Abuse Claims Mount Against Pentagon, Contractors

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Abuse Claims Mount Against Pentagon, Contractors

William Fisher

NEW YORK, May 7 (IPS) - As human rights groups demanded the release of a report on a long-running investigation of the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the unlawful interrogations of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, new torture claims were leveled at two U.S. military contractors by a former Abu Ghraib "ghost" detainee who was wrongly imprisoned and later released without charge.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a Freedom of Information Act request this week with the Departments of Justice and Defence demanding release of a report by the Justice Department's Inspector General (OIG), which the group says has been completed for months but blocked by the Defence Department.

The OIG investigation was initiated in 2005 after the ACLU obtained documents in which FBI agents described interrogations that they had witnessed at Guantánamo Bay.

While the documents were most notable for their description of illegal interrogation methods used by military interrogators, they also raised serious questions about the FBI's participation in abusive interrogations, the actions of FBI personnel who witnessed abusive interrogations, and the response of FBI officials to reports of abuse.

Testifying before a Congressional committee last week, FBI Director Robert Mueller denied that the FBI participated in any of the interrogations. The Defence Department has said the OIG's report must be reviewed and redacted to eliminate classified information before it can be made public.

The OIG report and all documents related to this investigation is part of a broader effort to uncover information about the George W. Bush administration's torture policies. To date, more than 100,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the ACLU's lawsuit enforcing the request -- including the Bush administration's 2003 "torture memo" written by John Yoo when he was a deputy at the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel.

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