By Xinhua,
Washington : The White House ignored early warnings from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, that U.S. interrogators may have abused detainees, according to a new report from the Justice Department.
The report, released here Wednesday, shows that FBI agents started reporting as early as 2002 about abusive interrogations methods used on detained terror suspects, including sexual humiliation, prolonged shackling and exposure to extreme temperatures.
Justice Department officials did convey some of these concerns in at least one White House meeting in 2003, but the White House ignored them.
A year later, the revelation of similar abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison became a source of everlasting shame for American citizens, and seen as a serious blow to the U.S. “moral authority.”
Some U.S. legal experts found the latest revelations not surprising.
Previous media reports said top Bush aides including Vice President Dick Cheney were micromanaging the torture of terrorist suspects from the White House basement in 2002.
Nevertheless, the latest revelations adds a key element to the portrait of complicity in what could someday be prosecuted as violations of U.S. torture statutes or even war crimes, the experts said.