WASHINGTON – Complaints by FBI agents about abusive interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other U.S. military sites reached the National Security Council but prompted no effort to curb questioning that the agents considered ineffective and possibly illegal, according to an internal audit released yesterday.
Reports that Guantanamo detainees were being subjected to simulated drowning, abuse of the Koran and nude interrogation were conveyed at White House meetings of senior officials in 2003, yet these questionable tactics remained in use, a lengthy report by the Justice Department's inspector general concluded.
In one instance, colleagues of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reported that he personally aired concerns about Defense Department strategy toward a particular detainee with Condoleezza Rice, who then was national security adviser, while other Justice Department managers shared similar fears with the council's legal adviser in November 2003, the report said.
Ashcroft declined to be interviewed by investigators, so it remains uncertain how aggressively he pressed the issue, according to the report. Other senior Justice Department officials told investigators that no changes were made in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay even after these and other complaints filtered up to the National Security Council, which includes President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Nearly half of the 450 FBI agents who worked at Guantanamo reported that they had observed or heard about military interrogators using a variety of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees, with the most common being sleep deprivation and short-shackling – or locking a detainee's hands and feet together to prevent comfortable sitting or standing – for long periods of time. The interrogators also continued to use “stress positions” and other such techniques well after they were prohibited by Defense Department policy in January 2003, the report said.
The 370-page report draws heavily on e-mail messages and contemporaneous memos to provide the clearest and most definitive account to date of the key tactics employed by the government against suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It describes, for example, a “frequent flyer program” intended to lessen resistance by extensively disrupting sleep, the use of strobe lights in conjunction with loud rock music, the twisting of thumbs backward, and the exposure of detainees to extreme temperatures, threatening dogs, pornography and sexual taunting.
Detainees in Iraq were subjected to water being poured down their throats while they were cuffed and kneeling, the FBI agents told investigators.
“Some have suggested that the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody was simply the result of a few bad apples acting on their own,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., said in a statement. “The report released today by the Department of Justice Inspector General is proof that that is simply not true. The IG found that scores of FBI agents observed the use of harsh interrogation techniques in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.”
Inspector General Glenn Fine generally praised the FBI's actions but faulted the bureau for waiting until abuses at Abu Ghraib became public in early 2004 to develop a policy obliging its agents to report similar abuses by other government employees.
