Gitmo interrogations spark battle over tactics

'Futility' or French fries?

The intelligence team had mostly completed a course at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, where they learned a series of interrogation scenarios described in the Army Field Manual with catchy names: Fear Up Harsh, Pride and Ego Down, Mutt and Jeff, We Know All, Isolation, Futility.

These scenarios are open to wide interpretation. An intelligence officer in Afghanistan was asked by an Army investigator to describe the Fear Up scenario. "Disrespect for the Koran," he began, though there’s nothing about that in the Army Field Manual. "Insult the PUC," or person under custody, "throw a chair inside a room. Have a room upstairs with spotlights. Turn on music very loud, under constant supervision of an MP guard."

The law enforcement investigators, on the other hand, had their own ways of making the detainees talk.

In captured al-Qaida training handbooks, jihadists are told what to expect during interrogation. The U.S. will whip you, use dogs, give you water but not allow you to urinate, isolate you, insult your family. The handbooks say nothing of French fries.

"Some of them really became fond of some fast food French fries, and cheeseburgers," Fallon said, noting that the law enforcement agents made frequent visits to a McDonald’s on the U.S. base.

Wearing polo shirts instead of uniforms, the law enforcement investigators would take off the detainees’ leg irons and handcuffs. Aside from the lack of a lawyer and a Miranda warning, the investigators said they tried to treat the captives as they would any suspect.

The cops call it rapport-building.

"Our folks would sit on the ground with detainees having tea," Fallon said. "Many of the detainees wanted also to be released. And our goal was to obtain accurate information. A good investigator works hard to prove guilt or innocence."

Before the interrogation, they would study. Fallon sought help from a friend from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, chief psychologist Michael Gelles, to develop training that included Arab culture and social networking, tribal origins, al-Qaida camps, the roles of shame, obedience and secrecy. They brought in Arabic speakers and agents with Middle Eastern experience, who had worked on the USS Cole and East African embassy bombings.

But their main weapon was their experience as cops.

"We were not browbeating them. We were not fussing with them," said Randy Carter, the director of operations at the Guantanamo interrogation "boxes" for the task force.

'In the tropics, beautiful views of the ocean'

"We would create an environment where they were comfortable talking with us. Asking about their families. Have they had any correspondence with them? Is their food acceptable?"

Andres Leighton / AP A detainee rests inside his cell in Camp Delta.

Agents would say, ‘You’re in the tropics, beautiful views of the ocean,’ and some of them would chuckle with that, and that would bring down the barriers that they had built up on themselves," Carter said.

Some were "head hangers," who wouldn't even acknowledge an interrogator, but others loved to talk.

Carter recalled an Australian detainee "coming in to discuss things, and just loving a pepperoni pizza, which is pork, and him being a good Muslim. He knew it. And smoking his Marlboros. Building a rapport is not what they’re used to, and it worked for us. As we built a rapport, it would be ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Then it would be telling us whether they did or did not do it, and if they didn’t, who did."

At first, the two sets of interrogators, intelligence and law enforcement, tried to work together, crowding into the box with the detainee and an interpreter. These efforts did not go well. The scripted scenarios of the intelligence interrogators, such as Rapid Fire – repeatedly asking the same question with slightly different phrasings no matter what the answer - frustrated the criminal investigators as well as the detainees.

In August 2002, the two teams agreed to take turns, each choosing 200 detainees for an exclusive period of interrogation. But that plan broke down frequently, because the intelligence group had priority.

"If we had a cooperating detainee," Carter said, "we would share that information, but then JTF 170 would get him up in the middle of the night to have him tell them the same information. It impeded our process."

Of greater concern was a different attitude toward abusing or degrading the detainees.

The law enforcement investigators said they saw early on in Afghanistan, before the detainees were shipped to Guantanamo, that the temptation to cross the line would be great - not out of sadism in most cases, but out of confusion about what would work.

"I watched the intelligence community, military and civilian, struggle with how to develop a coherent strategy to deal with terrorist subjects," Col. Mallow said.

"I wish they had asked our law enforcement folks more, had invited us to the table more. We sure did not have all the answers, but I think we could have helped."

On guard against runaway emotions
The messages from the Bush administration and the Pentagon had been mixed: The detainees were to be treated humanely, "consistent with" the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war. But they also said that the Geneva Conventions did not apply: These were not prisoners of war, but "enemy combatants."

U.S. Navy Col. Brittain P. Mallow, commander of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force. "All of this stuff is going to come to light, and you’re going to be embarrassed."

"We were very, very concerned," Fallon said, "to ensure that we would not, in the heat of battle, in a highly emotional period, in an effort to do the right thing, commit criminal acts."

That moral and legal line was patrolled by Carter, who monitored the interrogation booths in Guantanamo’s Camp Delta. From his observation booth in a triple-wide interrogation trailer, where he could see into two interrogation boxes at once, he was charged with ensuring that the intelligence interrogations, with their flashing lights, stress positions or the man in the cowboy outfit, didn’t contaminate the evidence from legal investigations.

"I told ICE — Interrogation Control Element — I do not want any of our interrogations or interviews in the same trailer as the intel collectors are," Carter said. "We are not to partake of any of their tactics, we are not to witness any of their tactics. We can’t have the foolishness from those folks in the mix."

At this stage, in the summer of 2002, said Col. Mallow, the commander of the law enforcement unit, "We’re not talking about grievous abuse. But frankly some of the things my agents saw were just plain silly and stupid. They were obviously amateurish and not likely to produce good results.

"It would get worse."

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