AG Holder Names Prosecutor for Review of CIA Interrogation Practice

Career federal prosecutor John Durham, who is overseeing the investigation of the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes, was tapped today to explore potential violations of anti-torture laws rooted in the interrogation of certain detainees, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said in a statement this afternoon.

http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2009/08/...n-practice.html

this should quiet the naysayers and Obama haters

and the MSM is all over this

Monday, August 24 2009 -
Review of alleged detainee abuse to have narrow scope

'Preliminary review' looks at whether interrogations followed guidance of the Bush 'torture memos.'
By Warren Richey
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the August 24, 2009 edition

In a highly contentious move, Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday appointed a special prosecutor to take a fresh look at whether US officials violated the law through harsh treatment of detainees during the Bush administration's war on terror.

Mr. Holder said he was authorizing John Durham, a career Justice Department prosecutor, to conduct a "preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations." He did not identify those detainees by name or where they were allegedly mistreated.

"I fully realize my decision to commence this preliminary review will be controversial," Holder said. "In this case, given all the information currently available, it is clear to me that this review is the only responsible course of action for me to take."

The announcement came shortly after the administration released a redacted version of a 2004 CIA Inspector General's report on harsh interrogation tactics.

The report said CIA interrogators threatened to kill the children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khaled Shaikh Mohammed, and threatened another detainee with a power drill and suggestions that if he didn't talk his mother would be brought into the room and raped in front of him.

The report was sent to the Justice Department for possible prosecution during the Bush administration. Prosecutors declined. The issue was resurrected by Holder after he read the CIA report.

Justice vs. witch hunt

Since its earliest days in office, the Obama administration has found itself caught in a heated debate over Bush administration antiterrorism policies. On one side, civil libertarians and human rights activists are pushing for a close examination of the legality of Bush policies with an eye toward potential high-level prosecutions. On the other side, members of the intelligence community are warning of the dangers to national security of a "witch hunt" that could decimate and demoralize those on the front lines of the fight against Al Qaeda.

President Obama has tried to avoid a showdown on the issue, suggesting that the Bush policies are a thing of the past. The White House sought to project that posture again on Monday.

"The president has said repeatedly that he wants to look forward, not back," according to a White House statement issued Monday. "Ultimately, determinations about whether someone broke the law are made independently by the attorney general."

Mr. Durham is already at work investigating the destruction of CIA videotapes of detainee interrogations. The videotape destruction investigation involves significant overlap of information with the new probe because they apparently involve some of the same interrogations. Holder said he was expanding Durham's mandate beyond the videotapes issue to include an examination of interrogations and detainee treatment.

Durham is specifically instructed to conduct a preliminary review and then present Holder with a recommendation of whether to proceed with a full investigation or drop the matter.

It appears that Durham's investigative mandate is narrow. The investigation apparently will not examine the role of senior administration officials and their legal advisers. Instead, the preliminary probe appears aimed at US officials and contractors who used harsh and brutal tactics that went far beyond those authorized in the Bush administration's so-called torture memos.

"The Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given" by the Bush Justice Department, Holder said.

Panetta will 'stand up for officers'

In a written statement to Central Intelligence Agency employees on Monday, CIA Director Leon Panetta sought to reassure the nation's intelligence officers. "My primary interest," Mr. Panetta wrote, "is to stand up for those officers who did what their country asked and who followed the legal guidance they were given."

Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA's executive director, called Holder's appointment of a special prosecutor "a welcome, yet incomplete, step."

"Any meaningful investigation would encompass both those who claimed they were following orders and those who designed and demanded that the illegal policies be implemented," Mr. Cox said.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut said he is fearful the country will come to regret Holder's decision. He said the investigation would have a chilling effect on US intelligence officers.

###



"Barack Obama's attorney general, worked for a Washington, D.C., law firm called Covington & Burling. And what did Simpson discover about that august firm? ... the firm had a very important client. His name was George W Bush. And they represented a very important organization . . . called the Republican National Committee."

http://legalschnauzer.blogspot.com/2...g-justice.html

40 YEARS down the road, LBJ looks better and better all the time

ain't life strange?

