WASHINGTON — The Justice Department prosecutor appointed this week to examine the CIA’s interrogation program will revisit long dormant-cases of abuse by the agency’s civilian contractors, bringing new attention to a little- known but controversial element of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.
Civilian contractors used by the CIA at secret overseas facilities were said to be involved in a series of cases of detainee abuses and deaths in the years following the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but only one was ever prosecuted.
The contractors also played a key but secret role in the CIA’s brutal interrogations of suspected top al-Qaeda leaders at black-site prisons overseas.
The new scrutiny will be a central part of the preliminary review by federal prosecutor John Durham, according to Justice Department officials and others familiar with the review.
Durham was appointed this week by Attorney General Eric Holder in a move that provoked sharp criticism from both ends of the political spectrum.
Conservatives fear Durham’s assignment will become a “witch hunt” targeting well-meaning intelligence officers. Liberals want the veteran prosecutor to go after the political and legal architects of the Bush administration’s so-called enhanced-interrogation program.
However, indications are that the scope of Durham’s assignment will be more limited and may not exceed a dozen or so cases, most of which already been the subject of several reviews. Durham may be able to expand his purview later, especially if he recommends a full-scale criminal investigation after concluding the preliminary review.
The investigation could then delve into whether CIA supervisors and officials at agency headquarters knew about or gave authorization to interrogators to use tactics that went beyond those approved by the Justice Department in legal memos.
In recent years, the U.S. military’s use of civilian contractors has been the subject of reviews, criminal trials, congressional hearings and public debate.
The use of civilian interrogators by the CIA had received less public scrutiny before the Obama administration released previously secret Justice Department legal memos. Much of the CIA interrogation program was farmed out to civilian contractors following charges that it supported torture in Latin America and elsewhere in earlier decades.
