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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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July 18th,
2009 - Official: US May Create Terror Interrogation Unit |
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Official: US May
Create Terror Interrogation Unit By Devlin Barrett Associated Press July 18, 2009 Washington - The Obama
administration is considering creating a special unit of professional
interrogators to handle high-value terror suspects, a government official
said Saturday. The recommendation is
expected from a government task force on interrogation methods that plans to
send some of its findings to the White House on Tuesday. The official said the panel
has concluded that the unit of intelligence and law enforcement agencies
should be created. Also, the official said the task force is unsure which
agencies should have a role, though the CIA and FBI are expected to be
important players. The official was not
authorized to publicly discuss the task force's work and spoke on condition
of anonymity. Ben LaBolt, a White House
spokesman, said President Barack Obama "has not reviewed the
recommendations of the task force." The spokesman declined to discuss
any findings. The recommendation to create
the unit was first reported in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. The official said the unit's
primary purpose would be intelligence-gathering, rather than building
criminal cases for prosecution. The structure would depart significantly from
such work under the Bush administration, when the CIA had the lead and sometimes
exclusive role in questioning al-Qaida suspects. The task force has not
reached a conclusion as to which agency should lead the unit or where it
should be based. Obama signed executive
orders when he took office in January calling for government task forces to
recommend future policies for interrogating and detaining suspected
terrorists. The deadline for those recommendations is Tuesday, but the work
will now take more time. Copyright © 2009 The
Associated Press. External link: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hk1PLQUhQ3uV9qoj8H7l9us7-bBAD99GVHAO0 |