Top White House Officials Discussed Harsh Interrogations in 2002
A picture emerges of Justice Department officials with differing views on the use of harsh interrogation techniques in early 2002 when top White House officials met to discuss the issue.
The discussions on the use of harsh methods on al-Qaida suspects by the CIA took place before the Justice Department issued a legal opinion in August 2002 authorizing the techniques, report the New York Times and Washington Post. The meetings were described in written answers provided to a Senate Committee by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her top legal adviser.
Those at the meetings included Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top officials. The Senate Armed Forces Committee chairman, Carl Levin, released the answers to the committee’s questions; the questionnaire did not specifically ask if President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney attended the meetings.
Congressional investigators are trying to learn who authorized the techniques, but the answers do not provide many details about positions taken by the meeting participants.
During the meetings, Justice Department lawyers gave oral input into the legality of the interrogation program, according to Rice’s legal adviser, John Bellinger III. One of them was John Yoo, the principal author of the 2002 legal opinion.
Bellinger said he recalled one Justice Department official who repeatedly complained in phone calls about alleged abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The calls came from Bruce Swartz, deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s criminal division. Billinger said he forwarded the complaints to the Defense Department and was told the department was investigating.
Swartz’s warnings that abuses could do “grave damage” to the country’s reputation were highlighted in an audit by the Justice Department’s inspector general, according to a Washington Post story published earlier this year. A 2005 New York Times story said Swartz and three other Justice Department lawyers in the criminal division attended weekly meetings with FBI officials in which harsh techniques were discussed and criticized as ineffective and unproductive. Another member of the group was Alice Fisher, who went on to head the Justice Department’s criminal division.
