Bush lawyers said torture OK

By John J. Lumpkin
The Associated Press

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most e-mailed articles

The lawyers, not identified by name, were part of a working group writing a policy governing interrogation techniques to be used at the prison for terrorist suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The arguments are one group's reflections on interrogation law and torture, Pentagon spokesmen said, and the legal latitude they describe is wider than the military gives itself.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said yesterday that the final set of interrogation methods adopted for use at Guantánamo in April 2003 are humane, legal and useful. It is a narrower set of methods than some had proposed.

Di Rita described the paper as a staff legal analysis that was part of an internal Bush administration debate on how to obtain intelligence from al-Qaida operatives in U.S. custody, within the confines of a standard of humane treatment. The intelligence sought was to prevent terrorist attacks, he said.

The contents of the paper, labeled "draft" and dated March 6, 2003, were first reported in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. Mary Ellen O'Connell, a professor of international law at Ohio State University who has seen the draft paper, called its arguments unconvincing.

"In every case it finds defenses, narrower readings of that statute, or justifications that allow torture in a wide variety of circumstances," she said.

Ultimately, the Pentagon adopted a set of 24 interrogation methods it would use at Guantánamo, Di Rita said. The majority are psychological tricks and techniques described in Army field manuals.

A smaller group are not, including four methods that require at least tacit approval from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. None are torture in the Pentagon's view, Di Rita said.

"It's my belief that Americans would find them perfectly reasonable," he said.

The nonstandard techniques includes isolating a prisoner from others, altering his diet (but still providing him adequate food to survive), and questioning him up to 20 hours at a time for up to three days, he said.

"There's nothing that involves deliberately applying pain," Di Rita said.

The four methods have been used on two inmates at Guantánamo, including one who may have been designated a "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot, military officials said.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

E-mail this article

Print this article

Search archive

More nation & world headlines...