Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  After a tour of the kitchens, we were shown the state-of-the-art medical facilities, which offered detainees at least as high a standard of healthcare as American veterans returning from Afghanistan. A library for the detainees included Arabic editions of Harry Potter. Newly built cells had arrows stencilled into the floor facing towards Mecca and were all equipped with a copy of the Koran. Surgical masks had also been handed out, which the detainees hung from the ceiling to protect their holy books from ever coming into contact with the ground. In a further demonstration of tolerance towards Islam, loudspeakers were dotted around the detention centre from which the call to prayer was broadcast five times a day.

  At the end of the briefings, we were finally allowed behind the wire, where virtually all the 700 inmates were bearded and wore crocheted prayer caps and flip-flops. White overalls indicated compliant prisoners who did not pose much of a threat to the guards – the majority – and orange clothing marked out supposed troublemakers. At the time of our visit, in late 2003, none of the inmates had been granted access to a lawyer or even told where they were being held. No one had been charged with any crimes, and some faced the prospect of spending the rest of their lives at Guantanamo without ever getting their day in court.

  Ahead of time, we were warned that our visit would come to an immediate end if any of us tried to speak or communicate in any way with the detainees. Today, however, it was a squawking warning siren and the panicked shouts of the prison warden that brought it to a premature conclusion. Rushed from the facility, we were told that there had been some kind of security breach, and it was no longer safe for us to continue our tour. Later, however, we learnt that the siren normally sounded when an inmate attempted to commit suicide – or made a ‘gesture towards suicide’, in the terminology favoured by the Pentagon.

  In the face of criticism from international human-rights groups, our Pentagon handlers aimed to demonstrate that compassion was being shown towards their captives. But they also left us in no doubt that the enemy combatants were the ‘worst of the worst’, as Donald Rumsfeld had described them. A reservist drafted in from the mainland, where he ran a prison in the Midwest, put it succinctly: ‘I have no doubt in my mind that if they had the chance they would kill us all. They’d kill you in a heartbeat. They’d kill women and children. They’d burn down our houses and destroy our way of life. That’s their intent.’

  More sympathetic was the camp’s new Muslim chaplain, a Chinese-American called Captain James Yee, who wore the Stars and Stripes on his sleeve, an Islamic crescent on his military cap and carried around a copy of the Koran wherever he went. A former Lutheran who converted to Islam during the first Gulf War, Captain Yee now provided pastoral care for the inmates and probably spent more time in conversation with them than any other American on the base.

  ‘As a Muslim, do you think it is moral that people are being held without charge?’ I asked him.

  ‘I try not to think about the idea of being charged or not charged,’ he replied, rather vaguely. ‘Whether they are charged or not, I can’t control that. But what I can control is … helping them get through every day.’

  Next up was a meeting with the head of the detention facilities, Geoffrey D. Miller, a two-star general who spoke fluent war on terrorism and had a penchant for quoting Thomas Jefferson: ‘the price of freedom is eternal vigilance’. Straight out of central casting, he made me think that the first question I should ask was ‘Did you order the Code Red?’. To which he presumably would have replied, ‘You’re goddamn right I did!’

  But, rather than ventriloquise Jack Nicholson, Miller presented himself as a benevolent reformer, mindful of both the sensibilities of his Muslim inmates and the criticisms of humanrights groups. ‘Did you see those kitchens?’ he asked. ‘Has the lieutenant colonel been taking good care of you?’

  He was also obliging enough to offer up a global scoop. Guantanamo Bay housed three juvenile enemy combatants, aged between 13 and 15, who were kept in a prison annex called Camp Iguana. It had the feel of a kind of terroristic crèche, with a small play area and a panoramic ocean view – something of an oddity for children who had grown up in landlocked Afghanistan. Miller announced that these legal castaways were about to be set free. Nothing numbs the inquisitive impulses of a journalist quite as instantly as a spoon-fed exclusive, so we dutifully went off to break the news to our editors at home.

