Interrogation Tactics Were Challenged at White House
Five years ago, as troubling reports emerged about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a career lawyer at the Justice Department began a long and relatively lonely campaign to alert top Bush administration officials to a strategy he considered "wrongheaded."
Bruce C. Swartz, a criminal division deputy in charge of international issues, repeatedly questioned the effectiveness of harsh interrogation tactics at White House meetings of a special group formed to decide detainee matters, with representatives present from the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA.
Swartz warned that the abuse of Guantanamo inmates would do "grave damage" to the country's reputation and to its law enforcement record, according to an investigative audit released earlier this week by the Justice Department's inspector general. Swartz was joined by a handful of other top Justice and FBI officials who said the abuse would almost certainly taint any legal proceedings against the detainees.
Now their predictions appear to be coming true. A top Pentagon official chose this month to drop charges against a detainee who was roughly interrogated at Guantanamo, and U.S. officials believe it may be difficult to charge him at all. Defense lawyers for a group of alleged Sept. 11 conspirators in U.S. custody have said they plan to raise concerns about harsh techniques used by the CIA and will seek to keep evidence derived from such tactics out of court.
Concerns among FBI agents about the interrogations first came to light in 2004, when a series of internal memos disclosed to the American Civil Liberties Union made clear that the bureau withdrew its agents from interrogation rooms in protest. But the degree of dissent over the administration's aggressive tactics within the bureau's top ranks and within the Justice Department was unclear until the release of this week's report, which starkly describes some of these protests and the cool reception the dissenters got among some officials at the White House and elsewhere.
Besides Swartz, the others depicted as raising sustained objections are then-FBI assistant general counsel Marion "Spike" Bowman, who documented his concerns in written reports, and Pasquale D'Amuro, then the bureau's assistant director for counterterrorism. Michael Chertoff, who was then assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division, raised concerns in November 2002 about the effectiveness of the military's methods, although he said later he did not recall hearing assertions that they were illegal.