How come you aren't hounding Arlen Specter, the last man standing from the Warren Commission?
If the phony teabaggers and deathers on the republican side can stand up in meetings, why not have JFK questioneers stand up
and ask Arlen about the old single bullet theory he named and for the truth of that?

Obama moving interegation from CIA to FBI is a great start

Great start indeed.

Too little, too late...a couple of low level persons will be sacraficed--enough to negatively impact morale of the
agency but not enough to force any systemic changes...

AG Holder Names Prosecutor for Review of CIA Interrogation Practice
The National Law Journal

Career federal prosecutor John Durham, who is overseeing the investigation of the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes, has been tapped to explore potential violations of anti-torture laws rooted in the interrogation of certain detainees, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. said Monday. The Office of Professional Responsibility submitted to Holder a report Monday that recommended the DOJ re-examine earlier decisions, made under the Bush administration, to decline to prosecute apparent violations of anti-torture laws.

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202...tion%20Practice

Holder Tapping Prosecutor to Probe 'Nearly a Dozen' CIA Interrogations
Stephen Webster, Raw Story
Rights and Liberties: America's torture debate is nowhere near over.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/142176/hold...interrogations/

Holder Eyes Narrow ‘Investigation’ Into CIA Torture
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/08/24/justice...to-cia-torture/

Rendition of Terror Suspects Will Continue Under Obama
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/08/24/obama-a...ndition-system/

Obama OKs Special Interrogations Unit
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/24/us....ions/index.html


Highlights of CIA Torture Report
http://www.salon.com/news/primary_sources/.../cia_ig_report/

Full CIA Torture Report (.pdf)
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nat...df?hpid=topnews


CIA Implicated in Overdoing Torture
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story...44-2703,00.html


What the IG Recommended About CIA Interrogations
http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/washington/20...rrogations.html

NATIONAL SECURITY
Prosecuting Torture

On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced he will appoint a federal prosecutor to decide whether CIA interrogators broke the law in prisoner abuse cases. On the same day, the Obama administration released a 2004 CIA Inspector General's (IG) report that "contains new allegations of detainee abuse at secret prisons around the world," including, reports that interrogators threatened to "kill the children" and "sexually assault the mother" of a key terror suspect. The administration declassified the report after a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Facing intense criticism after the release of the IG report, the CIA then decided to release secret agency reports from 2004 and 2005 that purportedly "detailed intelligence scoops produced by the interrogation program." For months, Vice President Cheney has been calling for the release of these reports as justification for the Bush administration's controversial policies. But the New York Times notes that these documents don't actually "refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness." Obama administration officials also announced on Monday that they will "continue the Bush administration's practice of sending terror suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but will monitor their treatment to ensure they are not tortured."

THE PROSECUTOR: Holder has named John H. Durham, a career Justice Department prosecutor, to lead the inquiry into whether the CIA broke anti-torture laws. In a statement, Holder said that Durham "will recommend to me whether there is sufficient predication for a full investigation into whether the law was violated in connection with the interrogation of certain detainees." Attorney General Michael Mukasey tapped Durham earlier this year to investigate the destruction of videotapes made of CIA detainee interrogations. That investigation is still ongoing. Durham, a registered Republican, "is known for seeking maximum sentences, shunning plea bargains and avoiding the spotlight." The review will be limited to those who did not "act in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance," restricting the investigation from targeting Bush administration lawyers like John Yoo and Jay Bybee. But in theory, "Holder's announcement does not foreclose the possibility that DOJ lawyers who authored the torture memos and/or those in the White House who authorized torture will, at some point, be investigated." Democrats in Congress are still demanding a truth commission in order to conduct a broader inquiry.

