I'm suffering outrage fatigue... I don't care. Here's some needed humor though... ____________ Jon Stewart: Stephen, what do you think about this idea that we are hearing from Rumsfeld, and now Sen. Inhofe, that the press was somehow irresponsible for releasing these photos of abuse? Stephen Colbert: Jon, I agree entirely with Secy Rumsfeld that the release of these photos was deplorable, but these actions of a few rogue journalists do not represent the vast majority of the American media. Stewart: The journalists did something wrong? Colbert: I'm just saying those journalists don't represent the journalists I know. The journalists I know love America, but now all anybody wants to talk about is the bad journalists--the journalists that hurt America. But what they don't talk about is all the amazingly damaging things we haven't reported on. Who didn't uncover the flaws in our pre-war intelligence? Who gave a free pass on the Saddam-al Queda connection? Who dropped Aghanistan from the headlines at the first whiff of this Iraqi snipehunt? The United States press corps, that's who. Heck, we didn't even put this story on the front page. We tried to bury it on "60 Minutes II." Who's on that--Charlie Rose and Anglela Lansbury? Stewart: Stephen, what do you think is at play here? Colbert: Politics, Jon, that's what. Pure and simple. I think it's pretty suspicious that these tortures took place during a Presidential campaign. This is a clear cut case of partisan sadism. You know, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure those Iraqi prisoners want Bush out of office too. You know I wouldn't be a bit surprised if a pile of hooded, naked Iraqis has a job waiting for them in the Kerry Administration.
LOL! I just love those guys. On an aside, an increasing number of friends confess to getting most of their current events from the Daily Show. Is this true of anyone in here?
I would not say that I get MOST of my news from the Daily Show, but I do get it on ReplayTV every day.
Rumsfeld Backs Iraq Interrogation Methods By KEN GUGGENHEIM, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld defended military interrogation techniques in Iraq on Wednesday, rejecting complaints that they violate international rules and may endanger Americans taken prisoner. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm.../20040512/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_prisoner_abuse
I wonder which "approved method" Rummy believes the glow-stick enema falls under: sleep deprivation, dietary changes, or a stress position?
DO YOU SEE WHO WE'RE DEALING WITH HERE? For days now the world's media has been full of stories about the abuse of prisoners at the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Let's review. We had pictures of Iraqi prisoners in a pile, pictures of an Iraqi prisoner wearing a leash held by an female American soldier. There was a picture of another Iraqi prisoner being intimidated by dogs and one standing on a box with a hood over his head and some wires attached to his hands. Strong stuff, right? And ohhhhh ... the outrage! Now ... what pictures did we see yesterday? We saw pictures of brave Arabs redeeming their manhood by beheading an American civilian named Nick Berg. These peace-loving Muslims first read a statement, then they pushed Berg to the floor and proceeded to saw off his head with a large knife while shouting "God is great." You could hear Nick Berg screaming .. right up until the time the knife went through his windpipe. When they were finished these brave Arabs, their manhood redeemed, held up his head for the camera. Suddenly the pictures of what happened in the Abu Ghraib prison don't seem to be quite so horrific, do they? The victims of abuse at the hands of U.S. soldiers will be compensated by United States taxpayers. Nick Berg will be buried ... in two pieces. Compare the two cultures. While America is investigating the abuse of Iraqi prisoners ... while America is preparing to punish those responsible ... while America is apologizing to the families of the prisoners and their countrymen for the actions of a few soldiers, and preparing to pay these families large sums of money .. while America is trying to do the right thing, Arab Muslims are slaughtering an innocent American civilian who's only crime was he was looking for a job trying to improve the Iraqi communications infrastructure. This was a terrorist attack. It was an attack by Islamic terrorists, only this time it took five men to kill one American. One American civilian, or 3000 ... it's terrorism all the same. Will this finally convince you that we are in the midst of a war? It's a World War. A war being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, on Manhattan Island and the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. It's a war being fought in former Soviet republics; a war is being fought on the island of Bali and in the Philippines. This is World War IV -- a war against fundamentalist Islamic Jihadists and terrorists. These are the people we are fighting. They are vicious relentless Muslim animals who will not stop killing innocent Americans and who will not abandon their dream of a world dominated by Islam until they are utterly and completely destroyed. These are people without a conscious who believe that the way to redeem their honor is to brutally slaughter innocent human beings, and this they do in the name of their god. The question may be