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ACLU Praises Senate Panel For 'Unprecedented Review' Of CIA Interrogation Program
February 27, 2009 11:01 a.m. EST
Kris Alingod - AHN Contributor
Washington, D.C. (AHN) - The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Friday welcomed reports that the the Senate Intelligence Committee will begin a review of CIA detention and interrogation policies.
The Senate panel plans to examine classified documents and testimony to find out how terror suspects were interrogated and if such interrogation methods produced useful intelligence, the Washington Post said, citing congressional sources. The review will also determine if the CIA's actions against detainees were authorized, the New York Times said.
The reports come five weeks after President Barack Obama signed three executive orders closing Guantanamo, requiring that prisoner interrogations follow the Army Field Manual and the third ordering a review of options for handling future detainees.
The Army Field Manual bans waterboarding, a method of interrogation that simulates drowning and that critics consider torture.
"When President Obama issued executive orders to end the CIA's authority to detain individuals abroad and to end torture through government-wide adherence to the Army Field Manual's interrogation guidelines, America began the long and grueling process of putting the abusive policies of the Bush administration behind us," Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said in a statement.
"But we cannot forget how our nation got to this point. We need to examine the failed policies of the last eight years in order to learn from these mistakes," she added.
Despite his swift reversals and departures from his predecessor's policies, Obama has not voiced enthusiastic support for any probes of the previous administration. But during his speech before a joint session of Congress early this week, he declared, "I can stand here tonight and say without exception or equivocation that the United States of America does not torture."
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had said in a statement last September to the Senate Armed Services Committee that she led meetings as National Security Advisor in 2002 about the legality of letting the CIA use harsh interrogation techniques on al-Qaeda detainees. It was the first admission from a senior Bush administration official that such meetings were held.
The interrogation methods discussed in the meetings, held over a two-year period at the White House, were based on a Pentagon program called Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) to train American military personnel how survive aggressive interrogations. They included methods such as forced nudity, sleep deprivation and waterboarding.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney had staunchly defended waterboarding in his last months in office.
He told Politico in his first interview early February, "If it hadn't been for what we did - with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees... we would have been attacked again. I think there's a high probability of such an attempt... depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States."
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