FBI agents witnessed “highly aggressive” interrogations and mistreatment of terror suspects at the US prison camp in Cuba starting in 2002 – more than a year before the prison abuse scandal broke in Iraq – according to a letter a senior US Justice Department official sent to the US army’s top criminal investigator.
In the letter obtained by The Associated Press, the FBI official suggested the Pentagon didn’t act on FBI complaints about the incidents, including a female interrogator grabbing a detainee’s genitals and bending back his thumbs, another where a prisoner was gagged with duct tape and a third where a dog was used to intimidate a detainee who later was thrown into isolation and showed signs of “extreme psychological trauma.”
One US Marine told an FBI observer that some interrogations led to prisoners “curling into a foetal position on the floor and crying in pain,” according to the letter dated July 14, 2004.
Thomas Harrington, an FBI counterterrorism expert who led a team of investigators at Guantanamo Bay, wrote the letter to Major General Donald J Ryder, the army’s chief law enforcement officer who’s investigating abuses at US-run prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo.
Harrington said FBI officials complained about the pattern of abusive techniques to top Defence Department attorneys in January 2003, and it appeared that nothing was done.
How many times can they point to “bad apples” and “isolated incidents” before the people running this horror show are held accountable? How about holding the real bad apples accountable:
