Narco News Scooped: "Reaction Forces" beat and humiliated Guantánamo prisoners

That section hasn't been published on-line yet, and yesterday news of these videos of these IRF operations came out thanks to an internal military investigation.  Media coverage of alleged IRF abuse thus scooped Narco News, but is a good six months behind Ellen Ray, Michael Ratner, and Chelsea Green Publishing.

The military report and the media covering it have tended to downplay the actions shown on the tapes as not all that violent.  Aside from the victims presumed innocence under the law, this coverage misses that IRF attacks are part of a comprehensive effort to get the prisoners to say what their U.S. military captors, and guest interrogators, want.
Paisley Dodds of the Associated Press reported yesterday in "Guantánamo tapes show teams punching, stripping prisoners":

The military has cited 10 substantiated cases of abuse at Guantánamo, and announced yesterday that an extension would be granted for an investigation to interview witnesses in the United States and abroad.

One such clip the investigators flagged was from Feb. 17, 2004. It showed "one or more" team members punching a detainee "on an area of his body that seemingly would be inconsistent with striking a pressure point," which is a sanctioned tactic for subduing prisoners.

In five other clips showing detainees who appeared to have been punched by team members, the investigators said: "The punching was in line with accepted law enforcement practice of striking the pressure point on the back of the thigh to temporarily distract the detainee."

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, indicated in the book that submission, let alone distraction, wasn't the purpose:

The British prisoners whom we represent spent the next two years under extremely high-security imprisonment at Guantánamo.  First, they were detained at Camp X-Ray in dog-run-like cages, exposed to the elements and at the mercy of the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF), which would go into the cages and beat people up, a process that came to be called “IRFing.”  Some of these beatings were taped and have recently been requested by one of the congressional committees involved in the investigation.  They may turn out to be important evidence of abuse and torture, if the most damaging evidence implicating these IRF squads has not already been destroyed by the military.

In the middle of 2002 the cells of those initially imprisoned in the dog-run cells were upgraded and a number of prisoners, including our clients, were transferred from Camp X-Ray to Camp Delta.  These prisoners were still in cage-like cells, three sides of which were chain link.  Prisoners had their hair shaved off; their toilets were holes in the floor; they had to stoop to get water; and guards, female and male, walked by them twice every minute, so they had absolutely no privacy. The detainees were deprived of the most basic utensils for human care. And they underwent scores and scores of additional interrogations under coercive conditions.  Some of these may have been videotaped as well.  It was during this process that some of the released British detainees made false confessions.

The videos cited in the report may represent the mildest behaviour by the IRF squads.  Without an independent investigation, there is no way to tell.  Dodds wrote:

Investigators from U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which oversees the camp in Cuba, wrote the report after spending a little over a week in June reviewing 20 of some 500 hours of videotapes involving "Immediate Reaction Forces."

The camp's layout prevented videotaping in all the cells where the five-person teams — also known as "Immediate Response Forces" — operated, the report said.

Yet what has been reported by the military seems hard to justify, given that the detainees – imprisoned for years without charges – are kept alone in their cells or shackled, and would have little opportunity to become unruly.

In other "questionable" cases, reviewers said a video showed a guard kneeing a detainee in the head, while another showed a team securing a detainee to a gurney for an interrogation.

A separate clip captured a platoon leader taunting a detainee with pepper spray and repeatedly spraying him before letting the reaction team enter the cell, reviewers wrote.

Many civil liberties and other concerned groups want to see the videos themselves, including the reported 480 hours the military investigators did not review.

Dodd wrote:

Prisoners released from Guantánamo have accused the extraction teams of abuse and one former U.S. National Guardsman suffered brain damage after posing undercover as a rowdy detainee and being beaten by teammates.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking for all photographs and videotapes depicting the treatment of the detainees.

Although a court ordered the government to comply with the ACLU request and turn over documents, the government has refused to provide videos, citing privacy concerns, said Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU attorney.

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Read Guantánamo on the front pages of Narco News - or buy the book - to put todays news in context... and almost certainly learn something that will be in tomorrow's news.