Congress eased interrogation rules under White House pressure
/At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a
legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions
on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence
officers, Congressional officials say. The defeat of the proposal
affects one of the most obscure arenas of the war on terrorism,
involving the Central Intelligence Agency's secret detention and
interrogation of top terror leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the
mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and about three dozen other senior
members of Al Qaeda and its offshoots. The Senate had approved the new
restrictions, by a 96-to-2 vote, as part of the intelligence reform
legislation. They would have explicitly extended to intelligence
officers a prohibition against torture or inhumane treatment, and would
have required the C.I.A. as well as the Pentagon to report to Congress
about the methods they were using. But in intense closed-door
negotiations, Congressional officials said, four senior members from
the House and Senate deleted the restrictions from the final bill after
the White House expressed opposition. In a letter to members of
Congress, sent in October and made available by the White House on
Wednesday in response to inquiries, Condoleezza Rice, the national
security adviser, expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds
that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they
are not now entitled under applicable law and policy." Earlier, in
objecting to a similar measure in a Senate version of the military
authorization bill, the Defense Department sent a letter to Congress
saying that the department "strongly urges the Senate against passing
new legislation concerning detention and interrogation in the war on
terrorism" because it is unnecessary. [more]
