2d Bush official: Torture was used

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - A former State Department lawyer responsible for Guantanamo-related cases said yesterday that the Bush administration overreacted after 9/11 and set up a system in which torture occurred.

Vijay Padmanabhan, who was State's chief counsel on Guantanamo litigation, is at least the second former Bush administration official to publicly label "enhanced interrogation techniques" as torture.

He said the administration was wrong in its entire approach when it sent detainees to the Navy base in Cuba and declared it out of reach of any U.S. court.

"I think Guantanamo was one of the worst overreactions of the Bush administration," he said in an interview. Others, he said, included extraordinary renditions, waterboarding at secret CIA prisons, and "other enhanced interrogation techniques that would constitute torture."

"The idea that you're going to be able to hold someone and detain someone where there is not an applicable legal regime governing their detention, rules, treatment, standards, etc. is, I think, foolish," he said.

His criticisms are among the harshest yet made by a former insider in George W. Bush's administration. The State Department declined to comment on the substance of Padmanabhan's remarks.

Bush always denied that the United States tortured anyone. The United States has acknowledged that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described plotter of Sept. 11, and a few other prisoners were waterboarded at secret CIA prisons before being taken to Guantanamo, but the Bush administration insisted that all interrogations were lawful.

Padmanabhan said he believed that these tactics - which the International Committee of the Red Cross has also described as torture - were approved because the White House was shocked by the Sept. 11 attacks and wanted to prevent other horrors.

"These are not things that I think any American president would have authorized had they been in a calmer environment," he said.

The first Bush administration member to publicly describe these acts as torture was Susan J. Crawford, the military official in charge of trying Guantanamo detainees. She said in January that the United States tortured a Saudi detainee in 2002, preventing her from bringing him to trial.

Padmanabhan said the Bush position invited a Supreme Court clash, which it lost when the justices ruled that Guantanamo detainees had the right to contest their detention in U.S. courts.

Padmanabhan, who now teaches at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, said there was plenty of dissent when detention policy was being formulated. But he said attorney-client privilege prevented him from describing what positions he advocated at the State Department.

"I can't reveal the specific advice I gave my clients," he said. "There always were, in all of these issues, a good diversity of viewpoints and a robust discussion."

Mirroring comments made this month by Lawrence Wilkerson, another former State official, Padmanabhan said many of the men taken to Guantanamo were innocent.

A total of almost 800 men have been held there since the detention center opened in January 2002; the number has come down to about 240. Proportionately fewer innocent men are there now, Padmanabhan said, with most having "some connection to al-Qaeda or the Taliban."

He said it was misguided for the Bush administration to insist that the detainees were not subject to the Geneva Conventions or U.S. or international law. The administration had argued that the detainees wore no uniforms, fought under no nation's flag, and violated the rules of war, and therefore deserved no Geneva protections.

In one of his first official acts, President Obama said the detainees had rights under the Geneva conventions.