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Rice delivered OK to waterboard as Bush's adviser
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-04-23 13:46 The Armed Services Committee report says that six months earlier, in December 2001, the Pentagon's legal office already had made inquiries about the use of mock interrogation and detention tactics to a US military training unit that schools armed forces personnel in how to endure harsh treatment. A former intelligence official said Wednesday the CIA officers also based their proposed harsh interrogations on the mock interrogation methods used by the unit. He declined to be identified because the CIA had not authorized the disclosure of the information. In July 2002, responding to a follow-up from the Pentagon general counsel's office, officials at the training unit, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, detailed their methods for the Pentagon. The list included waterboarding. But the training unit warned that harsh physical techniques could backfire by making prisoners more resistant. They also cautioned about the reliability of information gleaned from the severe methods and warned that the public and political backlash could be "intolerable." "A subject in extreme pain may provide an answer, any answer or many answers in order to get the pain to stop," the training officials said in their memo. Less than a week later, the Justice Department issued two legal opinions that sanctioned the CIA's harsh interrogation program. The memos appeared to draw deeply on the survival school data provided to the Pentagon to show that the CIA's methods would not cross the line into torture. The opinion concluded that the harsh interrogation methods would be acceptable for use on terror detainees because the same techniques did not cause severe physical or mental pain to US military students who were tested in the government's carefully controlled training program. Several people from the survival program objected to the use of their mock interrogations in battlefield settings. In an October 2002 e-mail, a senior Army psychologist told personnel at Guantanamo Bay that the methods were inherently dangerous and students were sometimes injured, even in a controlled setting. "The risk with real detainees is increased exponentially," he said. Nevertheless, for the next two years, the CIA and military officials received interrogation training and direct interrogation support from JPRA trainers. Last week, the Obama administration's top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, privately told intelligence employees that "high value information" was obtained through the harsh interrogation techniques. However, on Tuesday, in a written statement, Blair said, "The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means."
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