Nelson, Torin - Interview master file
Loading the media player...
Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Interviewer | Okay, good morning. | 0:06 |
- | Good morning. | 0:07 |
Interviewer | We are very grateful to you | 0:08 |
for participating in a Witness To Guantanamo project. | 0:09 | |
We invite you to speak of your experiences | 0:13 | |
and involvement with Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, | 0:15 | |
and we are hoping to provide you | 0:19 | |
with an opportunity to tell your story in your own words. | 0:21 | |
We are creating an archive of stories, | 0:25 | |
so that people in America and around the world | 0:27 | |
will have a better understanding | 0:30 | |
of what you and others have experienced and observed. | 0:31 | |
Future generations want to know | 0:36 | |
what happened at Guantanamo and by telling your story | 0:37 | |
you contributing to history, | 0:40 | |
and we appreciate your willingness to speak with us today. | 0:42 | |
- | It's my pleasure. | 0:45 |
Interviewer | Thank you. | 0:46 |
If anytime, during the interview, you want take a break, | 0:47 | |
please let me know. | 0:49 | |
- | Okay. | 0:51 |
Interviewer | And if there's anything you said | 0:52 |
that is classified that you'd like to retract, | 0:53 | |
we can remove it. | 0:55 | |
Just let us know as well. | 0:56 | |
- | Okay. | 0:58 |
Interviewer | Thank you, | 0:59 |
and I'd like to begin with just a little background | 1:00 | |
as to your name and your birth place, | 1:02 | |
and hometown and birth date and age, perhaps. | 1:05 | |
- | Okay, my name is Torin Nelson, | 1:09 |
22 years experience in the military, department of the army, | 1:14 | |
department of defense as a soldier or contractor civilian. | 1:17 | |
I was born in Washington, DC, December 22nd, 1968. | 1:21 | |
Interviewer | That makes you how old? | 1:24 |
- | It makes me about 45 now, I guess. | 1:27 |
And while I was born in DC, I actually grew up | 1:30 | |
in Salt Lake City, Utah, where my family is originally from, | 1:33 | |
went to school there and joined the military there | 1:37 | |
in 1992 as a 97 Echo, which is an interrogator in the army. | 1:41 | |
Interviewer | Will you tell us where you went to school? | 1:48 |
- | Well, bounced around to a couple of schools | 1:50 |
in grade school, obviously because of the moving, | 1:54 | |
but high school. | 1:55 | |
I graduated from Jordan High School, | 1:57 | |
the old one before it actually, it was torn down replaced, | 1:59 | |
and then attended the University of Utah. | 2:03 | |
I was going there until about, | 2:05 | |
off and on actually after about 1988, | 2:08 | |
it was a little bit more difficult | 2:10 | |
because my father died when I was 19. | 2:11 | |
I was kind of on a family scholarship at the time. | 2:13 | |
So, not being able to finish college at that time, | 2:15 | |
I floated around from job to job, | 2:20 | |
and interesting story about how I joined the military | 2:22 | |
was in 92. | 2:26 | |
I just wanted to get up and leave, | 2:27 | |
and when I walk about with a couple of friends | 2:29 | |
in the Northwest and spent about three months | 2:32 | |
out on the road with just our backpacks and, you know, | 2:35 | |
going from town to town, and would have continued with that, | 2:37 | |
except for we had all of our things stolen | 2:40 | |
when we were in Seattle, | 2:42 | |
and so we managed to get back to Salt Lake, | 2:43 | |
and while I was staying over at a friend's house | 2:45 | |
trying to figure out what to do, | 2:47 | |
I saw an advertisement on the TV late at night for the army, | 2:48 | |
and I thought, well, wait a second, | 2:52 | |
I just did all that stuff, but I wasn't getting paid, | 2:54 | |
so I think I'll go do that, | 2:57 | |
and the next day I went to the recruiter's office, | 2:58 | |
and I had hair down to about here, and just raggedy clothes, | 3:00 | |
and I was really really thin at the time, | 3:03 | |
just almost emasculated, | 3:05 | |
and then, I think the recruiters | 3:07 | |
probably looked at me going, | 3:09 | |
who is this Jesus hippie freak coming in? | 3:10 | |
But I aced all their tests, | 3:12 | |
and they loved me and sent me off, | 3:14 | |
and you know, the rest was history after that. | 3:16 | |
Interviewer | And what kind of work did you begin | 3:19 |
with in the army? | 3:22 | |
- | I was an interrogator from day one and- | 3:23 |
Interviewer | How did that happen? | 3:26 |
- | An interesting thing, | 3:27 |
I knew that I wanted to work in intelligence | 3:29 | |
when I went in ever since the 1980s | 3:31 | |
when a Marine recruiter actually tried to recruit me, | 3:34 | |
but he actually, instead of having me enlist, | 3:38 | |
he actually wanted me to go ROTC with the Marine option, | 3:41 | |
and I made it all the way up to the interview | 3:45 | |
with the Commandant of the University of Utah, | 3:47 | |
but because I was a history major they were like, | 3:50 | |
"No thanks, but we don't want to | 3:52 | |
give the scholarship to a history major. | 3:53 | |
We've got plenty of those. | 3:55 | |
We want science and engineering." | 3:55 | |
This is 1986, you know, Reagan years, and you know, | 3:57 | |
they were really pushing for that sort of thing, so. | 4:00 | |
Because I didn't get the scholarship, I said, | 4:02 | |
Well, you know, I'll just do my own thing. | 4:05 | |
So I ended up going Army ROTC for awhile. | 4:07 | |
So I still liked the military, | 4:10 | |
and of course when I couldn't finish college, | 4:13 | |
but I still wanted to go into the military, | 4:17 | |
I enlisted first thing on my mind was, | 4:19 | |
well I want to go intel, | 4:22 | |
and so they did a little bit of background check on me, | 4:23 | |
and because I had some outstanding debts at the time, | 4:26 | |
I couldn't get the top secret security clearance. | 4:28 | |
So they said, "Well, the only thing you can get, | 4:31 | |
is this job called interrogator, | 4:32 | |
and we don't really know much about it, | 4:34 | |
but we've got this little video we'll show you." | 4:36 | |
So I watched about a 10 minute video and it showed a couple | 4:38 | |
of guys out in the field, you know, talking to each other, | 4:40 | |
you know, you know, on this field table, you know, | 4:42 | |
and that was about all my experience with interrogation. | 4:45 | |
I said, "Well, that looks kind of fun, I'll do it," | 4:48 | |
Interviewer | trained as an Interrogator | 4:52 |
once you joined the army? | 4:53 | |
- | First, actually, the way we used to do it | 4:54 |
in the army was you go to basic training, | 4:56 | |
then you go to a language school, | 4:59 | |
if you didn't already have language that you could test at, | 5:00 | |
because every interrogator in the army | 5:04 | |
at that time was required to have at least one | 5:05 | |
foreign language that they scored at a certain level | 5:08 | |
of what we call a two, two, | 5:10 | |
meaning in reading and writing, | 5:12 | |
or listening and reading, I'm sorry, | 5:14 | |
and I could have probably taken the test and passed | 5:16 | |
with German, but they said, well, | 5:20 | |
if you take this other test, which was called the DLAB, | 5:21 | |
the Defense Language Aptitude Battery test, | 5:24 | |
which measures your ability to learn a foreign language, | 5:27 | |
it's just a made up language with some made up rules, | 5:29 | |
they said, if you do well enough on that, | 5:32 | |
then we'll send you to Monterey California, | 5:34 | |
all expense paid trip for up to a year, | 5:36 | |
year and a half, where you get to live | 5:39 | |
on the beach and study foreign language. | 5:40 | |
I said, sign me up, you know, of course. | 5:42 | |
So that's what I did, | 5:46 | |
and it was probably one of the most messed | 5:47 | |
up tests I've ever taken in my life. | 5:49 | |
It was just, I thought I'd failed, bombed it, | 5:51 | |
and ended up actually doing really well apparently. | 5:53 | |
So they said, well, you can get any language we have, | 5:55 | |
My first preference was Russian, | 5:58 | |
of course, you know, this was back just | 6:00 | |
at the end of the Cold War, | 6:02 | |
and I had always had this affinity to studying | 6:04 | |
the Soviet Union and studied it in college, | 6:07 | |
and so I said, "Well, I want to do Russian, | 6:10 | |
or Ukrainian or German." | 6:12 | |
Those are my three languages, | 6:14 | |
but nobody ever asked me, | 6:15 | |
nobody ever had me fill out any paperwork. | 6:17 | |
Amazing thing was, was when I showed up in Monterey, | 6:19 | |
they didn't even have a record of me showing up that day. | 6:21 | |
So it was just by coincidence | 6:24 | |
that I showed up with another fellow from basic training, | 6:26 | |
one other fellow, who had orders to go to Russian school, | 6:28 | |
that I ended up going to Russian school, | 6:31 | |
studied there for a year, | 6:33 | |
did really well, then we went from there, | 6:34 | |
from Monterey down to Southern Arizona, | 6:38 | |
to the US Army Intelligence Center. | 6:41 | |
There's an intelligence school down there | 6:44 | |
for the level 10 course, | 6:46 | |
we call it the basic course where I studied | 6:48 | |
for about nine weeks, | 6:51 | |
went through the interrogator school, | 6:52 | |
bombed the final exam The first time, | 6:53 | |
had to roll back, go through again, | 6:55 | |
aced it the second time that I went through. | 6:57 | |
So I was there for about four or five months, I suppose. | 6:59 | |
Interviewer | What do they teach | 7:03 |
at the interrogator school? | 7:04 | |
- | There were three main mods at that time | 7:06 |
that we were focusing on, | 7:08 | |
map rating because we were trained | 7:11 | |
to be tactical interrogators, | 7:14 | |
questioning methodology and then the final exam | 7:16 | |
which is everything that we had learned | 7:20 | |
in the actual conduct of a live interrogation | 7:23 | |
with a live source. | 7:25 | |
These are things that we had trained up from about week two | 7:26 | |
after the map reading course is where we actually | 7:30 | |
start to get one-on-one interaction with | 7:33 | |
with course instructors, | 7:36 | |
and we'd go through approach phases, | 7:38 | |
and preparing the interrogation booth, and rapport building, | 7:40 | |
questioning methodology, like I said, | 7:44 | |
and then actually conducting a full what we called | 7:48 | |
an order of battle interrogation. | 7:53 | |
Now, at that time, the school house was still geared | 7:55 | |
towards Cold War, you know, Soviet army Fulda gap type | 7:57 | |
of scenarios, where we were interrogating prisoners of war, | 8:01 | |
legitimate soldiers who, you know, | 8:05 | |
asking them about how many tanks, artillery positions, | 8:08 | |
platoon engagements, that sort of stuff. | 8:11 | |
We were just gearing up towards a crossover towards | 8:13 | |
insurgencies, you know, during my time that I went there, | 8:18 | |
we were doing a South American Central American | 8:22 | |
type of scenarios. | 8:25 | |
I can't really get into the details, | 8:27 | |
but we were just barely starting to focus | 8:29 | |
on insurgent type of operations. | 8:32 | |
Interviewer | Did you adhere to the army field manual? | 8:34 |
- | Absolutely, yeah, that was part of the grading | 8:37 |
of the test, and it was hammered into us back in those days, | 8:40 | |
about the importance of rule of law, | 8:43 | |
about Geneva Conventions, | 8:46 | |
about how we were the good guys, | 8:47 | |
but how we didn't torture or abuse people, | 8:48 | |
that sort of thing. | 8:51 | |
And so from day one, you know, that was, you know, | 8:53 | |
pretty much a given, | 8:56 | |
that we were going to do things the right way, | 8:57 | |
Interviewer | Before we go to 9/11, | 8:59 |
I just wanted to clarify the difference | 9:01 | |
between being an interrogator | 9:04 | |
and being an intelligence collector. | 9:05 | |
- | Well, an intelligence collector, | 9:08 |
specifically a human intelligence collector | 9:09 | |
can be more broad, generic. | 9:12 | |
You can collect information via human interaction | 9:14 | |
in a variety of settings. | 9:18 | |
It doesn't actually have to be someone who's | 9:19 | |
under control of the authorities on your side, | 9:21 | |
and that's where usually interrogation plays a | 9:25 | |
specific role where someone is incarcerated, detained, | 9:27 | |
basically held against their will, | 9:31 | |
and then it's your job to try and glean information | 9:34 | |
from them or gain their cooperation | 9:38 | |
under those very tight circumstances. | 9:40 | |
Whereas a human intelligence collector can be | 9:42 | |
someone who is an interrogator or maybe another field focus, | 9:44 | |
such as counter-intelligence agent, | 9:49 | |
who can work in a variety of circumstances. | 9:51 | |
They can work in strategic debriefing, | 9:54 | |
where they're meeting with willing sources, | 9:56 | |
walk-in sources, they can work | 9:57 | |
human intelligence collection teams, | 10:00 | |
also previously known as force protection teams. | 10:03 | |
They use a bunch of different acronyms now. | 10:06 | |
The names always change, | 10:09 | |
but basically it's a team of intelligence collectors who go | 10:10 | |
out into a field environment, I should say, | 10:13 | |
can be cities, villages, whatever, | 10:17 | |
usually in peacekeeping operations, | 10:20 | |
and they just interact with the locals. | 10:22 | |
It can be the local authorities, | 10:23 | |
