FBI agents accused U.S. military personnel at the Guantanamo prison of using illegal "aggressive interrogation tactics" on detainees but senior military officials rejected FBI concerns, documents made public on Thursday showed.
The FBI documents, released by the American Civil Liberties Union after being obtained under a court order, further exposed the rift between the agency and the Pentagon over treatment of foreign terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The FBI said the military's techniques, which involved homosexual pornographic movies, loud music and the Israeli flag, not only were illegal but were ineffective. Maj. Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman, said 12 major investigations have found that no Pentagon policy "ever encouraged or condoned abuse of detainees at Guantanamo" and that "the Department of Defence is treating and will continue to treat all of the individuals detained at Guantanamo humanely."
"This is another example of recycling old information," Shavers said. The United States has faced international criticism over treatment of detainees at the Guantanamo base and in Iraq and Afghanistan. An FBI agent described in one document witnessing two military investigators at Guantanamo interrogating a detainee while showing him homosexual pornography movies and using a strobe light in the room.
The agent said military interrogators routinely masqueraded as FBI agents while subjecting detainees to interrogations lasting 16 to 18 hours using tactics such as wrapping them in the Israeli flag and bombarding them with constant loud music. FBI agents expressed concern to agency officials in a May 30, 2003, memo about the actions of military interrogators and the rejection of the agents' concerns by the Guantanamo prison commander at the time, Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller.
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