https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/us/politics/guantanamo-torture-fbi-cia.html
The F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. The once-secret collaboration between the bureau and the C.I.A. came to light in pretrial proceedings in the death penalty case.
The F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. The once-secret collaboration between the bureau and the C.I.A. came to light in pretrial proceedings in the death penalty case.CreditâŚStefani Reynolds for The New York Times
Carol Rosenberg
By Carol Rosenberg
Nov. 19, 2021, 8:30 p.m. ET
GUANTĂNAMO BAY, Cuba â In the torturous history of the U.S. governmentâs black sites, the F.B.I. has long been portrayed as acting with a strong moral compass. Its agents, disgusted with the violence they saw at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand, walked out, enabling the bureau to later deploy âclean teamsâ untainted by torture to interrogate the five men accused of conspiring in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
But new information that emerged this week in the Sept. 11 case undermines that F.B.I. narrative. The two intelligence agencies secretly arranged for nine F.B.I. agents to temporarily become C.I.A. operatives in the overseas prison network where the spy agency used torture to interrogate its prisoners.
The once-secret program came to light in pretrial proceedings in the death penalty case. The proceedings are currently examining whether the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and his four co-defendants voluntarily confessed after years in the black site network, where detainees were waterboarded, beaten, deprived of sleep and isolated to train them to comply with their captorsâ wishes.
At issue is whether the military judge will exclude from the eventual trial the testimony of F.B.I. agents who questioned the defendants in 2007 at GuantĂĄnamo and also forbid the use of reports that the agents wrote about each manâs account of his role in the hijacking conspiracy.
A veteran GuantĂĄnamo prosecutor, Jeffrey D. Groharing, has called the F.B.I. interrogations âthe most critical evidence in this case.â Defense lawyers argue that the interrogations were tainted by the years of torture by U.S. government agents.
In open court on Thursday, another prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., confirmed the unusual arrangement, in which nine agents âbecame a member of the C.I.A. and worked within C.I.A. channels.â
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He said that the agents served as âdebriefers,â a C.I.A. term for interrogators, and questioned black site prisoners âout of the coercive environmentâ and after the use of âE.I.T.s.â
E.I.T.s, or enhanced interrogation techniques, is a C.I.A. euphemism for a series of abusive tactics that the agency used against Mr. Mohammed and other prisoners in 2002 and 2003 â tactics that were then approved but are now illegal. They include waterboarding, painful shackling and isolating a prisoner nude, shivering and in the dark to break his will to resist interrogation.