In many instances MPs were simply instituting the will of their commanders. “Always remember,” Saar heard one lieutenant colonel tell his charges, “you guys should feel privileged to be here guarding this scum. These men are the worst of the worst. This place is reserved for those terrorists who either helped 9/11 or were planning future attacks against us when they were apprehended.”
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One didn't have to be a Muslim to worry about detainees who returned from interrogations with “a defeated look,” their “head held low,” their “eyes lifeless.” After particularly “tough interrogations,” some simply “huddled in a fetal position in the corner of their cells, staring off into space or even quietly crying.”
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Saar, too, had a keen eye for the absurdity of detainee operations. After the suicide attempts, the camp assigned a “psych tech” to keep an eye on disconsolate detainees. “Do you feel hopeless?” one technician asked a detainee before moving on. “Seemed to me,” Saar observed, “that asking these men if they were feeling hopeless was a little absurd, given their situation.” Wasn't that exactly what interrogators “wanted them to feel? It was a little ridiculous that the psych team was trying to conduct damage control for everything the interrogators were trying to do, and I found that, in fact, there were certain detainees the psych techs didn't see because the interrogators wanted those guys depressed and dejected.”
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No less absurd was the spectacle of forced inoculations. Unsurprisingly, detainees were hesitant to accept shots and medicine from U.S. personnel. “They think we're going to kill them,” Saar explained to a psych tech sent to oversee one particular operation. After witnessing
an IRF team brutalize an intransigent detainee, Saar remarked to himself, “There was something nonsensical about all this, of course. American soldiers on a tropical island brutally suppressing a man captured in the Global War on Terrorâall for the sake of protecting him from the flu.”
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As Saar became increasingly alarmed by the abuse he witnessed at Camp Delta, he found himself hoping that at least it was paying off. Running into a fellow linguist assigned to the interrogation group, Saar allowed that he hoped that this was all leading to a rich harvest of intelligence. “Maybe in the interrogations I'm not in,” came the response.
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Saar would get a chance to see the interrogation operation himself soon enough. Transferred from the Detainee Operations Group to the Detainee Intelligence Group, he immediately became aware of turf wars between military intelligence and the FBI. He overheard one military interrogator, grown tired of watching for weeks as an FBI agent deployed conventional rapport-building techniques with a detainee, remark, “Those goddamn agents sit in chairs across the table and talk to the guy all night like they were chatting with their best friend.” One of the agents was actually growing a beard to demonstrate empathy with a detainee. “When are we going to get our hands on that bastard, sir?” the military intelligence official asked his boss.
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One of the first things Saar noticed upon transferring to the intelligence-gathering group was the marked discrepancy in training between the FBI officials, often with years of experience, and the military intelligence officials, often inexperienced and inadequately trained. Inscrutably, General Miller claimed the advantage in this contest went to the inexperienced. In “this testing lab in the global war on terror,” Miller told journalists, “intelligence is a young person's game.”
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The more Saar learned of the intelligence harvesting, the less the whole Guantánamo operation made sense to him. As commanders continued to insist that Guantánamo was yielding first-rate evidence that was saving people's lives, the whole detention operation came to seem like “a Potemkin village”âthose “elaborate fake towns the eighteenth-century Russian field marshal rushed to build when Catherine the Great toured her empire.” The military regularly carried out fake interrogations for visiting VIPs. “A façade would go up, like a set
in an old movie. We'd put on quite a showâthe camp's leadership had these events down to a science.” In the days approaching an important visit, Saar recalled, the intelligence group would receive the itinerary and set to work. “My commanders staged the production carefully,” Saar wrote. “A flurry of emails went back and forth among the JIG [Joint Intelligence Group] staff members about which detainee to schedule for these observations and what to ask him.” Choosing a cooperative detainee, the interrogator “would simply go back over the material covered with him previously. A foolproof recipe for faux interrogations and the VIPs were none the wiser.”
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Politicians as well as investigative teams regularly returned from Guantánamo touting the treatment of detainees, especially the food and medical care, and downplaying the overwhelming evidence of torture and abuse.
