Brigadier General David R. Irvine (U.S. Army)
Last Name: Irvine
First Name: David
Middle Name: R.
Rank: Brigadier General
Service/Department: U.S. Army
ACNSL Offices and Committees:
Medals and Honors:
Last or Significant Assignment: Deputy Commander for the 96th Regional Readiness Command
BG David Irvine is a Utah lawyer in private practice. He enlisted as a private in the 96th Infantry Division, U.S. Army Reserve in 1962. He received a direct commission as a strategic intelligence officer in 1967. He retired as a BG in 2002 after forty years of service. His service included 18 years on the faculty of the Sixth Army Intelligence School teaching prisoner of war interrogation and military law. His field grade command service included the 395th Finance Section, the 162d Corps Support Group, and a training brigade for the 91st Division. His last assignment was as the Deputy Commander for the 96th Regional Readiness Command, which provided command and control for Army Reserve units in Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, and North and South Dakota. After retirement, he volunteered as a clarinetist with the 23rd Army Band, Utah National Guard for another 18 years.
When news reports and photographs began to circulate in 2004 of American torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, BG Irvine began penning newspaper op-eds protesting those violations of international law. Those led to an invitation from the non-profit organization, Human Rights First, to join with what became a group of sixty retired generals and admirals who collectively and successfully worked to get the United States out of the torture business. The informal Chairs of this effort were GEN (Ret.) Jack Vessey, USA; Gen (Ret.) Joseph Hoar, USMC; and Gen (Ret.) Charles Krulak, USMC. BG Irvine was one of the core participants, who included former TJAGs, military judges, a past DIA Director, former Army and Marine division combat commanders, and the retired Army general who conducted the first formal investigation into events at Abu Ghraib. This twelve-year effort saw the group lobbying Congress, meeting with presidential candidates and presidential staff, cabinet officers, participating in academic forums, with national event appearances and press interviews.
In 2010, BG Irvine was appointed to a bi-partisan, eleven-member Task Force on Detainee Treatment sponsored by the non-profit Constitution Project in Washington, D.C. The Task force was co-chaired by now-former Governor Asa Hutchinson and former Ambassador James Jones. Among the members were University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, former American Bar Association president Sandy D’Alemberta; former FBI Director William B. Sessions; Mercer University professor of ethics Dr. David Gushee; University of Richmond law professor Azizah al-Hibri, LTG (Ret.) Claudia Kennedy, USA; and Columbia University professor of medicine Dr. Gerald Thomson.
Among the principal objectives of this nearly three-year inquiry were (1) to comprehensively establish from non-classified sources whether U.S. agencies and military personnel had engaged in practices that constitute torture under applicable federal and international law, and (2) whether such brutal and unlawful practices had produced actionable intelligence which likely could not have been developed through conventional methods of interrogation. The task force conducted more than one hundred interviews of military and intelligence officers, interrogators, former detainees, and policy makers; it conducted fact-finding in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Task Force issued its 550-page report on April 16, 2013. The conclusions pertinent to the above two questions were (1) Yes, there was deliberate torture of detainees; and (2) Most probably, brutality gained no useful intelligence which conventional interrogation would not have produced.
