The Wall Street Journal:

The Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda ruling obligates law-enforcement officials to advise suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have an attorney present for questioning. A 1984 decision amended that by allowing the questioning of suspects for a limited time before issuing the warning in cases where public safety was at issue.

That exception was seen as a limited device to be used only in cases of an imminent safety threat, but the new rules give interrogators more latitude and flexibility to define what counts as an appropriate circumstance to waive Miranda rights.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum reviewed by The Wall Street Journal says the policy applies to “exceptional cases” where investigators “conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary to collect valuable and timely intelligence not related to any immediate threat.” Such action would need prior approval from FBI supervisors and Justice Department lawyers, according to the memo, which was issued in December but not made public.

Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said the memo ensures that “law enforcement has the ability to question suspected terrorists without immediately providing Miranda warnings when the interrogation is reasonably prompted by immediate concern for the safety of the public or the agents.” He said “the threat posed by terrorist organizations and the nature of their attacks—which can include multiple accomplices and interconnected plots—creates fundamentally different public safety concerns than traditional criminal cases.”

Firedoglake’s Marcy Wheeler outlines why an FBI memo allowing for abbreviated Constitutionally-mandated Miranda rights flies in the face of Supreme Court rulings:

It is not as if this is some kind of unexplored area with no legal precedent; there is clear precedent on the nature of Miranda rights. In Dickerson v. United States 530 U.S. 428 (2000), the Supreme Court left no mistake as to the nature of Miranda:

But Congress may not legislatively supersede our decisions interpreting and applying the Constitution. See, e.g., City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507, 517—521 (1997). This case therefore turns on whether the Miranda Court announced a constitutional rule or merely exercised its supervisory authority to regulate evidence in the absence of congressional direction.
….
In sum, we conclude that Miranda announced a constitutional rule that Congress may not supersede legislatively.

Furthermore, the “public safety exception” the administration disingenuously bases their new Miranda policy on, is limited and does not support their expansive power grab. The public safety exception, first announced by the Court in Quarles v. New York, applies only where there is an imminent and immediate “great danger to public safety” and the officer who questions the suspect reasonably believes the information sought is necessary to protect the immediate public safety and the questions are limited to only those necessary to obtain the information to mitigate such threat. That is NOT what the Obama/Holder DOJ is contemplating or restricting their policy to and, thus, their policy is simply unconstitutional and inappropriate.

Let us not forget, this attempt by the administration is not aimed at terrorists and enemy combatants on foreign soil, it is aimed squarely at individuals arrested on domestic soil under the regular Article III criminal system. The law is quite established that the reading of the Miranda warning does not confer rights upon the arrestee, the rights are inherent and flow from the Constitution.

The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer points out that Miranda rights don’t apply to interrogation rules, just what can be allowed as evidence in court.

So are Miranda rights being gutted here? I think that overstates what’s happening. Miranda does not govern interrogation. It governs the admissibility of evidence in court. The FBI can interrogate someone without giving them Miranda warnings, it just can’t use the information from that interrogation against them. The Supreme Court never stated that Miranda warnings were mandatory, just that statements would be inadmissible without them. So I’m not sure this actually changes anything with regards to defendant’s rights, but it certainly may make it harder for the FBI to convict terrorists by making fewer of the statements they get admissible.

Serwer also notes that this action by Obama’s DOJ is likely the product of kowtowing to Republicans that politicized Miranda rights in claiming offering terror suspects like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — the Christmas Day ’09 “underwear bomber” — such Constitutional rights squanders intelligence-gathering opportunities. In addition, Serwer contends, the move could be to avoid Congress from pressing for the Department of Defense to handle domestic terror cases rather than the FBI.

Republicans have attacked the administration for “giving” terror suspects constitutional rights they already have, and the administration is concerned about looking soft on terrorism. But because Republicans know this isn’t an actual problem, they rebuffed administration overtures to codify a public safety exception with legislation. But by by issuing this memo, the administration has conceded the point. While not solving an actual national security problem, this further erodes the administration’s argument that Miranda does not impede intelligence gathering.

