From The New York Times
... The New York Times has found that government and military officials have repeatedly exaggerated both the danger the detainees posed and the intelligence they have provided. In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda. They said only a relative handful — some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen — were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization’s inner workings.
| The rest are innocents who were lost, looking for a ride home from church. So they flagged down these Americans, an'... |
While some Guantánamo intelligence has aided terrorism investigations, none of of it has enabled intelligence or law-enforcement services to foil imminent attacks, the officials said.
| I think most of them have been there for three years or so. They could probably provide information on what they had for breakfast... |
Compared with the higher-profile Qaeda operatives held elsewhere by the C.I.A., the Guantánamo detainees have provided only a trickle of intelligence with current value, the officials said. Because nearly all of that intelligence is classified, most of the officials would discuss it only on the condition of anonymity.
| Ummmm... All that intelligence is classified. That's why they call it "intelligence," instead of "news." |
"When you have the overall mosaic of all the intelligence picked up all over the world, Guantánamo provided a very small piece of that mosaic," said a senior American official who has reviewed the intelligence in detail. "It’s been helpful and valuable in certain areas. Was it the mother lode of intelligence? No." ....
| Y'see, there are various kinds of intelligence. There's tactical — "They're gonna boom the Eiffel Tower tomorrow at 8 a.m.!" You normally don't get that from guys you've held for three years. Among the other types is theater — how the Bad Guys intend to take down, say, Indonesia or Pakland, f'rinstance. Then there's strategic, which concerns the organization's overall goals — such as planting the Flag of Islam™ over the White House, controlling the world's oil supply, and establishing a caliphate from Mindanao to Rabat, ruled by a fat guy in a jewelled turban with a Grand Vizier and dancing girls. Intel falling into the latter two categories involves tactics, training, order of battle, doctrine, all sorts of stuff that's much too boring for New York Times writers to concern themselves with. Intel's also usually not the entire sheet of paper, but a corner here, a few lines there, and something that was scribbled on the back of the sheet in crayon. Putting the pieces together is a long drawn-out process and usually you don't get the entire picture. |
In interviews, officials at Guantánamo and in the Pentagon defended the intelligence-gathering effort and said it continued to produce useful information. "Every single day we get some piece of information that’s relevant to now," said Steve Rodriguez, who oversees the interrogation teams at the base. Officials said the intelligence had allowed them to piece together a more detailed picture of Al Qaeda before Sept. 11, 2001, including how young jihadis were recruited and screened, how the organization moved funds and how it related to other militant groups. They said some were important Qaeda operatives, including financiers, a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden and — a recent discovery — a militant who they say helped recruit 9/11 hijackers.
| No tactical intel, but lotsa order of battle, tactics, and such... |
Yet even as he argued the importance of that information, the commander of the task force that runs the Guantánamo prison, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, acknowledged disappointment among some senior officials in Washington. "The expectations, I think, may have been too high at the outset," he said. "There are those who expected a flow of intelligence that would help us break the most sophisticated terror organization in a matter of months. But that hasn’t happened." ....
| We probably started with a minor flood of information that dropped off. After three years we're feeding these goobers and not getting much out of them that's new. That's life in the intel biz. Guantanamo also keeps them out of circulation, so none of them have cut anybody's head off lately. |
While refusing to discuss specifics, Pentagon officials called the interrogation methods used at Guantánamo humane and said they had applied more severe methods only sparingly. In at least one of those cases, they said, the techniques prompted an important Qaeda member to give up vital information. But new details of that case, which involved a 26-year-old Saudi man who apparently tried unsuccessfully to enter the United States as the 20th hijacker in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, call some of those assertions into question. Several officials familiar with the case said that for months, no one at Guantánamo even knew who the detainee, Mohamed al-Kahtani, was and that he was identified only after the Federal Bureau of Investigation stepped in. The officials also said that the harsher interrogation methods used against him were largely unsuccessful, that he had little sense of other Qaeda plots, and that he had been most forthcoming under more subtle persuasion. ...
| So he's not top level, but he was willing to hijack a plane and kill people. What's the beef? |
Even now, officials acknowledge that they have been unable to get any information from at least 60 detainees — including in some cases their identities. Those uncertainties, the officials said, leave open the possibility that more serious terrorists may be among Guantánamo’s detainees. ... A former secretary of the Army, Thomas E. White, who supervised a team of senior Pentagon officers at Guantánamo, said he was told by a senior military official at the base on an early visit that only a third to a half of the detainees appeared to be of some value and that sorting through them would be a considerable problem. ...
| Most are battlefield captures, I believe. I've no doubt that only a third to half have overt intel value. Capturing a random sample of snuffies, gunnies, and other hard boyz isn't going to get you the top echelon — which isn't put up at Guantanamo. |
Many younger Army interrogators had never questioned a real prisoner before.
| That might have something to do with the fact that we were at peace when we were attacked. I'd never spoken to a Viet Bad Guy when I arrived in country. After I'd been at it for awhile I was pretty good at it. By the time I switched languages I was very good at it. |
As in Afghanistan, interrogators at Guantánamo asked the same basic questions again and again, many former detainees recalled. "They asked me, `Do you know the Taliban? Do you know Mullah Muhammad Omar? Do you know bin Laden?’ " said Jan Muhammad, 37, a farmer from Helmand Province who said he had been forcibly conscripted into the Taliban. "I said, `I have never seen bin Laden; I have not even seen bin Laden’s car driving past.’ " ...
