Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ’54, along with former Vice President Dick Cheney, created a culture within the federal government that contributed to the events recounted in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the use of torture in the War on Terror, former Inspector General of the CIA Frederick Hitz ’61 told The Daily Princetonian.
Hitz was inspector general from 1990-98.
Rumsfeld, who could not be reached for comment,is scarcely mentioned in the latest report. Of the 25 times his name appears, most refer to the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which he was sued in his official capacity.
According to the Intelligence Committee's report, CIA officers allegedly used waterboarding, rectal feeding and hydration, sleep deprivation and other techniques in an effort to procure information relevant to national security from terror suspects.
“They weren’t driving it in the sense that they weren’t in charge of the whole interrogation program … but what they were in charge of was the notion that the gloves came off and that we were gonna do what we felt we had to do,” Hitz said. “Dick Cheney, in anticipation of the release of this report, said he would do it all over again. Let ’em loose. Take the restraints off the interrogation process.”
Rumsfeld took full responsibilityin 2004 in his capacity as Secretary of Defense for prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, and a Senate investigation released in 2009 said he approved 15 “enhanced interrogation techniques” in 2002 as part of a “get tough” approach to interrogations.
“Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officers conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody,” the 2009 report said. “What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.”
Mike Madden of Salon allegedthat Rumsfeld “began laying the groundwork for detainee abuse years before Abu Ghraib,” claiming that Rumsfeld wrote at the bottom of a memo about sleep deprivation, “Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”
“There was a clear policy orchestrated at a high level within the Bush administration, which allowed [the CIA] to commit systematic crimes and gross violations of international human rights law,” United Nations special rapporteur Ben Emmerson said in a statement on Tuesday. “The individuals responsible for the criminal conspiracy revealed in today’s report must be brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorised at a high level within the US Government provides no excuse whatsoever.”
The report says Rumsfeld was briefed about the CIA program for the first time on Sept. 16, 2003, and also that Rumsfeld did not allow the CIA to transfer prisoners held at off-site prisons to the military base at Guantanamo base in 2006.
Hitz said he had difficulty understanding the CIA’s place in an interrogation program.
“[T]he CIA in recent years has had no involvement with interrogations, hostile interrogations … ever since the Vietnam War, because we had gotten into such difficult straits then, and for us to come back, even making allowances for the fact that 9/11 was a horrific event, is not something we had done in recent years,” Hitz said. “The only thing CIA really brought to the program was the fact that we could prevail upon our friends to give us space somewhere, whether it was in the middle of Poland … or wherever it turned out to be. We didn’t have any recent experience on the whole question of these interrogations.”
Hitz said he also didn’t believe claims that the Senate Intelligence Committee had downplayed the value of the information interrogators received.
“I’m sure we got some,” he said. “For the pain and damage it’s done to our good name, we didn’t get enough. There’s just no way to do it. You have to know how to interrogate. Especially in a foreign culture. In an Islamic culture. I’m sure you saw some of the stories about [Ali] Soufan, the American of Lebanese descent [and FBI agent who almost prevented the 9/11 attacks] … The FBI has to be good at [interrogation] because they can’t get court-admissible evidence as a result of torture.”
Hitz added that the entire program was “a disaster waiting to happen.”
“You’ve got a situation where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 38 times, and there’s no way in this world you’ll ever be able to bring that into court," he said. "We gave that up and gained the opprobrium of the world. … He could barely breathe, and that’s the way we’re going to get the truth? I don’t think so.”
Associate news editor Paul Phillips contributed reporting.
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