Gitmo Detainee’s Lawyer ‘Not Allowed To Tell Him’ He’s No Longer An ‘Enemy Combatant’»

Nearly two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that detainees held at Guantánamo Bay have the right to habeas corpus and can thus challenge their detention in civilian courts, a U.S. Court of Appeals dealt another blow to the Bush administration’s detention policy.

The appeals court ruled that the Pentagon improperly designated Huzaifa Parhat, an ethnic Uighur Chinese national, an “enemy combatant” after being swept up by the U.S. military in Afghanistan in 2001 and then sent to Guantánamo Bay, where he has been held since.

Despite the ruling, Parhat has yet to see any of its benefits. In fact, he doesn’t even know about it. Parhat’s lawyer told CBC radio’s As It Happens last night that Parhat is currently being held in solitary confinement and “has no idea” the appeals court ruled in his favor because, he added, “I’m not allowed to tell him”:

DEREK STOFFEL, CBC HOST: Mr. Willett, what’s your client’s reaction to this ruling?

SABIN WILLETT (PARHAT’S LAWYER): Boy what a great question that is because my client doesn’t know about this ruling because I’m not allowed to tell him. […] He’s sitting in solitary confinement today. He has no idea what’s happened as far as I know.

Indeed, it is unclear what the appeals court’s ruling actually means for Parhat. The New York Times noted that the U.S. “said it will not return Uighur detainees to China because of concerns about their treatment at the hands of the Chinese government, which views them as terrorists.” Thus, as another one of Parhat’s lawyers noted, the “court victory may not mean freedom for him.”

For now, Willett said that “we’re going to file a motion with a judge to order them to let us call him on the phone and take him out of solitary confinement.” He added, “We’ve got a man in solitary confinement that they’ve got no authority to hold at all. Its unbelievable.”

Transcript:

DEREK STOFFEL, CBC HOST: Mr. Willett, what’s your client’s reaction to this ruling?

SABIN WILLETT (Parhat’s Lawyer): Boy what a great question that is because my client doesn’t know about this ruling because I’m not allowed to tell him.

STOFFEL: He doesn’t know?

WILLETT: We’ve asked — the first thing we did was ask the government for permission to make a phone call and they haven’t given it to us. Now we have a way to send him a letter that goes through clearence and we’ve sent it and maybe in three weeks he’ll get it.

He’s sitting in solitary confinement today. He has no idea what’s happened as far as I know.

STOFFEL: Well let me ask you then, what’s your reaction to this ruling?

WILLETT: Well I’m thrilled except for the constant vexation of the inablitiy to bring this thing to a real and human close. Huzaifa Parhat
has now been determined by about as conservative a court as there is not to be an enemy combatant — this is what we’ve been saying for years — and yet I can’t get him out of solitary confinement in the hands of my own government. So it is a frustrating but somewhat thrilling moment for us. […]

STOFFEL: I suppose the next thing you need to do is to let your client know what’s happened.

WILLETT: Thats what we’re trying to do. I mean, we’ve sent him a letter. We’re going to file a motion with a judge to order them to let us call him on the phone and take him out of solitary confinement. I mean we’ve got a man in solitary confinement that they’ve got no authority to hold at all. Its unbelievable. So we’ll be in court pretty soon, trying to get some more relief but it was a good day to get that notice.

Report: Scalia’s Claim That Released Gitmo Prisoners Have Killed Americans Is An ‘Urban Legend’»

A new report from the Seton Hall University School of Law explodes the myth that some 30 detainees released from Guantanamo Bay prison have “returned to the battlefield” against American forces.

This conservative urban legend was recently parroted by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissent from the Court’s Boumediene decision. Scalia wrote that granting habeas corpus rights to Gitmo detainees “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” and supported this view by asserting that “at least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield.”

The new Seton Hall report (pdf) states that “Justice Scalia’s claim of 30 recidivist detainees is belied by all reliable data” :

Despite being repeatedly debunked, this statement has been reflexively accepted as true by Members of Congress and much of the American public. Justice Scalia is only the most recent disseminator of an urban legend that refuses to die. […]

[Scalia’s] source was a year-old Senate Minority Report, which in turn was based on misinformation provided by the Department of Defense.

Justice Scalia’s reliance on these sources would have been more justifiable had the urban legend he perpetuated not been (one would have thought) permanently interred by later developments, including a 2007 Department of Defense Press Release and hearings before the House Foreign Relations Committee less than two weeks before Justice Scalia’s dissent was released.

Among the report’s conclusions:

– According to the Department of Defense’s published and unpublished data and reports, not a single released Guantánamo detainee has ever attacked any Americans.

– Despite national security concerns, the Department of Defense does not have a system for tracking the conduct or even the whereabouts of released detainees.

While there is little evidence that fighters interred at Guantanamo Bay — that is, those who were fighters before they got there — have attacked Americans, there is quite a bit of evidence that, for those falsely imprisoned there and for many young Muslims watching around the world, Guantanamo has a politically radicalizing effect. Maintaining Guantanamo and other illegal detention sites hurts America’s image abroad, and calls into question America’s support for human rights and the rule of law. There is no good argument against closing it down.

October trial set for Canadian at Guantanamo

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - A young Canadian prisoner will go on trial before the Guantanamo prison camp's war crimes court on Oct. 8 on charges of murdering a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, a judge said Thursday.

But Omar Khadr's trial date is "not set in stone" and is dependent on prosecutors turning over evidence as ordered, said the judge, Army Col. Patrick Parrish.

The trial date was set during a brief hearing at the U.S. naval base, marking the first time the Guantanamo court has convened since last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the 270 Guantanamo prisoners have the right to contest their detention in the U.S. federal courts.

Khadr, 21, is charged with murdering U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer with a grenade during a firefight at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002.

