Donald Rumsfeld

Rumsfeld approves brutal interrogation methods, invites military to ask him about pushing the envelope even further

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld supervised the military’s planning for extreme interrogation methods outlawed by the army field manual and the Geneva Conventions. He arranged for legal memos to approve additional techniques, and he personally signed off on specific methods, sometimes with jokes to the effect that the techniques were more coddling than torture. He invited commanders in the field to propose even more varieties of torture, leaving the clear impression that he was eager to approve whatever they would like to try. The waterboarding, stress positions, use of dogs, and other techniques were initially approved for use at Guantanamo but soon spread throughout the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Rumsfeld’s approval of torturous interrogation “a direct cause” of Abu Ghraib abuses

Rumsfeld encouraged widespread use of torture during interrogations of detainees. He sent Gen. Geoffrey Miller from Guantanamo to Iraq to “Gitmo-ize” interrogation procedures at Abu Ghraib. His torture policies “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate” in prisons run by Americans; the eleven low-ranking soldiers eventually convicted of abusing Abu Ghraib prisoners were not the rare “bad apples” in our army, as Rumsfeld and other officials insisted, but rather were reflecting the tone of our entire military occupation, as set from the very top, in a “trickle down” culture of torture.