ASHINGTON, May 5 � The Justice Department is examining
the involvement of Central Intelligence Agency officers and contract
employees in three suspicious deaths of detainees, two in Iraq and one in
Afghanistan, federal law enforcement officials said Wednesday.
One of the victims of suspected abuse was an Iraqi major general in the
Republican Guard, who died in November 2003, several days after he was
questioned at an interrogation center in western Iraq by C.I.A. officers,
according to a senior law enforcement official. The official said the
Pentagon had identified the Iraqi officer as Abid Hamid Mohush.
On Wednesday, a C.I.A. official outlined the cases in which agency
employees or contractors are involved but declined to identify any of the
agency employees. The official would not name the victims or provide
details on grounds that the cases were under investigation by the agency's
inspector general, who has shared investigative findings with the Justice
Department.
In November 2003, the official said, a detainee at Abu Ghraib prison in
Baghdad died, apparently as he was being questioned by a C.I.A. officer
and a linguist who was hired by the agency as a contractor. In that case,
the detainee had been turned over to intelligence authorities by Navy
Seals, whose spokesman on Wednesday denied mistreatment of the prisoner.
The agency official said the detainee was not touched, but "slumped over"
during the interrogation. The C.I.A. officers who interviewed General
Mohush also denied mistreating him.
In a third case, in June 2003, a detainee in Afghanistan died during
questioning by an independent contractor working for the C.I.A., a case in
which the agency official did not rule out mistreatment.
Agency officials briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed
session on Wednesday about the prisoner abuse issue. Senator Pat Roberts,
a Kansas Republican and the committee chairman, said in a statement to
reporters, "So far there appears to be no evidence of intelligence
personnel that directed any of the abuses, but the investigation does
continue."
The Justice Department inquiry, which has focused first on what laws
may have been violated, means C.I.A. employees or contractors may be
prosecuted in civilian courts. Until now, only the military was known to
be investigating the deaths and degrading treatment of detainees in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Another area of possible wrongdoing by the agency disclosed Wednesday
relates to requests by C.I.A. personnel to military authorities at Abu
Ghraib prison to hold suspects without listing them on the prison's rolls,
according to newly available passages of an internal military report on
abuses in Iraqi prisons.
The practice was routine, according to a passage in the report by Maj.
Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. The passage was included in an unedited version of
the report that circulated on Wednesday on several Web sites; previous
edited versions of the report omitted any reference to withholding names
from prison rolls.
Detainees kept off the prisoner roster at Abu Ghraib were referred to
as "ghost detainees," the report said. In one instance, the report found,
a group of six to eight prisoners "was moved around within the facility to
hide them from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross survey
team."
A C.I.A. official said the agency had discontinued such practices but
said that the Geneva Conventions allowed a delay in the identification of
prisoners to avoid disclosing their whereabouts to an enemy.
The Justice Department's jurisdiction over agency employees stems from
federal statutes, like one cited by law enforcement officials, which make
it a crime for Americans acting under government authority to "inflict
severe physical or mental pain or suffering upon another person under his
custody or control."
Under the torture statute, a person convicted of killing someone by
torture could face a sentence of death or life in prison. Federal civil
rights law might also be applied, the officials said.
The Justice Department's jurisdiction over independent contractors
stems from the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, a four-year-old
law, untested in court, that gives federal courts jurisdiction over any
crimes that may be committed by civilian contractors working with the
military abroad.
Contractors are hired under an arrangement that assures them they will
not be prosecuted under Iraqi law, he said. They are also, because of
Supreme Court rulings, not held accountable to the Uniform Code of
Military Justice.