discomforting, but do these Islamic terrorist fanatics draw encouragement from the constant Democratic attacks on the president and the liberation of the people of Iraq from one of history's most brutal dictators? How could they not? How could these vicious Islamic bastards not draw comfort from Ted Kennedy's comparisons of Iraq with Vietnam? These Islamic fanatics know they're at war. They make no secret of their ambition and intention to destroy America. Do you think they haven't studied our history? How could they not know that America abandoned Vietnam to communist aggression when the going got particularly rough and when the tide of opinion in America turned against the war. Do they not hear the comparison to Vietnam from a leading American politician as nothing less than a prelude to surrender or withdrawal ... a sign of American weakness? This vicious murder of an American civilian should serve to reignite the American resolve to destroy, not to appease, but to destroy the Islamic Jihadists. Now you should know that playing nice won't work. While we try to bring to justice the people responsible for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, the Islamic fanatics cut the head off of an innocent American civilian in order to "redeem" their manhood. They're not men, they're bugs ... and they need to be squashed. The retaliation for this vicious act must be firm, it must be swift, and it must have a violent finality. These inhuman Muslims must learn that these actions against Americans will not go unanswered ... and the answer will have a terrible finality. Oh ... and just where are the Euro-weenies on all of this? Has anyone heard from the French? The Spanish? The Germans? I guess they're too busy adding up their losses since their buddy Saddam was tossed out on his Baathist butt. http://boortz.com/nuze/index.html
Yes. Al Queda. To start a war in Iraq, where few Al Queda exists, is a poor use of our resources to find the real enemy...the real terrorists.
Yes they still seem equally horrific. I will say that murder, torture, rape and abuse are bad, no matter who is perpetrator.
The entire article is about the terrorists from AQ committing these heinous acts and then the author throws in his little dig to Europe about Saddam. Do you not see the inference?
Where does Europe stand? Here is an interesting read from the International Herald Tribune... News Analysis: Concerned, NATO is not gloating on Iraq John Vinocur/IHT Wednesday, May 12, 2004 BRUSSELS These are hard days for Americans and the United States' friends in Europe, but not terribly comfortable ones for their doubters either. A NATO official, asked to speak his mind about the effects of the U.S. military's prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, leapt - despairingly - to the task. "It's the worst blow to American credibility in 25 years," he said. "People in Europe," he added, are telling the Americans "they've lost their moral authority. It is impossible to underestimate the problem." In another capital, a cabinet minister of a leading allied government described the situation as a "Guernica moment," a reference to the indelible impact on international opinion of that town's destruction by fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. America had never listened to Europe, the minister said. Donald Rumsfeld should quit as secretary of the defense, and Colin Powell ought to be moved from the State Department to take his place. Yet with all his anger, the minister insisted that schadenfreude was absent from the allies' reaction to the scandal because they were most concerned with the immeasurable damage to the West that a U.S. collapse in Iraq would bring. He said he knew of no European nation that thought otherwise. However exceptional a moment America's humiliation would seem for settling scores with the United States, the NATO official described France and Germany as restrained in their approach, in light of the potential for chaos in Iraq. The two main opponents to American intervention were said to be holding to their view that NATO involvement in Iraq - up for discussion in the coming weeks before NATO holds its late June summit in Istanbul and authority transfers to Iraqis on June 30 - would be a bad idea. At the same time, according to NATO officials, the French and Germans are telling their partners, "We won't get in your way." As phrased by another headquarters official, the French and Germans were defining their own role for the time being as a nonblocking mode "that does nothing that would help George Bush get re-elected." The Bush administration had hoped that NATO would emerge from its meeting in Istanbul with a specific role in Iraq. An approved NATO mission would give all the coalition forces there an internationalized label, and suggest to U.S. voters that American involvement had come within a more limited and acceptable framework. Now, diplomats and politicians suggest, it is uncertain whether the alliance will have regrouped with enough strength by the summit meeting to provide a nameplate for an international force at the request of the United Nations and a transitional Iraqi government. As for NATO members providing new troops, that appeared a dim perspective. The issue at hand within NATO, in the view of one of the alliance officials, was "how well and how honestly" the Americans were seen to confront the abuse issue. This was balanced against the allies' virtually unanimous