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The deception of those outside Guantánamo Bay was matched by internal indirection. In February 2003 the intelligence community at Guantánamo Bay was summoned to a meeting presided over by a JAG lawyer whose job it was to update the staff on the detainees' status vis-à -vis the Geneva Conventions. The meeting had a peculiar feel, Saar remembered. The previous year, President Bush had vowed to abide by the Geneva protocols, where
appropriate and consistent with military necessity
, despite the fact that neither al Qaeda nor the Taliban qualified for Geneva protections. This, apparently, was changing. While offering nothing new, the visiting JAG officer took pains to review the administration's rationale. “This meeting was an explainer, and the military doesn't do explainers,” Saar thought at the time. The administration “clearly felt” the issue “dicey enough that they had to stoop to providing us with some reasons, such as they were.” Reasons for what? The closest the head of the Guantánamo intelligence operation would come to saying it outright was this: “We still intend to treat the detainees humanely, but our purpose is to get any actionable intelligence we can, and quickly.”
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In the ensuing weeks and months, the interrogations at Guantánamo grew rougher. Upon first transferring from the Operations to the intelligence group, Saar heard news of the techniques loosed on al-Qahtani. The problem with these new techniques, he recognized, was that “nobody had any experience with them. In the army you're trained for every event. No detail is too minor. Training, in fact, is all
the army does when it isn't actually at war.” Having long relied on the guidelines of the
Army Field Manual
, army interrogators were now being asked to disregard not only its rules but also its overarching philosophy: “Torture doesn't work, and in fact produces less reliable information because it has a tendency to induce victims to lie. Interrogators were taught that if they were skilled, they could get all the information they needed without going too far.”
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The interrogations Saar participated in as a linguist confirmed the wisdom of the
Army Field Manual
. The premise behind the move to enhanced interrogation techniques was that conventional interrogation took time, and that the United States did not have the luxury of time in the war on terror. Violence does not speed up the harvest of intelligence, Saar suggests. On the contrary, it brings interrogation to a standstill. Saar contrasted an interrogation he witnessed by a CIA agent, who studiously “built a bridge” to a detainee, ending an interrogation session after two hours and promising to return and continue the session the next week, to that of a Defense Department interrogator, who relied on stress positions and uncomfortably cool room temperatures to soften up a detainee in advance of the interrogation. Where the CIA agent began her session by remarking, “I understand you speak some Spanish. Do you want me to talk to you in Spanish or would you rather we use Arabic?” her Defense Department colleague opened his interrogation with a curt “Are you going to cooperate with me tonight?” The outcome of the Defense Department interrogation seems preordained. As the detainee sat mutely, the interrogator became more and more frustrated and irate, before finally calling “the detainee a liar and every obscenity in the book.”
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By April 2003, Saar was hearing more and more interrogators talking about “turning up the heat” on detainees. The expression had sexual as well as purely violent overtones, and Saar was present at a notable incident of sexual humiliation. One evening, a female army interrogator asked Saar to take the place of a Muslim colleague who she didn't think “would enjoy taking part in this one.” The detainee they would be interrogating was “a piece of shit,” Saar was told, and they “might have to turn things up a bit.” The detainee in question was suspected of taking flight lessons, and had stopped cooperating with other intelligence agents. “I'm starting to take shit from above because
he's not talking,” the interrogator told Saar. “We need to try something new tonight.”
The key to breaking this detainee, the agent concluded, was to alienate him from his Muslim religion, by which he seemed to be maintaining his strength. “We've gotta find a way to break that, and I'm thinking that humiliation may be the way to go. I just need to make him feel that he absolutely must cooperate with me and has no other options. I think we should make him feel so fucking dirty that he can't go back to his cell and spend the night praying. We have to put up a barrier between him and God.”
