Has the Government Come Clean?
At least some of the internal FBI documents indicate that, for nearly a year prior to Mueller's testimony, top FBI officials were strongly objecting to unorthodox practices - such as hooding and slapping prisoners, sleep deprivation and the use of dogs for intimidation by U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. One internal FBI e-mail in December 2003 even calls them "torture techniques."
As Gonzales begins his confirmation hearings, new FBI documents suggest that abuse of Guantanamo prisoners was more widespread than previously acknowledged - and that Director Mueller may be in the hot seat.
While senators prepare to grill attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzales Thursday about his role in crafting policies that allegedly led to the abuse of detained terror suspects, a fresh controversy is brewing about previous testimony on the issue from another senior U.S. government official: FBI Director Robert Mueller.
In the past few weeks, a stack of newly disclosed and startling FBI documents recording agents' reports about serious abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been released largely as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. The newly available documents have prompted some senators to question whether Mueller may have misled the Senate Judiciary Committee when he was questioned closely about the subject in an appearance last May.
At least some of the internal FBI documents indicate that, for nearly a year prior to Mueller's testimony, top FBI officials were strongly objecting to unorthodox practices - such as hooding and slapping prisoners, sleep deprivation and the use of dogs for intimidation by U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. One internal FBI e-mail in December 2003 even calls them "torture techniques."
Moreover, as early as the spring of 2003, according to another document, a senior FBI lawyer was pressing the Pentagon to investigate specific instances of abuse reported by bureau agents assigned to Guantanamo. One case, eerily reminiscent of the scenes from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, involved a report by an FBI agent that a female U.S. military interrogator stroked and applied lotion to a shackled male prisoner, yanked his thumbs back, causing him to grimace in pain and then "grabbed his genitals," according to a later account of the incident contained in a letter to the Pentagon written by T.J. Harrington, deputy assistant FBI director for counterterrorism.
Yet when Mueller appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 20, 2004, just a few weeks after the Abu Ghraib scandal had broke, he gave little hint of the concerns by his own agents about the mistreatment of prisoners - much less the apparently intense dispute between the FBI and the Pentagon over the propriety of the "aggressive" interrogation techniques that had been authorized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to be used on prisoners at Guantamamo Bay.
Mueller, staffers say, appeared uneasy and unusually hesitant, at the hearing. He was pressed - in some cases, repeatedly - to explain whether FBI agents were aware of mistreatment of prisoners by the U.S. military or the CIA.
"He gave me a kind of gobbledygook answer," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, told Newsweek this week about the FBI director's response to her questions on whether he had "received any reports" about abuses similar to those in Abu Ghraib. "At best his answer was confusing and at worst it was obfuscatory." (Feinstein added she is especially "disappointed" in Mueller's responses because he is "generally straight as an arrow," adding that she has recently sent the FBI a letter demanding an explanation.)
A transcript of the May 20 hearing shows that Mueller did acknowledge in response to one of Feinstein's questions that there were instances where FBI agents "on occasion ... may disagree with the handling of a particular interview." In those instances, he said, FBI agents have brought it to the attention of "the authorities who are responsible for that particular interview." But he described the entire matter, benignly, as reflecting "differing points of view" about the "most effective way to obtain information" - not about concerns among agents about the abuse of prisoners.
An even more problematic exchange took place earlier in the hearing when Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy pressed Mueller about whether any FBI agents had "encountered objectionable practices involving the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo?"
Mueller gave a lengthy answer that ended with his saying that an internal FBI investigation concluded that none of the bureau's agents "witnessed abuses" in Iraq similar to those that had been revealed in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Leahy then followed up: "Is the FBI conducting any investigations involving handling of prisoners in Guantanamo?"
Mueller: "No."
Leahy: "It's not?"
Mueller: "We are not conducting any investigations into the handling.
Leahy: "Have you - have you conducted any?
Mueller: "No."
