Inquiry Ordered Into Alleged Guantanamo Prisoner Abuse

The U.S. armed forces ordered an investigation Wednesday into allegations that terrorism suspects were abused at the military detention facility here, and appointed a general to head the probe.

The U.S. Southern Command named Brig. Gen. John T. Furlow, deputy commander of its U.S. Army South wing at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas, to lead the investigation. The move came six weeks after an FBI memo detailed reports from 26 agents saying they had witnessed interrogation excesses at the prison at the U.S. naval base that held 558 “enemy combatants.”

According to the memo obtained through Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union in late November, interrogators at the Guantanamo detention center allegedly chained an inmate in the fetal position for as long as 24 hours, as the man lay in his own feces and pulled out his own hair in distress.

Other FBI agents told their superiors that they had seen “personnel of other agencies,” an apparent reference to Department of Defense interrogators, confronting shackled prisoners with growling dogs; exposing them to extreme heat or cold to “soften” them ahead of questioning; and wrapping suspects in Israeli flags and subjecting them to blaring rap music.

Allegations have surfaced that a female interrogator grabbed a detainee’s genitals and bent back his thumbs, and that another prisoner was muzzled with duct tape for singing verses from the Koran.

Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, who commands the joint task force here that operates the detention and interrogation centers, noted that none of the abuse allegations occurred on his 7-month-old watch, but said he welcomed the opportunity for the personnel who were “doing right” to restore their reputations.

“I don’t know anyone in uniform not sickened by what we saw come out of Abu Ghraib,” Hood said of the scandal that unfolded early last year when photographs surfaced of torture and humiliation of prisoners at the facility in Iraq.

The FBI agent reports were in response to an internal request by 500 agents who had served at Guantanamo for any information on abuse after some agents reported that military personnel here were impersonating bureau interrogators. FBI legal counsel Valerie Caproni has forwarded nine cases to the investigation, government sources said.

The ACLU, which posted the documents gained under its Freedom of Information Act request on its website more than a month ago, submitted fresh accusations Wednesday of military foot-dragging on the probe.

A military lawyer here involved with an internal inquiry, who spoke on condition he not be identified, said most of the alleged abuses fell within the Defense Department’s April 2003 list of “authorized interrogation techniques.” But he said some of the incidents concerned him, and pointed to the reported shackling incident as one that, if true, would not fit into the authorized interrogation techniques.

“We don’t define most of these as abuse,” he said. “We define most as misconduct.”

He and the chief military interrogator here, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said interrogation techniques that would be inadmissible in U.S. courts of law had not been in practice here for more than a year.