FBI 'warned military on Guantánamo techniques'
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Published: February 24 2006 01:15 | Last updated: February 24 2006 01:15
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at Guantánamo Bay warned military interrogators that some aggressive interrogation techniques were illegal, according to documents released on Thursday. The American Civil Liberties Organisation released internal FBI memos that outline agents' concerns about the interrogation tactics being used by Defense Intelligence Agency interrogators at the prison. According to a May 2003 memo, FBI agents in late 2002 believed DIA interrogators were using tactics that were of "questionable effectiveness". "Not only are these tactics at odds with legally permissible interviewing techniques used by US law enforcement agencies in the US, but they are being employed by personnel in GTMO [Guantánamo] who appear to have little, if any, experience eliciting information for judicial purposes," the memo said. Another memo documents how DIA interrogators used techniques such as showing pornographic videos and wrapping prisoners in the Israeli flag. It also alleges that the interrogators sometimes posed as FBI agents. According to the May 2003 memo, FBI agents complained that the US military officer overseeing interrogations at Guantánamo "blatantly misled" the Pentagon into believing that the FBI had endorsed some of the more aggressive techniques. The report said Major General Geoffrey Miller, overall commander of the prison from late 2002, who was later sent to Abu Ghraib to improve the flow of intelligence from interrogations, "favoured" the more aggressive techniques "despite FBI assertions that such methods could easily result in the elicitation of unreliable and legally inadmissible information". "We now possess overwhelming evidence that political and military leaders endorsed interrogation methods that violate both domestic and international law," said Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU lawyer. A military investigation last year recommended that Gen Miller receive a reprimand for inadequate supervision of interrogations, but his commanding officer declined to act as Gen Miller had broken no law. Gen Miller, who is soon expected to retire from the military, last month invoked the right not to testify at the trial of two Abu Ghraib dog handlers, who are accused of using dogs to abuse prisoners at the notorious Baghdad prison. Lindsey Graham, an influential Republican on the Senate armed services committee, recently said he wanted to get to the bottom of allegations that Gen Miller told Abu Ghraib officers how to use dogs in interrogations. The allegations were made by Colonel Thomas Pappas, who was in charge of interrogations at the prison and recently agreed to co-operate with military prosecutors. A Pentagon spokesman said 12 major investigations had found no evidence of a Pentagon policy that encouraged or condoned abuse at Guantánamo. He said the FBI memos were "another example of recycling old information". | 
