Documents have revealed that the United States hid suspected terrorist detainees from the International Committee of The Red Cross. the documents that were released by a Senate committee on Tuesday also show that harsh treatment was concealed.
As McClatchy reports:
"We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques," Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who's since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture. Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting that were made public Tuesday. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility — Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — were using sleep deprivation to "break" detainees well before then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved that technique. "True, but officially it is not happening," she is quoted as having said.
Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center admitted that the detainees were often moved to avoid the watchful eye of the ICRC. The International Red Cross keeps up with prisoners around the world that are being held due to conflicts.
Not only were the whereabouts of the detainees hidden away from the protective shield that the Red Cross tries to enforce the methods of interrogation were concealed from the group.
Administration officials at the top of the government pushed for tougher and tougher methods in which to interrogate the detainees.
what is unclear is if the detainees were actually moved from one site to another or if officials outright lied to the ICRC about the locations of detainees.
"If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."
Fredman of the CIA
The minutes of the Guantanamo meeting were among 25 documents that were released by Senator Carl Levin, D-Michigan on Tuesday. He chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and is the one leading a probe of where the origins of cruel and unusual punishments of the detainees in George Bush's "War on Terrorism" started.
The Bush administration ignored and overrode objections of all four branches of the United States military and criminal investigators who warned that the treatment of detainees would in the end impair the ability to prosecute suspects captured thought to be terrorists.
Navy Captain Jane Dalton who was the legal advisor to the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers wanted to begin a review of the proposed techniques for interrogating the detainees. That review was shelves when Myers informed her that then-Defense Department general counsel William Haynes "does not want this ... to proceed."
Officials in Rumsfield's office and at Gitmo designed their interrogation program by reversing the long standing military programs used to train U.S. soldiers to resist interrogation if the are captured.
The program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape was never meant to be a guide for the United States to interrogate foreign detainees.
"The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees." The documents confirm that a delegation of senior administration lawyers visited Guantanamo in September 2002 for briefings on intelligence-gathering there. The delegation included David Addington, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney; Haynes; acting CIA counsel John Rizzo; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and now the homeland security secretary. Few of the Republicans at Tuesday's hearing defended the Bush administration’s detainee programs. Guidance provided by administration lawyers "will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military intelligence communities," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C..
If another nation detained U.S. military detainees or citizens that were thought to have terrorist ties in the manner that the U.S. has during this "War On Terror" that nation would be brought up on war crimes.
At this time the ICRC believes that the United States are no longer concealing the whereabouts of detainees.
Bernard Barrett, the ICRC’s Washington spokesman, said, "We knew that we did not always have full access to all detainees. It was a fairly serious issue." “It’s been addressed,” he said. “We are confident we now have access to all detainees at Guantanamo.”
