"We did not torture anybody"

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN CENSORED BY GOOGLE

Dunlavey, 63, spent about two and a half years of his 10-year term -- from the fall of 2001 to March 2004 -- serving the George W. Bush administration in various capacities in the fight against terrorism.
From March to October 2002, Dunlavey, then a two-star general in the U.S. Army Reserve, oversaw interrogations of detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison camp. His decision to seek permission to use harsher interrogation methods in October 2002 has been the subject of international media coverage and a part of the debate on the use of torture as an interrogation technique after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Dunlavey, now retired from the military, has declined to comment about his role in the evolution of interrogation tactics.
He said he does not think the issue will be on voters' minds.
"We did not torture anybody," he said. "I think people realize I was pulled into some really difficult circumstances. We did a lot of good that was not put out in the press."
Even with his military service, Dunlavey said being a judge is the toughest job he has had, especially the heartbreak he said he has encountered in Family Court cases.
But Dunlavey said he finds meaning in serving the community and the legal profession.
"There is a real benefit to helping other people. When you see a light go on in a kid's face, it makes it all worthwhile," he said.
If retained, Dunlavey said he has plans for a new specialty court. He and others are working to create a therapeutic court to handle cases involving military veterans, he said. Like drug and mental-health court, the court would be designed to address the underlying causes of a defendant's criminal behavior.
Dunlavey said veterans often face a range of problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, that might stem from their service.

http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009310309942

ERIE COUNTY VOTERS ARE STRONGLY URGED TO NOT RETAIN RETIRED 2 STAR GENERAL MICHAEL E. DUNLAVEY. THIS MAN UNDER DIRECT ORDERS FROM GEORGE W. BUSH, ENGAGED IN TORURE OF THE DETAINEES BY THE SOLDIERS UNDER HIS COMMAND AT GITMO. HE BROKE THE GENEVA CONVENTION AND WATERBOARDED TERROR SUSPECTS. HE TOTALLY DENIES THESE ACTIONS, BUT INVESTIGATIONS HAVE PROVED OTHERWISE. HE HAS LOST ALL MORAL AUTHORITY TO SIT AS A JUDGE IN THE ERIE COUNTY COURT OF COMMON PLEAS. RETIRE ALREADY WILLYA?!

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general michael dunlavey says bush directly ordered guantanamo torture
October 24, 2007 · Leave a Comment
General claims Bush gave ‘marching orders’ on aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo
New book says US uses ‘methods of the most tyrannical regimes’
More than 100,000 pages of newly released government documents demonstrate how US military interrogators “abused, tortured or killed” scores of prisoners rounded up since Sept. 11, 2001, including some who were not even suspected of having terrorist ties, according to a just-published book.
In Administration of Torture, two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys detail the findings of a years-long investigation and court battle with the administration that resulted in the release of massive amounts of data on prisoner treatment and the deaths of US-held prisoners.
“[T]he documents show unambiguously that the administration has adopted some of the methods of the most tyrannical regimes,” write Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. “Documents from Guantanamo describe prisoners shackled in excruciating ’stress positions,’ held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months.”
Most of the documents on which Administration of Torture is based were obtained as a result of ongoing legal fights over a Freedom of Information Act request filed in October 2003 by the ACLU and other human rights and anti-war groups, the ACLU said in a news release.
Drawing almost exclusively from the documents, the authors say there is a stark contrast between the public statements of President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the policies those and others in the administration were advocating behind the scenes. President Bush gave “marching orders” to Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who asked the Pentagon to approve harsher interrogation methods at Guantanamo, the general claims in documents reported in the book.
The ACLU also found that an Army investigator reported Rumsfeld was “personally involved” in overseeing the interrogation of a Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed al Qahtani. The prisoner was forced to parade naked in front of female interrogators wearing women’s underwear on his head and was led around on a leash while being forced to perform dog tricks.
“It is imperative that senior officials who authorized, endorsed, or tolerated the abuse and torture of prisoners be held accountable,” Jaffer and Singh write, “not only as a matter of elemental justice, but to ensure that the same crimes are not perpetrated again.”

http://iraqupdate.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/general-michael-dunlavey-says-bush-directly-ordered-guantanamo-torture/

Published on Friday, November 2, 2007 by Erie Times News (Pennsylvania)
Orders From The Top:
Retired General Dunlavey: Guantanamo Mission Came Straight From Bush, Rumsfeld
by Lisa Thompson
When military investigators questioned Erie County Judge Michael E. Dunlavey about reported prisoner abuse during his tenure at the Guantanamo Bay camp for suspected terrorists, Dunlavey told them he got his "marching orders" from President Bush, according to a new book about U.S. policies regarding torture.
The book, "Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond," relies on government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to trace the development of what the authors claim was prisoner abuse and torture that emerged in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The book uses Dunlavey's words to place him, a retired two-star general in the U.S. Army Reserve, at the advent of the development of what have become disputed interrogation policies.
In a statement Dunlavey provided to a U.S. Air Force lieutenant general investigating FBI reports of detainee abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Dunlavey explains that as leader of interrogations at Guantanamo, he reported directly to President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
He acknowledged the use of loud music and dogs and shackling prisoners in the fetal position during interrogations, but stressed repeatedly that the standard was to treat detainees humanely. The military investigation into the claims of abuse at Guantanamo Bay found no reason to reprimand Dunlavey.
In the statement to U.S. Air Force Lt. General Randall Schmidt, as summarized and sworn to by Schmidt, Dunlavey said:
Rumsfeld summoned him to a meeting on Feb. 21 or 22, 2002, attended by Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and others. The date was two weeks after Bush had issued a directive denying al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners protections under the Geneva Conventions.
Dunlavey said at the meeting, Rumsfeld told him that the Department of Defense had "accumulated a number of bad guys."
Rumsfeld wanted these prisoners interrogated to identify senior Taliban leaders and other operatives and obtain information about future plans, Dunlavey said.
"Our mission was to stop Americans from being killed," Dunlavey said, according to the report.
Dunlavey, an intelligence specialist, said he had interrogation experience dating back to the Vietnam War and had conducted more than 3,000 interrogations. Rumsfeld needed a "common sense way to do business," Dunlavey said.
"The SECDEF (Secretary of Defense) said he wanted a product and he wanted intelligence now. He told me what he wanted; not how to do it."
Dunlavey said he was first directed to report to military officials, but then ordered to work more closely with President Bush. "The directions changed and I got my marching orders from the President of the United States," Dunlavey said. "I was told by the SECDEF that he wanted me back in Washington, D.C., every week to brief him."
The new book also includes the now well-known October 2002 memo in which Dunlavey asked for permission to use more-aggressive interrogation tactics at the camp, including the use of dogs and extreme cold.
ACLU's role in book
Authors Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union, seek to link official military and civilian policies to the emergence of alleged prisoner abuse, torture and death in places such as the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and elsewhere.
They base their argument on documents the ACLU obtained from the government through a Freedom of Information Act request.
"The Bush administration has professed a commitment to democracy and human rights and claimed solidarity with those who struggle against tyranny. But these documents show unambiguously that the administration has adopted some of the methods of the most tyrannical regimes," the authors write.
The Erie Times-News currently has an appeal pending over the Department of Defense's refusal to release to the newspaper documents relating to Dunlavey's tenure at Guantanamo.
The summary of Dunlavey's statement about practices at Guantanamo in the new book provides the first detailed account from Dunlavey, who has repeatedly said policy prevented him from commenting.
Dunlavey, an Erie County Court judge, agreed Thursday through a spokesperson in his chambers to review questions about the book from the Erie Times-News and answer them if he felt they were "appropriate."
He had not yet responded Thursday night.
He previously told the Erie Times-News that detainees at Guantanamo were "not prisoners of war the way we were trained for, or the (kind the) Geneva Conventions envisions." However, he has said he believes the tactics developed for their interrogations were "consistent with the Geneva Conventions."
'I treated them as human beings'
Rumsfeld called Dunlavey from his seat on the Erie County Family Court bench in February 2002 and placed him in charge of interrogations at Guantanamo in March 2002. Dunlavey, 61, was elected judge in November 1999.
Portions of Dunlavey's role in the development of interrogation practices after 9/11 have been well-publicized.
After the images of abuse and torture of prisoners emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the government released a series of documents to explain the development of interrogation policy in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The government maintained, and many refuted, that what happened at Abu Ghraib was not the result of government policy.
The Department of Defense released documents in June 2004 showing that while Dunlavey was commander at Guantanamo, he sought permission from Southern Command to use more extreme interrogation tactics, including convincing detainees that they and/or their families faced imminent death, scaring them with dogs, and exposing them to cold temperatures or water.
Most of Dunlavey's proposed methods, excluding the most severe, were approved by Rumsfeld in late 2002, but then retracted in early 2003. Dunlavey stepped down from his post at Guantanamo in early November 2002.
For the first time in the new book, "Administration of Torture," military documents that purport to show Dunlavey's view of the mission at Guantanamo have been released.
In the statement, as summarized by Schmidt, Dunlavey said the camp was in disarray when he arrived.
"The facility consisted of literally a dangling fence," he said.
The detainees were not in control, he said.
"They were shaking out their blankets and throwing food," he said.
Some threw feces on guards, fashioned weapons, even urinated on female interrogators, he said.
The guards, he said, were living no better than the detainees were.
Dunlavey also said most of the interrogators had little experience.
"The linguists were worthless. They came out of school and could order coffee, but they were getting smoked by the detainees," he said.
Dunlavey acknowledged loud music, shouting, dogs, and shackling were used to intimidate or control detainees. But he denied they denied the prisoners food or water or allowed female interrogators to taunt the detainees with their bodies.
He said he clearly communicated his task force rules.
"The Geneva Conventions applied. I treated them as human beings, but not like soldiers. They had significant culture. The rugs and beads were significant to me. I let them practice religion," he said.The Book
"Administration of Torture" (2007, Columbia University Press), is not available in local bookstores.
What Dunlavey said
Excerpts from a summarized witness statement Erie County Judge Michael E. Dunlavey provided on March 17, 2005, to U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt, who was investigating FBI complaints about abuse at Guantanamo.
The document is published in the new book "Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond," by Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh.
"The SECDEF said he wanted a product and he wanted intelligence now. He told me what he wanted; not how to do it."
"Initially, I was told that I would answer to the SECDEF and USSOUTHCOM ... The directions changed and I got my marching orders from the President of the United States."
"The mission was to get intelligence to prevent another 9/11."
"Virtually no one had a degree of expertise to deal with these people. They do not subscribe to our values legally and morally."
"The detainees were treated humanely. They had a high status of care. ... Humane is who we are as the American military."
"My first lesson was in Vietnam. I went out in the field and the South Vietnamese had two POWs. They got screamed at and kicked around. I watched what was going on. ... There was a big plate of boiled rice with flies on it. I asked one of the POWs when he had last eaten. He said, 'Four days ago and water two days ago.' ... I had a canteen. I drank and gave him a drink. It worked. I got his name."
"Keep in mind, they don't like dogs. Unless dogs are on patrol, they would be in an interrogation room. Using dogs is equal to the Fear Up technique. It breaks their concentration in their response to the interrogation techniques. They would be thinking about that dog. Is that dog a real threat? Absolutely not."
"We physically removed an FBI agent when he went across the desk at a detainee."
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/02/4987

