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Torture Inquiry Anyone

All the talk on the net about torture may be responsible for the US Senate finally getting off their asses and calling an inquiry into the actions taking place in places like Guantanamo.
The CIA wants to bow out as the official inquisitor in these proceedings hoping to have the FBI take over. It's definitely a hot potato, and one nobody seems to want to be a part of. The New York Times released this story. Senate May Open Inquiry Into C.I.A.'s Handling of Suspects By DOUGLAS JEHL - New York Times Published: February 13, 2005 WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 - The Senate intelligence committee is moving toward adoption of a plan to conduct a formal inquiry into the Central Intelligence Agency's handling of suspects captured in the American effort to curb terrorism, Congressional officials from each party said this week. The inquiry would be the first by Congress to address the C.I.A.'s conduct in what has remained a shadowy corner of American counterterrorism efforts. The agency is believed to be holding at least three dozen senior members of Al Qaeda at secret sites around the world, and former intelligence officials say it has been involved in the extrajudicial handing over to third countries of scores of other suspects, in an arrangement known as rendition. The C.I.A.'s inspector general is already conducting several reviews of the agency's detention and interrogation practices in Iraq and Afghanistan, including several episodes in which prisoners have been injured or killed in C.I.A. custody, intelligence officials have said. However, no C.I.A. review is known to be under way into the renditions or the treatment of prisoners at the secret sites, where those being held by the agency include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, regarded as the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The top Republican on the panel, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, confirmed in an interview on Friday that he and his staff were reviewing a proposal submitted by the top Democrat, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, which called for a formal investigation into detention, interrogation and rendition. Mr. Roberts said he was not sure that a formal investigation was warranted, but he suggested that the two sides could agree on a review. "I don't anticipate any difference of opinion regarding the subject," Mr. Roberts said. Mr. Rockefeller was the first to describe the proposal, in a telephone interview. The two senators spoke as part of the jousting between the parties about what the committee's priorities should be in the year ahead. Republicans and Democrats have already agreed on an approach, first outlined last weekend, that would devote more attention to reviewing intelligence on Iran and other hot spots in an attempt to identify weaknesses before any repeat of the mistakes made in prewar assessments on Iraq and its weapons programs. In the interview, Mr. Rockefeller did not speak directly about the C.I.A.'s role in the detention, interrogation and rendition of terrorist suspects, most details of which are highly classified. But he said he believed that the intelligence committee, which oversees the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies, was the right panel to conduct such a review because of the critical role that the handling of terrorist suspects plays in the collection of intelligence about the terrorist threat. "I think we need a formal committee investigation," Mr. Rockefeller said. "I would go so far as to say we'd be derelict if we did not carry out our oversight responsibilities." Republican Congressional officials said they were reviewing a written proposal from the Democrats that outlined the possible scope of such a review. They said it appeared to focus on whether there was a sufficient legal foundation for the coercive interrogation methods, secret detention and extrajudicial handing over of detainees to other countries that the C.I.A. has practiced. One Republican Congressional official said he believed that it would not be appropriate for Congress to begin any review until the C.I.A.'s inspector general, who reports to the agency and to Congress, completes the inquiries now under way. But a Democratic Congressional official said it was important for Congress to address any problems in the C.I.A.'s treatment of terror suspects. Last spring, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees held hearings into the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But those inquiries focused almost entirely on the conduct of the military, and members of the panels said at the time that they believed that the intelligence committees should take their own look at any involvement by the C.I.A. in detention and interrogation practices at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities around the world. Some administration officials have described the effort to curb terrorism as a new era in which old rules like the Geneva Convention for the treatment of war prisoners do not apply. Some of the administration's practices have been challenged by the federal courts, including rulings asserting that foreigners being held without trial in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to challenge their detention. In the House, Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, has said she plans to introduce legislation on interrogation and detention procedures that would make explicit what was permissible. Only one C.I.A. contract employee, David Passaro, has been charged with a crime in connection with allegations of abuse of Al Qaeda prisoners. Mr. Passaro is awaiting trial in federal court in North Carolina on assault charges in connection with the death of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002. Mr. Passaro has indicated that he will base his defense on the argument that the harsh methods he used were broadly authorized by the Bush administration. Intelligence officials have also acknowledged that the C.I.A.'s inspector general is reviewing the conduct of other C.I.A. officers in Iraq and Afghanistan, in episodes that included the death at Abu Ghraib in November 2003 of an Iraqi prisoner who had been in C.I.A. custody, and whose body was wrapped in plastic and packed in ice before it was removed from the facility. Some members of Congress have also sought to focus attention on what intelligence officials have acknowledged were coercive interrogation practices used by the C.I.A. on some detainees who were senior members of Al Qaeda, including Mr. Mohammed, who was captured in March 2003, and Abu Zubaydah, who was captured a year earlier. The officials have said that legal opinions issued by the Bush administration allowed the C.I.A. broader latitude in its use of interrogation methods than it did the military, prohibiting only measures that could be defined as torture. In response to a C.I.A. request for guidance, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion in August 2002 that defined torture as acts that induced pain tantamount to organ failure. That opinion and another document issued the same month have been described by former government officials as providing authorization for the use of harsh procedures like "waterboarding," a technique in which a prisoner is made to believe that he is drowning. The administration repudiated that opinion last summer, however, and formally revised it in December, steps that former intelligence officials said prompted the C.I.A. to impose new restrictions on its tactics. President Bush and his top aides have said repeatedly that the United States does not torture prisoners and does not hand them over to countries that torture them. Administration officials have generally declined to discuss cases in which prisoners have been turned over to third countries. But former intelligence officials say the practice has been widely used by the C.I.A. since the 1990's, including perhaps more than 100 cases since the Sept. 11 attacks in which the agency has turned over prisoners to third countries, including Egypt.

