What the FBI saw at GITMO (and Abu Ghraib)

I wrote my check to the American Civil Liberties Union last week. They’ve been doing a great job pursuing the government’s records re the tortures of detainees. And yesterday they released yet more extremely revealing documents that they’d managed to get the FBI to release.
Go here for the portal to this latest batch of documents.
The ACLU’s own media release focuses on this May 22 email, sent by an FBI person who signed herself/himself off as “On-scene commander–Baghdad” to a bunch of FBI agents in “Div13” and one in “Div10”. The writer noted that some FBI agents present at Abu Ghraib had had clear but indirect evidence that other interrogators there were utilizing,

techniques beyond the bounds of FBI practice but within the paramters of the Executive Order (e.g. sleep deprivation, stress positions, loud music, etc)…
We emphatically do not equate any of these things our personnel witnessed with the clearly unlawful and sickening abuse at Abu G that has come to light. The things our personnel witnessed (but did not participate in) were authorized by the President under his Executive Order.

This is probably the most direct evidence we have had to date that the Executive Order that White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez had signed regarding interrogation techniques was in force in Abu Ghraib, perhaps even as late as May 2004 (and almost certainly well after November 2003, when the most-infamous abuses were carried out there.) Also notable: that specificity regarding the content of the Gonzalez-authored Executive Order.
To me, an equally significant document in the new collection is this one, an email sent on August 2, 2004 from [name redacted] to Valerie E. Caproni, in the Office of the General Counsel of the FBI. (Maybe she IS the General Counsel? Anyone know?)
The sender writes:

As requested, here is a brief summary of what I observed at GTMO.
On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to 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. 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 what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion, 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.

Interesting that the OGC had asked for all such testimony, huh?

It seems the FBI was at the time–and still may be– in major rear-covering (CYA) mode. With good reason, since several of the other newly released emails make clear that interrogators from other US government agencies were trying to “impersonate” FBI officers, and this was of intense concern to people inside the FBI. See this doc, and this doc, and this one, and this one.
In the first of those docs there, a January 21, 2004 intra-FBI email (sender and recipients’ names all redacted), the writer writes:

[T]his technique [nature of technique redacted], and all of those used in these scenarios, was approved by the Dep Sec Def [Paul Wolfowitz].”

It’s not clear there, though, whether the “FBI impersonation ruse”, also referred to in this email, was one of the techniques that Wolfie had specifically approved.
The last doc I mentioned in that list was a December 5, 2003 intra-FBI email from [redacted] to RBI officers Gary Bald, Frankie Battle, and Arthur Cummings, with the subject line “Fwd: Impersonating FBI at GTMO”.
The author wrote:

I am forwarding this EC up the CTD chain of command. MDLU [something to do with a ‘detainee liaison unit’, I believe ~HC] requested this information be documented to protect the FBI. [my emphasis, HC] MDLU has had a long standing and documented position against use of some of DOD’s interrogation practices, however, we were not aware of these latest techniques until recently.
Of concern, DOD interrogators impersonating Supervisory Special Agents of the FBI told a detainee that [one-third of a line redacted] These same interrogation teams then [half a line redacted] The detainee was also told by this interrogation team [line and a half redacted]
These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date and CITF believes that techniques have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee. [my emphasis, HC] If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done the ?FBI? interrogators. The FBI will be left holding the bag before the public.

Well, there you have it. Not just the FBI’s keen desire to document its opposition to these techniques, but also their real fear — as I surmised at the end of this JWN post last week– that:

the very fact that many of the US military’s detainees have been tortured or abused in the past very frequently makes their captors reluctant to bring them into any court or court-like setting, or to simply set them free.
So the detainees truly get caught up in a Catch-22 situation. If they’d never been tortured or other abused, it would be far easier for the US military to simply let the vast majority of them go free. But since they have been tortured/abused, they can’t so easily be freed or even brought into a court of law; and thus their often quite illegal detention perforce continues…

One of the other notable documents in the latest collection is this one, a June 25, 2004 intra-FBI email that is wrongly described on the ACLU portal as being “from” the FBI Director, but was actually an urgent message to him from people in the Sacramento, California office.
This email provides a description of some of the worst tortures/abuses described anywhere in the ACLU-discovered paper trail to date. It’s the documentation of allegations made to agents in the Sacramento office by a [name redacted] individual who had seen considerable abuses of civilian detainees in Iraq, including,

strangulation, beatings, placing of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings, and unauthorized interrogations.

Also, the said individual,

was providing this information to the FBI based on his knowledge that [line-and-a-quarter redaction] were engaged in a cover-up of these abuses. He stated that these cover-up efforts included [massive redaction].

It immediately occurred to me that this informant was most likely Greg Ford, the Military Intel sergeant I wrote about in this JWN post, who in June 2003 got shipped out of Iraq strapped to a gurney as a punishment for his attempts to “blow the whistle” on the abuses he had seen his team members committing against Iraqi detainees.
I went to check the post, and the Salon article I cited there indeed said that the “mulitiple incidents” of detainee mistreatment he’d seen included,

incidents of asphyxiation, mock executions, arms being pulled out of sockets, and lit cigarettes forced into detainee’s ears while they were blindfolded and bound.

The Salon piece also noted that, once back in the US, Ford filed a report on his allegations of war crimes (and of his abduction) with the FBI office in Sacramento, which then, “forwarded the report to the Bureau’s headquarters in Washington, which in turn passed it along to the Department of Defense.”
The Salon article indicated that Ford didn’t file that report till August 2004. But it seems clear that the June 25 intra-FBI email referred to above relates to Ford’s allegations, so he must actually have filed his report on or before June 25. Should be easy enough to find out…
My three strongest reactions to the latest batch of documents are (1) horror at realizing that what’s been going on in Gitmo–and what may still be going on there and elsewhere– has actually been just as bad as I feared; (2) satisfaction at seeing more and more of the truth (however ugly) actually coming out; and (3) interest at seeing the degree of inter-agency disagreement over the whole question of what to do with the massive number of detainess who continue to be scooped up and held in US-run detention facilities around the world.
Let’s hope that that latter process continues to generate a good stream of “CYA” memos from various government agencies.
But let’s meanwhile work even harder than ever to overturn all the “Executive Orders” from the White House or elsewhere that allow/encourage the continuation of grossly abusive treatment of detainees. (= war crimes.) And redouble our efforts for a clear and universal policy of “No tolerance for torture.”
—-
Update, later Tuesday.
Also of interest in the collection: this partial string of intra-FBI emil correspondence. In it, an unnamed FBI agent, apparently from the Omaha field office, reported up the chain of command on July 30, 2004 that one day when he’d been at Gitmo (exact date not remembered) he’d seen an Israeli flag being used apparently as an instrument of additional humiliation,

I looked inside the adjacent interview room. At that time 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. I left the monitoring room immediately after seeing this activity. I did not see any other persons inside the interview room with the Israeli flag draped detainee, but suspect that this was a practice used by DOD DHS and the DOD MP Uniformed reservists…