FBI spokesman Michael P. Kortan said that Mueller had not misled the committee in his responses. "Some of Leahy's questions were very specific and Mueller was being very careful to give very specific responses and not go beyond that," he said. When Mueller denied to Leahy that the FBI was investigating abuses at Guantanamo Bay, he was being strictly accurate. "We were not investigating per se," Kortan said. What the FBI was doing, the newly released documents show, was pressing the Pentagon to investigate the abuses that had been documented by the FBI's own agents on the scene.
Kortan also said this week that, at the time of his testimony, Mueller "was not aware of the detail" of the incidents recorded in Deputy Assistant Director Harrington's letter documenting the case of the female military interrogator who had allegedly grabbed the genitals of the male detainee - as well as two other cases reported by FBI agents. (One involved a October 2002 case in which a detainee's head had been gagged with duct tape - apparently to stop him from chanting from the Qu'ran. Another case, about the same time, was said to involve "extreme psychological trauma" after a detainee was found crouching in the corner of his cell hearing voices and talking to nonexistent people following three months of total isolation in which his room was "flooded with light.")
Harrington's letter to Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder of the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Command documenting these cases is dated July 14, 2004 - nearly two months after Mueller's testimony to the Senate. But the letter was written apparently as a result of the FBI's frustration that no action had been taken by the Army to investigate the cases in the past: the letter reports that the cases were first documented by the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit in a May 30, 2003 "electronic communication" to FBI headquarters and "around the [same] time" the FBI's top national-security lawyer, Marion (Spike) Bowman, had raised the cases with senior Defense Department lawyers.
A DoD official told Newsweek that the U.S. military had originally investigated the case of the genital-grabbing female interrogator at the time it occurred, resulting in a monthlong suspension for "sensitivity training." More recently, the official said, the case has been reopened. The Pentagon's Southern Command, which oversees operations at Guantanamo, today announced a broad new investigation into all the reports of abuse contained in all the newly released FBI documents. "The Command wants to establish the facts and circumstances surrounding all credible allegations," a spokesman said.
After Mueller's testimony, Kortan said the FBI general counsel's office began a more systematic effort to document the abuses that had been recorded by its agents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. The result was a flood of alarming reports that have now been turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union in its Freedom of Information lawsuit seeking the release of government documents on the treatment of prisoners.
The release of these documents has exacerbated tensions between the FBI and the Pentagon over the issue. Defense officials have privately complained that bureau officials affirmatively decided to turn over the documents in the lawsuit in order to protect itself from charges that it was complicit in the improper treatment of prisoners. "This is cover you're a-- at its finest," one Pentagon official told Newsweek. (Kortan said the bureau had no choice: the federal judge in the case ordered the documents to be produced.)
In any event, the new documents clearly suggest that the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo was far worse than the government has ever publicly acknowledged: in one e-mail, dated July 16, 2004, an FBI agent (whose name is deleted) reports seeing one detainee at Guantanamo "sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing."
In another especially hair-raising e-mail, dated Aug. 2, 2004, another unidentified FBI agent reports "on a couple of occasions" entering interview rooms at Guantanamo and finding one of the detainees "chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defacated on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. When I asked the MPs [military police] what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment...."
"On another occasion," the e-mail continues, "the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor." [Read the full text of the e-mail here.]
Without discussing any case in particular, a Pentagon spokesman, Air Force Lt Col. John Skinner, said the Defense Department has investigated more than 300 cases of detainee abuse in all theatres (Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo) and more than 100 U.S. military personnel have been "held accountable for misconduct," either through courts martial, administrative actions or other forms of nonjudicial punishment. "Any forms of detainee mistreatment is unacceptable," Skinner said. "We aggressively investigate all credible allegations and we hold people accountable when mistreatment is found."
But clearly, the inquiries - and the controversies - are far from over. A broad review of U.S. military interrogation practices conducted by Navy Inspector General Vice Adm. Albert Church is now in its final stages, Skinner said.
In the meantime, said Kortan, the FBI has prepared a detailed 300-page response to follow-up questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee about Mueller's earlier testimony that will address many of the matters raised in the newly released FBI documents. But that response has been sitting at the Justice Department for review since October; apparently neither it, nor the Church report, will be publicly released any time soon - at least not before the nomination of Gonzales, who played a central role in creating the policies that governed the treatment of prisoners, is voted upon by the Senate.