He was 15 when captured and is one of two Guantanamo detainees captured as juveniles and charged with crimes that carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.

The other, Afghan captive Mohammed Jawad, is accused of throwing a grenade into a U.S. military jeep at a bazaar in Kabul in December 2002, shortly after the United States invaded Afghanistan to oust al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The explosion injured Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael Lyons, Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Martin and their Afghan interpreter, Assadullah Khan Omerk, the military charges said.

Jawad, now 23, is charged with attempted murder and causing great bodily harm, and appeared in another Guantanamo courtroom on Thursday.

Military defense lawyers have alleged that both Khadr and Jawad were abused at Guantanamo and have repeatedly complained that the government has refused to turn over evidence they need to prepare their cases.

Taguba: ‘The current administration has committed war crimes’ and needs to ‘be held to account.’»

In the preface to a report by Physicians for Human Rights on the “medical evidence of torture by the U.S.,” former Abu Ghraib investigator ret. Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba writes that President Bush “authorized a systematic regime of torture” that has stained “our national honor.” Taguba, who first spoke out publicly in June 2007, bluntly accuses the Bush administration of committing war crimes:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

The report found that medical examinations of 11 former detainees revealed “scars and other injuries consistent with their accounts of beatings, electric shocks, shackling and, in at least one case, sodomy.”

Documents confirm U.S. hid detainees from Red Cross

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday.

"We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques," Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who's since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture. Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting that were made public Tuesday. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility — Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — were using sleep deprivation to "break" detainees well before then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved that technique. "True, but officially it is not happening," she is quoted as having said.

A third person at the meeting, Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, disclosed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the ICRC, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world.

"In the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD (Defense Department) has 'moved' them away from the attention of the ICRC," Fredman said, according to the minutes.

The document, along with two dozen others, shows that top administration officials pushed relentlessly for tougher interrogation methods in the belief that terrorism suspects were resisting interrogation.

It's unclear from the documents whether the Pentagon moved the detainees from one place to another or merely told the ICRC they were no longer present at a facility.

Fredman of the CIA also appeared to be advocating the use of techniques harsher than those authorized by military field guides "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong," the minutes report Fredman saying at one point.

Beaver testified that she didn't recall making the comment about avoiding "harsher operations" while ICRC representatives were around, but she said she probably was referring to the need to conduct extended periods of interrogations of detainees without disruption.

The minutes of the Guantanamo meeting were among 25 documents released Tuesday by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and is leading a probe of the origins of cruel treatment of detainees in President Bush's "war on terrorism."

The administration overrode or ignored objections from all four military services and from criminal investigators, who warned that the practices would imperil their ability to prosecute the suspects. In one prophetic e-mail on Oct. 28, 2002, Mark Fallon, then the deputy commander of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, wrote a colleague: "This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of. ... Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this." The objections from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines prompted Navy Capt. Jane Dalton, legal adviser to the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to begin a review of the proposed techniques.

But Dalton, who's now retired, told the hearing Tuesday that the review was aborted quickly. Myers, she said, took her aside and told her that then-Defense Department general counsel William Haynes "does not want this ... to proceed." Haynes testified that he didn't recall the objections of the four uniformed services.

Officials in Rumsfeld's office and at Guantanamo developed the techniques they sought by reverse-engineering a long-standing military program designed to train U.S. soldiers and aviators to resist interrogation if they're captured.

The program, known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, was never meant to guide U.S. interrogation of foreign detainees.

An official in Haynes' office sought information about SERE as early as July 2002, the documents show. Two months later, a delegation from Guantanamo attended SERE training at Fort Bragg, N.C. Levin said, "The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees." The documents confirm that a delegation of senior administration lawyers visited Guantanamo in September 2002 for briefings on intelligence-gathering there. The delegation included David Addington, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney; Haynes; acting CIA counsel John Rizzo; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and now the homeland security secretary. Few of the Republicans at Tuesday's hearing defended the Bush administration’s detainee programs. Guidance provided by administration lawyers "will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military intelligence communities," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C..

Regarding the ICRC, the United States long has complained that other countries such as China or the old Soviet Union prevented independent access to prisoners or made their conditions look better when outsiders were inspecting. The Bush administration appears to have engaged in similar practices, however.

Bernard Barrett, the ICRC’s Washington spokesman, said, "We knew that we did not always have full access to all detainees. It was a fairly serious issue." “It’s been addressed,” he said. “We are confident we now have access to all detainees at Guantanamo.”

US official on interrogation: 'If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong.'

Military officials tasked with training U.S. troops to evade enemy interrogations provided Pentagon lawyers a list of abusive tactics that could be used in prisons like Guantanamo Bay, a top Senate Democrat disclosed Tuesday.

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said the harsh techniques were then pursued despite strong objections in November 2002 by the military's uniformed lawyers.

"If we use those same techniques offensively against detainees, it says to the world that they have America's stamp of approval," said Levin, D-Mich., at the onset of a committee hearing.

"That puts our troops at greater risk of being abused if they're captured. It also weakens our moral authority and harms our efforts to attract allies to our side in the fight against terrorism."

The hearing is the committee's first look at the origins of the harsher methods used in Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq and how policy decisions on interrogations were vetted across the Defense Department. Its review fits into a broader picture of the government's handling of detainees, which includes FBI and CIA interrogations in secret prisons.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the administration's legal analysis on detainees and interrogations following the the Sept. 11 attacks will "go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities."

The Pentagon's top civilian lawyer at the time, chief counsel William "Jim" Haynes, was expected to testify. Also present were Richard Shiffrin, Haynes' former deputy on intelligence matters, as well as legal advisers at the time to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Guantanamo Bay prison.

