* According to the 2003 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures, “DOC” is the acronym for the Detention Operations Center, which directs all movements within Guantánamo.
† “Mr. Tough Guy” appears here unredacted.
* It appears from the redacted pronouns here, and becomes clear from unredacted pronouns later in the scene, that this interrogator is female. In the ARB transcript, MOS indicates that a couple of days after the male first sergeant started interrogating him, a female interrogator joined the team. This seems to be the second of the four interrogators who will carry out the “Special Interrogation Plan.” She will become a central character. ARB transcript, 25.
* Very likely because of shackling. Just a few pages before, MOS described how the interrogator “made me stand up, with my back bent because my hands were shackled to my feet and waist and locked to the floor.” The Senate Armed Services Committee found that shackling MOS to the floor was prescribed in his “Special Interrogation Plan.” SASC, 137.
* This incident is well documented in the Schmidt-Furlow report, the DOJ IG’s report, and elsewhere. Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt and Lt. Gen. John Furlow, Army Regulation 15-6: Final Report, Investigation into FBI Allegations of Detainee Abuse at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba Detention Facility (hereinafter cited as Schmidt-Furlow). Schmidt-Furlow, 22–23; DOJ IG, 124. The Schmidt-Furlow Report is available at www.defense.gov/news/jul2005/d20050714report.pdf.
† This might be “the Night Club.” Elsewhere in the manuscript, MOS refers to a detainee who was “a member of the Night Club” and a guard who was “one of the Night Club attendants.” MOS manuscript, 293.
* Court papers filed in MOS’s habeas appeal reference records that may be from this exam: “The medical records document increased low back pain ‘for the past 5 days while in isolation and under more intense interrogation’ ” and note that the pain medication prescribed for him could not be administered throughout July 2003 because he was at the “reservation.” The June 9, 2010, Brief for Appellee is available at https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/brief_for_appellee_-_july_8_2010.pdf.
* Is seems possible, if incredible, that the U.S. government may have here redacted the word “tears.”
† MOS may be referring here to the particular cellblock in Camp Delta where he encountered the Puerto Rican division.
‡ It soon becomes clear that the lead interrogator is accompanied by another female interrogator, as his interrogator had threatened in the previous session.
* That position is likely a forced stoop precipitated by the shackling of his wrists to the floor; see footnotes here and here.
* Like all interrogations, this session would likely be observed from a monitoring room. The 2003 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures mandated that during all interrogations “a JIIF monitor will be located either in a monitor room that is equipped with two-way mirrors and CCTV or in a CCTV only room.” SOP, 14.2.
* The third of the four interrogators who will carry out MOS’s “Special Interrogation Plan,” this masked interrogator is named “Mr. X” in the Schmidt-Furlow, DOJ IG, and Senate Armed Services Committee reports. At his 2005 Administrative Review Board hearing, with characteristic wit, MOS said this interrogator was always covered “like in Saudi Arabia, how the women are covered,” with “openings for his eyes” and “O.J. Simpson gloves on his hands.” ARB transcript, 25–26.
* The Senate Armed Services Committee, which reviewed JTF-GTMO interrogation records, dates what appears to be this interrogation session as July 8, 2003. On that day, the committee found, “Slahi was interrogated by Mr. X and was ‘exposed to variable lighting patterns and rock music, to the tune of Drowning Pool’s ‘Let the Bodies Hit [the] Floor.’ ” SASC, 139.
* Based on MOS’s descriptions of the interrogation sessions that follow, I believe the shifts may work like this: morning/early afternoon shift with the male first sergeant/“I-AM-THE-MAN”/Mr. Tough Guy interrogator; late afternoon/evening shift with the Special Projects Team’s female interrogator; and overnight with the interrogator known as Mr. X.
† This paragraph could refer to the female member of the Special Projects Team; see footnote here.
* Because it encompasses lunch, MOS seems to be describing the routine of his first shift/day shift interrogator.
* As these July 2003 sessions were happening, General Miller was submitting Slahi’s “Special Interrogation Plan” to SOUTHCOM commander General James Hill for approval. On July 18, 2003, Hill forwarded the plan to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The plan was approved by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on July 28, 2003, and signed by Rumsfeld on August 13, 2003. For a detailed account of the development and authorization of MOS’s “Special Interrogation Plan,” see SASC, 135–41.
† This “her” is unredacted, so it seems clear that the afternoon shift is with the female member of the interrogation team. Described here as “the least evil” of the evils he was facing, this is likely the same interrogator he describes as “the least of many evils” a few pages earlier.
