Precious few were stepping forth to defend the President’s policy and rationale. “Administration policy on detainees in GTMO is clearly an issue about which there is not unanimous agreement—in the Administration, in the Congress, in the country or in the world,” I wrote in my December 2003 memo, adding:
That being the case, and since, nonetheless, it is our Administration’s policy, it would help if all agencies would help defend the Administration’s policy and explain the reasons for it to the Congress, to the country and to the world. I don’t think DoD is the best communicator of the Administration’s policy on detainees, since it is seen as a legal matter. Nonetheless, we are supporting it energetically. It would be appreciated if all agencies would pitch in and help carry the message.55
I was perfectly willing to shutter the facility if a better alternative could have been found that would be as effective at obtaining intelligence and preventing terrorists from returning to the fight. But no alternative to Gitmo was proposed. Nor did I receive any replies to my memo. Meanwhile, the public drumbeat against Guantánamo Bay intensified.
Gitmo, though damned across the political spectrum, offered a solution—however imperfect—to the problem of keeping high-risk detainees out of circulation. What was the alternative—letting them go and then hoping to catch them as they were committing their next terrorist attack against the American people? Dedicated men and women of the U.S. armed forces performed an enormously valuable service in running a first-rate detention and interrogation operation at Guantánamo. The base has logged a proud record of professionalism and success. Detainees routinely attacked the military guards there—kicking, biting, head butting, and throwing “cocktails” of feces and urine.56 The prisoners demonstrated remarkable resourcefulness in turning personal items into deadly weapons: blankets into garrotes, sinks into bludgeons, and wires into daggers. The guards demonstrated impressive restraint. In those few cases where the military guards were goaded by detainees and crossed the line, disciplinary action was taken.
To date, not a single prisoner has escaped from Guantánamo, and hundreds of terrorists have been kept from returning to the fight. At Gitmo, intelligence officials have uncovered information that has helped prevent terrorist attacks—information about al-Qaida’s leadership, the identities of operatives, terrorist communication methods, training programs, travel patterns, funding mechanisms, and plans to attack the United States and our allies. Detainees have provided information on bank accounts, al-Qaida front companies, improvised explosive devices, and tactics.57 Coalition intelligence officials and our forces on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq have used this information to help protect the American people.
Despite the more than $500 million that U.S. taxpayers have invested in state-of-the-art facilities at Gitmo, and in operations there since 9/11, both of the 2008 presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, pandered to popular misconceptions by promising to shut it down.58 On his second full day in office, President Obama vowed to close the facility “promptly.”59 Years later, however, Guantánamo remains open, undoubtedly because the Obama administration, despite its promises, has not found a practical alternative. Eventually it may be closed, but it will be closed at great financial cost. More important, the problems Guantánamo was established to address will remain.
CHAPTER 39
The Twentieth Hijacker
Though hundreds of thousands of vacationers and business travelers passed through Orlando International Airport every year, there was something unsettling about the man who had just arrived from London on Virgin Atlantic Flight 15. As he approached immigration control, Muhammed al-Qahtani presented a Saudi passport. When questioned by customs agents he revealed that he did not have a return ticket or a hotel reservation, and he refused to give the identity of the individual he said was picking him up. Though he carried nearly twenty-eight hundred dollars in cash, he had no credit cards. Qahtani did not seem the type to visit Disney World.
“He gave me the creeps,” a suspicious Immigration and Naturalization official later testified to the 9/11 Commission, saying that he had the bearing of “a hit man.”1 Before long Qahtani felt he had entertained enough questioning about his travel plans. He withdrew his application for entry and caught the next flight back to London, then to Dubai, on August 4, 2001. He left the INS agent with an ominous three words: “I’ll be back.”2
That December, as winter closed in on the mountain passes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, Qahtani made his way to the al-Qaida nest in Tora Bora. As U.S. and Northern Alliance forces stepped up their pummeling of the cave complexes, its murderous denizens, including Qahtani, fled to Pakistan’s tribal areas. But along with some two dozen other terrorist suspects, he was captured by Pakistani forces, who handed him over to our military on the Afghanistan side of the border.
As he was questioned by American military interrogators and intelligence officials, Qahtani claimed he had traveled to Afghanistan to “practice falconry”—a fiction that he was later forced to abandon when he couldn’t provide any details about the sport.3 Military interrogators judged him to be a high threat to our troops there and a possible threat for more terrorist attacks in the United States. Suspected of ties to senior al-Qaida figures, Qahtani was designated detainee number 063 and transported to Guantánamo Bay in February 2002.
