- NYT: Any Indictment of Interrogation Policy Makers Would Face Several Hurdl
Efforts to prosecute the high-level Bush administration officials who created and authorized the interrogation program in 2002 - like Vice President Dick Cheney; the C.I.A. director, George J. Tenet; the defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld; and Alberto R. Gonzales, who was then White House counsel - also “would be extremely difficult,” said Eric Posner, a University of Chicago law professor.
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The shield against prosecution provided by the Bush legal team’s assurances has led some critics to focus on the role played by the lawyers themselves, like Mr. Cheney’s counsel, David S. Addington; Mr. Rumsfeld’s counsel, William J. Haynes II; and the authors of the Justice Department memorandums: John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury.
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“No one is above the law,” Mr. Holder said. “So we’ll see what happens.”
“Top Rumsfeld aides were already laying the groundwork for torture barely two months after the 9/11 attacks, and just weeks into the war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s general counsel’s office contacted the military agency that runs the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape programs — schools where U.S. personnel and contractors are taught how to resist abuses that prisoners of war have been through before — in December 2001 to find out how the SERE training could help interrogators break al-Qaida suspects. Military officials at the time told top Pentagon aides that the SERE techniques produced “less reliable” information.”
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On April 16, 2003, Rumsfeld authorized 24 techniques at Guantánamo including sleep deprivation, messing with detainees’ diets and pretending the interrogators were from a different country — one where torture was even more acceptable — in order to scare them into cooperating. And he told commanders to ask him for permission to use additional techniques.
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By 2004, when news of the abuses at Abu Ghraib got out, the military had already grown accustomed to a culture of abusive interrogation that made that scandal possible — even if the Bush administration tried to claim it was a blip in an otherwise clean record. And as the Senate report makes clear yet again, that culture came about thanks to Rumsfeld.
