In New York, a Turf War in the Battle Against Terrorism

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 22, 2008; A01

NEW YORK -- Not long after Sept. 11, 2001, as New York City began to build a counterterrorism effort to rival those of most nations, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly decided to put an end to the department's reliance on the FBI for classified data coming in from Washington.

Kelly, who was working to protect the city against another attack, wanted his own access to the stream of threat reporting concerning New York. The solution was to install a classified-information vault, like the FBI's, at the headquarters of the New York City Police Department.

Kelly made the request in the spring of 2002 and waited six years for an answer. After questions from The Washington Post for this story, the FBI said it has decided to approve the vault, a specially designed, guarded room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.

No other police department in the United States has responded to the threats of terrorism in quite the same way as the NYPD -- or clashed as sharply with the nation's primary counterterrorism agency, the FBI.

A thousand NYPD officers are assigned full time to operations drawing on the traditional missions of the CIA and the FBI. The department's liaison officers have been deployed from Nairobi to Singapore, while its networks of domestic informants stretch across the five boroughs of New York City.

In the past seven years, Kelly and his deputies have formed close working relationships with key intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security. The NYPD has so many native foreign-language speakers that it lends translators to the Pentagon.

But the FBI, protective of turf and disdainful of local initiative, froze Kelly's department out of two New York-related terrorism investigations, officials say. When more than 100 top police detectives joined the FBI's joint terrorism task force, they were initially not permitted to read the bureau's case files.

"People have information, and they want to control information," Kelly said in an interview at police headquarters, just five blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood. "Controlling information is power, and they don't want to let it go -- it is as fundamental as that."

Working largely on its own, the NYPD has transformed an unmarked Brooklyn warehouse into a counterterrorism center with a national and global reach. In a second facility in Manhattan, the department runs undercover operations, recruits spies and houses intelligence analysts.

Inside police headquarters is a high-tech situation room where rows of computer monitors give off a moody blue light and floor-to-ceiling television screens beam images from around the world. It is staffed 24 hours a day with officers tracking local and international threats, as well as the movements of as many as a dozen NYPD detectives on foreign assignments.

During a recent interview there, Kelly and David Cohen, the deputy commissioner for intelligence, were interrupted by a liaison officer calling from the scene of a suicide bombing in Israel to report on a new technique employed by the bomber.

Successes include the arrest in 2004 of two Muslim men on charges of plotting to blow up a subway station near the Republican National Convention, and the arrest and deportation in 2003 of two Iranian men who were filming a subway track in Queens, Cohen said. The former probe, in which one of the men pleaded guilty and the other received a 30-year prison term, was based on a year of undercover work by one of Cohen's top detectives.

"Local law enforcement is best placed to gather ground-level intelligence," said Roger Cressey, the principal deputy to the counterterrorism chief at the National Security Council from 1999 to November 2001. "Only when you combine that with what you are getting at the federal level will you create a holistic picture of the threat. NYPD has done that and is a model for other major metropolitan cities to follow."

For Kelly, the vast and pricey operation fulfills a pledge to protect the city and provide its 8 million residents with a sense of security. Kelly, a former Marine and a Customs Service chief in the Clinton administration, is serving his second stint as commissioner and often chides himself and the city for not being more aggressive after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

He said he is not prepared to rely entirely on others for the city's protection. "We just see ourselves very much at risk here, the top of the target list," he said.
Shut Out of Local Cases

In March 2003, working from information gleaned by the CIA, NYPD detectives and FBI agents investigated and then arrested a Pakistani national named Uzair Paracha. Investigators said Paracha had been working with several senior al-Qaeda suspects, including Majid Khan -- whose family lives in the Baltimore area -- on plots that included blowing up gas stations on the East Coast.

The detectives and agents learned enough to tip off the CIA to the whereabouts of Paracha's father, a businessman and alleged al-Qaeda financier who investigators said had met with Osama bin Laden. Four months after the younger Paracha's arrest, the CIA picked up Saifullah Paracha in Thailand and then secretly rendered him to a CIA prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

NYPD detectives had previously been to Bagram, with Pentagon permission, to interview detainees connected to New York. But the Paracha case was treated differently. For the first time, the FBI blocked detectives from joining a bureau interrogator who was traveling to Bagram to interview the elder Paracha.

The FBI agent in charge in New York, Joe Billy, said the interrogator would brief detectives on her discoveries, but she went on extended leave after her return, according to a former NYPD official. As a result, whatever detail was extracted about the Paracha family's contacts or intentions in New York went unreported to the police, the official said.

"We wanted to send our lead detective on the case to Bagram with the FBI agent to talk to Paracha," said James Waters, a deputy commissioner and the senior ranking NYPD officer in the joint task force. But "the FBI just didn't want the NYPD there."

The ban on NYPD visits to Bagram, where hundreds of prisoners were detained by the CIA and the U.S. military, lasted two years and outraged New York detectives working on the task force, two officials recalled in interviews. By the time access was restored, Paracha had been moved to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. New York detectives interviewed him there, years after his arrest.

FBI spokesman John Miller said: "There were a number of issues and agencies involved in the Paracha case. We worked through it, and we're all fine now."

Just as the Paracha investigation was getting underway, FBI agents in Ohio were secretly questioning a Kashmiri-born truck driver named Iyman Faris. On orders from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the orchestrator of al-Qaeda's attacks against the United States, Faris plotted to help bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, prosecutors later alleged.

After two scouting trips, Faris reported back to Mohammed that security in New York was too tight to carry out the attack, prosecutors said in court documents. In May 2003, two months after Faris was secretly detained, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft held a news conference to announce his indictment for allegedly planning an al-Qaeda attack in New York.

The NYPD was stunned -- the department had not been told about the plot or Faris's visits to New York. Although Faris was cooperating with federal agents in Ohio, the FBI in New York was not following up on his contacts in the city, where he stayed during his visits and where he might have tried to buy explosives.

For months afterward, top NYPD officials -- Michael Sheehan, an ex-Army Ranger who had served as the State Department's top counterterrorism official, and Cohen, a former deputy director of the CIA -- sought access to Faris so detectives could question him about his trips. They also wanted Faris's computer, phone and address book. They were turned away.

The Justice Department moved swiftly against Faris, and he was sentenced just six months after his arrest. By the time the NYPD finally questioned him, he was serving a 20-year sentence, claiming that his guilty plea had been an error and refusing to cooperate. "We'll never even know what we missed, what leads we might have pulled," said a senior NYPD official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid creating tensions with FBI colleagues.

Asked for comment, FBI spokesman Miller said: "We realigned the way headquarters communicates with the field offices on terrorism matters, and it's unlikely that glitch could occur today."
NYPD's Global Reach

On a whiteboard in Cohen's office at One Police Plaza is a list of locations that currently trouble him. None of them are in the United States, and few of them are noted publicly by intelligence officials or counterterrorism experts in Washington.

Working with detectives posted overseas, undercover officers in New York and informants, Cohen has identified towns in South Africa, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco that he wants NYPD officers to know. If they arrest anyone who has been to those towns, he wants to be told.

Cohen, the only person to have led the CIA's clandestine service and its analytical division, still drinks coffee out of a CIA mug. He said his work with the NYPD has given him a sense of professional freedom and accomplishment that is hard to achieve in the bureaucratized intelligence world of Washington.

A fifth of Cohen's staff was born overseas. He has 70 Arabic speakers working on counterterrorism cases, and lends some to the Defense Department and foreign intelligence agencies.

The NYPD's foreign contacts provoked early FBI complaints, particularly when the department embedded homicide detectives with Britain's Scotland Yard, Israel's Shin Bet and other overseas security services.

"The FBI had essentially a monopoly on counterterrorism work nationally, and all of a sudden this local police department shows up and is beginning to send persons around the world, is developing a system of listening posts and trip wires, and to use the most benign word I can find, they were miffed," Cohen said.

But, recently, officials in the FBI and the NYPD said the bitterness that plagued their first years after the 2001 attacks has faded. The NYPD has successfully obtained $100 million in federal funds for its counterterrorism effort.

Both departments credit the improvement to a pivotal meeting, 2 1/2 years ago, between Kelly and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that coincided with a change in the FBI's top staff in New York.

Mark Mershan, the FBI's assistant director in charge of New York, said he and Mueller discussed whether the NYPD's practice of posting detectives overseas was harming the bureau, and decided it was not.

Mershan said senior officials at the FBI opposed giving the NYPD its own Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) because it would have allowed the department to "bypass the FBI and establish its own links with the intelligence community. Clearly that has happened anyway, so I have called David Cohen and told him that we will be pleased to certify the SCIF."

Mershan emphasized that the FBI's task force has become highly cooperative in the past several years. Last month, he signed travel orders for a bureau agent and an NYPD detective to go to the Horn of Africa to investigate a new lead in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings. "They are going together, as partners," he said.

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

C.I.A. Secretly Held Qaeda Suspect, Officials Say

By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency secretly detained a suspected member of Al Qaeda for at least six months beginning last summer as part of a program in which C.I.A. officers have been authorized by President Bush to use harsh interrogation techniques, American officials said Friday.