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0231140525?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0231140525&adid=1MGQ1G2JFRMJJNYJKT70&

Michael E. Dunlavey
From dKosopedia
Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey is a retired Army lawyer, who currently works as a State Judge in Erie, PA. He used to command JTF-170, Guantanamo prison, from ???? till November, 2002. Dunlavey began the practice of torturing prisoners at Guantanamo, starting with Mohammad al-Qahtani. Torture became standard operating procedure under his sucessor, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller.
From the article Inside GITMO:
On Oct. 11, 2002, Gen. Dunlavey sent a formal plan for al-Qahtani’s interrogation up the chain of command. He sought approval for a menu of 19 "counter-resistance techniques" not in the Army Field Manual:Category 1: Yelling, deception, use of multiple interrogators, misrepresenting identity of the interrogator (as from a country with a reputation for harsh treatment of prisoners).Category 2: Stress positions (such as standing for up to four hours), use of falsified documents or reports, isolation for 30 days or longer, interrogation in places other than the interrogation booth, deprivation of light and sound, hooding, interrogation for up to 20 hours straight, removal of all comfort items (including religious items), switching from hot food to military meals ready to eat, removal of clothing, forced grooming and shaving of facial hair, use of phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress.Category 3: Use of scenarios to persuade the detainee that death or pain is imminent for him or his family, exposure to cold or water, use of mild non-injurious physical contact, use of a wet towel or water-boarding to simulate drowning or suffocation.
In spite of this, Dunlavey says he believes that "torture is wrong."

The Center for Grassroots Oversight
This page can be viewed at http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=michael_e._dunlavey
Profile: Michael E. Dunlavey
Positions that Michael E. Dunlavey has held:
Commander of JTF-170
Michael E. Dunlavey was a participant or observer in the following events:
January 11, 2002-April 30, 2002: First Prisoners Arrive at Guantanamo Prison; House in Private Camp X-Ray
Camp X-Ray. The prisoners are housed in cages pictured. [Source: PBS]The first prisoners who arrived at Guantanamo Bay (see January 11, 2002) are accommodated in a location known as “Camp X-Ray.” This camp consists of small cages, measuring eight-by-eight feet, with open-air, chain-link walls, a concrete floor and a roof made of wood and metal. (Williams 1/14/2003) Inside, detainees are provided with a mattress, a blanket, a sheet, two towels, a toothbrush, shampoo, soap, flip-flops, two buckets, and plastic water bottles. (Meek 12/3/2003) One of the buckets is for water to wash with; the other to urinate in. (Rasul, Iqbal, and Ahmed 7/26/2004 ) The cages have no plumbing and thus guards have to escort detainees to portable toilets. (Williams 1/14/2003) The cells at Camp X-Ray are described by released British prisoners as being without privacy and open to the elements as well as to “rats, snakes, and scorpions.” (Prince and Jones 3/12/2004) During the first weeks until about the middle of February, the prisoners, according to Asif Iqbal, are “not allowed any exercise at all.” (Rasul, Iqbal, and Ahmed 7/26/2004 ) And later, Amnesty International confirms that prisoners are kept inside their cages “sometimes up to 24 hours a day with little exercise time out of their cells.” (Amnesty International 10/27/2004) Only after some months, according to the Tipton Three, are prisoners allowed, “once a week, to walk in a small recreation yard for about 5 minutes.” (Prince and Jones 3/12/2004) Jamal Udeen recalls: “Recreation meant your legs were untied and you walked up and down a strip of gravel. In Camp X-Ray you only got five minutes.” (Prince and Jones 3/12/2004) At first, prisoners are allegedly allowed a shower—a cold two-minute one—only once a week, and never in solitary confinement. Later the number of showers is increased to three a week. (Prince and Jones 3/12/2004) Eating has to be done in 10 minutes and the amount of food is very little. (Meek 12/3/2003) Speaking to each other is strictly prohibited. (Meek 12/3/2003) Five days later, however, he will be allowed to speak to neighboring detainees. (Rasul, Iqbal, and Ahmed 7/26/2004 ) But apparently worse than the accommodations is the uncertainty the prisoners are facing. “When we first got there, the level [of fear] was sky-high,” Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed, and Shafiq Rasul, who were among the first to arrive, recall: “We were terrified we might be killed at any minute. The guards would say, ‘Nobody knows you’re here, all they know is that you’re missing and we could kill you and no one would know.’” (Branigan and Dodd 8/4/2004) The prison operations at Guantanamo are at first handled by two Joint Task Forces: JTF-160 and JTF-170. JTF-160, first under the command of Brig. Gen. Michael R. Lehnert, is responsible both for guarding the prisoners, and for dealing with migrants seeking asylum. JTF-170, under command of Major-General Michael E. Dunlavey, is tasked with handling interrogation operations for the Department of Defense and ensuring coordination among government agencies involved in the interrogation of the suspected terrorists. (Williams 1/14/2003) It consists of personnel from the DIA, the CIA, and the FBI. (Borger 10/16/2002) Sccording to later statements by several officers who served at Guantanamo, aggressive methods of interrogation are introduced in early 2002. Prisoners are derived of sleep, forced into “stress positions,” and put into extra cold, air-conditioned rooms. (Golden and Schmitt 5/13/2004)