[...]

A secondary question though, is whether by doing this–or rather, by leaking word of the memo–the administration is trying to hold off efforts by Republicans to mandate that all domestic terrorism cases be handled by the military by assuaging fears that the FBI isn’t making intelligence gathering first priority in interrogations.

Soldiers at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan (army.mil)

GUANTANAMO BAY — His nickname wasn’t “Monster,” he admonished the lawyer. It was “The Monster.” That was what the Bagram Collection Point’s interrogators, guards — and most especially detainees — called Army interrogator Damien Corsetti. And it was important to him that the court correctly record his story.

Back then — in 2002 at Bagram, and later at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison — Corsetti was as fearsome as his handle. Although acquitted, he went before a court-martial proceeding related to the abuse of a detainee in Iraq. Now, Corsetti is an unemployed veteran of two wars, unable to work because of post-traumatic stress disorder, and an infamous figure in the U.S.’s post-9/11 history of torture.

[Security1] But he testified on Wednesday morning from a remote location on behalf of one of the former inmates at Bagram whom he used to intimidate and brutalize: Omar Khadr, the 23-year old Canadian citizen who has been in U.S. custody for nearly eight years. The large man once known as “The Monster” — the nickname is tattooed in Italian on his stomach — provided rare sworn testimony about the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in the Afghanistan war’s early days, the product of what he described as command pressure for intelligence and unclear rules about permissible interrogator behavior.

Corsetti didn’t directly interrogate Khadr, he told the court, but he spoke to Khadr at least two to three times a week from August to October 2002, after which Khadr was transferred here. “He was a child,” said an occasionally emotional Corsetti. “He was a 15-year old child who had been blown up, shot and grenaded. He was in one of the worst places on the earth. How could you not have compassion for that? … He was in the wrong place for a 15-year old child to be.”

It was the first moment during seven days of Khadr’s pre-trial hearing, meant to determine whether the statements Khadr gave to his interrogators may be used against him in his July military commission, that an interrogator described Khadr as a “child.” Other interrogators, testifying for the prosecution, described him clinically as a “15-year old” or “mature” or otherwise resisted the characterization of Khadr as a juvenile. Almost simultaneously with Corsetti’s testimony, Radhika Coomaraswamy, the United Nations special representative for children and armed conflict, called for Khadr’s release and decried the “dangerous international precedent” the Obama administration is setting by prosecuting him for war crimes.

That wasn’t the only time Corsetti contradicted earlier testimony. The witness before Corsetti, Army Col. Donna Hershey, the former chief nurse at Bagram, testified that she never allowed any interrogators to question detainees in Bagram’s hospital. But Corsetti testified that the first time he met Khadr, and the only time he was present for any questioning of Khadr, occurred in the hospital, on July 29, 2002, two days after Khadr suffered near-fatal wounds during his capture after a Khost, Afghanistan firefight.

“I would assume from his condition he was under excruciating pain,” Corsetti said. Despite the pain, and despite the questioning’s presentation to the court as a preliminary, in-processing brief, the questioning appeared to involve the acquisition of intelligence information, including “what kind of military training” Khadr had; what Khadr believed his offenses were that landed him in Bagram; his “knowledge of Soviet-issued weapons”; and general questions to assess “his cooperation and knowledgeability.” That spoke directly to the purpose of the hearing: To determine whether Khadr’s statements to interrogators, and information that followed from them, were coerced from him to a point rendering them unusable by the government at trial.

The pressure to acquire intelligence information was the overriding theme of Corsetti’s testimony. His unit, Alpha Company of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, then stationed at Bagram, had to file between “20 to 40 reports a week” or hear from higher command to complain about them “stagnat[ing].” That pressure, Corsetti said, came from the Afghanistan war command and the “Office of the Secretary of Defense” — and produced a command environment that encouraged detainee abuse.

