Gitmo interrogations spark battle over tactics

They didn’t have names for many of the detainees. It often wasn’t clear what country they were from. A detainee might claim he was a Saudi, then visiting law enforcement agents would recognize him as a Yemeni. Most weren’t picked up by U.S. forces, but were handed over by bounty hunters in the early days of the war in Afghanistan. They were transferred with scant records, often without any "pocket litter," the possessions and documents that can be invaluable to investigators.

The law enforcement team’s mission was to conduct criminal investigations, prepare cases for prosecution, recommend which detainees should be released or held, and pass on intelligence information to other agencies.

But this was no ordinary criminal case. Rumsfeld had called the detainees "the worst of the worst," but what crime had they committed?

"Instead of having a crime scene, a suspect, we had suspects," Fallon said. "So we had to take a suspect … then track that particular person, once we identified who they actually were, through various levels of their life, through possible radicalization, through a possible visit to … a training camp in Afghanistan or elsewhere where they might have learned some of the tradecraft of terrorism. We would then have to determine where they might have been at any particular point in their life, from there determine if any acts occurred in that particular area, and then if the individual might have been involved in any of those acts, and if those acts then would have been a criminal violation. So it was very much different from the way you would traditionally work a criminal investigation."

They called the process "This Is Your Life," after the biographical radio and television show.

Although Pentagon officials have referred to an "elaborate screening process" before detainees were sent to Guantanamo, the law enforcement agents said evidence of criminal activity or intelligence value in some cases was flimsy.

Fallon said two detainees were suspected in a rocket attack against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The evidence against them was that they were found wearing dark olive green jackets similar to the one worn by the attacker. "I’ve been to Kabul," he said. "That’s the only color jacket I’ve seen."

Because they saw so many detainees they thought didn’t belong there, the investigators decided early in 2002 to expand operations to Afghanistan, to help evaluate detainees before they were sent to Guantanamo. In the end, they were able to develop criminal cases against only about 100 of the roughly 775 detainees who came to Guantanamo.

Out of 445 detainees still remaining at Guantanamo, the Pentagon says "more than 70" are in line for military trials. (See sidebar, In Limbo: Cases are few against Gitmo detainees.)

"There are some mean, nasty people down there," said Jeffery K. Sieber, a former resident agent in charge of the law enforcement task force at Guantanamo. "There’s always been some hard-core people down there who want to do very bad things to the United States. And some who weren’t — but now they’re very upset."

Intelligence unit held lead role
The law enforcement investigators don't control the operations at Guantanamo. The lead role is played by a separate military intelligence unit, the Army’s Joint Task Force 170, later known as the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, which runs the prison and interrogates detainees for intelligence information. Rumsfeld has made clear in public statements that the Bush administration considers the intelligence mission more important than the law enforcement mission.

Alex Wong / Getty Images Less than a year after the Pentagon was attacked on Sept. 11, the pressure to get information from detainees was intense, investigators say.

"Once September 11th occurred and the global war on terror began, people … had in their mind that when you arrested somebody like a car theft or a bank robber, what you do is you put him in jail, then you give him a lawyer, then you have a trial, and then you punish them," Rumsfeld said in a 2004 radio interview. "Of course in this instance, the people in Guantanamo Bay, these are people that were picked up on the battlefield for killing innocent men, women and children in Afghanistan. … They're not car thieves. The purpose is to keep them off the battlefield so they don't kill more innocent men, women and children, and to try to interrogate them and find out what they know so we can stop other terrorists from killing still additional Americans and friends of ours. It isn't a law enforcement task. It's a war on terrorism task."

The Pentagon also has said that the intelligence interrogations at Guantanamo are "guided by a very detailed plan, conducted by trained professionals in a controlled environment, and with active supervision."

But the cops at Guantanamo said the intelligence interrogators were "very challenged."

"The first time most of these interrogators were actually ... in the room with a real bad guy was at Guantanamo Bay," Fallon said, "with this tremendous challenge of trying to elicit information from someone who’s a suspected terrorist."

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