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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sought today to avoid diving back into the controversy over what she knew about harsh interrogations of terrorist detainees and when she knew it, despited being armed with more ammunition on her side. In May, she acknowledged for the first time that she knew by early 2003 that the Central Intelligence Agency had subjected terror detainees to waterboarding, but saw little recourse to challenge the practice except by achieving Democratic control of Congress and the White House. In defending herself, she also accused CIA officials of misleading Congress about the extent of the use of waterboarding,...

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WASHINGTON, April 27 - The Army is preparing to issue a new interrogations manual that expressly bars the harsh techniques disclosed in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, and incorporates safeguards devised to prevent such misconduct at military prison camps in the future, Army officials said Wednesday. The new manual, the first revision in 13 years, will specifically prohibit practices like stripping prisoners, keeping them in stressful positions for a long time, imposing dietary restrictions, employing police dogs to intimidate prisoners and using sleep deprivation as a tool to get them to talk, the officials said. Those practices were not...

WASHINGTON, March 9 - After clashing with Afghan rebels at the village of Miam Do one year ago, American soldiers detained the village's entire population for four days, and an officer beat and choked several residents while screening them and trying to identify local militants, according to a new Pentagon report that was given to Congress late Monday night. Although the officer, an Army lieutenant colonel attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency, was disciplined and suspended from further involvement with detainees, he faced no further action beyond a reprimand. The episode, described only briefly in a summary of the report...

# NEW YORK, Feb. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Newsweek has obtained previously unpublished flight plans indicating the CIA has been operating a Boeing 737 as part of a top-secret global charter servicing clandestine interrogation facilities used in the war on terror. And the Boeing's flight information, detailed to the day, seem to confirm the claims of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, who says he was abducted by American operatives and in early 2004 flown to Afghanistan. Together with previously disclosed flight plans of a smaller Gulfstream V jet, the Boeing 737's travels are further evidence that a global...

If terrorists are able to carry out another spectacular attack on U.S. soil anytime soon, the least they could do afterwards would be to send the New York Times a thank-you note for helping them keep their plans secret. In its Monday edition the Times reports: "Doubts about whether interrogators can employ coercive methods, officials said, could create problems at the start of a critical summer period when counterterrorism officials fear that Al Qaida might attack the United States." Why are interrogators suddenly beset with doubts? Though the paper doesn't expressly say so, the reason is clear enough. Thanks to...

ASHINGTON, June 27 — Confusion about the legal limits of interrogation has begun to slow government efforts to obtain information from suspected terrorists, American intelligence officials said Sunday. Doubts about whether interrogators can employ coercive methods, the officials said, could create problems at the start of a critical summer period when counterterrorism officials fear that Al Qaeda might attack the United States. Interrogators are uncertain what rules are in effect and are worried that the legal safeguards that they had believed were in place to protect them from internal sanctions or criminal liability may no longer exist, the officials said....

The CIA has suspended the use of extraordinary interrogation techniques approved by the White House pending a review by Justice Department and other administration lawyers, intelligence officials said. The "enhanced interrogation techniques," as the CIA calls them, include feigned drowning and refusal of pain medication for injuries. The tactics have been used to elicit intelligence from al Qaeda leaders such as Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed. "Everything's on hold," said a former senior CIA official aware of the agency's decision. "The whole thing has been stopped until we sort out whether we are sure we're on legal ground." A...

OPERATION: IRAQI FREEDOM 'Heroic' officer clings to faith Facing charges after foiling ambush plot, 'devastating' to be regarded as a criminal Posted: November 5, 2003 5:00 p.m. Eastern By Art Moore © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com A U.S. Army officer facing assault charges for frightening an Iraqi into disclosing details of an impending ambush plot says his faith in God has kept him from falling apart amid the severe pain it has caused him and his family. "Without God and my Savior Jesus Christ, I would have cracked a long time ago," Lt. Col. Allen B. West, a battalion commander with the...

American military officials acknowledged yesterday that two prisoners captured in Afghanistan in December had been killed while under interrogation at Bagram air base north of Kabul – reviving concerns that the US is resorting to torture in its treatment of Taliban fighters and suspected al-Qa'ida operatives. A spokesman for the air base confirmed that the official cause of death of the two men was "homicide", contradicting earlier accounts that one had died of a heart attack and the other from a pulmonary embolism. The men's death certificates, made public earlier this week, showed that one captive, known only as Dilawar,...