The suspect, Muhammad Rahim, is the first Qaeda prisoner in nearly a year who intelligence officials have acknowledged has been in C.I.A. detention. The C.I.A. emptied its secret prisons in the fall of 2006, when it moved 14 prisoners to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but made clear that the facilities could be used in the future to house high-level terrorism suspects.

Mr. Bush has defended the use of the secret prisons as a vital tool in American counterterrorism efforts, and last July he signed an executive order that formally reiterated the C.I.A.’s authority to use interrogation techniques more coercive than those permitted by the Pentagon.

Mr. Bush used his veto power last weekend to block legislation that would have prohibited the agency from using the techniques, and this week the House of Representatives failed to override the veto.

Military and intelligence officials said that Mr. Rahim was transferred earlier this week to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay. In a message to agency employees on Friday, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said Mr. Rahim had been put into the C.I.A. program because of “his past and the continuing threat he presented to American interests.”

Intelligence officials would not say whether the C.I.A. had used any of what it calls an approved list of “enhanced” interrogation techniques against Mr. Rahim during his months in secret detention.

“This detention, like others, was conducted in accordance with U.S. law,” said Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman. He declined to say whether the C.I.A. currently had custody of any other prisoners.

Government officials described Mr. Rahim, an Afghan who has fought battles for two decades, as a Qaeda planner and facilitator who at times in recent years had been a translator for Osama bin Laden.

They said he was captured and detained by local forces last summer in a country they would not name before being transferred to C.I.A. custody. Pakistani newspapers reported last summer that Pakistani operatives arrested Mr. Rahim in Lahore in August.

Before Mr. Rahim, the last prisoner the C.I.A. acknowledged it had detained was Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, an Iraqi Kurd held by the agency for six months before being transferred to Guantánamo last April.

In his message to C.I.A. employees on Friday, General Hayden called Mr. Rahim a “tough, seasoned jihadist” with “high-level contacts” who at times had served as a personal translator for Mr. bin Laden. The message said that in 2001, Mr. Rahim helped prepare the Afghan cave complex of Tora Bora as a hideout for Qaeda fighters fleeing the American-led offensive.

According to an American counterterrorism official, Mr. Rahim is in his 40s and is a native of Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan, a rugged mountain territory that has long been a hive of jihadi activity.

The counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that Mr. Rahim had attended radical madrasas, or religious schools, in Pakistan.

The Bush administration last month formally charged six Qaeda operatives said to have been involved in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. Five of the six detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the attacks, had been in C.I.A. custody until September 2006, when they were among the 14 prisoners moved to Guantánamo.

Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty against the six men, government officials have said. During a speech on Friday in London, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said he hoped that the six men would not receive the death penalty. If they were to be executed, he said, “they would see themselves as martyrs.”

Also on Friday, a lawyer representing Majid Khan, who had spent more than three years in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons, briefed Senate Intelligence Committee staff members on her client’s description of his treatment there as torture. The lawyer, Gitanjali Gutierrez of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is the first lawyer to speak to Congress after meeting with a prisoner who was in the C.I.A. program.

The 90-minute meeting was closed, and Ms. Gutierrez said that she could not reveal what Mr. Khan had said about his treatment because the government declared prisoners’ statements to be classified.

Ms. Gutierrez said her testimony was aimed at giving Congress independent information on the C.I.A. program, which she said “is operating criminally, shamefully and dangerously.” C.I.A. officials say all of the agency’s interrogation techniques were lawful at the time they were used.

Scott Shane contributed reporting.

Pentagon Cites Tapes Showing Interrogations

By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department is conducting an extensive review of the videotaping of interrogations at military facilities from Iraq to Guantánamo Bay, and so far it has identified nearly 50 tapes, including one that showed what a military spokesman described as the forcible gagging of a terrorism suspect.

The Pentagon review was begun in late January after the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged that it had destroyed its own videotapes of harsh interrogations conducted by C.I.A. officers, an action that is now the subject of criminal and Congressional investigations.

The review was intended in part to establish clearer rules for any videotaping of interrogations, Defense officials said. But they acknowledged that it had been complicated by inconsistent taping practices in the past, as well as uncertain policies for when tapes could be destroyed or must be preserved.

The officials said it appeared that only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of interrogations worldwide since 2001 had been recorded.

The officials said the nearly 50 tapes they identified documented interrogations of two terrorism suspects, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri, and were made at a Navy detention site in Charleston, S.C., where the two men have been held.

The initial findings of the Pentagon review represent the first official acknowledgment that military interrogators had videotaped some sessions with detainees and could widen the controversy over the treatment of prisoners in American custody. A Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell, cautioned that the review was incomplete, and a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Don Black, said that interrogation videotapes had been routinely destroyed if they were judged to have no continuing value.

The only tape the officials described is of Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was arrested in December 2001 while in college in Illinois and moved five years ago to the jail after being designated an “enemy combatant.” Government officials say they believe he was an operative for Al Qaeda who was plotting attacks.

Two government officials said that the tape showed Mr. Marri being manhandled by his interrogators, but did not show waterboarding or any other treatment approaching what they believed could be classified as torture. According to one Defense Department official, the interrogators dispensing the rough treatment on the tape were F.B.I. agents.

An F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment, citing a continuing review of detention practices that is being carried out by the Department of Justice’s inspector general.

Mr. Black, the spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said its director, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, had reviewed the tape and was satisfied that Mr. Marri’s treatment was acceptable.

He said that Mr. Marri was chanting loudly, disrupting his interrogation, and that interrogators used force to put duct tape on his mouth, while Mr. Marri resisted. Mr. Black said most of the videos showing Mr. Marri’s interrogations had been destroyed. The government has never charged Mr. Marri, but because of his designation as an enemy combatant, the Pentagon is allowed to hold him indefinitely.

The scale of detention and interrogation by the military, with tens of thousands of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, dwarfs that of the C.I.A., which has held fewer than 100 high-level Qaeda suspects. The C.I.A. has acknowledged videotaping only two terrorism suspects, in 2002, and military officials said that the review, ordered in late January by James R. Clapper, the Pentagon’s senior intelligence official, had similarly found that only a small number of detainee interrogations had been videotaped.

“This is not a widespread practice,” said Mr. Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. He said that it was up to individual military commanders whether to tape interrogations and that the videotapes were often used as the basis of written intelligence reports. In addition to the existing interrogation videotapes, there are existing recordings that show interactions between military guards and terrorism suspects, including detainees’ forcible removal from cells at Guantánamo, military officials said.

Images of rough treatment of detainees is a delicate subject for the Pentagon. Soldiers’ snapshots of the abusive treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq set off a firestorm and led to prison terms for a number of military personnel.

Congress imposed a ban in 2005 on all harsh interrogation methods by the military but left a loophole for the C.I.A. Last month, Congress voted to extend the ban to the C.I.A., but President Bush vetoed the bill.

The C.I.A. acknowledged in December that in 2005 it had destroyed the only interrogation videotapes that its officers had made; the tapes showed two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al- Rahim al-Nashiri.

Lawyers for Mr. Marri, who have challenged his imprisonment in court, sought access to any tapes or other records of his interrogations, but in 2006 a federal judge in South Carolina said the government did not have to produce any tapes. That decision is being appealed.

Jonathan Hafetz, one of the lawyers, said Mr. Marri had heard guards describe “a cabinet full of tapes” showing his interrogations, but had never had independent confirmation that such tapes existed. Mr. Marri has alleged that earlier in his imprisonment he was deprived of sleep, isolated and exposed to prolonged cold.

Mr. Hafetz said he planned to file papers in court on Thursday describing the psychological harm done to Mr. Marri. “Locking someone up for five years without charges is a disgrace and a betrayal of American and constitutional values,” he said.

The difficulties in the Pentagon’s review can be glimpsed in a seven-page court filing last month by Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, the military commander at Guantánamo Bay.

Admiral Buzby’s report describes an array of digital video recorders used to capture “activities” — it does not specify whether interrogations are included — in at least four subcamps at Guantánamo. But the systems automatically recorded over older material when they reached capacity, he wrote.

In some cases, Admiral Buzby wrote, “We suspect that the recording devices contain recorded data but we are unable technologically to confirm whether data remains.”

Ex-Defense Official Assails Colleagues Over Run-Up to War

By Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 9, 2008; A01

In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.

Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush's policies.

Among the disclosures made by Feith in "War and Decision," scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush's declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that "war is inevitable." The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a "momentous comment."

Although he acknowledges "serious errors" in intelligence, policy and operational plans surrounding the invasion, Feith blames them on others outside the Pentagon and notes that "even the best planning" cannot avoid all problems in wartime. While he says the decision to invade was correct, he judges that the task of creating a viable and stable Iraqi government was poorly executed and remains "grimly incomplete."