“The only clear cut rules I remember was we weren’t allowed to strike the prisoners,” Corsetti said, and that interrogators couldn’t directly threaten detainees. “But we could do what we called ‘plant the seed’” of threats, and “let their imagination run wild with it.” One example, consistent with an affidavit Khadr submitted about his treatment at Bagram, was to suggest that detainees cooperate with interrogators to avoid being sent for more brutal treatment in other countries. “Egypt and Israel were the two big ones,” he said.

Corsetti also testified that detainees at Bagram were “regularly” placed in forced contorted positions known as “stress positions” (and, later, “safety positions,” according to an interrogator who testified on Tuesday). “Stress positions were used to inflict pain on the prisoners, to elicit information from them,” Corsetti said, rocking back and forth in his chair. “At any given time, there was always one airlock occupied by a prisoner shackled, blindfolded, earmuffed with his hands above his head.” That description came close to matching one given by an anonymous Bagram medic, known as Mr. M, who testified Monday to seeing Khadr shackled to the outermost door of his cell — known as an airlock or sallyport — with his hands shackled at about forehead-level. The level of positioning for a detainee’s restrained arms would “depend on the length of the chain they used from the top of the cage,” Corsetti calmly recounted.

Asked if he knew if Khadr would have been put in a stress position, Corsetti replied, “I can’t say if it was done to him, but it was something I would have done.”
Corsetti’s lack of direct knowledge of Khadr’s treatment repeatedly aroused objections from the chief government prosecutor, Jeffrey Groharing, a retired Marine major, pushing Corsetti’s testimony to nearly two hours. Groharing argued that the defense could only question Corsetti about any treatment of Khadr that Corsetti directly observed. But Col. Patrick Parrish, the judge presiding over Khadr’s military commission, responded that the hearing’s admission of hearsay evidence — ironically, one of the biggest civil-libertarian objections to the commissions — could work in the defense’s favor, as it had for the prosecution.

Groharing has called eight interrogators to testify so far about direct interactions with Khadr. All have largely portrayed their interrogations and interviews with him as free and uncoerced. But later this week, the defense intends to call to the stand someone known to the court as “Interrogator #1,” who interrogated Khadr at Bagram and who is expected to testify to threatening Khadr with rape.

For all the command pressure for intelligence and the harsh treatment that resulted at Bagram, Corsetti said he wasn’t sure whether it resulted in accurate intelligence. “I got some very good information while I was there and I got some very bad information while I was there,” he said.

He last saw Khadr shortly before the detainee’s October 2002 transfer to Guantanamo Bay. “I can’t say if he was afraid or not,” Corsetti said. “I remember he went from a smiling 15 year old kid to a look of defeat before he left.”

Yesterday and today, Army Col. Donna Hershey, the head nurse at the Bagram hospital back then, said that she forbade interrogations from occurring in the hospital. But Corsetti said that interrogators asked Khadr about “what kind of military training” he had, as well as his “knowledge of Soviet-issued weapons” and other questions that “would have also assessed his cooperation and knowledgeability.”

The government raised numerous procedural and relevance-based objections to Corsetti’s testimony, delaying it from moving forward. But Corsetti did begin to testify about a “ton of pressure” his company was under at the time.

“This is less than a year after 9/11, so we’re all still pretty heated about that,” he said. “There was a lot of pressure to get intelligence information. This was life and death stuff we were supposedly dealing with. Just a ton of pressure on us to get information out there to save lives and to generate reports.” Unless the unit generated “20 to 40 reports a week,” it would hear complaints from higher command.

Like who? “CJTF180, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, coming from everybody,” he said, using an acronym for what was then the Afghanistan-war command. “The only clear cut rules I remember was we weren’t allowed to strike the prisoners.”

Corsetti was acquitted in 2006 of charges related to detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib.

A view from the recreation yard at Camp 4 of the Guantanamo Bay detention center (Photo by Spencer Ackerman)

GUANTANAMO BAY — Making the most of their first court appearance since President Obama halted and then resumed the military commissions, attorneys for Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen held here since he was 15 years old and charged with murder and support for terrorism, launched a forceful case Wednesday afternoon that a military judge should bar from court all statements Khadr made to his interrogators for the last eight years.