it can be local farmers, businessmen, people in the street, | 10:25 | |
that sort of thing, | 10:29 | |
and just through casual conversation, | 10:30 | |
trying to elicit information or, you know, | 10:31 | |
find a willing source because then they can maybe | 10:34 | |
even recruit into source operations and, you know, | 10:36 | |
actually task them with gaining information. | 10:42 | |
Now, interrogators can do that information, | 10:45 | |
or can do that specific job. | 10:47 | |
However, people who are not trained in interrogation, | 10:50 | |
who can do those other types of operations, | 10:54 | |
those more broad general type of collection operations, | 10:56 | |
are not authorized to be able | 11:00 | |
to actually conduct interrogations. | 11:02 | |
They can work in interrogation facilities, | 11:04 | |
but it's usually under | 11:07 | |
very tightly controlled circumstances. | 11:07 | |
Interviewer | Did that change, what you just described, | 11:10 |
change after 9/11, that people who were not really equipped | 11:12 | |
to be interrogated become interrogated? | 11:15 | |
- | Well, I think really, | 11:18 |
it hadn't been defined clearly enough prior to 9/11, | 11:19 | |
and that's where one of the problems I saw came about, | 11:22 | |
was that the leadership hadn't actually really | 11:27 | |
gotten an SOP to my understanding, | 11:29 | |
to my knowledge about, well, | 11:33 | |
we're going to outline specifically who can conduct | 11:35 | |
interrogation operations and who can't, | 11:38 | |
and so it was a little bit more ad hoc, you know, | 11:41 | |
make the rules as you go type of type of situation. | 11:46 | |
(Interview speaks) | 11:49 | |
Well, I was at Gitmo from 2002 to 2003, | 11:50 | |
so specifically talking specifically talking | 11:55 | |
about operations at Guantanamo, it really seemed to change | 11:58 | |
because of the environment, the environment had changed. | 12:01 | |
We had very limited operations in the past | 12:04 | |
when it came to any hostile, and this is again, | 12:08 | |
one of the things that I would consider criteria | 12:12 | |
for an interrogation is that usually it's a hostile type | 12:15 | |
of interaction, meaning that, | 12:20 | |
you know that the person you're in front of is an enemy. | 12:22 | |
The enemy knows that they're in front of an enemy, | 12:25 | |
and yet you still are able | 12:28 | |
to have a conversation, basically. | 12:29 | |
So that's what I mean when I use the term hostile, | 12:32 | |
we didn't have a lot of those situations in the past, | 12:37 | |
prior to 9/11, we had limited operations | 12:41 | |
in the Desert Storm, Desert Shield, | 12:44 | |
also known as Gulf War One, a little bit in Somalia, | 12:47 | |
some very small encounters Panama in 1989, | 12:51 | |
that sort of thing. | 12:54 | |
But by and large, most interrogators, | 12:55 | |
if they were actually interrogating, | 12:58 | |
it was more in a strategic debriefing, | 13:00 | |
where it was a friendly environment. | 13:02 | |
It was a walk-in source. | 13:04 | |
You know, those were real-time missions during peace time, | 13:05 | |
but it wasn't a detention facility. | 13:08 | |
Interviewer | So, I'd like to ask you where you were 9/11, | 13:11 |
how that evolved into Guantanamo, but essentially, | 13:15 | |
you're saying that the interrogators weren't really prepared | 13:17 | |
for the kind of work they had to do once 9/11 happened? | 13:20 | |
- | By and large, | 13:26 |
I think that there were probably some interrogators | 13:27 | |
in the world, quite a few, in fact, that were probably | 13:29 | |
prepared to conduct real and good, | 13:32 | |
solid, exceptional interrogation. | 13:36 | |
But, those are few and far between even prior to 9/11, | 13:39 | |
even in our small group, just to give you an idea, | 13:44 | |
in the early 1990s, when I joined, I was told that | 13:47 | |
at the time in the army worldwide, we had some total | 13:52 | |
of 1200 interrogators, that included all languages | 13:56 | |
around the world, all scenarios, all bases. | 13:59 | |
So it was a fairly small outfit prior to 9/11, | 14:02 | |
after 0/11, I think those numbers | 14:08 | |
bumped up to somewhere on 12,000. | 14:10 | |
I think we, you know, magnitude 10, | 14:12 | |
and we were trying to graduate 3000 students per year | 14:16 | |
from the US Army Intelligence Center, | 14:20 | |
and that was just the army. | 14:22 | |
I don't know about the Marines, Air Force, Navy, | 14:23 | |
anything like that. | 14:25 | |
And we were looking for more numbers, | 14:27 | |
hoping that more numbers would actually, you know, | 14:30 | |
make a positive difference | 14:33 | |
in the quality of the intelligence | 14:35 | |
that we were actually getting to the leadership. | 14:37 | |
I differ with that. | 14:40 | |
However, prior to 9/11, I do believe that we | 14:41 | |
had qualified personnel. | 14:43 | |
I believe that I was qualified. | 14:45 | |
I had a better understanding. | 14:47 | |
I had good mentors when I first came in. | 14:48 | |
I was regular army when I first came in '92 to '98, | 14:51 | |
late '98 when I got out, | 14:55 | |
that first six years, | 14:57 | |
and I was working at a strategic debriefing center, | 14:58 | |
we did some tactical operations as well. | 15:01 | |
I had a handful of extremely good, knowledgeable, | 15:04 | |
and experienced personnel who were actively working | 15:10 | |
as my mentors. | 15:14 | |
We're talking Chief Warrant Officer three levels, | 15:15 | |
Chief Warrant Officer four level, | 15:19 | |
a GS-13, who worked with the CIA, | 15:22 | |
we're all in my unit, | 15:25 | |
and took a hands-on approach towards all the personnel | 15:27 | |
that they identified in the unit | 15:32 | |
to basically being what we call a careerist, | 15:33 | |
to somebody who had the interest and the potential | 15:36 | |
to actually do a full 20 or 30 years in the field, | 15:39 | |
and because I had that benefit when 9/11 came around, | 15:43 | |
I was completely prepared I believe, | 15:48 | |
to conduct quality interrogations. | 15:50 | |
I would have preferred to work | 15:53 | |
with people who maybe spoke one of my target languages, | 15:55 | |
by the way, I speak five languages, | 15:58 | |
three of which I was trained by the military, | 16:01 | |
the fourth one I learned on my own, | 16:03 | |
and I've used them in my job mostly prior to 9/11, | 16:06 | |
sometimes post 9/11. | 16:12 | |
I'm not a Middle East expert, | 16:14 | |
I wasn't prior to 9/11, I was a former Soviet Union | 16:17 | |
Eastern European specialist, that was my area. | 16:20 | |
When 9/11 occurred, I was re-stamped | 16:23 | |
as counter terrorism, counter extremist, | 16:27 | |
Middle East, Central Asian expert, and- | 16:30 | |
Interviewer | Can you describe exactly | 16:33 |
what happened after 9/11? | 16:35 | |
What happened to you in terms of how they approached you, | 16:37 | |
and how they got you do Guantanamo? | 16:41 | |
- | At the time, it was 2001, obviously, | 16:43 |
I had been serving in the military, | 16:46 | |
let's see, by then, about nine years, | 16:50 | |
I took a short break of about a couple of months | 16:53 | |
from late '98, early '99. | 16:56 | |
When I transitioned from being | 16:59 | |
regular Army full-time soldier, | 17:01 | |
to being part of the Utah National Guard, | 17:03 | |
and January of '99, | 17:05 | |
I joined up with a Utah National Guard. | 17:08 | |
At first I was just part-time, | 17:10 | |
but it didn't take long actually, | 17:11 | |
before I was brought on | 17:12 | |
as a full-time soldier for special projects, | 17:14 | |
we were mainly working language issues, | 17:19 | |
and I had the languages. | 17:21 | |
So that's primarily what I did, but yeah, | 17:22 | |
in my spare time I also continued | 17:24 | |
to study interrogation methodology, the history. | 17:26 | |
I studied more in depth on my own, | 17:30 | |
on the the work of Han Scharf from Horst Bart | 17:33 | |
from World War II, on the German side, | 17:38 | |
the German Luftwaffe, | 17:40 | |
their experiences and Colonel Moran in the Japanese theater | 17:42 | |
on the American side, | 17:48 | |
to really get an idea of what | 17:50 | |
more specialized expert interrogation looked like. | 17:52 | |
Then when 9/11 occurred, just to give you an idea, | 17:57 | |
I was in Salt Lake City. | 18:01 | |
I was basically stationed at what we call Fort living room, | 18:03 | |
living at home in west Jordan. | 18:08 | |
I was married at the time, | 18:11 | |
had a one stepson living with us, | 18:12 | |
and another stepson that lived in Germany, | 18:15 | |
and I was on my way, | 18:17 | |
just dropped off my younger stepson at school, | 18:19 | |
and was getting ready to go into the office | 18:22 | |
when I was listening to NPR at the time and, you know, | 18:25 | |
heard about the first building being hit. | 18:28 | |
So I was on my way back to the house, | 18:30 | |
just to grab some coffee before I went into the office, | 18:34 | |
and turn on the TV, | 18:37 | |
and I actually saw when the second plane hit, | 18:40 | |
and at that point I knew | 18:42 | |
that I wasn't going into the office that day. | 18:44 | |
We were on lockdown, | 18:46 | |
and we weren't going to be doing business | 18:48 | |
as usual for a while, | 18:50 | |
so I basically stayed at home. | 18:51 | |
I called in, stayed at home, | 18:53 | |
watched the entire event unfold on TV, you know, | 18:54 | |
mouth open, just unbelievable throughout the entire day. | 18:59 | |
When my wife came home at time, I told her look, | 19:03 | |
I'm going to be deployed. | 19:06 | |
I know it, for a fact. | 19:08 | |
There's very few people who do what I do. | 19:09 | |
We're at war, and that's what's going to happen. | 19:12 | |
I, that same week, I believe, I got a phone call | 19:15 | |
from my commander activating me, | 19:19 | |
but I was activated for deployment to Afghanistan | 19:22 | |
as an alternate, a small team. | 19:28 | |
But I was the primary alternate. | 19:30 | |
If any of the other people weren't able to make it, | 19:32 | |
then I would have been put on the plane and sent over there, | 19:35 | |
but all the other individuals wanted to go, | 19:39 | |
and were able to withstand the muster. | 19:41 | |
So they all went and then I stayed. | 19:45 | |
So I stayed for a few more months continuing to work my job, | 19:48 | |
and then I got another call in June or July of 2002, | 19:51 | |
so just three months later, where I was activated to go | 19:56 | |
down to a place called Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. | 19:59 | |
Interviewer | Did you know anything about Guantanamo Bay? | 20:02 |
- | I really didn't really know much about it. | 20:04 |
I had been following the events in Afghanistan | 20:07 | |
and Pakistan to some extent, but I was working full time | 20:09 | |
still on the job that I was doing, | 20:13 | |
which was more language matters, | 20:15 | |
and I was the admin non-commissioned officer in charge. | 20:17 | |
So I had a lot of work to do with that project. | 20:22 | |
- | So you had no expectations when you went | 20:25 |
to Guantanamo as to what you expected to see, did you- | 20:28 | |
- | What I expected and what I actually saw were | 20:31 |
two completely different things. | 20:34 | |
I was expecting to see a premiere site | 20:35 | |
with exceptional people. | 20:40 | |
You know, basically the cream of the crop | 20:43 | |
from the human intelligence community, all working | 20:46 | |
at tandem there much like what we would expect, you know, | 20:49 | |
because what we see in Hollywood movies, | 20:53 | |
and I was really disappointed, you know, not to | 20:57 | |
say anything disparaging about my comrades down there. | 21:00 | |
We were all working hard | 21:03 | |
working diligently for some very good people. | 21:05 | |
I just believe that a lot | 21:08 | |
of the other individuals that were there really | 21:10 | |
shouldn't have been there, that they weren't prepared | 21:14 | |
for it, that they did not have the background | 21:17 | |
the knowledge, the insight, the expertise, a lot | 21:21 | |
of it on the leadership side and not just on the military. | 21:24 | |
There was a small group of military there, | 21:28 | |
on the intelligence side, there were quite a few civilians, | 21:30 | |
and I won't mention any names, but you know | 21:35 | |
some of my civilian counterparts were talking | 21:38 | |
with the FBI and DIA and such, but for example, | 21:40 | |
the FBI, one of my counterparts | 21:47 | |
knew nothing about Afghanistan. | 21:51 | |
I mean, when the detainee was talking about major cities | 21:53 | |
in Afghanistan, Mazar-i-Sharif | 21:56 | |
were talking about the transit | 21:58 | |
of the captured prisoners across Northern Afghanistan | 22:00 | |
from Kunduz province over to Sheberghan Prison | 22:05 | |
by the Uzbek commander where she dosed him. | 22:08 | |
All this stuff should have been common knowledge | 22:11 | |
to an FBI interrogator, | 22:14 | |
and yet he had no idea where Mazar-i-Sharif was, | 22:16 | |
or how to spell it or anything about it. | 22:20 | |
So if you don't know anything | 22:22 | |
about what you're supposed to question on, | 22:23 | |
how are you going to question about it? | 22:26 | |
And was the man was an expert in his field, | 22:28 | |
which was, I believe he was the organized crime unit. | 22:32 | |
And, you ask him any question about organized crime | 22:39 | |
