WASHINGTON (Agencies)
The White House Wednesday rebuffed calls for an independent prosecutor to probe Bush-era terrorism interrogations as the Senate released a timeline documenting the use of controversial interrogation techniques, including a 2002 request by the CIA to use waterboarding.
Controversy raged anew a day after President Barack Obama appeared to change policy by leaving the door open to prosecutions of officials under former president George W. Bush who devised legal cover for tactics critics have derided as torture.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said flatly that a flurry of news reports proclaiming the administration had switched course on delving further into those behind methods like waterboarding were wrong.
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Up to Attorney General " The lawyers that are involved are plenty capable of determining whether any law has been broken " Robert Gibbs, White House Obama said Tuesday it was up to Attorney General Eric Holder to decide if former officials broke the law, though he had previously seemed to shield CIA officers who acted under orders to carry out brutal questioning of al-Qaeda suspects.
Obama's remarks caused a stir because his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said on Sunday on ABC News that the president did not want to pursue those who "devised policy" and was interested only in looking forward.
Gibbs rejected calls by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for the appointment of an independent prosecutor to probe the torture issue.
"The lawyers that are involved are plenty capable of determining whether any law has been broken," Gibbs said.
The ACLU called on Monday for Obama to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate those who took part in "horrific acts of torture," as the political row deepened over Bush-era legal memos justifying the tactics released by the White House last week. |
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Interrogating Abu Zubaydah The CIA had asked to be able to waterboard Abu Zubaydah fearing he was withholding information In the meantime, a Senate Intelligence Committee said in a detailed timeline of controversial "war on terrorism" interrogations on Wednesday that the CIA first requested in May 2002 to be allowed to question terrorism suspects with waterboarding and it got the green light to use the tactic, which has widely been judged to be torture, on July 26, 2002.
The CIA had asked to be able to waterboard Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abedeen Muhammad Hussein, fearing he was withholding information about "imminent" terrorist attacks, the panel said.
The committee did not wade into the growing controversy over whether so-called "enhanced interrogation" methods applied to Zubaydah -- who was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002 -- yielded solid information.
U.S. forces captured Zubaydah in a late March 2002 firefight, tended to his serious injuries, and began to question him, according to the timeline.
The agency asked senior officials in Washington, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possibility of using rougher interrogation methods, including waterboarding.
The CIA made the request because it "believed that Abu Zubaydah was withholding imminent threat information during the initial interrogation sessions."
The U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel orally advised the CIA on July 26, 2002, "that the use of waterboarding was lawful," a finding it put in writing on Aug. 1, 2002, the timeline said. |