At Guantánamo, the pieces began to fall together. Qahtani, investigators learned, had trained at the al-Faruq training camp near Kandahar “for the purpose of participating in jihad, which he deemed a religious obligation.”4 He was trained to fire small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. Intelligence officials then discovered Qahtani’s failed attempt to enter the United States at the Orlando airport shortly before 9/11. They learned that the man who had been waiting to meet him there was Muhammed Attah, ringleader of the 9/11 attacks.5 Investigators also uncovered that Qahtani had placed several phone calls with a calling card associated with Muhammed Attah, to another Saudi, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, a financier of the attacks.6 Hawsawi had dropped Qahtani off at the airport in Dubai.7
American intelligence officials came to believe Qahtani had been trained to become a weapon himself—as the fifth and final “muscle” hijacker on United Flight 93.8 Through the courage and heroism of the passengers who attacked the hijackers onboard—and possibly in part because that team of terrorists was one man short—Flight 93 crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, rather than its likely objective of the White House or the U.S. Capitol building. Had the immigration officer not been sharp enough to dissuade Qahtani from entering the United States just weeks before, the Flight 93 hijacking might have succeeded in finding its target.
Qahtani’s story is a vivid example of the complex moral questions that we faced in developing interrogation policies for prisoners in U.S. custody. A senior al-Qaida operative implicated in the worst terrorist attack in history was in DoD custody. Qahtani potentially possessed a treasure trove of intelligence information, including perhaps facts about future attacks planned against Americans. But like many senior al-Qaida officials, he was proving resistant to questioning. The issue ultimately made its way to my office.
By the late fall of 2002, the first anniversary of 9/11 had come and gone without another act of terrorism on American soil—a fact that in itself was a marvel, and in my view a result of President Bush’s effort to go on offense against the enemy. Still intelligence sources around the world were warning of new attacks. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s top deputy, released a tape recording in which he pledged to “continue targeting the keys of the American economy.”9 Al-Qaida terrorists launched attacks in Tunisia and Pakistan over the summer. In September, FBI agents outside of Buffalo, New York, arrested a group of Yemeni Americans, soon called the Lackawanna Six, who were later convicted of providing material support to al-Qaida. In October, bombs tore through nightclubs in Bali, killing 202 and injuring hundreds more. In the Washington, D.C., area, the so-called D.C. snipers terrorized the region; fo
r three weeks no one knew whether or not their attacks were connected in some way to overseas terror groups. The system, in the parlance of the intelligence community, was “blinking red.” But little intelligence was being obtained from military detainees.
The Defense Department was neither organized nor trained to elicit information from terror suspects. During the decade of lean defense budgets in the 1990s our government had not only cut combat forces, it also had furloughed military interrogators and experts in human intelligence. Because of the urgency and importance of obtaining information from detainees to help us prevent future 9/11s, the task was to develop interrogation guidelines, clarify rules and regulations, and improve our human intelligence-gathering capabilities to fit the unconventional and protracted first war of the twenty first century.
Military interrogators at Guantánamo first used traditional interrogation methods honed in conventional conflicts and designed for use with POWs protected by the Third Geneva Convention. Since the privileges of Geneva POW status did not apply to unlawful combatants such as war on terrorism detainees, interrogators had more flexibility.
Army Field Manual 34–52 prescribed guidelines and broad doctrines governing interrogation but did not prescribe specific techniques. It gave broad latitude for interrogators in some areas—arguably too much—while little in others. The American military’s approach for decades was to try to build trust with enemy prisoners. Military interrogators were trained in a combination of rapport-building techniques through which the prisoners might eventually choose of their own free will to provide useful information. By early 2002, however, it became clear that rapport-building techniques were not succeeding with key al-Qaida terrorists. “We saw firsthand in Afghanistan how ineffective schoolhouse methods were in getting prisoners to talk,” two military interrogators concluded.10 Some of the detainees had clearly undergone interrogation-resistance training. Al-Qaida fighters by and large scoffed at the efforts of Americans to promote rapport, except if they could use those efforts for deception.
Al-Qaida operatives also knew that the barbaric methods they employed—burning victims with cigarettes, electrocution, and cutting off people’s heads with knives—were not employed by the United States. Thus, there was little incentive for detained terrorists to provide useful information to us, and every reason for them to stonewall and delay.
But delay held risks for us in the post-9/11 environment. The American intelligence community’s ability to collect reliable information through interrogations of captured enemies could be the difference between success and failure in preventing more attacks and defeating our Islamist extremist enemies. Interrogations led to some of the most impressive successes in the war on terror, including: the capture of Saddam Hussein; the capture of two dozen terrorists in Germany who were plotting an attack against Ramstein Air Base; and the death of the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A revelation by a single detainee could be the key to preventing multiple attacks against the United States and our allies.
On October 11, 2002, the interrogators assigned to Joint Task Force 170 at Guantánamo Bay sent up, through every level in their chain of command, a request to use some techniques they believed were lawful and humane but which would go beyond the Army Field Manual. Their focus was on one individual in particular—Muhammed al-Qahtani.
Qahtani was more than simply brawn. He appeared to have known about the planning of the 9/11 operation. He was familiar with the inner workings and high-level personalities of al-Qaida. He was also a determined liar. Like many al-Qaida members and Taliban personnel captured early in the conflict, he pretended to be an inoffensive bad-luck guy indiscriminately swept up by U.S. forces in the fog of war. But an innocent bystander he was not. Qahtani aspired to the glory of jihad against America, and it was possible he held the key to saving a great many American lives from future jihadist operations. U.S. military commanders at Guantánamo had a responsibility to try to gather that information.
