Hydrablog

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/us/01justice.html
November 1, 2009
Documents Detail Conditions Found at Secret C.I.A. Jails
By SCOTT SHANE and CHARLIE SAVAGE [Obama white house] [Bush white house residuals, considerably] [bureaucracy] [from bureaucracy to some NSC level, latter particularly in the first W. Bush term, proximate to 9/11] [IC] [ODNI, DNI, other pillars of intelligence-gathering and analysis bureaucracy] [more on the enhanced-interrogation techniques (aka, torture)] [report came out Monday and I read it that afternoon] [while I can understand how some might characterize as “sickening,” because it was so counter to what most of us think of as US values and principles, one really needs to read it to understand how such things happen] [it will almost certainly happen again—not precisely the same but similar human-institutional frailty] [use psci355] [followup, 090209] [*]
F.B.I. agents who arrived at a secret C.I.A. jail overseas in September 2002 found prisoners “manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock,” and a C.I.A. official wrote a list of questions for interrogators including “How close is each technique to the ‘rack and screw,’ ” according to hundreds of pages of partly declassified documents released Friday by the Justice Department. [*] [this links to past summer disclosures that resulted from ACLU FOIA suit] [Obama released per court] [I read them with interest] [*]
The documents include handwritten notes, apparently prepared by Justice Department officials, discussing the possibility of prosecuting some employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. The notes reveal that the Justice Department considered prosecuting a C.I.A. interrogator for a previously reported incident in which a detainee was threatened with a gun and a power drill, but it says department officials declined to prosecute the case.
The documents were released in the latest response to several Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Judicial Watch, a Washington advocacy group. Some are new versions of documents previously released.
Newly disclosed passages from a 2008 report by the Justice Department inspector general describe what agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation saw at the C.I.A. jail where Ramzi bin al-Shibh, [I remember one conclusion I came away with] [Bin al Shibh was not the high-rank organizer I once thought] [he was more marginal, which surprised me given all the stuff that had been leaked on him] [*] one of the plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was being questioned.
The F.B.I. agents helped C.I.A. officers prepare questions for Mr. Binalshibh but “were denied direct access to him for four or five days,” the report said. Then an F.B.I. agent, identified as “Thomas,” was allowed to see him and found him “naked and chained to the floor.”
The agent told the inspector general that “he obtained valuable actionable intelligence in a short time but that the C.I.A. quickly shut down the interview,” the report said.
The September 2002 visit was the last F.B.I. involvement in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas interrogations, which senior F.B.I. officials questioned on grounds of both legality and effectiveness.
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