The mysterious case of CIA interrogator Mark Swanner

CQ Politics:

There are 14 names in the confidential Red Cross report that surfaced last week on the CIA's "ill treatment" of detainees.But you will not find in it the name of Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi who was picked up by U.S. Navy SEALS in Baghdad and interrogated by the CIA.That's because Jamadi died in the care of Mark Swanner, a 44-year-old CIA interrogator who battered the prisoner at the ghastly Abu Ghraib in 2003.

Swanner had "performed interrogations and polygraph tests for the agency ... since the nineteen-nineties," according to an eye-opening story by Jane Mayer in the Nov. 14, 2005 issue of The New Yorker magazine.But his treatment of Jamadi amounted to murder, the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigations Detachment concluded:

"The Final Autopsy Report listed the cause of Mr. AL-JAMADI's death as blunt force injuries of the torso complicated by compromised respiration, and the manner of Mr. Al-JAMADI's death as homicide."

So Jamadi was not available to tell Red Cross investigators how he was tortured, as could the lucky 14 who survived the CIA's "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" in secret prisons before being transferred to Guantanamo.But Swanner was. He was back home in Stafford County, Va.

In 2004-2005 the CIA's Inspector General reviewed Swanner's involvement in Jamadi's death and made a referral to the Justice Department for prosecution.

But two years after Jamadi's death, and a year after the CID's "homicide" finding, Swanner was still working for the CIA, according to Mayer's Nov. 2005 story. By then he had been "under investigation by the Justice Department for more than a year," she wrote.

It's not likely Swanner, who was not an undercover employee, was ever really under investigation by the Bush administration's Justice Department, which constantly found loopholes for CIA interrogators to escape Geneva Convention and congressional strictures on torture. Nor were CIA officers in charge of interrogations at Baghram Air Base in Afghanistan, where another prisoner died, ever held to account. CIA inspectors found that headquarters officials had carefully coached them on what to say in their official report.

But the matter, including the names of the CIA's Baghram base chief and his deputy, remains classified, and no one was punished, much less prosecuted.

Swanner's name, too, might have remained secret, were it not for Mayer's story.

But it quickly slipped beneath the waves, not to surface again. Nor has the Justice Department announced it has decided not to pursue charges against him.Swanner's case has just been left to die quietly, without notice, a former CIA official involved in the matter observed, on condition of anonymity because it remains classified.