FBI documents reveal secret CIA prisoners ‘manacled to the ceiling’

Joe Byrne
Raw Story
Sunday, Nov 1st, 2009

Hundreds of pages of documents partially declassified
by the Justice department on Friday reveal that the FBI was conducting
an investigation of overseas CIA prisons.

The documents were released as part of a lawsuit filed by the
American Civil Liberties Union and Judicial Watch, a Washington-based
advocacy group. Many of them were previously released but some of the
censoring has been removed.

In September of 2002, FBI officials visiting an overseas prison run
by the CIA found prisoners ‘manacled to the ceiling and subjected
to blaring music around the clock’, according to the documents.

Handwritten notes attributed to Justice Department officials discuss
the possibility of prosecuting CIA employees. Senior FBI officials
questioned the legality and effectiveness of the CIA’s
interrogation methods and prison conditions. An interrogation involving
threats with a gun and power drill was the focus of discussion in the
notes, but Justice Department officials eventually declined to
prosecute the CIA official.

A 2008 report details the FBI’s involvement with the
interrogation of Ramzi bin al-Shiebh, one of the plotters behind 9/11.
A sheet of questions were prepared for al-Shiebh with the help of the
FBI, but the FBI officials “were denied direct access to him for
four or five days.” When the FBI was permitted to see the
detainee, he was found “naked and chained to the floor.”
The FBI agent told the inspector general that he had “valuable
actionable intelligence” but the CIA quickly shut down the
interview, ruining the case.

Many of the pages of ‘declassified’ documents are heavily censored, due to DOJ restrictions.

Scott Horton, a professor at Columbia Law School, has watched the
document disclosures shift the focus of a potential investigation.
“Disclosures increasingly put the core of potentially criminal
conduct relating to torture not with CIA agents, but rather with senior
figures then at the Justice Department who were busily hushing
everything up.”

“The key questions here are which DOJ figures were involved in
the decision not to prosecute and why did they take those
decisions,” according to Horton.

The September 2002 overseas visit was the last involvement the FBI had with CIA interrogations, according to the New York Times.

Some of the declassified documents can be found here.