Dem denies ’02 knowledge of waterboarding

WASHINGTON – Congressional Republicans are rushing to defend the CIA after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the spy agency of misleading her and other lawmakers about its use of waterboarding during the Bush administration.

The issue of what did the speaker know about the interrogation method — and when did she know it — has deepened the fault lines between the two political parties. Pelosi was unequivocal about a CIA briefing she received in the fall of 2002.

“We were told that waterboarding was not being used,” the speaker said Thursday. “That’s the only mention, that they were not using it. And we now know that earlier they were.” She suggested the CIA release the briefing material.

Pelosi vehemently disputed Republican charges that she was complicit in the use of waterboarding, and she suggested the GOP was trying to shift the focus of public attention away from the Bush administration’s use of techniques that she and President Barack Obama have described as torture.

On Friday, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee contradicted Pelosi’s claims and questioned her criticism of the nation’s spy operations.

“I think it’s a tragedy that we are seeing this massive attack on our intelligence community,” Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show.

Bond said he reviewed the CIA’s material and it was clear that Pelosi had been informed about the enhanced interrogation method, although Bond said he was not with Pelosi when the spy agency briefed her.

The CIA was widely criticized for its intelligence gathering prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and faced questions about its information on suspected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the start of the war in March 2003. The weapons were never found.

CIA spokesman George Little said it is not the policy of the agency to mislead Congress, although he refused to answer directly questions about Pelosi’s accusation.

Pelosi has been the target of a campaign orchestrated in recent days by the House Republican leadership, which is eager to assign Democrats partial responsibility for the use of waterboarding — a kind of simulated drowning — in the Bush administration.

GOP officials secured the release of an unclassified chart by the CIA that describes a total of 40 briefings for lawmakers over a period of several years. Pelosi’s name appears once, as having attended a session on Sept. 4, 2002, when she was the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Former Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., who at the time was the chairman of the committee and later became CIA director, also was present.

The notation says the briefing was on “enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah … and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed.”

Little, responding to Pelosi for the CIA, said the chart “is true to the language in the agency’s records.” But he did not say whether the information was accurate.

Instead, he pointed to a recent letter from CIA Director Leon Panetta to lawmakers saying it would be up to Congress to determine whether notes made by agency personnel at the time they briefed lawmakers were accurate.

Coincidentally, Pelosi spoke as the CIA rejected former Vice President Dick Cheney’s request to release secret memos judging whether waterboarding and other harsh techniques had succeeded in securing valuable intelligence information.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the request was turned down because the documents are the subject of pending litigation, which makes them not subject to declassification.

WASHINGTON – Under strong attack from Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA and Bush administration of misleading her about waterboarding detainees in the war on terror and sharply rebutted claims she was complicit in its use.

“To the contrary . . . we were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used,” she told reporters, referring to a formal CIA briefing she received in the fall of 2002.

Pelosi said she subsequently learned that other lawmakers were told several months later by the CIA about the use of waterboarding.

“I wasn’t briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it,” she said.

The House’s top Democrat made her comments at a news conference where she was peppered with questions about her knowledge of a technique she and others have called torture. Republicans have insisted in recent weeks that she and other Democrats knew waterboarding was in use, but made no attempt to protest.

Pelosi renewed her call for a so-called truth commission to investigate the events in the Bush administration that led to the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques. While President Barack Obama has banned waterboarding, calling it torture, he has been notably cool toward an independent inquiry that might distract attention from his domestic agenda.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., also has expressed opposition, as have congressional Republicans.

Pelosi was particularly harsh in describing the CIA.

“They mislead us all the time,” she said. And when a reporter asked whether the agency lied, she did not disagree.

She also suggested that the current Republican criticism marked an attempt to divert attention from the Bush administration’s actions.

“They misrepresented every step of the way, and they don’t want that focus on them, so they try to turn the focus on us,” she said.

Pelosi contended that Democrats did what they could to stop the use of waterboarding. The senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, who received the 2003 briefing on the practice, sent the CIA a formal letter of protest, she said.

But Pelosi defended her own lack of action on the issue, saying her focus at the time was on wresting congressional control from Republicans so her party could change course.

“No letter could change the policy. It was clear we had to change the leadership in Congress and in the White House. That was my job – the Congress part,” Pelosi said.

Pat Tillman

WASHINGTON — The parents of slain Army Ranger and NFL star Pat Tillman voiced concerns Tuesday that the general who played a role in mischaracterizing his death could be put in charge of military operations in Afghanistan.

In a brief interview with The Associated Press, Pat Tillman Sr. accused Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal of covering up the circumstances of the 2004 slaying.

“I do believe that guy participated in a falsified homicide investigation,” Pat Tillman Sr. said.

Separately, Mary Tillman called it “imperative” that McChrystal’s record be carefully considered before he is confirmed.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Defense Secretary Robert Gates has complete confidence in McChrystal, whom he hopes can be confirmed by the Senate before month’s end.

“We feel terrible for what the Tillman family went through, but this matter has been investigated thoroughly by the Pentagon, by the Congress, by outside experts, and all of them have come to the same conclusion: that there was no wrongdoing by Gen. McChrystal,” Morrell said.

Aides to the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which will consider the nomination, said they were unaware of any opposition to McChrystal.

McChrystal, a former “black ops” special forces chief credited with nabbing one of the most-wanted fugitives in Iraq, was tapped Monday to lead U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. If confirmed by the Senate, he would replace Gen. David McKiernan, who was fired in an unusual wartime shake-up.

In April 2004, McChrystal approved paperwork awarding Tillman a Silver Star after he was killed by enemy fire — even though he suspected the Ranger had died by fratricide, according to Pentagon testimony later obtained by the AP.

The testimony showed that McChrystal sent a memo to top generals imploring “our nation’s leaders,” specifically the president, to avoid cribbing the “devastating enemy fire” explanation from the award citation for their speeches. In 2007, the Army overruled a Pentagon recommendation that McChrystal be held accountable for his “misleading” actions.

In a book published last year, Mary Tillman accused McChrystal of helping create the false story line that she said “diminished Pat’s true actions.”

Her one-sentence e-mail to the AP on Tuesday said: “It is imperative that Lt. General McChrystal be scrutinized carefully during the Senate hearings.”

Last year, however, the Senate unanimously approved promoting McChrystal from a two-star general to a three-star general as director of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.

Similarly, this time around, Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., “does not foresee any problems with Gen. McChrystal’s confirmation” with the committee, a Levin aide said Tuesday.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the committee’s top Republican, backs the decision to change leadership in Afghanistan and will support McChrystal’s nomination, said Brooke Buchanan, a McCain spokeswoman.

McCain was highly critical of the Army’s handling of the Tillman investigation, and in April 2007 he called the service’s actions “inexcusable and unconscionable.”

A new poll from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 62 percent of white evangelical Protestants surveyed believe that torture is often or sometimes justified. The poll also found that 44 percent of all regular churchgoers – regardless of race or denomination – believe that torture is often or sometimes justified.

David Gushee, a Baptist ethicist at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., said the poll is a sign of moral failure. He believes the war on terror has made Christians ignore the Bible.

Jesus, he said, told his followers to love their enemies. That makes torture unacceptable.

“It’s almost like we’ve got post-traumatic moral syndrome,” Gushee said. “We are giving the terrorists too much power if we say that they are so scary, we have to set aside 200 years of U.S. law to defeat them.”

For years, Gushee and other leaders of the National Campaign Against Torture have tried to change the United States policy on torture and interrogation. They were pleased with President Barack Obama’s executive order banning waterboarding and other interrogation techniques.

But that’s not enough, said Linda Gustitus, president of the campaign. She wants churchgoers and other citizens to reject torture completely.

“We cannot be confident that the United States will never use torture again unless the American people, including people of faith, believe it is wrong to do so – under all circumstances,” Gustitus said.

Americans have traditionally taken that approach. During the Revolutionary War, George Washington warned his soldiers not to mistreat prisoners.

“Treat them with humanity,” he wrote, “and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren who have fallen into their hands.”

Gushee said that aside from not being Christian-like, torture is ineffective.

“People being tortured are in pain and will lie to stop the torture,” he said.

In most cases, he said, torture is used to intimidate or punish prisoners, not gain useful information.

That should concern Christians in the United States, he said, because many of their fellow believers are tortured for their faith around the world. And totalitarian governments use torture to wipe out any political dissent.

“Torture means to crush a human body and a human spirit,” he said.

Politics skew results?

So, why do so many evangelicals support torture?

Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Conventions, said one reason is theological. Conservative Christians tend to have a pessimistic view of human nature. They are willing to justify torture if it can save lives.

“They believe in the innate sinfulness of human beings,” he said. “So they believe that sometimes you have to choose between doing a greater evil and a lesser evil.”

Political affiliation also plays a role. Pew researchers found that 64 percent of Republicans said that torture is often or sometimes justified, as opposed to 36 percent of Democrats.

Since evangelicals and regular churchgoers are more likely to be Republicans, that may skew the results.

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration may revamp and restart the Bush-era military trial system for suspected terrorists as it struggles to determine the fate of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and fulfill a pledge to close the prison by January.

The move would further delay terrorism trials and, coupled with recent comments by U.S. military and legal officials, amounts to a public admission by President Obama’s team that delivering on that promise is easier said than done.

Almost immediately after taking office, Obama suspended the tribunal system and ordered a 120-day review of the cases against the 241 men being held at the Navy prison in Cuba. That review was supposed to end May 20. But two U.S. officials said Saturday the administration wants a three-month extension.

The delay means that legal action on the detainees’ cases would continue to be frozen. Neither of the U.S. officials was authorized to discuss the delay publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

One official said the Obama administration planned to use the extra time to ask Congress to tweak the existing military tribunals system that was created for the detainees. Critics of former President George W. Bush, who pushed Congress to create it, have said the system violated U.S. law because it limits the detainees’ legal rights.

Now, faced with looming deadlines and few answers for where to transfer the detainees, the Obama administration may keep the tribunal system – with a few changes.

Asked at a Senate hearing last week if the administration would abandon the Guantanamo system, Defense Secretary Robert Gates answered: “Not at all.”

“The commissions are very much still on the table,” Gates said, adding that nine Guantanamo detainees are already being tried in military tribunals.