Powell, Feith argues, allowed himself to be publicly portrayed as a dove, but while Powell "downplayed" the degree and urgency of Iraq's threat, he never expressed opposition to the invasion. Bremer, meanwhile, is said to have done more harm than good in Iraq. Feith also accuses Franks of being uninterested in postwar planning, and writes that Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser during most of Feith's time in office, failed in her primary task of coordinating policy on the war.

He describes Bush as having wrestled seriously with difficult problems but as being ill-served by subordinates including Powell and Rice. Feith depicts former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with almost complete admiration, questioning only his rough handling of subordinates.

Feith left the administration in mid-2005 and is now on the Georgetown University faculty. He was the subject of an investigation early last year by the Pentagon's inspector general for his office's secret prewar intelligence assessments outlining strong ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. His reports, deemed "inconsistent" with those of the intelligence community, were judged "inappropriate" but not illegal.

In his book, Feith defends the intelligence activities on grounds that the CIA was "politicizing" intelligence by ignoring evidence in its own reports of ties between Hussein and international terrorists.

A copy of the nearly 900-page manuscript -- midway through the editing process -- was obtained by The Washington Post. Reached at his home yesterday evening, Feith declined to discuss its contents.

Despite its bulk, the book does not address some of the basic facts of the war, such as the widespread skepticism inside the top of the U.S. military about invading Iraq, with some generals arguing that doing so would distract attention from the war against global terrorists. Nor does Feith touch on the assertion of his fellow war architect, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, that Iraq would be able to pay for its reconstruction with oil revenue.

Feith says surprisingly little new about the conduct of the war on the ground, instead focusing on the policy battles in Washington and asserting that most accounts thus far have been written from the point of view of the State Department and the CIA. He attacks those criticisms as "fear-mongering" that serves the interests of certain officials and journalists.

Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, are described as repeatedly working behind the scenes to undercut sound proposals by Feith and other Pentagon officials and to undermine decisions Bush had made. Feith criticizes Powell's failure to persuade France and Germany to support U.S. war policy at the United Nations, and to gain Turkey's approval for U.S. troop movements in its territory, as failures of effort and commitment. Feith also asks what would have happened if Powell had argued with Bush against overthrowing Hussein. Powell might have persuaded the president, Feith writes, or, if not, could have resigned.

Feith's disdain for Armitage, with whom he sparred at NSC deputies meetings, is palpable. Powell's deputy, he says, "reflexively opposed any idea originating at the Pentagon."

In an introduction to the manuscript, Feith writes that he has tried to avoid polemic and seeks only to contribute to the historical record. He argues, as have other Iraq hawks such as Richard Perle -- a former Reagan administration Pentagon official and outside Rumsfeld adviser -- that the administration's careful approach to Iraq, including a swift transition to Iraqi control, was prevented from succeeding by ill-informed or disloyal subordinates.

The idea to which Feith appears most attached, and to which he repeatedly returns in the book, is the formation of an Iraqi Interim Authority. Feith's office drew up a plan for the body -- to be made up of U.S.-appointed Iraqis who would share some decision-making with U.S. occupation forces -- in the months before the invasion. But while he says that Bush approved it, he charges that Bremer refused to implement it.

The key mistake that the United States made in Iraq, Feith asserts, was "the mishandling of the political transition." The good that Bremer did, he concludes, "was outweighed by the harm caused by the fact of occupation."

In an interview yesterday, Bremer disputed Feith's narrative, saying he believes that Bush gave up on the idea of a quick transition shortly after Baghdad fell and widespread looting broke out in April 2003.

"By the time I sat down with the president on May 3, it was clear that he wasn't thinking about a short occupation," Bremer said. After consulting his records, Bremer also said that at a White House meeting on May 8, Vice President Cheney said, "We are not yet at the point where people we want to emerge can yet emerge." He said that Feith omits that comment. On May 22, he added, the president wrote to him, saying that he knew "our work will take time."

Others have criticized Feith's plan as relying too heavily on Iraqi exile politicians, including Ahmed Chalabi. Feith says that he considered Chalabi one of the most astute and democratically minded Iraqis but that he had no special brief for him. Instead, he charges that the State Department, the CIA and the military's Central Command were pathologically opposed to the exiles and to Chalabi in particular.

Feith continually denounces the CIA, accusing it of producing poor intelligence, intruding on the formulation of policy, and then using leaks to the media to defend itself and attack its bureaucratic opponents. Most notably, he charges that intelligence officials ignored and refused to investigate possible links between al-Qaeda and Hussein's government.

He reports, as others have, that Franks, who commanded the U.S. invasion force, treated him disrespectfully, sometimes rolling his eyes when Feith asked a question. But he indicates that Franks's disregard grew partly out of the general's lack of interest in planning for the postwar period. When Feith tried to talk to him about one aspect of that, Franks walked around the table, leaned over and said, "Doug, I don't have time for this [expletive]." He concludes that Franks failed in part because of advice he received from his advisers at the CIA and the State Department.

In contrast with the reputation of Gen. Richard B. Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for pliability, Feith reports that Myers grew irate at what he saw as administration attempts to get around the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners following the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Myers, he writes, threatened to bypass Rumsfeld and take his concerns directly to Bush, but calmed down after being told that the administration would distinguish between legitimate prisoners of war and al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.

In summarizing his view of what went wrong in Iraq, Feith writes that it was a mistake for the administration to rely so heavily on intelligence reports of Hussein's alleged stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear weapons program, not only because they turned out to be wrong but also because secret information was not necessary to understand the threat Hussein posed.

Hussein's history of aggression and disregard of U.N. resolutions, his past use of weapons of mass destruction and the fact that he was "a bloodthirsty megalomaniac" were enough, Feith maintains.

He blames both the CIA and Powell, who outlined the weapons case in a February 2003 speech at the United Nations, for overemphasizing the threat. But Feith appears to ignore the crucial role that statements from Cheney and Rice, about the imminence of "mushroom clouds" emanating from Iraqi nuclear weapons, played in the case the administration made for war.

The Unstudied Art of Interrogation

By SCOTT SHANE

Washington

HOW do you get a terrorist to talk? Despite the questioning of tens of thousands of captives in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years, and a high-decibel political battle over torture, experts say there has been little serious research to answer that crucial question.

The Bush administration has yet to fill the void, instead getting enmeshed in a defense of waterboarding — which the Central Intelligence Agency says it has not used in five years but which critics have seized on as a powerful symbol of how not to conduct war. And Congress, for its part, has skipped over the question in passing a bill (knowing that it would be vetoed by President Bush) that bans harsh interrogations but requires the C.I.A. to use only the tactics listed in the Army’s playbook.

Certainly the debate is rich in emotion, with each side claiming the moral heights: You approve torture! You’re coddling terrorists! But the arguments have been scant on science to back them up.

“We don’t have any idea — other than anecdote or moral philosophy — what really works,” said Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, author of “Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror,” set to be published in June.

There is the Army Field Manual 2-22.3, officially titled “Human Intelligence Collector Operations.” It eschews coercion and instead offers general advice on behavior (“People tend to want to talk when they are under stress and respond to kindness and understanding during trying circumstances”). It offers 19 approaches to interrogation that Congress wants the C.I.A. to stick to, including Mutt and Jeff, or good cop, bad cop; We Know All, in which the interrogator pretends merely to be confirming details of a story he knows already; Rapid-Fire Questioning, to produce contradictions that can then be challenged; Ego Up, in which flattery produces a bond; and False Flag, in which an American interrogator poses as one from another nation. The principles are familiar to anyone who’s watched enough police procedurals.

But the manual’s inherited wisdom has not been updated to reflect decades of corporate analysis of how to influence consumers. Behavioral economists have dissected decisionmaking, and academic psychologists have studied political persuasion, but their lessons have not informed the interrogator’s art either. Nor has there been a systematic effort to analyze the successes and blunders of the interrogations carried out since the attacks of 2001.

Steven M. Kleinman, a colonel in the Air Force reserve and a veteran interrogator in Iraq and elsewhere, says the government spends billions on spy satellites but almost nothing on studying interrogation. This is true, he said, despite a broad consensus that interrogation might be the best source of information on an elusive, low-tech, stateless foe like Al Qaeda.

“We need to bring scientific standards for interrogation to the same level of sophistication that we bring to satellite imagery and intercepting communications,” said Mr. Kleinman, who has studied the American interrogation programs used for high-level German and Japanese prisoners during World War II, which he judges superior to those developed since 2001.

Both Mr. Wittes and Mr. Kleinman occupy a middle ground of sorts in the standoff between Congress and the White House. They are outspoken opponents of the harshest methods used by the C.I.A. in 2002 and 2003. But they also argue that the Congressional bill imposing the Army’s methods would make bad policy in the long run by stifling creativity and deterring serious study of a critical subject.

Mr. Kleinman said he envisioned a new intelligence agency or subagency devoted solely to interrogation — sponsoring research, conducting training and building a team of sophisticated interrogators with linguistic and psychological skills. He speaks of creating a high-level interrogation center in the United States where settings could be customized for a particular suspect, Hollywood-style, “whether it’s a Bedouin tent or a suite at the Waldorf.”

