Wait.
He saw a tiny piece of metal, just one and a half inches long. On previous inspections, it had appeared to be part of the chassis, but this time the investigator could see that it was welded on. It somehow looked different from the rest of the frame, with a slight variation in color.
The investigator reached for a tool and pried off the sliver of metal. He fixed the light on the spot that had been covered. And his heart leaped.
“Come here!” he yelled out to his colleagues. “I have something!”
• • •
Pastika was in the middle of his devotions at the temple when his cell phone rang. One of his deputies was on the line.
“General, where are you?” the deputy asked. “Are you not in the office?”
“No,” Pastika replied. “I’m praying for the success of the investigation.”
The deputy laughed. “Your prayers have been answered,” he said. “We just found a number on the chassis.”
• • •
The discovery of another VIN number was so far-fetched that more than a few of the investigators suspected there might have been some divine intervention.
The terrorists had unwittingly purchased the wrong kind of van in the wrong country. They had known that Indonesian cars and trucks had two VIN numbers, one stamped on the chassis and the other on the engine. But, under Indonesian law, commercial vehicles like the van were required to have a third number, also stamped on the chassis. The perpetrators had successfully filed down the usual two, but had no inkling that the third even existed.
Perhaps a mundane misstep, but it was another factor that led some officers to see the hand of providence. The bombers hadn’t just missed seeing the number—by virtue of an improbable act, it had become almost impossible for them to have discovered it. A former owner of the van had welded a support strut onto the chassis, and by sheer chance, it had covered the VIN number. That not only hid it from the bombers, but also shielded it from the explosion. The van had been torn to pieces in the blast, but the third VIN number emerged unscathed.
The police ran the number through a computer database and found the names of the vehicle’s previous seven owners. The most recent, Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, had a record. He was a member of Jemaah Islamiyah, the Asian terrorist organization affiliated with al-Qaeda, and the brother of Ali Imron. And now the authorities knew his address.
• • •
The next morning, November 5, teams of Indonesian police raided Amrozi’s home in East Java. The forty-year-old mechanic was sleeping in the rear of the house. When the officers kicked in his door, he made no attempt to flee. Instead, he started to laugh.
“You guys are very clever,” he said with a smile. “How did you find me?”
The authorities swept through the house, quickly locating vital pieces of evidence. They found Amrozi’s cell phone, which had numbers for other conspirators; bags of bomb-making chemicals and the receipts from where they were purchased; training manuals on ambush techniques; and copies of speeches by Osama bin Laden.
Officers handcuffed Amrozi and ushered him outside. He beamed as he was led through the gaggle of investigators, shoved into the back of an armored van, and driven to the police station.
• • •
Amrozi readily confessed. He not only took responsibility for his role in the attack, but also identified other plotters. He was proud of what they had done and seemed to delight in talking about it.
In his confession, he told the police that he hadn’t been near Kuta on the night of the bombing. Instead, he learned that it had been successful the next morning at seven, when he heard a news report on Radio Elshinta.
“I was very happy,” he told the police. “How can I describe it? It was like when I was still a bachelor trying for a girl and you finally get to meet her. It was that sort of excitement. But this was even better.”
Eventually, the police put on a public show of Amrozi’s bizarre grandstanding. Questioned behind glass, he merrily recounted the bombing as dozens of reporters and photographers listened in. He described the allure of Jemaah Islamiyah and bin Laden as well as his own dedication to jihad.
He pointed at the journalists. “These are the sort of people I wanted to kill,” he said.
• • •
The debate about revving up the interrogation of al-Qahtani to harsh new levels was going nowhere. Dunlavey’s request to establish three ascending categories of aggressive techniques had been sent up the line; discussions had been held, but after a month, no decisions had been made.
By November, Dunlavey was gone, replaced by General Miller. His superior, General Tom Hill, the SOUTHCOM commander, had taken responsibility for consulting Rumsfeld about the proposals.5 Finally, on November 12, Hill gave a verbal approval for the use of Category I and Category II techniques. That meant interrogators could yell at or deceive detainees, force them to assume stress positions, question them for twenty hours at a time, take away their clothes, forcibly shave them, and turn their phobias against them. But there would be no waterboarding of Guantanamo detainees, no death threats, no exposure to frigid cold.
That day, military intelligence officials at Guantanamo wrote an interrogation strategy for al-Qahtani, and it went far beyond anything approved by Hill. Entitled the Special Interrogation Plan, it involved four phases, not just three. Before questioning began, al-Qahtani would have both his beard and hair forcibly shaved. During the first stage of the interrogation, he would be subjected to pressures such as stress positions but would be forbidden to talk. If he tried to speak, the interrogators would tape his mouth shut. Military dogs would be brought into the room to frighten him. Then, when al-Qahtani was allowed to speak, the proposal said, he would be eager to “tell all.”
The second phase would not be controversial—a government translator would pose as a fellow detainee and try to pry out his secrets. Phase three would employ the techniques requested by Dunlavey in the October 11 memo.