Gates also alluded to the administration’s likely request for Congress to tweak the law that created the Guantanamo legal system.

“Should there be any changes to the military commission law, if the decision is made to retain the military commissions?” he asked rhetorically.

Attorney General Eric Holder went further at a recent House hearing, saying the military commissions still could be used but “would be different from those that were previously in place.”

LONDON – The United States is “relatively close” to making decisions on what to do with an initial group of Guantanamo Bay detainees, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday.

Holder spoke to The Associated Press during a flight to London, the first of several stops where he will visit with European leaders to discuss terrorism, drugs and cyber-crime.

The attorney general did not say how much longer he thought it would take to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba. Before officials can meet President Obama’s January deadline, the U.S. must first decide which detainees to put on trial and which to release to the U.S. or other countries.

Holder said the first step is to decide how many detainees will be set free. “We’re doing these all on a rolling basis,” he said. “I think we’re probably relatively close to making some calls.”

The attorney general has called the Guantanamo work the toughest part of his job.

After eight years in which the previous Bush administration alienated European nations over issues like the Iraq war and Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration is trying to strengthen those ties.

“I don’t think they’re looking for as much of American leadership as a partnership,” Holder said.

After arriving in London on Sunday night, the attorney general and his staffers took a tour of the Tower of London – home of The Bloody Tower, a historic torture site.

The tower visit is standard fare for tourists, but one loaded with extra meaning for Holder, who listened quietly to tales of torture, execution and palace intrigue.

The Obama administration is edging toward taking some Guantanamo prisoners to the U.S., most likely to Virginia. They are Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs, and their supporters say they never should have been at Guantanamo in the first place.

Republicans in Congress say Guantanamo should remain in operation and are mobilizing to fight the release of detainees into the United States.

Against that backdrop, Holder hoped to reassure skeptical Europeans without generating too much public opposition back home. After meetings in London and Prague, the attorney general is to give a speech Wednesday night in Berlin about Guantanamo.

ISLAMABAD – Dozens of militants armed with guns and gasoline bombs attacked a truck terminal in northwestern Pakistan on Thursday and burned five tanker trucks carrying fuel to NATO troops in Afghanistan, police said.

NATO and U.S. commanders are seeking alternative transport routes into landlocked Afghanistan amid mounting assaults on the critical main supply line through Pakistan.

Militants attacked the truck depot near the city of Peshawar before dawn, hurling gasoline bombs which set fire to the five tankers, said Abdul Khan, a local police official.

Security guards fled and the assailants made their escape before police arrived, Khan said. Several truckers drove their vehicles out of the terminal to save them from the flames, which were later doused by firefighters, he said.

NATO and the U.S. military insist that their losses on the transport route remain minimal and have had no impact on their expanding operations in Afghanistan. Most of the fuel for U.S. troops in Afghanistan comes from Central Asia.

However, a series of attacks on terminals as well as on convoys heading through the nearby Khyber Pass into Afghanistan have contributed to concern that militants could paralyze or even seize control of northwestern Pakistan.

The government faces stiff criticism at home and abroad for striking a peace deal that includes the introduction of Islamic law in the nearby Swat Valley, from where Taliban militants appear to be expanding their authority.

Officials and witnesses said Wednesday that Taliban gunmen were mounting patrols, broadcasting sermons and spreading fear in the Buner district, just south of Swat and only 60 miles (100 kilometers) from Islamabad.

President Asif Ali Zardari approved the peace pact last week in hopes of calming Swat, where some two years of clashes between the Taliban and security forces have killed hundreds and displaced up to a third of the valley’s 1.5 million residents.

Critics, including in Washington, have warned that Swat could become a base for allies of al-Qaida — and might be the first domino in nuclear-armed Pakistan to fall to the Taliban.

Supporters of the deal say it will allow the government to marginalize hard-liners and gradually reassert control by taking away the militants’ rallying cry for Islamic law.

Sen. Levin: Abuse was systematic

WASHINGTON — The brutal treatment of prisoners by the military at Guantanamo Bay, Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and Afghanistan was systematic and a direct result of the CIA’s early use of harsh interrogation tactics, according to a Senate report.

The 232-page report released Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee came less than a week after President Barack Obama released the Aug. 1, 2002 memo that justified the use of severe methods by the CIA.

The timeline laid out in the report shows, however, that military and CIA officers were being trained how to conduct coercive interrogations for as much as eight months before receiving the Justice Department green light. The CIA had started conducting severe interrogations in the spring of 2002.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the committee’s chairman, said the report shows that abuse of prisoners was sweeping and not, as former Bush administration defense official Paul Wolfowitz once said, the result of “a few bad apples.” As the No. 2 defense official, Wolfowitz was a major architect of the Iraq war.

“Authorizations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment,” Levin said.

The Senate investigation has been in a Pentagon security review since Nov. 21, 2008. Its findings were drawn from more than 70 interviews and 200,000 pages of classified and unclassified documents.

“In my judgment,” Levin said, “the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan to low-ranking soldiers.”

According to the report, the road to the abuses began in December 2001, just three months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The Pentagon’s general counsel office reached out that month to a military agency that trains American personnel in how to endure enemy interrogations.

