April 1, 2009: Powell Refuses to Admit Participation in Approval of Torture

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, in an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, refuses to acknowledge his role in approving the torture of suspected terrorists. In 2008, ABC News named Powell as one of the members of the National Security Council’s principals committee who repeatedly authorized a variety of torture techniques to be used on detainees (see April 9, 2008). He also declines to affirm that several techniques, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation, qualify as torture. Powell says the torture of Abu Zubaida (see April - June 2002) and other al-Qaeda suspects “were not play-by-play discussed but there were conversations at a senior level with regard to what could be done with these types of interrogation. I cannot say further because I don’t have knowledge of all the meetings that took place or what was discussed at each of those meetings and I think it’s going to have to be in the written record of that meeting what will determine whether anything improper took place. But it is always the case that at least in the State Department’s standpoint, we should be consistent with the requirements of the Geneva Convention and that’s why this was such a controversial, controversial issue that you have to go—in due course I think we all will go to the written record. I’m not sure what memos were signed or not signed. I didn’t have access to all of that information.” Maddow asks, “If there was a meeting, though, at which senior officials were giving the approval for sleep deprivations, stress positions, waterboarding, were those officials committing crimes when they were getting their authorization?” Powell refuses to answer, saying, “I don’t know If any of these items would be considered criminal and I would wait for whatever investigation that the government or the Congress intends to pursue with this.” Maddow asks if he regrets his own participation in discussions about interrogations and torture, but Powell cuts her off to state: “There was no meeting on torture. It is constantly said that the meetings—I had an issue with this—we had meetings on what torture to administer. What I recall, the meetings I was in, I was not in all the meetings and I was not an author of many of the memos that have been written and some have come out and some have not come out. The only meetings I recall was where we talked about what is it we can do with respect to trying to get information from individuals who were in our custody. And I will just have to wait until the full written record is available and examined.… I don’t know where these things were being approved at a political level.” [MSNBC, 4/1/2009; Think Progress, 4/1/2009]