4 FBI Agents Hurt in Islamabad Blast

American Team A Possible Target In Saturday Attack

By Candace Rondeaux and Allan Lengel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 17, 2008; A13

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 16 -- Four FBI agents were among 12 people wounded in a weekend bomb blast at a popular Italian restaurant in Pakistan's capital, U.S. law enforcement officials said Sunday.

The attack Saturday occurred on the garden patio of Luna Caprese, a restaurant popular with foreigners in a busy, upscale section of Islamabad. The explosion killed a Turkish woman and injured several other people, including another American.

The four FBI agents who were wounded included a legal attache, an assistant legal attache and an agency supervisor, according to one law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the record. The job title of the fourth agent could not be determined. None of the injuries was life-threatening, the official said, although at least one agent was sent to London to undergo reconstructive surgery.

News of the four wounded FBI agents was first reported by CNN.

The cause of the blast at the restaurant remains under investigation. But sources in Pakistan familiar with the inquiry said a seven-member FBI team tasked with investigating bombings in the city of Lahore was in Islamabad at the time of the attack on Luna Caprese. The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the probe is ongoing, said the four agents might have been specifically targeted.

The U.S.-led task force was called in to assist with an investigation into two coordinated bombings Tuesday in Lahore. At least 28 people were killed and more than 170 injured in an attack at the headquarters of Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency. Minutes after that blast, suicide bombers struck a home in a residential area, killing three people.

The bombing at the Federal Investigation Agency was particularly devastating and caused portions of the agency's multi-story building to collapse. The agency is responsible for cases involving illegal immigration and smuggling, but is also the base for an FBI-trained counterterrorism unit.

The FBI has collaborated with its Pakistani counterpart on several occasions in recent years. In 2006, officials with the Pakistani agency announced plans for the FBI to train 100 Pakistani recruits in counterterrorism tactics. In 2002, the FBI assisted Pakistani authorities with the investigation of a suicide bombing at the U.S. Consulate in Karachi that killed 12 people and injured 50.

Lengel reported from Washington. Staff writers Ann Scott Tyson and Sari Horwitz in Washington contributed to this report.

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.