The legal office wanted information about how the training unit, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, conducted mock interrogations and detention operations. The agency trains U.S. armed forces personnel to endure abusive treatment similar to methods used by North Korean, Communist Chinese and Vietcong interrogators.

In February 2002, President George W. Bush declared that the United States would not extend full Geneva Convention protections to al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners. He replaced that 60-year-old standard governing the treatment of prisoners with a new, untested guideline vaguely requiring only “humane treatment.”

A month later, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah, an alleged top al-Qaida organizer in Pakistan. Zubaydah proved resistant to traditional interrogation techniques. During the first half of 2002, CIA interrogators began to subject Zubaydah to waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning taught by survival school trainers to CIA personnel sometime in the first half of 2002.

In July 2002, responding to a follow-up from the Pentagon general counsel’s office, JPRA officials detailed their methods, but warned that harsh physical techniques could backfire by making prisoners more resistant. They also cautioned about the reliability of information gleaned from the severe methods and warned that the public and political backlash could be “intolerable.”

“A subject in extreme pain may provide an answer, any answer or many answers in order to get the pain to stop,” the training officials said in their memo.

Less than a week later, the Justice Department issued two legal opinions that sanctioned the CIA’s harsh interrogation program. The memos, one of which remained classified top secret until it was released by the Obama administration last week, appeared to draw deeply on the survival school data to show that the CIA’s methods would not cross the line into torture, which was also newly defined.

The opinion concluded that the harsh interrogation methods would be acceptable for use on terror detainees because the same techniques did not cause severe physical or mental pain to U.S. military students who were tested in the government’s carefully controlled training program.

Several people from the survival program objected to the use of their mock interrogations in battlefield settings. In an October 2002 e-mail, a senior Army psychologist told personnel at Guantanamo Bay that the methods are inherently dangerous and students are sometimes injured, even in a controlled setting.

“The risk with real detainees is increased exponentially,” he said.

Nevertheless, for the next two years, the CIA and military officials received interrogation training and direct interrogation support from JPRA trainers.

By October 2002, military officials in the Pentagon and at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base had decided they needed tougher interrogations at the island prison. They crafted a plan that adopted some of the survival school methods — stress positions, food deprivation, shaving heads and beards, stripping prisoners naked, hooding them, exposing prisoners to extremes of heat and cold, and slamming them up against walls.

In December, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved 15 of those methods.

A month later, Rumsfeld’s approvals for Guantanamo interrogations were put on hold while the matter underwent review inside the Pentagon. The delay was caused in large part because of the strenuous objections of the military services’ top lawyers.

But according to the Senate report, the Rumsfeld memo had already made its way into the hands of special operations units based in Afghanistan. Military lawyers there saw the memo as permission to use the ‘advanced techniques’ on potential high-value prisoners. The Guantanamo methods were not supposed to be used at the island jail — but they were now deemed fair game in Afghanistan.

By February 2003, a special military unit preparing for the Iraq invasion obtained a copy of the Afghanistan interrogation policy that incorporated the techniques approved by Rumsfeld for Guantanamo. They changed the letterhead and adopted it wholesale for their own use in Iraq.

Subsequently, the interrogation officer in charge of Abu Ghraib obtained a copy of the special military unit’s Iraq interrogation policy. She made minor changes — adding sensory deprivation and constraining sleep deprivation to 72 hours at a time — and submitted it through her chain of command.

Many of the procedures were adopted Iraq-wide in a memo issued in September 2003 by the Iraq war commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

According to the Senate report, lawyers for U.S. Central Command raised immediate concerns that the policy violated the Geneva Conventions, which applied to Iraq.

It would be a month before the policy was brought back under Geneva Convention guidelines. Despite the revision, the abuses at Abu Ghraib had already began.

WASHINGTON — Widening an explosive debate on torture, President Barack Obama on Tuesday opened the possibility of prosecution for Bush-era lawyers who authorized brutal interrogation of terror suspects and suggested Congress might order a full investigation.

Less than a week after declaring it was time for the nation to move on rather than “laying blame for the past,” Obama found himself describing what might be done next to investigate what he called the loss of “our moral bearings.”

His comments all but ensured that the vexing issue off detainee interrogation during the Bush administration will live on well into the new president’s term. Obama, who severely criticized the harsh techniques during the campaign, is feeling pressure from his party’s liberal wing to come down hard on the subject. At the same time, Republicans including former Vice President Dick Cheney are insisting the methods helped protect the nation and are assailing Obama for revealing Justice Department memos detailing them.

Answering a reporter’s question Tuesday, Obama said it would be up to his attorney general to determine whether “those who formulated those legal decisions” behind the interrogation methods should be prosecuted. The methods, described in Bush-era memos Obama released Thursday, included such grim and demeaning tactics as slamming detainees against walls and subjecting them to simulated drowning.

He said anew that CIA operatives who did the interrogating should not be charged with crimes because they thought they were following the law.

“I think there are a host of very complicated issues involved here,” the president said. “As a general deal, I think that we should be looking forward and not backwards. I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively, and it hampers our ability to carry out national security operations.”

Still, he suggested that Congress might set up a bipartisan review, outside its typical hearings, if it wants a “further accounting” of what happened during the period when the interrogation methods were authorized. His press secretary later said the independent Sept. 11 commission, which investigated and then reported on the terror attacks of 2001, might be a model.