  Throughout the trip, we were fed other titbits of information, all of which were designed to show that the conditions at Gitmo were nowhere near as bad as was widely thought at the time. The message throughout this Pentagon PR offensive was that ‘America’s Caribbean gulag’ was getting an unfair rap. My favourite nugget was delivered by our Halle Berry lookalike. One morning, as we drove in our school bus past the golden arches of McDonald’s, she chirpily pointed out that detainees who provided interrogators with actionable intelligence got a fast-food reward: a Happy Meal from Guantanamo. This was presented as a key interrogation tool, although she was unable to say whether the meal came with a small moulded toy.

  None of us swallowed this, of course, and I suspect it actually added to our increasingly mutinous mood. Already, we were aggrieved that the Pentagon trip came with such prohibitive restrictions. We were not allowed to speak to inmates – which was understandable – or to film anything behind the wire. Instead, we were given Pentagon ‘B-roll’, as it is called: stock generic shots that showed the stainless-steel operating theatres, and the arrows on the floors of the cells and the copies of the Koran. Everything that the Pentagon wanted us to see and broadcast to the rest of the world.

  The only shot of the detention centre we were allowed to take for ourselves was from outside the wire – and one that featured in virtually every television report filed from Guantanamo – showing me entering through the gate. Under the conditions that news organisations signed up to ahead of time, and had long been fighting, the Pentagon could review our footage and delete sections that it deemed infringed the guidelines. Our prime reason for travelling to Guantanamo Bay had been to see the newly refurbished building on the base where the first military tribunals were about to start, but again we were not even allowed inside. Moreover, the windows had been fitted with mirror glass. The secrecy was all the more disconcerting given that the Pentagon had trumpeted the supposed transparency of the military-tribunal process.

  Within days of leaving Guantanamo, our interview with the Muslim chaplain suddenly became part of a larger news story. Captain Yee, the quiet chaplain who had been put forward as a poster boy of the Pentagon’s goodwill, was suddenly arrested and imprisoned on charges of mutiny, aiding the enemy and espionage. He had been recorded making regular phone calls to Damascus. He kept a personal journal that included a log of alleged atrocities against inmates, whom he apparently referred to as his brethren. Information was leaked to the press that he kept hand-drawn sketches of prison quarters along with notes of what was said during interrogations.

  As further evidence of his disloyalty, Yee was reluctant to eat in the company of his fellow West Point-trained officers. Added together, the evidence was enough to persuade his one-time cheerleaders to manacle him in a so-called ‘three-piece suit’ – a primitive set of wrist and ankle shackles, connected to a heavy leather belt. Then he was thrown into the navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was held in solitary confinement for 76 days.

  Not for the first time in post-9/11 America, the evidence did not survive close scrutiny. The calls to Damascus were easily explained. His wife was Palestinian-born and had decided to await his return from Cuba with her Syria-based family. Yee did not eat with his fellow officers because the mess hall did not serve halal meat. As for the journal, Yee simply chronicled what he saw. Rather, the case against Yee seemed to be based on groundless suspicions raised by colleagues who thought he spent too much time with inmates and seemed overly sympathetic towards their plight. Eventually, the case against him collapsed, and he was granted an honourable discharge. To
this day, he is awaiting an apology from the Pentagon.

  Neither was Major General Geoffrey D. Miller quite the forward-thinking reformer that the Pentagon would have us believe. Hand-picked by Donald Rumsfeld to generate more actionable intelligence from the Guantanamo inmates, he brought in expansive new guidelines granting interrogators much more latitude. Dogs were allowed to frighten detainees. They were stripped naked. The new guidelines also allowed for the use of stress positions.

  Miller had also been the driving force behind the prosecution of Captain Yee, one of the few officers to voice concerns about the tough new regime. Then still fairly obscure, Miller achieved much wider fame when he became a central figure in the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq. He had first visited the prison in 2003 with the apparent aim of ‘Gitmo-ising’ the facility and later went on to oversee it. Whether by coincidence or design, the first of the infamous pictures showing military policemen desecrating Iraqi prisoners were taken shortly after Miller’s first visit.

