WASHINGTON — FBI agents observed U.S. soldiers mistreating terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as early as 2002, but the Pentagon has done little to investigate, a letter from a senior agency counter-terrorism official said.
Agents visiting the U.S. naval base prison said they saw military and civilian interrogators using "highly aggressive" techniques to exact information from detainees captured on battlefields in Afghanistan.
In one incident, a soldier reportedly bent a prisoner's thumbs back and "grabbed his genitals." In another, an FBI agent saw a detainee "gagged with duct tape" for refusing to stop chanting from the Koran.
In a third episode, a prisoner allegedly was threatened with a dog and the man was placed for three months in "intense isolation," causing him to experience "extreme psychological trauma."
All three reported incidents were described in a letter this summer from Thomas Harrington, deputy assistant director of the FBI's counter-terrorism division, to Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder, head of the Army's Criminal Investigation Command. Harrington said that the FBI had detailed its concerns with Pentagon officials after its agents witnessed the questionable treatment.
Harrington also told Ryder in the July 14 letter that an FBI agent reported one interrogator had treated detainees so harshly that they often ended up "curling into a fetal position on the floor and crying in pain."
In the letter, first reported by Associated Press and obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Harrington expressed frustration that the military did not appear to be taking the FBI's allegations seriously.
"I have no record that our specific concerns regarding these three situations were communicated to DOD [the Department of Defense] for appropriate action," he wrote.
However, the Pentagon said Monday that the incidents were under investigation as part of a larger internal inquiry into allegations of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay. The overall investigation has substantiated at least 10 incidents of minor misconduct since 2003. They include a female interrogator climbing on top of a detainee's lap and a guard striking a detainee.
"We report all allegations of mistreatment to the chain of command," Army Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, commander of the joint task force that oversees some 550 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, said Monday. "We take all allegations seriously and investigate each one fully."
