WASHINGTON - Agence France-Presse


Harsh interrogation techniques used at U.S. war-on-terror prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay were sanctioned by top U.S. government officials in 2002 against the advice of lawyers from all branches of the military, a senior U.S. senator alleged Tuesday.

In a hearing Carl Levin, the Democratic head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, tied U.S. interrogation policies, which critics say have included torture, to Donald Rumsfeld, the powerful defense secretary from 2001 to 2006, and other top officials in President George W. Bush's administration.

Counter to the Bush administration's argument that mistreatment at the prisons arose from simply a handful of out-of-control military jailers, or a "few bad apples," Levin said a high-level debate raged in the U.S. defense and intelligence community from mid-2002 over techniques such as waterboarding, aaaual humiliation, menacing dogs and sensory deprivation.

Levin said, a Central Intelligence Agency lawyer who met with Guantanamo staff on October 2, 2002 argued that torture "is basically subject to perception."

"If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong," Jonathan Fredman, then chief counsel to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, told the meeting, Levin said."When Secretary Rumsfeld approved the use of abusive techniques against detainees, he unleashed a virus which ultimately infected interrogation operations conducted by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq," he said.