The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [232]
On that basis the interrogators wrote a report about “the anthrax program.” As for el-Sawah’s being the mastermind of any shoe bombing operation, I found out that the military interrogators had said to him: “You’re an explosives expert. If you were to build a shoe bomb, how would you do it?” He had drawn them a diagram. That diagram constituted their “proof.” It turned out that it was a bad drawing, unrepresentative of the shoe bomb Richard Reid used.
I went with FBI colleagues to the interrogators who had extracted the “confession” and told them that, based upon my interrogation, their claims didn’t add up. They were novice interrogators and didn’t understand that you can’t just jump to those kinds of conclusions. They admitted that they had messed up.
Around the time I was interrogating el-Sawah, Matrafi—the head of al-Wafa, whom I had interrogated in the early days at Gitmo with Ed and Andre—was taken by the same specialized military team to a black site (a secret location) and interrogated. Apparently they didn’t get much intelligence from him, so they asked me to come and talk to him again. A member of the team told me, “We know he knows about a threat, but he’s not cooperating. Can you get through to him and tell him to talk to us?” I didn’t have much faith in that specialized military interrogation team after the el-Sawah incident, but I felt that if there really was a threat that Matrafi knew about, I should help.
When I went in he was very angry, and before I could say anything, he said: “I told you everything I knew right at the start. I confessed everything. Why am I here? Why should I talk to you again?”
“I can’t explain Guantánamo. I don’t understand how it’s being run,” I told him. By this time the detainees knew exactly where they were. “But I can tell you that cooperation is always the best tactic, so I recommend you tell them everything.”
“But I already told you everything. Why should I repeat it again? Didn’t you write everything down?”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“The other interrogators just told me to repeat to them everything I told you when you interrogated me, so they can put it in their file.”
“I’m sorry that I wasted your time,” I told him, and walked out. It wasn’t the only time that these inexperienced interrogators tried to “reinterrogate” detainees, telling them simply to repeat what they had told the seasoned interrogators. The point was that they could then claim that their techniques were successful and that they had gotten “intelligence.”
On August 31, 2003, General Miller flew to Iraq to advise those running a prison in Baghdad called Abu Ghraib. Mark Fallon sent a CITF agent along with him, with instructions to warn the officials meeting Miller that use of the techniques he would advocate were not the only way to run interrogations. The general wouldn’t allow the agent into any of his meetings. In April 2004, General Miller became head of all prisons in Iraq that were under U.S. control.
In 2004, pictures of U.S. army personnel abusing detainees in Abu Ghraib were shown around the world. One of the photographs that went around the world was an image of one soldier, Lynndie England, holding a leash attached to the neck of a naked prisoner. Qahtani had endured the same treatment at Gitmo, also under General Miller’s command.
Instructors from the JPRA SERE school also went to Iraq and participated in interrogations using SERE techniques. Col. Steven Kleinman,