Torture began at the top
Apart from understanding how and why the Bush/Cheney administration tricked the American people into going to war in Iraq, no question is more urgent than how the White House forced the adoption of torture as state policy of the United States.
An investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, now partly concluded, already has gone a long way toward explaining the decision to place the United States among the world's pariah states. In a statement delivered Tuesday, committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said: "Some have suggested that detainee abuses committed by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantanamo were the result of a 'few bad apples' acting on their own. It would be a lot easier to accept if that were true." In fact, Levin said, senior U.S. officials "sought out information on aggressive [interrogation] techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees."
Until now, administration officials have insisted to other congressional panels that the government approved the use of "harsh" interrogation methods only after the military commanders at Guantanamo asked for permission to get tough with recalcitrant prisoners and only after serious soul searching.
As the Washington Post reported Tuesday, however, documents and e-mails collected by investigators for the Armed Services Committee show that officials working for then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld began their research into waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices as far back as July 2002, months before military commanders began asking for permission.
In fact, a full month before those requests came up the chain of command, former Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II and David S. Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, flew to Guantanamo to discuss the interrogation of prisoners.
That's significant because Jack Goldsmith, former assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel, has written that Addington was Cheney's point man on torture and other draconian "anti-terrorist" initiatives. (Goldsmith lost his job as the executive branch's chief lawyer because, among other things, he overturned his predecessor John Yoo's convoluted legal opinions approving torture.)
