by Mark Fallon
“I’m not on your team,” I said. “I’ve got a different chain of command. And we’re not going to concur with you or approve this. We simply disagree with the course of action that you’ve taken.”
He didn’t like that answer and threatened to deny me access to the intel his team was gathering. I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over that. He clearly had no idea I was reading the interrogation logs.
On January 16, after I had briefed Mora on my meeting with Miller, he drafted a memo to Jim Haynes, stating he would officially document the legal view that the approved techniques were unlawful. In the buttoned-up Pentagon legal universe, this was the equivalent of the nuclear option. Mora’s memo would document the legal opinion of a senior at the Office of General Counsel that the EITs were clearly cruel and likely torture. This wasn’t something that could be easily ignored at the top levels of the Pentagon. Mora had the courage and character to say, “Hell no!”
Mora also had Haynes backed into a corner, or so it seemed. Just as Dunlavey and Miller were chasing their third stars, so Haynes wanted to be appointed as a federal judge. A written legal opinion like this from Mora could derail his aspirations. To forestall a black mark like that, Haynes had Rumsfeld suspend the EITs immediately, but once again, the relief was only temporary.
As soon as he suspended the program, Rumsfeld started looking for another way to create legal cover so he could reinstate it. He decided to appoint a “working group” to investigate Mora’s claims, and those of other lawyers, that the interrogation tactics in question constituted cruel, abusive behavior—if not outright torture. Inside the Beltway, “working groups” are famous for providing cover for the person who appoints them, and this one was no exception. The whole process was a whitewash. The working group included Dave Becker, one of the people who designed the program at Gitmo, and Richard Shiffrin, the lawyer who was the first person in the Department of Defense’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to ask for information about SERE tactics.
To be sure, senior military lawyers opposed to the proposed interrogations tactics were given free license to weigh in against them. Among other issues, they pointed out that sanctioning these techniques would have a negative effect on the treatment of US military personnel captured as POWs and would adversely affect both human collection efforts and foreign-enemy force surrenders. During WWII, for example, many German troops surrendered to Americans rather than Russians, because they thought they’d get better treatment. Having an enemy fight to the death, rather than surrender, places troops at greater risk. It also negates intel collection from captured enemies, because the number of soldiers captured is very few.
But basically that was all cover for a predetermined outcome. Rumsfeld’s working group ignored all the Department of Defense lawyers, relying instead on the White House Office of Legal Counsel arguments authored by John Yoo, which held that only serious physical injury, such as organ failure, the impairment of bodily functions, or death were prohibited.
Captain Jane Dalton, lawyer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was “very angry” that the working group would use the OLC legal analysis rather than the Pentagon’s legal interpretation. The group, she said, had been “geared toward a particular conclusion.”
When Mora saw a draft version of the report, he said it contained “profound mistakes in its legal analysis, in large measure because of its reliance on the flawed OLC memo.” Mora’s advice to Haynes: Put the flawed report “in a drawer and never [let it] see the light of day.”
This time, Mora believed his advice really had been taken, because he never saw a final version. In fact, the report approving (or “reapproving,” to be more exact) torture techniques was stealthily finalized on April 4, 2003, but with one significant change: the word “SERE,” which had been on the other drafts, was omitted. Maybe that was just a last-minute typographical error, but all subsequent actions suggest another explanation: Rumsfeld was intent on treating detainees harshly, and Haynes and others were doing everything they could to give the secretary of defense what he wanted. Omitting “SERE” wouldn’t change a damn thing, but it might help the approval fly under the radar. And it did just that.
