Chimp_junta's Denial of Torture Was a Lie, FBI Confirms; ICRC Told it Like it Was...Surprised?

Official documents vindicate Red Cross report on US torture

By Richard Phillips
14 December 2004

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When a confidential International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report exposing the US military torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba was published by the New York Times late last month Washington reacted with the usual combination of crude denials and legalistic justifications of its violations of the Geneva Conventions and international law.

At the same time, sections of the American media, including the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and the Fox television network, attempted to smear the ICRC. The 140-year-old human rights body was deemed to be anti-American and its motives “questionable”. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal declared that the Red Cross had become “an ideological organisation unable to distinguish between good and bad”, while the New York Post called for a funding boycott of the ICRC and its American affiliates.

Within days of these attacks, however, further evidence surfaced, this time from senior Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials and the Pentagon’s own spy agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), vindicating the Red Cross investigation.

According to an Associated Press report published on December 6, FBI officers witnessed US soldiers torturing Guantánamo Bay detainees in 2002, not long after prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan began being transported to the American military prison. Such was the level of abuse that a senior FBI counterterrorism officer wrote to the US military, concerned that FBI officers could be implicated in the illegal activity.

Three incidents were cited in a July 14 letter from Thomas Harrington, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counter-terrorism division, to the head of the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, Major General Donald J. Ryder. Harrington wrote that one interrogator had abused prisoners so severely that they often ended up “curling into a fetal position on the floor and crying in pain”.

One of the episodes described in Harrington’s letter recall the sadism and sexual humiliation employed by the US military on prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. A female interrogator whispered in the ear of a handcuffed and shackled detainee, caressed him and then applied lotion to his arms. A Marine who witnessed the interrogation told an FBI officer that the interrogator later grabbed the detainee’s thumbs and bent them backwards and also grabbed his genitals.

In September or October 2002, FBI agents witnessed a dog being used “in an aggressive manner to intimidate a detainee”. A month later, they saw the same detainee “after he had been subjected to intense isolation for over three months, totally isolated in a cell that was always flooded by light”.

“By late November,” the report continued, “the detainee was evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma... talking to nonexistent people, reported hearing voices (and) crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet.”

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