Then, phase four: torture. American soldiers would not personally inflict pain on al-Qahtani. Instead, he would be shipped out of Guantanamo, temporarily or permanently, to either Egypt or Jordan, where beatings, burnings, and other abuses were routinely deployed. The strategy “would allow those countries to employ interrogation techniques that will enable them to obtain the requisite information,” the plan said.
General Miller was all for it. The director of intelligence at Guantanamo, Lieutenant Colonel Phifer, sent him an e-mail within hours, informing Miller that interrogators would begin using the techniques in two days.
• • •
There were times when Britt Mallow wanted to jab a pencil in someone’s eye.
Mallow, the commander of the Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantanamo, had been battling the Pentagon and the intelligence unit for months. At the detention center, he had witnessed some of the asinine interrogations conducted by young, poorly trained soldiers. No one had yet seemed to notice that screaming, “Where is bin Laden?” at detainees had zero effect.
Then those same interrogators who had resorted to contrivances started using tactics that looked as though they had been lifted from 24, the counterterrorism television show. Flashing lights, loud music, stress positions—the approach was ridiculous. Worse than ridiculous. Counterproductive.
Mallow had tried to persuade Dunlavey that the methods used by the criminal investigators were the most fruitful. But the general had just waved him away, captivated by the false glories of an intelligence unit that brandished information obtained by criminal investigators as its own.
Dunlavey’s false claims of success climbed up the line of command to the Pentagon, giving credence to the belief that screaming and jumping were strong components of a national defense. Mallow’s disparagement of that approach had earned him some screams of his own—from get-tough-on-terrorists Defense Department bureaucrats.
That’s when he hit the slow burn—or not so slow. These suits who had never questioned any
one outside of a job interview, who had never seen combat, who had never confronted the enemy, had the arrogance to tell the military officers trained for the job to butt out.
Then, in mid-November, Mallow saw Dunlavey’s October request to allow measures that were even more severe to loosen al-Qahtani’s tongue. The reason for the appeal: because the already rough treatment being meted out wasn’t working.
No kidding.
It was the proverbial slippery slope. Rather than acknowledging defeat, the intelligence officers wanted to double down on a failed approach. Harsh interrogations would work, they were arguing, if only they were harsher.
This madness had to be stopped, Mallow decided. On November 14, he sent an e-mail to Miller saying that he strongly opposed the tactics described in the Dunlavey proposal.
“I feel they will be largely ineffective, and that they will have serious negative material and legal effects on our investigations,” he wrote. “I am also extremely concerned that the use of many of these techniques will open any military members up for criminal charges.”
Mallow had no way of knowing that an even more disturbing solution was in the making—the just-written Special Interrogation Plan that was scheduled to be used on al-Qahtani within the next twenty-four hours.
• • •
The skies were overcast in Ottawa that same day as Colin Powell led an eleven-member diplomatic contingent to the headquarters of the Foreign Affairs Ministry. It was Powell’s first formal visit with senior Canadian officials, and the main topic of discussion was expected to be Iraq.
Six days earlier, the U.N. Security Council had unanimously approved Resolution 1441, declaring Iraq in breach of its cease-fire agreement from the Gulf War and offering Saddam a final opportunity to give up his weapons. Powell had traveled to Ottawa in part to ask, without suggesting specifics, what Canadian officials would be willing to contribute to a coalition military force in the event an invasion of Iraq proved necessary.
A working lunch had been scheduled, but first Powell met with Bill Graham, the foreign minister. Powell opened with the usual diplomatic fare about the important friendship of the two countries, then acknowledged recent frictions that had marred it—an American program that required all Canadians of Arab descent to be fingerprinted and photographed before being admitted to the country, the arrest and detention of a Canadian hunter who had wandered across the border carrying a rifle, the deportation of Maher Arar to Syria.
“But we should never lose sight of the great overall relationship,” he said, citing the high volume of trade and tourism between the two countries.
“Well, thank you, Mr. Powell,” Graham said. “And let me welcome you and extend my government’s deepest appreciation for your visit today.”
After dispensing with the niceties, the two men ranged over the international scene, discussing Iraq, North Korea, border restrictions, and security issues.
The last topic gave Graham the opening he needed to return to the topic of Maher Arar. The press had been lambasting Ottawa about the Arar case, he said, with commentators demanding to know why America had deported a Canadian to Syria. Graham wanted to know the answer himself.
“Mr. Powell,” Graham said. “We believe very strongly in security. But security will only come if our own citizens believe that it is being handled in a way where the right balance is being struck.”
Graham leaned on his elbows. “We don’t believe the balance was maintained here.”
“I understand your concern,” Powell said, “But we had evidence about Mr. Arar’s contacts and we were justified in doing what we did. He was a national security threat to the United States of America, which we were entitled to ascertain in our own sovereign right.”