According to the Senate committee's findings, Haynes became interested in using harsher interrogation methods as early as July 2002 when his office inquired into a military program that trained Army soldiers on how to survive enemy interrogations and deny foes valuable intelligence.

Haynes and other officials wanted to know if the program — known as "Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape" training — could be used used to develop more effective interrogation methods.

Shiffrin said his interest was not so much in trying reverse engineer the tactics to be used against the enemy but rather tapping military expertise in interrogations.

In response, the head of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which ran the SERE program, offered that resistance training included sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, stress positions, waterboarding and slapping.

Several of those techniques, including stress positions, were later approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a December 2002 memo.

Levin said these techniques were approved despite fierce objections a month earlier by the military services' lawyers. In separate memos, the lawyers told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the techniques warranted further study and could be illegal.

The committee also released previously secret and privately held memos dating from the 2002 inception of the harsh interrogation program at Guantanamo.

In one of them, the top military lawyer at Guantanamo, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, explains that the Defense Department had made a practice of hiding prisoners who were being treated harshly, even abusively, from the International Committee of the Red Cross, a non-governmental body empowered to monitor compliance with Geneva Convention rules for the treatment of military prisoners.

Beaver also confirmed that the military was secretly using previously forbidden techniques, such as sleep deprivation, but hiding them so as not to draw "negative attention," according to minutes of the meeting.

"Officially it is not happening," Beaver said, according to minutes from the meeting. "It is not being reported officially. The ICRC is a serious concern. They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave. This would draw a lot of negative attention."

Beaver said interrogators should "curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around."

Beaver was speaking at an Oct. 2, 2002 meeting between CIA and military lawyers and military intelligence officials on how to counter the resistance of Guantanamo detainees to military interrogation.

Beaver's comments suggest that the CIA's practice of hiding unregistered "ghost detainees" from the ICRC at military jails may have been as much in service to the Pentagon's interrogation program as it was to the CIA's.

A senior CIA lawyer at the meeting, John Fredman, explained that whether harsh interrogation amount to torture "is a matter of perception." The only sure test for torture is if the detainee died.

"If the detainees dies you're doing it wrong," Fredman said.

Bush: Critics Of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib And Rendition Are ‘Slandering America’»

During an interview with President Bush on Britain’s Sky News yesterday, Sky political editor Adam Boulton noted that while Bush talks “a lot about freedom,” there are many who say that some of the Bush administration’s torture and detention policies represent “the complete opposite of freedom.” But Bush quickly snapped back, saying those criticizing his policies are slandering America:

BOULTON: There are those who would say look, lets take Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, and rendition and all those things and to them that is the complete opposite of freedom.

BUSH: Of course, if you want to slander America.

So, according to Bush, below is a short — but by no means exhaustive — list of those who have suggested that Bush’s terrorism policies represent “the opposite of freedom” and thus have slandered America:

– The United States Supreme Court: The Court ruled last week that “terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to seek their release in federal court” saying that Bush’s policy compromised “the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty.”

– The Federal Bureau of Investigation: An FBI report issued last month said that according to its agents, “[m]ilitary officials at Guantanamo Bay used some aggressive techniques before they were approved, possibly in violation of Defense Department policy and U.S. law.”

– McClatchy Newspapers: An eight month McClatchy investigation found that after the Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned “perhaps hundreds” of men “in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.”

Boulton told Bush that the Supreme Court “ruled against what you have been doing” at Guantanamo but Bush wouldn’t budge, arguing that the district court, appellate court and Congress agreed that Gitmo detainees do not have to right to challenge their detention.

Boulton, a Briton, then had to remind Bush of America’s checks and balances system: “But the Supreme Court is supreme isn’t it?”

McCain And Graham Plan To Introduce Legislation Undermining Supreme Court Decision On Guantanamo

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay detainees have the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts. Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wasted no time in publicly blasting the decision, saying they were “disappointed” in “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

This ruling will inevitably lead to a “flood of new litigation” challenging the Bush administration’s right to hold these detainees, only one of whom has received a verdict. Detainees will then finally get a decision as to their status.

Today on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol revealed that “very soon” — likely as early as next week — McCain and Graham will be introducing legislation to undermine the Supreme Court decision by setting up a “national security court”:

And I think you will see Senator Graham, accompanied by Senator McCain, come to the floor of the Senate very soon, like next week, and say, We cannot let chaos obtain here. We can’t let 200 different federal district judges on their own whim call this CIA agent here, say, ‘I don’t believe this soldier here who said this guy was doing this,’ you have to release someone,’ or, ‘Let’s build up — let’s compromise sources and methods with a bunch of trials. I mean, it’s ridiculous.



A national security court would envision a scenario “in which sitting federal judges would preside over proceedings in which prosecutors would make the case that a person should be detained.” But as Michael Hoffman and Ken Gude note in a paper for the Center for American Progress, this scenario is problematic and underestimates the U.S. criminal justice system:

Adopting a national security court system would send the United States down another unproven path prone to repeat the same mistakes. It would not further justice or American legitimacy. Rather, it would risk creating American courts that more resemble the tribunals of dictators than those of democracies. And that would be a strategic victory for Al Qaeda, not for Americans. […]

The criminal justice system, coupled with standard military trials when necessary, has and can further law enforcement, intelligence, and prevention efforts without undermining our fundamental liberties or our long-term efforts to combat terrorism. It is time to let it fully do that crucial work.

As ThinkProgress reported on Friday, at one time, McCain and Graham advocated a solution similar to the Supreme Court ruling. In 2003, they called on then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to “formally treat and process the detainees as war criminals or to return them to their countries for appropriate judicial action.” Clearly, things change when you’re running for a third Bush term.

Some detainees can't go home

Whatever orders civilian judges might issue under the latest U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the United States is struggling with how to send away some of the detainees at Guantánamo who the Defense Department has already decided to let go.