The interrogation methods in the Army Field Manual 2-22.3 are valid approaches and sometimes applicable for interrogating members of al-Qaida, but even more effective are the techniques that I learned as a criminal investigator. I used these techniques, permitted by the Army Manual under the terms “…psychological ploys, verbal trickery, or other nonviolent or non-coercive subterfuge…” to great success and I taught these techniques to other members of my interrogation team. Just one example of a commonly used criminal investigative technique that has been adopted into the Army Field Manual is the Good Cop/Bad Cop approach, but there are numerous others that are absent from both the manual and the Army’s interrogator training. The U.S. law enforcement community has much to add to the improvement of our interrogation methods and the United States Army would do well to consult with experienced criminal investigators from our police departments and federal law enforcement agencies.

But I’m sure Marc Thiessen, a former White House speechwriter, knows more than a man who took down Zarqawi.

Then he avers that Obama’s rejection of torture has cost U.S. interrogators “any tools at our disposal” to “compel” information out of terrorist captures. Except that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber of Northwest Flight 253, is cooperating with his interrogators after they used pressure from his family to compel that cooperation. Also, the elite interrogators of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group will surely be surprised to hear they have no available tools for interrogating a resistant detainee. Then he says that torture stopped an attempted attack on the Los Angeles library tower, a misstatement that has been so thoroughly debunked it raises questions about Thiessen’s honesty.

Then Daniel Freedman — a former Rudy Giuliani aide, aide to ex-FBI counterterrorist agent Ali Soufan and torture opponent, more than ably points out that despite the torture of senior al-Qaeda captives like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, several attacks in Europe and throughout the Middle East nevertheless occurred. To say nothing of al-Qaeda’s demonstrable reconstitution in the tribal areas of Pakistan. And Thiessen — a former speechwriter — wants to credibly contend that torture is the difference between security and insecurity. “The problem Marc has is that he takes things out of context and doesn’t read the full documents,” Freedman observes. Yet he’s your newest Washington Post columnist.

Watch the whole thing — especially when Marc Thiessen implies that he knows more about interrogation than Gen. David Petraeus. And shame on Joe Scarborough for portraying Soufan, a man who has actually broken up al-Qaeda cells, as a “guy who writes a lot” and not one of the most experienced counterterrorists in American history:

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I’m sorry, just one more thing. Thiessen objects to the use of the non-torture techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual on Interrogation against the highest-value detainees because the manual is “on the Internet” and terrorists can train against it. That’s just a flat-out misunderstanding of the field manual in particular and the interrogations process itself. The field manual does not and never has required only the use of those techniques it lists, but it proscribes physical and psychological abuse. That’s why people like Abdulmutallab can, say, have their parents’ opprobrium be used against them, a technique not explicitly listed in the field manual but still legally and morally kosher — and proven to be effective.

And yet that’s exactly what Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, did when he sent out a press release boasting of an exchange he had today with FBI Director Robert Mueller during a hearing to examine the intelligence failures leading up to the unsuccessful Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253. From Sessions’ release:

FBI DIRECTOR MUELLER: “In this particular case, in fast-moving events, decisions were made—appropriately, I believe, very appropriately—given the situation…”

SEN. SESSIONS: “I don’t think you can say it’s appropriate. We don’t know what that individual knows, learned while he was working with al Qaeda, and we may never know, because he now has got a lawyer who’s telling him to be quiet.”

Let’s recall a point Spencer made on MSNBC last month in response to Pat Buchanan’s laments that the Nigerian suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was not immediately subjected to “hostile interrogation” — or what most of us would call torture.

We’ve seen we’ve gotten a lot of bad information from torturing people. I don’t really understand the argument that because every single time we have a new emergency, we have to forget about the hard lessons we’ve learned in the past over this. And then secondly, by every standard that we’ve seen so far, every piece of reporting, the guy cooperated. He immediately said he’s a member of al Qaeda. He started talking threateningly about how there were other attacks coming. So I’m not sure where we make this jump to the idea that we’re not getting information from the guy.