(April 2002)-October 9, 2002: White House and Pentagon Complain about ‘Nice’ Treatment of Gunatanamo Detainees
The POW-style treatment of detainees at Guantanamo by MP commander Gen. Rick Baccus (see March 28, 2002) does not resonate well with Pentagon and White House policymakers. (Barry, Hirsh, and Isikoff 5/24/2004) Pentagon officials complain that Baccus is “too nice” to the prisoners and makes it difficult for interrogators to extract information from them. Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, head of the interrogators’ unit JTF-170, is reportedly irritated by Baccus’ decision allowing the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to put up posters informing detainees they need only provide interrogators with their name, rank, and number. (Borger 10/16/2002) Irritation with Baccus’s attitude towards detains will culminate in his dismissal (see October 9, 2002) on October 9.
September 25, 2002: Administration Lawyers Give ‘Green Light’ for Harsh Interrogations at Guantanamo
Several high-level Bush administration lawyers arrive in Guantanamo. The group includes White House counsel Alberto Gonzales; Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington, who had helped the Justice Department craft its “torture memo” (see August 1, 2002); CIA legal counsel John Rizzo, who had asked the Justice Department for details about how interrogation methods could be implemented (see June 22, 2004); and the Pentagon’s general counsel, William J. Haynes. They are at Guantanamo to discuss the case of suspected “20th hijacker” Mohamed al-Khatani (see August 8, 2002-January 15, 2003). Pressure from Washington - The commander of the Guantanamo facility, Major General Michael Dunlavey, will recall: “They wanted to know what we were doing to get to this guy, and Addington was interested in how we were managing it… They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in DC. They came down to observe and talk.” Dunlavey will say that he was pressured by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself to expedite the interrogation and use extraordinary means to squeeze information from the suspect. “I’ve got a short fuse on this to get it up the chain,” Dunlavey recalls. “I was on a timeline. This guy may have been the key to the survival of the US.” Asked how high up the pressure was from, Dunlavey will say, “It must have been all the way to the White House.” Rumsfeld is “directly and regularly involved” in all the discussions of interrogations. 'Do Whatever Needed to Be Done' - Staff judge advocate Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver will recall that Addington is “definitely the guy in charge,” taking control of the discussions. Gonzales is quiet. Haynes, a close friend and colleague of Addington’s, seems most interested in how the military commissions would function to try and convict detainees. The lawyers meet with intelligence officials and themselves witness several interrogations. Beaver will recall that the message from Addington and his group is “Do whatever needed to be done.” In essence, the Guantanamo interrogators and commanders are given a green light from the administration’s top lawyers, representing President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the CIA. (Sands 5/2008)

October 11, 2002: Army Legal Adviser Suggests that ‘Immunity’ Can be Granted for Planned Use of Abusive Techniques
Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, the top legal adviser to the Army’s interrogation unit at Guantanamo, JTF-170, writes a legal analysis of the extreme interrogation techniques being used on detainees. Beaver notes that some of the more savage “counter-resistance” techniques being considered for use, such as waterboarding (the use of which has resulted in courts-martials for users in the past) might present legal problems. She acknowledges that US military personnel at Guantanamo are bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which characterizes “cruelty,” “maltreatment,” “threats,” and “assaults” as felonies. However, she reasons, if interrogators can obtain “permission,” or perhaps “immunity,” from higher authorities “in advance,” they might not be legally culpable. In 2006, a senior Defense Department official calls Beaver’s legal arguments “inventive,” saying: “Normally, you grant immunity after the fact, to someone who has already committed a crime, in exchange for an order to get that person to testify. I don’t know whether we’ve ever faced the question of immunity in advance before.” The official praises Beaver “for trying to think outside the box. I would credit Diane as raising that as a way to think about it.” Beaver will later be promoted to the staff of the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, where she will specialize in detainee issues. But Naval General Counsel Alberto Mora is less impressed. When he reads Beaver’s legal analysis two months later (see December 17-18, 2002), he calls it “a wholly inadequate analysis of the law.” According to Mora, the Beaver memo held that “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment could be inflicted on the Guantanamo detainees with near impunity.” Such acts are blatantly illegal, Mora believes. Mora will note that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld bases his decision to approve such harsh “counter-resistance” techniques (see December 2, 2002) in part on Beaver’s memo. He will write that Rumsfeld’s decision “was fatally grounded on these serious failures of legal analysis.” Neither Beaver nor Rumsfeld will draw any “bright line” prohibiting the combination of these techniques, or defining any limits for their use. As such, this vagueness of language “could produce effects reaching the level of torture,” which is prohibited without exception both in the US and under international law. (Mayer 2/27/2006) Written under Difficult Circumstances - Beaver later tells a more complete story of her creation of the memo. She insists on a paper trail showing that the authorization of extreme interrogation techniques came from above, not from “the dirt on the ground,” as she describes herself. The Guantanamo commander, Major General Michael Dunlavey, only gives her four days to whip up a legal analysis, which she sees as a starting point for a legal review of the interrogation policies. She has few books and materials, and more experienced lawyers at the US Southern Command, the Judge Advocate General School, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the DIA refuse to help her write the analysis. She is forced to write her analysis based on her own knowledge of the law and what she could find on the Internet. She bases her analysis on the previous presidential decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions, later recalling, “It was not my job to second-guess the president.” Knowing little of international law, she ignores that body of law altogether. She fully expects her analysis to be dissected and portions of it overridden, but she is later astonished that her analysis will be used as a legal underpinning for the administration’s policies. She has no idea that her analysis is to be used to provide legal cover for much more senior White House officials (see June 22, 2004). She goes through each of the 18 approved interrogation techniques (see December 2, 2002), assessing them against the standards set by US law, including the Eighth Amendment, which proscribes “cruel and unusual punishment,” the federal torture statutes, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Beaver finds that each of the 18 techniques are acceptable “so long as the force used could plausibly have been thought necessary in a particular situation to achieve a legitimate government objective, and it was applied in a good faith effort and not maliciously or sadistically for the very purpose of causing harm.” Law professor Phillippe Sands later observes: “That is to say, the techniques are legal if the motivation is pure. National security justifies anything.” The interrogators must be properly trained, Beaver notes, and any interrogations involving the more severe techniques must “undergo a legal, medical, behavioral science, and intelligence review prior to their commencement.” However, if all of the criteria are met, she “agree[s] that the proposed strategies do not violate applicable federal law.” Sands points out that her use of the word “agree” indicates that she “seems to be confirming a policy decision that she knows has already been made.” 'Awful' but Understandable - Sands later calls her reasoning “awful,” but understands that she was forced to write the memo, and reasonably expected to have more senior legal officials review and rewrite her work. “She could not have anticipated that there would be no other piece of written legal advice bearing on the Guantanamo interrogations. She could not have anticipated that she would be made the scapegoat.” Beaver will recall passing Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington in a Pentagon hallway shortly after she submitted the memo. Addington smiled at her and said, “Great minds think alike.” (Sands 5/2008)


October 11, 2002: Army Officials Request Permission to Use More Aggressive Techniques in Interrogation of Guantanamo Terror Suspects
Two days after General Rick Baccus has been relieved from duty as the guard commander at Guantanamo (see October 9, 2002), and almost one and a half months since the writing of the Office of Legal Counsel’s (OLC) August memo on torture (see August 1, 2002), military intelligence at Guantanamo begin suggesting new rules of interrogation. Lieutenant Colonel Jerald Phifer, Director J2, sends a memo, to Major General Michael E. Dunlavey, Commander of Joint Task Force (JTF) 170, requesting approval for more severe interrogation techniques. (US Department of Defense 10/11/2002 ; Mayer 2/27/2008) In 2009, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) will write (see April 21, 2009) that Dunlavey’s request is sparked by recent reports on the use of SERE training techniques for interrogation purposes (see January 2002 and After and April 16, 2002). (Levin 4/21/2009) Three Categories of Techniques - The memo states, “The current guidelines for interrogation procedures at GTMO [Guantanamo] limit the ability of interrogators to counter advanced resistance.” Phifer proposes three categories of techniques. The mildest, which includes yelling and weak forms of deception, are included in category one. Category two techniques are more severe and require approval by an “interrogator group director.” They include the use of stress positions for up to four hours; use of falsified documents; isolation for up to 30 days; sensory deprivation and hooding; 20-hour interrogations; removal of comfort and religious items; replacing hot food with cold military rations; removal of clothing; forced grooming, including the shaving of beards; and playing on detainees’ phobias to induce stress, such as a fear of dogs. The harshest techniques, listed in category three, are to be reserved for a “very small percentage of the most uncooperative detainees” and only used with permission from the commander of the prison. These methods include using non-injurious physical contact like poking or grabbing; threatening a detainee with death or severe pain or threatening that a family member would be subjected to such harm; exposing him to cold weather or water; using a wet towel to “induce the misperception of suffocation.” (US Department of Defense 10/11/2002 ; Mayer 2/27/2008) Desire to Extract More Information from Detainee - The request is prompted in part by military intelligence’s belief that Guantanamo detainee Mohamed al-Khatani has more information than the FBI has managed to extract from him. “Al-Khatani is a person in… whom we have considerable interest,” Dell’Orto will explain during a 2004 press briefing at the White House. “He has resisted our techniques. And so it is concluded at Guantanamo that it may be time to inquire as to whether there may be more flexibility in the type of techniques we use on him.” (Washington File 6/23/2004) JAG Officer Concludes Tactics are Legal - The same day, a staff judge advocate, Lieutenant Colonel Diane E. Beaver, reviews Phifer’s proposed techniques for legality and, while making qualifications and recommending further review, concludes in a memo to Dunlavey that they are legal. Also the same day, Dunlavey sends the list of techniques to his superior, General James T. Hill, commander of the Southern Command, requesting approval for their use. Dunlavey writes: “Although [the techniques currently employed] have resulted in significant exploitable intelligence the same methods have become less effective over time. I believe the methods and techniques delineated in the accompanying J-2 memorandum will enhance our efforts to extract additional information.” (US Department of Defense 10/11/2002 ) Beaver concludes that since President Bush had decided that all the detainees “are not protected by the Geneva Conventions” (see January 18-25, 2002, February 7, 2002), all of the desired techniques are allowable because “no international body of law directly applies.” (Savage 2007, pp. 178)


