Global IssuesRIGHTS-US: Justice to Probe Detainee Abuses
The issue of detainee interrogation and abuse lately eclipsed by the debate over U.S. health care reform bubbled back to the surface Monday in a number of headline-making developments.
First, the Office of Professional Responsibility - the ethics office at the Department of Justice (DOJ) is about to recommend that about a dozen cases of alleged prisoner abuse be reopened.
Second, in response to a court order triggered by a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) five years ago, Attorney General Eric Holder is poised to release a long-delayed report prepared in 2004 by the Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) detailing the 'enhanced interrogation' techniques used by the CIA and some of its contractors against so-called 'high value' terrorism suspects.
On Monday, the Washington Post reported that Holder is expected to name a special prosecutor, John Durham, to head up an inquiry into several cases of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan and to determine whether there should be a wider criminal investigation.
Lastly, President Barack Obama will create a new team of experienced operatives to interrogate prisoners suspected of serious terrorism crimes.
The unit will be called the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, and will be supervised by the National Security Council in the White House and housed at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, thus giving the White House direct supervision and apparently shifting responsibility away from the CIA.
Regarding the reported ethics unit recommendations, Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU National Security Project, said, 'It is encouraging that the Justice Department's ethics office recognises that prior decisions to cut off investigations of serious abuse cases were ill-advised, and that those who broke the law must be held accountable.'
'It is critical, though, that the scope of any criminal investigation not be limited at the outset to exclude the investigation of senior officials who authorised torture or wrote the memos that were used to justify it,' he added.
'An investigation that begins and ends with so-called 'rogue' interrogators would be indefensible given the evidence of high-level involvement that is already in the public domain. Nor should any 'good faith' limitation be used as a shield for interrogators who knew or should have known that they were violating the law.'
It is believed that reopening the dozen or so cases has the potential to open CIA and contractor interrogators to criminal prosecution for committing brutal acts against detainees.
According to media reports, interrogators used a power drill, mock executions, and threats against a prisoner's family, to terrify detainees into providing information. It is still unclear that this information was of any intelligence value, though former Vice President Dick Cheney has insisted that the techniques were of great value.
The report from the CIA's Inspector General (IG) has been kept secret since 2004, though some details have been leaked and some of its contents are believed to have been included in a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross that was published in the New York Review of Books.
It has been through a seemingly endless legal march through the U.S. federal court system, ended when a judge refused to give the CIA any more time to produce it.
Widely leaked portions of the IG report on the legality and effectiveness of the agency's 'enhanced interrogation' programme indicate CIA agents committed serious abuses that were previously unknown.
Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said in a statement, 'Portions of the report that have been leaked shed light on the scope of the CIA's torture programme and raise serious questions about what details are still being withheld. Releasing the report with minimal redactions is essential to knowing what crimes were committed and who was involved.'
During the administration of President Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, the IG's findings were referred to federal prosecutors in the DOJ, but those prosecutors decided that none of the cases should be pursued.
But Attorney General Holder took a different view when he read the IG report detailing gruesome physical and mental abuse as well as deaths among detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was reported as virtually certain that Holder would now appoint a special prosecutor to review these cases again. A major question that will linger over this investigation is whether it will focus solely on interrogators whose tactics exceeded their DOJ legal authority or would go higher up into a probe of who authorised or facilitated use of these techniques.
Another looming question is whether the DOJ lawyers who prepared the so-called 'torture memos' justifying abusive interrogations will also be pursued by prosecutors. Thus far, media reports suggest that these cases will be referred to state bar associations, which have the authority to sanction the attorneys for misconduct or even to move to have them disbarred.
Two key former DOJ lawyers prepared these memos: Jay S. Bybee, who is now a federal judge; and John Yoo, who is now a law professor in California.
In the case of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the Department of Defence (DOD) conducted more than a dozen separate investigations into who was responsible. Only a handful of what were then labeled 'bad apples' was tried and jailed; DOD found no evidence that the abuse orders came from any senior Bush administration officials.
Press accounts report that Holder will name John Durham, a career Justice Department prosecutor, to head the new inquiry. For the past two years, Durham has been investigating the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes and is thus familiar with the issue and the agency.
Monday's developments create a delicate situation for President Obama, who has sought to distance himself from any investigation of his predecessor's policies or practices.
He has said he would rather look forward than backward. But the president has made clear that Monday's investigation decisions are the responsibility of the attorney general.
© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service