FBI reports said to back claims of Guant'namo Bay detainees [about torture and abuse]

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: FBI reports said to back claims of Guant�namo Bay detainees: "Saturday, December 25, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M. | By Carol D. Leonnig | The Washington Post

At least 10 current and former detainees at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have lodged allegations of abuse similar to incidents described by FBI agents in newly released documents. The detainees' claims were denied by the government but gained credibility with the reports from the agents, their attorneys say.

In public statements after their release and in documents filed with federal courts, the detainees have said they were beaten before and during interrogations, "short-shackled" to the floor and otherwise mistreated as part of the effort to persuade them to confess to being members of al-Qaida or the Taliban.

Some of the detainees' attorneys acknowledged they initially were skeptical, mainly because there's been little evidence that captors at Guantánamo Bay engaged in the kind of abuse discovered at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. But the American Civil Liberties Union on Monday released FBI memos it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in which agents describe seeing or learning of serious mistreatment of detainees.
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Brent Mickum, a Washington, D.C., attorney for one detainee, said that "now there's no question these guys have been tortured. When we first got involved in this case, I wondered whether this could all be true. But every allegation that I've heard has now come to pass and been confirmed by the government's own papers."
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More than 60 of the 550 men who are detained have filed claims. Some have been held for nearly three years.