House Lawmakers Vote to Compel Cheney Aide to Testify on Interrogation Policy

WASHINGTON — A House judiciary subcommittee voted Tuesday to compel Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington, to testify about the aide's role in forming administration policies supporting harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists.

The move authorized House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., to issue a subpoena ordering Addington to answer questions about methods that critics say violate international and U.S. prohibitions against torture.

Conyers said he remained hopeful that Addington, who has so far refused to appear before the committee, would change his mind. If not, said Conyers, he would employ "more prodding through the legislative, coercive process — nonviolent, of course."

Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cheney's office, said that, for now, Addington stands by his refusal to appear.

"As of right now, we have not received a subpoena," she said. "If we do we'll certainly review it and respond accordingly."

Separately, former Attorney General John Ashcroft has agreed to testify before the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, as has John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer.

Yoo, currently a law professor at the University of California, wrote a 2002 memo - later repudiated as the result of a Supreme Court ruling - that gave legal cover to U.S. officials employing harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists.

No date has been set for their testimony.

The subcommittee is also talking with George Tenet, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, about his knowledge of how the interrogation policies were crafted, said Shin Inouye, spokesman for the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.

"Although shrouded in secret ... the legal opinions issued by administration lawyers have brought our nation into international disrepute," Nadler said in introducing legal experts at a subcommittee hearing on the issue Tuesday. "Torture is abhorrent. It is alien to our nation's values, our history and our laws. Secrecy and stonewalling will not change that."

British legal scholar Philippe Sands testified that "war crimes" have been committed by U.S. interrogators following administration policy that violates the Geneva Conventions against torture.

"The abuse was a result of pressures and actions driven from the very highest levels of the administration," said Sands, author of a book to be released this month entitled "Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values."

In the book, Sands alleges that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking administration officials pressed for increasingly harsh interrogation methods - that in Sands' estimation constituted torture - to ferret out intelligence from terrorist suspects in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"The administration relied on a small number of political appointees, lawyers with no real background in military law, with extreme views on executive power and, frankly, with an abiding contempt of international rules like the Geneva Conventions," said Sands, a law professor at University College in London. As a result, he said, "war crimes were committed."