CHAPTER 10
* * *
THE AMERICAN AZKABAN
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Who knows? But as this whole working-group drama was playing out to what I’m convinced was a predetermined end, Geoffrey Miller was already planning to expand the Battle Lab’s experiments. On January 16, 2003, as we were flying back from our unsuccessful meeting with him, Miller submitted a request to administer the EIT program developed for al-Qahtani on another detainee.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi had turned himself in XX XXXXXXXXXXX authorities in November 2001 for questioning with regard to the turn-of-the-century Millennium Plot, a series of unsuccessful al-Qaeda attacks planned for around the end of 1999 and early 2000. The evidence was circumstantial: Slahi had traveled briefly to Afghanistan just before the Soviets departed, ready to fight for Al Qaeda, and he had been living in Montreal in late 2000, where he attended the same mosque as Ahmed Ressam, who would ultimately be convicted of plotting to attack Los Angeles International Airport with explosives in late December 1999. XXXXXXXXXXX officials found nothing to suggest Slahi had aided Ressam, but they nonetheless passed him off to the CIA, which promptly rendered Slahi XX XXXXXXX X XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXX XXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX. Slahi was held there for eight months, during which time he gave no credible intel or incriminating evidence. Figuring he was a dead end, the CIA turned Slahi over to US military custody in Afghanistan.
Slahi’s story—abducted and tortured without anything close to the hard evidence that would be legally required to detain him in the US—was harrowing, but it wasn’t unique. XXXXXXXXX XX XXXXX US military bases became dumping grounds for the CIA’s cast-offs. Human beings were being bought, sold, and traded in the name of public safety and national security. They were taken from their families, wives, and children—often publicly kidnapped from streets or their homes. Operating in the shadows, the CIA used its influence and unlimited funding to capture and interrogate anyone it suspected. Soon the Agency was left with broken and beaten human beings with tales of brutal treatment. Risking exposure, the CIA pushed many of those prisoners into the military detainee system. XXXX XXXX XXXX XX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX
Slahi’s journey was typical. In July 2002 he landed in Bagram, the base that had sent personnel to Gitmo a few months previous to receive training in SERE tactics. New prisoners at Bagram arrived wearing hoods or blackout goggles and earmuffs, and were forcibly and immediately stripped of their clothes. While still hooded, with guards screaming at them, detainees would have their buttocks spread and cavities roughly searched. Many detainees shook as their interrogators screamed questions at them, not waiting for responses. Following additional interrogation in Bagram, Slahi was sent to Guantanamo a few weeks later. When he arrived at Gitmo on August 5, 2002, he weighed only 109 pounds and was given the internment serial number 760.
Slahi’s arrival was also indicative of how Gitmo became a grotesque human scrap yard. Like XXX XXXXXXXXXXX, many of the detainees who ended up at Guantanamo had already been subjected to CIA and CIA-rendered interrogation before arriving. XXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXX X XXXXX XXXX XXXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XXXX XX XXXXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXX XXXXX XX XXXXXXXXXX. Basically, they would do anything to get the treatment to stop. Combined with the detainees US forces bought from Afghan warlords or tribes, Gitmo hardly was housing the worst of the worst. More like the leftovers. A detainee such as al-Qahtani, someone with real potential for intelligence gathering, was a rarity at Gitmo.
Slahi didn’t rise to anything like al-Qahtani’s level, but while hard evidence was slim to nonexistent in Slahi’s case, there were deemed enough connections around him that he deserved a second look. From what we could gather, he was related to Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, who was a senior Al Qaeda figure and member of the group’s inner Shura Council. In 1990, Slahi had also gone t
o college in Germany, during which time he had attended a mosque led by an imam associated with Egyptian Islamic jihad. This apparently radicalized him sufficiently that he joined the Mauritanian Muslim Brotherhood. Then, in 1991, Slahi had spent time at the radical al-Farouq training camp in Afghanistan, during which time he also swore an oath to Osama bin Laden. He joined jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet-sponsored government as well as in Bosnia. He was also believed to have served as an Al Qaeda recruiter in Europe. There was also quite a bit of circumstantial information that placed him in the same areas as other suspects. What’s more, we had some raw intelligence that suggested Slahi might have been involved in financial transactions with suspected Al Qaeda figures.
All that was enough for Slahi to be assigned to our CITF Planners and Financiers Unit to determine if there was enough actual evidence of nefarious activity to begin moving his case toward trial by the military tribunal, and we began to draw up an interrogation plan that employed our rapport-based techniques. Geoffrey Miller, though, had other ideas. By January 2003 he had picked up that Slahi had the potential to provide useful intel, and to get it out of him, his team developed an interrogation plan for Slahi that mirrored al-Qahtani’s: dogs, water, forced grooming, denial of praying, blasting of music, environmental manipulation, and isolation.
