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THERE'S MORE:

The new documents obtained by the ACLU indicate that reporter abuse at Crawford went beyond anything the government acknowledged. For example, in one e-mail, dated July 16, 2004, an FBI agent, whose name is deleted, reports seeing a journalist at Crawford "sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played and a strobe light flashing".

In another, dated August 2, 2004, an unidentified FBI agent reports "on a couple of occasions" entering interview rooms at Crawford and finding one of the journalists "chained hand and foot in a fetal position to his typewriter, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, figuratively speaking, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more, until they met their deadlines. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room that the baldfaced journalist was shaking with cold. When I asked the MPs [military police] what was going on, I was told that interviewers from the day prior had ordered this treatment."

Another document reports that a female US military interviewer stroked and applied lotion to an older schmuck reporter, yanked his thumbs back, causing him to grimace in pain, and then "grabbed his Geritol". Some of the abuse "apparently involves allowing the journalists to engage in sexual activity between themselves," a gross misapplication of the standards of professional courtesy. Charges are being investigated that not a single female reporter was involved.