http://www.isria.com/pages/29_May_2009_12.htmRemarks of US Senator Carl Levin at the Foreign Policy Association<snip>
But then last week, a voice from the recent past reemerged, claiming that America can do what we please, preaching unilateralism again, and embracing the arrogance that for too many years alienated our friends and set back efforts to achieve common goals. Former Vice President Cheney’s world view, which so dominated the Bush years and which so dishonored our nation, gained a little traction last week – enough to persuade me to address it head on here tonight.
I do so as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which recently completed an eighteen month investigation into the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody and produced a 200 page bipartisan report which gives the lie to Mr. Cheney’s claims. I do so because if the abusive interrogation techniques that he champions – the face of which were the pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib – if they are once more seen as representative of America, our security will be severely set back.
When former Vice President Cheney said last week that what happened at Abu Ghraib was the work of “a few sadistic prison guards” acting on their own,
he bore false witness. And when he said last week there was no link between the techniques used at Abu Ghraib and those approved for use in the CIA’s secret prisons,
he again strayed from the truth. The seeds of Abu Ghraib’s rotten fruit were sown by civilians at the highest levels of our government.
On September 16, 2001, Vice President Cheney suggested that the United States turn to the “dark side,” his words, in our response to 9/11. Not long after that, White House Counsel Gonzales called provisions of the Geneva Conventions “quaint,” and President Bush determined that provisions of the Conventions did not apply to detainees captured in the Afghanistan war. Senior administration officials followed the President and Vice President’s lead. Our recent bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report determined the following: “Senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive
techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”
...
Mr. Cheney has also claimed that the release of classified documents would prove his view that the techniques worked. But those classified documents say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of the abusive techniques. I hope that the documents are declassified so that people can judge for themselves what is fact and what is fiction. Mr. Cheney has made other false statements. For instance, his claim that the techniques used on detainees were the “same exact procedures” used on our own people in the SERE training regime. That could not be farther from the truth. A report by the CIA Inspector General said that the CIA’s Office of Medical Services judged that the SERE waterboard experience is totally different from the CIA’s usage. And the reason is absolutely clear. SERE training is administered to our own people in highly controlled settings and can be terminated at any time by the student during the training. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. Waterboarding one of our own personnel even once over their objection would be a felony. It is a colossal misrepresentation for Mr. Cheney to claim that the techniques we use in SERE training are exactly the same, his words, as those used against detainees. The abuse of detainees in our custody has alienated our allies. It has fueled al Qaeda’s propaganda. And it has served as a recruitment tool for terrorists. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last year, former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora testified that “there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.” The vivid reports of U.S. personnel abusing detainees have also contributed to the decline of America’s standing in the world. Since the world embraced us after 9/11, its support for us has been dramatically diminished. And that should set off alarm bells for all of us, because we need the good will of people around the world for our own security and to deal with the greatest threats that we face. The bottom line in this debate was articulated by the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, who said recently that, “the damage have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us.” Mr. Cheney’s support of abusive techniques dishonors our nation and the men and women who wear our nation’s uniform. Listen to what a Captain in the 82nd Airborne Division wrote about the abuse of detainees that he had witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a letter to Senator McCain, he posed what he called “the most important question that this generation will answer,” – “Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security?” That Army Captain said in his extraordinarily eloquent words and in his own way that he would “rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of that idea that is ‘America.’”
Finally, the assertion by Mr. Cheney that the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody at Abu Ghraib were the actions of “a few sadistic prison guards” acting on their own is not only false, it is a shameful attempt to avoid accountability for those who were the most responsible – those senior civilian officials who, in the words of our bipartisan Armed Services Committee report “solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of legality, and authorized their use against detainees.” Until now, mainly lower ranking military personnel have been left to take the rap for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. I believe it is dishonorable and a failure of leadership to lay the sins of Abu Ghraib solely at their doorstep. The buck, to date, has stopped far below where it belongs.
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