Another day, another report offering an awful glimpse into Washington's tortuous torture policies. After so many previous torture revelations, what's most surprising to me about the 370-page report from the Justice Department's Inspector General isn't the horrific tactics themselves, or that word of them reached the National Security Council in 2003, but the fact that FBI agents apparently stood apart from CIA and military officials' torture tactics, like these:
…"a frequent flyer program" meant to lessen resistance by extensively disrupting sleep, use of strobe lights in conjunction with loud rock music, twisting of thumbs backward, and exposure of detainees to extreme temperatures, threatening dogs, pornography and sexual taunting.
Detainees in Iraq had water poured down their throats while they were cuffed and kneeling, the FBI agents told investigators.
Washington may not have acted with monolithic venality, but that doesn't absolve the bureau:
The report also highlights intensifying friction between FBI agents and their military counterparts over these strategies, some of which were eventually repudiated by the Bush administration.
After hundreds of interviews and reviews of more than 500,000 documents, investigators working for Inspector General Glenn A. Fine also said they found an interrogation process awash with confusion and conflicting sets of rules. Fine generally praised the FBI's actions but faulted the bureau for waiting until abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison became public in early 2004 to develop a policy obliging its agents to report similar abuses by other government employees.
Even then, the bureau's guidelines remained a source of uncertainty for many agents in the field, the report said.
When bureaucracy meets war, does confusion always ensue?
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Jeremy Gantz is an In These Times contributing editor working at Time magazine.