“The overriding principle should be: Make it as easy as possible for someone to cooperate with you,” he said. “If we want someone to re-create in minute detail something that happened three years ago, how can we help them remember?”

Mr. Kleinman said such a center would be wired for video and audio recording, in part to assure that interrogators follow the rules but also to let analysts with various kinds of expertise return to the suspect’s exact words and body language.

In a quiet effort to shift public talk from the past (waterboarding) to the future, a panel of experts, named by the Intelligence Science Board, which advises the intelligence agencies, has been pressing the administration to begin research on identifying the most effective, humane ways of questioning terrorist suspects. Robert A. Fein, a Harvard psychologist who heads the group, made such a presentation to 70 officials at the White House in January. According to people who have heard his talks, Dr. Fein, who declined to comment for this article, is concerned that even the word “interrogation” is tainted by torture. He uses the term “intelligence interviewing” for the skills he promotes.

All the talk of comfortable conditions, helping terrorists remember and preserving sessions on videotape stands in almost comic contrast to the C.I.A.’s approach in 2002, which resorted to exposure to heat and cold, bombardment with noise, sleep deprivation and waterboarding.

A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the agency’s methods “have proven to be very effective, producing information that has led to the capture of terrorists and the disruption of their operations.” All the methods were lawful, he said, noting that the program “has evolved over time.”

The argument against the use of pain or physical torture is practical as well as moral. From the Spanish Inquisition to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, brutal interrogations have been used to force confessions, often without regard to truth.

The government stopped sponsoring interrogation research in the 1970s, after Congressional investigators uncovered gruesome accounts of “mind control” experiments with drugs like LSD. In the polarized atmosphere of the waterboarding debate, it remains to be seen whether Congress or the public will endorse a carefully regulated program to find new ways of persuading people to give up their secrets.

GAO Seeks Review of Spy Agencies

The Outgoing Chief Auditor Makes a Pitch on Capitol Hill

By Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 7, 2008; A15

As he leaves his post as the nation's top auditor, David M. Walker is again asking Congress to give the Government Accountability Office the power to review the finances of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Walker, whose 10-year term as comptroller general concludes Wednesday, is supporting legislation that would give the GAO access to the last major area of the federal government not subject to its audits and investigations.

With some support on Capitol Hill, Walker said he is fighting powerful legislative patrons of intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, who have resisted examinations of how taxpayer dollars are spent.

"Everybody's for accountability in Washington until they're the ones subjected to it," Walker said in an interview. "There are a lot of forces that are vested in the status quo."

The GAO, Congress's investigative arm, has the power to review the finances and management of most government agencies. But the Justice Department issued a ruling in the early 1990s that restricted oversight of the CIA to House and Senate select committees on intelligence.

That authority has been a sensitive topic since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when information sharing between the CIA and law enforcement agencies that might have revealed the plot was bungled. More recently, the corruption scandal involving former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), who used his influence to steer intelligence contracts in return for bribes, has added to calls for more oversight.

Prompted by recommendations from the 9/11 Commission, the House and Senate in 2004 reorganized the way their committees oversee intelligence and homeland security issues. But the lawmakers have never pushed to allow the GAO to examine CIA spending. They have questioned whether the GAO is too closely aligned with the congressional majority and whether its investigators have the proper clearances to handle classified intelligence matters.

"You can't just sort of wander in and do this stuff like you're investigating FAA weather stations," said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee. Rockefeller called GAO investigations of the intelligence world a "rather bad idea" and suggested his committee should have more oversight authority, including the power to appropriate funds to intelligence agencies.

"The GAO does precisely what the majority [in Congress] asks them to do. It follows what the majority asks," said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chaired the intelligence committee before Rockefeller. "I don't want any further politicization of intelligence."

Walker, however, said he is not asking to look into the "sources and methods" used by spy agencies. Instead, he wants the GAO to look into "basic management transformation challenges" such as how the CIA recruits and retains top talent and, more important, how the agency has allocated its multibillion-dollar budget.

The GAO is already empowered to examine the finances of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and it has highlighted many examples of waste, fraud and abuse. Walker said. "I have little doubt that those challenges exist within the intelligence community," he said.

The CIA disagrees. Mark Mansfield, a spokesman for the agency, said that in 2007, CIA officers testified at more than 60 hearings on Capitol Hill, gave more than 500 briefings, delivered 100 "congressional notifications about our most sensitive programs" and answered more than 1,200 on-the-record questions posed by members of Congress.

"That's hardly a culture of rejecting oversight. It's a recognition of the importance of it," Mansfield said. He said CIA critics have no basis for alleging that the agency is littered with waste.

Sen. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii), sponsor of the bill that would give the GAO access to the intelligence community, said there is no way to know about problems unless the GAO can wade into CIA finances and management strategies. But in a brief interview, Akaka said he doubts the bill can clear the chamber given the bipartisan questioning it faces.

Horrifying and Unnecessary

In the next few days President Bush is expected to again claim the right to order mistreatment of prisoners that any civilized person would regard as torture.

Mr. Bush is planning to veto a law that would require the C.I.A. and all the intelligence services to abide by the restrictions on holding and interrogating prisoners contained in the United States Army Field Manual. Mr. Bush says the Army rules are too restrictive.

What are these burdens? In addition to a blanket prohibition of torture, the manual specifically bans:

¶ Forcing a prisoner to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner.

¶ Placing hoods or sacks over the head of a prisoner, and using duct tape over the eyes.

¶ Applying beatings, electric shocks, burns or other forms of physical pain.

¶ Waterboarding.

¶ Using military working dogs.

¶ Inducing hypothermia or heat injury.

¶ Conducting mock executions.

¶ Depriving a prisoner of necessary food, water or medical care.

Such practices have long been prohibited by American laws and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents. Mr. Bush, however, declared that he was unbound by the laws of civilization in responding to the barbarism of Sept. 11, 2001. And reports soon surfaced about the abuse of prisoners at detention centers in Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons.

Finally, in 2006, a compliant, Republican-controlled Congress outlawed the kinds of abuse and torture that Mr. Bush’s lawyers had turned into government policy. Unfortunately, Congress applied the prohibitions only to the military, and Mr. Bush immediately made clear that he would issue whatever orders he wanted to the intelligence agencies. In response, Congress approved an amendment to the intelligence budget bill this year that binds those agencies to the same rules as the military.

Opponents of Mr. Bush’s policies on prisoners have long argued that it is immoral, dangerous and counterproductive to abuse and torture prisoners. We do not hold out much hope that the president will heed our last, urgent plea not to veto this bill.

We urge him to read the Army Field Manual, which says: “Use of torture by U.S. personnel would bring discredit upon the U.S. and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort. It could also place U.S. and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse.”

He could listen to 43 retired generals or a bipartisan coalition of 18 former members of Congress, secretaries of state and national security officials who all supported the anti-torture amendment.

He could check the testimony of Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who told Congress last week that waterboarding violated the Geneva Conventions.

Or he could read the letter that Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, wrote to his troops.

“Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy,” General Petraeus wrote. “They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.”

U.S. Plan Widens Role in Training Pakistani Forces

By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — The United States military is developing a plan to send about 100 American trainers to work with a Pakistani paramilitary force that is the vanguard in the fight against Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Pakistan’s restive tribal areas, American military officials said.

Pakistan has ruled out allowing American combat troops to fight Qaeda and Taliban militants in the tribal areas. But Pakistani leaders have privately indicated that they would welcome additional American trainers to help teach new skills to Pakistani soldiers whose army was tailored not for counterinsurgency but to fight a conventional land war against India.

Even though the training program would unfold over several months, it is being disclosed at a time of heightened operations in the unruly tribal areas along the Afghan border. At least eight people suspected of being Islamic militants were killed Thursday in a triple missile attack on a house used for training in the tribal areas.

For several years, small teams of American Special Operations forces have trained their Pakistani counterparts in counterinsurgency tactics. But the 40-page classified plan now under review at the United States Central Command to help train the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force of about 85,000 members recruited from ethnic groups on the border, would significantly increase the size and scope of the American training role in the country.

United States trainers initially would be restricted to training compounds, but with Pakistani consent could eventually accompany Pakistani troops on missions “to the point of contact” with militants, as American trainers now do with Iraqi troops in Iraq, a senior American military official said. Britain is also considering a similar training mission in Pakistan, officials said. A spokesman at the British Embassy here declined to comment.

“The U.S. is bringing in a small number of trainers to assist Pakistan in their efforts to improve training of the Frontier Corps,” Elizabeth O. Colton, a spokeswoman for the United States Embassy in Islamabad, said in an e-mail message. “The U.S. trainers will be primarily focused on assisting the Pakistan cadre who will do the actual training of the Frontier Corps troops.”

Ms. Colton declined to specify how many American trainers would participate or where their bases would be. But Defense Department officials said that the number of American trainers could grow to about 100. Along with intensified missile strikes in Pakistan against suspected militants, the increased training program is another sign of the Bush administration’s growing concern and frustration with Pakistan’s failure to do more about Al Qaeda’s movements in the tribal areas.

