A TORTURED DEBATE

Even within the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, the debates never ceased. CIA officials remembered all too well how the agency was blamed in the 1970s human-rights backlash over covert plots. The agency, say senior intelligence officials, made sure it had explicit, written authorization from lawyers and senior policymakers before using new interrogation techniques. At the same time the agency felt intense pressure to extract information from suspects. So it began experimenting with methods like water-boarding and open-handed slapping. The CIA also asked to use "mock burial," in which a top Qaeda captive would be led to believe he was going to be buried alive. Administration officials declined to say whether the proposal was ever adopted. "My overwhelming impression is that everyone was focused on trying to avoid torture, staying within the line, while doing everything possible to save American lives," Tim Flanigan, formerly Bush's deputy White House counsel, told NEWSWEEK.

As with al-Libi, the internal debates usually turned on what to do with a specific Qaeda detainee. That's what happened in the summer of 2002 after the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who refused to cooperate after an initial spate of talkativeness. Frustrated CIA officials went to OLC lawyer Yoo for an opinion on bolder methods.

Another high-value Qaeda suspect captured toward the end of 2002, Mohamed al Qatani, provoked a major change of approach at Guantanamo Bay. "There was a spike in a lot of intel that we were picking up in terms of more attacks" on America, said Gen. James Hill, chief of the U.S. Southern Command. "We weren't getting anything out of him" using standard techniques outlined in Army Field Manual 34-52. So CIA and military-intel interrogators came up with new tactics based on the sorts of methods that U.S. Special Forces are specifically trained to resist, a Defense source says. The Special Forces' Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape course culminates in interrogations that include some physical roughing up; sensory, food and sleep deprivation, and a "water pit" in which detainees have to stand on tip-toe to keep from drowning.

Some inside the military criminal-investigation units at Gitmo, especially Navy personnel, approached Navy Secretary Alberto Mora with their concerns about violations of the Geneva Conventions. Perturbed, Mora in January 2003 went to see the Defense Department's Haynes and argued that the DOD was getting into unethical territory, and he warned of unhappiness among the uniformed military on this issue. Haynes concurred. On Jan. 15, 2003, according to a chronology supplied by Pentagon officials, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suspended use of the heightened techniques. Haynes, on Rumsfeld's orders, then set up an Interrogation Working Group that issued a March 6, 2003, memo on accepted practices, which in turn was based on the reasoning of Yoo's August 2002 Justice Department brief.

It's still not clear whether these first decisions made in the war on terror eventually led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. What does seem clear is that despite early efforts to vet interrogation techniques, the administration grew less and less careful as pressure built to get good intelligence. White House officials last week insisted that President Bush had made clear in an early-2002 policy directive that torture would not be used during the interrogation of Qaeda detainees. "The instructions went out to our people to adhere to the law," Bush himself told reporters. But the law according to whom? Bush originally said this was a war in which the old rules did not apply. But he may be learning now that they do.

WITH MICHAEL ISIKOFF, MARK HOSENBALL AND TAMARA LIPPER IN WASHINGTON

© 2004