SubscribePHILIPPE SANDS: Diane Beaver was the lawyer down at Guantanamo. Mike Dunlavey was her boss. General Hill was the commander of United States SouthCom based at Miami. I’ve spoken to all three of them, and both Diane Beaver and Mike Dunlavey, who have largely been scapegoated by the administration, described to me the visit that Mr. Gonzales made, accompanied by Mr. Addington, who’s Vice President Cheney’s lawyer, and Jim Haynes, who is Rumsfeld’s lawyer.
They came down. They talked about interrogation techniques. They apparently even watched an interrogation or two. I was told that the driving individual was Mr. Addington, who was obviously the man in control. ...
And [Rumsfeld] approves fifteen techniques of interrogation and then leaves open three other techniques, including waterboarding. Those techniques were used over a period of fifty-four days on al-Qahtani at Guantanamo, until one of Jim Haynes’s colleagues, Alberto Mora, who was the general counsel for the Navy, stepped in and said this cannot go on. And the order was then rescinded, but not before, I think, he had been abused and almost certainly also tortured.
[Cheney's] man was a guy called David Addington. I didn’t meet Addington; he doesn’t give interviews. I met his protege, Jim Haynes, with whom he worked very, very closely. Addington was plainly the man who was driving the issues forward. And one assumes he wasn’t doing it on his own behalf, but on behalf of his boss, who is the Vice President. Diane Beaver described to me, you know, that she was fearful of this man. He has a big powerful man, a booming voice, a big beard that he had. And he was obviously the man in charge. And it is plain from a lot of accounts that I’ve got from people who dealt with him directly, who were bullied by him, that he was the driving force. ...
The administration recognized the threat that it faced [after Hamdan], and within three months it had adopted legislation in the Military Commissions Act which created an immunity for any person who was involved in the interrogation of al-Qahtani, as well as many other people. That immunity applies within the United States.
But, as I write in the article in Vanity Fair, it doesn’t go beyond the United States. And I describe in the Vanity Fair piece, in much more detail than in the book, the meetings I’ve had with a European judge and a European prosecutor, who basically said the fact that the US has created a domestic immunity significantly increases the prospects of international investigational prosecution, if any of these people set foot out of the country. And as the prosecutor said to me, that was a very stupid thing to do, to create an immunity.
... because cruel treatment of prisoners constituted a criminal act in every European jurisdiction, there must be few European government officials, including military intelligence or police officials, who do not ask themselves at some point whether cooperating with the United States in the war on terror might not make them accomplices or abettors in criminal activity or expose them to civil liability.
[This and other factors] contributed to the difficulties our nation has experienced in forging the strongest possible alliance in this war. Because this is so, we consequently weakened our defenses. Whatever intelligence we obtain through the use of harsh interrogation tactics, on the whole these policies and practices greatly damaged our overall effectiveness and impaired our military intelligence capabilities in the war on terror.
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posted by joeblough at 7:55 AM on April 3, 2008