Despite eight months of research and more than $4.1 million in fees, David Hoffman and Sidley Austin's report omits the key Department of Defense (DoD) documents that governed military interrogations in the period leading up to the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) report. Only that omission enables him to make the false claims at the core of his major conclusion: that DoD guidelines did not prohibit abusive interrogation techniques and that we wanted the PENS guidelines to be similarly “loose.” In fact, the local DoD procedures – some of which we helped to draft – were very restrictive. Moreover, the PENS report clearly states that psychologists are bound by those policies as well as by the relevant international treaties.
In the face of the evidence David Hoffman and Sidley Austin had in their possession but omitted each of their major conclusions collapses. As our responses (see links on releases page) demonstrate, those omissions are part of a deliberate pattern of factual distortions and unsupported inferences that pervade the entire document.