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Thursday 06 January 2005
As Gonzales begins his confirmation hearings, new FBI documents suggest that abuse of Guantanamo prisoners was more widespread than previously acknowledged - and that Director Mueller may be in the hot seat.
While senators prepare to grill attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzales Thursday about his role in crafting policies that allegedly led to the abuse of detained terror suspects, a fresh controversy is brewing about previous testimony on the issue from another senior U.S. government official: FBI Director Robert Mueller.
In the past few weeks, a stack of newly disclosed and startling FBI documents recording agents' reports about serious abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been released largely as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. The newly available documents have prompted some senators to question whether Mueller may have misled the Senate Judiciary Committee when he was questioned closely about the subject in an appearance last May.
At least some of the internal FBI documents indicate that, for nearly a year prior to Mueller's testimony, top FBI officials were strongly objecting to unorthodox practices - such as hooding and slapping prisoners, sleep deprivation and the use of dogs for intimidation by U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. One internal FBI e-mail in December 2003 even calls them "torture techniques."
Moreover, as early as the spring of 2003, according to another document, a senior FBI lawyer was pressing the Pentagon to investigate specific instances of abuse reported by bureau agents assigned to Guantanamo. One case, eerily reminiscent of the scenes from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, involved a report by an FBI agent that a female U.S. military interrogator stroked and applied lotion to a shackled male prisoner, yanked his thumbs back, causing him to grimace in pain and then "grabbed his genitals," according to a later account of the incident contained in a letter to the Pentagon written by T.J. Harrington, deputy assistant FBI director for counterterrorism.
Yet when Mueller appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 20, 2004, just a few weeks after the Abu Ghraib scandal had broke, he gave little hint of the concerns by his own agents about the mistreatment of prisoners - much less the apparently intense dispute between the FBI and the Pentagon over the propriety of the "aggressive" interrogation techniques that had been authorized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to be used on prisoners at Guantamamo Bay.
Mueller, staffers say, appeared uneasy and unusually hesitant, at the hearing. He was pressed - in some cases, repeatedly - to explain whether FBI agents were aware of mistreatment of prisoners by the U.S. military or the CIA.
"He gave me a kind of gobbledygook answer," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, told Newsweek this week about the FBI director's response to her questions on whether he had "received any reports" about abuses similar to those in Abu Ghraib. "At best his answer was confusing and at worst it was obfuscatory." (Feinstein added she is especially "disappointed" in Mueller's responses because he is "generally straight as an arrow," adding that she has recently sent the FBI a letter demanding an explanation.)
A transcript of the May 20 hearing shows that Mueller did acknowledge in response to one of Feinstein's questions that there were instances where FBI agents "on occasion ... may disagree with the handling of a particular interview." In those instances, he said, FBI agents have brought it to the attention of "the authorities who are responsible for that particular interview." But he described the entire matter, benignly, as reflecting "differing points of view" about the "most effective way to obtain information" - not about concerns among agents about the abuse of prisoners.
An even more problematic exchange took place earlier in the hearing when Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy pressed Mueller about whether any FBI agents had "encountered objectionable practices involving the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo?"
Mueller gave a lengthy answer that ended with his saying that an internal FBI investigation concluded that none of the bureau's agents "witnessed abuses" in Iraq similar to those that had been revealed in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Leahy then followed up: "Is the FBI conducting any investigations involving handling of prisoners in Guantanamo?"
Mueller: "No."
Leahy: "It's not?"
Mueller: "We are not conducting any investigations into the handling.
Leahy: "Have you - have you conducted any?
Mueller: "No."
FBI spokesman Michael P. Kortan said that Mueller had not misled the committee in his responses. "Some of Leahy's questions were very specific and Mueller was being very careful to give very specific responses and not go beyond that," he said. When Mueller denied to Leahy that the FBI was investigating abuses at Guantanamo Bay, he was being strictly accurate. "We were not investigating per se," Kortan said. What the FBI was doing, the newly released documents show, was pressing the Pentagon to investigate the abuses that had been documented by the FBI's own agents on the scene.