When Saar arrived in the interrogation room, he found the detainee “short chained” by ankles and wrists to a metal ring on the floor, leaving him hunched over in an awkward position. Short-chaining may have been just the thing for a conventional roughing-up, but that is not what Saar's colleague had in mind on this night. She ordered the guards to seat the detainee in a chair, which would put his head about level with her waist. Then she began a striptease. “To my surprise,” Saar wrote, “she started to unbutton her top slowly, teasingly, almost like a stripper, revealing a skin-tight brown army T-shirt stretching over her chest.” Taunting him throughout, she circled behind him, “rubbing her breasts against his back.” The taunting continued: “Do you like these big American tits, Fareek? I can see you are starting to get hard. How do you think Allah feels about this?” Sitting in front of him, the interrogator grabbed her breasts and asked him, “Don't you like big tits?” prompting him to look away. The script practically writes itself. “Are you gay?” she asked him when he averted his eyes.
Predictably, when this treatment did not induce the detainee to talk, the interrogator turned up the heat still more. The way to make a Muslim man feel too dirty to appeal to God, a Muslim colleague had informed her, was to touch him with what appeared to be menstrual blood. Braced by this suggestion, the interrogator returned to the room, repeated her banter with the detainee, then stood up, unbuttoned her pants, and informed him that she was having her period. She then circled behind him, touching him as if with menstrual blood. Returning to face him head-on, she removed her hands from her pants, revealing what looked like real blood on them, and wiped them on his cheek. “Who told you to learn to fly, Fareek? You fuck.” At this point,
the detainee screamed, spat, lunged, and struggled vainly to extricate himself from the chair. Summoned to the room, the MPs shackled the detainee to the floor, where he lay crying “like a baby, sobbing and mumbling in Arabic too distinct for me to understand,” Saar remembered. “The only thing I picked out was, âYou American whore.'”
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The outside world was slow to comprehend the abuse and torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. “My gut tells me that the military is being very scrupulous,” Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski remarked in June 2002. “Law enforcement professionals in this country understand that torture is a wonderful technique for getting confessions from innocent people and a lousy technique for getting truth out of guilty people.”
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Later that fall,
The New York Times
seemed to take at face value statements by Guantánamo officials that all was hunky-dory in the camps. “I don't want the U.S. Naval Base, Guantánamo Bay, to be viewed in a sense as anything unfair, brutal, human rights violations,” Guantánamo commander Captain Robert A. Buehn remarked. “Certainly, that's not what's going on here.” Similarly, General Rick Baccus, who replaced Michael Dulavey in April 2002, insisted that, “while the public debates the technicalities of how these people should be classified, we will continue to follow the traditions of humane treatment. In other countries, these detainees would not be heard from again.”
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The upbeat reports continued through the middle of the following year. While criticizing the legal limbo in which detainees found themselves in March 2003, the
Times
assured readers that there were “no credible reports of abuse or substantiated complaints about the physical conditions of detainees.” The following May the paper announced that “all reports ⦠indicate that prisoners have not been physically mistreated.”
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Meanwhile, up in Washington, career intelligence officials became increasingly uncomfortable with the reports coming in from Guantánamo Bay. At the FBI, Marion “Spike” Bowman had, like many of the service JAGs, been left out of the discussion that led defense secretary Rumsfeld to sign off on the enhanced interrogation techniques in November 2002. Bowman, who had spent his career in navy intelligence and as judge advocate at the National Security Agency, among
other appointments, was the person who fielded the calls from the concerned FBI agents at Guantánamo. Interrogation plans were advancing not only for al-Qhatani but also for Mohamedou Ould Slahi, another supposed high-value subject, the agents warned, both of which seemed misguided, amateurish, and illegal. Upon hearing from the agents, Bowman directed them to document what they were seeing so he could show the evidence to colleagues in the Defense Department. He then contacted Pentagon legal counsel William Haynes, among others. But Pentagon officials did not make for sympathetic interlocutors, and Bowman had a difficult time getting his reservations heard. Rumsfeld seems to have appointed Haynes general counsel at the Pentagon precisely because he knew Haynes would do his bidding. In this way Haynes was much like Gonzales, and indeed like many second-tier Bush-Cheney appointees. He performed dutifully, quashing independent thinking while leaving no tracks.
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