The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [223]
General Miller was a strange choice for command of an operation whose focus was interrogating and sorting detainees. His background was in artillery, and he had no interrogation or intelligence experience. He had never even sat in on an interrogation, as he openly admitted. This inexperience showed when he ordered that interrogations be run like military operations: there had to be a fixed start time and end time, and he wanted a fixed number of interrogations to be conducted each day.
CITF tried explaining to him that interrogations don’t work like that. Each detainee is different, knows different things, and has different triggers that will get him to cooperate. Giving fixed end times to interrogations is better for the detainee, as he knows he only needs to hold out for a certain period of time, after which the interrogation will be over.
I learned years later that the move to employ aggressive interrogation techniques at Gitmo started long before Qahtani was alleged to be not cooperating. The November 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody, declassified in April 2009, reported that back in December 2001, seven months before we even identified Qahtani and removed him from the general Gitmo population, the Department of Defense’s general counsel’s office, headed by William James Haynes II, requested help with detainee “exploitation” from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency’s military Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) trainers. Haynes was a close friend of Vice President Dick Cheney’s counsel, David Addington, and had been the best man at his wedding.
SERE was established to teach U.S. military personnel how to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions. The strategies are partly based on tactics used by Chinese Communists during the Korean War to gain false confessions. The Senate report cites the deputy commander of the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA)’s higher headquarters, saying that “the expertise of JPRA lies in training personnel how to respond and resist interrogations—not in how to conduct interrogations.”
The wisdom of the Senate report was not available on September 16, 2002, when, following up on the earlier assistance, a group of military interrogators and behavioral scientists from Gitmo went to JPRA, in Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, for SERE training. On September 25, 2002, a delegation of senior Bush administration lawyers, including Jim Haynes and David Addington, along with John Rizzo and Michael Chertoff, then with the criminal division of the Justice Department (later director of Homeland Security), traveled to Gitmo for discussions on how interrogations should be run.
On October 2, 2002, the chief counsel to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center met with Gitmo staff. The Senate Armed Services Committee report notes: “Minutes of that meeting indicate that it was dominated by a discussion of aggressive interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, death threats, and waterboarding, which was discussed in relation to its use in SERE training.”
By the time the CTC chief counsel was giving this briefing, CIA contractors interrogating Abu Zubaydah had already been employing the aggressive techniques that I had [6 words redacted] objected to, and which FBI director Robert Mueller had ordered his agents not to use. But when Mark Fallon and other members of CITF, and the FBI, tried to gain access to the September 25 and October 2 meetings, to argue against the use of aggressive interrogation techniques, they were turned away. It appeared to CITF members that a decision had been made to employ harsh techniques, and the Bush delegation didn’t want to hear any contrary opinions. It was a strange situation, with lawyers giving orders on how interrogations