CIA rethinks role as interrogator of terrorism suspects

WASHINGTON: The CIA wants to reduce its involvement in interrogating high-profile, secretly-held terrorist suspects, a role it sees as increasingly untenable, The New York Times said Wednesday quoting current and former CIA agents. “No one has a plan for what to do with these guys and the CIA has been left holding the bag,” a former top CIA official told the daily. The Central Intelligence Agency’s leadership is concerned that the legal authority for interrogations and detentions is eroding and that there is no clear way out of what could be a lengthy process of holding and caring for terrorist suspects of dubious intelligence value, the sources said. Since the prisoner abuse scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison last year, the White House has been distancing itself from an August 2002 Justice Department memorandum that had stretched the rules of interrogation, notably restricting what could be defined as torture, to give CIA and other government agents more leverage in extracting information from suspects. afp

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