The proposed expanded training program is modest compared with the training efforts under way in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is said to offer scant likelihood of blossoming into a much larger American combat presence. American officials are also acutely aware of Pakistani sensitivities to any United States military presence in the country, even trainers, and spoke largely on the basis of anonymity because of the diplomatic concerns and because the plan had not been formally approved.

Until now, American officials have worked closely with President Pervez Musharraf on counterterrorism policies, including training programs. The landslide victory by Pakistan’s opposition parties in last month’s parliamentary elections adds a degree of complication and confusion to any long-term military planning of this sort because it is unclear to what extent new leaders, like Asif Ali Zardari, the head of the victorious Pakistan Peoples Party and the widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, will embrace those policies.

American officials are also taking a number of other steps to help increase Pakistan’s long-term ability to battle a newly resurgent Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in the tribal areas.

At the request of Pakistan’s new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Central Command two weeks ago sent a four-member intelligence team, led by a lieutenant colonel, to work closely with Pakistani intelligence officers in Islamabad. The Americans are helping with techniques on sharing satellite imagery and addressing Pakistani requests to buy equipment used to intercept the militants’ communications, a senior American officer said.

The United States is also helping to establish border coordination centers in Afghanistan just across the Pakistan border, where Afghan, Pakistani and American officials can share intelligence about Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups in and around the tribal areas.

The Pentagon has spent about $25 million so far to equip the Frontier Corps with new body armor, vehicles, radios and surveillance equipment, and plans to spend $75 million more in the next year. Over all, a senior Bush administration official said, the United States could spend more than $400 million in the next several years to enhance the Frontier Corps, including building a training base near Peshawar.

The training proposal now under review at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., which oversees military operations in the Middle East and much of South Asia, is subject to the approval of the commander, Adm. William J. Fallon, and top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Admiral Fallon said in an interview at his headquarters last week that additional trainers would be part of “a comprehensive approach” to address Pakistan’s security needs. “They want to do as much of this as they can themselves,” Admiral Fallon said.

Pakistani officials said they were aware of the Pentagon’s general offer for more trainers, but were not familiar with the details of the Central Command plan.

That document, titled “Plan for Training the Frontier Corps,” envisions a combination of Special Forces and regular Army troops working with the Frontier Corps in basic marksmanship, infantry skills and counterinsurgency techniques, Defense Department officials said.

Until recently, the Frontier Corps had not received American military financing because the corps technically falls under the Pakistani Interior Ministry, a nonmilitary agency that the Pentagon ordinarily does not deal with. But American and Pakistani officials say the Frontier Corps is drawn from Pashtun tribesmen, who know the language and culture of the tribal areas, and in the long term is the most suitable force to combat an insurgency there.

American and Pakistani officials acknowledge that it will take several years to build the Frontier Corps into an effective counterinsurgency. American officials say they have seen some Frontier Corps members wearing sandals on patrol and wielding barely functional Kalashnikov rifles with little ammunition.

The need for the training is evident. In January, hundreds of Islamic militants attacked a paramilitary fort in the restive South Waziristan tribal region in northwest Pakistan, killing 22 soldiers and taking several others hostage. A Pentagon official said the fort was overrun in part because the commander had failed to range his artillery properly before the attack.

“Pakistani military operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas have had limited effect on Al Qaeda,” Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. “Pakistan recognizes the threat and realizes the need to develop more effective counterinsurgency and counterterrorism capabilities to complement their conventional forces.”

Robert L. Grenier, a former director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, told a panel of the Council on Foreign Relations last week that any high-profile American military presence in the tribal areas or the neighboring North-West Frontier Province would be “the kiss of death.”

But Pakistan, he said, would welcome small numbers of trainers who kept a low profile, and were not involved in combat operations. “To an increasing degree as they see that it doesn’t cause the sky to fall, they will be willing to accept low-level support from the Americans, particularly in the form of training,” said Mr. Grenier, a former C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad.

Mr. Grenier added that the role American trainers played would rest largely with General Kayani, the new army chief. “He’s a very conservative, very cautious fellow,” Mr. Grenier said. “He will want to make his own decisions as to what is sustainable and what is not in the way of U.S. support.”

Romania Base Suspected CIA Prisoner Site

MIHAIL KOGALNICEANU AIR BASE, Romania (AP) — It always happened at 1 a.m. In a secluded corner of this heavily guarded airfield, two snipers would creep across a rooftop and take their positions. Moments later, just below, a black minibus would arrive and wait.

Three times in 2004, and twice more in 2005, a jet landed and the black bus drove out to meet it. Large, mysterious parcels were exchanged that, according to a Romanian official who says he witnessed it, looked like bundled-up terror suspects.

The official, a high-ranking veteran with inside knowledge of operations at the base, said the planes then left for North Africa with their cargo and two CIA handlers aboard.

His descriptions, told on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press, add to suspicions surrounding Romania's involvement in "extraordinary rendition" — the beyond-the-law transfer of U.S. terror suspects from country to country by the CIA. Human rights advocates say renditions were the agency's way to outsource torture of prisoners to countries where it is permitted practice.

Romania's precise role is a little-reported part of the system that is being slowly revealed, often to the chagrin of U.S. allies. In an embarrassing reversal after years of denial, Britain admitted Thursday that its military outpost on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia had twice been used as a refueling stop for the secret transport of terrorism suspects.

The European Commission on Friday accused Poland and Romania of dodging its requests to clarify their involvement. Both countries deny accusations of wrongdoing, including a report by Dick Marty, a Swiss official working for the Council of Europe, the continent's top human rights watchdog, who accused the CIA of running secret prisons in the two countries.

Prisoners typically were shackled and kept naked and in isolation, he alleged, in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. Such treatment also would run contrary to Romania's own laws and its commitment to human rights, a key condition to the Balkan nation's 2007 accession to the European Union.

According to the Romanian official:

_ U.S. pilots routinely filed bogus flight plans — or none at all — and headed to undeclared destinations.

_ C-130 Hercules cargo planes and other U.S. military aircraft arriving from Iraq regularly parked in a restricted area just off the runway, where they feigned technical trouble and sat under guard for days at a time — awaiting repairs that never occurred.

_ Three buildings on the military portion of the air base were strictly off-limits to Romanians but were frequented and controlled by the Americans.

"It was all set up and simulated to look like normal activity. But believe me, it was very unusual," said the official, who said he needed anonymity to protect himself.

"If you are 50 yards away, you say they are 'parcels,'" he said. "But I think people were on (the plane) and I think they were bundled up." The entire scene was completely out of character with normal aircraft arrivals or standard cargo protocol, he said.

But top Romanian authorities deny the CIA ran so-called "black sites" on their territory. While the official described a pattern of highly unusual flight maneuvers and covert American activities, he says he never saw a prisoner.

Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, former presidential security adviser Ioan Talpes said in an interview with the AP, had an arrangement with the CIA that gave the agency the right to use the base as needed.

"There were official arrangements of a secret and confidential nature which gave CIA planes the right to land at Romanian airports," said Talpes, who worked at the time for ex-President Ion Iliescu. "They had actions there that we didn't know about," Talpes said. He said Iliescu signed an agreement guaranteeing that Romania would secure the perimeter and otherwise not interfere.

John Sifton, who conducts independent human rights investigations, said the dates and descriptions of the flights described by the base official match the timing and routes of known CIA rendition flights recorded in Eurocontrol flight databases.

Those included an April 2004 flight from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that went out of its way to stop at Mihail Kogalniceanu before heading on to Casablanca, Morocco.

"It was a time when they were moving people around," Sifton told the AP. The Romania stopovers, he added, "look pretty shady to me."

Marty's report concluded that the CIA secretly held al-Qaida operatives, Taliban leaders and other "high-value detainees" in Romania and Poland between 2002 and 2005.

The report, citing unnamed intelligence officials, said five people either authorized or were aware of the Romania operation: Iliescu, Talpes, former Defense Minister Ioan Mircea Pascu, Sergiu Medar, a former head of military intelligence, and current President Traian Basescu. Detainees were subjected "to interrogation techniques tantamount to torture" and underscored "a permissive attitude on the part of the Romanian authorities."

Basescu's office refused to discuss the allegations. "What business do we have with this?" it replied. Pascu called it "a closed subject," and Medar declined a request to be interviewed.

Beyond the midnight flights and the bus, the base official who spoke with the AP said he had questions about what went on aboard larger aircraft from Iraq that arrived at the base and then parked for several days, supposedly awaiting repairs.

"They misinformed. They lied," he said. "It happened many times and there was nothing anyone could do about it."

President Bush and other administration officials have confirmed the existence of the rendition program but have not named the countries involved. They say the U.S. does not engage in torture.

Romanian officials said the U.S. military has invested about $18 million in Mihail Kogalniceanu Airport, including a $4 million perimeter fence, a new hangar and road improvements. Romania has supported and provided troops for the U.S.-led campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Talpes, the former presidential security adviser, said Romanian authorities did not intrude on the U.S. "respected zone" at Mihail Kogalniceanu, used mostly to ferry troops and supplies to Iraq and Afghanistan — because they did not want to make "an unfriendly gesture."