THE CIA REPORT: Former CIA IG John Helgerson's 2004 report into the CIA's Bush-era interrogations operations is "highly critical" of the program. The partly-declassified report concludes "that the public had been misled about the interrogation program," and waterboarding was used "in a way that had not been approved by the Justice Department." In addition to threatening to kill a detainee's children, the report states that the CIA used a "pressure point" tactic that temporarily blocked the flow of blood to the brain before the detainee was revived, and interrogators "racked an unloaded handgun close to the head of a high-value detainee, and revved a power drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded." "The EITs [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] used by the Agency under the CTC [Counterterrorist Center] Program are inconsistent with the public policy positions that the United States has taken regarding human rights," the report reads. Much of the report is still redacted. In a statement, Helgerson wrote that he was "disappointed" that the Obama administration did not "release even a redacted version of the Recommendations, which described a number of corrective actions that needed to be taken."

THE RENDITION PROGRAM: The Obama administration announced that it will continue the Bush administration's practice of rendition, while promising to make sure detainees are not tortured. Human rights advocates condemned the decision. "It is extremely disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration practice of relying on diplomatic assurances, which have been proven completely ineffective in preventing torture," said Amrit Singh of the ACLU. The Obama administration is also setting up a new interrogation unit that will be run by the FBI. That unit, which will be known as the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), will "oversee the interrogations of top terrorism suspects using largely non-coercive techniques approved by the administration earlier this year." To do that, the HIG team "will draw on interrogators, intelligence analysts, linguists and cultural experts to interrogate detainees without torturing them." As constructed, the HIG team will "have authority to operate outside of the United States, but it will operate within the legal boundaries set by a U.S. Army field manual that is supposed to comply with the Geneva Conventions."

Cheney Accuses Obama Of Politicizing Justice Department

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/25/c...p_n_268279.html

Reading the CIA IG Report
from The Washington Note by Andrew Lebovich

cia-seal.jpgMany writers and thinkers have had late nights and early mornings in the past few days, owing to the release yesterday of the 2004 CIA Inspector General's report. In particular, The Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman has given the report careful coverage on his blog and in the paper itself, while Andrew Sullivan's blog has been a great source for aggregated insight from different bloggers and journalists. The Washington Post and the New York Times both also have important articles on the report.

Much of the coverage thus-far has focused on the more lurid aspects of the report--abuses, specific techniques used, and the deaths of detainees in American custody. I do not wish to wade into the debate over what may or may not constitute torture, or what level of brutality can be designated illegal. Instead, I would simply like to point readers to the list of "acceptable" interrogation techniques, and encourage them to make up their own mind.

Moreover, while it may be surprising that one high-value detainee (almost certainly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) was kept without sleep for 180 hours, the report holds few revelations about techniques or tactics used to obtain information.

Rather, other elements of the report concerned me as I read in between the redactions. In particular, the report sketches the picture of an environment where unclear or non-existent guidelines and enforcement of regulations allowed abuses to occur, as portrayed in Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.

While it is unsurprising that large sections of the report are blacked-out, it is worth pointing out which sections of the report do not appear. For instance, the report's author(s) state that the Directorate of Operations (DO) handbook explains the CIA's "general interrogation policy." Yet this policy is redacted, in full.

The report's authors also take care to point out several times that, while CIA interrogation procedures and facilities are not required to conform to American prison standards, the CIA was required to provide basic medical care and keep detainees in generally good health. Unfortunately, the released report does not allow us to evaluate the actual medical guidelines used by CIA-employed doctors and interrogators. Similarly, guidelines for the capture of detainees and the specific training given to interrogators are blacked out in the text. And the entire recommendations section is gone.

These are only a few examples, but the redaction of whole sections like these prevents us from evaluating what baseline guidance was given to CIA operatives in the field, and makes it impossible to draw definitive conclusions on how policy-makers defined acceptable tactics and conditions for interrogation. And as Time's Michael Sherer points out, the report admits that at least initially, the guidance and staffing for interrogation programs was severely lacking.