By some measures, Mammar Ameur seems an unlikely candidate to be among the 270 war-on-terror detainees held at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay..

He has a white beard and bad feet. He has a wife and four kids. And 2 ½ years ago, the Pentagon decided he could go home. Yet he passes his days in Camp 4, a communal Hogan's Heroes-style compound for the most cooperative of captives.

That's because Ameur has the misfortune of being Algerian.

Despite years of talks, the North African nation has so far refused to take home a single one of its citizens held in war-on-terror custody at the U.S. base in southeast Cuba.

Meantime, Ameur is an example of the men for whom Thursday's Supreme Court ruling -- that they can take their cases to U.S. courts -- is likely a hollow victory.

NOWHERE TO GO

Even if a civilian court were to order Ameur's release, he has no place to go. The Pentagon says there are about 70 detainees in a similar predicament.

''[The Algerians] simply decided that they do not want to accept back any of the detainees from the United States,'' said Sandra L. Hodgkinson, the Defense Department deputy in charge of detainee affairs. She called it ``discouraging.''

Last summer, she said, Washington and Algiers agreed on repatriation of a number of Algerians she would not quantify. Then the North African nation reversed course. Its diplomats say that perhaps the men should go back to the countries where they were taken into custody -- locations from South Asia to Sarajevo, but none inside their home countries.

Ameur's may be a typical tale. He says he was a charity worker in Pakistan, a good Muslim who fled a bloody Islamic insurgency in Algeria in the 1990s and ultimately got U.N. refugee status in Pakistan.

In Pakistan, he said, U.S. intelligence officers mistook the home where he and his family lived for an al Qaeda safe house -- and labeled him a terrorist because he had once been trained by al Ittihad al Islami, a Kuwaiti aid group that President Bush listed as a terror organization after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

FATHERLESS FAMILY

After that, his wife and kids moved back to Algeria, and the children have grown up without him, says his attorney, Ramzi Kassem, a teaching fellow at the Yale Law School.

''He wants to be back home with his family. That's what he's always wanted. It's really not much more complicated than that,'' said Kassem.

But where to go? Back to Pakistan, whose security forces helped the United States round up the Guantánamo-bound suspects in the first place? To a third country?

The military has gradually thinned the ranks of prisoners at Guantánamo by getting their home governments to take them. Nearly 100 Saudi Arabians have been sent home to state-run rehabilitation programs designed to rid them of any vestiges of radical Islam.

The U.S. is likewise negotiating the return of many of the 100 or so detained Yemenis.

''I think the brutally frank answer is that we're stuck,'' Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a Senate committee May 20, when asked how the various agencies of the Bush administration were handling the task of moving toward closure of the prison camps at Guantánamo Bay.

OPPOSITION

There are also 25 detainees whose opposition to their home governments makes them likely subjects of political retribution.

Chief among them are the 17 Uighurs -- Chinese citizens from an ethnic Islamic minority who fled their homeland for Afghanistan long before the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. government now agrees that they would suffer religious oppression as devout Muslims if returned to China, a communist country.

Supreme Court rules Gitmo detainees can challenge their detention.»

The Supreme Court ruled today that “foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.” The AP reports:

The justices, in a 5-4 ruling Thursday, handed the Bush administration its third setback at the high court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

It was not immediately clear whether this ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for the detainees, some of whom have been held more than 6 years. Roughly 270 men remain at the island prison, classified as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

Families sue over Guantánamo Bay suicides

The US department of defence is being sued over the suicide deaths of two Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

The New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of Guantánamo detainees, said it was seeking unspecified damages on behalf of the families of Salah al-Salami and Yasser al-Zahrani, both Saudis.

The claim was announced yesterday, on the second anniversary of their deaths with another detainee from Yemen. All three hanged themselves inside their cells with bed sheets.

"After two years, there has still been no public accounting for what happened to these men," Pardiss Kebriaei, a lawyer at the centre, said in a statement.

The centre said it could not find the family of the Yemeni man.

The US military said the suicides prompted a complete review of operations at the detention centre in Cuba.

"As we value life, the deaths two years ago were deeply saddening," Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman and navy commander, said yesterday.

The military would release the results of its investigation of the deaths when the findings were ready, he said.

Washington is forging ahead with the prosecution of about 80 of the roughly 270 men being held at Guantánamo on suspicion of terrorism or links to the Taliban or al-Qaida.

They include the UK resident Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, who is accused of an al-Qaida dirty bomb plot to attack apartment buildings in the US.

His lawyers have condemned the charges against him as part of a US "rush to charge as many people as possible at Guantánamo Bay prior to President Bush leaving office".

About this articleClose This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Wednesday June 11 2008. It was last updated at 12:03 on June 11 2008.

Court backs Guantánamo man on torture

A British resident facing a life sentence at Guantánamo Bay has won a battle in a British court to force the government to hand over documents showing he was tortured into confessing he was a terrorist.

Binyam Mohamed, once a cleaner in Kensington, west London, is accused by the US of being an al-Qaida terrorist intent on the mass murder of civilians.

Yesterday it emerged that the high court had rejected a British government attempt to avoid a court hearing which would decide whether it should reveal evidence showing Mohamed was tortured by the US.

Mohamed, through his lawyers, who have visited him in Guantánamo, alleges he was "rendered" to Morocco, where his torture included his genitals being slashed.

The high court found the UK government supplied America with information to interrogate Mohamed and said the hearing should be held as soon as possible.

Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, said: "I have seen not one shred of evidence against him that was not tortured out of him. We know the British talked to Binyam in Pakistan, told him he was to be rendered and gave information to the US that was used in his torture in Morocco."

