Speaking publicly for the first time, senior U.S. law enforcement investigators say they waged a long but futile battle inside the Pentagon to stop coercive and degrading treatment of detainees by intelligence interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Their account indicates that the struggle over U.S. interrogation techniques began much earlier than previously known, with separate teams of law enforcement and intelligence interrogators battling over the best way to accomplish two missions: prevent future attacks and punish the terrorists.
In extensive interviews with MSNBC.com, former leaders of the Defense Department's Criminal Investigation Task Force said they repeatedly warned senior Pentagon officials beginning in early 2002 that the harsh interrogation techniques used by a separate intelligence team would not produce reliable information, could constitute war crimes, and would embarrass the nation when they became public knowledge.....
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....By the summer of 2002, the agents said, the intelligence unit was experimenting with harsher tactics, such as using a cinderblock to hold a detainee in a "stress position" by forcing him to sit on it with his hands chained to the floor.
By the fall of 2002, believing that some detainees had al-Qaida training in resisting interrogation, the intelligence team sought greater leeway from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. He approved new rules allowing stress positions for up to four hours, deprivation of light and sound, interrogation for up to 20 hours straight, removal of all comfort items (including the Koran and toilet paper), removal of clothing, forced shaving of facial hair, and use of military dogs to scare detainees.
In practice, these new rules were interpreted broadly: According to interrogation logs made public, al-Qahtani, the suspected 20th hijacker, was dressed in women's clothing and led around on a leash while performing dog tricks...
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...The investigators faced an almost insurmountable challenge at Guantanamo.
They didn't have names for many of the detainees. It often wasn't clear what country they were from. A detainee might claim he was a Saudi, then visiting law enforcement agents would recognize him as a Yemeni. Most weren't picked up by U.S. forces, but were handed over by bounty hunters in the early days of the war in Afghanistan. They were transferred with scant records, often without any "pocket litter," the possessions and documents that can be invaluable to investigators.
The law enforcement team's mission was to conduct criminal investigations, prepare cases for prosecution, recommend which detainees should be released or held, and pass on intelligence information to other agencies.
But this was no ordinary criminal case. Rumsfeld had called the detainees "the worst of the worst," but what crime had they committed?
"Instead of having a crime scene, a suspect, we had suspects," Fallon said. "So we had to take a suspect ... then track that particular person, once we identified who they actually were, through various levels of their life, through possible radicalization, through a possible visit to ... a training camp in Afghanistan or elsewhere where they might have learned some of the tradecraft of terrorism. We would then have to determine where they might have been at any particular point in their life, from there determine if any acts occurred in that particular area, and then if the individual might have been involved in any of those acts, and if those acts then would have been a criminal violation. So it was very much different from the way you would traditionally work a criminal investigation."
They called the process "This Is Your Life," after the biographical radio and television show.
Although Pentagon officials have referred to an "elaborate screening process" before detainees were sent to Guantanamo, the law enforcement agents said evidence of criminal activity or intelligence value in some cases was flimsy.
Fallon said two detainees were suspected in a rocket attack against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The evidence against them was that they were found wearing dark olive green jackets similar to the one worn by the attacker. "I've been to Kabul," he said. "That's the only color jacket I've seen."
Because they saw so many detainees they thought didn't belong there, the investigators decided early in 2002 to expand operations to Afghanistan, to help evaluate detainees before they were sent to Guantanamo. In the end, they were able to develop criminal cases against only about 100 of the roughly 775 detainees who came to Guantanamo.
Out of 445 detainees still remaining at Guantanamo, the Pentagon says "more than 70" are in line for military trials.
Link here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...