Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin (D-MI) on Wednesday called for an independent panel to determine whether top officials who authorized the use of harsh interrogation tactics should be punished for doing so.
"There's been no accountability at the higher levels" for those who enabled U.S. forces to use abusive tactics on prisoners in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Levin told NPR's Robert Siegel. "I really think it's important that the Justice Department make the decision as to who, if anybody, is prosecuted here, and we ought to keep that out of politics."
But, Levin added: "I can express my opinion that the legal opinions here were abominations."
Levin said he recommended to Attorney General Eric Holder that he appoint two or three independent people to make recommendations on whether to prosecute those responsible for the memos.
Levin's pronouncement comes after his committee released a 232-page report on Tuesday showing that top Bush administration officials approved abusive interrogation tactics developed by the military — a claim those officials have denied. The Obama administration recently released the 2002 memos approving the use of those tactics.
Levin said the use of harsh interrogation methods has hurt the military in a number of ways, by producing unreliable information and increasing the resistance of detainees to talk. He added that the infamous photos of torture used in Abu Ghraib prison have helped terrorist recruitment against U.S. forces.
Asked whether it is realistic to have expected opposition to the use of abusive interrogation in the days following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Levin said even at the time, there were many military legal authorities who spoke out against the use of such techniques.
"We had some very significant experts at the time who were arguing against this," he said.
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