Washington – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday that he rescinded the use of controversial interrogation techniques for detainees at Guantanamo Bay in early 2003 because he had learned Pentagon lawyers thought some of them were illegal and verged on torture.
“We didn’t want to be doing something that people had concerns about in the department,” Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference.
Rumsfeld was responding to the disclosure of a 2004 memorandum by Alberto Mora, a Republican appointee who retired last year as general counsel of the Navy, that described how he successfully opposed the coercive interrogation methods approved by Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002.
Mora’s memorandum also detailed his frustrations at failing to influence the legal discussion that led to new, less coercive methods approved by Rumsfeld the following April. Mora acknowledged in the memorandum that those methods were “well within the boundaries authorized by law.”
Rumsfeld said he had been unaware in 2002 of any internal objections to the more coercive techniques until four to six weeks after he signed the directive approving them.
Those methods included yelling at detainees, keeping them in physically stressful positions for up to four hours and “mild, non-injurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with a finger and light pushing.”
Rumsfeld said that after he learned of objections to the techniques, “we stopped it immediately.” He dismissed the significance of a handwritten postscript he had added to the Dec. 2, 2002, directive that read: “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”
Rumsfeld works standing up at a special desk in his Pentagon office.