CIA likely to be investagated over prisoner abuse

CIA likely to be investigated over prisoner abuse
Attorney general urged to reopen terror interrogation files


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Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Julian Borger
guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 August 2009 13.53 BST
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The US is close to ordering a criminal investigation into the conduct of the CIA during the Bush administration, it emerged today.
The US justice department's ethics office has recommended to the attorney general, Eric Holder, that he reopen a host of CIA alleged prisoner abuse cases during the interrogation of al-Qaida suspects.
The disclosure comes on the day that the justice department is scheduled to release an internal investigation into the CIA's behaviour, as well as other documents relating to the agency's treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo and in secret prisons round the world in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
The release of the documents will reopen the debate between senior members of the Bush administration, such as the former vice-president Dick Cheney, and the Obama administration over whether the intelligence obtained justified the interrogation techniques used.
Barack Obama initially said he did not want to look backward, with his advisers saying the row would distract from his heavy domestic and foreign agenda. But Holder is said to have been disturbed by what he read in internal justice department reports and it would be difficult for him to ignore the findings of his ethics office.
The alleged abuses all took place under the Bush administration but some intelligence officials are arguing that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, and congressional preoccupation with the CIA's past misdeeds is hindering its current operations.
The investigation into the CIA was drawn up in 2004 by the CIA inspector general, John Helgerson, and kept secret until now. According to leaks in the US press over the weekend, it will say that CIA interrogators carried out mock executions to frighten suspected terrorists into giving information.
In one case, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, suspected of playing a role in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, was threatened with a gun and a power drill. In another case, a gun was fired in a room next to a detainee who was being questioned, to convince him a fellow detainee had been killed. Threatening a detainee with summary execution is a violation of US law.
The reports come weeks after the CIA's admission that it had considered the use of hit squads to target senior al-Qaida leaders around the world, loosely inspired by the Israeli Mossad assassination teams that tracked down and killed Arabs believed to have been responsible for the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It also emerged that private contractors were hired to take part in the CIA programme. Although the programme was cancelled because of legal and logistical misgivings before any assassinations were carried out, the revelations have added to the CIA's embarrassment.
Obama's administration has been reluctant to open an investigation but pressure from Democrats in Congress and human rights groups has been fuelled by the revelations. Holder is now reported to be contemplating the appointment of a prosecutor to look into the allegations contained in the Helgerson report as well as detainee deaths in CIA custody.
The new wave of scrutiny of the intelligence services has been compared to the Senate's Church committee investigations in the mid-1970's which uncovered widespread abuses including assassination plots against foreign leaders and espionage against American citizens. The Church committee was credited with cleaning up an agency that had run amok, but after the 9/11 attacks it was retrospectively blamed for over-regulating the CIA, rendering it institutionally cautious and unable to infiltrate hostile countries or terrorist groups.
The new CIA director, Leon Panetta, who has brought some of his predecessors' excesses to the attention of Congress, warned this month that the political wrangling over the past could distract the agency from its key task.
"The CIA no longer operates black sites and no longer employs 'enhanced' interrogation techniques," Panetta wrote in the Washington Post. "Yet my agency continues to pay a price for enduring disputes over policies that no longer exist."
Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official, said that "the pendulum on intelligence has swung from one side to the other."
"The clandestine capability that was arduously built up is already weakened through bureaucratisation, potential congressional hearings and investigations motivated by partisan political concerns," Cannistraro said.
Robert Baer, another former CIA officer, disagreed, arguing the need for accountability was paramount.
"It's the appearance of illegality that keeps running through this as a watermark," Baer said. "You can't just say let's put this behind us.
"In the meantime clandestine intelligence will be bypassed by military action with all the drawbacks of limited oversight and lack of clandestine refinement."