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Report Details Alleged CIA Abuses

by: Greg Miller  |  The Los Angeles Times

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US Army Military Police escort a detainee to his cell in Camp X-Ray , Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Photo: Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy / US Navy)

    The methods were not mentioned in Justice Department memos authorizing the so-called enhanced interrogation program for terrorism detainees.

    Washington - The CIA staged a mock execution and brandished weapons, including a gun and a power drill, during interrogation sessions with detainees, according to a long-secret internal CIA report expected to be released Monday.

    The episodes are part of a catalog of alleged abuses -- a 2004 report by the CIA's inspector general -- that has prompted Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. to consider appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate cases in which the CIA strayed beyond its authorities.

    The prisoner confronted with the gun and drill was identified by current and former U.S. officials as Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the alleged plotter of the attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole. Nashiri was also one of three prisoners who was subjected to waterboarding, the simulated drowning method.

    The inspector general's report also describes at least one instance in which the CIA fired a gun in a room next door to a detainee in an apparent effort to convince the prisoner that another terrorism suspect had been executed, officials said.

    Some of the allegations, including the presence of a gun in an interrogation room, have been previously reported. But some of the details disclosed this weekend, including the name of the detainee, are new.

    The CIA officer who brandished the gun was removed from the program and reprimanded.

    The cases are among the most extreme examples in which CIA interrogators sought to improvise methods not mentioned in the legal memos the agency procured from the Justice Department authorizing the so-called enhanced interrogation program.

    "Some of the things that were done were almost in juvenile detective mode," said a former U.S. official familiar with the report, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

    Even so, the report focused most of its strongest criticism on alleged abuses of interrogation methods that the agency had been explicitly authorized to use. In particular, the report raised troubling questions about the frequency with which certain prisoners were being waterboarded.

    Segments of the report that were declassified this year indicate that two senior Al Qaeda prisoners, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were waterboarded a total of 266 times between them, far more than had been envisioned in Justice Department memos that gave the CIA permission to use the method.

    The CIA declined to discuss specifics in the report.

    But CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said that the Justice Department has had the report since 2004 and that prosecutors have carefully reviewed it for legal accountability. He said the CIA "in no way condoned behavior -- no matter how infrequent -- that went beyond formal guidance."

    "This has all been looked at," he added. "Professionals in the Department of Justice decided if and when to pursue prosecution. That's how the system was supposed to work and that's how it did work."

    Still, Holder is said to be moving closer to appointing a prosecutor to examine allegations of CIA abuses. The disclosure of fresh details from the report this weekend was seen by some in Washington as a sign that Holder may be setting the stage for such an announcement.

    The details on the mock execution and the use of the drill were first reported online Friday by Newsweek. The CIA's use of a gun in the booth with a prisoner was first disclosed in The Times this month.

  

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If not for the Bush

If not for the Bush Administration's policy on torture, those acting for that administration would not have gone to these lengths. It is time to lay blame where it truly belongs--at the feet of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. They, along with those in the Justice Department who helped craft this policy are the authors of this tragedy and should answer for their crimes. Otherwise, the Nuremberg Trials were a sham.

Since we can no longer

Since we can no longer believe in the uniform application of our system of laws, it's clearly time for a Constitutional Convention. A Constitutional Convention is the lawful non-violent means provided by our existing Constitution for its own renewal, and for the general renewal of our Republic and its social contracts. We need to press this "reset button" -- wisely provided by the Founders but never yet pressed -- for the same reason that any complex system needs to be rebooted from time to time: that is, so it can function. It's getting hard to breathe, and it's going to keep get harder until we have no choice but to press that reset button, or undergo an even more painful (and probably violent) transition. After a moment's thought, any systems geek can readily understand the necessity of invalidating the existing system's state and building up a new system state from first principles. Any experienced systems geek can also testify that it's much better to reboot at a time of one's own choosing than to be forced to press the reset button at a moment when the system is most stressed, or most urgently needed, or both. America appears to be drifting toward the latter scenario, and nobody's talking about the reset button. Why, I wonder? Is it because we no longer share enough values to provide a basis for a new social contract? The dividedness of public opinion about the lawless practice of torture by our government suggests the answer, discouragingly, may be "Yes, because America is now firmly on the same path as all the other declining empires that litter human history". People of good will should resist discouragement, no matter how discouraging things are, and press our Republic's reset button in the lawful, Constitutional way. All of the alternatives to the chaos of an orderly rebooting process are far more costly. The side-effects of rebooting are *always* more predictable than the side-effects of a system crash.

A Constitutional Convention,

A Constitutional Convention, as Steve Newcomb suggested, might be a good idea. If we could explicitly exclude corporations from politics (contributions, lobbying, etc.), that would help with all of our worst problems.

Telling the world we don't

Telling the world we don't want them to know what we have done (torturewise) is the same as telling them we have done the worst things imaginable and don't want them to know about it. Their imaginations will supply the details, and even amplify them, if that is possible. God help us from falling into the hands of the government!