Mid-October 2002: Guantanamo Manager Decides Four Detainees Will Be Repatriated, Unrest Breaks Out
Gen. Michael Dunlavey, head of the intelligence operations at Guantanamo, faces an outbreak of unrest among the prisoners after he announces that four detainees will be repatriated: three Afghans and a Tajik. According to an October 20 email sent by an FBI official from Guantanamo, these detainees “will be taken back to their respective countries in late October and the same plane will return with between ten and thirty-four new detainees.” After the announcement, the camp erupts in unrest and there is a “threat of mass suicide by the detainees.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation 10/26/2002 ) It is not clear what has caused the unrest. According to Shafiq Rasul, one of the detainees, “They would announce upon loud speakers (particularly when people were released) that if we co-operated with them they would release us. We knew this included acting as an informant.” (Rasul, Iqbal, and Ahmed 7/26/2004 ) According to the FBI official, “no suicides [happen] and the Camp quickly [settles] down.” (Federal Bureau of Investigation 10/26/2002 )


October 25, 2002: Pentagon General Counsel ‘Short-Circuits’ Approval Process of Harsh Interrogation Request
Shortly after the October 11, 2002, request by Guantanamo commander Major General Michael Dunlavey for approval of new, harsh interrogation techniques (see Torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere), and after Guantanamo legal counsel Diane Beaver submitted her analysis justifying the use of those techniques (see October 11, 2002), General James T. “Tom” Hill forwards everything to General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hill includes a letter that contains the sentence, “Our respective staffs, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Joint Task Force 170 [the Army unit in charge of interrogating Guantanamo detainees] have been trying to identify counter-resistant techniques that we can lawfully employ.” In the letter, Hill is clearly ambivalent about the use of severe interrogation methods. He wants the opinion of senior Pentagon lawyers, and requests that “Department of Justice lawyers review the third category [the most severe] of techniques.” But none of this happens. The Joint Chiefs should have subjected the request to a detailed legal review, including scrutiny by Myers’s own counsel, Jane Dalton, but instead, Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes short-circuits the approval process. Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora recalls Dalton telling him: “Jim pulled this away. We never had a chance to complete the assessment.” Myers later recalls being troubled that the normal procedures had been circumvented. Looking at the “Haynes Memo,” Myers will point out, “You don’t see my initials on this.” He notes that he “discussed it,” but never signed off on it. “This was not the way this should have come about.” Myers will come to believe that there was “intrigue” going on “that I wasn’t aware of, and Jane wasn’t aware of, that was probably occurring between [William J.] Haynes, White House general counsel [Alberto Gonzales], and Justice.” Instead of going through the proper channels, the memo goes straight to Haynes, who merely signs off with a note that says, “Good to go.” (Sands 5/2008)


June 22, 2004: Gonzales, Haynes Attempt to Blame Guantanamo Officials for Torture, Legal Justifications
Attempting to stem the flow of bad publicity and world-wide criticism surrounding the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and similar reports from Guantanamo Bay, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes, accompanied by Pentagon lawyer Daniel Dell’Orto, give a lengthy press conference to discuss the US’s position on interrogation and torture. Gonzales and Haynes provide reporters with a thick folder of documents, being made public for the first time. Those documents include the so-called “Haynes Memo” (see November 27, 2002), and the list of 18 interrogation techniques approved for use against detainees (see December 2, 2002 and April 16, 2003). Gonzales and Haynes make carefully prepared points: the war against terrorism, and al-Qaeda in particular, is a different kind of war, they say. Terrorism targets civilians and is not limited to battlefield engagements, nor do terrorists observe the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions or any other international rules. The administration has always acted judiciously in its attempt to counter terrorism, even as it moved from a strictly law-enforcement paradigm to one that marshaled “all elements of national power.” Their arguments are as follows: Always Within the Law - First, the Bush administration has always acted within reason, care, and deliberation, and has always followed the law. In February 2002, President Bush had determined that none of the detainees at Guantanamo should be covered under the Geneva Conventions (see February 7, 2002). That presidential order is included in the document packet. According to Gonzales and Haynes, that order merely reflected a clear-eyed reading of the actual provision of the conventions, and does not circumvent the law. Another document is the so-called “torture memo” written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (see August 1, 2002). Although such legal opinions carry great weight, and though the administration used the “torture memo” for months to guide actions by military and CIA interrogators, Gonzales says that the memo has nothing to do with the actions at Guantanamo. The memo was intended to do little more than explore “the limits of the legal landscape.” Gonzales says that the memo included “irrelevant and unnecessary” material, and was never given to Bush or distributed to soldiers in the field. The memo did not, Gonzales asserts, “reflect the policies that the administration ultimately adopted.” Unfortunately for their story, the facts are quite different. According to several people involved in the Geneva decision, it was never about following the letter of the law, but was designed to give legal cover to a prior decision to use harsh, coercive interrogation. Author and law professor Phillippe Sands will write, “it deliberately created a legal black hole into which the detainees were meant to fall.” Sands interviewed former Defense Department official Douglas Feith about the Geneva issue, and Feith proudly acknowledged that the entire point of the legal machinations was to strip away detainees’ rights under Geneva (see Early 2006). Harsh Techniques Suggested from Below - Gonzales and Haynes move to the question of where, exactly, the new interrogation techniques came from. Their answer: the former military commander at Guantanamo, Michael E. Dunlavey. Haynes later describes Dunlavey to the Senate Judiciary Committee as “an aggressive major general.” None of the ideas originated in Washington, and anything signed off or approved by White House or Pentagon officials were merely responses to requests from the field. Those requests were prompted by a recalcitrant detainee at Guantanamo, Mohamed al-Khatani (see August 8, 2002-January 15, 2003), who had proven resistant to normal interrogation techniques. As the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached, and fears of a second attack mounted, Dell’Orto says that Guantanamo field commanders decided “that it may be time to inquire as to whether there may be more flexibility in the type of techniques we use on him.” Thusly, a request was processed from Guantanamo through military channels, through Haynes, and ultimately to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who approved 15 of the 18 requested techniques to be used against al-Khatani and, later, against other terror suspects (see September 25, 2002 and December 2, 2002). According to Gonzales, Haynes, and Dell’Orto, Haynes and Rumsfeld were just processing a request from military officers. Again, the evidence contradicts their story. The torture memo came as a result of intense pressure from the offices of Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney. It was never some theoretical document or some exercise in hypothesizing, but, Sands will write, “played a crucial role in giving those at the top the confidence to put pressure on those at the bottom. And the practices employed at Guantanamo led to abuses at Abu Ghraib.” Gonzales and Haynes were, with Cheney chief of staff David Addington and Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee (the authors of the torture memo), “a torture team of lawyers, freeing the administration from the constraints of all international rules prohibiting abuse,” in Sands’s words. Dunlavey was Rumsfeld’s personal choice to head the interrogations at Guantanamo; he liked the fact that Dunlavey was a “tyrant,” in the words of a former Judge Advocate General official, and had no problem with the decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld had Dunlavey ignore the chain of command and report directly to him, though Dunlavey reported most often to Feith. Additionally, the Yoo/Bybee torture memo was in response to the CIA’s desire to aggressively interrogate another terror suspect not held at Guantanamo, Abu Zubaida (see March 28, 2002). Sands will write, “Gonzales would later contend that this policy memo did ‘not reflect the policies the administration ultimately adopted,’ but in fact it gave carte blanche to all the interrogation techniques later recommended by Haynes and approved by Rumsfeld.” He also cites another Justice Department memo, requested by the CIA and never made public, that spells out the specific techniques in detail. No one at Guantanamo ever saw either of the memos. Sands concludes, “The lawyers in Washington were playing a double game. They wanted maximum pressure applied during interrogations, but didn’t want to be seen as the ones applying it—they wanted distance and deniability. They also wanted legal cover for themselves. A key question is whether Haynes and Rumsfeld had knowledge of the content of these memos before they approved the new interrogation techniques for al-Khatani. If they did, then the administration’s official narrative—that the pressure for new techniques, and the legal support for them, originated on the ground at Guantanamo, from the ‘aggressive major general’ and his staff lawyer—becomes difficult to sustain. More crucially, that knowledge is a link in the causal chain that connects the keyboards of Feith and Yoo to the interrogations of Guantanamo.” Legal Justifications Also From Below - The legal justification for the new interrogation techniques also originated at Guantanamo, the three assert, and not by anyone in the White House and certainly not by anyone in the Justice Department. The document stack includes a legal analysis by the staff judge advocate at Guantanamo, Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver (see October 11, 2002), which gives legal justifications for all the interrogation techniques. The responsibility lies ultimately with Beaver, the three imply, and not with anyone higher up the chain. Again, the story is severely flawed. Beaver will give extensive interviews to Sands, and paint a very different picture (see Fall 2006). One Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) psychologist, Mike Gelles (see December 17-18, 2002), will dispute Gonzales’s contention that the techniques trickled up the chain from lower-level officials at Guantanamo such as Beaver. “That’s not accurate,” he will say. “This was not done by a bunch of people down in Gitmo—no way.” That view is supported by a visit to Guantanamo by several top-ranking administration lawyers, in which Guantanamo personnel are given the “green light” to conduct harsh interrogations of detainees (see September 25, 2002). No Connection between Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib - Finally, the decisions regarding interrogations at Guantanamo have never had any impact on the interrogations at Abu Ghraib. Gonzales wants to “set the record straight” on that question. The administration has never authorized nor countenanced torture of any kind. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were unauthorized and had nothing to do with administration policies. Much evidence exists to counter this assertion (see December 17-18, 2002). In August 2003, the head of the Guantanamo facility, Major General Geoffrey Miller, visited Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, accompanied by, among others, Diane Beaver (see August 31, 2003-September 9, 2003). They were shocked at the near-lawlessness of the facility, and Miller recommended to Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the supreme US commander in Iraq, that many of the same techniques used at Guantanamo be used in Abu Ghraib. Sanchez soon authorized the use of those techniques (see September 14-17, 2003). The serious abuses reported at Abu Ghraib began a month later. Gelles worried, with justification, that the techniques approved for use against al-Khatani would spread to other US detention facilities. Gelles’s “migration theory” was controversial and dangerous, because if found to be accurate, it would tend to implicate those who authorized the Guantanamo interrogation techniques in the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. “Torture memo” author John Yoo called the theory “an exercise in hyperbole and partisan smear.” But Gelles’s theory is supported, not only by the Abu Ghraib abuses, but by an August 2006 Pentagon report that will find that techniques from Guantanamo did indeed migrate into Abu Ghraib, and a report from an investigation by former defense secretary James Schlesinger (see August 24, 2004) that will find “augmented techniques for Guantanamo migrated to Afghanistan and Iraq where they were neither limited nor safeguarded.” (Sands 5/2008)