Pressed about whether prisoners were tortured, he said bluntly: "Even if I knew that one of my allies did something, I wouldn't tell you."

CIA chief spokesman Mark Mansfield said the agency had no comment about the black bus scenario, but he defended renditions as both legal and effective.

"They have disrupted potential attacks by taking terrorists off the streets, and they have allowed us, as well as our foreign partners, to gain invaluable intelligence on the terrorists who remain at large," Mansfield said.

Sen. Norica Nicolai, a former prosecutor who led a parliamentary investigation, said her probe found no evidence that the CIA operated a prison or conducted interrogations in Romania.

Nicolai said she was still waiting for Marty to respond to a September request to divulge his sources. "It's in our interests to try to see what happened. We are not a third-world country," she said.

But Cosmin Gusa, a leading opposition lawmaker, said a full accounting was unlikely. "Nobody wants to go deeper," he said. "They don't want to talk about this. This topic is a deadly one."

Justice Dept. is examining its water-boarding advice

The agency wants to know if its officials misled the CIA, which employed the interrogation technique until 2006.
From the Associated Press

February 23, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has opened an internal investigation into whether its top officials improperly authorized or reviewed the CIA's use of waterboarding when interrogating terror suspects, according to documents released Friday.

The investigation was revealed at the request of Democratic Sens. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. A Justice Department spokesman, however, said the inquiry had been continuing for several years.

Questions about waterboarding are part of a larger Justice probe of the so-called Bybee memo, wrote H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the department's Office of Professional Responsibility, in a Feb. 18 letter to the two senators.

"Among other issues, we are examining whether the legal advice contained in those memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys," Jarrett wrote.

Asked for details, Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said, "This is not a new investigation, but rather has been ongoing for some time."

Waterboarding involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his or her cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years, to the Spanish Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world. Critics call it a form of torture.

The memo at the heart of the internal Justice inquiry was dated Aug. 1, 2002, and written by then-Assistant Atty. Gen. Jay Bybee for then- White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. It defined torture as recognized by U.S. law as covering "only extreme acts" causing pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure.

The Bush administration maintains that waterboarding was legal when it was used by CIA interrogators in 2002 and 2003 on top Al Qaeda detainees Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri. Earlier this month, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said that waterboarding was used in part because of widespread belief among U.S. intelligence officials that more catastrophic attacks were imminent.

The CIA banned its personnel from using waterboarding in 2006. Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey has refused to publicly discuss whether waterboarding is currently legal since it is no longer used by CIA interrogators.

Durbin called the internal Justice inquiry "long overdue" and said the U.S. government had prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime.

"Within the question how America could come to use interrogation techniques of the Inquisition is the question how the Department of Justice could have overlooked its own precedents to authorize waterboarding," added Whitehouse, a former federal prosecutor.

Al Qaeda Threatens; U.S. Frets

By MARK MAZZETTI and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON

IN the Bush administration’s first analysis of what went wrong in the years leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, it quickly arrived at a relatively simple conclusion: The Clinton administration was sleepwalking as Al Qaeda strengthened its safe haven in Afghanistan.

After the attacks on American embassies in Africa and the U.S.S. Cole, the Clinton White House determined that invading a sovereign state to rid it of Osama bin Laden was fraught with too many difficulties. So it relied on pinprick attacks, hoping that covert actions and a cruise-missile attack on a training camp might do the trick. Only after nearly 3,000 Americans had died, did the United States invade.

Now, as a National Intelligence Estimate released last week makes clear, the Bush White House finds itself in a similar predicament. Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself in the wild west tribal areas of Pakistan. It is stronger than at any time in years, and it is actively plotting new attacks.

There is a chance, however, that events in Pakistan in recent weeks have at last presented the opportunity for a serious campaign against Islamic radicals in Pakistan, if it’s not already too late. The breakdown of a cease-fire between elders in the tribal lands of Pakistan and the government of President Pervez Musharraf, combined with the determination that General Musharraf showed earlier this month when he ordered an assault on the Red Mosque complex in Islamabad, may have finally given President Bush something his predecessor never had: a partner who may at long last be persuaded to go after an entrenched terrorist haven.

Pakistan experts argue that if General Musharraf were to begin an aggressive campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, it wouldn’t be to please Washington. Moreover, coming elections in Pakistan could be the impetus for action as General Musharraf tries to look forceful before his countrymen go to the polls.

“There is recognition on Musharraf’s part that he has an opportunity now that may not exist in a future political configuration because his power may wane,” said Daniel Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations, who previously worked on Pakistan issues at the State Department.

A challenge to that power rose again on Friday when the country’s Supreme Court restored the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, to his post after being suspended by General Musharraf. Mr. Chaudhry, now a hero to an anti-Musharraf movement, could end up ruling on whether the leader can remain the head of the army as he seeks re-election as president.

Washington is captivated by General Musharraf because he is a secular moderate, which is not to be confused with a civil libertarian. John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state who until late last year tracked the gathering Qaeda threat as the director of national intelligence, ended a trip to Pakistan a month ago convinced that General Musharraf’s government had, at long last, gotten the message about the tribal areas in the northwest officially known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

“I found that one of the really decisive factors driving the Pakistani government’s response to the situation is the fact that violence has spread from the FATA to what they called the settled territories,” he said. In the past week alone, he noted, roughly 100 Pakistani soldiers have been killed, largely in bombing attacks, and the army has vowed to stop what General Musharraf calls the “Talibanization” of the country.

While Washington is officially optimistic, it has received promises from General Musharraf before. It was more than two years between the time that he sidelined Abdul Qadeer Khan, the head of the Khan Nuclear Laboratories, and the time he actually put him under house arrest for running the world’s largest nuclear technology smuggling network. In the interim, a lot of damage was done.

On the Afghan border, General Musharraf has promised to pursue and break up the Taliban, but in case after case the Taliban leaders have moved unimpeded between the tribal areas and Afghan villages, while Pakistani troops looked the other way. No one believes that Pakistan’s intelligence service has been purged of Taliban sympathizers.

So when Americans hear General Musharraf’s promises, they are once burned, and twice skeptical. “I’ve heard all this before,” one recently departed senior C.I.A. official with extensive experience in Pakistan and Afghanistan said last week about the administration’s official optimism.

The Pakistani Army, he and others said, is designed, trained and equipped to fight India in Kashmir and deter New Dehli with nuclear weapons. That requires a dramatically different kind of strategy from what is needed in the tribal areas, whose leaders do not consider themselves part of Pakistan.

A senior administration official said on Wednesday that even if General Musharraf had the right intentions, “it’s not clear he’s got the capability,” which is why the United States is rushing to supply him with more money and weapons. And even as they speak publicly about throwing their support behind General Musharraf’s efforts against radicals, administration officials in private find themselves re-enacting those Clinton-era debates about how to dismantle a terrorist haven inside a sovereign country.

The western mountains of Pakistan have been the hatching grounds for some of Al Qaeda’s deadliest plots. Besides the London transportation attacks in July 2005, the thwarted plot to blow up multiple trans-Atlantic commercial jets last August is thought by British and American officials to have been planned by Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas.

But the options facing President Bush are at least as unpalatable as those that confronted President Clinton.

One, of course, would be to initiate aggressive campaigns of deniable covert action in Pakistan to capture or kill Qaeda operatives, and pray that American Special Forces or C.I.A. officers don’t get caught. Another would be to use airstrikes against known terrorist compounds in the tribal areas. A third would involve carrying out a large-scale ground offensive across the border from Afghanistan — sending troops to rumble through villages in the hunt for the world’s most wanted men.

That last option seems, for all intents and purposes, off the table. Sending thousands of heavily armed American soldiers on a cave-to-cave search of North Waziristan, is, in the view of most experts, the least likely means of effectively dismantling Al Qaeda’s Pakistan base of operations. Besides, a decision to allow an American invasion across Pakistan’s western border could very well doom a government the Bush administration considers its best bet.

As for unilateral airstrikes, military and intelligence officials said that information on the whereabouts of top terrorists is rarely precise enough to justify bombings that could result in significant civilian casualties, and a failed airstrike could shut the door to future American operations in the region.

“You could do a hit-and-run really quick,” said one Bush administration official. “But that better be one damn good strike, because there ain’t going to be another.”

The C.I.A. has had occasional success in recent years killing top Qaeda planners with missiles fired from remote-controlled Predator aircraft — a covert action effort that the United States officially denies.

But intelligence officials acknowledge that after each attack, the terror group has merely tapped a deep bench and elevated another operative to a more lofty position.

So the administration that raised military pre-emption to the level of national doctrine after 9/11 is now confronting a more nuanced reality: officials acknowledge they would be hard pressed to mount an all-out attack against the Qaeda redoubt unless the terrorists struck first.

Yet, when asked how the United States would respond if Al Qaeda were to plot a successful attack on the United States from the tribal areas, the answer from one intelligence officials was direct: “We’d go in and flatten it.”