British resident at Guantánamo faces bombing charge

A UK resident imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay is to be charged by the Pentagon over an alleged al-Qaida dirty bomb plot.

Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, an Ethiopian educated in the UK, is accused of planning to blow up apartment buildings in the US.

The Pentagon's chargesheet for the 30-year-old, who had training as an electrical engineer, states he was selected for "a specialised terrorist mission".

Mohamed allegedly plotted with other operatives in building remote-controlled explosive devices in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The alleged aim was to unleash a radioactive dirty bomb against an unspecified US location.

Yesterday, his lawyers condemned the charges as part of a US "rush to charge as many people as possible at Guantánamo Bay prior to President Bush leaving office".

Mohamed faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted on charges of conspiracy and supporting terrorism.

The director of British legal rights group Reprieve, Clive Stafford Smith, said: "The least the British government can do is insist that no British resident be charged in a kangaroo court on evidence tortured out of him with a razor blade."

Mohamed, one of two British residents still held at Guantánamo was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002 and taken to Morocco by the CIA.

Once there, it is alleged he was beaten and handcuffed during prolonged interrogations as well as being tortured with a scalpel. His mental state has deteriorated as a result, his lawyers say.

Mohamed is said by the Pentagon to have conspired with Jose Padilla, the US citizen and former Chicago gang member who was convicted by a federal court in Florida last year of conspiracy and material support for terrorism. Padilla, 37, was sentenced to 17 years in prison in January.

Mohamed's chargesheet also states that he and Padilla were instructed by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a confessed mastermind of 9/11, to rent apartments in large US cities, fill the corridors and air ducts with natural gas and then blow them up.

In August last year, Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband formally asked the Bush administration to release Mohamed, along with four other UK residents at Guantanamo.

Three of the men were sent home but the US refused to release Mohamed and Saudi-born Shaker Aamer, citing security concerns.

The Guantánamo Bay detention centre, situated on a US base in southern Cuba, currently holds around 270 men.

Prosecutors have indicated they intend to try around 80 of the prisoners in the first US war crimes tribunal since the second world war.

Omar Khadr labelled 'good kid' by U.S. captors

Prison stay could radicalize him, officials told

OTTAWA — The U.S. soldiers holding Omar Khadr believe the detained Canadian is a "good kid" who is not only "salvageable" but actually runs the risk of becoming a radical if he stays in Guantanamo Bay, according to Foreign Affairs reports.

The documents - likely the most significant ever made public in the case - will almost certainly put pressure on Ottawa to finally attempt to bring Mr. Khadr home.

Two reports written by Department of Foreign Affairs officials who visited Mr. Khadr in Guantanamo Bay in March and April of this year describe a "likeable, funny and intelligent young man." Those aren't just the sentiments of the Canadian officials, but also the U.S. soldiers charged with guarding Mr. Khadr, and whose fellow soldier the Canadian is alleged to have killed.

"Omar is 'salvageable,' 'non-radicalized' and 'a good kid' who is well-liked both within the Camp and by [Joint Task Force] staff," a Foreign Affairs official notes in March. "JTF staff seems to look out for him by stopping by to chat on occasion, convincing him to meet with his lawyers and encouraging him to 'keep his nose clean.' "

But perhaps the most significant observation comes a report dated a month later.

"... our U.S. military contact repeated what he had said during the welfare visit conducted in March," a Foreign Affairs official writes. "He said that extended detention in Guantanamo would however run the risk of turning [Mr. Khadr] into a radical."

The reports have not yet been made public, but were obtained by The Globe and Mail. At least one of the reports is expected to be presented to members of a House of Commons subcommittee studying the Khadr case in Ottawa as early as today.

Virtually every prevailing opinion about Mr. Khadr over the years is contradicted by the reports. Canadian officials describe a hopeful young man who is nonetheless aware of how serious his situation is.

"The overarching theme of much of our discussions focused on his desire to get out of Guantanamo, to return to Canada, to fix his health, to educate himself, to have a family and to eventually find a job satisfying his personal commitment to help those in need," a Foreign Affairs official writes. "By contrast, he also expressed a hyper-awareness of the challenges that he would face, but demonstrated no bitterness or anger, emphasizing instead a desire to move forward in life."

In another report, an official says Mr. Khadr tells him he is in Guantanamo Bay because of his family, and wants another chance.

"He wonders however why Canada is so quiet on his case and commented that, while Canada was the best country in the world to live in, it was not as strong as the UK to defend its citizens abroad, although both countries have the same Queen.

"He hopes that Canada will intervene to get him out of Guantanamo [he said he hoped PM Harper will do something]."

Mr. Khadr's relationship with his much-loathed family - widely believed to be one of the reasons the government has refused to try to bring him home - is also described in one of the reports. An official notes that Mr. Khadr barely talks about his family and doesn't seem overly keen to call them.

"The [U.S. official] told me later that one of his last phone calls had initially been cancelled by his mother, because she couldn't make herself available."

Officials also list Mr. Khadr's myriad health problems: He has no vision in his left eye and his right eye is deteriorating because of shrapnel embedded in the eye's membrane. He still has shrapnel in his right shoulder, and it causes the metal detectors at the prison camp to go off.

Mr. Khadr says he doesn't like the 14-day rotation of meals, which he describes as heavy and covered in "red sauce." However, he makes sure to keep within a specific weight range so he isn't force-fed.

Some of the items Mr. Khadr requests from the Canadian officials are surprising. He asks for, among other things, a book on French for beginners, a first-aid book and a stress ball.

The U.S. military's responsiveness to those requests is mixed: Mr. Khadr is allowed an origami book brought for him by a Canadian official, but not the paper accompanying the book.

When a Canadian representative asks why Mr. Khadr did not get a pillow brought for him, a U.S. official notes that "pillows were only handed out as incentives for detainees being interrogated and that since Mr. Khadr had lawyers and was no longer subject to interrogation, he was not eligible for one."

