A high-level military investigation into complaints by FBI agents about the abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, concluded in a report released on Wednesday that their treatment was sometimes degrading but did not qualify as inhumane or as torture.
The report was presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee by Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt of the Air Force, who conducted the investigation after e-mail messages between FBI agents at Guantanamo and their superiors in Washington were disclosed in a lawsuit.
In the messages, the agents complained that they had seen abusive, possibly illegal behavior by military interrogators. They spoke of "torture techniques" and described detainees forced into uncomfortable positions for 18 to 24 hours at a time or left to soil themselves.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Schmidt told the committee that his investigation could not substantiate some of the FBI accusations. His report said that some of the practices that evoked criticism among the FBI agents were approved interrogation techniques, like stripping detainees, forcing one to wear women's lingerie and wiping red ink on a detainee and telling him it was menstrual blood.
The unclassified version of the report, which was distributed publicly, provided the military's first acknowledgement that it had used dogs to intimidate prisoners at Guantanamo on a few occasions, as was done later at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
In addition, one of the high-value detainees, Mohamed al-Kahtani, who the military has said confessed that he was meant to be the 20th hijacker in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, was led around on a leash and forced "to perform a series of dog tricks."
The leashing of a detainee to humiliate him was another practice that became notorious after it was recorded in a photograph of abuses at Abu Ghraib.
The report said those techniques and others were part of authorized approaches called "ego down" or "futility," which are used to make the interrogation subject question his sense of personal worth or the value of resisting.
Schmidt said that an accusation by an FBI agent that detainees were deprived of food and water as part of an interrogation regimen could not be substantiated. He said the agent was difficult to find and was therefore not questioned. Similarly, he said that about 10 former interrogators could not be questioned as they were no longer in the military and declined to answer questions voluntarily.
The report also an incident recounted by an FBI agent who said she saw a detainee shackled to the floor for hours, soiling himself and pulling out his hair could not be corroborated.
The report was greeted by several Republican senators on the committee as a demonstration of the humaneness they said was generally used in Guantanamo. Several Democrats said the report showed that the military was committed to absolving any high-level person of responsibility.
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