The Obama administration is considering creating a special unit of professional interrogators to handle key terror suspects, focusing on intelligence-gathering rather than building criminal cases for prosecution, a government official said Saturday.
The recommendation is expected from a presidential task force on interrogation methods that plans to send some findings to the White House on Tuesday.
The official said the panel, which has not completed its work, has concluded that the unit of intelligence and law enforcement agencies should be created. The task force is unsure which agencies should have a role, though the CIA and FBI are expected to be important players, according to the official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the panel's work and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman, said President Obama has not reviewed the task force's recommendations. The spokesman declined to discuss any findings. The recommendation about the new unit was first reported in Saturday's Wall Street Journal.
The unit's structure would depart significantly from the approach of the Bush administration, when the CIA had the lead and sometimes exclusive role in questioning al Qaeda suspects. Such a unit would not alter the Obama administration's decision against using harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, which simulates drowning, that were authorized by the Bush administration. The Obama task force is examining what other techniques could be used, the official said.
Obama signed executive orders when he took office in January calling for government task forces to recommend future policies for interrogating and detaining suspected terrorists. The deadline for those recommendations is Tuesday. The coming week also marks the halfway mark to Obama's deadline to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
When Obama became president in January, there were about 245 inmates at the facility. After six months, the U.S. has relocated fewer than 20. Most of those were sent to other countries; one has been brought to U.S. to face trial in a civilian criminal court.
The government hopes to transfer many of the detainees - including up to 100 Yemenis - to other nations for rehabilitation or release. A much smaller number are expected to be brought to trial by the Justice Department, and a separate group will be tried in military commissions. A final group probably will be held without formal charges, subject to some form of regular judicial review.
Obama campaigned on a pledge to close Guantanamo. As president, he has seen members of his own party abandon him on the issue when Republicans mounted effective opposition.
Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the legal issues surrounding Guatanamo too often have been pushed aside by politics.
"There's been an ugly, angry backlash in Congress that's based on a mix of fear-mongering and misunderstanding. Obama has pledged to restore the rule of law and abide by the rule of law, and he needs to act out of principle, not political pressure," Hafetz said.
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