The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [222]
Once the detainee named the emir, or the person who’d trained him, we’d begin to hear names we knew from past interrogations and investigations, which gave us an indication of how the detainee fit into the al-Qaeda chart. If, for example, the detainee said that his emir was Abu Musab al-Yemeni, one of the many regular instructors in al-Qaeda’s camps, it was likely that he had done only basic training. If Saif al-Adel was involved, however, he might have been used for a special operation.
The process could take one hour or a week; each detainee was different. Eventually they’d start telling us what really happened. But to get to that point, the interrogator needs to be an expert in the subject, and you have to show you are familiar with what the detainees are talking about. You can’t stop to ask them to start spelling names of people or places, as that would make it clear that lies aren’t being picked up.
I got to the small talk stage with Qahtani and started developing a relationship with him. We even prayed together. I then had to leave Gitmo on another mission that was viewed as a higher priority, so I handed his case back to the agents who had originally handled him.
In my experience, people like Qahtani would only be able to tell us their specific role in a plot: how they were recruited and trained, the people they interacted with. All of which would be useful information to convict Qahtani and give us information on the plot itself, but it was unlikely to give us much information about other plots.
When KSM was later arrested, he told interrogators that Qahtani was “an unsophisticated Bedouin,” and derided him for being unable to learn English phrases or even use e-mail. Al-Qaeda had also tried to put Qahtani through a special training course in the al-Banshiri camp, named after the al-Qaeda military leader and shura council member who had drowned in the ferry accident in Lake Victoria, but he had failed the course.
After I had left, other FBI agents worked on Qahtani and continued to make progress. But military interrogators, backed by political appointees in Washington, wanted to get “juicy” intelligence from Qahtani. They didn’t understand that someone like Qahtani didn’t have it. They argued that the FBI had been unsuccessful and that harsher interrogation techniques were needed. If you don’t know what a detainee should know—and political appointees in Washington certainly didn’t—there is no way to know what is success and what is failure.
While CITF and FBI members were having problems with the military command over interrogations, there was also friction within the two strands of the military—JTF 170, under General Dunlavey, and JTF 160, under General Baccus. The separation of responsibility into interrogations and base organization frustrated nonmilitary personnel at Gitmo, too, with the lack of a coherent command structure making it difficult to produce decisions. General Dunlavey felt that General Baccus was too soft on the detainees, and at one point he even asked the NCIS to investigate him for “consorting with the enemy.” General Baccus was in fact just treating the detainees as required by military rules and regulations. While I was frustrated with both the lack of organization at the base and the way detainees were being handled, I never had any problems with General Dunlavey and always found him to be receptive to suggestions.
The complaints about the difficulty of the two command structures reached senior U.S. military leaders, and on October 9, 2002, General Baccus was relieved of his command,