Counter Intelligence

By EVAN THOMAS
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LEGACY OF ASHES
The History of the CIA.

By Tim Weiner.

Illustrated. 702 pp. Doubleday. $27.95.

America’s foes and rivals have long overrated the Central Intelligence Agency. When Henry Kissinger traveled to China in 1971, Prime Minister Chou En-lai asked about C.I.A. subversion. Kissinger told Chou that he “vastly overestimates the competence of the C.I.A.” Chou persisted that “whenever something happens in the world they are always thought of.” Kissinger acknowledged, “That is true, and it flatters them, but they don’t deserve it.”

A few years later, in 1979, Iranian revolutionaries seized the American embassy in Tehran. They captured a C.I.A. case officer named William Daugherty and accused him of running the agency’s entire Middle Eastern spy network while plotting to assassinate Ayatollah Khomeini. Daugherty, who had been in the C.I.A. for only nine months, tried to explain that he didn’t even speak the native tongue, Persian. The Iranians seemed offended that the Americans would send such an inexperienced spy. It was “beyond insult,” Daugherty later recalled, “for that officer not to speak the language or know the customs, culture and history of their country.”

The C.I.A. never did have much luck operating inside Communist China, and it failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. “We were just plain asleep,” said the former C.I.A. director Adm. Stansfield Turner. The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb by India in 1998 — the list goes on and on, culminating in the agency’s wrong call on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3.

Tim Weiner’s engrossing, comprehensive “Legacy of Ashes” is a litany of failure, from the C.I.A.’s early days, when hundreds of agents were dropped behind the Iron Curtain to be killed or doubled (almost without exception), to more recent humiliations, like George Tenet’s now infamous “slam dunk” line. Over the years, the agency threw around a lot of money and adopted a certain swagger. “We went all over the world and we did what we wanted,” said Al Ulmer, the C.I.A.’s Far East division chief in the 1950s. “God, we had fun.” But even their successes turned out to be failures. In 1963, the C.I.A. backed a coup to install the Baath Party in Iraq. “We came to power on a C.I.A. train,” said Ali Saleh Saadi, the Baath Party interior minister. One of the train’s passengers, Weiner notes, was a young assassin named Saddam Hussein. Weiner quotes Donald Gregg, a former C.I.A. station chief in South Korea, later the national security adviser to Vice President George H. W. Bush: “The record in Europe was bad. The record in Asia was bad. The agency had a terrible record in its early days — a great reputation and a terrible record.”

And yet the myth of the C.I.A. as an all-knowing, all-powerful spy agency persisted for years, not just in the minds of America’s enemies but in the imagination of many American television-watchers and moviegoers. Among those fooled, at least initially, were most modern presidents of the United States. The promise of a secret intelligence organization that could not only spy on America’s enemies but also influence events abroad, by sleight of hand and at relatively low cost, was just too alluring.

When presidents finally faced the reality that the agency was bumbling, they could be bitter. Reviewing the C.I.A.’s record after his two terms in office, Dwight Eisenhower told the director, Allen Dulles, “I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this.” He would “leave a legacy of ashes” for his successor. A fan of Ian Fleming’s spy stories, John F. Kennedy was shocked to be introduced to the man described by C.I.A. higher-ups as their James Bond — the fat, alcoholic, unstable William Harvey, who ran a botched attempt to eliminate Fidel Castro by hiring the Mafia. Ronald Reagan went along with the desire of his C.I.A. director, William Casey, to bring back the mythical glory days by “unleashing” the agency — and his presidency was badly undermined by the Iran-contra affair.

In Weiner’s telling, a president trying to use the C.I.A. resembles Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. The role of Lucy is played by scheming or inept directors. Dulles is particularly egregious, a lazy, vain con artist who watches baseball games on television while half-listening to top-secret briefings (he assesses written briefings by their weight). Casey mumbles and lies and may have been almost mad from a brain tumor by the end. Even the more honorable directors, like Richard Helms, can’t resist telling presidents what they want to hear. To fit the policy needs of the Nixon White House in 1969, Helms doctored a C.I.A. estimate of Soviet nuclear forces. In a draft of the report, analysts had doubted the Soviet will or capacity to launch a nuclear strike. Helms erased this crucial passage — and for years thereafter, until the end of the cold war, the C.I.A. overstated the rate at which the Soviets were modernizing their arsenal. The C.I.A.’s bogus intelligence on Iraq in 2002-3, based on the deceits of dubious sources like the one known as Curveball, was hardly unprecedented. To justify the Johnson administration’s desire for a pro-war Congressional resolution on Vietnam in 1964, the intelligence community manufactured evidence of a Communist attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Weiner, a reporter for The Times who has covered intelligence for many years, has a good eye for embarrassing detail. High-ranking officials, it appears, were often the last to know. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Robert M. Gates, who is now the secretary of defense but at the time was the first President Bush’s top intelligence adviser, was at a family picnic. A friend of his wife’s joined the picnic and asked him, “What are you doing here?” Gates asked, “What are you talking about?” “The invasion,” she said. “What invasion?” he asked. A year earlier, when the Berlin Wall fell, Milt Bearden, the leader of the C.I.A.’s Soviet division, was reduced to watching CNN and deflecting urgent calls from White House officials who wanted to know what the agency’s spies were saying. “It was hard to confess that there were no Soviet spies worth a damn — they all had been rounded up and killed, and no one at the C.I.A. knew why,” Weiner writes. (The American agents in Moscow had been betrayed by the C.I.A. mole Aldrich Ames.)

Weiner is not the first reporter to see that the C.I.A.’s golden era was an illusion. After the 1975 Church Committee hearings exposed the agency as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” various authors began to deconstruct the myth of the C.I.A., most notably Thomas Powers in “The Man Who Kept the Secrets.” But by using tens of thousands of declassified documents and on-the-record recollections of dozens of chagrined spymasters, Weiner paints what may be the most disturbing picture yet of C.I.A. ineptitude. After following along Weiner’s march of folly, readers may wonder: Is an open democracy capable of building and sustaining an effective secret intelligence service? Maybe not. But with Islamic terrorists vowing to set off a nuclear device in an American city, there isn’t much choice but to keep on trying.

Evan Thomas, an editor at large at Newsweek, is the author of “The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the C.I.A.”

Al Qaeda widespread in Pakistan

Anti-terrorism officials and experts say a U.S. report incorrectly focuses on the group's strength in border areas.
By Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writer

July 20, 2007

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda has strongholds throughout Pakistan, not just in the areas bordering Afghanistan that were emphasized in a terrorism assessment this week, according to U.S. intelligence officials and counter-terrorism experts who say Osama bin Laden's network is more deeply entrenched than described.

The National Intelligence Estimate on the Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland, which reflects the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, described Al Qaeda as having "regenerated key elements" and freely operating from bases in northwestern Pakistan. But several officials and outside experts interviewed since the document's release this week say the situation is more problematic.

These analysts said the Bush administration was blaming Al Qaeda's resurgence too narrowly on an agreement that the Pakistani government struck in September with militant tribal leaders in the country's northwest territories.

In recent years, U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials who focus on South Asia say they have watched with growing concern as Al Qaeda has moved men, money and recruiting and training operations into Pakistani cities such as Quetta and Karachi as well as less populated areas.

Militant Islamists are still a minority in Pakistan, commanding allegiance of a little more than 10% of the population, judging by election results. But Al Qaeda has been able to widen its sway throughout the country by strengthening alliances with fundamentalist religious groups, charities, criminal gangs, elements of the government security forces and even some political officials, these officials said.

Bin Laden's network also has strengthened ties to groups fighting for control of Kashmir, most of which is held by India, a broadly popular cause throughout Pakistan that has the backing of the government and military.

"It is a much bigger problem than just saying it is a bunch of tribal Islamists in the fringe areas," said Bruce Riedel, a South Asia expert who served at the CIA, National Security Council and Pentagon and retired last year after 30 years of counterterrorism and policymaking experience.

Riedel disagreed in particular with the administration's effort to blame Al Qaeda's resurgence primarily on the September peace agreement. Under the terms of that truce, Pakistan pulled its troops out of North Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in exchange for promises by tribal leaders that militants affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban would not engage in violent activity, in Pakistan or across the border in Afghanistan.

The peace accord has been roundly criticized as having backfired, with Taliban attacks and suicide bombings in Afghanistan soaring, and Al Qaeda activity in the tribal areas growing noticeably, according to top U.S. military and intelligence officials. Militants recently renounced the pact and officials are trying to revive it.

The Pakistani government has limited authority in the largely autonomous tribal areas, and has had little success in attacking Al Qaeda there, but it also has refused to allow U.S. forces to go in.

Riedel and others who share his view said the intelligence estimate put too much emphasis on the September agreement.

"By putting it all in the [tribal region] we are trying to downplay this, saying it is all a problem of one cease-fire agreement that was a bad idea, when in fact Al Qaeda has spread throughout Pakistan," said Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

One U.S. counter-terrorism official confirmed Riedel's assessment that Al Qaeda's influence extended far beyond the tribal areas, but said those areas had become more important to the group in recent years because it faced increased pressure in urban centers.

