Condi Admits White House Role in CIA Interrogation TalksIn a big admission from the Bush White House, Condoleezza Rice has admitted to Senate investigators that senior administration officials met repeatedly between 2002 and 2003 to discuss the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods on detainees.
In written statements to Senate investigators looking into the use of torture against detainees, Rice gives new details about administration members who were involved, and their consideration of a military training program, SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) to be used in interrogation.
From the L.A. Times:
In particular, Rice wrote in the Sept. 12 statement that officials discussed simulated torture techniques that elite U.S. soldiers were subjected to as part of a survival training program, and that she and other officials were told that such methods “had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm.”Rice, who was serving as national security advisor at the time of the discussions, did not identify the source of that assertion. She was referring to a U.S. military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, which at times has included waterboarding and other controversial methods subsequently employed by the CIA.
… Rice did not disclose who at the meetings, but said that she had “asked Atty. Gen. [John] Ashcroft personally to review and confirm the legal advice” being prepared by the Department of Justice on the CIA’s interrogation plans.
Other senior officials who routinely attended so-called principals meetings included then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; Alberto R. Gonzales, then the presidential counsel; and David S. Addington, the vice president’s counsel.