Ethics Newsline®

“If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

– CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman, speaking to military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Guantánamo, Cuba, in 2002, according to minutes from the meeting. “The document, one of two dozen released by a Senate panel investigating how Pentagon officials developed the controversial interrogation program introduced at Guantánamo Bay in late 2002, suggests a larger CIA role in advising Defense Department interrogators than was previously known,” reports the Washington Post.

Source: Washington Post, June 18.

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“We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques.”

– Now-retired military lawyer Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, as recorded in minutes from an October 2002 meeting at Guantánamo Bay. According to McClatchy Newspapers, newly released documents show that the “U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny” of the Red Cross.

Source: McClatchy, June 17.

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“They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify. Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

– U.S. Army official Charles Smith, talking to the New York Times last week. Smith, who oversaw the U.S. government’s multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the Iraq war, says he was summarily removed from his post after threatening to withhold payments and bonuses to KBR over the company’s inability to justify more than $1 billion in questionably charges. Smith says KBR refused to act on his warning until he directed one of his deputies to hand-deliver a letter to the company. Two days later, Smith and the woman who delivered the letter were both summarily removed from their jobs and reassigned. They were replaced by a contractor, RCI Holding Corporation, which approved the payments and bonuses for KBR, once a subsidiary of Halliburton, the firm formerly run by U.S. vice president Dick Cheney. This spring, both KBR and RCI were awarded new contracts, notes the Times.

Source: New York Times, June 17.