See other Dead Constitution Articles
Title: Files show military rebuffs FBI Guantanamo worries
Source:
Reuters
URL Source: http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.j ... =11322038&src=rss/politicsNews
Published: Feb 23, 2006
Author: By Will Dunham
Post Date: 2006-02-23 20:09:22 by Zipporah
Keywords: Guantanamo, military, rebuffs
Views: 4
By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - FBI agents accused U.S. military personnel at the Guantanamo prison of using illegal "aggressive interrogation tactics" on detainees but senior military officials rejected FBI concerns, documents made public on Thursday showed. The FBI documents, released by the American Civil Liberties Union after being obtained under a court order, further exposed the rift between the agency and the Pentagon over treatment of foreign terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The FBI said the military's techniques, which involved homosexual pornographic movies, loud music and the Israeli flag, not only were illegal but were ineffective. Maj. Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman, said 12 major investigations have found that no Pentagon policy "ever encouraged or condoned abuse of detainees at Guantanamo" and that "the Department of Defense is treating and will continue to treat all of the individuals detained at Guantanamo humanely." "This is another example of recycling old information," Shavers said. The United States has faced international criticism over treatment of detainees at the Guantanamo base and in Iraq and Afghanistan. An FBI agent described in one document witnessing two military investigators at Guantanamo interrogating a detainee while showing him homosexual pornography movies and using a strobe light in the room. The agent said military interrogators routinely masqueraded as FBI agents while subjecting detainees to interrogations lasting 16 to 18 hours using tactics such as wrapping them in the Israeli flag and bombarding them with constant loud music. FBI agents expressed concern to agency officials in a May 30, 2003, memo about the actions of military interrogators and the rejection of the agents' concerns by the Guantanamo prison commander at the time, Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller. 'QUESTIONABLE EFFECTIVENESS' The document said members of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense HUMINT (human intelligence) Service, or DHS, "were being encouraged at times to use aggressive interrogation tactics in GTMO (Guantanamo) which are of questionable effectiveness and subject to uncertain interpretation based on law and regulation." "Not only are these tactics at odds with legally permissible interviewing techniques used by U.S. law enforcement agencies in the United States but they are being employed by personnel in GTMO who appear to have little, if any, experience eliciting information for judicial purposes," the memo said. "Unfortunately, these arguments were met with considerable skepticism and resistance by senior DHS officials in GTMO, despite several attempts to convince them otherwise." The memo said FBI agents took their concerns to Miller but he "favored DHS's interrogation methods, despite FBI assertions that such methods could easily result in the elicitation of unreliable and legally inadmissible information." Miller is a central figure in the detainee controversy for his role at Guantanamo and later in Iraq detention operations. A May 5, 2004, FBI document stated that "hooding prisoners, threats of violence and techniques meant to humiliating (sic) detainees" had been "approved at high levels" at the Pentagon. U.N. human rights investigators last week said detainees at Guantanamo faced treatment "amounting to torture," and Secretary-General Kofi Annan said it should be closed. Files released a year ago revealed tensions between FBI agents and the military at Guantanamo. ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer said the new documents "show conclusively that the abuse and torture of prisoners at Guantanamo was not the result of rogue elements but rather the consequence of policies that were deliberately adopted by senior military and Pentagon officials."
Poster Comment: Maj. Michael Shavers is sort of telling the truth.. the invesigations were done by the military themselves but new documents reveal that the okay for the torture came from the top.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread