By CHRIS STROHM, CongressDaily
President Obama's pick to head the CIA on Thursday found himself in the crossfire of political and policy differences between Democrats and Republicans on controversial intelligence matters.
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee peppered Leon Panetta during his confirmation hearing with questions on issues that have sharply divided lawmakers along party lines. That included whether intelligence officials should be prosecuted for conducting coercive interrogations of terrorism suspects and how practical it would be to close the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
A second round of the hearing is slated for today, as Republicans still have questions.
Panetta said he believes that waterboarding, or choking detainees with water, is torture. The U.S. government has admitted subjecting three detainees to waterboarding.
But Panetta said intelligence officials should not be investigated or prosecuted for conducting coercive interrogation practices if they were following what they believed to be legitimate legal opinions provided by the Justice Department during the Bush administration.
He added, however, that if officials deliberately violated the law, then "obviously in those limited cases there should be prosecutions."
Continue reading Panetta Faces Questions On Terror, Torture.
(Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
National Journal's Kirk Victor recently spoke with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who set out his concerns about the implementation of President Obama's order to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
Graham, who has served as a judge advocate and as a prosecutor, worries that closing the prison is the "easy" move, but the more difficult call is what to do with the approximately 245 prisoners there. Graham also voiced concern that the president will feel pressure from critics on the left who favor prosecuting George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others from the previous administration as war criminals for approving brutal interrogation techniques. Edited excerpts follow.
NJ: Have any of President Obama's actions in his first days in office surprised you?
Graham: The one thing I am somewhat concerned about is executive orders on Guantanamo Bay. I support closing it. I support making sure that we have a process that restores our image in the world, but I do not support a plan that would criminalize the war. I think we can find a system, a rule of law called the Law of Armed Conflict, to deal with these detainees when they are brought to the United States. The point I am trying to make is that we are at war and the Law of Armed Conflict should apply, not domestic criminal law. I don't know where this is going to take us, but I am hopeful they will not create a system that restricts our ability to defend ourselves and not advance our moral standing at all.
NJ: What do you do with some of these prisoners who may not be prosecutable but are very dangerous?
Graham: That's the point. Some of them can be tried as war criminals, like [Khalid] Sheikh Mohammed. I think you try them in the military.... Some will be repatriated to third countries. Probably half of them are going to be kept in jail because they are part of al-Qaida. The evidence is not such you would submit [their cases] to a criminal court because of the sensitive nature of it, but we know they are part of the al-Qaida network and a judge agrees with the military that they are part of al-Qaida.You don't let those people go. You have a review process that keeps them in jail, constantly reviews their cases until they are no longer a threat. Sixty-one people have gone back to the fight after being released already.... Let me tell you -- closing Guantanamo Bay and moving them is the easy part. What to do with them is the hard part. We're talking about people who would kill us if they could.
NJ: Are you worried that Obama might be persuaded by critics on the left who want to pursue officials in the Bush administration who may have countenanced torture?
Graham: Yes, I am worried that the radical left who thinks that everybody at Guantanamo Bay is a victim and that Dick Cheney and George Bush are war criminals will have more sway [with the administration] than they deserve. But so far so good. I met with the administration on this issue.
NJ: Can President Obama withstand the pressure from the left on this issue?
Graham: This will be a good test. This is about a system that will render justice within our values, recognizing that we are at war. This is about a fresh start. If we're talking about prosecuting people because of political vendettas, then I think President Obama will have failed the test. If there is some competent evidence out there, somewhere, then that will be different, but this idea that policy disagreements lead to criminal [prosecution] will destroy our democracy. And I don't believe he is inclined to do that.
By CORINE HEGLAND
(Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
With a few strokes of the pen Thursday morning, President Obama toppled most of his predecessor's dilapidated framework for handling prisoners from the war on terrorism. The final vestiges of "enhanced" interrogations and secret prisons, both already shrunk from their post-9/11 heyday by court order and congressional action, were swept away by an executive order putting the entire U.S. government under the interrogation standards of the U.S. Army Field Manual and prohibiting the CIA from operating detention facilities.
