U.S. hid detainees to avoid Red Cross, documents show
WASHINGTON • The U.S. military hid the locations of detained terrorism suspects and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents a Senate committee released Tuesday.
"We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques," Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who has retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture.
Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility - Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan - were using sleep deprivation to "break" detainees well before then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved that technique. "True, but officially it is not happening," she told another person at the 2002 meeting.
A third person at the meeting, Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, disclosed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the Red Cross, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world.
"In the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD (Defense Department) has ‘moved' them away from the attention of the ICRC," Fredman said, according to the minutes.
The document, along with two dozen others, shows that top administration officials pushed for tougher interrogation methods in the belief that terrorism suspects were resisting interrogation.
Fredman also appeared to be advocating the use of techniques harsher than those authorized by military field guides.
"If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong," Fredman is reported to have said.
Beaver testified that she didn't recall making the comment about avoiding "harsher operations" while Red Cross representatives were around, but she said she probably was referring to the need to conduct extended periods of interrogations of detainees without disruption.
The minutes of the Guantanamo meeting were among 25 documents released Tuesday by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee and is leading a probe of the origins of cruel treatment of detainees suspected of terrorist activities.
The administration overrode or ignored objections from all four military services and from criminal investigators, who warned that the practices would imperil their ability to prosecute the suspects.
In one prophetic e-mail on Oct. 28, 2002, Mark Fallon, then the deputy commander of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, wrote a colleague: "This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of. ... Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this."
Few of the Republicans at Tuesday's hearing defended the Bush administration's detainee programs.
Guidance provided by administration lawyers "will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military intelligence communities," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C.