As close as Washington’s relationship was with Ottawa, Powell said, the Canadians were not in the position to tell the Bush administration which individuals were or were not security threats.
“Well, look,” Graham said, “we are protesting that you did this.”
The United States had the absolute right to deport Arar the way it did, Powell responded. “And by the way,” he added, “your guys knew what we were doing all along. They gave a go-ahead.”
What the hell? Graham had heard nothing of the kind. On the contrary, he had been told that no one in the government even knew that Arar had been shipped to Syria until days after it had happened.
“Okay,” Graham said, “if somebody by a wink or a nod or something explicit said something, tell us who it is and we can go to that person and find out what happened.”
Powell nodded solemnly. “I’ll see what we can do.”
• • •
Two experienced FBI interrogators read the new plan for al-Qahtani with alarm. Where did the military come up with these ideas?
The agents poked around and were incredulous when they discovered that the “force him not to speak and then he’ll tell all” theory came from a single army translator. Other than the crackpot notion of a linguist with zero understanding of interrogation, the military had no data, no study—nothing—to back it up.
The scariest part of the initiative, though, was the provision in phase four that would allow for detainees to be shipped to Middle Eastern countries where they were sure to be tortured. Never mind that it was wrongheaded—torture just plain didn’t work—it crossed the line from foolish to illegal.
If the agents were disturbed by the contents of the plan, they were even more taken aback by the attitude of the people who would be following the proposed rules. They attended a meeting to discuss the policy with their military counterparts, who laughed and joked as they showed an undisguised glee about its cruelty.
The circuslike atmosphere of the meeting put the FBI agents on edge. Was it the baseless expectation that they might be able to pry information out of al-Qahtani that aroused the military interrogators’ enthusiasm? Or was it the anticipation of revenge, the opportunity to hurt a man who had been part of the plot that murdered thousands of their fellow citizens?
The two agents sent a memo to Washington. If this plan was not overhauled, and if a decision was made to implement the tactics that it authorized, their people in Guantanamo would have nothing to do with it.
In private discussions, members of the full Criminal Investigative Task Force were even blunter. If military intelligence officials tried to carry out phase four, then the agents would have to arrest them.
• • •
The explosion of anger from law enforcement prompted General Miller to postpone the execution of the Special Interrogation Plan and instead order a review. In his recent e-mail, Britt Mallow had suggested that the intelligence unit and criminal investigators work together in developing a common strategy based on the traditional relationship-building approach. Miller gave the go-ahead for the two sides to hammer out an agreement.
The result was a hybrid that combined ideas from both groups. The law enforcement approach would be pursued for about a week. If that didn’t work, the military’s plan would be put into effect, minus some of its harsher provisions.
One of the criminal investigators told his colleagues that the compromise was the best they could hope for—the “lesser of two evils.” Others disagreed, saying that if they accepted it, the military would assume the agents were giving their blessing to the remaining abusive techniques.
In the end, nobody was happy. The military interrogators grumbled that they wanted to reject any proposal that excluded SERE techniques and the option of sending al-Qahtani to the Middle East for torture. Inflicting severe pain, one officer said to an agent, worked with terrorists.
“Haven’t you seen 24?” he asked.
• • •
On November 21 in the Czech Republic, Bill Graham was wandering through the Prague Conference Center on the lookout for Colin Powell. It was a challenging hunt—the center was packed with crowds of dignitaries attending the first NATO summit since the Bali massacre and only the second since 9/11.
Fro
m the time of the last meeting between Graham and his American counterpart, the Canadian foreign minister had angrily instructed his aides to find out who had approved of Maher Arar’s deportation to Syria. But everyone contacted—from Graham’s own department, the Mounties, Canadian intelligence—insisted that they had known nothing of the Americans’ plans.
Finally, Graham located Powell and pulled him aside.
“Look, I want to speak to you for a couple of minutes about the troubling issues around Mr. Arar,” Graham said. “My information still is that nobody in Canada had any participation in the decision that he be taken to Syria. Would you please continue looking into this?”
“Bill,” Powell replied, “my answer is exactly the same. You are not getting the straight goods from your guys. I am telling you my information is that there were people involved in this decision in Canada.”
Graham nodded. But again, he asked Powell to identify them. The case was becoming a cause célèbre in Canada, and he needed to tamp down the furor. Powell again promised to do his best to get a name.
The two shook hands and Powell disappeared into the sea of faces. Graham boiled; someone in his government was lying. When he returned to Ottawa, he was going to pound some tables—his aides were going to find this person!
Or were they? Graham couldn’t shake a nagging doubt. What if the Canadian officials were telling the truth? What if Powell was wrong, and the United States had sent Arar to the Middle East without telling anyone? What if this citizen had been snatched away from his home and sent to a Syrian prison based on bad intelligence?
No trial, no chance to defend himself, Graham thought. What chance did Arar have for justice in this Kafkaesque situation?
• • •
At a private room in another part of the Prague Center, Bush met with Blair and a few of his top subordinates.
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