CIA men to escape punishment: Death of prisoners in Iraq
By Our Correspondent
NEW YORK, Oct 23: The CIA officials involved in the deaths of at least four prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan will escape criminal charges in all but one of the incidents, said the New York Times on Sunday, quoting current and former intelligence and law-enforcement officials.
Federal prosecutors reviewing cases of possible misconduct by CIA employees have recently notified lawyers that they do not intend to bring criminal charges in several cases involving the handling of terrorism suspects and Iraqi guerillas, the officials told the newspaper.
Some of the cases are still technically under review by the Justice Department, but the intelligence and law-enforcement officials said they had been told that the department was not preparing to bring charges against CIA employees in those cases.
The Justice Department has charged only one person linked to the CIA with wrongdoing in any of the cases: David A. Passaro, who was a contract worker, not a CIA officer. The details of the CIA cases remain classified, as do the Justice Department reviews.
The newspaper says that the prosecutors’ decisions appear to reflect judgments that the CIA was far less culpable in the mistreatment of prisoners than was the military, where dozens of soldiers have been convicted or accepted administrative punishment for their actions in cases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The cases became public in April 2004, with reports about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and have led to the convictions of Charles A. Graner Jr., Lynndie R. England and other soldiers implicated in those episodes.
The decisions are based on reviews of eight dossiers referred to the Justice Department by the CIA’s inspector-general, describing possible misconduct by a half dozen to a dozen CIA employees in the deaths and other cases.
A case still technically under review by the Justice Department, the officials told the Times, involves a high-profile episode in which a CIA officer has been linked to mistreatment of prisoners, in a case involving an Iraqi who died under CIA interrogation in a shower room at Abu Ghraib. But in another case, involving the hypothermia death of an Afghan at a CIA-run detention centre called the Salt Pit in Afghanistan in November 2002, the Justice Department has signalled that it does not intend to bring charges.
The newspaper said that a third episode studied within the CIA involves a former Iraqi general who died of asphyxiation after being stuffed head-first into a sleeping bag at an American base in Al Asad, in western Iraq, on Nov. 26, 2003, after several days of interrogation.
The questioning involved beatings by a group that included at least one CIA contract worker. One official said that the case was never referred to the Justice Department for prosecution.
Mr Passaro is awaiting trial in North Carolina in connection with his role in a fourth case, involving the death of a prisoner in Afghanistan in June 2003.
