Two different stories are being told about how the torture program started.

[EFerrari]

1. Hissyspit posted this one:

Torture planning began in 2001, Senate report reveals
By Mark Benjamin

April 22, 2009 | WASHINGTON -- The Senate Armed Services Committee has just released an exhaustive review of torture under the Bush administration that, among other revelations, torpedoes the notion that the administration only chose torture as a last resort. Bush officials have long argued that they turned to coercive interrogations in 2002 only after captured al-Qaida suspects wouldn't talk, but the report shows the administration set the wheels in motion soon after 9/11. The Bush White House began planning for torture in December 2001, set up a program to develop the interrogation techniques by the next month, and the military and the CIA began training interrogators in coercive practices in early 2002, before they had any high-value al-Qaida suspects or any trouble eliciting information from detainees.

As the report puts it, "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees." The report undercuts the Obama administration's case for leniency against the CIA, since the agency was pursuing abusive techniques even before Department of Justice lawyers had issued their supposed legal justification for the techniques in August 2002. The report also shows that the administration appears to have attempted to use the abusive techniques to shore up its case for war in Iraq. Interrogators employed the techniques, which are notorious for producing bad intelligence, to get detainees to make statements linking Iraq and al-Qaida.

To hear former President Bush tell it, you would think the United States only turned to the techniques in desperation. When Bush announced the existence of the CIA's interrogation program in September 2006, for example, he argued that suspected al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah stopped cooperating with interrogators after his capture on March 28, 2002, forcing the agency to get rough. "We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives," Bush said. "But he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation," the president said. "And so, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures."

Not to worry, the president explained. "The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively, and determined them to be lawful."

But that's not how it happened. Staff reporting to Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., pored over 200,000 pages of documents and interviewed more than 70 people. After months going through the declassification process, their report is a stunningly frank tick-tock of the development of torture policy under the Bush administration. The sequence of events shows the early genesis of torture and also exposes repeated, vivid warnings -- falling on deaf ears -- that torture is a clumsy, wrongheaded and ineffective way to gather intelligence.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/04/22/benjamin/

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5510025


2. sinkingfeeling posted this one:

In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: April 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22detain.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5510728

They both can't be true.



/oops