FBI agents witnessed music and flag torture

December 21, 2004 - 3:20PM

Newly released documents show that FBI agents at Guantanamo Bay witnessed harsh abuses of terror suspects that included being left in their own excrement, chained in ice-cold or super-hot cells and other interrogation techniques that caused one prisoner to pull his hair from his head.

The agents' accounts, contained in emails to their superiors to distance the FBI from the behaviour, are the first by US officials confirming Guantanamo prisoners' complaints of sleep deprivation, temperature manipulations, strobe lights and loud music.

An example: Alleged al-Qaeda accountant Ibrahim al Qosi of Sudan claimed in a civil lawsuit last month that prisoners were subjected to mind-numbing music and humiliated by being wrapped with an Israeli flag - an allegation that military spokesmen flatly denied at the time.

"We have no evidence to suggest that this ever happened here," Navy Commander Robert Mulac, a Guantanamo spokesman, said on November 6. "We do not treat the detainees inhumanely or with disdain or humiliation."

Yet four months earlier, an FBI agent wrote in one of the emails made available today by the American Civil Liberties Union that he had seen an almost identical event at the prison.

"I saw another detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing," the agent wrote in a July 30 email.

Federal officials blocked out the names of both detainees and the agents in the emails, the latest public release of documents obtained by the ACLU under a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

The agents' emails, which do not include dates of the alleged abuses, followed an FBI-wide email soliciting eyewitness accounts after the disclosure of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

FBI agents have rotated through the base in Cuba since the prison opened in January 2002, and taken part in interviews with at least 747 prisoners.

In their emails, the agents make clear that they did not take part in any abuses but had spotted the abuses during other interrogations by the military.

In August, a Boston-based agent described tactics that were "not only aggressive but personally very upsetting".

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a foetal position on the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more."

The agent also described Military Police manipulating the temperatures in detainees' cells. One was kept in air conditioning so frigid "the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold".

"When I asked the MPs what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment," the agent wrote.

In another occasion the same agent saw an "almost unconscious" prisoner in a room where the temperature was "probably well over 100 degrees" - and a pile of his hair on the floor.

The detainee "had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night".

Pentagon spokesmen have long asserted that the 550 or so al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects from 42 nations at Guantanamo are held in humane conditions, and in the spirit of the Geneva Conventions. When guards or interrogators have misbehaved, the military claims, they have been punished.

Yet none of the abuses described by FBI agents were among the 10 cases of relatively minor mistreatment that the military has acknowledged at Guantanamo across the nearly three years of the prison's existence.

"The methods that the Defence Department has adopted are illegal, immoral and counterproductive," said ACLU staff lawyer Jameel Jaffer.

The FBI emails also reflect divisions between the Bureau and Pentagon over how some of the interrogations were carried out.

An agent protested to his superiors in a December 2003 message that Defence Department interrogators posed as FBI agents and used torture. The details of the torture were excised when the email was released.

"If this detainee is ever released, or his story made public in any way, DOD (Department of Defence) interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done by 'FBI' interrogators," the writer complained. "The FBI will (be) left holding the bag before the public."

The Pentagon-FBI debate over interrogation tactics began in the first year of the prison. An email of December 9, 2002 - 11 months after the first prisoners arrived - describes an evolution of directives on interrogation tactics.

One FBI agent described a DOD lawyer's directive this way: "Basically, it appears that the lawyer worked hard to write a legal justification for the type of interviews they (the Army) want to conduct here."

Today's documents also included a June 25 report from the FBI in Sacramento, California, quoting an informant who alleged that soldiers in Iraq subjected prisoners to "strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into a detainee's ear openings and unauthorised interrogations".

The report heavily excised report was labelled urgent but gave no indication of the claims' credibility, in part because the informant's name, the date and place of the abuse were blacked out.