Right.

The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, has said Mr. Abdulmutallab provided “useable, actionable intelligence,” but declined to specify what it was. A law enforcement official said Mr. Abdulmutallab explained who gave him the bomb, where he received it and where he was trained to use it, among other things.

Eventually, Mr. Abdulmutallab stopped talking and asked for a lawyer, which he received about 30 hours after his arrest. It was not clear when in that timeline that the F.B.I. read him his Miranda rights.

But Sessions continued:

SESSIONS: “It’s not just the ability to prosecute this individual, but whether, if he were properly interrogated over a period of time, we may find out that there are other cells, other plans, other Abdulmutallabs out there boarding planes that are going to blow up American citizens.”

Here we go. What does Sessions mean by “properly interrogated”? What evidence is there, in the wake of news reports that Abdulmutallab immediately started talking upon his arrest, to suggest that he was not properly interrogated?

Make no mistake — when Sessions is talking about “proper interrogation,” this is a euphemism. He’s talking about waterboarding. He’s talking about torture. Elements of the Republican Party have become so completely Cheney-ized that they view due process, which is enshrined in the Bill of Rights, as “inappropriate” and maintain that torture should be the tactic of first resort whenever someone is suspected of being a terrorist.

And as Adam Serwer deftly pointed out this morning, Senator-elect Scott Brown (R-Mass.) represents the GOP’s continued acceptance of torture as standing operating procedure during interrogations. From Brown’s acceptance speech last night:

And let me say this, with respect to those who wish to harm us, I believe that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation — they do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.

Raising taxes, taking over our health care, and giving new rights to terrorists is the wrong agenda for our country.

Serwer notes:

This is the new normal for Republicans: You can be denied rights not through due process of law but merely based on the nature of the crime you are suspected of committing. Brown’s rhetorical framing, that jettisoning the legal system we’ve had for 200-plus years represents “tradition” while granting suspected criminals the right to legal counsel represents liberalism gone mad is new, and I suspect we’ll hear it again. “New rights” recalls the term “judicial activism,” which conservatives have redefined to mean “decisions Republicans don’t like” instead of decisions that overturn precedent. “New rights” can be broadly defined as upholding the legal rights of individuals based on the Constitution, rather than arbitrarily according to the whim of politicians. For Brown and the GOP, if you’re accused of terrorism, you’re automatically guilty, so legal representation is frivolous. These guys look at the Constitution like David Vitter and John Ensign look at the Ten Commandments.

Let’s also be clear: Brown, a former military lawyer, isn’t merely talking about denying people their day in court, he’s talking about torturing people who are suspected of being terrorists. Brown says he doesn’t think waterboarding is torture, which is on par with thinking evolution is fake and global warming is a hoax. He thinks not torturing people suspected of a crime or detained by the military is granting them “new rights.” We know where this goes.

Ladies and gentlemen, the new face of the Republican Party.

Most of those [Bush holdovers], of course, were in the moderate camp inside the Bush administration, not the Cheney cadre, or like Brennan they present themselves as simply career professionals who followed orders or who even quietly dissented from the most extreme policies of the last eight years. “I was somebody who did oppose waterboarding,” Brennan told me. “I opposed different aspects of the enhanced interrogation program. But there were some aspects of it that I concurred with.” For instance, he offered, “if you grab somebody by the lapels, and you say, Oh, my goodness, you’ve violated their rights as a person, well, I’m not going to go that far.”

Well, OK, but how far are you willing to take that? Years of awful experience with torture demonstrates that grabbing someone by the lapels doesn’t stay just a lapel grab for very long. If an interrogator is led to believe he can grab someone by the lapels, he’s likely to grab someone in other places. There’s a reason that U.S. laws and binding legal conventions against torture are absolute.