"It is a blanket repudiation of the Bush approach," said Elisa Massimino, the CEO and executive director of Human Rights First. She pointed in particular to the order's effective overruling of all legal advice on interrogations issued between Sept. 11, 2001, and Jan. 29, 2009, saying it "wipes away all of the barnacles that the Bush administration had accumulated over the legal standards."
A second executive order ensures that the last 250 or so detainees in Guantanamo Bay, all that remains of the approximately 770 prisoners who have been there since January 2002, will depart the island within the next 12 months. After individual case reviews, some of the detainees will go home; some, who face the possibility of torture at home, will settle in third countries; some will be prosecuted, and some may well continue their indefinite detention as enemy combatants in prisons on the soil of the continental United States.
"We are not," Obama said as he signed the orders amidst beaming retired military officers, "going to continue with a false choice between our safety and our ideals."
The slew of orders leaves quite a few questions unanswered: What, for example, will happen to prisoners like Mohammed al-Qahtani, whose torture at American hands makes prosecution difficult, but whose alleged role in the 9/11 hijacking makes his release dangerous? What about people like the Uighurs, who pose no security risk but face almost-certain persecution if they are returned to China? Or to the detainees without al-Qaeda connections whose low potential risk could be mitigated by rehabilitation and surveillance, if their countries had programs for such things?
On the other hand, none of the questions raised by Obama's executive orders are new. Over the past two years, they were all fiercely debated inside the Bush administration, which wanted to close Guantanamo, too. Obama's signatures Thursday morning simply commit him to mustering the political will necessary to find the solutions that eluded Bush.
His initial steps toward finding that solution garnered swift support from an unlikely source later that day as his former White House rival, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., issued a joint statement with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. "Numerous difficult issues remain," the Republican pair noted, but "we support President Obama's decision to close the prison at Guantanamo, reaffirm America's adherence to the Geneva Conventions and begin a process that will, we hope, lead to the resolution of all cases of Guantanamo detainees."
CORRECTION: The original version of this post misstated the date of Obama's executive orders.
President Obama this morning took the first step toward fulfilling his campaign pledge to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison, signing three executive orders and a memorandum to close the facility, alter Bush-era interrogation guidelines and appoint an interagency task force to advise the White House on what to with detainees. The president signed the order surrounded by Vice President Joe Biden and no fewer than 16 retired generals and admirals.
In an award-winning package of stories, National Journal investigated how some Guantanamo detainees had come to be there and what would be required to close the prison, tracing the story of Farouq Ali Ahmed, a young Yemeni man handed over to U.S. intelligence by Pakistan.
Another cover story, "Guantanamo, The Day After," examined the legal and practical problems involved in shutting down the prison.
Check back later this afternoon for more on Obama's next steps on Guantanamo.
Complete text of the release is available after the jump.
Continue reading Obama Signs Orders To Close Guantanamo, Change Interrogation Tactics.
By AMY HARDER
As Barack Obama reportedly considers closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, a report [PDF] released today by the University of California, Berkeley, in association with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, urges the president-elect to appoint a commission charged with examining the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, Afghanistan and other locations since Sept. 11.
Researchers interviewed more than 60 former detainees and 50 "key informants," such as government officials and attorneys representing the detainees. The report found "serious flaws" in the system President Bush set up to detain, interrogate and release suspected members of the Taliban and al-Qaida.
In a conference call today with reporters, the report's authors stressed that setting up a commission -- similar to the one that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 -- should be the first step for the Obama administration. Laurel Fletcher, director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law, emphasized the global influence this commission could have.
Establishing the commission right away would "create a very strong symbolic message to the American public and to our international community that the Obama administration is going to turn the page on this dark chapter and is willing to take a critical look at the last eight years about what went wrong and what went right," Fletcher said.
Fletcher, along with Eric Stover, director of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center, and Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, insisted that the camp should be closed immediately, but that closing it is not enough. "There's a larger political question here," Warren said. "It's important that the Obama administration look to the findings in this report to help guide its policy on what the next steps are."
Stover said the commission would include a wide range of experts on subjects such as constitutional and military law, public health and medicine. Who those experts should be, and how many of them should be selected, is for the Obama administration to decide, Stover said.
The group also wholeheartedly supports employing executive orders to end the use of torture in interrogation practices, a step that Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., who chairs the Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, is advocating.
