Interrogation

Moscow's Lefortovo is a forbidding-looking brick fortress prison built in the shape of a K -- a bizarre tribute to Katherine the Great by the architect, who was infatuated with the empress.Over the centuries, thousands have passed through Lefortovo's TC dark corridors. To some it was the starting point on a long journey through czarist penal colonies and, later, through Stalin's Gulag. Others languished in its tepid cells until they received the executioner's call. The lucky ones -- who were relatively few -- eventually were let go.Will Englund, a Moscow correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, has been making repeated trips to Lefortovo in recent days at the demand of the Russian Security Ministry, which is building a case against one of his sources.

The Baltimore Police Department is taking steps to begin videotaping interrogations in its most serious criminal investigations - a long-resisted move that is being adopted by an increasing number of Maryland law-enforcement agencies. The department, the eighth-largest in the country, recently began using video as part of a series of reforms of its sex-offense unit. Now officials are exploring equipment options and the policy impact of videotaping homicide and shooting interrogations.

DETERMINING THE most effective way to interrogate prisoners in the war on terror has proved to be tricky business for the Bush administration, practically and politically. The sudden release this week of classified directives, memos and legal analyses clearly was designed to settle the question of the administration's inclination toward torture. It provided President Bush with yet another opportunity to emphatically disavow the use of torture in interrogating detainees. It also allowed the administration to engage in a little revisionist history.

Why did a detective continue to interrogate a woman after she invoked her right to have a lawyer present? It's a question that Carroll County law enforcement has been grappling with since last fall -- and one that last week sank a prosecution in the case of a Baltimore City teenager who died at Bowling Brook Academy in 2007. In internal memos circulated last fall, officials in the state's attorney's and sheriff's offices discussed detective Douglas Epperson's descriptions of the questioning in the murder case of Jeremiah P. DeMario, who was killed in 2010.

Physicians should not participate in the interrogation of detainees in military or civilian detention in the United States or elsewhere. The Bush administration produced a series of documents after 9/11 to justify psychologically and physically traumatic interrogation techniques for detainees labeled by the government as "unlawful combatants." Steven Miles, writing in the British medical journal Lancet, found that the medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive intelligence interrogations.

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning. Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview. Cheney's comments, in a White House interview Tuesday with a conservative radio talk show host, appeared to reflect the Bush administration's view that the president has the constitutional power to do whatever he deems necessary to fight terrorism.

At a critical moment in the police interrogation of Dontay Carter, homicide Detective Donald Steinhice rose from his chair to hit the teen-age suspect in a tender spot -- his ego.Convinced that Carter was lying when he initially tried to pass the blame for Vitalis V. Pilius' death to a youth known as "Tom Boh," the detective said: "In other words, you ain't s," according to testimony yesterday in Baltimore Circuit Court."

Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening. The proposal, in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, is a tangled mix of cross-references and significant omissions. Legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow CIA operatives and others to use many of the techniques disavowed by the Pentagon, including stress positions, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and perhaps simulated drowning "It's a Jekyll and Hyde routine," Martin S. Lederman, who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown, said of the administration's dual approaches.

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama's nominee to head the CIA, Leon E. Panetta, said yesterday that he intends to test the claims by current agency officials that coercive interrogation methods were effective in getting terrorism suspects to talk. Panetta's comments were the latest indication that the administration might restore some of the CIA's authority to use interrogation techniques that go beyond those allowed for the U.S. military. But Panetta stressed that he would also examine the "downside" of using coercive methods and that the agency would operate within the law. Last month, Obama signed executive orders to abolish harsh interrogation methods and close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

WASHINGTON - Two of the Bush administration's most influential lawyers played down yesterday their roles in crafting controversial legal policies in the war on terrorism, even as they rejected criticism that the president had overreached in asserting sweeping executive powers. Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington, and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo said they had sought after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to protect what they described as the president's inherent wartime powers and to offer interrogators clear guidance on what was permitted under what they described as vague U.S. and international laws.