October 22, 2007: ACLU Book Documents ‘Systematic’ Torture of Detainees Authorized by Senior Government Officials
Administration of Torture book cover. [Source: Public domain]American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyers Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh publish the book Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. In their book, Jaffer and Singh use over 100,000 pages of government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to detail the sometimes-horrific conditions under which suspected terrorists are detained by the US government. The book spans detention facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The book’s central thesis is, according to the ACLU’s press release for the book, “that the torture and abuse of prisoners was systemic and resulted from decisions made by senior US officials, both military and civilian,” including President Bush himself. (American Civil Liberties Union 10/22/2007) “[T]he documents show unambiguously that the administration has adopted some of the methods of the most tyrannical regimes,” write Jaffer and Singh. Some of the prisoners “abused, tortured, and killed” were not even terror suspects, the authors show. (Juliano 10/22/2007) The book grew out of a long, difficult battle by the ACLU and several other such organizations to secure records pertaining to detainees held by the US in other countries (see October 7, 2003). The book shows a starkly different reality than the picture painted by the Bush administration’s repeated disavowals of torture, a reality established by the government’s own documentation. The administration has repeatedly claimed, for instance, that the torture and abuse so well documented at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison was an isolated, unusual set of incidents that was not repeated at other US detention facilities. The documentation compiled by Jaffer and Singh prove that claim to be a lie: “This claim was completely false, and senior officials almost certainly knew it to be so.” Beatings, kickings, and all manner of abuses have routinely occurred at other detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, the book states. Autopsy reports show that numerous prisoners in US custody have died due to strangulation, suffocation, or blunt-force trauma. Documents from Guantanamo, a facility where Bush officials have repeatedly claimed that the “excesses” of Abu Ghraib were never implemented, show that Guantanamo detainees were regularly “shackled in excruciating ‘stress positions,’ held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months.” And, perhaps most damningly for the administration, government documents show that top White House and Pentagon officials were not only well aware of the scope of the abuse months before the first pictures from Abu Ghraib were broadcast to the public, but that torture and abuse are part of the administration’s policy towards detainees. “[T]he maltreatment of prisoners resulted in large part from decisions made by senior officials, both military and civilian,” Jaffer and Singh write. “These decisions… were reaffirmed repeatedly, even in the face of complaints from law enforcement and military personnel that the policies were illegal and ineffective, and even after countless prisoners… were abused, tortured, or killed in custody.… The documents show that senior officials endorsed the abuse of prisoners as a matter of policy—sometimes by tolerating it, sometimes by encouraging it, and sometimes by expressly authorizing it.” The book presents a number of damning claims, all backed by extensive documentation, including the following: (American Civil Liberties Union 10/22/2007) General Michael Dunlavey, who oversaw prisoner interrogations at Guantanamo and considered former camp commander Brigadier General Rick Baccus too soft on the detainees (BBC 10/16/2002) , and who asked the Pentagon to approve more aggressive interrogation methods for the camp, claimed that he received his “marching orders” from Bush. Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was “personally involved” in overseeing the interrogation of a Guantanamo prisoner named Mohammed al-Khatani, the alleged would-be 20th 9/11 hijacker (see July 2002). Al-Khatani was “stripped naked, paraded in front of female interrogators, made to wear women’s underwear on his head, led around on a leash, and forced to perform dog tricks.” It is not clear just what being “personally involved” entails. Rumsfeld did not himself authorize such methods, but according to the investigator who documented the al-Khatani abuse session, Rumsfeld “failed to place a ‘throttle’ over abusive ‘applications’ of the ‘broad techniques’ that he did authorize….” Interrogators who used abusive ‘SERE’ (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) methods at Guantanamo did so because the Pentagon had endorsed those methods and required interrogators to be trained in the use of those methods (see December 2001). FBI personnel complained of abuses at Guantanamo; these instances of abuse were authorized by the chain of command within the Defense Department. Some of the most disturbing interrogation methodologies displayed in photos from Abu Ghraib were used at Guantanamo, with the endorsement of Rumsfeld, and that Major General Geoffrey Miller’s aggressive plan to “Gitmoize” Abu Ghraib was endorsed by senior Defense officials. Bush and his senior officials have always insisted that abuse and torture was limited to a few unauthorized soldiers at Abu Ghraib. Yet a Defense Department “Information Paper” shows that, three weeks before the Abu Ghraib photos appeared in the press, the US Army knew of at least 62 allegations of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of which had no relation to Abu Ghraib. The Defense Department held prisoners as young as 12 years old. The Defense Department approved holding prisoners in cells as small as 3 feet wide, 4 feet long, and 18 inches high. Special Forces units held prisoners in cells only slightly larger than that. (American Civil Liberties Union 10/22/2007)