in America, that guy had an answer and it was spot on, | 22:43 | |
and he could interrogate Mafioso, you know, | 22:45 | |
day and night I'm sure, but he was just the round peg | 22:48 | |
in the square hole at this point. | 22:52 | |
And so his quality | 22:53 | |
of interrogations unfortunately suffered dramatically | 22:55 | |
because of that, because he didn't know where | 22:58 | |
to question anybody on those sorts of things. | 22:59 | |
- | Were you trained specifically toward these kinds | 23:02 |
of details before you started your work? | 23:06 | |
- | Absolutely not. | 23:08 |
No, not any type | 23:10 | |
of organized training structure. | 23:12 | |
The training that I got, as far as geographics, | 23:16 | |
specifics, and that area of the world came about one, | 23:22 | |
from Central Asia because the Soviet Union was involved | 23:27 | |
in Afghanistan during the 1980s, | 23:31 | |
and so because of my studies in the Soviet Union | 23:33 | |
in the 1980s in college, and then in the 1990s with the rise | 23:35 | |
of the Taliban, I was able to, on my own, | 23:39 | |
get some of that information. | 23:42 | |
So I was aware of it. | 23:43 | |
I had read Ahmed Rashid's book the Taliban, | 23:44 | |
or is it an Abdor Rashid? | 23:48 | |
It's been a while since I read it. | 23:51 | |
And that was very informative to begin with. | 23:54 | |
That helped a lot, but that | 23:58 | |
wasn't something that was assigned for me to read. | 24:01 | |
- | Can I just clarify, they brought you down to Guantanamo, | 24:04 |
and they put you into an interrogation unit | 24:07 | |
without any training or any background as | 24:10 | |
to the kind of people you'd be interrogating | 24:13 | |
and what your purpose was, is that correct? | 24:15 | |
- | Yeah, you hit the nail on the head with that one. | 24:19 |
Honestly, that was one of the most perplexing things. | 24:23 | |
I thought that I was going to be one | 24:26 | |
of the least experienced fellows down there, | 24:27 | |
and so that there would be all these top-notch CIA, | 24:30 | |
DIA careers professionals, who would say, | 24:33 | |
okay, Sergeant Nelson, | 24:36 | |
I was a Sergeant at the time, you know, | 24:38 | |
you've got some good solid generic background information, | 24:41 | |
you know, interrogation. | 24:45 | |
So we're going to put you in this area and assign you | 24:46 | |
with someone who's a geographic specialist and, you know, | 24:48 | |
you're going to work together in tandem and such like that. | 24:51 | |
No, in fact, when I arrived, | 24:53 | |
I was asked by an E7 in the Navy, | 24:56 | |
which is a Chief Warrant Officer or a Chief Petty Officer, | 24:59 | |
I'm sorry, if I would be the team NCOIC, | 25:02 | |
the non-commissioned officer in charge, | 25:05 | |
even though there was somebody | 25:06 | |
there on the team who outranked me, | 25:08 | |
because I was the most experienced person, | 25:10 | |
and I turned it down because I didn't want | 25:13 | |
to disrespect the staff Sergeant in the army, | 25:16 | |
and so I allowed him to be the NCOIC, | 25:20 | |
and this was on the team that was the Saudi and Yemeni team, | 25:26 | |
which was probably the most difficult team to work with. | 25:30 | |
The Saudis and Yemenis are some very hardcore | 25:33 | |
jihadists who believe, you know, | 25:36 | |
100% in the cause that they were fighting for, | 25:40 | |
and they were very, very difficult to work with, | 25:45 | |
and very cunning as well, very difficult as far | 25:48 | |
as trying to even glean information from them, | 25:51 | |
let alone gain any willing cooperation. | 25:54 | |
So I was amazed at the fact that I, | 25:57 | |
going down there thinking that I was going to be one of | 26:01 | |
the least experience turned out to be one | 26:02 | |
of the more experienced ones, | 26:04 | |
and was put on the most difficult team, | 26:06 | |
and there were people on my team | 26:08 | |
who had no business interrogating, | 26:10 | |
case in point, there was a fellow from, | 26:13 | |
he was a foreign national who was a US citizen, | 26:15 | |
been in the army. | 26:18 | |
He was, most of us were Reserves at that time, | 26:18 | |
National Guard or Army Reserves or Navy Reserves. | 26:21 | |
So it was a lot of part-timers, | 26:25 | |
and the one young fellow who was on our team | 26:28 | |
was having some difficulties to say the least, | 26:33 | |
and the chief had noticed it, | 26:35 | |
and so she took me aside and said, | 26:38 | |
"Hey, can you train this soldier a little on, you know, | 26:40 | |
questioning and how to build rapport and stuff like that?" | 26:45 | |
And so I spent a week and, you know, hands-on, | 26:48 | |
so I was still doing my full load. | 26:51 | |
I had about 40 cases that I was working at that time, | 26:53 | |
and I spent a week trying to mentor this young soldier, | 26:56 | |
who was a foreign national, well, | 27:01 | |
he was a US citizen obviously, | 27:03 | |
but he was from a foreign country, | 27:05 | |
so he didn't speak English as his native language, | 27:07 | |
and he wasn't from the Middle East or Central Asian | 27:10 | |
or South Asian countries, | 27:12 | |
he was Southeast, he was Pacific region basically, | 27:13 | |
and so he would have been terrific in that specific area, | 27:17 | |
but he knew nothing about Al-Qaeda, | 27:21 | |
and nothing about the Taliban, | 27:24 | |
nothing about any of the numerous insurgent groups, | 27:25 | |
or extremist groups that were operating in the area, | 27:30 | |
didn't know anything about their culture, their language. | 27:32 | |
So we had no solid basis, | 27:34 | |
and this was his first appointment, | 27:37 | |
his first assignment ever. | 27:39 | |
So he was out of the box, he was brand new, | 27:41 | |
and honestly, when we went into the booth together, | 27:44 | |
the first time, and I opened up the interrogation, | 27:48 | |
started talking with the detainee, | 27:52 | |
he was a very easy going detainee. | 27:53 | |
He would actually answer some questions. | 27:54 | |
He wasn't really honest and truthful, | 27:57 | |
but he was very easy going, | 27:58 | |
and that's why I picked him. | 27:59 | |
I opened it up and kind of, you know, introduced everybody, | 28:02 | |
and we just kind of had a little bit of a round table. | 28:06 | |
then I handed it over to my friend, | 28:07 | |
and his hands were shaking while he was trying | 28:10 | |
to formulate his first question, | 28:13 | |
which was about, give me your name. | 28:16 | |
At that point I knew that we were | 28:19 | |
in trouble with training this young man. | 28:21 | |
And so that day I went to the chief | 28:25 | |
and I said, "Look, I tried, I've given it a week. | 28:26 | |
I don't think he should be interrogator here. | 28:29 | |
You know, we can send it back, | 28:32 | |
it could go through a retraining at the course, | 28:34 | |
but he really doesn't need to be in the booth." | 28:36 | |
She really took umbrage at that and actually said, | 28:39 | |
"Well, I don't think you tried hard enough." | 28:42 | |
So she went and worked with him | 28:44 | |
for about a week and then came back | 28:46 | |
and apologized to me and said, | 28:47 | |
"You're right, he doesn't have any business | 28:49 | |
being an interrogator." | 28:51 | |
So he became a Reports Officer after that, | 28:52 | |
and he was perfectly fine with that. | 28:54 | |
He was very happy, in fact, | 28:57 | |
I think that he didn't have to be in the booth | 28:58 | |
from that point on. | 29:00 | |
Why do you think there was no training, why nobody | 29:03 | |
was there to take all the interrogators who, like yourself, | 29:05 | |
and just say, "Look, okay, this is the environment, | 29:09 | |
this is the culture we're working with." | 29:11 | |
Why was that not available? | 29:13 | |
- | You know, some people would think | 29:16 |
that this is actually something new, | 29:17 | |
that it's, you know, post 9/11 again, | 29:21 | |
where we were in over our heads, | 29:23 | |
this is a worldwide phenomenon, | 29:25 | |
worldwide struggle that we're fighting, | 29:26 | |
and it was just so big | 29:28 | |
and such an enormous complex development all of a sudden, | 29:29 | |
I disagree. | 29:34 | |
I think that we've actually been | 29:35 | |
in this exact same circumstance previously. | 29:37 | |
My case point is if you read the book, | 29:40 | |
"Talking With Victor Charlie," | 29:42 | |
it's a memoir basically from | 29:46 | |
a soldier who worked in Vietnam, | 29:48 | |
started out as a Vietnamese interpreter | 29:51 | |
and then switched over to being an interrogator. | 29:53 | |
I remember specifically about halfway through that book, | 29:55 | |
he had a conversation | 29:57 | |
with his Vietnamese interrogator counterpart, and, you know, | 29:59 | |
it was talking about how the Americans really | 30:02 | |
don't seem to understand what's going on, | 30:04 | |
we're not as good | 30:06 | |
as the Vietnamese interrogators and such, | 30:07 | |
and he was wondering why that was, | 30:08 | |
and the south Vietnamese counterparts said, | 30:10 | |
"Well, it's because you train | 30:13 | |
for every circumstance in the world. | 30:14 | |
We only train for Vietnam. | 30:17 | |
We know who we're talking to. | 30:19 | |
They're our cousins. | 30:21 | |
They, you know, they're the same people. | 30:22 | |
So we know how to talk to them. | 30:25 | |
We know when they're Bsing us, | 30:26 | |
we know about their families, we can do much more research. | 30:28 | |
Plus we can just build a rapport with them. | 30:34 | |
You try to fit a round peg | 30:37 | |
in all the different holes around the world, | 30:39 | |
and each hole requires a different peg." | 30:42 | |
We're fighting that same battle to this day, in my opinion, | 30:46 | |
and I blame leadership 100% for this. | 30:51 | |
Why? | 30:57 | |
Because in 2005, I was invited to go speak | 30:58 | |
to a senior leadership conference of retired generals | 31:02 | |
and admirals and such, | 31:05 | |
there was a lot of brass in the room, in Virginia, | 31:06 | |
and I was one of two interrogators | 31:10 | |
who actually spoke to them, | 31:11 | |
and we were bringing up some of these problems, | 31:14 | |
and there was a lot of nodding going on in the room, | 31:16 | |
there was a lot of agreement going on in the room, | 31:18 | |
and these were people who had the ear | 31:19 | |
of people in the Senate and in the House of Representatives | 31:22 | |
and with the White House at the time, | 31:25 | |
with all the senior leadership | 31:27 | |
at the various intelligence agencies. | 31:29 | |
So it's the senior leadership level that we're talking to | 31:31 | |
when we give them this advice, these experiences, | 31:34 | |
and make our suggestions. | 31:38 | |
"You need to work on specialization. | 31:40 | |
You need to work on geographic specialization, | 31:41 | |
area knowledge specific specialization," you know, | 31:43 | |
have a chemist talk to a chemistry guy, | 31:47 | |
have a geologists talk to, you know, geology scientist, | 31:49 | |
you know, specifically, you need to make sure | 31:55 | |
that you have people who understand each other | 31:58 | |
talking to each other. | 32:01 | |
We were making all these suggestions almost 10 years ago. | 32:02 | |
- | Why wasn't that going on from your take when you came | 32:07 |
down and was surprised in what you saw, | 32:10 | |
why do you think nobody was doing the work? | 32:12 | |
Nobody was doing their homework? | 32:15 | |
- | Well, a lot of people, like I say, | 32:18 |
are not careerists, meaning that they they like working | 32:22 | |
in the intelligence community part-time, | 32:27 | |
and they, you know, for example, the National Guard | 32:30 | |
and Reserves, they show up one week in a month, | 32:33 | |
and two weeks out of the year, they put on the uniform, | 32:36 | |
they go out and they train. | 32:39 | |
Of the training weekend, out of two days, | 32:40 | |
they're actually maybe spending four or five hours | 32:42 | |
total actually working intelligence related activities. | 32:45 | |
The rest of the time, it's, you know, | 32:47 | |
organizational type of stuff, it's PT type of stuff, | 32:49 | |
it's, you know, just shooting the breeze or going out, | 32:51 | |
and you know, a myriad of other things that, you know, | 32:54 | |
as a soldier you are expected to comply with as well. | 32:56 | |
So for the part-timers, | 33:02 | |
it's very difficult to actually maintain the skillset | 33:03 | |
and the knowledge that you have | 33:08 | |
if all you're doing is doing it at drill time. | 33:09 | |
You really need to continue to do this | 33:15 | |
on your own on a regular basis, | 33:18 | |
and I believe that's what helped me, | 33:22 | |
was because I just had such a firm interest | 33:25 | |
in it ever since I was an interrogator full-time, you know, | 33:27 | |
at my first unit I saw that- | 33:30 | |
Interviewer | What did you observed when you | 33:32 |
were down there in the other interrogation, | 33:33 | |
besides that one person you | 33:35 | |
talked to us about, what else did you observe? | 33:36 | |
- | A lot of frustration, and blaming it on the detainees. | 33:39 |
The lack of results, especially like I said, | 33:44 | |
on the more difficult teams like the Saudi and Yemeni teams, | 33:48 | |
or the Gulf Arab state teams. | 33:51 | |
The results, as far as on the reporting side, | 33:56 | |
were minuscule compared to what, you know, | 33:59 | |