Miller wasn’t able to implement his plan immediately. Remember, the ruckus caused by Alberto Mora at the Pentagon had forced Jim Haynes and Donald Rumsfeld to temporarily withdraw approval for the EITs. That spring, however, after Rumsfeld had papered over Mora’s objections with the report from his phony working group report, Miller got back in the game, and now he was ready to treat Slahi even more harshly. The new Behavior Management Plan proposed still crueler and more ridiculous treatment. By August 2003 Rumsfeld seemed confident that Mora’s storm had blown over and approved Miller’s new agenda.
Slahi was transferred into isolation and subjected to sensory deprivation. His few “comfort items,” including legal papers and letters from his mother, were seized, and his cell was kept ice cold to add to his discomfort. Just as with al-Qahtani, JTF-GTMO’s Battle Lab approach to Slahi was a failure. It produced no new information except what Slahi fabricated to ease his pain. Never willing to admit defeat, Miller’s answer was to ramp things up and request approval for even harsher and more controversial techniques. The JTF-GTMO psychologists, interrogators, and other various self-appointed experts—people who had never even participated in intel exploitation until the previous year—had convinced each other they had developed a better way to extract the truth. If “breaking” a detainee didn’t do the job the first time around, they would just break him a little harder at every subsequent round.
This time, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which by now had joined JTF-GTMO’s interrogations, developed a plan for Slahi that centered on sexual assault, degradation, and religious humiliation. On July 1, 2003, Miller forwarded the new special interrogation plan up the chain of command, starting with SOUTHCOM. The general was going to show that he had more teeth than Slahi had ass.
Once again, Miller’s abusive plans had supporters in high places. SOLIC’s Marshall Billingslea, the same man who had told Mallow and Gelles they didn’t know anything about interrogation, sent a handwritten note to Rumsfeld: “OGC concurs that this is legal. We don’t see any policy issues with these interrogation techniques. Recommend you authorize.” Rumsfeld did just that, putting his stamp of approval on the plan on August 1, exactly one year after the White House’s August 2002 memo had very quietly legalized torture tactics.
The JTF-GTMO pseudo-BSCT intended to “condition” the detainee by making him respond to tasks. Slahi later gave testimony about his treatment. His account from his book Guantanamo Diary, which follows, was never officially confirmed, but it does conform to the methods and goals devised by the Gitmo pseudo-crew. At one point, he said, he was kept for days in a “secret place” in complete darkness and isolation:
I must not know the difference between day and night. I couldn’t tell a thing about days going by or time passing; my time consisted of a crazy darkness all the time. My diet times were deliberately messed up. I was starved for long periods and then given food but not time to eat.
“You have three minutes: Eat!” a guard would yell at me, and then after about half a minute he would grab the plate. “You’re done!” And then it was the opposite extreme: I was given too much food and a guard came into my cell and forced me to eat all of it. When I said “I need water” because the food got stuck in my throat, he punished me by making me drink two 25-ounce water bottles.
“I can’t drink,” I said when my abdomen felt as if it was going to explode. But [omitted] screamed and threatened me, pushing me against the wall and raising his hand to hit me. I figured drinking would be better, and I drank until I vomited.
All the guards were masked in Halloween-like masks, and so were the Medics, and the guards were briefed that I was a high-level, smart-beyond-belief terrorist.
“You know who you are?” said [omitted] friend. “You’re a terrorist who helped kill 3,000 people!”
“Indeed I am!” I answered. I realized it was futile to discuss my case with a guard.
Slahi was also subject to sleep deprivation, but rather than being moved to a new cell every few hours, he was forced to drink a 25-ounce bottle of water every hour or two:
The consequences were devastating. I couldn’t close my eyes for more than ten minutes because I was sitting most of the time in the bathroom. Later on, after the tension was relieved, I asked one of the guards, “Why the water diet? Why don’t you just make me stay awake by standing up, like in [omitted]?”