Major General Michael E. Dunlavey...
...again. I've noticed a fair amount of traffic coming here from "Dunlavey" Google searches, because of a brief post I made about interviewing him in June. The full interview can be found buried in this massive article. It's also excerpted in its entirety below.There's not a lot of info about this guy on the web, and this post certainly won't add much, save for the fact that he likes pizza. But who doesn't? For the real scoop on the man in charge of interrogation at Gitmo in the beginning, you really must read Philippe Sands's Torture Team.***I arrive in Erie late, find an unmetered parking spot just outside of downtown and call it Camp X-Ray. They’re serving $2 pitchers of swill at a place nearby called The Antler. “The Moose is Loose,” reads the sign. Pennsylvania’s a strange place—a Puritan’s conundrum. You can’t buy booze anywhere outside of the pubs, but you can get it to go. I drink two pitchers, ogle college girls and then stumble back to camp.It’s a sweltering morning. Beer seeps from my pores as I enter the massive, Greek-columned courthouse on West 6th.Courtroom H is paneled in dark wood with red-painted vertical accents that reach the vaulted ceiling. The bench is raised and situated in the left corner. “All rise for the Honorable Michael E. Dunlavey,” instructs the bailiff. “You may be seated.”This morning’s defendant is a minor drug offender and petty thief. The judge is a far more interesting criminal. Dunlavey is an army reservist Major General, handpicked by Donald Rumsfeld to head up the interrogation division at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He served as Commanding Officer of Joint Task Force 170 from February to November, 2002. His October 11, 2002 request to pursue 18 methods of torture – including stress positions, dog phobias, extremes in temperatures and general dickishness – was attached to the now infamous Haynes memo, which Donald Rumsfeld lent his signature and this hilarious note: “However, I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” William “Jim” Haynes II, a bipedal worm and former General Counsel of the DoD, recalled in 2004 that the request of the “aggressive Major General” is what started the move away from The Geneva Conventions and toward enhanced interrogation. In his impeccably researched book Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, British barrister and professor of law at University College London Philippe Sands wrote this of Dunlavey’s brief memo: “It propelled a momentous request into the heart of the Pentagon without raising a single policy concern about the consequences of ditching [US Army Interrogation] Field Manual 34-52.”Sands continues: “This memo was written by someone who knew the request would be approved, which suggested prior contact with decision-makers in the Pentagon. Such a request would not have been made if its author entertained doubts as to its prospects.”Around the time of the one year anniversary of 9/11, Dunlavey was under incredible pressure to come up with actionable intelligence. There was, perhaps, a wink and a nod coming from the very top—Feith, Rumsfeld and even Bush, whom the Major General reported to directly. Now Dunlavey’s in a modest Pennsylvania courtroom keeping America safe from drug users and smalltime crooks. “It looks like you stopped growing—a little bit,” Dunlavey quips to a black kid in shackles and prison orange. He stands out like a lump of charcoal in a snow bank. The Judge has built a rapport with the repeat offender. Dunlavey’s been interrogating people since Vietnam. Most of that time he’s likely stuck to FM 34-52, which stresses rapport building. “You have been read your rights,” a clerk tells the defendant. “Do you understand those rights?” He nods pensively. Today Dunlavey will be adhering to the Geneva Conventions. Common Article 3 will apply. The detainee shows no physical or psychological signs of mistreatment. How will he juice him for intel? As Dunlavey hears evidence, he asks the occasional question, judiciously strokes his bottom lip and chin, and periodically reclines in his large leather chair. In the end, the kid gets off easy—probation, some fines and time served. The next defendant is a no-show. “Alright,” Dunlavey stands up and looks toward the press seats. His posture is every bit military issue. “Who do we have here?” “These two are interning with Erie PD,” the bailiff says and motions to the kids sitting quietly to my right. “And this guy’s a journalist from Buffalo.”“Buffalo?” Dunlavey beams. “Where’d you grow up?”It turns out that we grew up in the same South Buffalo neighborhood. I went to the terrible public school and he went to the Catholic school down the road. We always hated those Catholic kids with their stupid ties, and they hated us with our lack of ties. But he’s of an older generation and neither of us holds a grudge. We talk for a while about the sorry state of Buffalo’s economy. He’d been back home recently for a UB law school reunion, and can’t get over the mess they’ve made of the waterfront.“Why are you here?” he finally asks.“To talk to you.” “About what?” “I don’t really know,” I say. “Politics and stuff.”“Well, I’m apolitical,” he replies. “I voted for the president.”“Are you going to the dinner tomorrow?” I ask. “The what?”“You know, the Bush thing.”“No,” he says curtly. “No reason to go.” In roughly 36 hours Erie, PA will be hosting the 104th annual meeting of the Manufacturer and Business Association at the Bayfront Convention Center. The dinner costs from $1,100 to $1,500 a plate. About 1,600 people are expected to attend. International war criminal George W. Bush will be the keynote speaker. It’s his first domestic post-presidency speech. I suspect there’ll be a massive protest.“What about Gitmo?” I ask directly.“Can’t.” he scowls. “It’s in litigation. After it’s out of litigation, I’ll give you a draft of my book... an autographed copy.”“Um....cool.”“I’d love to talk to you about it, because there’s so much disinformation and misinformation—and just out and out lies. It’s just absolutely mind-boggling to me. And the end result is a lot of people have been falsely accused of doing the wrong thing when they didn’t. They did the right thing. They did it well, and it’s totally out of control. It’s incredible to me how partisan people in this administration have been, but it’s not my—it’s way above my pay grade as they say.“And, while we’re in litigation my lawyers told me don’t talk to anybody anymore. I said, ‘Why not?’ They said, ‘Well, you know as well as I do that no matter what you do or what you say, somebody will take it out of context.’ Some people will—there’s actually been people who’ve written articles and I don’t even know who they are, or attributed comments to me from a third party, and I have no idea who these people are. So, how do you fight that?”Mock burials...fierce dogs...stress positions....fake menstrual blood....Koran in the toilet....Christina Aguilera!“Classic example was some stuff two weeks ago in the Charlotte paper. I happened to be passing through there to go to a friend’s retirement, and I talked about uh... (sighs)... not Zawahiri. I’ve just forgotten his name. The guy [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] who we captured in Pakistan and waterboarded—the CIA did it. You know, I mean, they did. But this writer, on the front page of the Charlotte Observer, or whatever it was, said that happened by the CIA in Guantanamo in 2002. The guy wasn’t even captured yet! I mean, you print something like that, and then it will be republished and people will reference it, and it’s just one mistake after another, and each one—you know, I’m a historian. I love history. We fail to pay attention to it. It’s just like right now. We’ll probably have 100,000 pairs of boots on the ground in Afghanistan by the end of the year. That’s where we’re going. Despite what the administration wants us to believe, Europeans aren’t jumping on this bandwagon. They’re not putting anybody in harm’s way—except for the Brits and the Australians, and ironically, Malaysians—or Indonesians. And I just go, ‘The whole thing’s insane!’ There’s a famous quote out there: ‘Afghanistan is a very easy country to get into and a very difficult one to get out of.’ You know who said that? The Duke of Wellington in 1810. There’s been two major British forces there. One in 1842, then 40 years later. They didn’t want the Russians there. Even Genghis Khan wanted to get out of there.”We talk Buffalo. “Has anyone done a biography of [deceased former mayor] Your Honor Jimmy Griffin?” he asks. “He was like a modern-day Daley out of Chicago,” he says with admiration, smoothing his long, black robe.“Is that the guy who told everyone to go out and drink beer during a blizzard?” the clerk asks Dunlavey. “I don’t recall,” he answers, “but that sounds about right!” Dunlavey then complains about Erie—how they built a public parking ramp on the most valuable piece of property downtown, and how you can’t get a decent pizza. “You gotta go to Wildwood,” the bailiff butts in. “John’s Wildwood. He’s from Wildwood, New Jersey.”We say our goodbyes and Dunlavey disappears into his chamber. I hate to say it, but I sort of liked the guy. The Major General’s influence would be felt around the world. The guy who replaced him, General Geoffrey D. Miller, went on to “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib. And was it just me, or weren’t those some really nice photos? Too bad Obama won’t release more. Seymour Hersh says that there’s video depicting atrocities well beyond the 18 techniques of Dunlavey’s request—like raping teenage boys in front of their mothers.It’s unclear from the available information whether Dunlavey’s memo sprang from his sincere desire to protect us from evildoers, or if the idea was seeded by his seniors to construct a ground-up narrative. The portrait painted in Torture Team is of a soldier following unspoken orders. “No one ever told me ‘the gloves are off,’“ he told Sands. “But I didn’t need to talk about the Geneva Conventions, it was clear that they didn’t apply.”Maybe Americans are too dumb to delve into the legality of what was done in our dungeons. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll shows that we oppose closing Gitmo 2-1, and according to The Economist we have a more permissible attitude toward torture than China. Muckraker Jeremy Scahill reports that abuses continue at Guantánamo to this day. Sami al-Haj, an Al Jazeera journalist who was held illegally at Gitmo until May 2008, is now suing Bush & Company, but nobody cares. Obama retained Bush’s policy of indefinite detention, but that’s not as sexy as a fake birth certificate controversy. (Incidentally, when I purchased Sands’ book the clerk at Borders asked me, “How do you spell torture?”)Public opinion of Dunlavey in Erie ranges from “he’s an asshole” to “he kept us safe” to “I don’t know no Dung-wavy.” A local reporter I talked to stopped just short of calling him Hitler’s Douchebag. I spend the rest of the day walking around Erie killing time and looking for public toilets. Back at Camp X-Ray—my beleaguered ‘96 Cavalier—I recline the seat as far as she goes, smoke a joint and enjoy another night of solitary confinement.

