The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive
interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and
operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the
agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism
officials.
At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a
detainee with a gun during questioning, they said. In the case of
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have
helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used
graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water
boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under
water and made to believe he might drown.
These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the
interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in
Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The
rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the
Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a
new understanding throughout the government that officials would have
greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees.
Defenders of the operation said the methods stopped short of torture,
did not violate American anti-torture statutes, and were necessary to
fight a war against a nebulous enemy whose strength and intentions
could only be gleaned by extracting information from often
uncooperative detainees. Interrogators were trying to find out whether
there might be another attack planned against the United States.
The methods employed by the C.I.A. are so severe that senior officials
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have directed its agents to stay
out of many of the interviews of the high-level detainees,
counterterrorism officials said. The F.B.I. officials have advised the
bureau's director, Robert S. Mueller III, that the interrogation
techniques, which would be prohibited in criminal cases, could
compromise their agents in future criminal cases, the counterterrorism
officials said.

There is now concern at the agency that the
Congressional and criminal inquiries into abuses at Pentagon-run
prisons and other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan may lead to
examinations of the C.I.A's handling of the Qaeda detainees. That, in
turn, could expose agency officers and operations to the same kind of
public exposure as the military now faces because of the Iraq prison
abuses.