people who were working the Pakistani and Afghan prisoners. | 34:02 | |
Those were much more cooperative, at least as far | 34:08 | |
as being able to give some basic information. | 34:10 | |
So the frustration was more evident, that I saw. | 34:14 | |
And when people were frustrated, | 34:19 | |
instead of looking inwardly and saying, | 34:21 | |
"Well, what can I do to become a better interrogator?" | 34:23 | |
It was mostly, "Well, what can we do | 34:25 | |
to the detainees to get them to talk?" | 34:26 | |
And this is where you start getting leadership who, | 34:29 | |
because of their ignorance and their arrogance, | 34:31 | |
this deadly combination that I've spoken about before, | 34:34 | |
where they don't know what to do, | 34:38 | |
but they're in a position of authority, | 34:41 | |
so they're too arrogant to listen to other people | 34:42 | |
who maybe do know what to do, | 34:44 | |
they start making a calls and the judgment calls on well, | 34:46 | |
instead of focusing on making better interrogators, | 34:51 | |
or providing the interrogators | 34:53 | |
with the adequate supplies and tools, | 34:55 | |
knowledge requirements that they need, | 34:57 | |
we're going to focus on how far | 34:59 | |
can we push the limit on the detainees? | 35:01 | |
How far can we push them as far as coercion? | 35:03 | |
As far as mental or physical coercion? | 35:07 | |
And this is where you start getting people talking about | 35:09 | |
the gray area, | 35:13 | |
which really never should have been spoken about, | 35:14 | |
because a good interrogator never needs to go | 35:17 | |
into what we call the gray area. | 35:19 | |
Interviewer | I want to go into that | 35:21 |
and see how that evolved, | 35:22 | |
but can you just tell us how interrogation | 35:24 | |
worked when you would conduct an interrogation, | 35:26 | |
what the process was? | 35:29 | |
- | What my process was. | 35:30 |
Interviewer | Yeah. | 35:32 |
- | Well, like I said, | 35:33 |
at that time I had a fairly large load, | 35:34 | |
I had about 40 plus detainees. | 35:35 | |
So even if I were to speak to one detainee per day, | 35:37 | |
conduct one interrogation per day, | 35:40 | |
I couldn't see my detainees more than one time per month | 35:41 | |
to go through all of them. | 35:46 | |
It was very, very difficult to actually focus | 35:48 | |
on specialization and really getting to know a guy. | 35:50 | |
So it was unfortunately because of the circumstances | 35:52 | |
that I was put in the ratio of personnel | 35:55 | |
who were interrogating versus personnel who were detained. | 35:59 | |
We were really at a disadvantage | 36:04 | |
from the very beginning of my opinion. | 36:06 | |
Interviewer | So does that mean if you had a good | 36:09 |
conversation with one of the detainees, | 36:11 | |
could you invite them back the next day, | 36:13 | |
or you had to move on to someone else | 36:15 | |
because you had to cover the 40 people? | 36:17 | |
- | Nope, I had much more say as to who I wanted to talk to, | 36:19 |
for how I wanted to talk to them, | 36:26 | |
but the problem was from the very beginning, | 36:28 | |
was well you need to go through and basically do- | 36:30 | |
As an interrogator, you're given a caseload, | 36:34 | |
and these fellows have already been interrogated. | 36:36 | |
Remember we were there in late July, | 36:38 | |
early August when we first got there of 2002, | 36:40 | |
there had already been a rotation before us of interrogator. | 36:43 | |
So these guys were not fresh from battlefield. | 36:46 | |
They had been screened, they had been interrogated. | 36:49 | |
So, we had to conduct our own screening. | 36:52 | |
The handoff as we call it, | 36:55 | |
where you shake hands with your counterpart was okay, | 36:58 | |
but it was very time constrained. | 37:03 | |
So there was only a couple of days | 37:05 | |
that I was able to actually spend in the booth | 37:06 | |
with the previous interrogator working with me, | 37:09 | |
and so we just got a couple of his priority cases, | 37:12 | |
and I won't mention names, but basically these were | 37:16 | |
fellows who had the potential of providing some information, | 37:20 | |
but they really hadn't provided much information up | 37:24 | |
to that point. | 37:26 | |
Again, this is the Saudi team. | 37:27 | |
So you work on the recommendation | 37:29 | |
from the previous interrogator, but then I had to | 37:31 | |
go through the file cases on each and every one of these, | 37:33 | |
this was before we had access to what | 37:37 | |
we call SIPRNet and the secret internet, if you will, | 37:39 | |
very classified, highly classified, confidential, | 37:45 | |
stand alone type of networking that we were able to, | 37:49 | |
you know, have bases in Afghanistan, | 37:54 | |
communicating at a classified level with computers | 37:58 | |
in the states or in Gitmo, or, you know, | 38:02 | |
in Europe, wherever it might be, | 38:06 | |
this really before we had | 38:07 | |
a lot of that access that we do now. | 38:08 | |
So we were looking at paper files, | 38:11 | |
we were looking at, you know, carbon copies. | 38:12 | |
We were in a transition in the technology | 38:15 | |
of human intelligence at the time. | 38:18 | |
So limited to a lot of the reports that were basically | 38:20 | |
done very quickly over in Afghanistan. | 38:25 | |
A lot of these fellows, my opinion, | 38:29 | |
had no business being in Gitmo, | 38:31 | |
mainly because they were low level- | 38:35 | |
Interviewer | From the beginning? | 38:37 |
- | What's that? | 38:38 |
Interviewer | From the beginning you felt that? | 38:39 |
- | Not long after I arrived. | 38:40 |
Interviewer | Why did you think that? | 38:42 |
- | Well after working their cases, | 38:44 |
and realizing that well, yeah, okay, | 38:46 | |
maybe they don't like us. | 38:48 | |
Maybe they're not cooperative, | 38:49 | |
they're not going to tell you, you know, | 38:50 | |
they're not going to rat out their cousins | 38:51 | |
and their families and all that sort of stuff. | 38:52 | |
It's kind of like, well, wait a second, | 38:54 | |
it sounds like you were there on holiday, | 38:57 | |
if you're a foreign national, you know, | 38:59 | |
kind of like doing the jihad vacation type of thing, | 39:01 | |
you just showed up to just kind of like, | 39:03 | |
see what it was like. | 39:05 | |
Yeah, maybe you fired off a gun or two, | 39:07 | |
but that doesn't make you some sort | 39:08 | |
of international mastermind criminal, you know, | 39:09 | |
that's leading this nefarious, you know, insurgency network. | 39:12 | |
- | What do you think when you begin to see that some | 39:17 |
of these people maybe shouldn't have been there? | 39:19 | |
- | You well, in that time period, | 39:23 |
you basically kept quiet about it, | 39:25 | |
if you had any disagreements. | 39:26 | |
The attitude was, you know, | 39:28 | |
even at the four star general level was | 39:31 | |
"F these guys, they're all terrorists," | 39:33 | |
and so when you have that type of, and again, | 39:37 | |
I'm an EFI Buck Sergeant at the time, you know, | 39:41 | |
granted, I had some experience, | 39:46 | |
but I had no voice at that point. | 39:47 | |
I remember having a conversation at night | 39:53 | |
out of the facility with | 39:56 | |
a CWT Chief Warrant Officer two level. | 39:57 | |
So he outranks me. | 40:00 | |
He is a commissioned officer. | 40:02 | |
Even he was afraid to openly speak about his reservations | 40:03 | |
about what are these guys doing here, you know? | 40:07 | |
So there were, | 40:10 | |
there were. | 40:12 | |
- | What would happen? | |
- | Repercussions, vilification, ostracization, | 40:14 |
the, you know, basically being blacklisted. | 40:19 | |
We liked our job. | 40:22 | |
We liked being effective and doing our job, | 40:24 | |
but the atmosphere at the time, the attitude | 40:26 | |
at the time set out by the leadership was, | 40:30 | |
"Hey, you're either against us or you're with us," | 40:32 | |
and what we say is that they're all terrorists, | 40:35 | |
and in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, | 40:38 | |
they're the worst of the worst. | 40:40 | |
Interviewer | Did you know they were purchased | 40:42 |
at that point? | 40:43 | |
- | Yes. | 40:44 |
- | How did you know that? | |
- | We have human intelligence, we have imagery intelligence, | 40:47 |
we have el-ence, which is electronic intelligence. | 40:52 | |
We also have ru-ment, which is rumor intelligence. | 40:54 | |
The one thing that people who work | 40:58 | |
in offices of the government and the military | 41:00 | |
love to do is chit chat all the time, | 41:03 | |
and so they're a rumor- | 41:06 | |
The rumormongering mills are notorious around the world. | 41:07 | |
So we had heard about these things. | 41:11 | |
There hadn't been any corroboration about it, | 41:15 | |
so, but we were aware of it. | 41:17 | |
What could we do about it at that point? | 41:19 | |
But it did seem to indicate, | 41:22 | |
and there was another problem that I also saw was | 41:24 | |
in addition to the idea that | 41:27 | |
these prisoners were actually being purchased, | 41:28 | |
was that vendettas were being, | 41:31 | |
you know, settled via incarceration. | 41:35 | |
And so if you had, you know, | 41:39 | |
basically it's karma rearing its ugly head | 41:43 | |
in the most despicable way. | 41:45 | |
If you had, you know, pissed off some Afghan local, | 41:48 | |
you know, cousin, or maybe neighboring villager | 41:53 | |
over a land dispute, because most disputes | 41:57 | |
in Afghanistan have to deal with land disputes, | 42:00 | |
then the American forces has come along and they're looking | 42:04 | |
for all the bad guys and all the Taliban supporters, | 42:07 | |
and Taliban senior leadership, | 42:09 | |
and they don't know anything about who the Taliban are. | 42:10 | |
Remember that when we went into Afghanistan, | 42:14 | |
we knew next to zero, as far as our leadership goes as | 42:17 | |
to who the Taliban were, who their senior leadership was, | 42:20 | |
any other organizational structure, | 42:24 | |
even though that was all accessible, | 42:26 | |
we just hadn't prepared for it. | 42:28 | |
The same thing happened in Iraq. | 42:30 | |
I mean, I was amazed at the fact that Iraq, | 42:32 | |
which we'd been fighting, you know, | 42:35 | |
chomping at the bit to get into for years, | 42:38 | |
at the time of the invasion in 2003, | 42:42 | |
we didn't have one- | 42:45 | |
(audio static) | 42:46 | |
On the scene supporting us. | 42:53 | |
That was just amazing to me, | 42:57 | |
but to go back to Guantanamo, the vendetta scoring, | 42:59 | |
and settling was a big factor, I believe, | 43:05 | |
in the reason why a lot of the Afghans | 43:08 | |
were sent there because all it took was somebody saying, | 43:11 | |
"Yeah, he's a Taliban shadow governor," | 43:13 | |
or sub governor or, you know, he's some, you know, | 43:15 | |
Mula for the shura, the religious shura, | 43:18 | |
and they'd really didn't have any way of fact checking | 43:23 | |
any of this stuff. | 43:25 | |
So, we laugh about it, | 43:26 | |
but unfortunately this is what affects people's lives being | 43:27 | |
in the wrong place at the wrong time, you know, | 43:32 | |
a fellow who his son is picked up by the Taliban | 43:35 | |
in the summer of 2001 to participate, you know, | 43:41 | |
'cause they basically had press gangs going around the | 43:44 | |
around the country, forcing the young men | 43:47 | |
into the Taliban army | 43:49 | |
to go fight the Northern Alliance fellows | 43:51 | |
that were holed up in Badakhshan, | 43:54 | |
and so an older fellow goes in looking for his son, | 43:55 | |
travels across country, spends money, | 43:59 | |
spends time and ends up in Kunduz | 44:01 | |
of all the places in Afghanistan | 44:04 | |
that you can be when the invasion occurs, | 44:06 | |
you're in Kunduz, | 44:08 | |
so you are part of that huge roundup, | 44:10 | |
and then you're sent off to the other side of the world | 44:14 | |
because some PFC who doesn't know anything | 44:17 | |
about Afghanistan thinks that, well, | 44:22 | |
you just look like you're a Taliban, you know, | 44:24 | |
and yeah, I had experience with them. | 44:27 | |
Interviewer | So I just want to clarify again, | 44:31 |
so when you began to see that some of these people | 44:33 | |
weren't really a threat to the US, | 44:36 | |
you just kept it up | 44:39 | |
because that's what people did, | 44:40 | |
and you just continued your job- | 44:41 | |
- | On my own. | 44:43 |
However, I was given an opportunity in December of 2002. | 44:44 | |
So I worked for a few months on the Saudi Yemeni team, | 44:48 | |
and then around December, I believe it was, | 44:51 | |
I was switched over to what we call the tier three team. | 44:55 | |
Tier three was the small team of interrogators. | 44:57 | |
There were just three of us, actually, | 45:02 | |
at that time who were responsible for | 45:04 | |
re-reviewing the cases that had been recommended | 45:08 | |
for release. | 45:10 | |
So the process at that time | 45:11 | |
was the detainees would be interrogated. | 45:12 | |
Once their interrogator felt | 45:16 | |
that they had no more information of valuable, | 45:18 | |
and that they really pose no more threat, | 45:21 | |
that they could see to the United States, | 45:24 | |
that they they could recommend them for release. | 45:26 | |
They could recommend them, | 45:30 | |