Brennan is clearly not being literal here. And progressives have tended to underplay the notes Brennan has struck advocating basically the approach to terrorism progressives advocated all throughout the Bush years. But President Obama issued an executive order revoking his predecessor’s interrogation rules practically root and branch. Brennan’s interview complicates the meaning of that order.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan (USUHSy/ZUMA Press)

The new unit created by the Obama administration to interrogate the highest-value terrorism targets is unlikely to play a role in the case of the highest-profile new potential terrorist target in U.S. custody: Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter.

The director of the new interrogation unit, FBI Special Agent Andrew McCabe — who has not been previously identified in the press as the leader of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) — referred all questions about the Hasan case to the FBI’s public affairs office and said he would not be able to elaborate on HIG operations beyond an August statement by Attorney General Eric Holder announcing the group’s creation. Still, it is unlikely that the HIG would interview Hasan. Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department’s national security division, clarified that the new group is mandated to operate “overseas only.”

[Security1] The White House, Justice Department and intelligence community created the HIG as the result of a months-long review of interrogation policy to determine effective means of eliciting information from important captured terrorists or terrorist suspects without violating U.S. laws or jeopardizing potential prosecutions. As first reported by TWI in June, the new group placed elements from the FBI in charge of interrogations, stripping the CIA of the lead role, although the HIG itself is intended to include representatives of the FBI, CIA and Defense Department. Its architects describe its targets as the highest echelon of extremists: Hakimullah Mahsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, for instance, or Osama bin Laden himself.

It is not clear whether Hasan ought to be considered a terrorist, and most evidence to date suggests he is better understood as a criminal suspect. An inquiry that began shortly after he allegedly shot and killed 14 people at Fort Hood on Nov. 7 has yet to determine any substantive links to extremist organizations, and reportedly indicates that he acted alone. An FBI spokeswoman, Denise Ballew, declined to comment, and referred all questions about Hasan to the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, which is leading the Hasan inquiry with FBI support. Spokespeople for the Criminal Investigation Division did not return phone messages.

But an al-Qaeda affiliated cleric now based in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaqi, has confirmed to The Washington Post that he communicated with Hasan, and Army psychiatrist, repeatedly before the shooting occurred. While Hasan is convalescing from wounds sustained when police officers stopped the attack, he might shed light on the circumstances that lead a very small minority of radicalized American Muslims to commit acts of extremism and even seek to connect with the broader terrorist infrastructure, which the counterterrorism community refers to as the “self-starter” or “lone-wolf” problem.

In a Senate hearing on Thursday, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) called the shooting a “homegrown terrorist attack,” a point not entirely accepted by his panel’s witnesses. Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert with the Rand Corporation, testified that while “radicalization and recruitment to terrorism is occurring in the United States and is a security concern,” the small handful of examples of such behavior meant that American Muslim communities are “overwhelmingly unsympathetic to terrorist appeals,” a point Lieberman endorsed.

Individuals close to the HIG had mixed perspectives about whether it should play any role with Hasan. None agreed to speak for attribution, citing both the ongoing investigation into Hasan’s case and the secrecy surrounding the Obama administration’s new interrogation unit. “I can think of a lot of uses I could make of a HIG team while waiting for someone to be captured in Afghanistan,” said one such individual. “There’s no reason the HIG couldn’t be used domestically. There’s a ban on the CIA doing things in country, so they might just have to use FBI interrogators or interviewers. But aside from that I don’t see any other issues.”

A U.S. official involved with the establishment of the HIG said that it remained an open question whether Hasan is a “lone wolf with mental pathology” or someone who “latched onto extremist ideology and influence” like al-Awlaqi. As a result, there is insufficient evidentiary basis for involving the HIG, since it is unclear what actual information Hasan might have that could illuminate aspects of the broader terrorist puzzle. “I also have not seen anything that indicates known or suspected outside influence — other than firebrand al-Awlaqi’s call-to-arms, which is dangerous enough in itself — whether non-state actor or otherwise” is involved in the Hasan case, the official said.