conviction that the Americans were needed to stop chaos from taking over Iraq. The awkwardness of the situation for Europeans was defined this way by the minister who referred to Guernica. He said, "Europe realizes it can't do America's job, but wishes at this point there were another America doing it." NATO's entry might require public reassertion, potentially humbling in U.S. domestic political terms, of American compliance with the Geneva convention on prisoners' rights. The matter was a real one because NATO countries like Italy and the Netherlands have turned over captured combatants in Iraq or Afghanistan to American jailers. "In these circumstances," one of the NATO officials said, "the United States is hardly in a position to push anything concerning the internationalization of Iraq to the breaking point." The agenda for the next six weeks involves two tracks of contacts and negotiations. One is centered at the UN where, in one optimistic scenario, a new resolution on Iraq might clear the Security Council as early as the end of May, followed by action by Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN's special representative for Iraq, to put a government in place by June 15. The other is a succession of four meetings among the major Western leaders throughout June, beginning with D-Day ceremonies in France. Much depends on what Secretary General Kofi Annan specifies in terms of forces to stabilize the new government and the UN presence in Iraq. "It would be easy to say no to Bush now," the NATO headquarters official said. "But could you say no to Annan?" http://www.iht.com/ I highlighted parts of the article, but it's safe to say that our Allies are extremely angry with Bush.
Ex-POW says she fared better than jailed Iraqis By JENNIFER WEIL THE JOURNAL NEWS (Original publication: May 12, 2004) WEST NYACK — Shoshana Johnson said her treatment at the hands of her Iraqi captors was better than the humiliation and abuse shown being committed by the U.S. service members in recent pictures. "It really hurts to think that our soldiers would do something like this," Johnson said yesterday during an event to create teddy bears for children of service members. "I was treated very humanely and of course, as Americans, we all assume that the same is done for them. I hope everybody realizes that most soldiers are not like this." The former Army specialist, who was captured at the same time as Pfc. Jessica Lynch, said that while she was not mistreated in her 22 days as a prisoner of war, her captors did not always follow the Geneva Conventions. "Do I expect the average Iraqi to know every niche of the Geneva Convention? No. But I was treated humanely." Johnson explained that she received medical care while she was held. "That's what I was talking about being treated humanely," said Johnson, who was shot in both ankles. "The U.S. doctors said if they hadn't operated on me, I would have lost my legs." http://www.nyjournalnews.com/newsroom/051204/b0112shoshana.html
From today's Washington Post -------- Rumsfeld Defends Rules for Prison - Senators Question Interrogation Guidelines By Dana Priest and Dan Morgan Washington Post Staff Writers Thursday, May 13, 2004; Page A01 Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday defended U.S. military interrogation guidelines in Iraq against mounting complaints that the authorized techniques violate international rules and may endanger Americans taken prisoner. Appearing before the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, Rumsfeld said all authorized methods had been confirmed by Pentagon lawyers as complying with the Geneva Conventions on treatment of detainees. Rumsfeld's contention was backed by Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who noted at the hearing that a published version of the approved list -- which includes a number of threatening, disruptive or stressful actions -- also includes an order that U.S. soldiers treat detainees humanely. But senators challenged the compliance claim and accused Rumsfeld and other administration officials of confusing matters by professing that the Geneva Conventions need not be applied in all cases -- notably, not when captured members of the Taliban and al Qaeda are involved. Experts in military law and human rights also argued that some of the authorized U.S. methods run counter to international prohibitions against coercive or cruel treatment. Even within the military, some lawyers have expressed unease with the interrogation rules. Last year, several military lawyers appealed to a senior representative of the New York State Bar Association to try to persuade the Pentagon to revise its practices. Scott Horton, then head of the bar association's committee on international law, confirmed yesterday that he received unsolicited visits in May and October by a total of eight military legal officers. "They were quite blunt," Horton recalled. "They were extremely concerned about how the political appointees were dealing with interrogation issues. They said this was a disaster waiting to happen and that they felt shut out" of the rules-drafting process. Horton would not identify the participants, saying they did not want their names publicized. "They did it out of a sense of desperation and frustration. It's a fairly strong commentary on how they felt," said retired Rear Adm. John Hutson, who served as the Navy's staff judge advocate from 1997 to 2000 and is now dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire. Fueling the rising dispute this week was the release Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee of a list of once-secret interrogation techniques used by the U.S. military in Iraq. The list emerged in connection with hearings into abuses by U.S. military guards at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. The list showed two categories of measures -- those approved for all detainees and those requiring special authorization by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Among the items in the second category are "sensory deprivation," "stress positions," "dietary manipulation," forced changes in sleep patterns, isolated confinement and use of dogs. Holding up the list, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said some procedures requiring special approval "go far beyond the Geneva Conventions." Rumsfeld shot back that "any instructions that have been issued or anything that's been authorized by the department was checked by the lawyers" in the Pentagon and deemed to be consistent with the Geneva code. The conventions state that "no physical or moral coercion shall be exercised against protected persons, in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties." "Most of the things on the list that require approval from the commanding general seem to be coercive to the extent they aren't just lifestyle changes," said Miles Fischer, who heads the New York bar association's committee on military affairs and justice. "Any stress position is coercive." Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, said the U.S. interrogation rules for Iraq "look like someone tried carefully to avoid torture but forgot about the parallel rule against cruel and inhumane treatment." He called those U.S. techniques that require special approval "blatantly illegal." Hutson said the Pentagon was trying to draw lines within the gray area between torture and benign treatment. "I fundamentally disagree with where they drew the lines," he said. One of the concerns of the military lawyers who approached the New York bar association last year was the elimination of the requirement that judge advocates general -- or JAGs -- be present during tough interrogations of detainees or watch from behind two-way mirrors. At a hearing Tuesday of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) asked the Army's judge advocate general, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Romig, about this complaint, which was first reported in the Washington Times. "Sir, I'm not aware of the use of the two-way mirror as a regular standard method of monitoring interrogations," Romig answered. "The fact that there are so many interrogations going on at different locations, we wouldn't have enough JAG officers to sit through all of these." During yesterday's hearing, Rumsfeld complained that the administration's policy on the Geneva Conventions has frequently been misreported. U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said, are under orders to observe the conventions. By contrast, he said, President Bush decided two years ago that Taliban and al Qaeda fighters do not warrant protection under the conventions because they belong to terrorist groups, not nations, and do not abide by the norms of regular militaries. Nonetheless, U.S. policy has been to accord those detainees treatment "consistent with" the Geneva Conventions, Rumsfeld said. But both Durbin and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) criticized this attempt to differentiate. Feinstein said the United States has a "moral imperative" to apply the conventions in all cases. Durbin said the administration's statements have generated confusion and could encourage the mistreatment of U.S. soldiers taken captive. He noted that one U.S. soldier is currently missing in Iraq. "Wouldn't it be good for us, at this moment in time, to clearly and unequivocally state that we will follow the Geneva Conventions with civilian and military detainees?" Durbin asked. Rumsfeld responded that applying the conventions to terrorist groups would weaken the international standards, not strengthen them. Rumsfeld also faced a grilling about the overall course of U.S. policy in Iraq. Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), who has been an administration ally on the issue, said he is "very worried" about how prepared Iraqis are to assume responsibility after the planned transfer of limited authority on June 30. "We have cities we are abandoning to a bunch of thugs and yet at the same time we're saying we're going to form a new government and turn over power to them. I believe that you have to be better prepared for this transition than I have heard," Domenici said. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) asked how long before "we can see the end of the tunnel" and U.S. troops can withdraw from Iraq. Myers responded that this fall or winter, "after the Iraqis are in charge," U.S. officials will be able to make a judgment about "the way forward." In a closing comment, Rumsfeld said he has been reading a book about the Civil War and noted that dire, despairing reports about high casualties and other problems from that era echo those from Iraq today. "The carnage was horrendous, and it was worth it," he said of the Civil War. "And I look at Iraq, and all I can say is I hope it comes out well. And I believe it will, and we're going to keep at it."
