Justice Redacted Memo on Detainees
FBI criticism of interrogations was deleted.
U.S. law enforcement agents working at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, concluded that controversial interrogation practices used there by the Defense Department produced intelligence information that was "suspect at best," an FBI agent told a superior in a memo in May last year.
But the Justice Department, which reviewed the memo for national security secrets before releasing it to a civil liberties group in December, redacted the FBI agent's conclusion.
The department, acting after the Defense Department expressed its own views on which portions of the letter should be redacted, also blacked out a separate assertion in the memo that military interrogation practices could undermine future military trials for terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay.
FBI agents and officials had complained about the shackling of detainees to the floor for periods exceeding 24 hours, without food and water; the draping of a detainee in an Israeli flag; and the use of growling dogs to scare detainees.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who as White House counsel participated in detailed discussions about the legality of aggressive military interrogation techniques, has twice publicly expressed skepticism about the reliability of these FBI accounts.
But the May 10, 2004, memo, written by an official whose name has not been disclosed, contains a highly detailed account of the efforts that FBI agents made to convince the Defense Department that its interrogation practices were wrongheaded.
Jeffrey Fogel, legal director for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, an advocacy group that helped organize lawyers for 150 military detainees, said the newly disclosed passages could be used to persuade judges to "look behind" any military assertions during court trials that the suspects had confessed during questioning.
"An awful lot of cases have been built on information obtained through these kind of coercive interrogation techniques," Fogel said.
~It not just about the DOD and Bush Department of Justice appointees approving the use of torture, (they're soldiers, they follow orders; they're Republicans, Jesus gave them blank checks) the detainees they tortured are still incarcerated and facing more years in Guantanamo-type prisons after their military trials. What the Bush Administration is doing is a unique form of inhumanity for a country as modern, as lawyer-ridden, as the USA. It's incredible.
Unfortunately none of the 150 military detainees are in a vegetative state, and had their feeding tubes removed by court order. (Actually we can't know that for certain because the identities of military detainees have not been made public.)