According to Wapo it will be made up of experts from several intelligence and law enforcement agencies and housed at the FBI, the group will be overseen by the National Security Council, which means shifting the center of gravity away from the CIA and giving the White House direct oversight.
WaPo
President Obama has approved the creation of an elite team of interrogators to question key terrorism suspects, part of a broader effort to revamp U.S. policy on detention and interrogation, senior administration officials said Sunday.---------------
Seeking to signal a clean break from the Bush administration, Obama moved to overhaul interrogation and detention guidelines soon after taking office, including the creation of a task force on interrogation and transfer policies. The task force, whose findings will be made public Monday, recommended the new interrogation unit, along with other changes regarding the way prisoners are transferred overseas.---------------------
Under the new guidelines, interrogators must stay within the parameters of the Army Field Manual when questioning suspects. The task force concluded -- unanimously, officials said -- that "the Army Field Manual provides appropriate guidance on interrogation for military interrogators and that no additional or different guidance was necessary for other agencies," according to a three-page summary of the findings. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters freely.
Keep in mind that CIA inspector general's report will be released today.
The administration is releasing the new guidelines on the day when what it sees as the worst practices of the Bush administration are being given another public airing. New details of prisoner treatment are expected to be included in a long-awaited CIA inspector general's report being unveiled Monday about the spy agency's interrogation program. The report could set off a fresh debate between members of the current administration and the previous one over whether such tactics are necessary to prod detainees into cooperation and, ultimately, keep the country safe.
Update:
The NY Times is reporting the Justice Dept advises pursuing CIA abuses
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department has recommended reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, which could expose CIA employees and contractors to prosecution for their treatment of terrorism suspects, The New York Times reported on Monday.
The recommendation, reversing the Bush administration, came from the Justice Department's ethics office and has been presented to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.------------
The Justice Department is due to disclose details on Monday of prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the CIA's inspector general but have never been released, according to the Times report, which cited an unnamed person officially briefed on the matter.
Update 2:
Firedoglake is reporting the CIA report will contain the following
From what we can reconstruct, the report appears to include the following:
•Intro and summary
•A history of CIA's involvement in torture
•A description of the development of the torture techniques as if they were developed for use for Abu Zubaydah
•A review of the legal authorization for the program, with the critique that doctors were not involved in the pre-authorization review and, probably, a description of the ways that torture as practiced exceeded the guidelines included in Bybee Two
•An erroneous claim that everyone who should have been briefed was briefed
•Apparently a general review of how the program was implemented, including a description of the close involvement of medical personnel, and a description of what was done to which High Value Detainees
•A description of the decision to videotape and apparent reviews of what a review of the videotapes and cables revealed about whether the torture was what it was claimed to be
•Forty pages of completely redacted material
•The Effectiveness section
•A policy section that notes that the program includes many of the same techniques as the State Department qualifies as abusive
•Three pages of recommendations
•A number of Appendices--the CIA appears to be hiding the very existence of about five of these and most of the contents of the rest of them
link