Bush Reportedly Pushed for Harsh Interrogations
A new book by two ACLU lawyers, "Administration of Torture," includes documents in which one Gen. Michael Dunlavey claims that President Bush gave him "marching orders" to get the Pentagon's approval of more severe interrogation methods at Guantanamo. Also, it alleges that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was "personally involved" in the interrogation of Mohammed al Qahtani.
A new book by two ACLU lawyers, “Administration of Torture,” includes documents in which one Gen. Michael Dunlavey claims that President Bush gave him “marching orders” to get the Pentagon’s approval of more severe interrogation methods at Guantanamo. Also, it alleges that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was “personally involved” in the interrogation of Mohammed al Qahtani.
“[T]he documents show unambiguously that the administration has adopted some of the methods of the most tyrannical regimes,” write Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. “Documents from Guantanamo describe prisoners shackled in excruciating ‘stress positions,’ held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months.”
Most of the documents on which Administration of Torture is based were obtained as a result of ongoing legal fights over a Freedom of Information Act request filed in October 2003 by the ACLU and other human rights and anti-war groups, the ACLU said in a news release.
The documents show that prisoner abuse like that found at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was hardly the isolated incident that the Bush administration or US military claimed it was. By the time the prisoner abuse story broke in mid-2004 the Army knew of at least 62 other allegations of abuse at different prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, the authors report.
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