A Competitive Process

I’m just looking over some stuff that I haven’t had time to read thoroughly and I came across this item from last Friday’s LA Times,

Officials Say Rumsfeld OKd Harsh Interrogation Methods:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld last year personally approved a series of aggressive interrogation techniques for suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks and help prevent future ones, Pentagon officials said Thursday.

Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 a request five months earlier by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who had arrived at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in November 2002 to oversee prisoners. Miller sought permission to use a broad range of extraordinary “nondoctrinal” questioning techniques on an Al Qaeda detainee, a general with the Pentagon’s Judge Advocate General’s office said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

[…]

The effort to define how far interrogators can go in pressuring detainees for information without violating international law exposed the rift between interrogators and JAG lawyers, who considered some of the techniques Miller proposed to be illegal.

“You had intelligence officials that might have been pulling in a direction that was different from the lawyers,” Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said. “It’s a competitive process.”

[…]

Rumsfeld trimmed the list of requested interrogation techniques by about one-third, and he insisted that he personally approve a “handful” of techniques, the senior Pentagon lawyer and the JAG official said. Rumsfeld approved the revised proposal in April 2003.

I’m just wondering what that “handful of techniques” are. And the article isn’t clear, but it sounds as if Rumsfeld also insisted that he approve particular instances of their use. If that’s the case, you have to wonder how many cases of torture Donald Rumsfeld personally signed off on.

That’s the kind of evidence that war crimes trials are made of.