Pentagon Cites Tapes Showing Interrogations

[Gunny]

By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE
Published: March 13, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department is conducting an extensive review of the videotaping of interrogations at military facilities from Iraq to Guantánamo Bay, and so far it has identified nearly 50 tapes, including one that showed what a military spokesman described as the forcible gagging of a terrorism suspect.

The Pentagon review was begun in late January after the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged that it had destroyed its own videotapes of harsh interrogations conducted by C.I.A. officers, an action that is now the subject of criminal and Congressional investigations.

The review was intended in part to establish clearer rules for any videotaping of interrogations, defense officials said. But they acknowledged that it had been complicated by inconsistent taping practices in the past, as well as uncertain policies for when tapes could be destroyed or must be preserved.

The officials said it appeared that only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of interrogations worldwide since 2001 had been recorded.

The officials said the nearly 50 tapes they identified documented interrogations of two terrorism suspects, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri, and were made at a Navy detention site in Charleston, S.C., where the two men have been detained.

The initial findings of the incomplete Pentagon review represent the first official acknowledgment that military interrogators had videotaped some sessions with detainees and could widen the controversy over the treatment of prisoners in American custody. A Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell, cautioned that the review of interrogation videotapes was incomplete, and a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Don Black, said that interrogation videotapes had been routinely destroyed if they were judged to have no continuing value.

The tape of rough treatment shows Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was arrested in December 2001 while attending college in Illinois and moved five years ago to the jail after being designated an “enemy combatant.” Government officials say they believe he was an operative for Al Qaeda who was plotting attacks.

Two government officials said that one tape showed Mr. Marri being manhandled by his interrogators, but did not show waterboarding or any other treatment approaching torture. According to one defense official, the interrogators dispensing the rough treatment are F.B.I. agents. An F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment, citing a continuing review of detention practices that is being carried out by the Department of Justice’s inspector general.

Mr. Black, the spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the D.I.A. director, had reviewed the existing tape and was satisfied that Mr. Marri’s treatment was acceptable. He said that Mr. Marri was chanting loudly, disrupting his interrogation, and interrogators used force to put duct tape on his mouth to silence him, while Mr. Marri resisted. Mr. Black said most of the tapes showing Mr. Marri’s interrogations had been destroyed. The government has never brought charges against Mr. Marri but because of his designation as an enemy combatant, the Pentagon is allowed to hold him indefinitely.

The scale of detention and interrogation by the military, with tens of thousands of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo, dwarfs that of the C.I.A., which has held fewer than 100 high-level Qaeda suspects. The C.I.A. has acknowledged videotaping only two terrorism suspects, in 2002, and defense officials said that the review, ordered in late January by James R. Clapper, the Pentagon’s senior intelligence official, had similarly found that only a small number of detainee interrogations had been videotaped.

more ... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/w...6b229553c86531&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

And it goes on and on ....