When Defense Secretary Rumsfeld issued his original authorization to use interrogation techniques beyond those included in the Army Field Manual, including forced standing, he famously appended the note “I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?” But as Albert Biderman found in his study of coercive interrogation techniques employed by North Korean interrogators during the Korean War, “Returnees who underwent long periods of standing and sitting… report no other experience could be more excruciating.” Biderman explained, “Where the individual is told to stand at attention for long periods an intervening factor is introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the victim himself. The contest becomes, in a way, one of the individual against himself. The motivational strength of the individual is likely to exhaust itself in this internal encounter. Bringing the subject to act ‘against himself’ in this manner has additional advantages for the interrogator. It leads the prisoner to exaggerate the power of the interrogator. As long as the subject remains standing, he is attributing to his captor the power to do something worse to him, but there is actually no showdown of the ability of the interrogator to do so.” See http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torturingdemocracy/documents/19570900.pdf.
* Again, likely shackled. See footnote here.
* The interrogator may be referring to Mauritania, and to then-president Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya. See footnotes here and here.
* This seems to be describing a night shift session with Mr. X. The scene is mentioned again in the final chapter.
* Military, Department of Justice, and Senate investigators have described in more detail several of these threats. According to a footnote in the Schmidt-Furlow report, “On 17 Jul 03 the masked interrogator told that he had a dream about the subject of the second interrogation dying. Specifically he told the subject of the second special interrogation that in the dream he ‘saw four detainees that were chained together at the feet. They dug a hole that was six-feet long, six-feet deep, and four-feet wide. Then he observed the detainees throw a plain, pine casket with the detainee’s identification number painted in orange lowered into the ground.’ The masked interrogator told the detainee that his dream meant that he was never going to leave GTMO unless he started to talk, that he would indeed die here from old age and be buried on ‘Christian… sovereign American soil.’ On 20 Jul 03 the masked interrogator, ‘Mr. X,’ told the subject of the second Special Interrogation Plan that his family was ‘incarcerated.’ ”
The report continues, “The MFR dated 02 Aug 03 indicates that the subject of the second special interrogation had a messenger that day there to ‘deliver a message to him.’ The MFR goes on to state: ‘That message was simple: Interrogator’s colleagues are sick of hearing the same lies over and over and over and are seriously considering washing their hands of him. Once they do so, he will disappear and never be heard from again. Interrogator assured detainee again to us
e his imagination to think of the worst possible scenario he could end up in. He told Detainee that beatings and physical pain are not the worst thing in the world. After all, after being beaten for a while, humans tend to disconnect the mind from the body and make it through. However, there are worse things than physical pain. Interrogator assured Detainee that, eventually, he will talk, because everyone does. But until then, he will very soon disappear down a very dark hole. His very existence will become erased. His electronic files will be deleted from the computer, his paper files will be packed up and filed away, and his existence will be forgotten by all. No one will know what happened to him, and eventually, no one will care.’ ” Schmidt-Furlow, 24–25.
* Context suggests there are two guards, one male and one female, and that the female guard undresses him. An incident in which MOS was “deprived of clothing by a female interrogator” is recorded in the DOJ IG report; the report suggests the date of that session was July 17, 2003. DOJ IG, 124.
* The date, according to the DOJ Inspector General, is now August 2, 2003. The IG reported, “On August 2, 2003, a different military interrogator posing as a Navy Captain from the White House” appeared to MOS. Both the Senate Armed Services Committee report and the DOJ IG report describe the letter he delivered. According to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the letter stated “that his mother had been detained, would be interrogated, and if she were uncooperative she might be transferred to GTMO.” The DOJ IG reported that “the letter referred to ‘the administrative and logistical difficulties her presence would present in this previously all-male environment,’ ” and “The interrogator told Slahi that his family was ‘in danger if he (760) did not cooperate.’ ” The DOJ IG and SASC reports and the army’s Schmidt-Furlow report all make clear that this interrogator was in fact the chief of MOS’s “Special Projects Team,” and the Schmidt-Furlow report indicates he presented himself to MOS as “Captain Collins.” MOS describes him here as crawling from behind the scene; in his book The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), Jess Bravin, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, writes that the Special Projects Team chief who carried out this ruse had taken over MOS’s interrogation a month before, on July 1, 2003, which is the same day General Miller approved his “Special Interrogation Plan.” DOJ IG, 123; SASC, 140; Schmidt-Furlow, 25; Bravin, The Terror Courts, 105.
* The interrogator who posed as “Captain Collins” and led MOS’s Special Projects Team has been identified by name in court documents filed in MOS’s habeas corpus appeal, in footnotes to the Senate Armed Services Committee report, and in other published sources as Lt. Richard Zuley. In The Terror Courts, Jess Bravin describes Zuley as a Chicago police officer and navy reservist. SASC, 135, 136; Bravin, The Terror Courts, 100, 105; Brief for Appellee, 23.
* The time of day would make this the afternoon shift, and the redacted pronouns and later context suggest this is the team’s female interrogator.
* It will become clear, and explicit, that this is Mr. X.
* It could be that MOS’s escorts are pulling or manipulating his shackles to cause pain.
