Conclusions of the Senate Armed Services Report

Sorry is this post seems a bit schizophrenic for a humor blog, but I felt I had to note the publication of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s new report, “Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody,” which is now posted on the committee’s website. This thing is just heart-breaking. The report’s Executive Summary includes 19 Conclusions that matter-of-factly lay out the entire chronology of the program. Here are the first and the 19th conclusions, which effectively bookend this shameful period in our nation’s history.

Conclusion 1: On February 7, 2002, President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. Following the President’s determination, techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions, used in SERE training to simulate tactics used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody.

Conclusion 19: The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.

[Props=Balloon Juice has the rest of the summary’s conclusions]