"Douglas Feith had a long-standing intellectual interest in Geneva, and for many years had opposed legal protections for terrorists under international law," Sands wrote in his book. "He referred me to an article he had written in 1985, in The National Interest, setting out his basic view. Geneva provided incentives to play by the rules; those who chose not to follow the rules, he argued, shouldn't be allowed to rely on them, or else the whole Geneva structure would collapse. The only way to protect Geneva, in other words, was sometimes to limit its scope. To uphold Geneva's protections, you might have to cast them aside."
On Thursday, April 2, two days after this story was first published Justin Polin, Feith's research assistant based at the Hudson Institute, sent me an e-mail stating that Sands' account of their conversation as described in Torture Team was inaccurate and filled with "distortions," and "misquotations."
"You cite the work of Philippe Sands to imply that Mr. Feith somehow advocated torture. Mr. Feith did no such thing," Polin wrote. "Mr. Feith rebutted Mr. Sands's allegations in detail during a July 15 hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties."
"In an August 13, 2008 letter to Subcommittee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, Mr. Feith then provided a list of some of the major errors in Torture Team," Polin said. "On Oct. 6, 2008, Mr. Feith submitted answers to the subcommittee's "Questions for the Record," further rebutting Mr. Sands's allegations. These documents, as well as links to the complete transcript and video of the hearing, are publicly available" on Feith's website. (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Sands, who is based in the UK, did not immediately return phone calls or e-mails Thursday.
Still, in addition to Sands' account, New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, in her book, The Dark Side, also documented Feith's role in implementing aggressive interrogation techniques and his position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to terrorists.
"As far back as the 1980s, when he had been a midlevel Reagan Administration official, Feith had argued that terrorists did not deserve to be protected by the Geneva Conventions. The issue had first arisen in connection with the Palestinian Liberation Organization," Mayer wrote. "Feith, a passionate Zionist, had helped to convince the Reagan Administration to oppose international efforts to protect anti-Israel terrorists as soldiers. John Yoo and other Bush Administration lawyers seized on this position as a precedent."
Moreover, the Senate Armed Services Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union have already released documents showing that Haynes. the Pentagon's general counsel regularly briefed Feith about a list of aggressive interrogation techniques for use against "high-value" Guantanamo detainees.
In November 2002, Haynes sent Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a memo stating that he "had discussed the issue [of enhanced interrogations] with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, and General [Richard] Myers and that he believed they concurred in his recommendation."
The Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to release a declassified version of its report that will include a full account of Feith's role in implementing a policy of torture at Guantanamo. The report is 200 pages, contains 2,000 footnotes, and will reveal a wealth of new information about the genesis of the Bush administration's interrogation policies, according to these sources. The investigation relied upon the testimony of 70 people, generated 38,000 pages of documents, and took 18 months to complete.
Other documents released last year show that Feith worked closely with Haynes on an Army and Air Force survival-training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which were meant to prepare U.S. soldiers for abuse they might suffer if captured by an outlaw regime, against detainees at Guantanamo. One of the SERE techniques used against detainees was waterboarding.
Moreover, Feith and Haynes were members of a Pentagon "working group" that met from January through March 2003 and prepared a report for Rumsfeld stating what methods military interrogators could use to extract information from a prisoner at Guantanamo. Yoo worked on the legal memo for the group.
According to an executive summary of the Armed Services Committee report released last December, "techniques such as stress positions, removal of clothing, use of phobias (such as fear of dogs), and deprivation of light and auditory stimuli were all recommended for approval" by Feith, Haynes and other Defense Department officials.
Early drafts of the report advocated intimidating prisoners with dogs, removing prisoners' clothing, shaving their beards, slapping prisoners in the face and waterboarding.
Though some of the more extreme techniques were dropped as the list was winnowed down to 24 from 35, the final set of methods still included tactics for isolating and demeaning a detainee, known as "pride and ego down."
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