Air Force Instructor Details
Harsh Interrogations
Colonel Tells Senate Panel How U.S. Training Program
Was Adapted for Use Against Iraqi Detainees
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post, September 26, 2008
go to original
See Article I.3 Promoting
Torture
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Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin
(D-Mich.) was the only senator to attend the
hearing.
source: Jay Mallin,
Bloomberg News
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WASHINGTON -- The techniques themselves -- forced
nudity, sleep deprivation, painful shackling -- had
been used for years to prepare U.S. fighter pilots
for possible capture by an enemy. But Col. Steven
Kleinman, an Air Force instructor, said he was shocked
in 2003 to see the same harsh methods used haphazardly
on Iraqis in a U.S. prison camp.
"It had morphed into a form of punishment for
those who wouldn't cooperate," said Kleinman,
a career intelligence officer and survival-school
instructor.
In dramatic testimony before a Senate panel yesterday,
he gave a rare account of how the Pentagon adapted
an Air Force training program to squeeze information
from captured Iraqis.
What Kleinman witnessed in Baghdad in September 2003
prompted him to order a stop to three interrogations,
and to warn his superiors that the military's interrogation
practices were abusive and, in his opinion, illegal.
"I told the task force commander that the methods
were unlawful and were in violation of the Geneva
Conventions," he told the Senate Armed Services
Committee.
Kleinman was one of two witnesses at a hearing that
probed the Pentagon's use of specific interrogation
tactics in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba. Defense officials previously have acknowledged
a decision in 2003 by then-Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld to authorize techniques adapted from a
training program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance
and Escape, or SERE.
That program subjects pilot trainees to physical
and psychological abuse they may face if captured
by an enemy that does not honor the Geneva Conventions'
guidelines for treatment of prisoners of war.
Also yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted
10 to 9, along party lines, to subpoena memos and
other materials related to harsh interrogation techniques
from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.
Senate and House Democrats have long sought the documents,
which offered legal authority for some of the Bush
administration's most controversial detainee treatment
policies.
Kleinman, a senior officer at the Air Force Academy
where SERE training was conducted, was part of a team
invited to Iraq in 2003 to observe interrogations
and offer advice. He said he witnessed several episodes
in which young troops sought to overcome a lack of
training in interrogations by blindly using harsh
SERE tactics on Iraqi detainees. Many of the interrogations
took place in a former ammunition bunker, which he
described as "underground, cold and dark."
In one instance, he said, a detainee was forced to
kneel under a spotlight, flanked by guards toting
iron bars, while interrogators shouted questions at
him. Each answer automatically elicited a hard slap
across the face -- a pattern that was repeated without
pause for 30 minutes. When Kleinman intervened to
stop the questioning, the interrogators appeared baffled.
"They didn't seem to think it was a problem,"
he said.
A second detainee interrogated in Kleinman's presence
was subjected to sleep deprivation and painful stress
positions. A third had all his clothes physically
torn from his body and was ordered to stand continuously
for 12 hours, "or until he passed out,"
Kleinman said.
When Kleinman complained about the practices, various
Defense Department officials agreed that the techniques
probably violated Geneva Conventions standards but
the interrogations continued unabated, he said. By
then, six months into the Iraq war, White House and
Defense Department lawyers had issued legal opinions
that declared the Iraqi detainees to be "unlawful
enemy combatants" not covered by Geneva Conventions
protections for prisoners of war.
Kleinman said the Air Force's training program was
distorted into an offensive program. He noted that
the harsh techniques were adapted from torture methods
used by Chinese communists, and were never regarded
as useful in eliciting intelligence. Instead, they
break a prisoner psychologically and make him eager
to say anything to stop the pain.
"That model's primary objective was to compel
a prisoner to generate propaganda, not intelligence,"
he said.
Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman
and the only senator to attend the hearing, sought
to draw a link between the alleged abuse Kleinman
described and the actions of Bush administration officials
who made the initial decisions to allow "enhanced
interrogation" of detainees. Pentagon decisions
approving harsh measures "conveyed the message
that senior officials felt that physical pressures
and degrading tactics were appropriate," he said.
Levin noted that many of the aggressive techniques
approved by Pentagon officials -- and witnessed by
Kleinman and others -- were later used against detainees
at Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
"The clear message to our troops was that the
abuse of detainees was permissible activity,"
Levin said.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this
report.
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