CIA officers refused to work at secret prisons, says paper

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration emptied its CIA prisons and transferred top terrorism suspects to Guantanamo Bay partly because CIA officers refused to carry out interrogations, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.

CIA officers were concerned they could be prosecuted for using illegal interrogation techniques and refused to continue their work until their legal situation could be clarified, the newspaper said in an article quoting unnamed former spy agency officials.

Critics have said the secretive CIA programme of detentions and interrogation amounts to allowing torture, but the White House has denied this.

The CIA denied the report. "The notion that CIA interrogators refused to question detainees, and that is what led to their transfer, is flat out wrong," CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said.

The article appeared as the White House is embroiled in an intense struggle on Capitol Hill to secure new legislation that would endorse tough interrogation tactics and protect agency interrogators from potential legal liability.

Bush acknowledged the existence of the secret CIA programme for the first time on September 6, when he announced the transfer of its last 14 detainees to the US prison for foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

At the time, Bush said the program's future had been placed in doubt by a US Supreme Court ruling in June that struck down his original plan for trying terrorism suspects as violating the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners.

But the Financial Times quoted State Department legal adviser John Bellinger as saying CIA interrogations slowed last December, after congressional passage of a bill outlawing torture and the inhumane treatment of prisoners.

The bill was authored by senator John McCain of Arizona, one of three Republicans in the Senate who have led a rebellion against White House efforts to win congressional authorisation for CIA interrogation techniques.

The CIA's secret prisons were first disclosed by the Washington Post last November and stirred an international outcry against what critics branded a US policy of torture.

Top administration officials described the interrogations as an essential tool in the US war on terrorism and credit the system with providing information that foiled an attack inside the United States.

Among the 14 detainees transferred from CIA detention this month was senior al Qaeda member Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

- REUTERS