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CIA director says agency did not mislead Congress on interrogation techniques

By Bernard Hibbitts (editor) and University of Pittsburgh School of Law students.

[JURIST] Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Leon Panetta on Friday defended information the CIA gave to Congress on the use of interrogation techniques during the Bush administration. In response to statements made by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), in which she claimed to have been misled by the CIA, and the subsequent media reaction to those statements, Panetta issued a statement to his employees urging them to "ignore the noise and stay focused on your mission." In the statement, Panetta said: Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values. As the Agency indicated previously in response to Congressional inquiries, our contemporaneous records from September 2002 indicate that CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing "the enhanced techniques that had been employed." Ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.On Thursday, Pelosi claimed that the CIA misled Congress on use of harsh interrogation techniques, just one day after Wednesday's hearing before the Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts on whether Bush administration interrogation techniques constituted torture. The recent release of four CIA interrogation memos has renewed calls for the criminal prosecution of the memos' authors. US President Barack Obama has said that he would not rule out the possibility of prosecuting lawyers responsible for authoring the memos. Obama had previously said that he would not pursue prosecutions of CIA interrogators, a pledge which drew sharp international criticism.

Full post as published by JURIST - The Paper Chase on May 16, 2009 (boomark / email).