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Report on Military Interrogation and Brutal Torture Techniques
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: May 2nd, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22report.html?...
A newly declassified Congressional report released Tuesday outlined the most detailed evidence yet that the militarys use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration. The report focused solely on interrogations carried out by the military, not those conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency at its secret prisons overseas. It rejected claims by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others that Pentagon policies played no role in harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or other military facilities. The 232-page report, the product of an 18-month inquiry, was approved on Nov. 20 by the Senate Armed Services Committee, but has since been under Pentagon review for declassification. Some of the findings were made public in a Dec. 12 article in The New York Times. The Senate report documented how some of the techniques used by the military at prisons in Afghanistan and at the naval base in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq stripping detainees, placing them in stress positions or depriving them of sleep originated in a military program known as Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape, or SERE. According to the Senate investigation, a military behavioral scientist and a colleague who had witnessed SERE training proposed its use at Guantnamo in October 2002, as pressure was rising to get tougher with detainee interrogations. Officers there sought authorization, and Mr. Rumsfeld approved 15 interrogation techniques.
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