Next month, the Obama administration’s Task Force on Interrogation and Transfer Policy is going to deliver a series of recommendations to the White House about how to flesh out the January 22 executive order barring torture. I have a piece today in the Washington Independent reporting out one aspect of its recommendations: the creation of joint interagency interrogation teams for the noncoercive interrogation of high-value terrorist targets, reporting both to the Justice Department and the Director of National Intelligence to ensure that interrogation techniques don’t jeopardize potential prosecutions. A taste:

Last month, J. Douglas Wilson, the Justice Department official who leads the Obama administration’s Special Task Force on Interrogation and Transfer Policies — a panel created by President Obama’s January 22 executive order banning torture — invited the Intelligence Science Board members to Washington to brief the task force on their recommendations. In an oral presentative and a five-page summary of hundreds of pages of work, Heymann said, he and his colleagues recommended the creation of “an organizational structure that could draw” on the experience of a small corps of the best interrogators currently working for the government who “could produce what would very likely be the best non-coercive interrogation or interviewing capacity in the world.” That corps would serve as the first wave of interrogators under the new structure while preparing a syllabus on proper interrogation guidelines for new recruits to the teams.

“The group would be mobile, and go where it needed to go,” said Heymann, now a Harvard law professor, envisioning teams of three to five interrogators at a time who would “only deal with major interviews and major occasions to get information from a terror suspect” of the order of Abu Zubaydah or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, two of the most senior al-Qaeda captives held by the CIA and later the Defense Department. While emphasizing that the task force might not adopt every detail of his proposal and that modifications were likely, Heymann said that the teams would “report both to the Justice Department and to the intelligence world,” a move intended to ensure that interrogations do not compromise prosecutions of detainees, a significant departure from the Bush administration.

The task force — officially chaired by Attorney General Eric Holder and co-vice-chaired by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — has embraced the proposal, according to an official familiar with its work. “It’s highly thought out and sophisticated,” the official said. “This is going to be part of the draft recommendations. It may or may not make the final cut, but I’d be very surprised if it did not.” The task force is scheduled to deliver its recommendations to the White House by July 21. Spokespeople for Holder and Blair declined to comment on the task force’s recommendations while its work was ongoing.

 This bit is both substance and interagency intrigue:

“There would have to be an early decision, presumably made in Washington by people with a high level of responsibility, as to whether to take whatever steps necessary to ensure any statements could be used at a trial, or to go ahead and get as much information as possible, without worrying about convicting on that basis,” Heymann said. The decision would impact whether to immediately provide a detainee with a lawyer in preparation of seeking a conviction or whether to proceed with an interrogation in order to collect intelligence about a broad picture of a terrorist organization or specific plot.

“That doesn’t mean we torture them,” Heymann said. “It means to forget about offering a lawyer, if that’s required, even though that means we would not use any statement at trial.” Acquiring information intended for use when trying a detainee would have to meet standards for admissibility in criminal court. “If you want to admit it in American court, it’s going to have to be noncoercive and perhaps comply with the Miranda rules,” Heymann said.

According to the official familiar with the task force’s work, who requested anonymity because the draft has not been finalized, the interrogation teams would “draw on the best and the brightest from the FBI, [Department of Justice], [Department of Defense] and other parts of the intelligence and law enforcement community,” and there were “some discussions” among task force members about whether “it would make the most sense for the FBI to take the lead,” given the FBI’s 100-year history with interrogating criminal suspects. Some task force members want the “FBI to lead but not dominate.” The official added that the CIA’s role in interrogations remained to be determined at this point in the task force’s work.

I couldn’t find out every aspect of what the task force will report. Not all of it is finalized, either. But I’m hoping to figure out more and follow up.