http://ianlarrymurphy.blogspot.com/2009/09/major-general-michael-e-dunlavey.html

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/warcriminals

Battle over tactics raged at Gitmo
The inside story of criminal investigators who tried to stop abuse
PART ONE OF TWO
By Bill Dedman
Investigative reporter
msnbc.com
Updated: 7:34 p.m. PT Oct 23, 2006
Speaking publicly for the first time, senior U.S. law enforcement investigators say they waged a long but futile battle inside the Pentagon to stop coercive and degrading treatment of detainees by intelligence interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Their account indicates that the struggle over U.S. interrogation techniques began much earlier than previously known, with separate teams of law enforcement and intelligence interrogators battling over the best way to accomplish two missions: prevent future attacks and punish the terrorists.
In extensive interviews with MSNBC.com, former leaders of the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Task Force said they repeatedly warned senior Pentagon officials beginning in early 2002 that the harsh interrogation techniques used by a separate intelligence team would not produce reliable information, could constitute war crimes, and would embarrass the nation when they became public knowledge.
The investigators say their warnings began almost from the moment their agents got involved at the Guantanamo prison camp, in January 2002. When they could not prevent the harsh interrogations and humiliation of detainees at Guantanamo, they say, they tried in 2003 to stop the spread of those tactics to Iraq, where abuses at Abu Ghraib prison triggered worldwide outrage with the publishing of graphic photos in April 2004.
Their account, confirmed by the Navy's former general counsel, outlines a fierce debate within the Defense Department over the competing goals of justice and security in the war on terror. President Bush has said repeatedly that the detentions at Guantanamo were intended not only to secure intelligence information to prevent al-Qaida attacks, but also to "bring to justice" the terrorists.
As a result, a dual structure of intelligence gathering and criminal investigation, with two arms of the U.S. military, with overlapping missions, interrogating the same prisoners, continues today.
The law enforcement agents, who were building criminal cases against the detainees, also say that military prosecutors told them that abusive interrogations at Guantanamo compromised the chance to bring some suspected terrorists to trial. Among them, the agents say, is Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi whom the Pentagon has described as the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
"We were told by the Office of Military Commissions, based on what was done to him, it made his case unprosecutable," said Mark Fallon, the deputy commander and special agent in charge of the Criminal Investigation Task Force from 2002 to 2004. "It would taint any confession if obtained under coercion. They were unwilling to move forward with any prosecution of al-Qahtani."
A Pentagon spokesman on Friday dismissed this as "speculation," but would not say whether al-Qahtani would be tried. He is not among the 10 detainees who have been approved for a military trial.
It was two years before the photos emerged from Abu Ghraib, the Pentagon cops said, when they began arguing that coercive or abusive interrogations would not serve war-fighting or justice.
"No. 1, it’s not going to work," said Col. Brittain P. Mallow, the commander of the task force from 2002 to 2005.
"No. 2, if it does work, it’s not reliable. No. 3, it may not be legal, ethical or moral. No. 4, it’s going to hurt you when you have to prosecute these guys. No. 5, sooner or later, all of this stuff is going to come to light, and you’re going to be embarrassed."******
The members of the criminal task force who spoke with MSNBC.com are experienced criminal investigators. The task force drew from the Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as from the FBI, Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies. These agents are not whistleblowers. Those still serving inside the Department of Defense received authorization to be interviewed by MSNBC.com.
Working in the shadow of Sept. 11, under pressure to prevent another attack on the nation, the investigators found themselves pitted in a war of principle against a unit of young intelligence interrogators, often reservists, with little or no experience.
Based on their experience interrogating al-Qaida members involved in the bombing of the USS Cole and other attacks, the agents preferred an approach to interrogation they called "rapport building."
"We had agents who knew how to do adversarial interviews, had sat across from bad guys," Col. Mallow said. "Interviews and interrogations are not about making someone talk. They are about making them want to."
Early in 2002, when the first detainees were brought from the Afghan front to the barbed wire of Guantanamo, the law enforcement agents said, they saw intelligence interrogators struggle to apply to suspected al-Qaida terrorists the techniques taken from the Army Field Manual. They said frustrated intelligence interrogators were trying whatever they thought might work: One interrogator fancied blaring country and western music and a full cowboy getup during his sessions.
By the summer of 2002, the agents said, the intelligence unit was experimenting with harsher tactics, such as using a cinderblock to hold a detainee in a "stress position" by forcing him to sit on it with his hands chained to the floor.
By the fall of 2002, believing that some detainees had al-Qaida training in resisting interrogation, the intelligence team sought greater leeway from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. He approved new rules allowing stress positions for up to four hours, deprivation of light and sound, interrogation for up to 20 hours straight, removal of all comfort items (including the Koran and toilet paper), removal of clothing, forced shaving of facial hair, and use of military dogs to scare detainees.
In practice, these new rules were interpreted broadly: According to interrogation logs made public, al-Qahtani, the suspected 20th hijacker, was dressed in women's clothing and led around on a leash while performing dog tricks.
Warnings and alternatives
With increasing frustration, the agents said, they worked for change within the Pentagon in these ways:
Suggested alternatives to the Army commanders in charge of the Guantanamo intelligence interrogations, Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey and his replacement, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller. They said Dunlavey wouldn’t listen, and Miller questioned their loyalty and patriotism, saying, "If you want to be on the team, you’ve got to put on the uniform." Miller acknowledges saying this. He said he was trying to get the intelligence and law enforcement groups to work together, to repair a situation where they were barely speaking. Dunlavey says he was a supporter of the rapport-building approach, and "torture doesn't work," but he can't say more because he is a defendant in two lawsuits brought by former detainees.
Refused to participate in interrogations they felt were abusive; reported any signs of criminal acts by the intelligence interrogators; blocked an FBI plan to move al-Qahtani to another country where he could be tortured; and threatened to remove their investigators from Guantanamo entirely if they were forced to watch abusive interrogations.
Pushed their warnings up the chain of command to the Pentagon’s general counsel, William J. Haynes III, and to officials in Rumsfeld's office. "In some cases, they listened to what we said," said Col. Mallow, the unit’s commander. "In other cases, we just got head nods."
The agents said they were shut out of briefings when senior lawyers from the Bush administration toured Guantanamo on Sept. 25, 2002, while the plan for the aggressive interrogation of al-Qahtani was being formed. The VIP visitors included White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, now the attorney general; David S. Addington, legal counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, now his chief of staff; and Justice Department attorney John Yoo, who helped write memos narrowly defining torture.
They also were surprised not to be contacted during subsequent Pentagon investigations of detainee treatment at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, which concluded that there was no policy of abuse. Fallon, Col. Mallow and other investigators recently provided written answers to questions from Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has told the investigators he plans to issue a report as soon as this week calling for an investigation of Bush administration policies on detainees.
'We will not be a party to this'"What makes me intensely proud of all these individuals was they said, ‘We will not be party to this, even if we're ordered to do so,’" said Alberto J. Mora, the former general counsel of the Navy, who ultimately got Secretary Rumsfeld to roll back permission for some of the harshest interrogation techniques. "They are heroes, and there's no other way to describe them. They demonstrated enormous personal courage and personal integrity in standing up for American values and the system we all live for."
In the end, the law enforcement investigators said, they were not able to stop abusive interrogations, but they were able to slow them.
"We always said, there are no secrets, just delayed disclosures," said Fallon, the chief investigator. "And what we told our folks is, your grandchildren are going to ask, ‘What did you do during the war?’ We wanted our folks to be proud of what they did."
******
Mark Fallon is a cop.
The grandson of a police commissioner and son of a deputy chief, he married the daughter of his father’s partner from the detective bureau. He grew up in Harrison, N.J., now best known as "Sopranos" family territory. (The television version of Big Pussy’s auto body shop is just down the street from Fallon's boyhood home, and his boat is the "Bada Bing.") After college, Fallon took his father’s advice to "go federal," first as a deputy U.S. marshal and then in 1981 as an agent for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
Working undercover and wearing a rattail haircut as a young agent, he busted Filipino drug dealers in Subic Bay before the ships came in, hoping to discourage sales to American sailors. In 1993, he worked with the FBI on the investigation of the blind sheik, Abdul Omar Abdel-Rahman, who planned to blow up the United Nations and other New York City landmarks. In 1998, he was the lead agent investigating the joyriding Marine aviators from Aviano Air Base who clipped a cable-car wire in Italy, killing 20 tourists. As chief of counterintelligence operations in Europe and the Middle East, Fallon commanded the Navy’s USS Cole Task Force, investigating with the FBI the 2000 al-Qaida suicide bombing that killed 17 sailors in the Yemeni port of Aden.
As an investigator, Fallon has been trained to collect the facts and challenge assumptions. As a civilian who has served the Navy and Marine Corps in 31 countries, he has grown accustomed to speaking truth to people in uniforms – with a New Jersey bluntness if necessary. "If you’re honest and act with integrity," he says, "what else do you need?"
'This Is Your Life'In January 2002, Fallon was lent by the Navy to the Army to serve as deputy commander and special agent in charge of a new Criminal Investigation Task Force. Based at Fort Belvoir, Va., he supervised agents working in Afghanistan, Iraq and Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, commonly known as "Gitmo," building cases against detainees believed to be al-Qaida members or supporters.
The investigators faced an almost insurmountable challenge at Guantanamo.
