In late 2002, more than a year before a whistle-blower slipped military investigators the graphic photographs that would set off the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, an F.B.I. agent at the American detention center in Guant?namo Bay, Cuba, sent a colleague an e-mail message complaining about the military's \"coercive tactics\" with detainees, documents released yesterday show.
\"You won't believe it!\" the agent wrote.
Two years later, the frustration among F.B.I. agents had grown. Another agent sent a colleague an e-mail message saying he had seen reports that a general from Guant?namo had gone to Abu Ghraib to \"Gitmo-ize\" it. \"If this refers to intell gathering as I suspect,\" he wrote, according to the documents, \"it suggests he has continued to support interrogation strategies we not only advised against, but questioned in terms of effectiveness.\"
When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last spring, officials characterized the abuse as the aberrant acts of a small group of low-ranking reservists, limited to a few weeks in late 2003. But thousands of pages in military reports and documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to the American Civil Liberties Union in the past few months have demonstrated that the abuse involved multiple service branches in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba, beginning in 2002 and continuing after Congress and the military had begun investigating Abu Ghraib.
An article in today's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine says that military medical personnel violated the Geneva Conventions by helping design coercive interrogation techniques based on detainee medical information. Some doctors told the journal that the military had instructed them not to discuss the deaths that occurred in detention.
No one predicted the acts that showed up in snapshots from Abu Ghraib - naked detainees piled in a pyramid or leashed and crawling - but the documents showed many warnings of mistreatment, most explicitly from the F.B.I.
\"Basically, it appears that the lawyer worked hard to write a legal justification for the type of interviews they (the Army) want to conduct here,\" one agent said in an e-mail message from Guant?namo in December 2002.
\"When you see the same thing happening in three different places, you see abuses being committed with impunity, then it ceases to be the sole responsibility of the individual soldiers,\" Reed Brody, special counsel to Human Rights Watch, said. \"At a certain point, it becomes so widespread that it makes it look like a policy.\"
Officials have defended some cases of harsh treatment by saying it was simply the cost of the so-called global war on terror. The Special Operations task force was assigned to track down terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. But many of the detainees were not terrorists. In Iraq, 70 percent to 90 percent of those detained, according to military intelligence estimates reported by the International Committee of the Red Cross, \"had been arrested by mistake.\" A military report on Iraqi prisons said that many detainees were held for several months for things like expressing \"displeasure or ill will\" toward the American occupying forces.
The Bush administration decided in February 2002 that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to members of Al Qaeda and that while they did apply to the Taliban, prisoners taken in Afghanistan were not entitled to the protections of the conventions. Many detainees were taken to Guant?namo, held indefinitely and interrogated with harsh techniques approved for by Mr. Rumsfeld in April 2003. The administration said detainees in Iraq were covered by the conventions, which should have protected them from threats or harassment in interrogations, or from physical or mental torture.
But a military report by a former defense secretary, James R. Schlesinger, which was released in August, concluded that harsh tactics intended for use only at Guant?namo - threatening detainees with dogs, leaving them naked in extreme heat or cold, shackling them upright to keep them awake - \"migrated\" improperly to Afghanistan and then to Iraq.
\"The AC had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees,\" one F.B.I. agent reported from Guant?namo in August. \"The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.\"
The earliest abuses on record in Iraq apparently came in May 2003. On May 15, two marines in Karbala held a 9-millimeter pistol to the head of a bound detainee while a third took a picture. One marine, according to military records, then poured a glass of water on the detainee's head. In June 2003, according to records, a marine ordered four Iraqi children who had been detained for looting to stand next to a shallow ditch, then fired a pistol in a mock execution.
In August, a marine put a match to a puddle of hand sanitizer that had spilled in front of an Iraqi detainee, igniting a flame that severely burned the detainee's hands.
In April of 2004, marines shocked detainees with wires from an electric transformer - \"the detainee 'danced' as he was shocked,\" an investigative report said. And in June, Defense Intelligence agents reported members of a military Special Operations task force repeatedly punching a detainee in the face. The agents also reported finding prisoners with burn marks on their backs and complaining of kidney pain.
The F.B.I. complaints began in December 2002, according to the documents. A year later, an agent complained that \"these tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date.\"
But agents struggled with what they could complain about, believing that, in some cases, tactics they considered harsh or abusive had high-level approval.
\"This technique and all of those used in the scenarios was approved by the dep sec def,\" or deputy secretary of defense, one agent wrote from Guant?namo in January 2004.
An agent in Iraq reported seeing military interrogators yelling at detainees, covering them with hoods and subjecting them to loud music. That went beyond acceptable F.B.I. practice, the agent wrote, but had been \"authorized by the president under his executive order.\" An e-mail message from the agent made several references to President Bush's signing of an order allowing such techniques.
The Pentagon and the White House say that no executive order existed. Yeah, right.
Most of the 137 people who have been charged or disciplined, were members of the Army. Of those, 46 resulted in nonjudicial or administrative punishments, which generally mean fines or reductions in rank.
Fourteen marines have been convicted by courts-martial, including one who shocked a detainee with electrical wires. That marine was sentenced to one year's confinement. The marine who conducted the mock execution received a reduction in rank, 30 days' hard labor and 6 months' forfeiture of pay.
One Special Operations member, the Pentagon said, admitted using a stun gun on detainees.
