Captured on Tape: Interrogation and Videotaping of Detainees in Guantanamo Bay

Abstract

A review of Government documents published by the Department of Defense or released pursuant to FOIA litigation reveal the following:

More than 24,000 interrogations have been conducted at Guantánamo since 2002.

Every interrogation conducted at Guantánamo was videotaped.

The interrogations of detainees in Guantanamo were conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency and also by many other entities including:

1. The Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF); 2. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); 3. The Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) of the FBI; 4. The Defense Intelligence Analysis (DIA); 5. The Defense Human Intelligence (HUMINT); 6. The Army Criminal Investigative Division (ACID); 7. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI); 8. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and 9. A variety of private contractors.

Each of these entities has identical motives to destroy taped investigations as has the Central Intelligence Agency. As one former senior Central Intelligence Agency official put it: It's a qualitatively different thing - seeing it versus reading about it.

One Government document, for instance, reports detainee treatment so violent as to shake the camera in the interrogation room and cause severe internal injury. Another describes an interrogator positioning herself between a detainee and the camera, in order to block her actions from view.

The Government kept meticulous logs of information related to interrogations. Thus, it is ascertainable which videotapes documenting interrogations still exist, and which videotapes have been destroyed.

Keywords: Videotape, interrogations, erase, CIA, Guantanamo, detainees, national security, intelligence, Military Commissions, Habeas Corpus