From Texas to Abu Ghraib: The Bush Legacy of Prisoner Abuse While administration officials express shock and outrage over allegations of the torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners by US forces, a deeper look into Bush's stateside prison-system record shows disturbing similarities. Despite Taguba's report detailing US "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" of Iraqi detainees, the President declared, "We acted, and there are no longer mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms in Iraq." In George Bush's America, denial about inmate mistreatment runs similarly rampant. As Texas governor, Bush oversaw the executions of 152 prisoners and thus became the most-killing governor in the history of the United States. Ethnic minorities, many of whom did not have access to proper legal representation, comprised a large percentage of those Bush put to death, and in one particularly egregious example, Bush executed an immigrant who hadn't even seen a consular official from his own country (as is required by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to which the US was a signatory). Bush's explanation: "Texas did not sign the Vienna Convention, so why should we be subject to it?" Governor Bush also flouted the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child by choosing to execute juvenile offenders, a practice shared by only Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Significantly, in 1998 a full 92% of the juvenile offenders on Bush's death row were ethnic minorities. Conditions inside Texan prisons during Bush's reign were so notorious that federal Judge William Wayne Justice wrote, "Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions." In September 1996, for example, a videotaped raid on inmates at a county jail in Texas showed guards using stun guns and an attack dog on prisoners, who were later dragged face-down back to their cells. Funding of mental health programs during Bush's reign was so poor that Texan prisons had a sizeable number of mentally-impaired inmates; defying international human rights standards, these inmates ended up on death row. A prisoner named Emile Duhamel, for example, with severe psychological disabilities and an IQ of 56, died in his Texan death-row jail cell in July 1998. Authorities blamed "natural causes" but a lack of air conditioning in cells that topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a summer heat wave may have killed Duhamel instead. How many other Texan prisoners died of such neglect during Bush's governorship is unclear. As president, Bush presides over a prison population topping 2 million people, giving America the dubious distinction of having a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country. When considering that the US has three times more prisoners per capita than Iran and seven times more than Germany, the nation looks more like a Gulag than the Land of the Free. Abu Ghraib has left administration officials falling over themselves with protestations of compassion, but it's worth remembering that the Bush White House has fought hard against the International Convention Against Torture, especially a proposal to establish voluntary inspections of prisons and detention centers in signatory countries, such as the United States. It's not difficult to see why: if even a fraction of Bush's devastating legacy with Texan prisoners has been transferred to the US prison system as a whole, then the scandal over Abu Ghraib will seem like child's play. The White House also wants to stifle investigation into the roughly 760 aliens (mainly Muslim men) the US government rounded up post-911, ostensibly for immigration violations. Amnesty International reports 911 detainees have suffered "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some corrections officers" and a denial of "basic human rights." Then of course, there's Guantanamo, where the US is holding hundreds of detainees in top secrecy and without access to courts, legal counsel or family visits. Add to that the roughly 1000 civilians the US imprisons in Afghanistan, the 10,000 civilians thought to be detained in Iraq and who knows how many others across the globe, and it looks as if incarceration is the nation's best export. But blame can't stop with Bush. A recent CNN poll asking "Is torture ever justified during interrogation?" yielded 47% of respondents answering in the affirmative, which explains why there hasn't been much stateside outrage over prisoner neglect in the past. It's that Faustian with-us-or-against-us mentality rearing its ugly head once again, promising safety but tempting us to dehumanize others and lose our souls in the process. http://www.heatherwokusch.com/columns/column62.html
