A cold-war case of CIA detention still echoes

The memo is in sharp contrast to the 1978 congressional testimony of former CIA Director Richard Helms, who ran the agency at the end of Nosenko's detention. He was asked who gave legal authorization for the CIA to hold a KGB defector in an isolation cell for 1,277 days with no charges filed and no access to a lawyer or the courts. Mr. Helms said then-Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach had authorized it. But Mr. Katzenbach told the congressional panel that he would never have given such legal advice.

In a recent telephone interview, Katzenbach said the CIA never shared with him any details of Nosenko's treatment. "All they were talking about was the amount of time he was being held, which was harsh," he says.

Katzenbach, who later served as attorney general in the Johnson administration, says the intelligence agency was operating under its own rules. "The CIA had no authority to question anybody any differently than the FBI or the local police force," he says.

The legality of Nosenko's treatment in the 1960s was never tested in court in part because Nosenko later waived his right to sue the US government over his detention and treatment. After his release, the agency declared Nosenko a bona fide defector, paid him $175,000, and hired him for $35,000 a year as a consultant. In 1974, he became a US citizen.

As with the Nosenko affair, the US government is working to avoid judicial scrutiny of interrogations of terror suspects. Former enemy combatant Yasser Hamdi was released in 2004 and is now living freely in Saudi Arabia after signing an agreement not to sue the US government over his treatment.

In contrast, lawyers working on behalf of the other two Charleston detainees, Mr. Padilla and Mr. Marri, have filed civil lawsuits claiming their clients were tortured in the military prison. Lawyers for Padilla also filed a second suit Friday in San Francisco against former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo. The suit says Mr. Yoo was a legal architect of the Bush administration's harsh interrogation policies that were "intended to destroy Mr. Padilla's ordinary emotional and cognitive functioning ... to extract from him potentially self-incriminating information."

Padilla has been diagnosed with significant mental disabilities stemming from his three years and seven months in the Charleston brig. He was convicted last summer in a terror conspiracy trial in Miami. On Tuesday, a federal judge begins a week-long hearing to consider whether Padilla should receive a more lenient sentence because of his harsh treatment at the brig. Federal prosecutors want Padilla sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Marri remains in an isolation cell at the brig, but his conditions of confinement have eased since 2005. A federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., is currently examining the constitutionality of Marri's detention, though not the legality of the interrogation techniques used against him. A ruling is expected soon.

One common thread running through all four men's stories is a perceived need by the government to quickly extract information deemed essential to protect US national security.

"One of the difficulties with this kind of issue is that it is a slippery slope," says Katzenbach. "If you can put somebody in isolation for 24 hours, why not 48, why not a week?"

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