AFP, Washington :
President Donald Trump’s advocacy of waterboarding and the promotion of a CIA official who once led brutal interrogations have raised concerns that the United States could yet resume torturing suspects in its fight against Islamist extremists.
Last week the leaked draft of a White House executive order detailed a desire to reopen CIA “black sites” used in so-called enhanced interrogations in the early 2000s and to ease tough restrictions on interrogation techniques set by former president Barack Obama.
On Thursday, the Central Intelligence Agency announced that Gina Haspel would become the agency’s deputy director, answering to new director Mike Pompeo.
Haspel, a veteran undercover agent, presided over the interrogations of Al-Qaeda detainees Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in a secret CIA facility in Thailand after the 9/11 attacks. Those interrogations involved repeated waterboarding and other now-banned techniques. On Friday, five top Democratic senators sent a letter to Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis expressing alarm that the government could change policies and laws to resume the practice of torture, especially in the offshore black sites.
The draft executive order and Trump’s own comments in support of torture “have created alarm that this administration may be preparing a return to policies and practices that are ineffective, contrary to our national values, and damaging to our national security,” the senators said.
“Torture is immoral and deeply contrary to the principles of this nation. Beyond that, it is widely recognized as ineffective and even counterproductive, as it produces unreliable information.”
But analysts and intelligence community officials say that, even if the Trump administration wanted to use torture, it would run into both a dense thicket of laws against the practice and extreme reluctance within the intelligence community to resume practices used on detainees in the four years after the 2001 terror attacks.
·During his presidential campaign and since his election Trump repeatedly has said he thinks waterboarding and other techniques widely considered torture are effective.
“Absolutely, I feel it works,” he said again last week in an interview.
Moreover, he and key advisers have said they want to aggressively attack Islamic extremism, which is the focus of the draft order.
The draft would reverse key Obama orders from 2009 that required that detainees be handled in accordance with international laws including the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, as well as with the US Army Field Manual, which sets clear limits on what can be done in interrogations.
President Donald Trump’s advocacy of waterboarding and the promotion of a CIA official who once led brutal interrogations have raised concerns that the United States could yet resume torturing suspects in its fight against Islamist extremists.
Last week the leaked draft of a White House executive order detailed a desire to reopen CIA “black sites” used in so-called enhanced interrogations in the early 2000s and to ease tough restrictions on interrogation techniques set by former president Barack Obama.
On Thursday, the Central Intelligence Agency announced that Gina Haspel would become the agency’s deputy director, answering to new director Mike Pompeo.
Haspel, a veteran undercover agent, presided over the interrogations of Al-Qaeda detainees Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in a secret CIA facility in Thailand after the 9/11 attacks. Those interrogations involved repeated waterboarding and other now-banned techniques. On Friday, five top Democratic senators sent a letter to Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis expressing alarm that the government could change policies and laws to resume the practice of torture, especially in the offshore black sites.
The draft executive order and Trump’s own comments in support of torture “have created alarm that this administration may be preparing a return to policies and practices that are ineffective, contrary to our national values, and damaging to our national security,” the senators said.
“Torture is immoral and deeply contrary to the principles of this nation. Beyond that, it is widely recognized as ineffective and even counterproductive, as it produces unreliable information.”
But analysts and intelligence community officials say that, even if the Trump administration wanted to use torture, it would run into both a dense thicket of laws against the practice and extreme reluctance within the intelligence community to resume practices used on detainees in the four years after the 2001 terror attacks.
·During his presidential campaign and since his election Trump repeatedly has said he thinks waterboarding and other techniques widely considered torture are effective.
“Absolutely, I feel it works,” he said again last week in an interview.
Moreover, he and key advisers have said they want to aggressively attack Islamic extremism, which is the focus of the draft order.
The draft would reverse key Obama orders from 2009 that required that detainees be handled in accordance with international laws including the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, as well as with the US Army Field Manual, which sets clear limits on what can be done in interrogations.
