Word: hig
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) was intended to replace the Bush Administration's intelligence-gathering procedures for captured terrorist suspects. One of President Obama's first acts after taking office was to suspend his predecessor's controversial detention and interrogation practices, and convene a task force to recommend new ones. When the Department of Justice announced its findings on Aug. 24, among the proposals was the creation of HIG, a mobile team of experienced interrogators, linguists, al-Qaeda experts and others would swing into action to question captured suspects. Intended for deployment overseas, according to Director of National Intelligence...
...However, HIG was not activated when Abdulmutallab was taken into custody, as Blair admitted at a Senate hearing in January. He said he was never consulted about deploying the interrogation unit when the young Nigerian was arrested in Detroit; the team of intelligence experts was never summoned. "We should have automatically deployed the HIG," he said. "We will now." More confusion followed: the next day, Blair issued a clarifying statement revealing that the unit wasn't even fully operational. (See pictures of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab...
Intelligence and law enforcement officials insist that while the HIG has not been finalized, intelligence units are deploying to interrogate suspects - including Abdulmutallab and David Headley, who was arrested in Chicago last year and has been linked to the Bombay massacre of 2008. At a hearing before the Senate's Select Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that HIG-like teams had been deployed since the fall, and CIA Director Leon Panetta said agency interrogators have accompanied them. This raised more questions whether the unit was functional. "It's moving along," was all Blair said. When committee...
Despite the apparent progress of the interrogation, the unavailability of HIG has inspired fresh rounds of criticism from national security hawks. "Why wasn't his group brought in once this terrorist was taken into custody?" McConnell declared on the Senate floor. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden wrote in an op-ed last Sunday that while the Administration was still unprepared to question terrorists, interrogations of CIA personnel over Bush-era abuses are "well underway." William Burck, a former deputy counsel to President Bush, says the idea of the HIG is "fabulous" - but it needs to be implemented. The fact that...