The Central Intelligence Agency secretly detained an Al Qaeda suspect for at least six months beginning last summer as part of a program in which CIA officers have been authorized by President Bush to use harsh interrogation techniques, American officials said Friday.
The suspect, Muhammad Rahim, is the first Al Qaeda prisoner in nearly a year who intelligence officials have acknowledged has been in CIA detention. The CIA emptied its secret prisons in the fall of 2006, when it moved 14 prisoners to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but made clear the facilities could be used in the future to house high-level terrorism suspects.
Bush has defended the use of the secret prisons as a vital tool in American counterterrorism efforts, and last July he signed an executive order that formally reiterated the CIA’s authority to use interrogation techniques more coercive than those permitted by the Pentagon.
Bush used his veto power last weekend to block legislation that would have prohibited the CIA from using the techniques, and this week the House of Representatives failed to override the veto.
Military and intelligence officials said that Rahim was transferred earlier this week to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. In a message to employees on Friday, CIA Director Michael Hayden said that Rahim was put into the CIA program because of “his past and the continuing threat he presented to American interests.”
Intelligence officials would not say whether the CIA used any of what it calls an approved list of “enhanced” interrogation techniques against Rahim during his months in secret detention.
“This detention, like others, was conducted in accordance with U.S. law,” said Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman. He declined to say whether the agency has custody of any other prisoners.
Government officials described Rahim, an Afghan who has fought in the jihad for two decades, as an Al Qaeda planner and facilitator who at times in recent years had been a translator for Osama bin Laden.
They said he was captured and detained by local forces last summer in a country they would not name before being transferred to CIA custody. Pakistani newspapers reported that Pakistani operatives arrested Rahim in Lahore in August.
In his message to the CIA workforce Friday, Hayden said that in 2001, Rahim helped prepare the Afghan cave complex of Tora Bora as a hideout for Al Qaeda fighters fleeing the U.S.-led offensive.
A U.S. counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Rahim had attended radical madrassas in Pakistan.
The Bush administration last month formally charged six Al Qaeda operatives said to have been involved in plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. Five of the six detainees, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the attacks, had been in CIA custody until September 2006, when they were moved to Guantanamo.
Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty against the six men, government officials have said. In a speech Friday in London, Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey said if the men were to be executed, “they would see themselves as martyrs.”