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Rdtf
CNO
Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 2209
Location: BUSHville
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 Posted: Sun May 01, 2005 6:43 pm Post subject: CBS/60 Minutes at it again tonight:'Sex-Up' Tactics At Gitmo |
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/28/60minutes/main691602.shtml
| Quote: | 'Sex-Up' Tactics At Gitmo?
(CBS) A former Guantanamo Bay translator says prisoner interrogations were staged to give visiting congressmen, senators and generals the impression that valuable intelligence information was being gleaned from cooperative detainees on a regular basis.
He also says detainees were treated in sadistic ways, including being taunted sexually.
Former Army Sgt. Erik Saar talks to Correspondent Scott Pelley in his first interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, May 1, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
Saar spent six months at Guantanamo and believes "only a few dozen" of the 600 detainees at the base were real terrorists, and that little information was obtained from them. Visiting authorities were led to believe otherwise, says Saar.
"Interrogations were set up so the VIPs could come and witness an interrogation...a mock interrogation, basically," he tells Pelley. "They would find a detainee that they knew to have been cooperative. They would ask the interrogator to go back over the same information...and they would sit across a table and talk...[it was] a fictitious world they would create for these VIPs."
The reality, says Saar, was sometimes in complete contrast. Detainees didn't always cooperate, he says, and many were treated harshly. He recalls translating for one female interrogator who used sex against a devout Muslim who had taken flight lessons in the United States, and was probably a dangerous terrorist with potentially crucial information.
When touching her breasts through her T-shirt to make him "feel unclean in an Islamic way" failed to make him talk, the female officer went further, says Saar.
"She...put her hands in her pants...she pulled out her hand which was red and said, 'I'm actually menstruating right now and I'm touching you. Does that please your God?'" recalls Saar.
It was really red ink, says Saar, but "[the detainee] got pent up and shied away from her and she then took the ink and wiped it on his face."
The interrogator ended the session telling the detainee that the water would be turned off in his cell, "so that he then could not go back and become ritually clean...[and] therefore could not pray," says Saar.
Saar says this particular detainee "was a bad individual" who should remain locked up forever, but he thinks the use of this method, known as "sex-up," against him was not only disgusting, but also useless.
"It did not work and from what I later learned, the detainee remained uncooperative," Saar tells Pelley. "There are much better methods that were being employed at Guantanamo Bay that yielded the little bit of intelligence we did receive."
FBI agents stationed at Guantanamo Bay have written classified emails to FBI headquarters warning that detainees were being physically mistreated in addition to being subjected to the "sex-up" interrogation tactics.
Retired Army Col. Patrick Lang, formerly the head of human intelligence gathering at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, says that after reading the FBI emails and listening to Saar's accounts, "A lot of this behavior which has been allowed is so far outside the pale...I think it's torture."
The Army declined to comment on Saar's story or to provide someone to answer questions about Guantanamo Bay.
© MMV, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
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shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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| Posted: Sun May 01, 2005 10:06 pm Post subject: |
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Looks like the team of '60 Minutes' and the 'New York Times' colluding
again to create another "scandal"!! www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/national
| Quote: | Inquiry Finds Abuses at Guantánamo Bay
Published: May 1, 2005
By NEIL A. LEWIS and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, April 30 - A high-level military investigation into accusations of detainee abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has concluded that several prisoners were mistreated or humiliated, perhaps illegally, as a result of efforts to devise innovative methods to gain information, senior military and Pentagon officials say.
The report on the investigation, which is still a few weeks from being completed and released, will deal with accounts by agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who complained after witnessing detainees subjected to several forms of harsh treatment.
The F.B.I. agents wrote in memorandums that were never meant to be disclosed publicly that they had seen female interrogators forcibly squeeze male prisoners' genitals, and that they had witnessed other detainees stripped and shackled low to the floor for many hours.
Although the Pentagon has issued other reports about accusations of abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo, the new investigation, by Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt of the Air Force, is intended to be the first major inquiry devoted solely to determining what interrogation practices were used at Guantánamo. The investigation was initiated in response to the disclosure of F.B.I. messages that especially concerned Pentagon officials because the bureau's complaints carried great credibility.
It remains unclear, however, how high up the chain of command the report's authors will assign responsibility for the abuses. Pentagon officials have been criticized for absolving high-level officers in previous investigations.
The new report by General Schmidt also comes as an increasing number of Guantánamo prisoners who have been released are providing accounts of their treatment for the first time to journalists and supportive American lawyers.
One recently released detainee, interviewed by telephone from Kuwait, said he had witnessed or learned from fellow inmates about many of the abusive practices that have been described in previous reports by nongovernmental groups like the International Committee of the Red Cross.
But that detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, also said in a series of interviews with The New York Times that detainees sometimes prevailed over the authorities after protesting conditions with campwide hunger strikes.
