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Chalk up a win for the spying authority of the Pentagon and the Beltway's bureaucratic heavyweight, Donald Rumsfeld. House intelligence committee chairman Peter Hoekstra tells TIME he's dropping legislation that would have more formally enshrined in law the tradition that the CIA coordinates human spy operations outside the U.S. The provision-Section 401 of the intelligence authorization bill now making its way through the House-would have subjected intelligence operations by agencies like the Pentagon and FBI to "coordination" under a process to be developed by CIA director Porter Goss and director of national intelligence John Negroponte...
...bill describes the proposal as a "Clarification of role of the director of Central Intelligence Agency as head of human intelligence collection." One worry, Hoekstra says, is what kind of activity would fall in the category of "tactical intelligence for the military," which the Pentagon jealously guards. Hoekstra said he agreed to drop the provision "to give the players the opportunity to work out in practice what the intelligence reform bill means." Hunter could not immediately be reached for comment. A Negroponte spokeswoman said the DNI was "unaware of any such deal. We were never consulted and played no role...
...unclear how al-Qhatani's interrogation proceeded from that point and whether it is still continuing. Senior Pentagon officials told TIME that some of his most valuable confessions came not during the period covered in the log or as a result of any particular technique but when al-Qahtani was presented with evidence coughed up by others in detention, especially Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, the alleged mastermind of 9/11. The intelligence take was more cumulative than anything else, says a Pentagon official. Once al-Qahtani realized KSM was talking, the official speculates, al-Qahtani may have felt...
...Qahtani has never been charged with a crime, has no lawyer and remains in detention at Guantánamo. But his case is already the subject of several probes in Washington. A year ago, a senior FBI counterterrorism official wrote the Pentagon complaining of abuses that FBI agents said they witnessed at the naval base. The agents reported seeing or hearing of "highly aggressive interrogation techniques." The letter singles out the treatment of al-Qahtani in September and October of 2002--before the log obtained by TIME begins--saying a dog was used "in an aggressive manner to intimidate Detainee...
President Bush has said the U.S. would apply principals consistent with the Geneva Conventions to "unlawful combatants," subject to military necessity, at Guantánamo and elsewhere. The Pentagon argues that al-Qahtani's treatment was always "humane." But the Geneva Conventions forbid any "outrage on personal dignity." Eric Freedman, a constitutional-law expert and consultant in some of the growing number of federal lawsuits challenging U.S. treatment of these detainees, says, "If the techniques described in this interrogation log are not outrages to personal dignity, then words have no meaning." Then again, in the war on terrorism, the personal dignity...