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December 12, 2008

Bush Administration Repsonsible for Abuses
Posted by James Lamond

The bipartisan Senate Armed Services committee report on detainee abuse released by Carl Levin and John McCain, places the blame for the abuse of American prisoners squarely on the civilian leadership at the DoD, Justice, and the White House. 

The most incredible part of the report is:

JPRA is the DoD agency that oversees military Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training. During the resistance phase of SERE training, U.S. military personnel are exposed to physical and psychological pressures (SERE techniques) designed to simulate conditions to which they might be subject if taken prisoner by enemies that did not abide by the Geneva Conventions. As one JPRA instructor explained, SERE training is '€œbased on illegal exploitation (under the rules listed in the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War) of prisoners over the last 50 years.'€ The techniques used in SERE school, based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions, include stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. It can also include face and body slaps and until recently, for some who attended the Navyâ€'s SERE school, it included waterboarding. 

Typically, those who play the part of interrogators in SERE school neither are trained interrogators nor are they qualified to be. These role players are not trained to obtain reliable intelligence information from detainees. Their job is to train our personnel to resist providing reliable information to our enemies. As the Deputy Commander for the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), JPRA'€™s higher headquarters, put it: 'the expertise of JPRA lies in training personnel how to respond and resist interrogations'€“ not in how to conduct interrogations. 'Given JPRA'€™s role and expertise, the request from the DoD General Counsel'€™s office was unusual. In fact, the Committee is not aware of any similar request prior to December 2001. But while it may have been the first, that was not the last time that a senior government official contacted JPRA for advice on using SERE methods offensively. In fact, the call from the DoD General Counsel'€™s office marked just the beginning of JPRA'€™s support of U.S. government interrogation efforts.

The Bush administration actually trained the interrogators to be like the "€œenemies that did not abide by the Geneva Conventions."€  These were techniques that were explicitly '€œbased on illegal exploitation of prisoners over the last 50 years.'€

Those OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] opinions distorted the meaning and intent of anti-torture laws, rationalized the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody and influenced Department of Defense determinations as to what interrogation techniques were legal for use during interrogations conducted by U.S. military personnel.

This violation our America's most cherished principles are not only a disgusting act, but simply a bad tactic that will only hurt our own security.  As retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, a, ex-Navy judge advocate general, said "€œTheir weapons are hate and terror. ... The enemy's goal is to make us more like them. This nation's main mission is to not forget who we are ... to hold our ideals even more tightly... We are going to win the war against this bunch of chumps because we are better than them, not because we are more inhumane."

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Comments

There isn't any excuse for bloggers who want to be taken seriously on a topic of this importance not to proof their own writing.

Nice job! Thanks for your information.


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