for release for continued incarceration, you know, | 45:31 | |
but just no more interrogation, that sort of thing. | 45:34 | |
They go to us at tier three level, | 45:37 | |
our job was to re-review all the interrogation | 45:39 | |
reports that have been done | 45:41 | |
and then go through a complete bio on them, | 45:43 | |
talking about, you know, their complete background, | 45:46 | |
education and family, circumstances of capture, | 45:48 | |
all these sorts of things, and then, you know, | 45:51 | |
of course, intentions. | 45:52 | |
Trying to get any more information from them | 45:54 | |
that we could | 45:58 | |
in the process so that we produce more reports, | 46:01 | |
but our primary function was to basically sign | 46:04 | |
off in agreement with the initial interrogators | 46:07 | |
and initial analysts assessment that he should be released, | 46:10 | |
or at least not interrogated anymore, | 46:14 | |
and so I worked that for the next three or four months | 46:16 | |
until February when I left Guantanamo. | 46:20 | |
By the time I had left, | 46:27 | |
the numbers changed quite a bit, | 46:29 | |
and remember, I'm talking about something that was occurring | 46:30 | |
11, 12 years ago. | 46:33 | |
I believe we had on the books | 46:37 | |
88 personnel that we had recommended for release already, | 46:40 | |
by that time. | 46:44 | |
We had released three, I think, | 46:45 | |
and that was mainly because we were afraid | 46:48 | |
that they were going to die of old age in prison, | 46:51 | |
and we didn't want that. | 46:55 | |
We didn't want them dying under our watch. | 46:56 | |
It was okay to release them | 46:59 | |
and have them die getting off the plane, | 47:00 | |
but we just didn't want them dying at Guantanamo, | 47:03 | |
so that was the only reason why those had been hurried up, | 47:05 | |
and the others, | 47:10 | |
I believe that there were some there that really | 47:12 | |
should have been released. | 47:14 | |
They should never have been sent to Gitmo to begin with, | 47:16 | |
but really should have been released within a few months | 47:19 | |
of actually getting to Gitmo, | 47:21 | |
not just because it's a violation of their human rights, | 47:22 | |
but I personally believe it's a waste of our time | 47:25 | |
and our money and our resources to spend millions, | 47:28 | |
tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars, | 47:33 | |
of man hours, of energy that could be used somewhere else | 47:36 | |
more effectively on people who are by and large. | 47:40 | |
A lot of them, just dirt farmers who were caught | 47:44 | |
up in the wrong place at the wrong time. | 47:46 | |
- | While you were interrogating, since you said | 47:49 |
that the upper brass was blaming the detainees for not | 47:51 | |
revealing information, did they put pressure | 47:55 | |
on you to start using more harsh methods to interrogate? | 47:57 | |
- | Well, me personally, no, | 48:01 |
because I was confident in what I did. | 48:04 | |
Interviewer | Did they push you | 48:07 |
even though you were confident? | 48:09 | |
- | No, because I got results even on the- | 48:10 |
Interviewer | What did you do to get results? | 48:15 |
- | I got detainees to provide me information, right? | 48:17 |
Interviewer | What was your method that you, | 48:20 |
I just wanted it on film, | 48:21 | |
what was your method that successfully got you stuff? | 48:23 | |
- | Harsh conversation, yeah, it was hours and hours of | 48:26 |
I call it the logic up harsh approach, which was, | 48:31 | |
we're going to discuss your life and your view of the world, | 48:34 | |
and we're going to put that | 48:38 | |
versus my life and my view of the world, | 48:39 | |
and we're going to see where we can meet in the middle. | 48:42 | |
And my goal was to get cooperation, | 48:45 | |
was to get them to actually say, you know what? | 48:48 | |
Maybe I don't have all the answers | 48:52 | |
and maybe my version of Islam and the Quran | 48:53 | |
and being a Mujahid is maybe not kosher, you know? | 48:57 | |
So, that was my ultimate goal. | 49:04 | |
However, I was satisfied if I could just glean information, | 49:08 | |
where I wouldn't get them to willingly cooperate, | 49:11 | |
but in the course of conversation | 49:15 | |
that they would actually let something slip | 49:18 | |
that they would not be aware of. | 49:20 | |
That was the secondary goal. | 49:23 | |
I knew that I was not good enough to do that, one, | 49:27 | |
because I didn't speak language again. | 49:30 | |
I was former, prior to 9/11, I was a former Soviet Union. | 49:31 | |
Interviewer | Did you have an interpreter | 49:34 |
present with you? | 49:35 | |
- | Almost every single time. | 49:36 |
Interviewer | Was anyone else in the room besides? | 49:38 |
- | Yeah, usually I actually had, | 49:40 |
because I was military at the time, | 49:41 | |
I usually had a civilian counterpart. | 49:43 | |
So, somebody from somebody from the FBI, | 49:46 | |
or somebody from CITF, Criminal Investigative Task Force. | 49:49 | |
Interviewer | Would they would ask questions too, | 49:53 |
or would they just be present? | 49:54 | |
- | No, they would ask questions too. | 49:55 |
We'd usually do it as joint interrogations. | 49:56 | |
They would have their specific agenda, | 49:58 | |
I would have my agenda. | 50:00 | |
My agenda was mainly focusing on military capabilities | 50:01 | |
insurgent capabilities, morale, methodologies, | 50:05 | |
those sorts of things, tactics, strategy. | 50:10 | |
Theirs was often more in line with | 50:12 | |
uncovering criminal networks or violations of law, | 50:16 | |
that sort of stuff, | 50:22 | |
and trying to get some sort of | 50:23 | |
maybe a confession if possible. | 50:25 | |
That's basically, as law enforcement individuals, | 50:27 | |
that's what they were focusing on more, | 50:29 | |
that's what they do. | 50:31 | |
Interviewer | Was it easy to work them? | 50:33 |
- | Absolutely, it was easy to work with them as far as, | 50:34 |
as long as we had our lanes, you know, | 50:38 | |
clearly defined as to what we were going to do. | 50:41 | |
I thought it was a great working environment, | 50:43 | |
but the the only problem that I had was | 50:47 | |
if I would get somebody in there | 50:49 | |
who really wasn't prepared to talk to that specific person, | 50:51 | |
again, like somebody who was talking | 50:54 | |
about events going on in Afghanistan, and yet, | 50:55 | |
you know nothing about Afghanistan. | 50:58 | |
It makes it very difficult | 51:01 | |
to conduct any proper questioning. | 51:01 | |
Interviewer | Did you trust the interpreter? | 51:04 |
- | Yes and no. | 51:11 |
We had been trained early on and I remember back | 51:15 | |
in '93 when I went through the, or no '94, sorry, | 51:17 | |
yeah, '94, | 51:21 | |
when I went through the interrogator school, | 51:22 | |
about cases where interpreters had | 51:25 | |
not interpreted correctly, | 51:30 | |
that they'd been working for the enemy. | 51:32 | |
So I remember seeing one video where it was only found | 51:33 | |
out after the fact, | 51:37 | |
because they had used this video as a training environment, | 51:38 | |
and then it was about Vietnam and they were | 51:40 | |
using a local national Vietnamese interpreter | 51:43 | |
to conduct the interpreting of this interrogation, | 51:46 | |
and it was only found | 51:49 | |
out afterwards when they brought it back to the states | 51:52 | |
and they used it for training environment, | 51:54 | |
that a native Vietnamese speaker said | 51:55 | |
"That's not what the guy is saying. | 52:00 | |
What he's saying in English, that's completely different. | 52:02 | |
This guy is Vietcong. | 52:04 | |
He's telling you two different stories right here." | 52:06 | |
So that was a training device that we used, | 52:10 | |
or that was used for us in the schoolhouse back in '94, | 52:14 | |
to tell us, okay use an interpreter, | 52:19 | |
but really try to focus on, okay, | 52:21 | |
you're almost interrogating two people now, | 52:26 | |
where you've got to focus on whether | 52:28 | |
or not this person is actually working on your side. | 52:29 | |
And even though a lot of times we were using | 52:32 | |
US citizens as interpreters, | 52:34 | |
and you still have to understand that a lot of times, | 52:35 | |
these are native speakers of the foreign language, | 52:38 | |
they're foreign speakers of our language, | 52:40 | |
and so they might have a conflict of interest, | 52:42 | |
and so you do have to keep that in mind, | 52:45 | |
and we run into that to this day. | 52:48 | |
So that's why I always try to | 52:50 | |
push for language involvement on the interrogator. | 52:55 | |
I would actually rather have a US citizen | 52:59 | |
who's a native speaker of a foreign language | 53:03 | |
actually be trained as an interrogator, | 53:07 | |
than to have some farm boy from Kansas | 53:09 | |
be sent off to a school for a year, | 53:12 | |
and you know, or five weeks I've seen, | 53:14 | |
where they get the turbo training for some language, | 53:17 | |
and then stamped as you know, okay, | 53:21 | |
now you can interrogate in that language, | 53:23 | |
because I believe it's easier to teach someone | 53:25 | |
to be an interrogator than to be an interpreter, | 53:31 | |
but to use an interpreter as an interrogator, | 53:34 | |
I believe is fraught with peril, | 53:40 | |
and we lose a lot when we do that. | 53:43 | |
Interviewer | Do you take notes? | 53:47 |
- | Almost all the time. | 53:49 |
Interviewer | And did you analyze the notes, | 53:51 |
or was someone else there to analyze the notes? | 53:52 | |
What happened? | 53:55 | |
- | Most of my notes were just for me. | 53:55 |
Interviewer | Just for you? | 53:57 |
- | Yeah. | 53:58 |
Interviewer | For what purpose? | 53:59 |
I write almost in a shorthand purpose, | 54:00 | |
in a shorthand manner. | 54:02 | |
- | Were they taped as well? | |
Were the interviews taped? | 54:05 | |
- | Nope, most of the time, no. | 54:06 |
Interviewer | Do you know why? | 54:08 |
- | I believe it was because leadership really was afraid | 54:10 |
that if we started taping these, that it might somehow | 54:13 | |
get leaked out or such, | 54:15 | |
and that they felt like they had something to hide, | 54:17 | |
and I felt that if nothing else, | 54:23 | |
it was one, another tool for us to go back, | 54:26 | |
because even though we have our notes, | 54:30 | |
we might miss something, | 54:31 | |
and so we could go back if we're writing, you know, | 54:32 | |
very thorough reports that we could go back to the actual | 54:35 | |
interrogation and say, "Oh, did I ask that? | 54:39 | |
What was his response right here?" | 54:41 | |
You know, that sort of thing. | 54:42 | |
So a useful tool for the interrogator | 54:45 | |
who's writing the reports, useful tool for training purposes | 54:48 | |
and a way to do quality control and quality analysis. | 54:52 | |
I always thought that the benefits of it were amazing, | 54:56 | |
and up until about, I believe it was 2007, 2008, | 55:00 | |
leadership was still fighting to say, | 55:04 | |
"No, we're not going to tape any interrogations." | 55:06 | |
They eventually did start videotaping these, | 55:10 | |
and I don't know how long that they keep them on record. | 55:14 | |
I believe that after a certain amount of time, | 55:19 | |
they actually let them expire and delete them, but- | 55:20 | |
Interviewer | Nobody would tape in those early days? | 55:24 |
- | None that I know of. | 55:27 |
Interviewer | Were there people observing your interview | 55:28 |
from the outside, like, you know, two way mirrors? | 55:31 | |
- | Yes. | 55:35 |
Interviewer | And who were they? | 55:36 |
- | Oh, I don't know. | 55:37 |
Most of the time they wouldn't be announced. | 55:38 | |
You got to remember, Gitmo, | 55:40 | |
this is prior to the invasion of Iraq, | 55:41 | |
and so at the time, Gitmo was the only show in town really, | 55:43 | |
and it was so close to the United States | 55:48 | |
that the dog and pony show, as we call it, | 55:50 | |
was going on almost every week | 55:53 | |
where some dignitary was coming down, | 55:54 | |
whether it was members of Congress, the Senate, House, | 55:56 | |
intelligence leadership, military leadership, | 55:59 | |
the executive office administration, even press sometimes, | 56:03 | |
and then of course you always had the ICRC, | 56:08 | |
the international- | 56:10 | |
or the Red Cross on the international side | 56:11 | |
coming down and conducting their inspections, | 56:16 | |
and then you had foreign delegations coming in, | 56:18 | |
because we had all this foreign cooperation going on, | 56:20 | |
and we had a foreign detainees, | 56:23 | |
and so they have representatives | 56:25 | |
from their governments coming in. | 56:27 | |
Interviewer | Sit in there with you? | 56:28 |
- | Nobody actually sat in an interrogation with me. | 56:29 |
They did go in, | 56:33 | |
sometimes they would go in on their own. | 56:34 | |
Sometimes, I believe, I may be wrong on this, | 56:37 | |
that they might have done some joint type | 56:40 | |
of exercise with some Americans, | 56:43 | |
but I can't speak about that, only about myself, | 56:45 | |
and I was always, you know, just with US personnel. | 56:49 | |
- | Did you, so you said no one ever questioned you to | 56:53 |
use harsh interrogation methods, | 56:56 | |
but you believe that they pressured other interrogators | 56:57 | |
who were not as competent as you to do that? | 57:01 | |