Mr. Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, is due back in a Guantanamo Bay courtroom later this month. He faces multiple charges - including the murder of a U.S. soldier during an Afghan firefight - before a military commission. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists.

At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were "disappeared" to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantánamo Bay.

Reprieve believes prisoners may have also been held for interrogation on the USS Ashland and other ships in the Gulf of Aden during this time.

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo Bay, who described a fellow inmate's story of detention on an amphibious assault ship. "One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo ... he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo."

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said: "They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.

"By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been 'through the system' since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them."

Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, called for the US and UK governments to come clean over the holding of detainees.

"Little by little, the truth is coming out on extraordinary rendition. The rest will come, in time. Better for governments to be candid now, rather than later. Greater transparency will provide increased confidence that President Bush's departure from justice and the rule of law in the aftermath of September 11 is being reversed, and can help to win back the confidence of moderate Muslim communities, whose support is crucial in tackling dangerous extremism."

The Liberal Democrat's foreign affairs spokesman, Edward Davey, said: "If the Bush administration is using British territories to aid and abet illegal state abduction, it would amount to a huge breach of trust with the British government. Ministers must make absolutely clear that they would not support such illegal activity, either directly or indirectly."

A US navy spokesman, Commander Jeffrey Gordon, told the Guardian: "There are no detention facilities on US navy ships." However, he added that it was a matter of public record that some individuals had been put on ships "for a few days" during what he called the initial days of detention. He declined to comment on reports that US naval vessels stationed in or near Diego Garcia had been used as "prison ships".

The Foreign Office referred to David Miliband's statement last February admitting to MPs that, despite previous assurances to the contrary, US rendition flights had twice landed on Diego Garcia. He said he had asked his officials to compile a list of all flights on which rendition had been alleged.

CIA "black sites" are also believed to have operated in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.

In addition, numerous prisoners have been "extraordinarily rendered" to US allies and are alleged to have been tortured in secret prisons in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt.

9/11 trial sought during presidential campaign

Defense lawyers for the alleged 9/11 conspirators on Thursday accused the Pentagon prosecutor of rushing to begin the complex Sept. 11, 2001, mass-murder trial in the height of the presidential campaign season.

The U.S. military attorneys included the claim in a 20-page brief asking the military judge to dismiss the capital charges against alleged al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Guantánamo detainees.

The document includes an e-mail from a civilian member of the prosecution team proposing to set the trial date for Sept. 15, the Monday after the seventh anniversary of the suicide attacks.

''Not coincidentally,'' the defense attorneys say, ``that would force the trial of this case in mid-September, some seven weeks before the general elections.''

The date, in fact, is 10 days after Sen. John McCain, an architect of Military Commissions law, is expected to be officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate at the GOP national convention in St. Paul, Minn.

''Three months and 18 days is not enough time to prepare a defense in this death penalty case even if the government had provided the defense with the attorneys, resources, and facilities necessary to do so,'' said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, attorney for Ammar al Baluchi, who is also known as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.

A Pentagon spokesman denied the trial schedule was linked to the national political campaign season. ''We're moving forward with the trials,'' said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon. ``And we're going to continue with the process.''

DEVELOPMENTS

In other signs of the drive to get more cases to trial this year:

• The Defense Department on Thursday issued preliminary conspiracy charges against three alleged al Qaeda bomb-makers -- two Saudis and an Algerian -- raising the total number of currently active prosecutions to 17. Sufiyan Barhoumi, Jibran Qahtani and Ghassan Sharbi, long-held Guantánamo detainees, face maximum life sentences, if convicted.

• The military replaced an Army judge who had threatened to suspend the commission trial of Canadian captive Omar Khadr, until the prison camps at Guantánamo release Khadr's health records to defense attorneys. Military commissions sources had earlier indicated that the judge, Col. Peter E. Brownback III, was weighing his retirement.

By law, U.S.-held detainees charged at the war court must be tried within 120 days of finalization of charges -- unless the defense team is granted a delay.

All five men in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror-attack case face possible execution, if convicted. Civilian and military criminal defense lawyers have predicted it will take a year to prepare, in part because it's a death-penalty case and classified information is being used.

DEFENSE CLAIMS

Defense lawyers have claimed for some time that the Pentagon is rushing to trial before President Bush leaves the White House in January, or cited alleged internal debates by appointees about whether charges could be brought for political gain or to capture the imagination of the American people.

The latest brief raises the allegations a notch a week before the five men go before a military judge for their arraignment, or official reading of charges.

The Pentagon is organizing for large-scale coverage of the first-ever appearances of the former CIA-held captives.

It has invited 60 national and international journalists to be airlifted to Guantánamo from Andrews Air Force Base a day ahead of the trial date and then taken back to the Washington Beltway the next day.

Censors put limits on Guantánamo photos

Guards put on a mock war court conviction to test the $12 million expeditionary legal compound; censors put a three-tent limit on photos; a Sudanese detainee cracked wise.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Pity the photographer who takes a picture of five tents in a row at ``Camp Justice.''

Or two whole tents and slivers of two others.

Under the latest rules for ''operational security,'' there's now a three-tent rule for photos the public can see of the tents that house journalists and support staff at the expeditionary legal compound, where reputed al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other alleged 9/11 co-conspirators are due to get their first taste of military commission justice June 5.

Censorship of news photos has evolved to show, well, less and less across the 6 ½-year Defense Department venture in detaining and at times interrogating war-on-terrorism suspects here.

And numbers do count.

At Camp Delta, the prison camps, photographers are forbidden from showing two guard towers -- or, for that matter, any one detainee's face, except in shadows that make him look like nobody in particular.