| Again, it's the random sample syndrome. And eventually you can think of more interesting questions to ask: who was your unit commander? What units were associated with yours? Who paid you? Where did your supplies come from? Who was responsible for supply? When was payday? The questions are repeated to check them for consistency... |
One of the few American intelligence sectors to show any early interest in the detainees was an obscure defense intelligence unit that traced weapons around the world, one interrogator said. As a result, interrogators were required to question detainees about the serial numbers on rifles they had used and the markings on their bullets. "Of course, they had no idea," the interrogator said. .... But senior defense officials grew frustrated with the shortage of compelling information. "At the beginning, the process was broken everywhere," said Lt. Col. Anthony Christino III, a recently retired Army intelligence officer who specialized in counterterrorism and was familiar the Guantánamo intelligence. "The quality of the screening, the quality of the interrogations and the quality of the analysis were all very poor. Efforts were made to improve things, but after decades of neglect of human intelligence skills, it can’t be fixed in a few years." ...
| We weren't capturing a lot of Soviets and subjecting them to extensive interrogation, were we? In fact, such as we did get weren't interrogated at all; they were "debriefed." And the Soviet Union had been dead for nine years when this war started, with no major military actions in between. |
Around the same time, faced with continuing resistance from many detainees, some military intelligence officers urged that they be allowed to take advantage of the suspension of Geneva Conventions to try more coercive methods — a step that led to bitter conflicts between military intelligence members and military criminal investigators assigned to prepare cases for the tribunals. ....
| There are different techniques that are appropriate to different prisoners. And all the Amnesia International hangers-on in the world are looking over our shoulder, just waiting for something to point the finger at. Those are called "constraints." |
For interrogators at Guantánamo looking to score a high-profile intelligence victory, Mr. Kahtani, the Saudi who was the so-called 20th hijacker, appeared to be their man. In the end, though, his case instead came to illustrate some of the problems they faced in determining who they were holding and what they knew. .... In July 2002, a routine check by F.B.I. agents matched his fingerprints to a thumbprint from a man who had been turned back by an immigration official after flying into Orlando International Airport in Florida from London on Aug. 3, 2001, without a return ticket or hotel reservation. ... On that same day in August 2001, they noted, toll records showed calls from a pay phone at the Orlando airport to Mustafa al-Hawsawi, a Qaeda member in the United Arab Emirates who served as a logistical coordinator for the attacks, the officials said. Checking surveillance camera recordings for that day, the agents found that a rental car used by the hijackers’ leader, Mohamed Atta, entered an airport parking lot shortly before Mr. Kahtani’s Virgin Atlantic flight arrived from London, officials said. ....
| That's good term intel work. You don't put all that together in an afternoon, at least not in a free country... |
The bureau [FBI] sent a longtime counterterrorism specialist who is fluent in Arabic and worked extensively on investigations of Al Qaeda. .... Over a series of interrogations that extended into the fall of 2002, the agent slowly built a rapport with Mr. Kahtani, approaching him with respect and restraint ... Mr. Kahtani began to open up, officials said. He disclosed that he attended an important Qaeda planning meeting with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia, in January 2000. Mr. Kahtani also said he had a relative he thought might be living near Chicago. The relative, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, is believed by officials to have been planted in the United States as a Qaeda "sleeper" agent. He was taken into custody as a material witness shortly after arriving in the country on Sept. 10, 2001, and was later confined to a Naval brig in Charleston, S.C., with two American citizens charged as "enemy combatants," Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi. One official said that Mr. Kahtani had admitted that he had intended to join the hijackers but that he had given up little or nothing about other Qaeda plans.
| It's doubtful he knew anything about them... |
To some F.B.I. experts, officials said, his ignorance seemed credible: he had been recruited to be what the plotters called a "muscle" hijacker, someone to subdue passengers rather than pilot a plane. Officials said such lower-level operatives were generally only minimally informed even as to the details of attacks in which they would take part. But military intelligence officials were skeptical, believing that new approaches to Mr. Kahtani might well reveal plans for attacks that were to follow the hijackings or that might have involved Mr. Marri. In late November 2002, Pentagon officials informed the F.B.I. that they would take over interrogations of Mr. Kahtani, an official said. A list of 17 new interrogation techniques ... was approved by Mr. Rumsfeld in early December. Ten of the techniques were used on Mr. Kahtani before complaints from some military officials prompted Mr. Rumsfeld to retract his approval for the more extreme methods, military officials said. ...
| No word on whether or not they struck pay dirt. I'd guess not, but if they did they shouldn't be telling... |
Last month, a senior Bush administration official told The Times that Mr. Kahtani had provided information to interrogators "about a planned attack and about financial networks to fund terrorist operations." But several other officials disputed that characterization, saying he had not given any new information about plots by Al Qaeda. ...
| So he did or he didn't. My valuable intel might not be your valuable intel. Or he might have given something but it didn't fit with anything else anybody had. Very few things happen in a vacuum, and if there aren't any intersects with anything else the guy's probably lying... |
In interviews, Mr. Rodriguez, the head of Guantánamo’s intelligence-gathering effort, and two interrogators said valuable information continued to be produced. .... |