Washington, Aug 25 (DPA) US Attorney General Eric Holder Monday appointed a special prosecutor to re-examine nearly a dozen cases of CIA interrogators who allegedly abused terrorism detainees in the aftermath of the Sep 11, 2001, attacks.

It was one of a flurry of decisions and reports issued throughout Monday relating to former President George W. Bush's once-secret interrogation programmes that were launched in 2002.

President Barack Obama authorised the formation of an elite interrogation team to handle top terrorism suspects, shifting that responsibility from the CIA to the FBI and bringing it under the direct oversight of the White House.

The Justice Department released a much-anticipated 2004 report by the inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The 154-page report offers a history of the CIA detention programme and documents a series of prisoner abuses by interrogators.

Holder said his decision to launch a new investigation was largely based on the 2004 report. John Durham, a career prosecutor, is tasked with investigating whether CIA personnel and private contractors broke the law as they dealt with terrorism suspects held overseas.

The decisions mark a repudiation of the Bush administration, which sanctioned 'enhanced' interrogation techniques that critics have called torture. Obama ended the practice within days of entering office in January.

Bush administration officials long defended the methods as critical to preventing more terrorist attacks against the US.

The CIA report says interrogations 'enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the US and around the world'. But critics argue there is no way of knowing how much of that information could have been garnered without the harsh techniques.

The CIA report documented cases where interrogators went well beyond even the expanded methods. Interrogators in Iraq and Afghanistan carried out mock executions, threatened one detainee with a gun and electric drill and threatened the families of other detainees.

'We're going to kill your children,' an interrogator told Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sep 11 attacks on New York and Washington, according to the report.

Obama has said he prefers to move forward with his own agenda rather than prosecute abuses of the past, but the White House said it would be up to Holder whether to actually launch criminal cases.

The Justice Department's ethics office recommended that some cases of prisoner abuse be reopened.