"As pressure increased in the urban areas, you look for a more permissive environment, and the tribal areas are thought to have provided that. You tend to go to where your opponent isn't," the counter-terrorism official said in reference to Al Qaeda. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he was not allowed to discuss counterterrorism operations on the record, especially regarding the sensitive but fragile U.S. alliance with Pakistan.

But, the official said, Al Qaeda's presence in the rest of Pakistan remains a problem. "Nobody is looking at one to the absolute exclusion of the other," the official said. "This is not a one-dimensional problem."

The signs of Al Qaeda's spread across Pakistan have been apparent for years. The 15 so-called muscle hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks trained at an Al Qaeda hide-out in the southern port city of Karachi, according to the 9/11 Commission report.

Husain Haqqani, a former advisor to several Pakistani prime ministers, said that before the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Qaeda had hide-outs and logistical bases throughout Pakistan from where it moved foreign fighters into and out of Afghanistan.

"Once their headquarters in Afghanistan was shattered, they turned to making their logistical bases in Pakistan into operational bases," said Haqqani, director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University and author of "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military."

"Look at the arrests of Al Qaeda in recent years," he said. "They have been all over the country. People there were providing them with guidance and help."

Top Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubeida was captured in Faisalabad in 2002 and reputed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who also had close ties to Karachi, was caught in 2003 in the city of Rawalpindi, headquarters of Pakistan's military. Mohammed's replacement, Abu Faraj Libbi, was arrested in 2005 in Mardan, about 75 miles northwest of Islamabad, the capital.

U.S. intelligence officials believe Al Qaeda's presence throughout Pakistan has enabled it to recruit and train operatives, raise significant sums of money, and to film and disseminate high-quality propaganda videos through its Al Sahab multimedia arm.

Al Qaeda's No. 2 and chief propagandist, Ayman Zawahiri, has released numerous tapes in recent months, each of them issued with increasing speed after a significant event. After Pakistani troops stormed the Red Mosque in Islamabad, killing and capturing Islamist militants, Zawahiri's professional-looking video was in cyberspace in a matter of days.

"When you look at the quality of these propaganda tapes, they are not being produced in some primitive area but where you can get access to news media on a regular basis," Riedel said.

Pakistan's Foreign Ministry issued a statement Wednesday in response to the U.S. intelligence paper, strongly protesting the conclusion that the government had allowed Al Qaeda a haven in the tribal areas.

"It does not help simply to make assertions about the presence or regeneration of Al Qaeda in bordering areas of Pakistan," the statement says. "What is needed is concrete and actionable information and intelligence sharing."

The Foreign Ministry statement said Pakistan was determined not to allow Al Qaeda or any other terrorist entity to establish a base on its territory, but in an apparent reference to the U.S., said no foreign security forces would be allowed to pursue militants in Pakistan.

Last week during testimony to Congress on global threats, Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, cautioned against an overly aggressive effort to crush Al Qaeda in the tribal areas.

"Part of the dilemma … here is the risk of taking actions in the less-well-governed areas of Pakistan, the federally administrated tribal areas … that could lead to developments in all of Pakistan, that would increase the problem," Fingar told the House Armed Services Committee.

"There are an awful lot of potential recruits that are being engaged in the struggle in Kashmir that are held in check by the security forces in the rest of Pakistan. So it is not too great an exaggeration to say there is some risk of turning a problem in northwest Pakistan into the problem of all of Pakistan."

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josh.meyer@latimes.com

Bush signs new CIA interrogation rules

The long-awaited order prohibits some widely protested techniques used on terror suspects, but gives the agency special leeway.
By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer

July 21, 2007

WASHINGTON — President Bush signed an order Friday that clears the way for the CIA to resume some of the harsh interrogation methods it has used against terrorism suspects, but the order prohibits techniques that had caused an international outcry, including sexual humiliation and the denigration of religious symbols.

The executive order ends months of legal skirmishing in the government over how to comply with laws barring mistreatment of detainees and a Supreme Court ruling last year that the government was required to treat terrorism prisoners in accordance with the Geneva Convention.

In practical terms, the document places significant new limits on the CIA while making it clear that the agency will continue to operate under special rules that set it apart from the rest of the government.

The order places no restriction on employing coercive methods — such as sleep deprivation and the use of so-called stress positions — that are expressly off-limits for the military and domestic law enforcement agencies.

On another level, the order represents an attempt by the Bush administration to straddle two competing mandates by bringing the CIA program into line with court rulings and legislative requirements without disabling an operation that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have defended as one of the most valuable weapons in the war on terrorism.

The order does not specifically address one of the most controversial methods employed by the CIA: water-boarding, a technique in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and doused with water to simulate the sensation of drowning.

A separate document spelling out specific techniques remains classified.

Human rights groups said the order brought the United States closer to international standards on the treatment of prisoners but still gave the CIA significant latitude to employ methods that other countries and organizations had condemned.

"It certainly was a positive thing to see express prohibitions on things like sexual humiliation," said Jumana Musa, advocacy director for Amnesty International in Washington. "But the places where [the document] is silent speak volumes."

In a statement issued to the CIA workforce Friday, agency Director Michael V. Hayden said that because of the order, "we can focus on our vital work, confident that our mission and authorities are clearly defined."

The agency says it suspended its use of harsh methods three years ago, as the Bush administration's legal justifications for them began to crumble and CIA operatives working in secret detention facilities abroad became worried that they might face lawsuits or even criminal prosecution for the techniques they were being told to use.

Bush administration officials involved in drafting the order said it was designed to preserve flexibility for the CIA and to avoid spelling out boundaries that might be studied by Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations.

In a telephone briefing with reporters, an administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing the internal development of the policy, refused to elaborate on what the order would allow CIA interrogators to do, saying: "That will only enable Al Qaeda to train against those [methods] they know are on or off."

The official emphasized that the order contained "red lines which I think we can all agree are beyond the pale," but acknowledged that there were no provisions for allowing the Red Cross to visit CIA facilities or for allowing prisoners to be in contact with their families.

The order prohibits acts deemed "beyond the bounds of human decency, such as sexual or sexually indecent acts undertaken for the purpose of humiliation."

It also forbids "acts intended to denigrate the religion, religious practices or religious objects of the individual," a provision that appears designed to address complaints that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba had mistreated prisoners' copies of the Koran.

And it requires that detainees "receive the basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care."

Asked what might constitute extreme heat or cold, the administration official said, "We're not talking about forcibly induced hypothermia or any use of extreme temperatures as a practice in a program like this."

The provision requiring "essential medical care" might have applied to Abu Zubaydah, an alleged Al Qaeda operative who reportedly was denied pain medication after he was badly injured in a shootout during his capture in Pakistan in 2002.

Former U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged that water-boarding was used on Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed after he was taken into custody in Pakistan in 2003. But officials have said the method was abandoned years ago.

Critics called Bush's order frustratingly vague and said its most specific language addressed abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib and other military facilities that were never part of the CIA's interrogation program.

"The stuff they rule out is stuff they've always been willing to rule out," said Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch.

U.S. officials said the executive order was accompanied by a separate document prepared by the Justice Department that spelled out the specific interrogation methods and procedures that the CIA would be allowed to use in the secret detention program. That document is classified and will not be released to the public, officials said.

"The White House is basically saying: 'Trust us. Everything in that other document we're not showing you is legal,' " Malinowski said. "But the people in charge of interpreting this document don't have a particularly good track record of reasonable legal analysis."

The executive order is designed to bring the CIA program into compliance with the Supreme Court ruling last year in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, a case brought against the government by a detainee.

In Hamdan, the court said that even if detainees did not deserve full status as prisoners of war, they still must be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention's Common Article 3, which prohibits, among other things, "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment."

The executive order released Friday represents the Bush administration's effort to spell out what the CIA must do to comply with Common Article 3.

The Bush administration previously had contended that terrorism suspects were unlawful combatants and did not warrant the protections of the Geneva Convention.

In the wake of the Hamdan ruling, Bush declared that all of the prisoners in CIA custody had been transferred to the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The agency has since taken other prisoners into custody, including alleged Al Qaeda operative Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, who was transferred to Guantanamo in April. U.S. officials declined to say whether other prisoners were being held by the CIA now.

In his statement Friday, Hayden emphasized that the CIA program "always operated in strict accord with American law," that "fewer than 100 hardened terrorists" had been held in the program, and that "well under half" were ever subjected to "enhanced" interrogation methods.

Congress has also sought to bring the CIA program under greater scrutiny. The Senate Intelligence Committee passed a measure this year that questioned whether a CIA detention program that operated under different rules than those applicable to military and U.S. law enforcement was "necessary, lawful and in the best interests of the United States."

Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said in a statement Friday that the committee would evaluate how Bush's order "will translate into actual conduct by the CIA" and would seek information from the Justice Department on the legal analysis underpinning the order.

greg.miller@latimes.com