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Contractors Are Cited in Abuses at Guantanamo
An FBI agent reported seeing detainees at Delta Camp at the Guantanamo Bay military prison held in sweltering rooms and subjected to loud rap music. The agent was told the treatment was ordered by contractors, the FBI said.
(By Brennan Linsley -- Associated Press)
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"Chenega was not involved in debriefing or interrogating detainees in 2002 or early 2003," Chenega's communications director, Kristina Woolston, said in a written statement.
The FBI documents were released late Tuesday as part of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, and include several new allegations of questionable treatment of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. One interrogator infuriated a prisoner by squatting over a Koran, and two agents reported witnessing military personnel using vicious dogs to intimidate prisoners, the records show. The documents also expand upon earlier allegations of mistreatment, including two cases in which detainees were shackled to the floor, subjected to extreme temperatures and allowed to defecate on themselves.
The Army has previously acknowledged five incidents of intentional and unintentional mishandling of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay.
The allegations are reminiscent in certain respects to charges of mistreatment at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. There, too, contractors who supplied interrogation services were allegedly involved, and some U.S. military personnel said they had mistreated detainees under orders from contractors.
The U.S. attorney's office was assigned to investigate contractor behavior at Abu Ghraib, but no charges have been filed.
It's unclear how the law would apply to the contractors this time. Contractors have traditionally not been subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the body of laws that governs the behavior of soldiers. Other laws apply to contractors, but many remain untested.
"You have two different types of people operating under different sets of rules," said Scott L. Silliman, executive director of the center on law, ethics and national security at Duke University.
Staff writer Dan Eggen and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
