Rumsfeld OK’d tough questioning techniques for detainees, officials say

WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld last year personally approved a series of aggressive interrogation techniques for suspected Taliban and al Qaeda detainees to extract more information about the Sept. 11 attacks and help prevent future ones, defense officials said Thursday.

Rumsfeld was presented with a request in December 2002 by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had arrived a month earlier to oversee prisoners at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to use a broad range of extraordinary “nondoctrinal” questioning techniques on a specific al Qaeda detainee at the base, a general with the Pentagon’s Judge Advocate General’s office said on condition of anonymity.

The officials did not detail the procedures Miller sought to use or name the detainee, but said he was thought to have valuable information about future attacks by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network. Pentagon lawyers and interrogators clashed over the proposed procedures, which some of the attorneys said would violate international law.

The account confirmed some portions of earlier media reports on the development of post-Sept. 11 interrogation practices. But it was the first official acknowledgment that Rumsfeld personally has been involved in the development of interrogation policies for war detainees.

Miller is the general who was sent last month to oversee prison operations in Iraq in the wake of misconduct involving sexual humiliation and physical abuse uncovered at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Miller also issued a report last year recommending changes at Abu Ghraib, including more effective interrogation of detainees.

The abuse scandal touched off congressional hearings that have widened from an investigation of misconduct by seven military police officers at a single cellblock to the Pentagon’s overall detention policy and interrogation practices.

The methods Miller sought to use at Guantanamo in 2002 were harsher than those used in standard military doctrine, and some drew objections among military lawyers in the Judge Advocate General’s office at the Pentagon, the JAG official said. Intelligence officials, however, felt an immediate need for better information.

The Pentagon general counsel’s office gathered a group of military and civilian lawyers, intelligence officials, officers from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, regional combatant commanders and Pentagon policy-makers for a lengthy summit on the plan.

The effort to define how far interrogators can go in pressuring detainees for information without violating international law exposed the rift between interrogators and JAG lawyers, who considered some of the techniques proposed by Miller to be illegal.

Military lawyers successfully argued for the removal of some practices from the list, although some of those already had been used on detainees, officials said. Countering the earlier news reports, the JAG officer said “substantially less” than 72 techniques were proposed. He did not say how many actually were on the proposed list or the list finally approved.

Rumsfeld trimmed the list of requested interrogation techniques by about one-third, and required his personal approval for a “handful” of techniques, a senior Pentagon attorney and the JAG official said. Rumsfeld approved the revised proposal in April 2003.

Officials provided few details of the specific case that prompted Rumsfeld’s review and have declined to say which interrogation tactics drew criticism from military lawyers or whether the techniques yielded any useful information. The officials stressed that while prisoners at Guantanamo are considered possible terrorists, rather than prisoners of war, those held in Iraq are considered POWs. The Iraqi detainees are covered by the Geneva Convention, while the Guantanamo prisoners are not, although U.S. officials insist they observe the spirit of international law.

Rumsfeld did not personally approve the interrogation procedures for so-called enemy combatants in Iraq, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said.