Page A1 International A3-9 Mikhail S. Gorbachev was elected to the newly enhanced post of President, but not before he an aggressive public interrogation.

The government's condoning of aggressive interrogation has been castigated at home and abroad as support for torture.

'Admiral, it was a concerted effort,' Rojer repeated, an edge to his voice now because he was growing weary of the barrage of naval doubts and, particularly, del Falco's aggressive interrogation.

Yet those appear to be the operative theories at Guantánamo Bay, where military jailers developed the "aggressive" interrogations that were later exported to the Abu Ghraib prison.

Amid aggressive interrogation by Delau, Birns insisted he had been dining on frog legs in a Garfield Heights steakhouse at the night of Gold's murder.

It became imperative to define what constituted, in government talk, "aggressive interrogation" or "exceptional techniques" and what was, in blunt talk, torture.

Over the objections of the Central Intelligence Agency, he recommended releasing Justice Department memorandums describing aggressive interrogations.

Unfortunately, experts say, those first days of detention are when some of the worst police abuses occur - when defendants are subjected to aggressive and sometimes brutal interrogation to obtain confessions.

It said that F.B.I. agents observed "highly aggressive" interrogations at Guantánamo more than a year before the Abu Ghraib disclosures.

These would be followed by aggressive interrogations and detective work, leading to still more arrests.