Interrogation

The three European men with Somali roots were arrested on a murky pretext in August as they passed through the small African country of Djibouti . But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their jail cells by a succession of American interrogators. U.S. agents accused the men — two of them Swedes, the other a longtime resident of Britain — of supporting al-Shabab, an Islamist militia in Somalia that Washington considers a terrorist group. Two months after their arrest, the prisoners...

A CIA officer who was the first woman to lead the agency's clandestine service, but was also directly involved in its controversial interrogation program, will not get to keep that job as part of a management shake-up announced Tuesday by CIA Director John O. Brennan. The officer, who is undercover, served as director of the National Clandestine Service on an interim basis over the past two months, and many considered her a front-runner to keep the post, which involves overseeing the CIA's spying operations...

PRESIDENT-ELECT Barack Obama spoke forcefully on the campaign trail of the need to ban torture by U.S. interrogators. He criticized the Bush administration's reliance on secret interrogation programs and secret prisons and repeatedly embraced the notion that all U.S. personnel -- including CIA agents -- must use only those interrogation techniques outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, which hews to the Geneva Conventions and domestic prohibitions against...

Established in Miranda v. Arizona 47 years ago, the you-have-the-right-to-remain-silent litany has "become part of our national culture," as the Supreme Court noted in a 2000 ruling that reaffirmed Miranda . My favorite example: In the 1987 film "Robocop," the eponymous cyborg hero grabs a murderer by the lapels, growls, "You have the right to an attorney" — and hurls the creep through a plate-glass window. Today, the issue is how, or whether, to apply Miranda to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon...

Justice Department documents released yesterday offer the fullest account to date of Bush administration interrogation tactics, including previously unacknowledged strategies of slamming a prisoner into a wall and placing an insect near a detainee terrified of bugs. Authorities said they will not prosecute CIA officers who used harsh interrogation techniques with the department's legal blessing. But in a carefully worded statement, they left open the possibility that operatives and higher-level administration officials could face jeopardy if...

Excerpts from the Justice Department's 2003 memo on interrogation rules: "Customary international law is not federal law and . . . the president is free to override it at his discretion. " For the use of drugs to be illegal, "they must produce an extreme effect. " To constitute a prohibited act, "a threat of death alone is insufficient; the threat must indicate that death is 'imminent.' " "Employing a shove or slap as part of an interrogation would not run afoul" of legal standards.

I understand Marc A. Thiessen's desire for vindication for the Bush administration's use of torture [" A medal, not an inquest ," op-ed, May 5]. Compassion for those who committed the atrocities is not unwarranted, as it was the commander in chief, the secretary of defense and the vice president who authorized the use of torture on detainees. Nonetheless, it can never be proved that any intelligence of use that may have been elicited under or after torture could not also have been secured using ethical means.

CIA interrogators used a handgun and an electric drill to try to frighten a captured al-Qaeda commander into giving up information, according to a long-concealed agency report due to be made public next week, former and current U.S. officials who have read the document said Friday. The tactics -- which one official described Friday as a threatened execution -- were used on Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the CIA's inspector general's report on the agency's interrogation program.

CHARLOTTESVILLE — In May of his senior year, with his lacrosse season behind him and his graduation from the University of Virginia just weeks away, George Huguely V sat in an interrogation room, his black "Police World Tour 2008" band shirt stark against the white-painted cinder-block wall, his beefy hands resting on the wood-laminate table. Over 64 minutes on May 3, 2010, a video camera captured Huguely taking two detectives step by step through his final argument with his ex-girlfriend,...

Five years ago, as troubling reports emerged about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a career lawyer at the Justice Department began a long and relatively lonely campaign to alert top Bush administration officials to a strategy he considered "wrongheaded. " Bruce C. Swartz, a criminal division deputy in charge of international issues, repeatedly questioned the effectiveness of harsh interrogation tactics at White House meetings of a special group formed to decide detainee matters, with...

Correction: A previous version of this article failed to attribute the source of a quotation by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). She was speaking on "Fox News Sunday. " This version has been corrected. Federal prosecutors on Sunday were preparing to file charges against the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, even as he remained under heavy guard at a local hospital amid questions about whether authorities would be able to interrogate him. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was in...

Mississippi Suspect kills officer during interrogation A murder suspect wrested a gun from a police detective during an interrogation and shot the officer to death before killing himself, authorities said Friday. Hinds County Coroner Sharon Grisham-Stewart told the Associated Press that Jackson Police Det. Eric Smith was shot twice in the chest and twice in the arm with a 9 mm pistol. The suspect, Jeremy Powell, 23, had one...

Former CIA director Mike Hayden credits " an incredible band of sisters " for the success of the operation that found and brought down Osama bin Laden. Now one of those sisters has been appointed acting chief of the CIA's National Clandestine service . It is a major milestone for women at the CIA, the first time in the agency's history that a female officer has headed the clandestine service. But The Post reports that CIA Director John Brennan is "hesitating" at giving her the position on a permanent basis,...

As John Brennan moved into the CIA director's office this month, another high-level transition was taking place down the hall. A week earlier, a woman had been placed in charge of the CIA's clandestine service for the first time in the agency's history. She is a veteran officer with broad support inside the agency. But she also helped run the CIA's detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and signed off on the 2005 decision to destroy videotapes of prisoners...

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies . He was a CIA case officer from 1985 to 1994. The Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have bequeathed to the lucky few with clearances a 6,000-page report on the Central Intelligence Agency's enhanced interrogation program . Although such length suggests detailed intellectual promiscuity (the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report ...

Correction: An earlier version of this review stated that Dick Cheney earned a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. Cheney earned a master's degree and left before finishing his PhD. This version has been corrected. R.J. Cutler's new documentary, "The World According to Dick Cheney," finds the former vice president as resolute and indifferent as ever to his critics. What else did you expect — that the heart transplant would have magical effects? That he...

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney on Sunday condemned the Justice Department's decision to investigate suspected CIA prisoner abuses, reiterated his assertion that enhanced interrogation techniques worked in revealing terror plots, and indicated that he may not cooperate with the prosecutor assigned to the case. Cheney accused President Obama of setting a "terrible precedent" by allowing an "intensely partisan, politicized look back at the prior administration. " Asked whether he would talk to John Durham, the veteran...

"I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. " — Col. Nathan Jessep to Lt. Daniel Kaffee "A Few Good Men" (1992) "You," said Jack Nicholson's Jessep to Tom Cruise's Kaffee, "have the luxury of not knowing what I know. " Viewers of the movie "Zero Dark Thirty" will, according to some informed persons, lose the luxury of not knowing about...

"I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. " — Col. Nathan Jessep to Lt. Daniel Kaffee "A Few Good Men" (1992) "You," said Jack Nicholson's Jessep to Tom Cruise's Kaffee, "have the luxury of not knowing what I know. " Viewers of the movie "Zero Dark Thirty" will, according to some informed persons, lose the luxury of not knowing about hard but morally...

In his Jan. 6 Outlook commentary, "Sorry, Hollywood. What we did wasn't torture," Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. stated, "Inevitably, films like ["Zero Dark Thirty"] come to be seen . . . as a sort of proxy for reality. Even those who should know better get caught up in false arguments, debating, for example, ‘Can torture (as shown in the film) be justified?,' rather than ‘Are harsh but legal measures (as not shown in the film) sometimes necessary?' " Lest this statement also be taken as a proxy for...