US: Declassified FBI documents about the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo are giving new credence to detainees' claims of humiliation and abuse by US interrogators at the US base in Cuba, reports Conor O'Clery in New York
They come at a time when President George Bush's nominee for attorney general, Mr Roberto Gonzales, faces questions at a Senate confirmation hearing about his role in defining administration policy.
Mr Gonzales, who as White House counsel advised that the war on terrorism rendered some of the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions "obsolete" and "quaint", told the hearing on Thursday that prison abuses resulted from lack of training and irresponsible prison guards and not from his memos.
General Bantz Craddock, chief of the US Southern Command, which has responsibility for Guantanamo, has ordered an inquiry into the FBI agents' allegations of ill-treatment and torture at Guantanamo.
Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Pat Leahy last week complained angrily to the head of the FBI, Mr Robert Mueller, for failing to disclose the FBI information at a Senate hearing on Guantanamo last year.
Mr Mueller called Senator Feinstein to express regret that he hadn't kept her better informed, according to Newsweek, which published new details of the FBI complaints yesterday.
In one report, on July 30th an FBI agent said he saw a detainee draped in an Israeli flag and subjected to loud music and strobe lights. Mr Ibraham Al Qosi, a Sudanese accountant detained on suspicions of ties to Al Qaeda, made identical allegations last year in a legal action. He said he was strapped to a floor, wrapped in an Israeli flag, humiliated by a female interrogator who rubbed against him sexually, and subjected to cold and to deafening music. At the time, a Guantanamo spokesman dismissed the allegations.
In another FBI memo, released after legal action by the American Civil Liberties Union, an agent wrote in August: "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a foetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more."