ACLU: New documents show senior officials approved Gitmo abuse

The American Civil Liberties Union released newly obtained documents Thursday showing that senior Defense Department officials approved aggressive interrogation techniques that FBI agents deemed abusive, ineffective and unlawful, RAW STORY has learned.

“We now possess overwhelming evidence that political and military leaders endorsed interrogation methods that violate both domestic and international law,” Jameel Jaffer, an attorney with the ACLU said in a release. “It is entirely unacceptable that no senior official has been held accountable.”

Included in today’s release is a memorandum prepared by FBI personnel on May 30, 2003, which supplies a detailed discussion of tensions between FBI and Defense Department personnel stationed at Guantбnamo in late 2002. According to the memo, Defense Department interrogators were encouraged by their superiors to “use aggressive interrogation tactics” that FBI agents believed were “of questionable effectiveness and subject to uncertain interpretation based on law and regulation.” The May 2003 memo specifically names Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who was then Commander of Joint Task Force-Guantбnamo, as having favored interrogation methods that FBI agents believed “could easily result in the elicitation of unreliable and legally inadmissible information.” The memo states that FBI personnel brought their concerns to the attention of senior Defense Department personnel but that their concerns were brushed aside.

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To date, more than 90,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The ACLU has been posting these documents online at http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia

The friend-of-the-court brief in Qassim v. Bush is available online at www.aclu.org/intlhumanrights/gen/24248lgl20060223.html

The documents released today are available online at http://action.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/022306/

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The problem with the whole torture debate imho is that we Americans are even debating and weighing the cost to benefits of torture.

This is an example of that Ben Franklin close and funneling I was talking about in another thread Carpro.

 

Funny how such important revelations such as this are ignored simply because the ACLU is the entity doing the revealing.

90,000 pages of documents pointing to the intentional abuse of individuals in their charge by this administration is nothing to sneeze at imho.

Guess I'm just old fashioned.

 

So that all means that abusing prisoners is cool or something, or the information is faulty because the ACLU happened to reveal the documentation?

The United Nations have many roots and ideals based on communism and socialism but we have let ourselves become subservient to them and their idea of free trade, and communistic pseudo evironmentalism that seeks to do away with private property rights so what's the difference?

Why shun one and embrace the other if they have both been grown from the same roots?

 

That's good, that's really good! Keeping agendas in mind. I couldn't agree more with that Carpro. To bad most folks seem to ignore this sound reasoning eh?

Maybe then we would actually be protecting our republican form of goverment instead of helping those that seek to subvert it by becoming their followers. Good point!

 

Okay. I get the point. It's more important to dis the ACLU than to read the documents and find out if there actually was/is an intentional systematic abuse of prisoners in our charge.

 

I guess I should of expected as much from people so conditioned to do just that BiR. I wonder how Pavlov would react if he knew how successfully his discovery was used to balkanize this nation into babbeling bickering factions.

 

Oops.