Stepping up a confrontation with the Senate over the handling of detainees, the White House is insisting that the US Central Intelligence Agency be exempted from a proposed ban on abusive treatment of suspected Qaeda militants and other terrorists. The Senate defied a presidential veto threat nearly three weeks ago and approved, 90 to 9, an amendment to a $440 billion military spending bill that would ban the use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of any detainee held by the United States government. This could bar techniques that the CIA has used in some interrogations overseas. But in a 45-minute meeting last Thursday, Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA director Porter Goss urged Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who wrote the amendment, to support an exemption for the agency, arguing that maximum flexibility was needed in dealing with the war on terrorism, said two government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity. Human rights advocates, however, said that parallel sets of interrogation rules for military personnel and clandestine intelligence operatives would be impractical in the war on terrorism, where soldiers and spies routinely cross paths on a global battlefield and often share techniques “They are explicitly saying, for the first time, that the intelligence community should have the ability to treat prisoners inhumanely,” Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said. “You can't tell soldiers that inhumane treatment is always morally wrong if they see with their own eyes that CIA personnel are allowed to engage in it.” —NYT 8 US ‘terror’ prisoners fatally abused: ACLU WASHINGTON: Autopsy reports on 44 prisoners who died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan indicate that 21 were the victims of homicide, including eight who appear to have been fatally abused by their captors, the American Civil Liberties Union reported Monday. The abuse involved cases in which detainees were smothered, beaten or exposed to the elements, sometimes during interrogations. Many of these cases had been brought to light previously but now have been confirmed through autopsies; some of the deaths followed abusive interrogations by elite Navy SEALs, military intelligence and the CIA, the ACLU said. —LATWP