And do you know, did you observe anything? | 57:03 | |
Did you hear anything? | 57:05 | |
- | Well, when we had the case of the fellow | 57:06 |
that's known as the 20th Hijacker, | 57:08 | |
this was something that I really objected to, | 57:13 | |
not openly, obviously, again, | 57:16 | |
I'm just an E5 Buck Sergeant, | 57:18 | |
but I really did not feel good about was, again, | 57:21 | |
we had hundreds of detainees at this time, | 57:27 | |
and a plethora of information that we could get from them, | 57:30 | |
and yet 50% of our resources | 57:34 | |
on the interrogation side were all of a sudden | 57:37 | |
devoted to one detainee, and for what reason? | 57:40 | |
Because we suspected that he was involved | 57:43 | |
with the 9/11 attack, a past event, | 57:45 | |
not an upcoming event, who was not actually involved, | 57:49 | |
but we were suspected that he was somehow involved | 57:53 | |
on a secondary, tertiary level, | 57:57 | |
never actually got into any of the operations, | 58:00 | |
had been detained outside of that, | 58:02 | |
and as an operative, we knew that based | 58:05 | |
upon previous Al-Qaeda and other extremist group operations, | 58:08 | |
that they're not going to be privy | 58:15 | |
to most of the information, | 58:16 | |
because they are not senior level, you know, leadership, | 58:19 | |
and so as a cell, part of their OPSEC, | 58:24 | |
their operational security, | 58:28 | |
is to make sure that their operatives | 58:29 | |
only know there one lane of fire, that's it. | 58:30 | |
And so to spend 50% | 58:33 | |
of your entire interrogation operations | 58:37 | |
for months to interrogate this one fellow, | 58:39 | |
I thought it was a really bad call | 58:42 | |
and was on the side of the leadership, | 58:43 | |
and it was something that they pushed for, | 58:45 | |
I mean, very, very hard over the objections of, | 58:47 | |
I believe the Navy and the FBI, | 58:50 | |
who actually went all the way up | 58:52 | |
to the Secretary of Defense, Rumfeld, | 58:54 | |
who actually said, | 58:57 | |
"No we're going to go with the Department of Defense | 58:58 | |
push to interrogate this fellow for 24 hours, | 59:03 | |
seven days a week, you know, constant." | 59:06 | |
And that was a push that was based | 59:10 | |
upon the idea of what can we do to the detainee? | 59:13 | |
How do we treat them? | 59:15 | |
How far do we push them? | 59:16 | |
Do we use some dogs, put them in isolation, | 59:17 | |
put them in a completely different camp, | 59:20 | |
use noise, you know, music, loud music, | 59:22 | |
use just series of interrogator after interrogator, | 59:26 | |
after interrogator coming in, | 59:29 | |
really pushing the limits of what they can withstand? | 59:31 | |
That is the exact wrong thing, in my opinion, | 59:35 | |
to do for a myriad of reasons. | 59:38 | |
Interviewer | Were you involved in that at all? | 59:40 |
Did you see any of that? | 59:40 | |
- | I didn't see it, no. | 59:42 |
Interviewer | You heard though? | 59:45 |
- | Oh yeah, yeah, everybody knew about it. | 59:46 |
Absolutely, we had planning meetings. | 59:48 | |
Interviewer | Planning meetings on how to? | 59:51 |
- | How to conduct it, yeah, yeah. | 59:52 |
How, what the course of action was going to be, you know, | 59:54 | |
the team assignments and the round the clock operations, | 59:58 | |
who is going to be working at what times, | 1:00:03 | |
that sort of stuff. | 1:00:05 | |
Interviewer | Did you ever talk about waterboarding him? | 1:00:06 |
- | No, I didn't remember any any discussion | 1:00:07 |
about waterboarding. | 1:00:10 | |
Interviewer | And did you hear about the mistreatment | 1:00:12 |
of other detainees besides him? | 1:00:14 | |
- | Case by case, but that was not by interrogators. | 1:00:16 |
The mistreatment that we mostly heard about was on the part | 1:00:19 | |
of the MP's, where the guards were, | 1:00:23 | |
and it was individuals, individual harassment, | 1:00:26 | |
it was stupid little prankster stuff. | 1:00:28 | |
Remember, a lot of these guards of young kids. | 1:00:30 | |
They feel like, some of them feel like they were just, | 1:00:33 | |
you know, kicked in the gut type of things, | 1:00:39 | |
or sucker punched when 9/11, | 1:00:42 | |
they were out for revenge and, you know, | 1:00:44 | |
had a score to settle, | 1:00:46 | |
and here's somebody who speaks a foreign language, | 1:00:47 | |
who looks different, acts different, | 1:00:51 | |
and everybody's calling him, you know, | 1:00:53 | |
the worst of the worst, you know, a terrorist, | 1:00:56 | |
and so of course they, you know, | 1:00:59 | |
they look at that person as subhuman as a target, | 1:01:02 | |
and they're going to act out some of their frustration | 1:01:07 | |
over the defilement, if you will, from 9/11. | 1:01:13 | |
Interviewer | So, if some of the interrogators, | 1:01:16 |
or most of the interrogators did not | 1:01:19 | |
have your professional background and training, | 1:01:20 | |
they probably were more vulnerable to being pushed to say, | 1:01:24 | |
cruel and inhumane treatment of the detainees, | 1:01:31 | |
certainly, that's what the research seems to show, | 1:01:35 | |
you must've heard about any of that at all, | 1:01:39 | |
or were you able to stand up | 1:01:41 | |
to the military during that time you were there? | 1:01:44 | |
- | Nope. | 1:01:47 |
Again, there was a major change of command | 1:01:48 | |
during my time there, where we went from, | 1:01:57 | |
I believe the first commander that we had on the intel side | 1:02:00 | |
was a two-star general, I believe his name was Don LaVey, | 1:02:03 | |
if I'm not mistaken, who I have the utmost respect for. | 1:02:06 | |
I think that he was actually a decent man. | 1:02:10 | |
I believe that he was actually put under a lot | 1:02:12 | |
of pressure to get results, | 1:02:14 | |
but I believe that he may have fought against it, | 1:02:16 | |
and that may why he was | 1:02:18 | |
taken away early from his assignment. | 1:02:21 | |
Jeffrey Miller came in, Major General Miller came in | 1:02:24 | |
afterwards during my time there, | 1:02:27 | |
and my understanding is | 1:02:30 | |
that he was focused really on getting results at all costs, | 1:02:34 | |
and that the detainees, | 1:02:40 | |
we're not gonna talk about the detainees rights. | 1:02:42 | |
The only right that they have is to give us intel, | 1:02:45 | |
was was the word that was put out. | 1:02:48 | |
And so that attitude, again, that ambiance of the work | 1:02:52 | |
environment that we were placed under, | 1:02:56 | |
I believe a lot of the younger, | 1:02:59 | |
less experienced interrogators individually | 1:03:00 | |
may have been more susceptible to coercive techniques, | 1:03:03 | |
or at least if not coercive, at least antagonistic. | 1:03:07 | |
So instead of focusing on let's build rapport, | 1:03:14 | |
let's build a bridge of understanding between us, | 1:03:17 | |
so that we can get some sort of cooperative measure, | 1:03:19 | |
which is really what good interrogation should get you, | 1:03:21 | |
it was more of | 1:03:24 | |
"I know you're Taliban, I know you're Al-Qaeda, | 1:03:25 | |
we're going to get this information from you, | 1:03:28 | |
you know, if it, you know, | 1:03:30 | |
don't make me get angry." | 1:03:32 | |
That sort of thing, | 1:03:34 | |
"I'm going to throw around some furniture," | 1:03:34 | |
that sort of stuff, | 1:03:35 | |
and it could either be comic, | 1:03:37 | |
or it could be extremely unsettling to the detainee, | 1:03:39 | |
depending on how close it gets. | 1:03:42 | |
I'm not going to talk about any specific reports. | 1:03:44 | |
I thought that, for example, in comparison to Abu Ghraib, | 1:03:47 | |
Gitmo was actually quite a bit better circumstance, | 1:03:50 | |
where there was a lot less pressure to push the detainees, | 1:03:55 | |
but the pressure that we experienced | 1:04:02 | |
at Abu Ghraib, because by the way, | 1:04:05 | |
I was at Abu Ghraib subsequent to Gitmo, | 1:04:06 | |
the pressure that we felt at Abu Ghraib | 1:04:11 | |
to push the detainees to get results | 1:04:13 | |
was a lot less than what we were experiencing at Gitmo, | 1:04:15 | |
in my opinion. | 1:04:19 | |
That people were more, the interrogators were more | 1:04:21 | |
free to treat the detainees more humanely, | 1:04:24 | |
have more of the conversation, | 1:04:27 | |
have more the friendly thing, | 1:04:29 | |
one of my bosses, 'cause I had a couple | 1:04:32 | |
of different bosses during my time there, | 1:04:34 | |
was very good interrogator, even though she was | 1:04:37 | |
fairly inexperienced, she had a natural knack for it. | 1:04:41 | |
So one of her detainees, | 1:04:44 | |
a younger fellow, she went in with coloring books, | 1:04:45 | |
and, you know, built a rapport with him, | 1:04:48 | |
like she was an older sister, | 1:04:52 | |
like she was a family member, | 1:04:53 | |
and then that way, as a woman, | 1:04:55 | |
she could actually interrogate this very devout Muslim, | 1:04:57 | |
because she was the older sister, | 1:05:01 | |
and eventually he ended up saying, | 1:05:03 | |
he had been captured in in Afghanistan, Pakistan area. | 1:05:05 | |
He confided in her and said, | 1:05:09 | |
"Look, I gave a lot of reports | 1:05:12 | |
to my interrogators over in Afghanistan, | 1:05:13 | |
but I lied in almost everything I told them, | 1:05:15 | |
because they were really abusive to me | 1:05:19 | |
and they treated me like crap, | 1:05:22 | |
and they made me feel really, you know, | 1:05:23 | |
like subhuman. | 1:05:27 | |
You treat me well, and I feel like you | 1:05:30 | |
could be my family member. | 1:05:33 | |
So I'm going to tell you the truth | 1:05:35 | |
about what I lied to them about." | 1:05:37 | |
And so she got a ton of reports for weeks, | 1:05:39 | |
she was working on just this one case with all these reports | 1:05:42 | |
that she got, because she actually had a very friendly, | 1:05:45 | |
very convivial type of a relationship with this individual. | 1:05:49 | |
Interviewer | Can you tell us her name? | 1:05:53 |
- | No, I'm sorry. | 1:05:54 |
Interviewer | When was she there? | 1:05:56 |
- | Same time as I was, roughly the same time. | 1:05:57 |
Interviewer | She was also with the Saudis? | 1:06:00 |
- | No, she was not. | 1:06:03 |
She was working with me actually | 1:06:04 | |
on a tier three team for a while, | 1:06:06 | |
but she had been given a special assignment | 1:06:08 | |
basically to work this one particular case | 1:06:10 | |
while she was working with the tier three team with me. | 1:06:12 | |
Interviewer | And when did General Miller arrive? | 1:06:17 |
Were you there when he arrived? | 1:06:22 | |
- | See, there was a lot of coming and going. | 1:06:24 |
I think he got there around November, | 1:06:25 | |
really officially took over around December, | 1:06:26 | |
about the same time that I worked | 1:06:29 | |
over on the tier three team. | 1:06:30 | |
Interviewer | And you saw the difference you felt was- | 1:06:31 |
- | A palpable difference in the sense of focusing again, | 1:06:34 |
that the detainees only have the right to give us intel, | 1:06:39 | |
and of course, Major General Miller was very influential | 1:06:42 | |
in giving advice and counseling the individuals | 1:06:48 | |
who were running Abu Ghraib subsequent | 1:06:54 | |
because of his placement in Gitmo. | 1:06:56 | |
My understanding is General Miller had really | 1:07:00 | |
no hard background in Intel prior | 1:07:03 | |
to his command at Guantanamo Bay. | 1:07:07 | |
He was an infantry officer from what I understand, | 1:07:09 | |
and I believe that there | 1:07:12 | |
could have been somebody much better | 1:07:15 | |
qualified to be put in his position. | 1:07:17 | |
- | Were there other female interrogators | 1:07:20 |
besides this one woman you just mentioned? | 1:07:21 | |
- | Oh yeah, there was one, two, three, | 1:07:24 |
I would say at least four during my time. | 1:07:29 | |
Interviewer | Did they have any problem generally, | 1:07:31 |
where they, in terms of the reaction | 1:07:33 | |
of the men to women interrogators? | 1:07:37 | |
- | Yes and no. | 1:07:42 |
I would say at that time, the detainees, | 1:07:43 | |
the Guantanamo detainees were still unsure about how far, | 1:07:46 | |
how much power they had as far as cooperation, | 1:07:52 | |
as far as fighting back, as far as mouthing off, | 1:07:56 | |
that sort of thing and what the consequences were of it. | 1:08:00 | |
They were still fresh enough | 1:08:03 | |
at that point that you could use the storyline of, | 1:08:04 | |
"Hey, if you cooperate with us, | 1:08:07 | |
we're gonna let you go early." | 1:08:08 | |
You know, kind of hard to do that after 10 years, | 1:08:09 | |
but in the first year or two, it's a little easier. | 1:08:12 | |
So at that point, I think that they were probably less | 1:08:16 | |
confrontational when it came to women detainees, | 1:08:19 | |
or women interrogators. | 1:08:22 | |
I don't remember really seeing any reports or hearing any | 1:08:24 | |
of the chit-chat in the office about women | 1:08:27 | |
having so much of the problems. | 1:08:31 | |
Later on, you know, with my work in Iraq, | 1:08:32 | |
with my work in Afghanistan, | 1:08:37 | |
you would get the detainees who would be like, | 1:08:39 | |
"Look I'm not going to talk to this person. | 1:08:40 | |
This is a woman. | 1:08:44 | |
I'm not going to be interrogated by a woman," | 1:08:44 | |
