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thedrifter
11-09-07, 06:08 AM
Corps lawyer: Interrogation testimony blocked
By Laurie Kellman - The Associated Press
Posted : Friday Nov 9, 2007 5:36:25 EST

WASHINGTON — A Marine Corps lawyer told a House subcommittee Thursday the Pentagon blocked him from testifying that harsh interrogation methods tripped up his prosecution of a suspected terrorist.

The accusation came as the debate over detainee treatment continued to affect Michael Mukasey’s nomination as attorney general, with lawmakers struggling to come to a decision on when a confirmation vote would be scheduled.

“The Department of Defense has decided I cannot testify,” Marine Lt. Col. V. Stuart Couch wrote to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich. “Please be advised that I am willing to testify before the subcommittee in the event I am allowed to do so.”

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Couch has worked on several detainee cases that are still pending.

“In order to safeguard against potentially compromising a case that is still pending it is department practice not to have prosecutors testify in an open hearing,” Whitman said.

The chair intended for Couch stayed empty during proceedings by the House subcommittee on the Constitution into the effectiveness of so-called waterboarding and other severe interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might help stop would-be terrorist attacks.

Subcommittee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., noted Couch had made speeches and his story was published in The Wall Street Journal.

“These are not state secrets,” Nadler said of Couch’s account. “It is disgraceful that the administration would allow Colonel Couch to make after-dinner speeches about the subject matter, to talk at length to the press about the subject matter, but (be) prohibited from testifying before a duly constituted committee of the Congress.”

It was the latest development in an increasingly bitter debate over whether certain harsh interrogation methods should be outlawed in all circumstances. Waterboarding, which makes the subject think he’s drowning, is banned by domestic law and international treaties.

But those policies don’t cover the use of the technique by CIA personnel, and the administration won’t say whether it has allowed the agency’s employees to use it against terrorism detainees.

The question nearly toppled Mukasey’s nomination after he refused repeatedly to say whether it allowed the agency’s employees to use it against suspected terrorists.

The House and Senate are now considering legislation to outlaw the practice in all circumstances.

The question has dogged Mukasey’s nomination after his repeated refusal to equate waterboarding with illegal torture cost him the votes of many Democrats. Promising to enforce any anti-waterboarding law passed by Congress, Mukasey won back a majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee and awaits a confirmation vote by the full Senate.

Still, Senate leaders struggled to agree when to hold the vote. Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said on the Senate floor that a possible vote Thursday had been postponed and that a final vote could come as late as December.

Couch’s story adds a dimension to the debate over severe interrogation techniques, taking it beyond moral and legal questions to a practical one: Do such methods elicit helpful intelligence, or invalidate it?

A Marine Corps pilot and prosecutor, Couch told the Journal that he refused to proceed with the prosecution of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, accused of helping assemble a terrorist cell that included the hijacker who steered United Flight 175 into the World Trade Center.

Couch halted Slahi’s prosecution because he concluded that Slahi’s incriminating statements had been obtained through beatings and psychological torture.

“In our zeal to get information, we had compromised our ability to prosecute him,” Couch told the paper.

Meanwhile, a former interrogation instructor for the Navy said the words that congressional Democrats wanted to hear from Mukasey: Waterboarding is torture and should be banned.

“Waterboarding is torture, period,” Malcolm Wrightson Nance, a former Navy instructor of prisoner of war and terrorist hostage survival programs, told a House constitutional subcommittee. “I believe that we must reject the use of the waterboard for prisoners and captives and cleanse this stain from our national honor.”

Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., said at the panel’s hearing that he is against torture but that “sometimes we have to take measures to protect the innocent that we do not like.”

“Severe interrogations are sometimes part of doing that,” said Franks, the ranking Republican on the panel.

As a former master training specialist in survival programs, Nance said he underwent waterboarding as part of his training and that he personally led or was involved in using the procedure on hundreds of other trainees at the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program.

Nance described the experience as a “slow-motion suffocation” that provides enough time for the subject to consider what’s happening: “water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel(ing) your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs.”

“The victim is drowning,” Nance said in materials submitted with his testimony. The intent during training, he said, is to stop the process before death occurs.

Ellie