WASHINGTON — Senior FBI officials in Iraq were reluctant to investigate allegations of prisoner abuse for fear that the bureau would lose access to high-value detainees and the stream of intelligence from interrogations, according to documents released Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union.
But the documents also contain numerous complaints from FBI agents working at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The agents said that military interrogators were using abusive, ineffective and potentially illegal methods. One e-mail described an interrogation in which a prisoner was put under a strobe light and shown gay pornographic films.
The e-mails were among more than 50 documents obtained from U.S. agencies as part of a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act by the ACLU.
The documents suggest that harsh interrogation methods were approved of and encouraged by high-ranking Pentagon officials and commanders. In an internal FBI memo dated May 2004, an unidentified bureau official complained that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's public pronouncements about interrogation policies were misleading.
"I know these techniques were approved at high levels within DoD and used" on specific prisoners, said the official, referring to the Department of Defense. The names of the author and recipients of the e-mail were blanked out on the version obtained and released by the ACLU, and no information was provided to indicate how the author knew the techniques were authorized at top levels.
In an e-mail from May 2003, Guantanamo's prison commander, Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, was described as favoring aggressive methods "despite FBI assertions that such methods could easily result in the elicitation of unreliable and legally inadmissible information."
Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU lawyer, said the documents offered new evidence that military leaders "endorsed interrogation methods that violate both domestic and international law."
A Pentagon spokesman described the ACLU documents as "old information," and said that 12 investigations and reviews had found there was no Defense Department policy that encouraged or condoned abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
The FBI memos had been previously released to the ACLU in December 2004, but with most of their contents censored.
