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Saturday, June 14, 2008

DOJ Official: Rumsfeld Personally Approved Torture

clipped from www.scoop.co.nz

Former Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld personally authorized the use of brutal
interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists
imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay despite warnings from the FBI
that the methods amounted to inhumane treatment, was
possibly illegal, and would not produce reliable
intelligence, a Department of Justice inspector general
testified Tuesday.

"The FBI believed that these techniques
were not getting actionable information, that they were
unsophisticated and unproductive," said Glenn Fine, the
DOJ’s inspector general, in testimony Tuesday before the
Senate Judiciary Committee. "They raised their concerns with
the Department of Defense, but the Department of Defense,
from what we were told, dismissed those concerns and that no
changes were made in the Department of Defense's
strategy."

The piece goes on:

Fine issued a 437-page report last month on the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, which found that White House officials ignored FBI concerns about the treatment of detainees...

“The Bush administration may have systematically implemented, from the top down, detainee interrogation policies that constitute torture or otherwise violate the law," the letter to Mukasey says. “We believe that these serious and significant revelations warrant an immediate investigation to determine whether actions taken by the President, his Cabinet, and other Administration officials are in violation of the War Crimes Act, the Anti-Torture Act, and other U.S. and international laws.”

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