Wednesday, May 21, 2008

No surprise here

Regarding the Justice Department's report released yesterday that states FBI agents repeatedly complained about interrogation techniques used in Guantánamo Bay:

From the Washington Post

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.

Military officials at Guantanamo Bay used some aggressive techniques before they were approved, possibly in violation of Defense Department policy and U.S. law, the report said. They 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.

and from the NYT

FBI agents at the base created a “war crimes file” to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday.

[...]

Many of the abuses the report describes have previously been disclosed, but it was not known that F.B.I. agents had gone so far as to document accusations of abuse in a “war crimes file” at Guantánamo...Sometime in 2003, however, an F.B.I. official ordered the file closed because “investigating detainee allegations of abuse was not the F.B.I.’s mission,” the report said.

And as a conclusionary measure, in one of her best articles on the CIA interrogation tapes "The Harm Initiative: How We Got Hoodwinked Into Tolerating Abusive Interrogations", from Dahlia Lithwick a few months ago

John Yoo and Steven Bradbury [from the Office of Legal Counsel at the DoJ] think that an interrogation method is torture only if it produces irrevocable damage. But long after the torture tapes are forgotten, what may be irrevocably damaged is our capacity for outrage.

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