FBI Created "War Crimes File" On Bushco's Torture Regime

[kpete]

WASHINGTON — In 2002, as evidence of prisoner mistreatment at Guantánamo Bay began to mount, Federal Bureau of Investigation 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.

More senior officials, including Spike Bowman, who was then the head of the national security law unit at the F.B.I., tried to sound the alarm as well.

“Beyond any doubt, what they are doing (and I don’t know the extent of it) would be unlawful were these enemy prisoners of war,” Mr. Bowman wrote in an e-mail message to top F.B.I. officials in July 2003.

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. The report does not say how many incidents were included in the file after it was started in 2002, but the “war crimes” label showed just how seriously F.B.I. agents took the accusations. 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.

REPORT HERE:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/washington/20080521_DETAIN_report.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/washington/21detain.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=lichtblau&st=nyt&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[Ichingcarpenter]

1. I was getting ready to post this Kpete

In one of several previously undisclosed episodes, the report found that American military interrogators appeared to have collaborated with visiting Chinese officials at Guantánamo Bay to disrupt the sleep of Chinese Muslims held there, waking them every 15 minutes the night before their interviews by the Chinese. In another incident, it said, a female interrogator reportedly bent back an inmate’s thumbs and squeezed his genitals as he grimaced in pain.

The report describes what one official called “trench warfare” between the F.B.I. and the military over the rough methods being used on detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The report says that the F.B.I. agents took their concerns to higher-ups, but that their concerns often fell on deaf ears: officials at senior levels at the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council were all made aware of the F.B.I. agents’ complaints, but little appears to have been done as a result.

[Purveyor]

2. Sounds like the FBI could be quite helpful should we ever seat a gov't willing to hold

'war crimes' investigations and hearings.

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. "Pretty much" like living in a fraternity house" Says Gitmo Admiral

Detainees released from the prison at Guantanamo Bay have complained about inhumane conditions there, but according to the admiral in charge, their living situation is "pretty much" like that in a fraternity house.

Rear Admiral Mark Buzby, who is completing a one-year assignment as the commander of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo recently held a conference call with defense bloggers to discuss the treatment of detainees.

"We're all about the safe and humane care and custody of detained enemy combatants," Buzby began. "We do that safely and we also do it ethically and transparently, and, of course, in strict accordance with the law." He added that Guantanamo is "very much different than what it's portrayed, typically, you know, in popular culture. ... The greatest compliment that I get from visitors is, 'Gosh, I never realized it was so different.'"

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Guantanamo_commander_Were_all_about_safe_0521.html

[Vincardog]

4. “investigating BUSHITLER'S abusees was not the F.B.I.’s mission,”

[L. Coyote]

5. K & R