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"Extremely Troubling" Documents Show How Obama Administration Embraced Foreign Detention of Terror Suspects

Mother Jones

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What happens when an FBI agent steps into a foreign prison to interrogate a US citizen? For several years, even as the FBI has cooperated with foreign governments to question Americans locked up in countries such as Kuwait, South Sudan, and Yemen, the Obama administration has been tight-lipped about the rules that govern such interrogations. FBI officials have told Congress that the same rules apply when FBI agents interview suspects at home and overseas. But an internal bureau interrogation manual suggests that the truth is more complicated—and new information from the FBI shows that key edits were made to the manual as the Obama administration shifted away from the Bush-era practice of questioning terrorism suspects at Pentagon- or CIA-run facilities, and toward outsourcing detentions to foreign regimes.

The FBI acknowledges that information it shares with foreign countries sometimes leads to the arrest of people the FBI is interested in, including Americans, and that its agents sometimes interview these suspects. This controversial practice, often called proxy detention, has been denounced by human rights advocates who say it circumvents suspects’ constitutional rights. But it took a lawsuit from the ACLU to force the Obama administration to disclose a manual that offers advice to FBI agents conducting these interviews.

When the manual, titled “Cross-Cultural, Rapport-Based Interrogation” was released in 2012, the sections that dealt with proxy detention were heavily redacted. The FBI’s page-and-a-half of “recommended practices” for conducting interviews of suspects in foreign custody was entirely redacted:

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Another section, titled “Conducting Custodial Law Enforcement Interviews Overseas,” was also heavily censored:

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Then, in December, I broke the story of a bizarre FBI mistake: In 2010, a top agent at the bureau, thinking (incorrectly) that he could copyright the manual, deposited an unredacted version at the Library of Congress, where anyone could read it. But the tale gets even stranger.

More MoJo reporting on proxy detention


Locked Up Abroadâ&#128;&#148;for the FBI


Obama Administration Interrogating Terror Suspects Locked Up Abroad (Again)


Document Shows US Government Knew About American Locked Up in Yemen


American Muslim Alleges FBI Had a Hand in His Torture (Updated with Video)


US Charges Yonas Fikre, American Who Claimed Torture, With Conspiracy


READ: Letter to Justice Department About Alleged Proxy Detainee Yonas Fikre


Obama Administration Sued Over “Proxy Detention”

The interrogation manual deposited at the Library of Congress was labeled “Version 3” and dated August 18, 2008, just a few months before President George W. Bush left office. A side-by-side comparison showed that the section dealing with proxy detentions had changed dramatically between this Bush-era version and the 2011 one released to the ACLU.

The Bush-era section focused on interviews in Defense Department facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan—not suspects held by foreign governments. It was titled “Conducting Custodial Law Enforcement Interviews in Combat Zones,”—minus the word “Overseas,” with its broader meaning. And the page-and-a-half on “recommended practices” that was entirely redacted in the 2011 version wasn’t in this version of the manual at all.

So when were the changes made? Recently, an FBI spokesman got me an answer. He said the tweaks came “around late 2010,”—well into the Obama administration—and “were mainly based on additional experiences gained overseas along with additional research on the subject matter.”

Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Law and Justice at New York University, says it is “extremely troubling” that it took the ACLU to uncover the manual, and that “these rules seem to expand without notice or public discussion. It is clear evidence there are insufficient internal or external controls on the FBI.”

In recent years, the Obama administration has continued to shift away from unilateral measures such as drone strikes, and toward working with foreign allies through means like proxy detention. Publicly disclosed funding to train and equip foreign militaries to fight terrorism has increased from $218.6 million in 2012 to a requested $290.2 million in 2014, and defense officials recently told The Hill that the government’s secret counterterrorism budget now has less money going to Afghanistan and more going to North Africa and the Middle East. Data collected by Long War Journal show that drone strikes in Pakistan peaked in 2010 and have declined every year since; similar data for Yemen show a peak in 2012 and a decline in the years since.

For more on what the FBI’s work with American citizens overseas can look like in practice, check out my recent investigation in the May/June issue of Mother Jones.

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"Extremely Troubling" Documents Show How Obama Administration Embraced Foreign Detention of Terror Suspects

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A Soldier’s Stories: Iraq Tour Yields Fictional Homecomings

Mother Jones

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“There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of a war they can’t quite see.”

That’s the beginning of “Bodies,” the most darkly humorous short story in Phil Klay’s debut collection, Redeployment. Klay served as a public affairs officer in the Marines during the 2007 Iraq surge, before returning to school to get his MFA at Hunter College in New York City. Among other outlets, his work has appeared in the literary magazine Granta, the New York Times, Newsweek, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012. Redeployment goes on sale this week.

“Bodies” follows a young Marine who returns home after a serving in Iraq as a Mortuary Affairs Specialist, and then resorts to lies and embellishment in tackling what might be the great challenge of homecoming: How to talk to civilians about what you’ve been through.

Mortuary Affairs is a particularly grim assignment, which involves finding and handling soldiers’ remains. When he tells his “funny” version, Klay’s narrator describes an “arrogant bear” of a lieutenant colonel swaggering over to help him with a body bag: “‘He was strong, I’ll give him that,’ I’d say. ‘But the bag rips on the edge of the truck’s back gate, and the skin of the hajji tears with it, a big jagged tear through the stomach. Rotting blood and fluid and organs slide out like groceries through the bottom of a wet paper bag. Human soup hits him right in the face, running down his mustache.’

“Even if it had happened, more or less, it was still total bullshit. After our deployment there wasn’t anybody, not even Corporal G, who talked about the remains that way.”

The difficulty Klay’s characters face while trying to express their Iraq experiences sits like a lump in the reader’s throat throughout the collection. But the variety of those experiences is wide, and Klay takes us to disparate corners of the armed services: from Psychological Operations to the Chaplain Corps, from the bloodthirsty and reckless to the tragicomic and absurd. I tracked Klay down recently to ask about his book and about his own experiences over there.

Mother Jones: How has the literary world received you, a military man?

Phil Klay: It’s a different culture. I went straight from the Marine Corps to the MFA. The way that you would express things among Marines is somewhat different than the way you’re supposed to express things in a creative writing workshop. So there was certainly an adjustment period.

MJ: What led you to join the Corps?

PK: A ton of reasons. I was in college. I was a physical guy, a boxer and rugby player. There’s a tradition of public service in my family. I’m one of three boys that joined the military. My father was in the Peace Corps. I felt that whether or not the war was a good idea, you would still need good people executing US policy to try and make things turn out as well as they possibly could. There’s a tendency to look at anybody who joined the military as if they underwrote everything that happened policywise. That’s not really the case. I have a friend who both protested the Iraq war and joined the military, and ended up serving two deployments in Afghanistan.

MJ: Your characters have very diverse experiences and military assignments. How did you research what things were like in these various departments?

PK: As a Public Affairs Officer, I spent a lot of time with a lot of different types of units. The variety of experience is broad, so I did as much research as I could. I wanted to get the details right, and be true to the experience, but at the end of the day I didn’t want the reader to just accept everybody’s story at face value.

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A Soldier’s Stories: Iraq Tour Yields Fictional Homecomings

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