The harsher methods were authorized to gain information after the 2001 attacks.

The three men facing the most scrutiny are former Justice Department officials Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury. Bybee is currently a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Yoo is a professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

It might be argued that the officials were simply doing their jobs, providing legal advice for the Bush administration. However, John Strait, a law professor at Seattle University said, “I think there are a slew of potential charges.”

Those could include conspiracy to commit felonies, including torture, he suggested.

Bybee also could face impeachment in Congress if lawmakers were so inclined.

Meanwhile, a separate investigation into the memos is being conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which usually limits itself to examining the ethical behavior of employees but whose work in rare cases leads to criminal investigations.

Over the past weekend, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said in a television interview the administration did not support prosecutions for “those who devised policy.” White House aides say he was referring to CIA superiors who ordered the interrogations, not the Justice Department officials who wrote the legal memos allowing them.

Yet it was unclear exactly whom Obama meant in opening the door to potential prosecutions of those who “formulated the legal decisions.” Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked if the president meant the lawyers who declared the interrogation methods legal, or the policymakers who ordered, them or both.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Gibbs said during a briefing in which he was peppered with questions about the president’s words. Later, he added: “The parsing of some of this is better done through a filter of the rule of law and done at the Justice Department and not done here at the White House.”

When pressed about any confusion stemming from his comments and Emanuel’s, Gibbs said: “Take what the president said, as I’m informed he got more votes than either of the two of us.”

A number of Republicans, including former Vice President Cheney and former top intelligence officials, say Obama has undermined national security with his release of the memos on the matter. On the other side, some Democratic lawmakers, human rights groups and liberal advocates want to see punishment for those involved in sanctioning brutal interrogations — the kind they say amount to torture and have damaged U.S. standing around the world.

“Certainly, this is an attempt not just to stake a ground between the left and the right, but also to navigate through something that he would prefer not be there as an ongoing issue,” said Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

“He’s walking the tightrope,” Ornstein added. “You don’t want to give a blanket, `everything’s OK, we’re only moving forward.’ And you don’t want a president making a decision that it is a legal decision.”

The chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary committees said Tuesday they want to move ahead with previously proposed, independent commissions to examine Bush’s national security policies.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who has referred to his proposed panel as a “Truth Commission,” said, “I agree with President Obama: An examination into these Bush-Cheney era national security policies must be nonpartisan. … Unfortunately, Republicans have shown no interest in a nonpartisan review.”

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has proposed separate hearings by his committee in addition to an independent commission.

Obama said he was not proposing that another investigation be launched, but if it happens it should be done in a way that does not “provide one side or another political advantage but rather is being done in order to learn some lessons so that we move forward in an effective way.”

———

CIA memos

Last week, Obama’s Justice Department published previously classified memos that described the Bush administration’s legal justification for CIA interrogation techniques that included methods criticized as torture. Republican lawmakers and former CIA chiefs have criticized the release of the memos, contending that revealing the limits of interrogation techniques will hamper the effectiveness of interrogators.

The memos detailed the use of waterboarding — a form of simulated drowning that Attorney General Eric Holder has denounced as torture — as well as sleep deprivation, isolation and physical violence.

According to the declassified memos, waterboarding was used on alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003. Suspected al-Qaida logistics chief Abu Zubaydah was subjected to the treatment 83 times in August 2002.

Seeking to move beyond what he calls a “a dark and painful chapter in our history,” President Barack Obama said Thursday that CIA officials who used harsh interrogation tactics during the Bush administration will not be prosecuted.

The government also released four memos long held secret by the Bush administration in which its lawyers approved in extensive and often graphic detail the tough interrogation methods used against 28 terror suspects, the fullest and now complete government accounting of the techniques.

The rough tactics range from waterboarding — simulated drowning — to using a plastic neck collar to slam detainees into walls.

Even as they exposed new details of the interrogation program, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, offered the first definitive assurance that those CIA officials are in the clear, as long as their actions were in line with the legal advice at the time.

Obama said in his statement and a separate letter sent directly to CIA employees that the nation must protect their identity “as vigilantly as they protect our security.”

“We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history,” the president said. “But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

Free lawyers

Holder told the CIA that the government would provide free legal representation to CIA employees in any legal proceeding or congressional investigation related to the program and would repay any financial judgment.

“It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department,” Holder said.

As current CIA Director Leon Panetta put it in a message to employees: “CIA responded, as duty requires.”

Torture?

The CIA has acknowledged using waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning, on three high-level terror detainees in 2002 and 2003, with the permission of the White House and the Justice Department. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said waterboarding has not been used since, but some human rights groups have urged Obama to hold CIA employees accountable for what they, and many Obama officials, say was torture.

Stacy Sullivan of Human Rights Watch said Obama is “dead wrong” to say that nothing would be gained by examining the past for criminal acts.

“Prosecuting violations of the law is not about laying blame for the past, it’s about ensuring that those crimes don’t happen again,” she said.

The memos produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 and 2005 were released to meet a court-approved deadline in a lawsuit against the government in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union.

In addition to detailing individual techniques, one memo also specifically authorized a method for combining multiple methods, a practice human rights advocates argue crosses the line into torture even if any individual methods does not.