“Psychologically it’s devastating to make someone stay awake on his own, without ordering him,” said [omitted]. “Believe me, you haven’t seen anything. We have put detainees naked under the shower for days, eating, pissing, and shitting in the shower!”
Slahi reported that he was only occasionally hit, but JTF-GTMO clearly was trying as hard as they could to turn him into a broken human. Slahi was stripped naked and forced to stand. He was bent over so his anal cavity could be searched—yet another attempt to humiliate and sexually denigrate him. Other times, Slahi was beaten. Medical records documented rib contusions and cuts on his lip and head. He was placed in isolation, water was poured over his head, and he was subjected to temperature extremes, both cold and hot. Interrogators and guards bombarded him with strobe lights and blasting rock music to keep him awake. He was often kept in a room called the freezer. At other times, he was handcuffed to the floor with the air conditioner turned off and the hot tropical sun baking his cell.
The pseudo-BSCT also tried to use sexual taboos and violence to break Slahi. They told him his mother was going to be arrested and brought to Guantanamo, intimating that she would be brutally raped by the male prisoners. They had female interrogators pull off their shirts, rub their breasts on him, and grab his genitals. Devoutly religious, Slahi believed he was being raped.
One time Slahi was hooded and taken out into Guantanamo Bay in a boat for a mock execution. Interrogators told him, in Arabic, about how he was going to be killed and dumped overboard. That was enough to get him to piss his pants. Dunlavey’s tenure had been notable for gross incompetence. Under Miller, that had been replaced by calculated sadism.
Later, resigned to spending his life in detention but hoping to stop the abuse, Slahi agreed to a confession:
“We know you came to Canada to bomb the U.S.,” said [omitted].
“And what was my evil plan?”
“Maybe not exactly to harm the U.S., but to attack the CN Tower in Toronto?” he said. I was thinking, Is the guy crazy? I’ve never heard of such a tower.
“You realize if I admit to such a thing I have to involve other people? What if it turns out I was lying?” I said.
“So what? We know your friends are bad, so if they get arrested, even if you lie about [omitted] it doesn’t matter, because they’re b
ad.” I thought, “What an asshole! He wants to lock up innocent people just because they’re Muslim Arabs! That’s nuts!” so [omitted] very much told me a precise crime I could admit that would comply with the Intel theory.
Slahi wasn’t the only detainee being broken beyond all humane standards, for virtually no intel reward. On October 1, 2003, just days after Rumsfeld approved the plan for Slahi, Gitmo interrogators were also working hard to break another detainee, named Mohammed Jawad. He had become the focus of attention after being charged in Afghanistan with throwing a grenade at a military convoy, killing two Americans. After initially denying he was involved in the attack, Jawad “admitted” to the charge after Afghani authorities threatened to kill him and his family. He was sent to Gitmo, and when he arrived, he had a bone scan done that estimated his age at seventeen years old. (It is common in that part of the world not to keep strict track of age.) His family estimated he was much younger, and he sure looked it. Whatever his age—and the truthfulness of his confession—Jawad could have been only an extremely low-level foot soldier, someone very unlikely to have any valuable information. Nonetheless, he had confessed to killing two Americans, so interrogating him became a higher priority than spending resources on the many other detainees who had ended up at Gitmo purely through bad luck or an Afghan warlord’s spite.
After keeping Jawad for weeks in solitary confinement in darkness, one of the interrogators who had spent little time with Jawad before witnessed him having conversations with posters on the wall, not uncommon among detainees. When this same interrogator asked Slahi what it was like when he was held in dark isolation, he reported hearing voices that were “clear as crystal,” including casual family conversation and someone reading the Koran in a heavenly voice. (Slahi also claimed the guards tried to exploit his state, talking to him through the plumbing and encouraging him to attack other guards.) Concerned about Jawad’s mental state, the interrogator emailed Diane Zierhoffer, the psychologist providing guidance on the boy’s case. “It seems a little creepy,” he wrote, wondering if the cause might be isolation from human contact and sunlight.