The New York Daily News followed up with a story about military insiders coming forward about inappropriate interrogations they had witnessed and tried to stop.

At war with Gitmo grilling Military counsel fought but lost BY JAMES GORDON MEEK New York Daily News WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON - Military lawyers at the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison tried to stop inhumane interrogations, but were ignored by senior Pentagon officials, the Daily News has learned. Judge advocates - uniformed legal advisers known as JAGs who were assigned to a secret war crimes task force - repeatedly objected to aggressive interrogations by a separate intelligence unit at Camp Delta, where Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects have been jailed since January 2002. But Pentagon officials "didn't think this was a big deal, so they just ignored the JAGs," a senior military source said. The military lawyers' actions had never been disclosed and are the first known cases of lower-level officers resisting interrogations at the Cuban camp that might constitute torture. Some officials called them "unsung heroes" for risking their careers by crossing senior officials who approved the techniques. The potentially unlawful methods objected to by the judge advocates were among 33 procedures authorized in a Dec. 2, 2002, memo by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and used on at least two detainees. A Pentagon report last August found the prisoners gave "important and time-urgent information." The lawyers' objections were that battlefield interrogation methods, where slapping around a prisoner might be justifiable if it immediately saved lives, were immoral and possibly illegal if used on prisoners far from a war zone and long after their capture, three sources said. Abuse cases reported in FBI memos obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union are now being probed by the Justice Department and the U.S. Southern Command, the Pentagon unit that oversees Gitmo. One of the judge advocates, an Air Force officer, left Gitmo and then filed a Jan. 15, 2003, "Memorandum for the Record," sources said. According to portions read to The News, the memorandum noted conflicting interrogation policies at Gitmo and objected to aggressive techniques. These were raised repeatedly with the Southern Command by their secret unit, the Criminal Investigation Task Force, a 150-person team of investigators from each branch of the military. Its mission was to work with the FBI and Secret Service to identify detainees' fitness for military war crimes trials. On the same day of the 2003 Memorandum for the Record, Rumsfeld temporarily rescinded his December 2002 order permitting "stress positions," the use of dogs and "mild" physical contact to intimidate uncooperative prisoners, because of legal concerns. The objectionable interrogations were done by Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, a separate intelligence unit seeking tips on terror threats, sources said. Defense Department officials refused repeated requests for comment by The News. The dispute about the methods at Gitmo began after the September 2002 sacking of the camp's commander, Army Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus. He was replaced in November by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, whose later attempts to "Gitmo-ize" Iraq's prisons tied him to the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. In October that year, just before Miller's arrival, the U.S. Southern Command asked the Pentagon to use harsher methods on detainees resisting questioning, and by December Rumsfeld had okayed the techniques, which Miller then encouraged. An Air Force colonel with the war crimes task force told a superior he was "aghast" at the harsher techniques. Long interrogations and isolation had been effective, a senior former officer said. And Miller dismissed the concerns of the judge advocates who were persuaded the interrogation policies violated the law, sources said.