  As for the Happy Meals at Guantanamo, it soon emerged that interrogators preferred a very different menu of techniques to extract information. Allegations surfaced of inmates being taunted by female interrogators and prostitutes, who flashed G-strings, wore miniskirts and smeared fake menstrual blood on the cheeks of prisoners. Waterboarding, a form of torture that simulates drowning by pouring water into the breathing passages, was also used, a technique once favoured by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

  Back in Washington a few months later, I ended up having dinner with the military spokeswoman who had been our guide. She was the most charming company, and she revealed that after leaving the military she ideally wanted to become a novelist: not quite the radical career change that once it might have seemed.

  After 9/11, and especially in the run-up to the Iraq war, the character of Correspondentland changed completely. A BBC colleague who accompanied me on that trip to Guantanamo was part of a new breed of journalists who had suddenly come into their own. Not only was he fluent in American politics but he was also an expert in nuclear proliferation, working in his spare time on an exposé of A. Q. Khan, the founding father of Pakistan’s nuclear capability – the ‘Islamic bomb’, as it was often called – who was believed to be trading secrets to rogue states such as North Korea and Libya.

  Though we all tried to catch up by replenishing our Rolodexes with the names of spooks, academics who specialised in proliferation issues and chemical, biological and nuclear weapons experts, these kinds of journalists were way out in front, since they had courted them for years. Security specialists with good contacts in the intelligence community were at a premium. So, too, were South Asian hands who knew their way around Afghanistan and Pakistan. Former Kabul correspondents, who had been neglected for more than a decade after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union, found themselves instantly rehabilitated and heading back to the Hindu Kush.

  In this reordered hierarchy, Arabists vaulted to the top: correspondents who could pronounce, remember and link the names of terrorist suspects, and read for themselves the jihadist websites that fired their imaginations. Journalism had a new caste system, and previously obscure reporters rapidly found themselves in high demand. Washington had always tended to favour show ponies. Now, workhorses, with a methodical approach and unflashy prose, proved their worth.

  This helps explain why, as the Bush administration prosecuted its case for regime change in Baghdad, so many journalists who lacked this kind of expertise came to rely so heavily on those who didn’t. Of these, Judith Miller of The New York Times was the Brahmin among Brahmins – an obsessive reporter with razor-sharp elbows and a highly developed diva complex, who for years had been preoccupied with the destructive power of weapons of mass destruction. Now folkloric is the story of how she once invited her boyfriend to watch her swim laps at the pool of the Washington Hilton, and then pondered, as she stretched in the afternoon sun, which was the more destructive, chemical or nuclear weapons.

  With attention shifting to Iraq, every news organisation craved its own Judith Miller. The Pulitzer Prize-winning article she had published eight months before the attacks, on the determination of al-Qaeda to equip itself with weapons of mass destruction, now seemed brilliantly prescient. So, too, did her book published that summer entitled Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, which by Christmas topped her paper’s own bestseller list.

  Thus, when a series of eye-catching reports on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program appeared in late-2001 and throughout 2002 with Miller’s byline attached, everyone took notice. Based on raw intelligence from the vice president’s office, key Pentagon officials and their favourite Iraqi defector, Ahmed Chalabi, her stories warned that the Baghdad regime had taken delivery of a particularly virulent strain of smallpox, and that Saddam Hussein had started renovating his storage facilities for biological and chemical weapons.

  More alarming still was the revelation that he sought to import the type of aluminium tubes that were essential components in the development of nuclear weapons. With the stories given pride of place in the top right-hand corner of the front page of The New York Times, the same fearful tone found an echo in everyone’s follow-up stories. If the information had come from Miller and had the imprimatur of The Times, it must have the stamp of truth.

