FBI's torture concerns aired

WASHINGTON — In 2002, concerned about the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, FBI agents created a "war-crimes file" to document accusations against U.S. military personnel, a Justice Department report disclosed Tuesday.

The Justice Department inspector general's report, which took four years to complete, provides the fullest account to date of dissent and confusion over the interrogation tactics used by the military and the CIA.

In one of several previously undisclosed episodes, the report found that U.S. military interrogators appeared to have collaborated with visiting Chinese officials at Guantánamo Bay to disrupt the sleep of Chinese Muslims held there, waking them up every 15 minutes the night before their interviews by the Chinese.

The report describes what one official called "trench warfare" between the FBI and the military over the methods used on detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The report says officials at senior levels in the FBI, the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Council were made aware of the agents' complaints, but little appears to have been done as a result. The National Security Council, which includes President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, was chaired at the time by Condoleezza Rice, then the national-security adviser.

The report quotes objections from FBI officials who grew increasingly concerned about the reports of practices such as intimidating inmates with snarling dogs, parading them in the nude before female soldiers or "short-shackling" them to the floor for many hours in extreme heat or cold.

Such tactics, said one FBI agent in an e-mail to supervisors in November 2002, might violate U.S. law banning torture.

The report does not say how many incidents were included in the file after it was started in 2002. An FBI official ordered the file closed in 2003, because "investigating detainee allegations of abuse was not the FBI's mission," the report says.

The inspector general, Glenn Fine, found that in a few instances, FBI agents participated in interrogations using pressure tactics that would not have been permitted inside the United States. But the "vast majority" of agents followed FBI legal guidelines and "separated themselves" from harsh treatment.

Several witnesses told Fine's investigators that John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, also brought the situation to the attention of the National Security Council or the Pentagon, but Fine couldn't verify the accounts because Ashcroft refused to be interviewed.

A spokesman for Ashcroft, Mark Corallo, said the former attorney general did not cooperate because "his conversations with the White House and with staff on national security matters are privileged."

Fine said his investigators interviewed more than 230 witnesses and surveyed 1,000 FBI agents for the report. Prosecutors declined to pursue charges after concluding the Pentagon was ultimately responsible for policing the treatment of al-Qaida detainees held in military prisons.

A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, noted that techniques used at Guantánamo were the subject of a 2005 Defense Department investigation that found no evidence of torture. The investigation did fault some interrogation tactics, specifically those used on Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11 attacks, calling his interrogation degrading and abusive.

This month, military officials dropped charges against al-Qahtani, citing concerns about information obtained during the interrogations.

Al-Qahtani's lawyer disclosed Tuesday that he tried to kill himself last month, saying the Saudi prisoner was distraught over a possible death sentence for the charges that were dropped.

A CIA spokesman objected to the report's characterization of the agency's methods. "Interrogation methods that the CIA has used in its terrorist detention program were examined and found lawful, by the Department of Justice itself," agency spokesman Mark Mansfield said.

Material from McClatchy Newspapers and The Associated Press is included in this report.