For months, FBI agents made no headway using law enforcement interview methods with Qahtani. According to a DoJ inspector general report, the FBI agents exceeded their own traditional rules and policy guidelines by isolating and threatening him.11
The military interrogators and their commanding officer, Major General Michael Dunlavey, put together a list of techniques they thought might be effective in inducing Qahtani to cooperate. Their request moved up the chain of command to the four-star SOUTHCOM combatant commander, Army General James T. Hill. On October 25, 2002, General Hill forwarded the request to General Myers.
“[D]espite our best efforts,” Hill wrote, “some detainees have tenaciously resisted our current interrogation methods.”12 He requested consideration of interrogation methods that went beyond the Army Field Manual, but which might still be implemented in ways that were legal and humane. A combatant commander with initiative, General Hill wanted to provide his interrogators with all the tools that were lawful and appropriate. Hill was leaning forward. He wasn’t to be faulted for that. He flagged the fact that there were complexities here, and accordingly he was seeking clarification up his chain of command.
The additional techniques proposed by the Guantánamo interrogators fell into three categories. The techniques ranged from yelling in Category I, to deprivation of light and sound and other measures that would cause a temporary sense of isolation and disorientation in Category II. One technique included changing the detainee’s regular hot meals to standard MREs (meals ready to eat).13 I found it strange that serving detainees the same meals our soldiers ate could be called an enhanced interrogation procedure. Category III involved more aggressive and controversial techniques, which SOUTHCOM proposed only for Muhammed al-Qahtani. The techniques included making the detainee believe that he, or a family member, might suffer death or severe pain if he failed to cooperate, exposure to cold, and the “[u]se of mild, non-injurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger, and light pushing.”14 Category III also included the “[u]se of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation.”15 This latter practice became known as waterboarding. Each of the Category II and III techniques proposed by SOUTHCOM would require explicit review and permission at senior military levels before they were employed by the interrogators.
I did not believe it would be appropriate for anyone in Defense Department custody to be waterboarded or stripped and subjected to cold temperatures, and I rejected those techniques.16 Military interrogators were not trained to do those things. There were important military traditions of restraint that I intended to preserve. I was deeply uncomfortable with nudity and any techniques that had a tinge of sexual humiliation. As I remarked in meetings when the treatment of detainees was discussed, I believed the American people would not approve of anything of that sort. When the SOUTHCOM interrogators suggested removal of comfort items or clothing, I read that not as referring to nudity but as part of a set of measures to make a recalcitrant interrogation subject feel disconnected from familiar items that gave him comfort and stability, such as particular books or favored items of apparel. Changes in sleeping and other ordinary daily scheduling could also cause a captured terrorist combatant to let down his guard.
General Hill’s October 25 request for additional techniques went through several weeks of policy and legal review at various levels, both civilian and military, before it arrived on my desk. On November 27, Jim Haynes, the Department’s general counsel, sent a memo to me with his recommendations. “I have discussed this with the Deputy [Paul Wolfowitz], Doug Feith and General Myers,” Haynes wrote, adding: “I believe that all join in my recommendation that, as a matter of policy, you authorize the Commander of USSOUTHCOM to employ, in his discretion, only Categories I and II and the fourth technique listed in Category III (‘Use of mild, non-injurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger, and light pushing’).” Haynes concluded, “Our Armed Forces are trained to a standard of inte
rrogation that reflects a tradition of restraint.”17 He recommended against other Category III proposals put forward by SOUTHCOM, including creating fear of death or severe pain, exposure to cold, and waterboarding.
I agreed and approved the recommendations. At the bottom of the Haynes memo I scrawled a note that referred to the Category II technique that could require a detainee under certain circumstances to stand for four hours while interrogators questioned him.
“However, I stand for 8–10 hours a day,” I wrote. “Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”18 My offhand comment was a statement of fact. I used a stand-up desk and spent much of the day on my feet. The note received enormous attention when detainee abuse became a major public issue. It was a mistake to make that personal observation to my general counsel. It certainly was not a signal to the Department that it would be okay to stretch the rules, as some have suggested.19
Pentagon lawyers had determined that the interrogation methods I approved in that memo were both legal and humane. I believed then—and I believe today—that they were. However, the application of any interrogation technique requires care and the supervision of experts. Any technique that is legal and humane on its own could conceivably be applied in ways that are not legal and not humane if, for example, it is done repeatedly, over long periods of time or used in an inappropriate combination with other techniques. That is why detailed interrogation plans have to be approved at the appropriate levels of military command. Plan specifics were devised, as they should have been, by experienced interrogators and their commanders at Gitmo, not by officials in Washington far removed from day-to-day management of the interrogation operations.
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