They didn’t have names for many of the detainees. It often wasn’t clear what country they were from. A detainee might claim he was a Saudi, then visiting law enforcement agents would recognize him as a Yemeni. Most weren’t picked up by U.S. forces, but were handed over by bounty hunters in the early days of the war in Afghanistan. They were transferred with scant records, often without any "pocket litter," the possessions and documents that can be invaluable to investigators.
The law enforcement team’s mission was to conduct criminal investigations, prepare cases for prosecution, recommend which detainees should be released or held, and pass on intelligence information to other agencies.
But this was no ordinary criminal case. Rumsfeld had called the detainees "the worst of the worst," but what crime had they committed?
"Instead of having a crime scene, a suspect, we had suspects," Fallon said. "So we had to take a suspect … then track that particular person, once we identified who they actually were, through various levels of their life, through possible radicalization, through a possible visit to … a training camp in Afghanistan or elsewhere where they might have learned some of the tradecraft of terrorism. We would then have to determine where they might have been at any particular point in their life, from there determine if any acts occurred in that particular area, and then if the individual might have been involved in any of those acts, and if those acts then would have been a criminal violation. So it was very much different from the way you would traditionally work a criminal investigation."
They called the process "This Is Your Life," after the biographical radio and television show.
Although Pentagon officials have referred to an "elaborate screening process" before detainees were sent to Guantanamo, the law enforcement agents said evidence of criminal activity or intelligence value in some cases was flimsy.
Fallon said two detainees were suspected in a rocket attack against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The evidence against them was that they were found wearing dark olive green jackets similar to the one worn by the attacker. "I’ve been to Kabul," he said. "That’s the only color jacket I’ve seen."
Because they saw so many detainees they thought didn’t belong there, the investigators decided early in 2002 to expand operations to Afghanistan, to help evaluate detainees before they were sent to Guantanamo. In the end, they were able to develop criminal cases against only about 100 of the roughly 775 detainees who came to Guantanamo.
Out of 445 detainees still remaining at Guantanamo, the Pentagon says "more than 70" are in line for military trials. (See sidebar, In Limbo: Cases are few against Gitmo detainees.)
"There are some mean, nasty people down there," said Jeffery K. Sieber, a former resident agent in charge of the law enforcement task force at Guantanamo. "There’s always been some hard-core people down there who want to do very bad things to the United States. And some who weren’t — but now they’re very upset."
Intelligence unit held lead roleThe law enforcement investigators don't control the operations at Guantanamo. The lead role is played by a separate military intelligence unit, the Army’s Joint Task Force 170, later known as the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, which runs the prison and interrogates detainees for intelligence information. Rumsfeld has made clear in public statements that the Bush administration considers the intelligence mission more important than the law enforcement mission.
"Once September 11th occurred and the global war on terror began, people … had in their mind that when you arrested somebody like a car theft or a bank robber, what you do is you put him in jail, then you give him a lawyer, then you have a trial, and then you punish them," Rumsfeld said in a 2004 radio interview. "Of course in this instance, the people in Guantanamo Bay, these are people that were picked up on the battlefield for killing innocent men, women and children in Afghanistan. … They're not car thieves. The purpose is to keep them off the battlefield so they don't kill more innocent men, women and children, and to try to interrogate them and find out what they know so we can stop other terrorists from killing still additional Americans and friends of ours. It isn't a law enforcement task. It's a war on terrorism task."
The Pentagon also has said that the intelligence interrogations at Guantanamo are "guided by a very detailed plan, conducted by trained professionals in a controlled environment, and with active supervision."
But the cops at Guantanamo said the intelligence interrogators were "very challenged."
"The first time most of these interrogators were actually ... in the room with a real bad guy was at Guantanamo Bay," Fallon said, "with this tremendous challenge of trying to elicit information from someone who’s a suspected terrorist."
'Futility' or French fries?
The intelligence team had mostly completed a course at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, where they learned a series of interrogation scenarios described in the Army Field Manual with catchy names: Fear Up Harsh, Pride and Ego Down, Mutt and Jeff, We Know All, Isolation, Futility.
These scenarios are open to wide interpretation. An intelligence officer in Afghanistan was asked by an Army investigator to describe the Fear Up scenario. "Disrespect for the Koran," he began, though there’s nothing about that in the Army Field Manual. "Insult the PUC," or person under custody, "throw a chair inside a room. Have a room upstairs with spotlights. Turn on music very loud, under constant supervision of an MP guard."
The law enforcement investigators, on the other hand, had their own ways of making the detainees talk.
In captured al-Qaida training handbooks, jihadists are told what to expect during interrogation. The U.S. will whip you, use dogs, give you water but not allow you to urinate, isolate you, insult your family. The handbooks say nothing of French fries.
"Some of them really became fond of some fast food French fries, and cheeseburgers," Fallon said, noting that the law enforcement agents made frequent visits to a McDonald’s on the U.S. base.
Wearing polo shirts instead of uniforms, the law enforcement investigators would take off the detainees’ leg irons and handcuffs. Aside from the lack of a lawyer and a Miranda warning, the investigators said they tried to treat the captives as they would any suspect.
The cops call it rapport-building.
"Our folks would sit on the ground with detainees having tea," Fallon said. "Many of the detainees wanted also to be released. And our goal was to obtain accurate information. A good investigator works hard to prove guilt or innocence."
Before the interrogation, they would study. Fallon sought help from a friend from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, chief psychologist Michael Gelles, to develop training that included Arab culture and social networking, tribal origins, al-Qaida camps, the roles of shame, obedience and secrecy. They brought in Arabic speakers and agents with Middle Eastern experience, who had worked on the USS Cole and East African embassy bombings.
But their main weapon was their experience as cops.
"We were not browbeating them. We were not fussing with them," said Randy Carter, the director of operations at the Guantanamo interrogation "boxes" for the task force.
'In the tropics, beautiful views of the ocean'
"We would create an environment where they were comfortable talking with us. Asking about their families. Have they had any correspondence with them? Is their food acceptable?"
Agents would say, ‘You’re in the tropics, beautiful views of the ocean,’ and some of them would chuckle with that, and that would bring down the barriers that they had built up on themselves," Carter said.
Some were "head hangers," who wouldn't even acknowledge an interrogator, but others loved to talk.
Carter recalled an Australian detainee "coming in to discuss things, and just loving a pepperoni pizza, which is pork, and him being a good Muslim. He knew it. And smoking his Marlboros. Building a rapport is not what they’re used to, and it worked for us. As we built a rapport, it would be ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Then it would be telling us whether they did or did not do it, and if they didn’t, who did."
At first, the two sets of interrogators, intelligence and law enforcement, tried to work together, crowding into the box with the detainee and an interpreter. These efforts did not go well. The scripted scenarios of the intelligence interrogators, such as Rapid Fire – repeatedly asking the same question with slightly different phrasings no matter what the answer - frustrated the criminal investigators as well as the detainees.
In August 2002, the two teams agreed to take turns, each choosing 200 detainees for an exclusive period of interrogation. But that plan broke down frequently, because the intelligence group had priority.
"If we had a cooperating detainee," Carter said, "we would share that information, but then JTF 170 would get him up in the middle of the night to have him tell them the same information. It impeded our process."
Of greater concern was a different attitude toward abusing or degrading the detainees.
The law enforcement investigators said they saw early on in Afghanistan, before the detainees were shipped to Guantanamo, that the temptation to cross the line would be great - not out of sadism in most cases, but out of confusion about what would work.
"I watched the intelligence community, military and civilian, struggle with how to develop a coherent strategy to deal with terrorist subjects," Col. Mallow said.
"I wish they had asked our law enforcement folks more, had invited us to the table more. We sure did not have all the answers, but I think we could have helped."
On guard against runaway emotionsThe messages from the Bush administration and the Pentagon had been mixed: The detainees were to be treated humanely, "consistent with" the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war. But they also said that the Geneva Conventions did not apply: These were not prisoners of war, but "enemy combatants."
"We were very, very concerned," Fallon said, "to ensure that we would not, in the heat of battle, in a highly emotional period, in an effort to do the right thing, commit criminal acts."
That moral and legal line was patrolled by Carter, who monitored the interrogation booths in Guantanamo’s Camp Delta. From his observation booth in a triple-wide interrogation trailer, where he could see into two interrogation boxes at once, he was charged with ensuring that the intelligence interrogations, with their flashing lights, stress positions or the man in the cowboy outfit, didn’t contaminate the evidence from legal investigations.
"I told ICE — Interrogation Control Element — I do not want any of our interrogations or interviews in the same trailer as the intel collectors are," Carter said. "We are not to partake of any of their tactics, we are not to witness any of their tactics. We can’t have the foolishness from those folks in the mix."
At this stage, in the summer of 2002, said Col. Mallow, the commander of the law enforcement unit, "We’re not talking about grievous abuse. But frankly some of the things my agents saw were just plain silly and stupid. They were obviously amateurish and not likely to produce good results.
"It would get worse."

Major General Michael E. Dunlavey, former commander of detainee operations at Guantanamo.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15361458/

http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Guantanamo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_J._Mora

http://fl1.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/dod/dunlavey101102mem.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_E._Beaver

IT IS PRETTY STRANGE THAT DURING A GOOGLE SEARCH OF PHOTOS OF RETIRED GENERAL OR ERIE COUNTY JUDGE "MICHAEL DUNLAVEY", IT APPEARS AS MANY OF HIS PHOTOS HAVE BEEN "SCRUBBED" FROM THE INTERNET..., I AM SHARING WHAT I CAME UP WITH.

"We did not torture anybody" - WHAT A LAUGH.