Today’s Must Read

The focus of the news coverage of the report released yesterday by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine has been on what involvement the FBI had, if any, in the “enhanced interrogations” undertaken by the Bush Administration — and to a lesser extent how the FBI’s concerns were ignored at the highest levels of government.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal‘s lede:

A Justice Department inquiry lauded Federal Bureau of Investigation agents for refraining from harsh interrogations of terror suspects but found fault with how senior officials handled agents’ concerns about alleged abuses.

But as you dig down into the 370-page report (.pdf), it’s most revealing for what it shows the U.S. government was actually doing to detainees. Because of the limited jurisdiction of the DOJ inspector general, the report was focused on the FBI. But in establishing the environment in which the FBI was operating, the report paints a picture of ghastly treatment of detainees by the United States on a consistent long-term basis.

In the course of his investigation, the IG interviewed 450 FBI agents who were detailed to Gitmo at one time or another. Nearly half reported witnessing or hearing about “rough or aggressive treatment of detainees, primarily by military investigators.”

The report contains a chart of the conduct FBI agents reported at Gitmo and the manner in which the agents learned of the conduct. You can click on the image for a larger view:

Similar charts were created for cataloging the conduct reported by FBI agents in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Most of the “techniques” listed have been previously revealed but there were some surprises:

In one of several previously undisclosed episodes, the report found that American military interrogators appeared to have collaborated with visiting Chinese officials at Guantánamo Bay to disrupt the sleep of Chinese Muslims held there, waking them every 15 minutes the night before their interviews by the Chinese. In another incident, it said, a female interrogator reportedly bent back an inmate’s thumbs and squeezed his genitals as he grimaced in pain.

The charts, though, are less telling in the specifics than they are in the totality of the scheme the U.S. government came up with to legalize and then implement a policy of torture.

Late Update: Justin has more on the U.S.-China collaboration at Gitmo.