That opened the door for an increased role for the FBI, which for the last year has deployed more agents and analysts overseas to work alongside the CIA, U.S. military and foreign governments.
The initiative would mean even broader incorporation of the FBI and Justice Department into global counter-terrorism operations. Many national security officials said it is a vindication of the FBI, which before Sept. 11 had played a leading role in international terrorism investigations.
FBI agents for years had used non-coercive interrogations to thwart attacks, win convictions of Al Qaeda operatives and gain an encyclopedic knowledge of how the terrorist network operates. But they withdrew from questioning important suspects after the bureau opposed the tactics being used by the CIA and military -- often by inexperienced civilian contractors.
The harsh interrogations provided such bad information that U.S. agents spent years chasing false leads around the world, former FBI agent Ali Soufan testified before Congress two weeks ago. "It was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against Al Qaeda."
Bush administration officials, however, have defended the tactics and rejected claims that the FBI's methods would have worked better.
"With many thousands of lives potentially in the balance, we did not think it made good sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time," former Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech this month.
The FBI itself has been criticized, as has the CIA, for failing to connect the dots before the Sept. 11 attacks. In hindsight, the evidence pointed to a clear and intensive Al Qaeda effort to launch attacks on U.S. soil.
Before Sept. 11, the FBI model of "informed" interrogation -- knowing everything about a suspect to get them talking -- was the preferred method of intelligence and military interrogators.
Even veteran CIA agents said that abandoning that approach after Sept. 11 was counterproductive. "To use a contractor to ask the questions and not let the FBI guy who's collected all the evidence and knows all of the intelligence about these guys, it makes no sense at all," said former CIA counter-terrorism case agent Robert Baer.
One intelligence official said the FBI's expanded role in the global fight against terrorism was a natural outgrowth of the Obama administration's new priorities. "It stands to reason because, by executive order, the CIA is out of the long-term detention business," the official said, referring to Obama's closing of overseas prisons.
