Mark Hosenball: Newsweek:
A special counterterrorism unit created by the Obama administration to replace the Bush administration’s controversial CIA detention and interrogation program is playing only a limited role in the investigation of the attempted May 1 car bombing of New York’s Times Square, according to four U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence officials who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information. The limited role of the interagency High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) in the questioning of Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American suspect who has been arrested for attempting to carry out the failed attack, raises new questions about just what the HIG’s mission is and when the unit is supposed to be deployed.
The four U.S. officials who spoke to Declassified all said that “elements” of the HIG, which reports to the Justice Department but is also supervised by a subcommittee of the National Security Council at the White House, are participating in the interrogation of Shahzad himself. However, two of the officials said that their understanding was that what HIG personnel are doing in the Shahzad investigation is providing “intelligence support” to FBI agents who are doing the actual questioning of Shahzad and who are not part of the HIG.
The rest here.