  To this day, I think that one of the main reasons why journalists proved so malleable in the run-up to the war on Iraq was not because of the persuasive powers of the Bush administration but more down to the authority of The New York Times. When the two worked in tandem, they were an unstoppable combination.

  To offer a word in our defence, it was not as if we had taken complete leave of our senses or were entirely unthinking or uninquiring. After all, our own sources validated much of Miller’s reportage. Washington was heavily populated with former United Nations weapons inspectors proffering dire warnings of their own. Even French diplomats would quietly tell you, off the record and not for attribution, that they believed Saddam Hussein had built up a formidable stockpile of chemical weapons. Their disagreement with the Bush administration was not over the existence of weapons but in how to prevent their use. As for the Bush administration’s most vocal critic, the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, he appeared on the cable networks so frequently and at such a high volume that he tended to drown out his own message.

  Among the ironies of American journalism in the run-up to Iraq was that this phase of suspended scepticism only began drawing to an end after the Bush administration delivered its most detailed presentation of the case against Saddam. When the US secretary of state Colin Powell went before the UN Security Council in February 2003, with the CIA director George Tenet sitting meaningfully behind, all of us expected an Adlai Stevenson moment: the dramatic, incontrovertible evidence that would register just as powerfully as the black-and-white aerial-reconnaissance pictures revealing the Soviet missile launchers on Cuba that the Americans had produced at the height of the missile crisis in October 1962.

  Instead, the best that Powell could produce were a few PowerPoint graphics, some inconclusive satellite imagery and a mocked-up vial of anthrax that he dangled suggestively between his fingers. You could almost hear the collective cry of ‘Is that it?’ echo across the newsrooms of the capital.

  However, even if the Powell speech helped restore a greater sense of journalistic balance, there was still widespread press support for the war. For many, the Bush administration’s ‘mushroom cloud’ argument remained persuasive: why take the chance that Saddam might one day have a nuclear capability when his regime could be decapitated in a short sharp war?

  With or without the press, with or without cast-iron evidence, and with or without an international ‘coalition of the willing’, the Bush administration was about to wage war against Saddam Hussein, and blood was about to be spilt. That much had become clear during George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2002, when he declared that Iraq was part of an ‘axis of evil’ alongs
ide North Korea and Iran. As part of our live coverage, I watched it from a radio studio alongside a former member of Bill Clinton’s national security team, who physically recoiled when Bush delivered his ‘axis of evil’ line. This dovish foreign-policy expert was so startled and agitated it was almost as if he was watching the second plane hit the South Tower. He thought it the most belligerent speech he had ever heard a president deliver and feared it ran the risk of squandering all the international goodwill that had followed 9/11.

  The prescience of these fears became immediately apparent when the press corps and I travelled with Bush in the months after the ‘axis of evil’ speech. Arriving in Seoul a few weeks later, we saw protesters gathered outside the military base where Air Force One touched down brandishing ‘No Bush, No War’ placards. In the capital itself, South Korean Government officials were privately seething that Bush had so publicly trashed the ‘sunshine policy’ of the then president Kim Dae-jung, which sought détente with Pyongyang.

  Out of politeness to his hosts, Bush consciously decided not to repeat the phrase ‘axis of evil’ while on Korean soil – in the filing centre, we dubbed it the ‘Don’t Mention the Axis of Evil’ tour. But we suspected he might not be able to bite his lip for the duration of the trip. Sure enough, early one morning we were all choppered in great hulking Chinooks to one of the American outposts in the demilitarised zone, the famed DMZ. There, the White House staged a photo opportunity, where Bush peered, Patton-like, through binoculars at the North Korean watchtowers in the hostile distance. As he stood on the ramparts, one of his US military guides recounted the story of a deadly attack on American GIs in the 1970s, and how the axes used in the killings now had pride of place in a ‘peace museum’ on the North Korean side of the DMZ. Bush relayed the harrowing story to reporters watching from below and then added, ‘No wonder I think they’re evil.’