Washington – The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is questioning whether the CIA’s secret prison program – which he fears has become a black eye to the United States – should continue.
The review led by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., comes as the Bush administration deliberates an executive order, called for by Congress, that will establish new guidelines for the CIA’s system for detaining and interrogating terrorism suspects. It is the agency’s most publicly controversial intelligence collection program.
Rockefeller says there is no doubt that intelligence from detainees has been valuable. Yet he says he wonders whether the CIA needed to create a system outside of long-standing FBI and military interrogation programs.
Rockefeller’s spokeswoman, Wendy Morigi, said he has not been convinced that the CIA prisons produce better intelligence than the FBI and military systems.
“The real question is whether the administration’s decision to pursue an alternate system (at the CIA) was the right approach,” Rockefeller said in a statement Friday.
President Bush said he emptied the CIA’s secret prisons in September and sent its last 14 high-value detainees to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But he left open the possibility that the program could be used again.
As chairman, Rockefeller has promised to conduct more vigorous oversight of the spy agencies than did his Republican predecessor.
He is asking whether having a separate CIA detention and interrogation system is necessary and worth the toll on the U.S. image abroad.
“The widespread reports about secret prisons and torture, whether accurate or not, have damaged the United States’ reputation around the world and hindered counterterrorism efforts with our allies,” he said.
Human-rights groups have argued for years that the CIA’s detention and interrogation techniques amount to torture. The International Committee of the Red Cross is the only independent watchdog to interview the 14 detainees who were held by the CIA.
