Declassified Docs Reveal Pentagon Ignored FBI’s Warnings on Abusive Interrogations

[kpete]

Source: Washington Independent

Declassified Docs Reveal Pentagon Ignored FBI’s Warnings on Abusive Interrogations
Digg Tweet By Daphne Eviatar 11/7/09 7:05 PM

The Justice Department released more documents — or, at least, less-redacted documents — late Friday to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of the government’s obligation in a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

These latest documents provide a glimpse of the early struggles between the FBI and the Pentagon over just how to conduct the “war on terror” and how to interrogate and treat that war’s detainees. Sadly, they reveal that the FBI knew perfectly well — and repeatedly warned Defense Department officials, as well as Justice Department lawyers — that the abusive interrogation techniques being used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay were likely to be ineffective and make subsequent prosecutions impossible.

As one memo says, while the interrogation techniques based on tactics used in the U.S. Army Search, Escape, Resistance and Evasion (SERE) training “may be effective in eliciting tactical intelligence in a battlefield context, the reliability of information obtained using such tactics is highly questionable, not to mention potentially legally inadmissible in court.”

That memo was written in May 2003. The “enhanced” interrogation techniques, such as stress positions and prolonged sleep deprivation, were still being used and justified in memos as late as July 2007. The memo raises several important questions. Did the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers drafting those later memos for the CIA not know about the FBI’s earlier objections? Or did they just dismiss them out of hand? Were they told to ignore those earlier conclusions?

Read more: http://washingtonindependent.com/67016/declassified-docs-reveal-pentagon-ignored-dojs-warnings-on-abusive-interrogations

[buckrogers1965]

1. Gained a lot of respect for the FBI

They trained their agents to stand up for what is right and report wrong doing. Something they have not always done in their long history.

Thank you for standing up for the rights of people.

[jtrockville]

2. Are these the documents Cheney wanted declassified?

[Blandocyte]

3. Dark times in our history.

[Arctic Dave]

4. Farm Boys Inc. has always been more respectful for the law. The got this one right.

[boppers]

5. Another "leak" in here un-noticed:

The "rendition" sites that weren't, that is, making detainees think they were in a torture-sanctioning country, with foreign captors, when they were actually in US hands.

[Solly Mack]

6. K&R

[TexasObserver]

7. Recommended.

[Peace Patriot]

8. If it's true that the FBI warned the Pentagon about torture (and the FBI wasn't just covering its

own ass at the time)--and that will be a difficult thing to determine (--there are bad as well as good reasons for people leaving paper trails)--it may be one more evidence that Rumsfeld was engaging in torture NOT to "keep us safe," but for purposes unknown that we can only guess at. Those purposes might be covering up trails of complicity on 9/11 and other crimes, and gaining control of obscure Islamic financial systems and weapons and drug networks, not to "keep us safe" but to profit from them (this was a Reaganite M.O., in their infamous "arms for hostages" and Iran-Contra war operations)--establishing Pentagon-run networks and eliminating rivals. This is something I have suspected Rumsfeld of (and Cheney). I have never believed that they did anything for the purpose of "keeping us safe." Their purpose, on the contrary, has been to terrorize us and everyone else, in order to engage in massive looting with impunity.

The other day, someone posted an item from these ACLU-obtained memos about an FBI non-torture interrogation of a 9/11 suspect whom the CIA had been torturing. The memo stated that the CIA stopped the FBI interrogation after 45 minutes but gave no reason for this. One question would be: Why did the CIA stop that FBI questioning? Also, who gave that order? The memo also reveals that Rumsfeld was micro-managing the torture of prisoners. It's possible that the torturers themselves didn't know the true purposes of some (or many) questions and orders from above.

The true purposes of the torture might also be related to Cheney's assassination squads, that is, the torture was used to identify the names and locations of people whom Rumsfeld/Cheney wanted to eliminate for business/profiteering purposes.