PAMELA HESS | December 11, 2008 
WASHINGTON -- A new Senate report says the physical and mental abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay Naval Base was the direct result of Bush administration policies and should not be blamed on guards and interrogators.
The report from the Senate Armed Services Committee is the result of a two-year investigation. It directly links President Bush's policies after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, legal memos on torture and interrogation rule changes with the abuse that was photographed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq four years ago.
The report says administration officials publicly blamed the abuses on low-level soldiers but called that "both unconscionable and false."
"The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees," Levin said.
Arizona Republican and former prisoner of war Sen. John McCain, called the link between the survival training and U.S. interrogations of detainees inexcusable.
"These policies are wrong and must never be repeated," he said in a statement.
Lawrence Di Rita, a senior aide to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at the time the Abu Ghraib and other abuses took place, disputed the report.
"This oddly timed report provides no evidence that contradicts more than a dozen other investigations that found that there was no systematic or widespread detainee mismanagement," Di Rita told The AP. "A relatively small number of people abused detainees, and they were brought to justice in criminal or civil proceedings."
The report comes as the Bush administration continues to delay and in some cases bar members of Congress from gaining access to key legal documents and memos about the detainee program, including an August 2002 memo that evaluated whether specific interrogation techniques proposed to be used by the CIA would constitute torture.
That memo, written by Jay Bybee, then-chief of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, was guided in part by an assessment of the psychological effects of resistance survival training on U.S. military personnel. The CIA provided that document to his office, Bybee told the Senate Armed Services Committee in an October letter, obtained by The Associated Press.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/11/white-house-responsible-f_n_150305.html
