] Mr. Millet says that, basically, the United States is not responsible for any war crimes, had no intention of killing anyone in Iraq and, I guess, according to what he’s saying the numbers, really, are not so substantial. Your take on that, Mr. Tarpley.

Tarpley: Well, I have to disagree with that. It’s just during the time of the so-called economic sanctions during the 1990s - it’s between 1 million and 1.5 million people died in Iraq with sanctions that extended to food.

You remember Madeleine Albright was asked if that kind of a death toll was worth it for democracy? And Madeleine Albright, today the head for the wonderful National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute part that brings you [freedom for tomorrow], said, yes, that death toll is worth it.

Then, after the invasion in 2003, it’s certainly another 1 million to 1.5 million. So, we’re getting up to Second World War proportions. I think that the matter of intent is clear.

The Nuremberg Precedent is international conspiracy to launch aggressive war. Bush, Tony Blair and some others, they fill the bill. So that would be the subject of some future Nuremberg prosecution.

I wonder if you’re interested in this question now that just came up, though, the problem of why the state department is publishing this memo at the present time? This is obviously politically timed.

Here in Washington we’re going to have in Guantanamo concentration camp, in Cuba, the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohamad Ramzi bin al-Shibh and a couple of others. They’ve all been water boarded, repeatedly. And this was clearly, everybody knew, a violation of the Geneva Convention, a war crime.

At the same time, we have some people now who want to separate their political careers from that. The State Department that chose to release this now is obviously interested in saying, ‘oh, don’t look at us - we’re not part of water boarding, we’re not war criminals here at the State Department’; although they are.

Then we’ve got Philip Zelikow who’s the author of the memorandum, who was interviewed in The Guardian. Philip Zelikow was happy to be interviewed. I think he could either be Secretary of State or UN ambassador in a Romney administration coming up. So he wants you to be reminded that he’s not part of this water boarding, war crimes creek.

The time is now coming for this counter [new court] in Guantanamo Bay which is politically motivated also because Obama wants to profile himself as tough on terrorism; that means likely people like Ashcroft, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee, Haines, Addington, many others, who really are suspect of war crimes.

We had the Garz?n prosecution in Spain which seems to have essentially broken down. And then there was Moreno-Ocampo - but everyone knows Moreno-Ocampo is servant of the US imperialism and he’ll never touch it.

Press TV: Your take [on US democracy - defined as being free of starting wars].

Tarpley: The United States is a plutocracy or an oligarchy, and that ought to be clear. And the current American foreign policy is to sabotage economic development.

Wherever there’s a pipeline: be it in Burma, Myanmar; be it the TAPI, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India; be it the Iran, Pakistan, India or China; wherever there’s peaceful economic development that involves access to oil and other raw materials, the US is there with what I consider a lunatic foreign policy, of attempting to sabotage economic development, great projects, and infrastructure.

Wherever they’re found, with the idea that the US has to sabotage these things because the US has nothing to contribute to them, and you had a [working system] in Iran, Pakistan, India, to justify the entire region, the US would have no role.

Press TV: Do you think that we would see George W. Bush and Tony Blair actually standing in a court for war crimes?

Tarpley: Yes.

http://www.presstv.com/detail/235172.html

Go and join the Taliban Falah if you feel so strongly about it.....what's stopping you?