you know, or they would be interrogated, | 1:08:46 | |
but they wouldn't look at her, you know? | 1:08:49 | |
They'll sit there and face the wall | 1:08:51 | |
while this voice comes out of nowhere and talks to them, | 1:08:53 | |
they would have their own ways of dealing with it. | 1:08:56 | |
But that's about it, it wasn't a major concern. | 1:08:59 | |
Interviewer | Some of the detainees we interviewed told us | 1:09:04 |
that the interrogators decided everything in their lives, | 1:09:06 | |
like whether they could get certain items, comfort items, | 1:09:09 | |
or where they can go see a doctor or they go see a dentist. | 1:09:13 | |
Is that true? | 1:09:16 | |
Did you guys have that kind of authority? | 1:09:17 | |
- | Oh yeah, yeah. | 1:09:19 |
We had a lot more leeway and a lot more say | 1:09:20 | |
in what happened with the detainee at that point. | 1:09:23 | |
Again, the rules and restrictions | 1:09:27 | |
hadn't been put on us so much, | 1:09:29 | |
and I believe that that's actually more beneficial when | 1:09:32 | |
the interrogator actually has that type of authority, | 1:09:35 | |
and that type of say, of course, | 1:09:38 | |
I should say that, I'm an interrogator, | 1:09:40 | |
we always want to have the authority, | 1:09:42 | |
but as far as being able to give the | 1:09:44 | |
appearance of being effective, of being the authority, | 1:09:47 | |
the person that you, my friend, want to talk to me, | 1:09:50 | |
because I can get something done for you, | 1:09:54 | |
versus well, you know, I really don't do much, | 1:09:56 | |
I just kind of fill out some paperwork and well, | 1:09:59 | |
you've got this request. | 1:10:01 | |
I'll put in a request for you, but you know, | 1:10:02 | |
you're about as good as talking to me, | 1:10:05 | |
or as talking to the guard about it. | 1:10:07 | |
That really doesn't build a lot as far as that confidence | 1:10:09 | |
in me to be able to confide in me your secrets, right? | 1:10:12 | |
So give the interrogators my opinion, that that sense | 1:10:18 | |
of authority, that ability to provide extra comfort items, | 1:10:22 | |
to get them those phone calls to maybe even | 1:10:26 | |
get a one-on-one face, meet, you know, | 1:10:28 | |
somebody or get those cells moved, and that sort of stuff, | 1:10:31 | |
we would get a lot of pushback, | 1:10:34 | |
but mainly there would be pushback | 1:10:36 | |
from leadership on the guard force side. | 1:10:37 | |
Because again, we have a dynamic that we're | 1:10:40 | |
we run into Intel versus guard force, | 1:10:44 | |
and these are two opposing forces, | 1:10:47 | |
and one wants to be in control of the other, | 1:10:49 | |
and, you know, we had a major problem with that at Gitmo. | 1:10:51 | |
We had two separate task forces at the beginning, | 1:10:56 | |
one was a task force in charge of the brigade | 1:10:59 | |
of NP's that we had. | 1:11:02 | |
The other one was the task force in charge | 1:11:03 | |
of just the Intel, which was like maybe a battalion size, | 1:11:06 | |
I mean, much smaller, maybe a company plus, | 1:11:10 | |
and yet you've got a higher ranking person in charge | 1:11:14 | |
of the smaller component versus the lower ranking person | 1:11:17 | |
in charge of the lower component, | 1:11:19 | |
and so you've got this really harsh dynamic | 1:11:21 | |
behind the scenes of, | 1:11:24 | |
"I'm in control." | 1:11:26 | |
"No, I'm in control." | 1:11:27 | |
And it really, | 1:11:28 | |
I would say, | 1:11:33 | |
probably worsened our ability to function, | 1:11:35 | |
to be able to ultimately get what we were looking for, | 1:11:39 | |
which was actionable, good, reliable | 1:11:42 | |
information that could be turned | 1:11:45 | |
into intelligence product for leadership, | 1:11:47 | |
for senior leadership, for tactical leadership. | 1:11:49 | |
- | One of the psychologists told us that | 1:11:52 |
sometimes they would put detainees in isolation, | 1:11:55 | |
because then they would only be able to talk | 1:11:57 | |
to the interrogator, and no one else, | 1:11:59 | |
they wouldn't have any support system | 1:12:01 | |
from the other detainees, | 1:12:03 | |
was that part of what you saw too? | 1:12:04 | |
- | Well, yes, | 1:12:08 |
but the isolation, I believe was actually used more | 1:12:10 | |
as a punishment type of thing, not as, in those days, | 1:12:14 | |
not as an effective tool of getting, you know, | 1:12:18 | |
fostering that relationship | 1:12:22 | |
between the interrogator and the detainee. | 1:12:23 | |
It has been used more effectively since then, | 1:12:27 | |
where people are actually doing it. | 1:12:30 | |
But again, it is one tool, | 1:12:31 | |
it is not the entire toolkit. | 1:12:34 | |
And it's only as effective | 1:12:36 | |
as the interrogator is to be able to use that. | 1:12:39 | |
In my opinion, it should be a minimal type of tool. | 1:12:42 | |
It should be standard procedure | 1:12:46 | |
that everybody goes through isolation. | 1:12:48 | |
That way you're not punishing anybody, | 1:12:51 | |
because everybody's got it, | 1:12:52 | |
but not for prolonged periods of time. | 1:12:55 | |
It's a short period of time when you first get there, | 1:12:58 | |
you can use it for medical reasons. | 1:13:01 | |
Well, we need to screen you, quarantine you, | 1:13:03 | |
while we medically screen you to make sure | 1:13:06 | |
that you're fit to be in the general population. | 1:13:07 | |
At the same time, we're going to introduce you | 1:13:12 | |
to a guy who's going to do some paperwork for you basically, | 1:13:14 | |
this interrogator who by the way, has the ear | 1:13:17 | |
of the commandant of the entire base | 1:13:20 | |
and can get stuff done for you if you like, | 1:13:22 | |
and oh, by the way, also speaks your language. | 1:13:25 | |
Oh, and by the way, totally can build a rapport, | 1:13:27 | |
and understand where you're coming from | 1:13:30 | |
and that sort of stuff. | 1:13:32 | |
So it's a good guy to talk to, good guy or gal to talk to. | 1:13:33 | |
That, if you guys go back and study the works of, you know, | 1:13:37 | |
the interrogators and Luftwaffe during World War II, | 1:13:42 | |
Han Scharf, Horse Bart, | 1:13:46 | |
(Torin speaks German), | 1:13:49 | |
I think is what it was in World War II. | 1:13:52 | |
That's was their standard procedure. | 1:13:54 | |
They put everybody in isolation for the beginning, | 1:13:56 | |
and they would conduct all their interrogations, | 1:14:00 | |
which would usually be done within a matter of a few days | 1:14:02 | |
to a couple of weeks before they would be sent | 1:14:04 | |
off to an actual stalag after that, | 1:14:07 | |
and during that short period of time, | 1:14:11 | |
these cream of the crop interrogators | 1:14:14 | |
who are handpicked by other cream of the crop interrogators | 1:14:17 | |
to actually be interrogators, | 1:14:21 | |
would be able to glean all the information | 1:14:22 | |
that they really needed from these fellows, | 1:14:24 | |
without them being cooperative sources. | 1:14:26 | |
We're talking fighter ACE pilots | 1:14:28 | |
on the American and British side, | 1:14:30 | |
guys who wouldn't normally want to cooperate | 1:14:32 | |
with the enemy when they were captured, | 1:14:34 | |
and yet they were still able to get tons | 1:14:36 | |
of information, accurate, thorough information from them. | 1:14:38 | |
Well, why is that? | 1:14:42 | |
How is that? | 1:14:43 | |
Is it because they focused | 1:14:44 | |
on how do you make a better interrogator, | 1:14:45 | |
versus how far do you push the detainee? | 1:14:47 | |
That's a lesson that we have yet to learn. | 1:14:50 | |
- | Where did you interview the detainees, at work buildings? | 1:14:53 |
- | When I first got there, we'd just opened up Camp Delta. | 1:15:00 |
So our offices were located down at Camp Delta, | 1:15:03 | |
and the interrogation booths. | 1:15:06 | |
These are all in basically like double-wide trailer type | 1:15:09 | |
of buildings. | 1:15:12 | |
Pretty much the same layout as our offices were, | 1:15:16 | |
and it was very simple interrogation booth where no windows, | 1:15:19 | |
except for the one mirror window, you know, | 1:15:26 | |
where somebody may or may not be watching. | 1:15:28 | |
We didn't know, the detainee didn't know. | 1:15:30 | |
We really didn't let it bother us. | 1:15:33 | |
We would be in the room with that person. | 1:15:35 | |
That was our job to talk | 1:15:38 | |
to that individual as a human being. | 1:15:39 | |
Interviewer | Were they shackled? | 1:15:42 |
- | Oh yeah, most of the time. | 1:15:43 |
Interviewer | Was there military | 1:15:45 |
in the room with you as well? | 1:15:47 | |
- | No, they would, the MP's would usually be observing either | 1:15:48 |
from the booth or through other means, | 1:15:53 | |
but they would not be in the room with us, | 1:15:56 | |
when they first came in, we had the authority | 1:16:00 | |
and the power at that time to basically say | 1:16:02 | |
release them from the shackles, you know, | 1:16:04 | |
and I believe that was a much more effective way so, | 1:16:07 | |
that you have it as a standard procedure to bring them in, | 1:16:12 | |
have them shackled for security reasons. | 1:16:15 | |
Then also give the authority | 1:16:17 | |
to the interrogator to basically say, take those things off. | 1:16:19 | |
I'm going to treat this man as a human being. | 1:16:22 | |
Interviewer | Did you bring food ever? | 1:16:26 |
- | Oh sure. | 1:16:27 |
- | What kind of food did you bring? | 1:16:28 |
- | Whatever they wanted that we had access to, | 1:16:29 |
hamburgers, pizza, their local diet food from the kitchen, | 1:16:33 | |
drinks, tea, a lot of them like tea, | 1:16:40 | |
but it was only when they wanted it, you know. | 1:16:44 | |
The idea that we're going to force them to have fun with us, | 1:16:48 | |
or we're going to punish them without food. | 1:16:54 | |
Again, that's focusing on the detainee. | 1:16:57 | |
That's focusing on what you do to the detainee. | 1:16:59 | |
I feel, again, like good interrogation focuses | 1:17:02 | |
on the interrogator, | 1:17:05 | |
what you do to the interrogator | 1:17:07 | |
to make him or her a better person. | 1:17:08 | |
Interviewer | Did you ever know any interrogators | 1:17:12 |
who got PTSD from doing their work? | 1:17:15 | |
- | At Guantanamo? | 1:17:19 |
No, no. | 1:17:20 | |
No, especially at Guantanamo, | 1:17:26 | |
because while it was extremely expensive | 1:17:29 | |
to fly these individuals halfway around the world | 1:17:33 | |
and keep them locked up with 24 hours surveillance, | 1:17:37 | |
multiple echelons of defense, | 1:17:41 | |
the security for the peace of mind | 1:17:47 | |
for the people that were working there was amazing. | 1:17:51 | |
I've never worked in a more secure facility. | 1:17:54 | |
We had no interruptions with mortar fire, with rocket fire, | 1:17:56 | |
with no fear of some impending attack. | 1:18:00 | |
You know, we had miles of patrols, you know, | 1:18:06 | |
going out to sea, going over land, you know, | 1:18:09 | |
and we were very close to home in the sense that even | 1:18:12 | |
though we were in Cuba, foreign country, hostile towards us, | 1:18:16 | |
we're a short flight away from Florida, | 1:18:21 | |
and so because of that peace of mind, | 1:18:26 | |
it allowed us to focus more on the mission itself. | 1:18:29 | |
Whereas subsequent missions, | 1:18:31 | |
where I was in Iraq or Afghanistan, | 1:18:33 | |
where we are actually receiving fire during interrogations, | 1:18:35 | |
and we're supposed to be at a strategic level, | 1:18:40 | |
we're supposed to be, you know, | 1:18:42 | |
working with senior level members of either | 1:18:44 | |
the Iraqi military or the Taliban or Al Qaeda, | 1:18:48 | |
and we can't even defend ourselves in these areas, | 1:18:52 | |
let alone, how are we supposed to safeguard the detainees? | 1:18:55 | |
So while I disagree with the idea | 1:18:59 | |
of spending enormous amounts of money | 1:19:03 | |
for locking up people for years at a time, | 1:19:06 | |
who really have no business being locked up, | 1:19:09 | |
the idea that we get them out of the immediate theater | 1:19:13 | |
of operations into a more secure and safe area, | 1:19:17 | |
especially if it's strategic level people, | 1:19:20 | |
I agree with that, | 1:19:24 | |
and there's a good case in point, | 1:19:26 | |
we had during World War II on the American side, | 1:19:27 | |
we had a top secret interrogation facility that was only | 1:19:31 | |
for senior level Nazi leadership and Wehrmacht leaders | 1:19:36 | |
and scientists, | 1:19:44 | |
and that was, I believe it was known as PO box, | 1:19:46 | |
oh, it was a four digit number. | 1:19:51 | |
It's been a while since I've researched that, | 1:19:53 | |
and I actually spoke with one | 1:19:57 | |
of the interrogators who worked there a few years ago, | 1:19:58 | |
and he was a professor at Georgetown, I believe now, | 1:20:01 | |
at least was at the time. | 1:20:06 | |
He was a specialist in chemistry, | 1:20:08 | |
that's why he was talking to the scientists about chemistry. | 1:20:10 | |
Plus he also spoke fluent German, | 1:20:12 | |
but this was a facility that was, | 1:20:14 | |
we would bring them back at fairly good expense, | 1:20:17 | |
and keep them incarcerated for an indefinite period of time, | 1:20:20 | |
at least until the end of the war, | 1:20:23 | |
maybe a little bit longer than that. | 1:20:25 | |
But it was worth it because these were | 1:20:28 | |