† The Senate Armed Services Committee found that the military’s “Special Interrogation Plan” for MOS included a staged scene in which “military in full riot gear take him from his cell, place him on a watercraft, and drive him around to make him think he had been taken off the island.” Afterward, the committee reported, “Slahi would be taken to Camp Echo,” where his cell and interrogation room—self-contained in a single trailer-like isolation hut—had been “modified in such a way as to reduce as much outside stimuli as possible.” The plan directed that “the doors will be sealed to a point that allows no light to enter the room. The walls may be covered with white paint or paper to further eliminate objects the detainee may concentrate on. The room will contain an eyebolt in the floor and speakers for sound.” The SASC also recorded that an August 21, 2003, e-mail from a JTF-GTMO intelligence specialist to Lt. Richard Zuley reported on the final preparations to the Camp Echo hut: “The email described sealing Slahi’s cell at Camp Echo to ‘prevent light from shining’ in and covering the entire exterior of his cell with [a] tarp to ‘prevent him from making visual contact with guards.’ ”
According to the DOJ Inspector General, the original Special Interrogation Plan that General Miller signed on July 1, 2003, “stated that Slahi would be hooded and flown around Guantanamo Bay for one or two hours in a helicopter to persuade him that he had been moved out of GTMO to a location where ‘the rules have changed.’ ” However, the IG reported, military interrogators told investigators that in the end “they did not use a helicopter because General Miller decided that it was too difficult logistically to pull off, and that too many people on the base would have to know about it to get this done.” Instead, “on August 25, 2003, Slahi was removed from his cell in Camp Delta, fitted with blackout goggles, and taken on a disorienting boat ride during which he was permitted to hear pre-planned deceptive conversations among other passengers.” SASC, 137–38, 140; DOJ IG 122–123, 127.
* Mr. X appears here unredacted in the original.
† Based on court filings in MOS’s habeas corpus appeal, this is likely to be Richard Zuley (“Captain Collins”), MOS’s Special Projects Team chief. Brief for Appellee, 25.
* MOS may be referring here to detainees who were captured along with Ramzi bin al-Shibh on September 11, 2002, and also held for a time in CIA custody before being transferred to Guantánamo. See footnote here.
* MOS’s habeas appeal brief refers to medical records from what could be this exam, describing a corpsman “who treated his injuries while cursing him” and citing “medical records confirming the trauma to Salahi’s chest and face, as ‘1) Fracture ?? 7–8 ribs, 2) Edema of the lower lip.’ ” Brief for Appellee, 26.
* Defense Department publicity materials for Guantánamo indeed emphasize protections for religious expression in Guantánamo; see, e.g., “Ten Facts about Guantanamo,” which states, “The Muslim call to prayer sounds five times a day. Arrows point detainees toward the holy city of Mecca.” See http://www.defense.gov/home/dodupdate/For-the-record/documents/20060914.html. Here MOS seems to be contrasting the situation as he experienced it when he was held in Camp Delta with the situation in his Camp Echo cell.
* MOS’s habeas appeal brief describes what could be the same scene: “After Salahi had been in isolation for a few days, Zuley told him he had to ‘stop denying’ the government’s accusations. While Zuley was talking, the [redacted] man was behind the tarp, cursing and shouting for Zuley to let him in.” Brief for Appellee, 26–27.
* The tone of this interrogation session suggests the lead interrogator may be the same “hateful” first sergeant whom MOS identified in his 2005 ARB hearing as a member of the Special Projects Team. The second interrogator in this scene appears to be the female interrogator who assisted in the earlier sexual assault.
† Threatening prisoners with the specter of abusive interrogations by Israeli or Egyptian agents apparently was commonplace. In 2010 a former Guantánamo military interrogator named Damien Corsetti testified at the military commissions trial of Omar Khadr that during his time at the Bagram air base, interrogations included threats of sending detainees to Israel and Egypt. See http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/omarkhadr/2010/05/05/interrogator_nicknamed_the_monster_remembers_omar_khadr_as_a_child.html.
* The reference here might be to the Mauritanian government and its close cooperation with the U.S. government, and to MOS’s own arrest in Mauritania at the behest of the United States.
* This is corroborated chillingly in government documents. According to the Senate Armed Services Committee, on October 17, 2003, a JTF-GTMO interrogator sent an e-mail to a GTMO Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) psychologist that read, “Slahi told me he is ‘hearing voices’ now.… He is worried as he knows this is not normal.… By the way… is this something that happens to people who have little external stimulu
s such as daylight, human interaction, etc???? seems a little creepy.” The psychologist responded, “Sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations, usually visual rather than auditory, but you never know.… In the dark you create things out of what little you have.” SASC, 140–41.
* The Schmidt-Furlow report places the date of this session as September 8, 2003, noting that interrogation records show that on that date “the subject of the second special interrogation wanted to see ‘Captain Collins’ ” and that the interrogation team “understood that detainee had made an important decision and that the interrogator was anxious to hear what Detainee had to say.” It appears that another member of the Special Projects Team continued to lead the interrogation instead. Schmidt-Furlow, 25.
* The reference here might be to Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who spied for Soviet and then Russian intelligence services from 1979 until his arrest and conviction in 2001.
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