Mr. al-Mutairi said there were three major hunger strikes in his more than three years of imprisonment at Guantánamo. He said that after one of them, a protest of guards' handling of copies of the Koran, which had been tossed into a pile and stepped on, a senior officer delivered an apology over the camp's loudspeaker system, pledging that such abuses would stop. Interpreters, standing outside each prison block, translated the officer's apology.
A former interrogator at Guantánamo, in an interview with The Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans.
The military has long contended that abuses at Guantánamo were aberrations for which soldiers have been disciplined. But in a separate report being released Sunday, Physicians for Human Rights, a group of health professionals based in Cambridge, Mass., says that "since at least since 2002, the United States has been engaged in systematic psychological torture" of Guantánamo detainees.
The physicians' group said that it believed that the practices of soldiers in Guantánamo had "led to devastating health consequences for the individuals subjected to them."
Its report was based mostly on publicly available reports by other organizations and news accounts, but the group's investigators said that they used someone they identified as a confidential source at Guantánamo to corroborate some facts. The group did not describe the source's position or responsibilities at the prison.
The physicians' group said its investigators were confident of the veracity of news media accounts of female interrogators flaunting their sexuality to humiliate devout Muslims, including smearing red fluid said to be menstrual blood on prisoners.
The report by General Schmidt is intended to cover such accusations, and officials said that some former female interrogators had been questioned.
Continued
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(Page 2 of 2)
Lt. Col. Jim Marshall, a spokesman for the United States Southern Command, said Friday that General Schmidt submitted an initial report March 31; the report's authors were still writing their findings, and military lawyers were reviewing them. A final version will probably be approved in two or three weeks by Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, the head of the command, Colonel Marshall said.
A senior Pentagon official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report has not been completed, said that the inquiry centered on what procedures were used at Guantánamo and why interrogators thought they were acceptable. The official said there was no evidence of physical mistreatment, but investigators were examining whether interrogators improperly humiliated prisoners or used psychological abuse.
The Pentagon official said that the Schmidt report found that some interrogators devised plans that they thought were legal and proper, but in hindsight and with some clearer judgment might have been found to violate permissible standards.
"People determined which interrogation technique they would use, made interrogation plans and wrote them out," the Pentagon official said. "In retrospect, however, how they applied those judgments to a particular technique is what one might want to question."
Confusion among interrogators and military commanders over how to employ interrogation techniques permitted by the Army's field manual has emerged as a persistent problem in several of the military's investigations into the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, and at other military detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army is preparing to issue a new interrogation manual that expressly prohibits harsh techniques that were revealed during the detainee-abuse scandal.
Mr. al-Mutairi, the released Kuwaiti detainee, described the camp environment as one in which authorities sought to keep prisoners thoroughly obedient.
He said the first hunger strike, which spread through word of mouth, was generally caused by the prisoners' despondency over not knowing what would eventually happen to them. It lasted several days, he said, and ended after the authorities released the first handful of detainees and transferred them back to Afghanistan.
He said that guards and interrogators used that transfer as an example to give people hope. "They said, 'This could be you,' and people started to eat again," Mr. al-Mutairi said through an interpreter.
The second hunger strike was to protest treatment during interrogations, including the use of sexual taunting by female interrogators. It ended more ambiguously, he said. The International Committee of the Red Cross, in a confidential June 2003 report, said the use of sexual taunts by female interrogators was prevalent in 2002 and early 2003, but stopped abruptly in the middle of that year.
The third hunger strike was over the treatment of the copies of the Koran, given to each prisoner as part of a package of religious items that the military publicizes as evidence of its religious tolerance.
Mr. al-Mutairi said that the treatment of detainees improved the most just before tribunals began last year. In the tribunals, each prisoner was allowed to go before a three-officer panel to determine if he had been properly imprisoned as an unlawful enemy combatant.
"In general, everybody was behaving very good then," he said, "very professional. Maybe they got orders from the top, but I don't know why." |
PULLEEEZE!! GIVE ME A BREAK!!
This is hardly torture!!
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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Rdtf
CNO
Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 2209
Location: BUSHville
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| Posted: Sun May 01, 2005 10:57 pm Post subject: |
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| I am going to watch it, just to catch who is producing it. I wonder who Mary Mapes has passed the torch to.. |
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Rdtf
CNO
Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 2209
Location: BUSHville
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| Posted: Sun May 01, 2005 11:05 pm Post subject: |
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| It said Produced by Paul C. Gallagher. |
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srmorton
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Joined: 07 Aug 2004
Posts: 383
Location: Jacksonville, NC
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| Posted: Mon May 02, 2005 2:50 am Post subject: |
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I made myself watch it, biased as it was. I was not impressed with Sgt.
Saar because he should have reported any tactics that he felt were not
in keeping with the stated policy to his superiors at the time rather than
"saving" them for a tell-all book.
As I was watching it, I kept thinking about the graves of the women and
children recently discovered in Iraq and of the harsh treatment of women
by the Taliban. Compared to these atrocities, what Sgt. Saar was describing
seems pretty tame.
_________________
Susan R. Morton |
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