Report revives legal debate on interrogation

By Associated Press in Washington | China Daily | Updated: 2014-12-16 08:01

When the CIA sought permission to use harsh interrogation methods on a captured al-Qaida operative, the response from Bush administration lawyers was encouraging.

In one of several memos forming the legal underpinnings for brutal interrogation techniques, the CIA was told that Abu Zubaydah could lawfully be placed in a box with an insect, kept awake for days at a time and slapped multiple times in the face. Waterboarding, too, was acceptable because it did not cause the lengthy mental anguish needed to meet the legal standard of torture, the 2002 Justice Department memo says.

The release last week of a Senate report cataloging years of such interrogation tactics has revived debate about legal opinions since discredited and withdrawn, and about the decision not to prosecute the program's architects or officers who used the methods. Civil rights groups in the United States and abroad are renewing calls to prosecute those who relied on techniques that President Barack Obama has called torture.

"How can we seriously use the phrase 'rule of law' if crimes of this magnitude go uninvestigated and unprosecuted?" said Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union's deputy legal director.

The US Justice Department, which spent years looking into the matter, says it lacks sufficient evidence to convict anyone and found no new information in the report. It is also far from clear that any international case could be brought.

Justice Department officials said they will not revisit their 2012 decision to close the investigation, citing, among other challenges, the passage of time and the difficulty of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that crimes were committed, in light of government memos that gave interrogators extraordinary latitude.

Outgrowth of probe

That conclusion followed an investigation led by special prosecutor John Durham that began in 2009 as an outgrowth of a probe into the destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogation tactics. The inquiry into interrogation tactics came amid the release of an internal CIA inspector general's report that said CIA interrogators once threatened to kill the children of a suspect in the Sept 11, 2011 attacks and suggested that another suspected terrorist would be forced to watch his mother being sexually assaulted.

One argument in the memos held that certain aggressive interrogation practices were permitted so long as they stopped short of producing pain equivalent to experiencing organ failure or death. Another said they were permissible provided the interrogator's primary objective was not to "inflict severe pain or suffering".