Interesting... ______________ JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG: But if the law is what the executive says it is, whatever is "necessary and appropriate'' in the executive's judgment, as the resolution you gave us that Congress passed, it leads you up to the executive, unchecked by the judiciary. So what is it that would be a check against torture? PAUL CLEMENT (Deputy Solicitor General): Well, first of all, there are treaty obligations. But the primary check is that just as in every other war, if a U.S. military person commits a war crime by creating some atrocity on a harmless, you know, detained enemy combatant or a prisoner of war, that violates our own conception of what's a war crime. And we'll put that U.S. military officer on trial in a court martial. So I think there are plenty of internal reasons -- Q. Suppose the executive says, "Mild torture, we think, will help get this information?" It's not a soldier who does something against the code of military justice, but it's an executive command. Some systems do that to get information. A. Well, our executive doesn't, and I think - I mean. -------------------- Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations By JAMES RISEN, DAVID JOHNSTON and NEIL A. LEWIS, NYTimes WASHINGTON, May 12 — The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials. At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said. In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown. These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees. Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture, did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions could only be gleaned by extracting information from often uncooperative detainees. Interrogators were trying to find out whether there might be another attack planned against the United States. The methods employed by the C.I.A. are so severe that senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have directed its agents to stay out of many of the interviews of the high-level detainees, counterterrorism officials said. The F.B.I. officials have advised the bureau's director, Robert S. Mueller III, that the interrogation techniques, which would be prohibited in criminal cases, could compromise their agents in future criminal cases, the counterterrorism officials said. After the attacks of Sept. 11, President Bush signed a series of directives authorizing the C.I.A. to conduct a covert war against Osama bin Laden's Qaeda network. The directives empowered the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda leaders, but it is not clear whether the White House approved the specific rules for the interrogations. The White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment on the matter. The C.I.A. detention program for Qaeda leaders is the most secretive component of an extensive regime of detention and interrogation put into place by the United States government after the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan that includes the detention facilities run by the military in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There is now concern at the agency that the Congressional and criminal inquiries into abuses at Pentagon-run prisons and other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan may lead to examinations of the C.I.A's handling of the Qaeda detainees. That, in turn, could expose agency officers and operations to the same kind of public exposure as the military now faces because of the Iraq prison abuses. So far, the agency has refused to grant any independent observer or human rights group access to the high-level detainees, who have been held in strict secrecy. Their whereabouts are such closely guarded secrets that one official said he had been told that Mr. Bush had informed the C.I.A. that he did not want to know where they were. The authorized tactics are primarily those methods used in the training of American Special Operations soldiers to prepare them for the possibility of being captured and taken prisoners of war. The tactics simulate torture, but officials say they are supposed to stop short of serious injury. Counterrorism officials say detainees have also been sent to third countries, where they are convinced that they might be executed, or tricked into believing they were being sent to such places. Some have been hooded, roughed up, soaked with water and deprived of food, light and medications. Many authorities contend that torture and coercive treatment is as likely to provide information that is unreliable as information that is helpful. Concerns are mounting among C.I.A. officers about the potential consequences of their actions. "Some people involved in this have been concerned for quite a while that eventually there would be a new president, or the mood in the country would change, and they would be held accountable," one intelligence source said. "Now that's happening faster than anybody expected." The C.I.A.'s inspector general has begun an investigation into the deaths of three lower-level detainees held by the C.I.A in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department is also examining the deaths. The secret detention system houses a group of 12 to 20 prisoners, government officials said, some under direct American control, others ostensibly under