Spencer Ackerman February 7, 2007, 4:59 PM

It’s getting to be a familiar story. Soldier or Marine hears about detainee abuse; reports it up the chain of command; and the official investigation says no such abuse occurred.

This time it happened to Marine Sergeant Heather Cerveny, who heard people identified to her as Guantanamo Bay guards bragging about beating detainees. The investigator on the case, Army Colonel Richard Bassett, found no evidence of abuse — only he didn’t interview any detainees:

In an affidavit filed to the Pentagon’s inspector general, Cerveny — a member of a detainee’s legal defense team — said a group of more than five men who identified themselves as guards had recounted hitting prisoners. The conversation allegedly took place at a bar inside the base.

“The evidence did not support any of the allegations of mistreatment or harassment,” the Miami-based Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in southeastern Cuba, said in a statement.

Investigators conducted 20 interviews with “suspects and witnesses,” the Southern Command said. Bassett did not interview any detainees, said Jose Ruiz, a Miami-based command spokesman.

“He talked to all the parties he felt he needed to get information about the allegations that were made,” Ruiz said by telephone from Miami.

Hopefully it’s the truth that no mistreatment occurred. Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s history of investigating itself about Guantanamo has been pretty poor, as I reported after a trip to GTMO in August 2005:

In response to the public disclosure of the FBI accounts —not the accounts themselves—the Pentagon assigned Generals Randall Schmidt and John Furlow to investigate Guantánamo interrogations. Their report, released last month, is euphemistic and disingenuous. Schmidt and Furlow maintain that they found “no evidence of torture or inhumane treatment,” while simultaneously confirming many of the FBI descriptions. Their most startling conclusion is that nearly every incident they investigated was “authorized” by Pentagon guidelines—guidelines Donald Rumsfeld approved between October 2002 and April 2003. Sometimes, to reach this conclusion, Schmidt and Furlow shoehorn in new definitions to the Army’s field manual on interrogations, which complies with the Geneva Conventions. For instance, Schmidt and Furlow consider sexual coercion by female interrogators—including the smearing of fake menstrual blood on a detainee, who subsequently “threw himself on the floor and started banging his head”—to fall within the boundaries of the manual’s “Futility” technique. (One veteran of an Army intelligence unit fighting the war on terrorism told me sexual manipulation is decidedly not “Futility.”) Qatani, Schmidt and Furlow found, was the subject of a “Special Interrogation Plan.” That meant he endured, among other things, high-blast air conditioning that slowed his heartbeat until he required medical attention; was interrogated for 18 to 20 hours daily for 48 days out of a 54-day stretch; was straddled by a female interrogator; and was led on a leash and forced “to perform a series of dog tricks.” As their report states: “[E]very technique employed against [Qatani] was legally permissible under the existing guidance.”

Torture