Broadly, the military explains the need for operational security, or OP-SEC, two different ways.

First, they seek to shield from public view any details of this remote base that might help al Qaeda or other enemies of the United States stage an attack.

Second, they want to shield from public view the faces of detainees because the Geneva Conventions prohibit the parade or humiliation of prisoners of war.

• Heard at the war court:

An Air Force judge, Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, at one point told defendant Ibrahim al Qosi, 47, that if he wanted to arrange a phone call home to Sudan through the International Committee of the Red Cross, ``This is up to you.''

The slight, dark man with a salt-and-pepper beard looked stunned.

''Me?'' he sputtered.

``What can I do? I'm a detainee. I cannot do anything about anything.''

The one thing he could do Thursday, for hours, was refuse an effort by his Pentagon-appointed defense attorney, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, to help orchestrate the call.

• Mindful that the audio broke, the video froze and the power went off earlier this month, military commissions staff spent much of Tuesday testing the technology at their two courtrooms at Camp Justice.

Guards played judge, lawyers and, sometimes detainees, while a technician posed as a witness and an Arabic language translator hired by the war court at one point sat in an alleged terrorist's seat.

The goal is glitch-free simultaneous hearings at the old retrofitted courtroom as well as the $12 million state-of-the-art expeditionary legal compound, once the war crimes trials get rolling sometime after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in late June.

So Tuesday morning, U.S. forces were reading from a fake script of a trial of a fictional war on terror detainee named Abdul Khadr of Yemen during a daylong equipment check.

Declared one guard playing a presiding officer: ''Mr. Khadr, this commission has convicted you of conspiracy.'' Next Khadr's jury of military officers, called commissioners, were going into secret session to see the evidence against him.

So the presiding officer ordered the feed cut to the media's press room.

But the feed kept going, and reporters at an adjacent media center got to watch the guard playing a detainee get convicted twice before lunch.

No one could explain who exactly wrote the fake script and why.

But by afternoon the war court script was gone and guards were back in their places, reciting lines from the 1988 Hollywood hit Big -- the Tom Hanks tale of a boy who makes a wish and suddenly finds himself living the life of a man.

Attorney general tells law grads that attorneys shouldn't be punished for protecting country

Attorney General Michael Mukasey is defending former government lawyers who drew up the legal basis of the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation methods against terror suspects.

Mukasey told Boston College Law School graduates Friday that lawyers doing their part to protect the country in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks should not now be held liable or face criminal charges for doing so.

Mukasey did not mention any specific lawyers by name.

Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo is facing at least one civil lawsuit and demands for his firing from Berkeley Law School. Yoo worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003.

While there, he wrote several memos legally defending the use of harsh interrogation tactics which are now under criticism by human rights groups and members of Congress. Yoo's memos concluded that President Bush has broad, unfettered wartime authority that cannot be limited by domestic law or international bans on torture.

One memo defined torture, as recognized by U.S. law, as covering "only extreme acts" causing pain similar in intensity to that caused by organ failure or accompanying death.

An internal Justice Department investigation is now considering whether such advice was improper.

At the Friday ceremony, Mukasey lambasted critics seeking to bring lawsuits or charges against the lawyers. "The rhetoric of these discussions is hostile and unforgiving," Mukasey said in his prepared remarks.

Mukasey's confirmation as attorney general briefly stalled over the issue of waterboarding, an interrogation method simulating drowning that critics call torture. He has since refused to say whether waterboarding is illegal since it is no longer used by the CIA or military interrogators.

Terror suspect phones Sudan to hire own lawyer

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Within hours of a judge's order, an accused al Qaeda conspirator from Sudan got a call from home Thursday to consult with his family on how they might hire him a lawyer, at their own expense.

Ibrahim al Qosi, 47, had earlier fired his U.S. military lawyer and threatened to boycott his war crimes trial. He said he wanted to talk by telephone with his brother, presumably in Khartoum, to get the Sudanese Bar Association to line him up a defense lawyer instead.

In response, Air Force Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, a military judge, ordered lawyers to arrange the call through the International Committee of the Red Cross. She gave them until July 1.

But commanders at the prison camp, ringed by barbed wire and overlooking the Caribbean, accomplished the assignment soon after the judge gaveled the court to a closure.

''It's done,'' said Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, spokeswoman for the detention center.

The call lasted about one hour, Storum said, unaware of what was discussed or who was on the other end.

Just hours earlier, Qosi had sat placidly at the war court, miles from the prison camp, wearing the crisp white tunic and trousers of a cooperative captive -- and politely insisted that he would not accept the services of his Pentagon-appointed defense attorney.

''I would like you to allow me to contact my family in Sudan so I can get a legal advisor through the bar in my country,'' Qosi told the judge.

It was a stark contrast to a tense hearing a day earlier for an alleged al Qaeda foot soldier from Afghanistan, who bit and spat on guards ordered by another judge to force him into his arraignment.

Qosi is accused of conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism for allegedly working as Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver and as a member of an al Qaeda mortar crew. Conviction carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Earlier allegations that he worked as an al Qaeda payroll clerk in Khartoum, Sudan, and ran bin Laden's kitchen in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, are omitted from his current charge sheet.

At his arraignment in April, Qosi threatened to boycott his trial. He said he would not accept any U.S.-appointed lawyer, military or civilian, and called the war crimes court illegitimate.

Thursday, his Air Force judge spent a chunk of the morning session trying to get Qosi to let Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier help him hire his own lawyer. He refused.

''I've been imprisoned here for 6 ½ years. I have no contact with the outside world,'' he said. ``If you allow me to call my family, I will ask them to do that.''

The prison camps launched the Red Cross telephone call program two months ago. It lets cooperative captives get a once-a-year hour-long phone call from home.

So far, approximately 35 of the 270 detainees have received calls, Storum said.

