In a further rejection of his predecessor George W. Bush’s war on terror tactics, President Barack Obama will set up an elite interrogation team under White House oversight to question terror suspects.
The move will absolve the CIA of the duty of grilling terror suspects, and the team will be housed at the FBI but under direct oversight of the National Security Council, a senior official said Monday on condition of anonymity.
Details of the new approach for dealing with top terror detainees were revealed as the US Justice Department readies the disclosure of new details of prisoner abuse gathered in 2004 but never released.
The move will further solidify Obama’s complicated and controversial effort to provide new legal underpinnings for interrogating, detaining and trying terror suspects, including the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
The new interrogation unit, to be named the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) was approved by the president last week, the Washington Post said.
It will be made up of experts from several intelligence and law enforcement agencies and housed at the FBI, the Post reported, quoting senior Obama administration officials.
Obama, currently on vacation in the upscale east-coast resort of Martha’s Vineyard, moved to overhaul terror suspect guidelines soon after taking office, including the creation of a task force on interrogation and transfer policies.
The task force recommended the new interrogation unit, along with other changes regarding the way prisoners are transferred overseas, the Post said.
In a related development, the Department of Justice was set to release further details of a report by a CIA inspector general detailing new allegations of abuse of an Al-Qaeda prisoner.
The development could potentially expose CIA employees and contractors to prosecution for their treatment of terrorism suspects.
The report reportedly says that CIA interrogators used a handgun and an electric drill to try to scare an Al-Qaeda commander, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, into spilling information.
Nashiri, captured in November 2002 and held for four years in one of the CIA’s secret prisons, ultimately became one of three Al-Qaeda leaders subjected to waterboarding, according to earlier media reports.
Nashiri’s interrogation is said to have included episodes in which the detainee reportedly was threatened with death or grave injury if he refused to cooperate.
When the CIA first referred its inspector general’s findings to prosecutors, they decided that none of the cases merited prosecution, The New York Times reported.
But Holder’s associates say that when he took office and saw the allegations he began to reconsider, the paper noted.
The recommendation to review the closed cases, in effect renewing the inquiries, centers mainly on allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, the report said.
