News Clips - Retired Military Leaders Speak Out Against Torture in South Carolina and Florida

<<Back to Human Rights First

GUEST: Brigadier General David R. Irvine

DATE: January 23, 2007, 8:53 am

SHOW: AM Tampa Bay

HOST: Joining us right now is retired General David R. Irvine. Good morning General and welcome to AM Tampa Bay.

DI: Thank you.

HOST: There are several retired generals and admirals that are talking to the presidential wannabes. You guys are concerned about torture. Explain your position.

DI: We are hoping that we can speak with all of the presidential candidates about this issue because we believe torture is unnecessary. We believe it produces unreliable information. It’s wrong. It’s against the law. It is in violation against our international treaties and it is dangerous to the army and the nation.

HOST: What about waterboarding? Where do you stand on that?

DI: We believe that waterboarding is absolutely torture.

HOST: That seems to be the contentious issue in defining what is torture. Whether cold temperatures or made to stand for long periods of time or something like that is considered torture or whether or not they are just routine discomforts that prisoners are put through and not treating them too well.

Well, when we talk about changing temperature in terms of some of these interrogations we are talking about shifts in temperature from 100 degrees down to 10 degrees and dousing prisoners at those lower temperature ranges with cold water, keeping them naked for long periods of time, keeping them in isolation for long periods of time. And psychologically the degradation that occurs in those kind of circumstances absolutely is torture. And, if it were done to our people by someone else we would be outraged and appalled and be calling for some kind of action.

HOST: Those are the kinds of thing that we condemn other countries for doing.

Absolutely. And it doesn’t do any good because they behead our troops

HOST: General, let me ask you a quick question here. There is a study that came out yesterday by two non profit journalism groups that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about national security threats in Iraq and in the years leading up to…we went to war, basically under false pretenses. What is your reaction to that?

DI: Well, I haven’t seen the study, so I don’t know what they specifically said. But, I can say, one of the principle reasons we went to war in Iraq was the assumption that Iraq had been involved with Al Quaeda in teaching and making available weapons of mass destruction in terms of chemicals and that sort of stuff. That information was passed to the United States as a consequence of one man under torture who said whatever he thought was necessary to save his life. He later recanted all of that, and unfortunately all of that information found its way into Secretary Powell’s speech at the United Nations, and it was just false.

HOST: We appreciate you joining us on AM Tampa Bay this morning.

DI: Happy to be here.

HOST: Thank you.