The House Intelligence Committee formally announced Friday that it will probe whether the CIA broke the law by failing to inform Congress about a top secret assassination program reportedly aimed at targeting leaders of al-Qaeda.

Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes said the probe would be part of a wide-ranging investigation about the way in which the CIA informs Congress about its covert activities and other matters.

Reyes, in announcing the wide-ranging probe Friday, said he had consulted with the panel’s ranking Republican minority leader, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, and other committee members and concluded that an investigation into "possible violations of federal law, including the National Security Act of 1947" were warranted. Under that law, the CIA must keep Congress "fully and currently informed" via classified briefings about its intelligence activities.

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CIA interrogators were given legal authorization to slam an alleged "high-value" detainee's head against a wall, place insects inside a "confinement box" to induce fear and force him to remain awake for 11 consecutive days, according to a closely guarded August 1, 2002, legal memo released publicly by the Justice Department for the first time on Thursday.

The memo, signed by the former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Jay Bybee, was written about a week after Bybee's office had given the CIA verbal authorization that subjecting the detainee to seven other brutal interrogation methods would not violate torture laws.

"This letter memorializes our previous oral advice given on July 24, 2002 and July 26, 2002, that the proposed conduct would not violate the prohibition against torture," wrote Bybee, who now has a lifetime judgeship on the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals. CIA interrogators would not be in violation of torture laws, Bybee wrote, because they would not be acting with the intent to inflict "severe pain or suffering" by subjecting detainees to the brutal interrogation methods outlined in the memo.

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