A former U.S. counterterrorism official agreed: “The HIG is for high-value detainees and he’s not a high-vale detainee. He’s a criminal who did a heinous act.” The ex-official went on to say that if information emerged changing that picture, Army CID and FBI investigators have “a process to share information with behavioral analysis groups, [and] share with the HIG, to be careful to watch for other possible wackos.”

There are a number of investigations open into Hasan aside from the main CID-FBI probe. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the Pentagon would undertake its own review of the Hasan case to determine if its personnel missed warning signs leading to Hasan’s attack that might have prevented it. The intelligence community is reviewing what it knew about Hasan’s communications with al-Awlaqi or other extremists. Late last week, President Obama directed all relevant agencies to turn over information about those communications to his principle White House counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, John Brennan — who, coincidentally, is also the White House liaison with the HIG.

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

The task force advising the Obama administration on interrogating terrorism-related detainees is wrapping up its work this week, and although some of its final recommendations remain unfinished, officials familiar with its work indicate that it will focus less on specific interrogation techniques than on recommending interrogators develop their non-abusive strategies around known information about the specific detainees being questioned.

As first reported in June by The Washington Independent, the task force, chaired by J. Douglas Wilson of the Justice Department, is likely to recommend removing the CIA as the lead federal agency in charge of terrorism interrogations in favor of a mixed team of interrogation specialists from the FBI, the CIA and the military. A consensus has formed within the task force that creating such teams is the optimal path for eliciting vital information from the highest-value terrorism suspects without jeopardizing potential prosecutions of those detainees.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The task force, convened as part of a January executive order from President Obama ending the CIA’s so-called enhanced interrogation program, is supposed to recommend which non-coercive interrogation techniques ought to be employed. But a source familiar with the task force’s work cautioned that experienced interrogators on the task force believe that a narrow focus on the use of particular techniques missed the point of interrogation work.

“One of the major recommendations was an investment in research and the application of science to better the elicitation of information, more than [specific] techniques,” said one such official, who requested anonymity because the task force’s report has yet to be delivered to the White House. “As far as techniques go, it’s not about techniques, it’s more about the application” of interrogation plans built around the specific circumstances of a detainee.

The Wall Street Journal also quoted an official familiar with the task force’s work as saying that professional interrogators find the Army Field Manual on Interrogations, a mostly Geneva Conventions-compliant instruction manual for tactical military interrogations, as less relevant for their work with high-value targets. “That’s good for 18-year-olds who need an operator’s manual in the field,” the official told The Journal’s Siobhan Gorman, but “you want to have a spectrum of things, and to know what the borders are — what you can’t do.”

Nothing in the task force’s recommendations would approach “extreme physical or mental discomfort,” an official told TWI, as Obama’s executive order has banned any such approaches and revoked all Justice Department legal foundations for the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, and there are “no signs those measures work.” The official added that within the bounds of the executive order’s torture ban, the task force’s discussion on interrogation approaches centered on “what works, what’s known to work, and not have an extreme price on it.”

While the executive order creating the task force mandated it to deliver its finished product by July 21, the Journal reported that the task force was unlikely to meet the deadline. The Washington Post reported that it was still likely to give its recommendations to the White House by week’s end. It is unclear why the task force might require an extension to its deadline.

TWI reported in June that the task force was favorably inclined to a proposal making the interrogation teams report jointly to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence when interrogating high-value terrorism detainees. The logic behind the proposal is to ensure that even when the purpose of an interrogation is to develop intelligence — such as information around a specific plot or about the structure of a terrorist organization — the interrogations do not preclude the Justice Department from seeking prosecutions of those detainees.

In a May speech at the National Archives, Obama lamented how the abuse of detainees in hidden CIA prisons and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility during the Bush administration may have jeopardized his Justice Department’s ability to convict some detainees in civilian courts. He has used that abuse as part of an argument to construct a system of preventive detention, possibly including captives off the battlefields of Afghanistan — something civil libertarians have fiercely resisted.