Next will come the more delicate issue of what role a lawyer lined up by Sudan's Bar Association might play at Qosi's trial.

War court rules largely require that U.S military attorneys act as defense counsel, in part because of national security concerns at Guantánamo itself and involving evidence at trial.

A clause in the war court manual lets a detainee defend himself or hire his own attorney, so long as there is no U.S. government expense. But the lawyer must be a U.S. citizen and get a Defense Department security clearance that lets the lawyer travel to this remote base.

The war court rules also permit an alleged terrorist to have a foreign attorney consultant on his defense team. But they say the detainee's U.S. military-appointed defense counsel -- whom Qosi rejects -- must apply to have the foreign lawyer join the team.

After that, it is up to a Bush administration political appointee, or the trial judge, to approve that foreigner's role.

Report details military tactics FBI agents found abusive

WASHINGTON — FBI agents repeatedly complained that harsh interrogation techniques used on detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo might violate the law and jeopardize future criminal trials, but administration officials did little to address the concerns, a government watchdog concluded in a report released Tuesday.

At one point in 2003, several top Justice Department officials took the concerns about interrogation practices used by the military at Guantanamo to the National Security Council, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine said in his report. However, Fine said the complaints did not appear to trigger any response from the National Security Council, which includes President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and was chaired at the time by then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Although the FBI's concerns about harsh interrogation techniques were previously known, Fine's report provides the most detailed narrative yet of how top law enforcement and military officials were slow to respond to the agents' complaints and how, in some instances, administration officials appear to have disregarded them.

Several witnesses told Fine's investigators then-Attorney General John Ashcroft also brought the matter to the attention of the National Security Council or the Pentagon, but Fine couldn't verify the accounts because Ashcroft refused to be interviewed.

The 370-page report took four years to complete, with its release delayed by the Pentagon's attempt to keep a larger portion of the report classified, according to Fine. His investigators interviewed more than 230 witnesses and surveyed 1,000 FBI agents.

The report describes how agents beginning in 2002 became deeply troubled by some of the interrogations they witnessed and details frequent clashes between agents and their military counterparts over the military's and CIA's use of harsh techniques that one agent described as "borderline torture."

In late 2002, the military adopted broad interrogation policies that clashed with those permitted by the FBI. Among the permitted techniques were hooding, putting prisoners in stress positions for as long as four hours, 20-hour interrogations and removal of clothing.

While FBI agents took part in interrogations in a few isolated cases "that would not normally be permitted in the United States," Fine said the situations "in no way resembled" the treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where graphic photos later exposed abuses. A vast majority of the FBI agents followed FBI policies and did not participate when other agencies used techniques that violated the bureau's policies, Fine said.

"In sum, we believe that while the FBI could have provided clearer guidance earlier, and while the FBI could have pressed harder for resolution of concerns about detainee treatment by other agencies, the FBI should be credited for its conduct and professionalism in detainee interrogations," said Fine, who has no jurisdiction over the CIA or the Pentagon.

Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Pentagon found no evidence that interrogators tortured detainees during a 2005 review of techniques used at Guantanamo. Whitman also said he did not know of any Pentagon efforts that had delayed the inspector general's report.

In a brief statement, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the department was "pleased" that the report "credited the FBI for its conduct and professionalism during interrogations."

Justice and Pentagon officials, however, did not address the questions raised by the report's description of interrogation techniques that disturbed FBI agents. Agents at Guantanamo, for example, witnessed and complained about the use of sleep deprivation, prolonged short-shackling, in which a detainee's hands were shackled close to his feet, and the holding of detainees in rooms at extremely cold or hot temperatures.

At times, agents witnessed detainees' thumbs twisted, female interrogators touching detainees sexually and the wrapping of detainees' heads in duct tape.

In 2002, FBI agents objected to the treatment of top al Qaida member Abu Zubaydah, whom they first questioned but later handed over to the CIA. The CIA has since acknowledged waterboarding him, but Fine said FBI agents did not appear to have witnessed waterboarding, which simulates drowning by pouring water over a restrained detainee's face.

Tensions between agents and interrogators heightened between 2002 and 2003 during the military's interrogation of Mohammed al Qahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker who was prevented from participating in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Fine said.

After his capture, al Qahtani resisted FBI attempts to interview him and the military took over his questioning. FBI agents complained interrogators relied on questionable techniques, including keeping him awake during 20-hour intervals and threatening him with a dog.

"The informal response that some of these agents received from FBI Headquarters was that agents could continue to witness (military) interrogations ... so long as they did not participate," Fine said.

"No formal responses were ever received by the agents."

Although agents witnessed interrogation techniques that appeared to violate their own policies, the FBI was slow to clarify the bureau's stance on the methods, Fine said.

In 2002, the FBI decided it would not participate in joint interrogations with other agencies when techniques violated the bureau's policies. However, the FBI did not formalize the guidance until May 2004, after abuse surfaced at Abu Ghraib.

Meanwhile, agents continued to remain concerned about whether they could be criminally liable for merely witnessing the interrogations and questioned whether the interrogations jeopardized future trials, Fine said.

Their concerns appear to be justified. This month, military officials dropped charges against al Qahtani, citing concerns about questionable information obtained during the interrogations.

"We believe that the FBI should have recognized earlier the issues raised by the FBI's participating with the military in detainee interrogations ... and should have moved more quickly to provide clearer guidance to its agents on these issues," Fine said.

Officials with the CIA and the Pentagon have said they later revised their rules to limit interrogation methods, including banning the use of waterboarding, which the CIA has acknowledged was used on three high-level terrorism suspects.

The Pentagon and CIA knew of the FBI's ongoing concerns, but did not appear to have weighed them when coming up with their own interrogation policies, Fine said.