Tuesday August 25, 2009, 8:36 pm
Only two weeks' training for CIA interrogators

Report reveals agents' doubts about whether their actions were legal

By David Usborne, US Editor

New details about the treatment of terror suspects in the wake of 9/11 contradict old assurances from former Vice President Dick Cheney that interrogators were "highly trained professionals" who well knew the boundaries of the law. Often, they had received barely two weeks' training and sometimes made up the rules as they went along. The haphazard nature of the CIA's handling of the detainees, especially in the early years of the "war on terror", becomes clear in the internal CIA report released by the US Justice Department. Its publication on Monday coincided with the appointment of a special prosecutor by the Attorney General, Eric Holder.

"How cold is cold?" one officer is reported to have enquired of CIA headquarters, offering just one example of how interrogators were sometimes forced to seek guidance via email or telephone from superiors thousands of miles away in Virginia as they muddled along in the field. "How cold is life threatening?"

Mr Holder agreed to open the new investigation in part because of what he read in the report. Authored in 2004 by the-then Inspector General of the CIA, it described several instances where the actions of the agency's interrogators may have amounted to criminal abuse. Those cases were referred to the Justice Department. In the Bush-Cheney era, the department decided not to prosecute anyone involved.

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Thursday August 27, 2009, 4:04 am
Only 2 weeks, to be given a power of horror over people ?

Friday August 28, 2009, 9:00 am
Most people spend more time learning to drive a car...........