Earlier Report of Prison Abuse
Intelligence Official Informed Defense Dept. in June
By Barton Gellman and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 8, 2004; Page A01
From a classified report five months ago, one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's closest advisers learned of allegations that a clandestine military task force in Iraq was beating detainees, ordering trained DIA debriefers out of the room during questioning, confiscating evidence of the abuse and intimidating the debriefers when they complained.
The June 25 report -- sent by the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency to Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone -- is among dozens of documents made public yesterday that allege brutal and sometimes illegal military interrogation methods employed against prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In the documents, government witnesses describe the regular use of violence -- much of it inflicted on prisoners by a top secret task force devoted to capturing "high-value targets" in Iraq -- more than seven months after a fact-finding mission reported to senior defense officials that the unit was beating prisoners. There is no record, among the documents made public yesterday or previously, that makes clear whether the abuses -- separate and apart from the highly publicized incidents at Abu Ghraib -- have stopped or whether anyone has been held responsible for them.
...
Other documents describe heated battles in which the FBI and some DIA intelligence officers objected to harsh interrogation methods in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
One FBI agent, reporting on May 10 to superiors about an earlier conversation with Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller and Maj. Gen. Michael B. Dunleavey at Guantanamo Bay, said the two men cited Rumsfeld as the source of their authority to use techniques that the FBI regarded as potentially illegal and "not effective or producing intel that was reliable." The author of that report, whose name is redacted, said "both agreed the Bureau has their way of dong business and DoD has their marching orders from the Sec Def."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45373-2004Dec7.html
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