The methods authorized in them include keeping detainees naked for long periods, keeping them in a painful standing position for long periods, and depriving them of solid food. Other tactics included using a plastic neck collar to slam detainees into walls, keeping the detainee’s cell cold for long periods, and beating and kicking the detainee. Sleep-deprivation, prolonged shackling, and threats to a detainee’s family were also used.

Interrogators were told not to allow a prisoner’s body temperature or caloric intake to fall below a certain level, because either could cause permanent damage, said senior administration officials. They discussed the memos on condition of anonymity to more fully describe the president’s decision-making process.

The Obama administration last month released nine legal memos. It probably will release more as the lawsuit proceeds, the officials said.

The ACLU suit has sought to use the Freedom of Information Act to shed light on the treatment of prisoners — even though the Bush administration eventually abandoned many of the legal conclusions and the Obama administration has gone further to actively dismantle much of President George W. Bush’s anti-terror program.

Obama has ordered the CIA’s secret overseas prisons known as “black sites” closed and ended so-called “extraordinary renditions” of terrorism suspects if there is any reason to believe the third country would torture them. He has also restricted CIA questioners to only those interrogation methods and protocols approved for use by the U.S. military until a complete review of the program is conducted.

Bush opinions revoked

Also Thursday, Holder formally revoked every legal opinion or memo issued during Bush’s presidency that justified interrogation programs.

The documents have been the subject of a long, fierce debate in and outside government over how much officials should say.

The Bush administration held the view that the president had the authority to claim broad powers that could not be checked by Congress or the courts in order to keep Americans safe. Obama and Holder, among others, have said that the use of such unchecked powers has actually made Americans less safe, by increasing anti-U.S. sentiment, endangering American troops when captured and handing terrorists a recruiting tool.

“Enlisting our values in the protection of our people makes us stronger and more secure,” Obama said in his statement.

Even so, the officials described the president’s process of deciding how much to release in response to the suit as very difficult. Over four weeks, there were intense debates involving the president, Cabinet members, lower-level officials and even former administration officials.

Obama was concerned that releasing the information could endanger ongoing operations, American personnel or U.S. relationships with foreign intelligence services. CIA officials, in particular, needed reassuring, the officials said.

But in the end, the view of the Justice Department prevailed, that the FOIA law required the release and that the government would likely be forced to do so by the court if it didn’t do so itself, the officials said.

In his statement, Obama said he was reassured about the potential national security implications by the fact that much of the information contained had already been widely publicized — including some of it by Bush himself — and by the fact that the program itself no longer exists.

He said “exceptional circumstances surround these memos and require their release” and does not change his determination to keep other intelligence operations secret and information about them classified.

But, said Obama, “Withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time. This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States.”

Those assurances are not likely to innoculate Obama against criticism from conservatives. Last month, Vice President Dick Cheney said, for instance, that Obama’s decisions to revoke Bush-era terrorist detainee policies will “raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”

By Jennifer Loven, Devlin Barrett

Sues funeral home, claiming neglect

FAIRFAX, Va. — The family of an Army veteran has sued a Virginia funeral home, claiming the firm mishandled the man’s body by leaving it in an unrefrigerated garage for more than two months as it awaited burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

The lawsuits filed against National Funeral Home and its parent company, Houston-based Service Corp. International, seek $60 million in damages.

The family of retired Army Col. Andrew DeGraff claims in the lawsuits filed Tuesday that the body was “defiled, degraded, humiliated and debased” as it sat in storage last fall.

“The treatment Colonel DeGraff’s body suffered was not fitting for anyone,” lawyer Kim Brooks-Rodney wrote.

The four lawsuits — separately filed on behalf of four of DeGraff’s grandchildren — came after The Washington Post reported that as many as 200 bodies were stored in the garage.

One of DeGraff’s grandchildren, Marian Savage of Springfield, said he was a veteran of three wars “who served his country dutifully. He deserved in death what he provided in life.”

Richard Morgan Jr. of Harrisonburg claims his father’s body was left for months to rot in the garage and has asked Fairfax County authorities to start a criminal investigation. Prosecutors have not said whether they are investigating.

Last year, National Funeral Home was placed on probation for three years and ordered to pay a $13,000 fine after an unannounced inspection found unsanitary conditions and other violations. It was the second time in the past six years that Virginia regulators put the home on probation.

SCI spokeswoman Lisa Marshall said an investigation is under way. If problems are identified, the company plans to “promptly take immediate corrective action,” she said.

In December 2003, SCI paid $100 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed in Florida by about 700 families that accused company cemeteries of misplacing bodies, losing track of plots and in some cases digging up remains to make room for new graves.

WASHINGTON – The top U.S. commander in Iraq said Sunday that a decision on withdrawing American forces from Iraq’s major cities by a June 30 deadline will be made by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki with U.S. military advice.

Gen. Raymond Odierno did not specifically say whether U.S. troops would leave Iraqi cities by the deadline, which is part of a plan for the gradual drawdown of American forces.

Odierno contends that overall violence in Iraq remains at the low levels seen in the early months after the U.S. invasion in 2003. But, he noted, “there are still some elements” in Iraq able to conduct serious attacks on U.S. and Iraqi security forces.

