NEW YORK, Jan 9 (AFP) - Two US Democratic senators wrote angry letters to FBI director Robert Mueller demanding to know why he failed to disclose his own agents' complaints about abuses at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Newsweek magazine reported Sunday.
The letters by California Senator Dianne Feinstein and Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy came after the American Civil Liberties Union published correspondence by Federal Bureu of Investigations agents who witnessed abuses in Guantanamo.
The ACLU obtained the correspondence -- which includes e-mail -- through a court order and made it public in December.
The accounts by FBI agents, which were produced after last year's Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, suggest that the abuse there was part of a broader pattern prisoner mistreatment rather than an isolated case as US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has insisted, according to rights activists.
Feinstein and Leahy were on a panel that questioned Mueller about Guantanamo Bay prisoners in May 2004.
Mueller however was so evasive Feinstein described his answers as "gobbledygook."
According to Newsweek, Mueller eventually called Feinstein to express regret that he hadn't kept her better informed.
01/09/2005 21:03 GMT - AFP