Doris C. Margulis, a Baltimore actress who during the 1960s and early 1970s trained Special Forces troops in interrogation at the Army's old Fort Holabird in Dundalk, died Nov. 27 of cancer at the North Oaks retirement community in Pikesville. The former Mount Washington resident was 95. The daughter of a cigar maker and a homemaker who later owned a grocery store, Doris Crane was born in Baltimore and raised on Smallwood Street. After graduating from Western High School in 1932, she went to work as a stenographer and typist for Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. and later for several lawyers.

"I would find myself trussed up and left for hours in ropes, my biceps bound tightly with several loops to cut off my circulation and the end of the rope cinched behind my back, pulling my shoulders and elbows unnaturally close together. It was incredibly painful. " — Sen. John McCain from his book, "Faith of My Fathers" "[John McCain] doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works. " — former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum For the record, John McCain was learning "how enhanced interrogation works" when Rick Santorum was still trying to find a good acne cream.

For those who don't know, U.S. Senator John McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five years, where he saw up close the terrible, ineffective nature of torture. McCain has since spoken out against torture (aka "enhanced interrogation techniques") for these very reasons.  "In my personal experience, the abuse of prisoners sometimes produces good intelligence, but often produces bad intelligence," McCain said on the floor of the Senate recently. "Under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear -- whether it is true or false -- if he believes it will relieve his suffering.

Regarding your editorial arguing that renewed interest in water-boarding after the killing of Osama bin Laden is misplaced because it simply does not work and reflects poorly on the values of our nation ("Tortured arguments, revisited," May 5), I completely reject your reasoning. The record regarding the interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed is clear. Initially, intelligence officers used traditional questioning techniques to gain information, and predictably, KSM remained defiant, silent and unhelpful.

It's been almost nine years since Sept. 11, but we still have no established procedures for interrogating terrorism suspects detained inside the United States. The military-based system developed during the Bush administration disregards civil liberties. The criminal justice model used in many terrorism cases inhibits intelligence collection. We need a better system. To meet our counterterrorism objectives, Congress should enact a law that allows the government to interrogate a suspect for intelligence purposes, without counsel present, for up to seven days.

It's been a busy summer at the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The joint task force in charge of the 226 remaining detainees is spending about $440,000 to expand the recreation yards at Camp 6. At nearby Camp 4, which offers communal living for the most "compliant" captives, the soccer yard is being enlarged. At Camp 5, a maximum-security facility, a $73,000 classroom is under construction. In March, the task force added art classes to the thrice-weekly instruction it offers in Arabic, Pashtu and English, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney said yesterday that he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation methods used by the CIA and that the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should remain open indefinitely. Cheney's remarks on Guantanamo appear to put him at odds with President George W. Bush, who has expressed a desire to close the prison, though the decision is expected to be left to the administration of President-elect Barack Obama. Cheney's comments also mark the first time that he has acknowledged playing a central role in clearing the CIA's use of an array of controversial interrogation tactics, including a simulated drowning method known as "waterboarding."

WASHINGTON --The Army plans to charge Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, former head of the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, with dereliction of duty, lying to investigators and conduct unbecoming an officer, the officer's lawyer said yesterday. Jordan would be the highest-ranking officer at Abu Ghraib to face criminal charges in the abuses at the prison. Ten low-ranking soldiers who served at the prison outside Baghdad have been convicted. The highest-ranking officer convicted in any of the prisoner abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan is Capt.

With the economy still sputtering, unfinished wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and health care reform under attack, it's little wonder President Barack Obama isn't eager for a distracting debate over the Bush administration's policy on torture to extract information from suspected terrorists. But a report released Monday revealing new details of the abuses carried out by the agency shows why Mr. Obama will have to tackle the subject. Indeed, within hours of the report's release, the Justice Department announced a criminal probe of alleged detainee abuses, and the White House said it will assume direct control of interrogations of terror suspects.