Pentagon reviewing interrogation tapes - report
WASHINGTON, March 12 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Defense is conducting a review of the videotaping of interrogations at military facilities from Iraq to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and so far has identified nearly 50 tapes, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
One of the tapes showed what a military spokesman described as the forcible gagging of a terrorism suspect, the newspaper said in the article, posted on its Web site on Wednesday.
Many of the tapes documented interrogations of Jose Padilla, the report said. Padilla is a Chicago gang member once accused of plotting a radioactive bomb attack, but sentenced in January to more than 17 years in prison for supporting terrorism.
He had been held without charge for 3 1/2 years and his lawyers argued that years of extreme isolation and interrogation had left him too mentally impaired to help his lawyers defend him in court.
The initial findings of the incomplete Pentagon review represent the first official acknowledgment that military interrogators had videotaped some sessions with detainees and could widen the controversy over the treatment of prisoners in American custody, the newspaper said.
The report said the Pentagon review of the tapes was begun in late January after the CIA acknowledged it had destroyed videotapes of harsh interrogations conducted by CIA officers.
The destruction of those tapes is the subject of criminal and congressional investigations and the review was intended partly to establish clearer rules for any videotaping of interrogations, defense officials said, according to the report.
The officials also said that only very few of tens of thousands of interrogations conducted worldwide since 2001 had been recorded.