Kortan also said this week that, at the time of his testimony, Mueller "was not aware of the detail" of the incidents recorded in Deputy Assistant Director Harrington's letter documenting the case of the female military interrogator who had allegedly grabbed the genitals of the male detainee - as well as two other cases reported by FBI agents. (One involved a October 2002 case in which a detainee's head had been gagged with duct tape - apparently to stop him from chanting from the Qu'ran. Another case, about the same time, was said to involve "extreme psychological trauma" after a detainee was found crouching in the corner of his cell hearing voices and talking to nonexistent people following three months of total isolation in which his room was "flooded with light.")
Harrington's letter to Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder of the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Command documenting these cases is dated July 14, 2004 - nearly two months after Mueller's testimony to the Senate. But the letter was written apparently as a result of the FBI's frustration that no action had been taken by the Army to investigate the cases in the past: the letter reports that the cases were first documented by the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit in a May 30, 2003 "electronic communication" to FBI headquarters and "around the [same] time" the FBI's top national-security lawyer, Marion (Spike) Bowman, had raised the cases with senior Defense Department lawyers.
A DoD official told Newsweek that the U.S. military had originally investigated the case of the genital-grabbing female interrogator at the time it occurred, resulting in a monthlong suspension for "sensitivity training." More recently, the official said, the case has been reopened. The Pentagon's Southern Command, which oversees operations at Guantanamo, today announced a broad new investigation into all the reports of abuse contained in all the newly released FBI documents. "The Command wants to establish the facts and circumstances surrounding all credible allegations," a spokesman said.
After Mueller's testimony, Kortan said the FBI general counsel's office began a more systematic effort to document the abuses that had been recorded by its agents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. The result was a flood of alarming reports that have now been turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union in its Freedom of Information lawsuit seeking the release of government documents on the treatment of prisoners.
The release of these documents has exacerbated tensions between the FBI and the Pentagon over the issue. Defense officials have privately complained that bureau officials affirmatively decided to turn over the documents in the lawsuit in order to protect itself from charges that it was complicit in the improper treatment of prisoners. "This is cover you're a-- at its finest," one Pentagon official told Newsweek. (Kortan said the bureau had no choice: the federal judge in the case ordered the documents to be produced.)
In any event, the new documents clearly suggest that the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo was far worse than the government has ever publicly acknowledged: in one e-mail, dated July 16, 2004, an FBI agent (whose name is deleted) reports seeing one detainee at Guantanamo "sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing."
In another especially hair-raising e-mail, dated Aug. 2, 2004, another unidentified FBI agent reports "on a couple of occasions" entering interview rooms at Guantanamo and finding one of the detainees "chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defacated on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. When I asked the MPs [military police] what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment...."
"On another occasion," the e-mail continues, "the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor." [Read the full text of the e-mail here.]
Without discussing any case in particular, a Pentagon spokesman, Air Force Lt Col. John Skinner, said the Defense Department has investigated more than 300 cases of detainee abuse in all theatres (Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo) and more than 100 U.S. military personnel have been "held accountable for misconduct," either through courts martial, administrative actions or other forms of nonjudicial punishment. "Any forms of detainee mistreatment is unacceptable," Skinner said. "We aggressively investigate all credible allegations and we hold people accountable when mistreatment is found."
But clearly, the inquiries - and the controversies - are far from over. A broad review of U.S. military interrogation practices conducted by Navy Inspector General Vice Adm. Albert Church is now in its final stages, Skinner said.
In the meantime, said Kortan, the FBI has prepared a detailed 300-page response to follow-up questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee about Mueller's earlier testimony that will address many of the matters raised in the newly released FBI documents. But that response has been sitting at the Justice Department for review since October; apparently neither it, nor the Church report, will be publicly released any time soon - at least not before the nomination of Gonzales, who played a central role in creating the policies that governed the treatment of prisoners, is voted upon by the Senate.
Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Thursday 06 January 2005
posted by R7 | 1/09/2005 03:12:00 PM
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