The Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight is currently holding a hearing, “City on the Hill or Prison on the Bay? The Mistakes of Guantanamo and the Decline of America's Image, Part III.” The hearing focuses on a recently released report from the Justice Department inspector general:
Report: CIA Pushed Torture Envelope
CBS News – May 20, 2008
CIA and military interrogators bucked repeated warnings from the FBI that methods used to question terror suspects were in some cases “borderline torture” and potentially illegal, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog reported Tuesday.
Prosecutors stopped far short of pursuing charges against interrogators, however, after concluding that the Pentagon was ultimately responsible for policing the treatment of al Qaeda detainees who were being held in military prisons.
Subcommittee Chairman Bill Delahunt questions Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn Fine on how the Defense Department did not operate “in good faith” by delaying the FBI’s report on torture:
| IG Fine: “It was after six months we eventually got it. But the delay was very concerning to us, they did not initially, in our view, make a good faith effort to provide classification markings on it, other agencies had, the CIA did it very quickly, the FBI did it in a timely fashion, the Department of Defense didn’t, and that was part of the delay of the release of the report.” |
Extended transcript:
Chairman Delahunt: “The first footnote in the Executive Summary of your report indicates that the Department of Defense took a rather lengthy time getting back to you on classification issues. Can you amplify on that, because I have a real serious problem about the use of classification throughout our government during the course of the past seven years.”
IG Fine: “We completed a draft of this report in October of 2007. Consistent with our normal practice we provided it to the agencies involved for their comment, is there anything factually inaccurate, and for their classification and sensitivity review.
“We provided it to the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. We received timely responses from those agencies except for the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense did not respond to us, we kept pressing for that, eventually they said ‘we’re almost done,’ then in January, almost three months later, they said ‘we can’t do it,’ because there were no paragraph markings on it, which was apparent from the beginning of the time we gave it to them, and also we were asking them for what was classified in terms of Department of Defense issues. Eventually a new entity at the Department of Defense, the Undersecretary of Defense for Counterintelligence and Security got involved, we also got the Department of Defense Inspector General involved.
“Eventually they gave it to someone new and they did provide classification. Even then, it was not full classification markings. Initially, we went back and forth with them and eventually got their classification comments.
“I will say that the eventual classification comments we didn’t have problems with. It was after six months we eventually got it. But the delay was very concerning to us, they did not initially, in our view, make a good faith effort to provide classification markings on it, other agencies had, the CIA did it very quickly, the FBI did it in a timely fashion, the Department of Defense didn’t, and that was part of the delay of the release of the report.”
| IG Fine: “We also heard that, and we weren’t able to interview him, but we heard from others that Mr. former Attorney General Ashcroft raised this with the National Security Council and the DOD, raised it particularly in the context of al-Qahtani and the effectiveness of the interrogation techniques on al-Qahtani.” |