A roadside bomb killed an American soldier north of Baghdad on Sunday, the sixth U.S. combat death in the past three days.

“So we will continue to conduct assessments along with the government of Iraq as we move forward (to) the June 30th deadline. If we believe that we’ll need troops to maintain a presence in some of the cities, we’ll recommend that, but, ultimately, it will be the decision of Prime Minister Maliki,” Odierno said.

The deadline is included in an agreement negotiated between the governments of al-Maliki and former President George W. Bush last year. President Obama plans to pull combat troops from the country by September 2010 and bring home the last of the force by the end of 2011.

Trooper: Pilot hoped to be shot down

WAUSAU, Wis. — A man suspected of stealing a plane in Canada and flying erratically across three states was trying to commit suicide, hoping he would be shot down by military fighter planes, a state trooper said Tuesday.

Adam Dylan Leon, 31, was arrested at a convenience store in Ellsinore, Mo., shortly after landing the single-engine, four-seat Cessna on a rural Missouri road Monday night, ending a six-hour flight, police said.

The plane was tracked as a “flight safety issue” and was not believed to be a terrorist threat, Mike Kucharek, spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said in a telephone interview from Colorado Springs.

The Missouri state trooper who arrested Leon said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the pilot told him he had hoped to be shot down.

“He made a statement that he was trying to commit suicide and he didn’t have the courage to do it himself. And his idea was to fly the aircraft into the United States, where he would be shot down,” Trooper Justin Watson said on ABC.

Watson said Leon apparently hitched a ride to the convenience store after landing on a highway and taxiing the plane to a side road. He didn’t appear surprised when the officer entered the convenience store to arrest him.

Leon said “he didn’t have any ID, but he was the person we were looking for,” Watson said.

He said Leon “gave me no indication that it was anything other than he was having personal problems and was in an attempt to end his life.”

“He did state that he thought at one time he was getting shot down, but apparently the Air Force were just shooting flares,” the trooper said.

Leon was in the Butler County Jail on Tuesday in Poplar Bluff, Mo.

The plane was reported stolen Monday afternoon from Confederation College Flight School at Thunder Bay International Airport in Ontario. It was intercepted by F-16 fighters from the Wisconsin National Guard after crossing into the state near the Michigan state line.

The pilot was flying erratically and didn’t communicate with the fighter pilots, Kucharek said at the Aerospace Defense Command.

The pilot acknowledged seeing the F-16s but didn’t obey their nonverbal commands to follow them, Kucharek said.

The plane’s path over Wisconsin prompted a brief, precautionary evacuation of the Wisconsin capitol in Madison, although there were few workers in the building at the time and the governor was not in town.

The Cessna 172 continued south over Illinois and eastern Missouri before landing near Ellsinore, about 120 miles south-southwest of St. Louis.

The plane landed about six hours after the reported theft, and had enough fuel for about eight hours of flight, NAADC officials said.

“We tailed it all the way,” Maj. Brian Markin said. “Once it landed our aircraft returned to base.”

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko told CNN that Leon was a native of Turkey who changed his name from Yavuz Berke and became a Canadian citizen last year.

The end of a fighter jet built for the Cold War and cancellation of a new fleet of presidential helicopters sparked concerns of job cuts at Lockheed Martin Corp. and its partners — but did not appear to shake Wall Street’s confidence in defense stocks.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday the Pentagon will end the F-22 fighter jet and White House helicopter programs run by Lockheed, but would increase production of the company’s Joint Strike Fighter.

Job and other budget figures released by Gates sought to assuage fears of deep cuts at the nation’s largest defense contractor and its suppliers, helping Lockheed shares to rise nearly 9 percent.

Gates recommended more than doubling the number of Joint Strike Fighters to 30 in the upcoming budget, which would increase funding to $11.2 billion from $6.8 billion.

According to the Pentagon, there already are 38,000 employees working on the next-generation stealth fighter jet, known as the F-35. That number is anticipated to jump to 82,000 in fiscal 2011.

Still, Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed has said almost 95,000 jobs — mostly in California, Texas, Georgia and Connecticut — could be at risk if the Pentagon didn’t buy more F-22 jets.

Gates offered a very different employment picture, saying the number of direct jobs would fall to 13,000 in fiscal 2011 from 24,000 this year.

JSA Research Inc. analyst Paul Nisbet said the disparity of F-22 and Joint Strike Fighter job figures appeared to “surprise a few people” and was enough to offset Lockheed losing two major programs.

Military analysts widely expected the radar-evading supersonic F-22 jet — considered an outdated weapon system — would not go beyond the 187 already planned. The planes cost $140 million each.

Lockheed said it’s assessing the impact of Gates’ decision on several defense programs.

Most of the F-22′s are being built in Marietta, Ga. and Fort Worth, Texas. Boeing Co. manufactures the wings and other parts in Seattle. The engines are supplied by Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies Corp. unit, in Middletown, Conn.

Georgia Republicans, Rep. Phil Gingrey and Sen. Johnny Isakson, said Gates’ decision put thousands of manufacturing jobs at risk. And Jeff Goen, president of the union representing Lockheed’s employees in metro Atlanta, said layoffs are inevitable unless Congress restores the fighter program.

