Torture and the FBI

Friday, May 23, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

In 2002 FBI agents started documenting abuse of suspected terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. They opened a “war crimes file” to keep track of the tactics of CIA and military interrogators and took their concerns to supervisors.

Their complaints fell on deaf ears, and the next year the agents were told to close the file because it was not within the FBI’s jurisdiction.

In a report released Tuesday, the Justice Department’s inspector general said for the most part FBI agents did not treat the detainees harshly and kept their distance from those who did. The agents tried building rapport with the suspected terrorists but found their efforts were undercut by the aggressive tactics used by the military and the CIA.

For example, detainees were left in frigid cells or left with their hands cuffed to their ankles for long periods of time. The report also said members of the military kept some detainees from sleeping the night before an interrogation. The report also mentioned the terrible practice of waterboarding, in which a suspect goes through a simulated drowning.

Agents complained to the military official in charge of the prison at Guantanamo but were rebuffed. FBI officials were told the techniques were not effective and would have been illegal had they occurred in the United States. The report says their complaints made it to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and senior members of the Defense Department, the CIA and the National Security Council.

What was unknown to the FBI agents at the time was that those tactics had the blessing of the Bush administration and had even been sanctioned in a legal opinion by Justice Department lawyers.

Sadly, it is not surprising that senior-level Bush administration officials knew of the tactics but did nothing to stop them. It is tragic, however, that those officials willingly allowed actions that were contrary to U.S. law and violated common human decency.