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New York Times - May 1, 2005
Inquiry finds abuses at Guantánamo Bay
By Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt
WASHINGTON, April 30 - A high-level military investigation into accusations of detainee abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has concluded that several prisoners were mistreated or humiliated, perhaps illegally, as a result of efforts to devise innovative methods to gain information, senior military and Pentagon officials say.
The report on the investigation, which is still a few weeks from being completed and released, will deal with accounts by agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who complained after witnessing detainees subjected to several forms of harsh treatment.
The F.B.I. agents wrote in memorandums that were never meant to be disclosed publicly that they had seen female interrogators forcibly squeeze male prisoners' genitals, and that they had witnessed other detainees stripped and shackled low to the floor for many hours.
Although the Pentagon has issued other reports about accusations of abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo, the new investigation, by Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt of the Air Force, is intended to be the first major inquiry devoted solely to determining what interrogation practices were used at Guantánamo. The investigation was initiated in response to the disclosure of F.B.I. messages that especially concerned Pentagon officials because the bureau's complaints carried great credibility.
It remains unclear, however, how high up the chain of command the report's authors will assign responsibility for the abuses. Pentagon officials have been criticized for absolving high-level officers in previous investigations.
The new report by General Schmidt also comes as an increasing number of Guantánamo prisoners who have been released are providing accounts of their treatment for the first time to journalists and supportive American lawyers.
One recently released detainee, interviewed by telephone from Kuwait, said he had witnessed or learned from fellow inmates about many of the abusive practices that have been described in previous reports by nongovernmental groups like the International Committee of the Red Cross.
But that detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, also said in a series of interviews with The New York Times that detainees sometimes prevailed over the authorities after protesting conditions with campwide hunger strikes.
Mr. al-Mutairi said there were three major hunger strikes in his more than three years of imprisonment at Guantánamo. He said that after one of them, a protest of guards' handling of copies of the Koran, which had been tossed into a pile and stepped on, a senior officer delivered an apology over the camp's loudspeaker system, pledging that such abuses would stop. Interpreters, standing outside each prison block, translated the officer's apology.
A former interrogator at Guantánamo, in an interview with The Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans.
Mr. al-Mutairi, the released Kuwaiti detainee, described the camp environment as one in which authorities sought to keep prisoners thoroughly obedient.
He said the first hunger strike, which spread through word of mouth, was generally caused by the prisoners' despondency over not knowing what would eventually happen to them. It lasted several days, he said, and ended after the authorities released the first handful of detainees and transferred them back to Afghanistan.
He said that guards and interrogators used that transfer as an example to give people hope. "They said, 'This could be you,' and people started to eat again," Mr. al-Mutairi said through an interpreter.
The second hunger strike was to protest treatment during interrogations, including the use of sexual taunting by female interrogators. It ended more ambiguously, he said. The International Committee of the Red Cross, in a confidential June 2003 report, said the use of sexual taunts by female interrogators was prevalent in 2002 and early 2003, but stopped abruptly in the middle of that year.
The third hunger strike was over the treatment of the copies of the Koran, given to each prisoner as part of a package of religious items that the military publicizes as evidence of its religious tolerance.
Mr. al-Mutairi said that the treatment of detainees improved the most just before tribunals began last year. In the tribunals, each prisoner was allowed to go before a three-officer panel to determine if he had been properly imprisoned as an unlawful enemy combatant…..
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/national/nationalspecial3/01gitmo.html
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