More importantly, key decisions regarding the treatment of prisoners were made on the basis of vague guidelines that left room for major interpretation on the part of agents on the ground. For instance, several times the report's authors note that by law torture was defined as the inflicting of "severe" pain and suffering upon a detainee. But I saw no adequate definition in the report of what constitutes severe mental or physical anguish, ignoring the fact that each person has a different threshold for suffering that must be evaluated by observers and officials.

Furthermore, as Scherer and others have noted, this subjective judgement, as well as a simple lack of information, directly led to the employment of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," or EITs, against high-value detainees Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri.

The report's authors write, for instance, that al Nashiri gave information on other terrorists during the first day of interrogations, but was still waterboarded on the twelfth day, presumably because interrogators felt he was withholding information. Later, after interrogators deemed al Nashiri compliant in December 2002, a seperate operative believed him to be withholding information and subjected him to "hooding and handcuffing." Similarly, even after the team that had been interrogating Abu Zubaydah deemed him compliant, an unidentified operative believed that Zubaydah was holding back, and "generated substantial pressure from Headquarters to continue use of the EITs." After the application of the EIT, the DO determined that Zubaydah had nothing more to offer.

But how did various operatives come to these conclusions about the extent of information held by captured terrorists? From the report's conclusion:

Agency officers report that reliance on analytical assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence may have resulted in the application of EITs without justification. Some participants in the Program, particularly field interrogators, judge that...assessments to the effect that detainees are withholding information are not always supported by an objective evaluation of available information and the evaluation of the interrogators but are too heavily based, instead, on presumptions of what the individual might or should know.

Thus, in important interrogations, decisions about harsh practices were made at times based not on those actually interrogating suspects, but on unsupported feelings and suspicions.

I do not wish, in analyzing this report, to shortchange the immense pressure placed on interrogators and the officials above them to produce intelligence against terrorist leaders and networks. Nor would I downplay the strain induced by the post-9/11 fear of another attack, and the subsequent drive to protect against it.

But the report is vague about whether or not harsh techniques actually produced actionable intelligence (as opposed to normal techniques), and it seems clear that the push to gain information overwhelmed the need to ensure accuracy and compliance with the laws governing the way American agents operate abroad.

It may be painful to read documents such as this, but it is necessary. On the one hand, we must be able to evaluate the most effective ways to glean intelligence, and understand what techniques cause more harm then good, whether in the form of false intelligence or damage to America's image abroad. But more importantly, we must know why there was so little guidance of CIA interrogation operations, at least until 2003, and how much senior leadership knew about interrogations where men, no matter their crime, were made to suffer greatly for what at times seems more like caprice than reason.

-- Andrew Lebovich

Instead of spending all our time and energy exploring how huch torture we will tolerate and under what circumstances, we need a Congressional Commission to study the question of how much SECRECY we need and
will tolerate in a Humanitarian Constitutional Democratic Republic with an Open Market Economy?

I submit, for your consideration, that secrecy and the lack of oppenness and transparency is the Cancer that is devouring the "Soul" of our social system--at every level across every domain of Human activity...

Dave Lindorff
Getting Away With Torture: Holder's Limited, Modified Hangout

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff08262009.html

JOANNE MARINER
What the Inspector General Found
FindLaw columnist and human rights attorney Joanne Mariner discusses the long-delayed release of the 2004 report of the CIA's Inspector General, describing Bush-era interrogation abuses, and the related news that Attorney General Eric Holder is appointing a federal prosecutor to look into such abuses. Mariner summarizes the significant new information in the report -- which was revealed thanks to ACLU litigation. She also points to the potentially high significance of the report's large blacked-out portions (constituting almost a third of its length), which include lengthy sections concerning waterboarding. Mariner argues that while appalling unauthorized interrogation techniques were used, it is important to keep in mind, too, that many appalling techniques were also fully authorized by interrogators' superiors and Bush Administration attorneys. She urges that Attorney General Holder should refrain from putting full responsibility on underlings while ignoring the wrongs of higher-ups who evidence suggests orchestrated abuse as a matter of policy. Tuesday, August 25, 2009

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20090825.html