the supervision of foreign governments. The C.I.A. high-level interrogation program seemed to show early results with the capture of Abu Zubaida in April 2002. Mr. Zubaida was a close associate of Mr. bin Laden's and had run Al Qaeda's recruiting, in which young men were brought from other countries to training camps in Afghanistan. Under such intensive questioning, Mr. Zubaida provided useful information identifying Jose Padilla, a low-level Qaeda convert who was arrested in May 2002 in connection with an effort to build a dirty bomb. Mr. Zubaida also helped identify Mr. Mohammed as a crucial figure in the 9/11 plot, counterterrorism officials said. A few other detainees have been identified by the Bush administration, like Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another 9/11 plotter and Walid Ba'Attash, who helped plan the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998 and the attack on the Navy destroyer Cole in October 2000. Some of the prisoners have never been identified by the government. Some may have only peripheral ties to Al Qaeda. One Middle Eastern man, who had been identified by intelligence officials as a money launderer for Mr. bin Laden, was captured in the United Arab Emirates. He traveled there when some of the emirates' banks froze his accounts. When the U.A.E. government alerted the the C.I.A. that he was in the country, the man was arrested and subsequently disappeared into the secret detention program. In the interrogation of Mr. Mohammed, C.I.A. officials became convinced that he was not being fully cooperative about his knowledge of the whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden. Mr. Mohammed was carrying a letter written by Mr. bin Laden to a family member when he was captured in Pakistan early in 2003. The C.I.A. officials then authorized even harsher techniques, according to officials familiar with the interrogation. The C.I.A. has been operating its Qaeda detention system under a series of secret legal opinions by the agency's and Justice Department lawyers. Those rules have provided a legal basis for the use of harsh interrogation techniques, including the water-boarding tactic used against Mr. Mohammed. One set of legal memorandums, the officials said, advises government officials that if they are contemplating procedures that may put them in violation of American statutes that prohibit torture, degrading treatment or the Geneva Conventions, they will not be responsible if it can be argued that the detainees are formally in the custody of another country. The Geneva Conventions prohibit "violence to life and person, in particular . . . cruel treatment and torture" and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." Regarding American anti-torture laws, one administration figure involved in discussions about the memorandums said: "The criminal statutes only apply to American officials. The question is how involved are the American officials." The official said the legal opinions say restrictions on procedures would not apply if the detainee could be deemed to be in the custody of a different country, even though American officials were getting the benefit of the interrogation. "It would be the responsibility of the other country," the official said. "It depends on the level of involvement." Like the more numerous detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the high-level Qaeda prisoners have also been defined as unlawful combatants, not as prisoners of war. Those prisoners have no standing in American civilian or military courts. The Bush administration began the program when intelligence agencies realized that a few detainees captured in Afghanistan had such a high intelligence value that they should be separated from the lower-level figures who had been sent to a military installation at Guantánamo Bay, which officials felt was not suitable. There was little long-term planning. The agency initially had few interrogators and no facilities to house the top detainees. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency began to search for remote sites in friendly countries around the world where Qaeda operatives could be kept quietly and securely. "There was a debate after 9/11 about how to make people disappear," a former intelligence official said. The result was a series of secret agreements allowing the C.I.A. to use sites overseas without outside scrutiny. So far, the Bush administration has not said what it intends to do over the long term with any of the high-level detainees, leaving them subject to being imprisoned indefinitely without any access to lawyers, courts or any form of due process. Some officials have suggested that some of the high-level detainees may be tried in military tribunals or officially turned over to other countries, but counterterrorism officials have complained about the Bush administration's failure to have an "endgame" for these detainees. One official said they could also be imprisoned indefinitely at a new long-term prison being built at Guantánamo.
