Interrogation

For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has argued that the worth of the Bush administration's aggressive interrogation program was proved in two secret CIA memos that he urged be released. But those documents, and others that were finally unsealed Monday, are at best inconclusive -- attesting that captured terrorism suspects provided crucial intelligence on Al Qaeda and its plans, but offering little to support the argument that harsh or abusive methods played a key role.

When Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. announced in 2009 that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other accused Sept. 11 conspirators would be tried in a civilian federal court, we said that his decision "makes an eloquent statement about the Obama administration's determination to avenge the victims of terrorism within the rule of law. " But the five never made it to civilian court; instead, thanks to domestic politics, they are being tried for murder and...

Former Vice President Dick Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior members of Congress about controversial interrogation programs, part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used against detainees.

Last week, my colleagues and I did something defense attorneys rarely do: We asked the government to file charges against our client. And because it seems unlikely the case will ever make it to an American courtroom, we have asked that it be heard in the nation's flawed military commission system. Abu Zubaydah, our client, was an early poster child for the Bush administration's torture regime. He was the first prisoner held in a secret "black site" and the first to be tortured using "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

A federal judge who provided the Bush administration with legal advice on what constitutes torture declined to respond Thursday to a letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman calling on him to explain his actions to the American public. Judge Jay S. Bybee, of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, was head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel when he described the intensity of pain that could legally be inflicted.

In the open desert outside Baiji, Iraq, a naked man with a thick black beard crouched in the dust of a railroad culvert at twilight. Hours before, he had been mumbling and praying in Arabic. Now he spoke few words. Army 1st Lt. Michael Behenna stood over him in the grainy darkness, his Glock pistol racked and pointed down at him. "If you don't talk, I will kill you," Behenna said. The night was warm and ragged from the dust storm that had turned the afternoon an eerie ocher.

A British TV channel is preparing "Guantanamo Guidebook," a show that will test the effectiveness of interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation that freed inmates say were used by the U.S. military at its camp in Cuba. Channel Four, which brought the world the reality TV hit "Big Brother," will film seven British volunteers as they are subjected to extreme temperatures and mild physical contact while being kept awake for long periods.

Re "Secret Service Interrogation of 2 Students Sparks Furor," May 13: "Anytime the issue of a threat to the president of the United States comes up, the Secret Service has to look into it." So says John Gill, a special agent with the Secret Service in Washington. But does he include intimidation and lying to high school sophomores as part of "looking into it"? Count the constitutional violations here. I wonder how seriously he would look into it if his children had been treated that way and then told, "You don't have any ... rights, we own you," along with the use of profanity, while preventing them from having an attorney present.

Ron Hutchinson, whose "Rat in the Skull" opens Friday at Taper, Too, is a tall shy man with an improbable English accent delivered in a voice so soft as to be nearly undetectable. He stands and walks and gestures in angular spasms, like Jacques Tati's M. Hulot, an ambulatory Cubist drawing. The effect would be comical were it not for his spectral face and manner. He looks like someone who has just stepped away from a horrible auto accident.

In a basement downtown, the librarians are being interrogated. On most days, they work in middle schools and high schools operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District, fielding student queries about American history and Greek mythology, and retrieving copies of vampire novels. But this week, you'll find them in a makeshift LAUSD courtroom set up on the bare concrete floor of a building on East 9th Street. Several sit in plastic chairs, watching from an improvised gallery as their fellow librarians are questioned.

The tale told by former Los Angeles Times reporters Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer in "The Hunt for KSM," the story of the pursuit, capture and interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of9/11, at times so resembles something straight out of "24" or the Bourne movies that the authors have to keep reminding the reader that this is for real. On the one hand, "The Hunt for KSM" is a flat-out thriller. On the other, it lays out aspects of our factual contemporary world that are far more ambiguous, internecine and dangerous than anything Hollywood dare contemplate.

A UC Berkeley law professor who helped the Bush administration create policies to justify harsh interrogation techniques and prolonged detention may not be sued by an American citizen detained under those conditions, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Jose Padilla, an American citizen arrested in 2002 and declared an "enemy combatant," may not hold professor John Yoo liable for "gross physical and psychological abuse" that Padilla said he suffered during more than three years of military detention.

Mistakes were made, but on balance waterboarding of terrorism suspects made the world safer. That is the conclusion of Jose Rodriguez, a key CIA architect of the harsh measures used to elicit intelligence from prisoners snatched from the streets of foreign countries and flown to a globe-spanning network of secret prisons for interrogation. But in Europe, where leaders of developing democracies like Poland, Lithuania and Romania allowed the CIA to conduct counter-terrorism activities the Council of Europe defines as torture, Rodriguez's position is unlikely to dampen the quest for accountability for those who welcomed U.S. agents.

Human rights activists are pressing for the public release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's post-Sept. 11 detention and "enhanced interrogation" practices, hoping that it will answer the question once and for all of whether torture played a role in locating Osama bin Laden. Whatever the document might say about that question, releasing it would add to public knowledge about what President Obama rightly has called a "dark and painful chapter in our history. " Next week, almost a year to the day after the killing of Bin Laden, Jose Rodriguez, the former director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, will publish a book titled "Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.

Al Deen occasionally let out a goofy, drawn-out laugh when he recalled some of the absurdities he had witnessed during his three months of torture and humiliation in Syria's brutal prisons. Like the blind man accused of being a sniper. The sightless prisoner was subjected to a month of interrogation and beatings, Al Deen said, before intelligence officers finally concluded that he was in fact blind and released him. But he grimaced when he talked about the teenager from the southern province of Dara who had been shot three times, in his shoulder, chest and hand, and was given only a sling — no treatment or pain medication.

When Emily Watson heard she was being sent a script for "Appropriate Adult," she was wary. The made-for-TV movie, which premieres Saturday on Sundance Channel, depicts the real-life relationship between British serial killer Fred West and Janet Leach, a social worker in training who was asked to sit in on police interrogations as an "appropriate adult," a role in the United Kingdom legal system meant to safeguard the rights of young people and vulnerable adults...

The CIA staged a mock execution and brandished weapons, including a gun and a power drill, during interrogation sessions with detainees the agency was desperate to persuade to talk, according to a long-secret internal CIA report expected to be released Monday. The episodes are part of a catalog of alleged abuses -- a 2004 report by the CIA's inspector general -- that has prompted U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. to consider appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate cases in which the CIA strayed beyond its interrogation authorities.

Former Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey is taking issue with Sen. John McCain's characterization of his account of whether information from detainees who were subjected to harsh techniques helped lead to Osama bin Laden. "Sen. McCain described as 'false' my statement that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed broke under harsh interrogation that included waterboarding and disclosed a torrent of information that included the nickname of Osama bin Laden's courier" -- Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti -- Mukasey said in a statement.

The ACLU of Southern California filed suit Thursday against Glendale Unified administrators and three law enforcement agencies, alleging that about 55 Latino high school students were illegally detained, searched and interrogated in what the civil rights organization called "a textbook case of racial profiling. " The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleges that the Hoover High School students were rounded up at lunch on Sept. 24, 2010, detained for at least an hour in two classrooms and intimidated and frisked by Glendale and Los Angeles police officers.

A case to be argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday poses the question of whether a prisoner must be advised of his rights when he is interrogated inside prison walls. The court should answer yes and close an unconscionable loophole in the Miranda rule. Randall Lee Fields was in jail for disorderly conduct when he was taken by a corrections officer to a locked conference room. He was then questioned about his relationship with a man named Travis Bice, whom he had met when Bice was a minor.