“It’s going devastate many families here,” Goen said.

Goen didn’t know how many jobs might be lost, but said Lockheed has about 2,000 workers — out of 7,000 at its Georgia plant — assigned to the F-22. The union, the International Association of Machinists Local 709, represents about 1,200 employees working on the jet’s assembly.

Matthew Perra, a spokesman for Pratt & Whitney, said that without additional F-22 aircraft orders, the company will be forced to halt orders from suppliers within months.

Hartford, Conn.-based United Technologies last month announced plans to trim 11,600 jobs from its global work force. And the company’s CEO Louis Chenevert has said the diversified manufacturer may cut an additional 2,000 to 3,000 jobs in Connecticut if the Pentagon cancels production of the F-22.

Plans to buy a new fleet of White House helicopters also were among the programs terminated by Gates. With a price tag of $13 billion and a six-year delay, the helicopters were considered at risk to be cut in the 2010 budget.

Obama has said he would closely examine the program, noting that his current ride seemed “perfectly adequate.”

Gates said the Pentagon will look into other options in fiscal 2011 for a new program to replace the aging helicopter fleet.

Cost overruns and delays have plagued Lockheed’s program due partly to aggressive plans by the Bush administration to incorporate anti-missile defenses, communications equipment, hardened hulls and other advanced capabilities on the helicopters following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The Navy waited nearly a year before formally disclosing the information to lawmakers as it sought to find ways to keep the program within budget. Those efforts failed.

Shares of Lockheed Martin added $5.97, or 8.9 percent, to $73.28 Monday. Many other defense stocks also rose.

The casket of Air Force Staff Sgt. Phillip Myers, of Hopewell, Va., who was killed Afghanistan on Saturday is carried by an honor guard on Sunday in Dover Air Force Base, Del. After receiving permission from the family, Myers is the first casualty to be observed arriving at Dover since the ban on media news coverage of returning war dead was put in place 18 years ago.

DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. – The Pentagon’s 18-year ban on media covering the return of fallen U.S. service members ended with a solemn ceremony for the arrival of a flag-draped casket of an airman felled in Afghanistan.

After receiving permission from family members, the military opened Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to the media Sunday night for the return of the body of Air Force Staff Sgt. Phillip Myers of Hopewell, Va.

The 30-year-old airman was killed April 4 near Helmand province, Afghanistan, when he was hit with an improvised explosive device, the Department of Defense said.

Myers’ family was the first to be asked under a new Pentagon policy whether it wished to have media coverage of the arrival of a loved one at the Dover base mortuary, the entry point for service personnel killed overseas. The family agreed, but declined to be interviewed or photographed.

On a cool, clear night under the yellowish haze of floodlights on the tarmac, an eight-member team wearing white gloves and camouflage battle fatigues carried Myers’ body off of a military contract Boeing 747 that touched down at 9:19 p.m. after a flight from Ramstein Air Base, Germany.

Myers’ widow and other family members, along with about two dozen members of the media, attended the solemn ceremony, which took about 20 minutes and was punctuated only by clicking of camera shutters and the barked salute orders of Col. Dave Horton, operations group commander of Dover’s 436th Airlift Wing.

Horton presided over the ceremony along with Air Force civil engineer Maj. Gen. Del Eulberg and Maj. Klavens Noel, a mortuary chaplain.

Noel and the other officers boarded the plane for a brief prayer before an automatic loader slowly lowered the flag-draped transfer case bearing Myers’ body about 20 feet to the tarmac, where the eight-member team slowly carried it to a white-paneled truck.

Preceded by a security vehicle with flashing blue and red lights, the truck then slowly made its way to the base mortuary, where Myers’ body was to be processed for return to his family.

Myers was a member of the 48th Civil Engineer Squadron with the Royal Air Force in Lakenheath, England, one of the bases the U.S. Air Force uses in the country. He was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery last year in recognition of his efforts in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Department of Defense said.

Myers’ widow flew from England to attend the arrival of his body to the U.S., which marked the first time since 1991 that members of media were allowed to witness the return of a combat casualty to Dover.

The ban was put in place by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, at the time of the Persian Gulf War. From the start, it was cast as a way to shield grieving families.

But critics argued the government was trying to hide the human cost of war. President Barack Obama had asked for a review of the ban, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that the blanket restriction made him uncomfortable.

Under the new policy, families of fallen servicemen will decide whether to allow media coverage of their return. If several bodies arrive on the same flight, news coverage will be allowed only for those whose families have given permission.

There have been some exceptions since 1991, most notably in 1996 when President Bill Clinton attended the arrival of the remains of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 32 others killed in a plane crash in Croatia. In 2000, the Pentagon distributed photographs of the arrival of remains of those killed in the bombing of the USS Cole and in 2001, the Air Force distributed a photograph of the remains of a victim of the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon.

One objection to lifting the ban had been that if the media were present, some families might feel obligated to come to Dover for the brief, solemn ritual in which honor guards carry the caskets off a plane.

Few families now choose to attend, in part because doing so means leaving home and the support system of friends at a difficult time. The sudden trip can also be expensive and logistically difficult, though the military provides transportation for up to three members to greet their service members at Dover.