the senior level guys, | 1:20:32 | |
a small group, ones that we could actually identify. | 1:20:35 | |
We had volumes of information on them. | 1:20:38 | |
Then, in that case, yeah, | 1:20:42 | |
it is worth it to take your senior level individuals, | 1:20:44 | |
and maybe take them out of the theater, | 1:20:48 | |
to safeguard them for one, | 1:20:49 | |
to safeguard the personnel who were interacting with them. | 1:20:51 | |
But, | 1:20:55 | |
you know, to do it willy-nilly with just anybody, | 1:20:57 | |
you know, some Joe Schmoe down on the ground | 1:20:59 | |
for political reasons, | 1:21:03 | |
you want to round up a whole bunch of people, | 1:21:04 | |
and for political reasons | 1:21:08 | |
you don't want to let a whole bunch of people go | 1:21:09 | |
because you're afraid of the political fallout | 1:21:11 | |
from releasing terrorists, you know, | 1:21:13 | |
so that they can go fight back on the battlefield, | 1:21:16 | |
who cares? | 1:21:19 | |
There's thousands of them out there already. | 1:21:20 | |
What's one or two more going to make a difference | 1:21:23 | |
when they're just Joe schmoes? | 1:21:25 | |
They're not big senior guys. | 1:21:26 | |
But the longer you can keep them incarcerated, | 1:21:28 | |
at major expense, the more that they actually | 1:21:30 | |
raise in status. | 1:21:33 | |
So you're just helping them when you do that. | 1:21:35 | |
Interviewer | I just want to go back | 1:21:38 |
to that question about PTSD, | 1:21:39 | |
because we did interview an interrogator who did | 1:21:40 | |
end up with PTSD, | 1:21:44 | |
and so I just wondered, | 1:21:46 | |
even if you weren't on a battlefield, | 1:21:47 | |
the fact that you were involved | 1:21:50 | |
in something that was pretty intense didn't cause- | 1:21:51 | |
You didn't see people have any mental responses | 1:21:55 | |
subsequently to it? | 1:22:00 | |
- | No, no. | 1:22:01 |
I think if there was anybody | 1:22:05 | |
who was having some mental problems, | 1:22:06 | |
mental difficulties with it, | 1:22:07 | |
may have brought those mental difficulties with them, | 1:22:08 | |
whether it was, you know, | 1:22:12 | |
people who are drinking too much | 1:22:14 | |
because they were probably alcoholics to begin with. | 1:22:15 | |
You know, they didn't pick it up while they were there. | 1:22:17 | |
Interviewer | We were told people did drink a lot | 1:22:20 |
in Guantanamo, | 1:22:22 | |
- | Oh, they drank a lot. | |
- | Do you think it was because of working there? | 1:22:23 |
- | They drink a lot. | 1:22:26 |
Heck, I drank a lot a couple of times. | 1:22:27 | |
Interviewer | Because of working there, | 1:22:30 |
the pressures of working there? | 1:22:31 | |
- | No, I think it was mainly a boredom factor. | 1:22:32 |
My personal experience. | 1:22:34 | |
It wasn't really so much depressing. | 1:22:36 | |
It was just, you're stuck on a base | 1:22:39 | |
that's what, 25 square miles? | 1:22:43 | |
You've got nowhere to go really. | 1:22:45 | |
There's not a lot you can do. | 1:22:47 | |
So you know, we would drink usually about maybe once a week. | 1:22:49 | |
I wouldn't drink that much, only in social occasions, | 1:22:55 | |
but there was almost all, almost every weekend | 1:22:57 | |
there was at least one little get together, | 1:23:00 | |
whether it was at the Tiki lounge, | 1:23:04 | |
or I think there was another dance club and NCO club, | 1:23:06 | |
or whether it was one of our little block parties | 1:23:10 | |
that we were doing, | 1:23:12 | |
and those were more just social gatherings, you know, too, | 1:23:14 | |
and it was mainly for the Intel people | 1:23:17 | |
who were all always hanging out. | 1:23:19 | |
We didn't really hang out with the guards that much | 1:23:20 | |
because we would usually get into, you know, | 1:23:22 | |
problematic fights with them, | 1:23:24 | |
and they did outnumber us, | 1:23:26 | |
so that was not a good idea, but I only know maybe a couple | 1:23:28 | |
of people who actually had a problem | 1:23:33 | |
with drinking where they would drink, you know, to excess, | 1:23:35 | |
pass out on lawns, that sort of stuff. | 1:23:38 | |
And again, I think that was just something | 1:23:40 | |
that they brought down with them. | 1:23:41 | |
I really don't see having experienced Guantanamo, | 1:23:44 | |
having experienced at Abu Ghraib, | 1:23:47 | |
having experienced Bogram and Kandahar. | 1:23:49 | |
I don't see how somebody could wind | 1:23:54 | |
up with PTSD at a place like Gitmo. | 1:23:58 | |
It was really one of the best locations, | 1:24:00 | |
as far as an American person goes, | 1:24:03 | |
to get assigned as an interrogator. | 1:24:05 | |
The worst part of it is maybe | 1:24:07 | |
the boredom factor, that's about it. | 1:24:09 | |
Interviewer | I don't want to spend hardly any time | 1:24:13 |
on your work in Bogram or Abu Ghraib, | 1:24:15 | |
but maybe just since people who are watching this | 1:24:19 | |
will wonder when you were there and exactly what you did. | 1:24:22 | |
If you could just briefly just describe those two locations, | 1:24:25 | |
so people understand the context. | 1:24:28 | |
- | Sure, just to give you an idea, | 1:24:29 |
a 22 year career as an interrogator, almost the entire time, | 1:24:32 | |
and from 1992 to 2014, and I just basically | 1:24:38 | |
finished up my last deployment. | 1:24:43 | |
I've got 14 deployments over all my career, | 1:24:45 | |
some of them short term, minor deployments, | 1:24:48 | |
most of them major deployments, | 1:24:51 | |
either to a war zone or for over six months at a time. | 1:24:52 | |
And I've deployed to Guantanamo bay once, | 1:24:57 | |
a couple of times to Iraq, | 1:25:01 | |
including the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and to Afghanistan, | 1:25:02 | |
and in Afghanistan, it's been Bogram, | 1:25:07 | |
which is our main base up north, | 1:25:09 | |
Qubole in the capitol and Kandahar one time down there, | 1:25:11 | |
2009, I was down there. | 1:25:16 | |
Almost always, again, as either intelligence support, | 1:25:19 | |
or specifically as an interrogator, | 1:25:23 | |
sometimes as an analyst working in interrogation operations. | 1:25:25 | |
Interviewer | When were you in Bogram? | 1:25:32 |
- | Bogram, I was there eight years out of 10, | 1:25:33 |
from 2004 to 2014. | 1:25:37 | |
That is well, not just Bogram, Afghanistan. | 1:25:39 | |
Bogram, from first time was in 2004, | 1:25:42 | |
and my last time was 2014. | 1:25:45 | |
Interviewer | And who were you interrogating | 1:25:48 |
in Bogram in '04? | 1:25:49 | |
- | Actually I was working on a site | 1:25:52 |
where I wasn't doing interrogation, | 1:25:55 | |
but I was supporting special forces. | 1:25:57 | |
That's about all I can say. | 1:25:59 | |
Interviewer | And in Abu Ghraib, | 1:26:00 |
did you know the people who were involved | 1:26:02 | |
in that despicable incident that became so public, | 1:26:05 | |
did you know those people? | 1:26:10 | |
- | Oh yeah, I was at Abu Ghraib 2003 to 2004, | 1:26:10 |
during the height of the worst part of it really. | 1:26:14 | |
I arrived there in November. | 1:26:19 | |
I was aware of some things going on that were not good, | 1:26:21 | |
and I started investigating it on my own, | 1:26:25 | |
because before you can make accusations, | 1:26:28 | |
especially about your own counterparts in a theater of war, | 1:26:30 | |
you better make sure that you've got it backed | 1:26:34 | |
up with some real hard facts and figures, | 1:26:35 | |
and you're not just spewing, you know, just conjecture. | 1:26:37 | |
Like I see a lot of times with individuals. | 1:26:43 | |
I think we're experiencing that right now, | 1:26:47 | |
and we're seeing all the ruckus | 1:26:49 | |
that it's happening in the media, specifically dealing | 1:26:51 | |
with the Bergdahl case where you've got one side, | 1:26:54 | |
for their own motivation, are just spewing | 1:26:57 | |
out whatever they want to and, you know, | 1:26:59 | |
vilifying somebody worse. | 1:27:01 | |
On the other side, you've got people, | 1:27:02 | |
you know, glorifying, same individuals, same acts, | 1:27:04 | |
that sort of stuff without actually seeing all the facts. | 1:27:07 | |
So in 2003, | 1:27:09 | |
when I started to see some questionable activities, | 1:27:11 | |
I started looking into the files of some | 1:27:14 | |
of the detainees first that were specifically | 1:27:16 | |
mine that had been given to me by a previous interrogator. | 1:27:19 | |
So I started looking more specifically | 1:27:23 | |
into the actions of the interrogators, | 1:27:24 | |
as during the conduct of those interrogations, | 1:27:26 | |
as opposed to just what the reporting was, | 1:27:29 | |
and then any interrogations that were associated. | 1:27:33 | |
So they might not specifically be my detainees, | 1:27:36 | |
but they were associated detainees who had been interrogated | 1:27:40 | |
by these individuals while I was conducting my | 1:27:42 | |
own personal investigation prior to actually bringing | 1:27:44 | |
up any accusations or any questions. | 1:27:47 | |
The formal investigators under Major General Tokunbo | 1:27:51 | |
came in and actually started questioning everybody. | 1:27:54 | |
So I took that opportunity to actually bring | 1:27:56 | |
up some of my questions, | 1:27:58 | |
some of my facts that I had uncovered about the conduct | 1:27:59 | |
of a couple of other individuals that were there, | 1:28:03 | |
and that was pretty much the end | 1:28:06 | |
of my work there at Abu Ghraib, because it was found | 1:28:09 | |
out that I was cooperating with the interrogators, | 1:28:14 | |
or the investigators and naming some names, | 1:28:16 | |
and so it became a very hostile work environment | 1:28:19 | |
for me at that point. | 1:28:22 | |
But my sole reason for it, again, | 1:28:23 | |
was to support professional interrogation. | 1:28:25 | |
I like interrogating. | 1:28:30 | |
I like interrogation. | 1:28:32 | |
I think it is an effective tool. | 1:28:34 | |
It is good when you know what your enemy is doing, | 1:28:36 | |
and why they are doing it. | 1:28:39 | |
Truth and understanding is what we bring to the table, | 1:28:42 | |
and without that, | 1:28:47 | |
a leader can't really make a good judgment call | 1:28:48 | |
as to where they're gonna use their forces | 1:28:53 | |
or whether or not they're going to invade a country. | 1:28:54 | |
You know, whether it's at the tactical or strategic level. | 1:28:57 | |
Human interrogation brings that to the table. | 1:29:00 | |
So it's not just a necessary evil, in my opinion, | 1:29:04 | |
it's a good thing, but it can be used for bad, like a gun. | 1:29:07 | |
It can be used to enforce the law or to break the law. | 1:29:15 | |
Interviewer | Why do you think that kind | 1:29:18 |
of behavior did occur in Abu Ghraib? | 1:29:20 | |
- | At Abu Ghraib, | 1:29:23 |
well, it started early on, | 1:29:24 | |
and again, going back to that idea of the gray area, | 1:29:27 | |
it was a concept that had been known to us, | 1:29:31 | |
but we really didn't speak about it very much | 1:29:32 | |
because good interrogator doesn't need to worry | 1:29:34 | |
about the gray area because a good interrogator | 1:29:36 | |
can void the gray area almost completely. | 1:29:38 | |
And, you know, we work in a very overt manner. | 1:29:41 | |
You know I'm interrogating you, | 1:29:47 | |
you know I'm on the side, I'm not a spy. | 1:29:49 | |
I'm not trying to sneak in. | 1:29:52 | |
So I can play above the board, | 1:29:55 | |
and people were being pushed in my opinion, | 1:29:58 | |
by leadership to get results. | 1:30:04 | |
At first, it was a small push, | 1:30:06 | |
in Afghanistan in the early days | 1:30:09 | |
because there was so much information out there, | 1:30:11 | |
the leadership really didn't need to push that much, | 1:30:13 | |
and then later on at Gitmo, when we started to run | 1:30:16 | |
into some difficulties where we started to run | 1:30:19 | |
into resistance, people were not being cooperative | 1:30:22 | |
from the very beginning. | 1:30:24 | |
That's when people started, some people started saying, | 1:30:27 | |
"Well, what can we do to the detainees? | 1:30:29 | |
What can we, how far can we push it?" | 1:30:31 | |
You know, can we bring in instructors from the SERE school | 1:30:34 | |
and have them give the interrogator some instruction | 1:30:39 | |
on how they do interrogations at SERE school? | 1:30:43 | |
At SERE school by the way, survive, escape, | 1:30:46 | |
resist and evade. | 1:30:47 | |
It is a training that we send usually most of our pilots | 1:30:50 | |
and certain special forces and other individuals through | 1:30:54 | |
in order to get them used to what interrogation | 1:30:58 | |
and incarceration would be like if they were captured | 1:31:03 | |
by the enemy, SERE school is not our interrogation school. | 1:31:05 | |
It is the enemy's interrogation school, | 1:31:10 | |
and that's a big red flag right there in my opinion, | 1:31:13 | |
when you start bringing the enemies interrogator instructors | 1:31:18 | |
down to our interrogators in the field and telling them, | 1:31:22 | |
well, this is what we would do. | 1:31:26 | |
Well, no, this is what the enemy would do. | 1:31:27 | |
This is what you're saying. | 1:31:29 | |
- | They were bad, that's what you're saying right? | 1:31:32 |
- | We had SERE instructors that were sent | 1:31:33 |
down to Gitmo during my time there, and- | 1:31:35 | |
Interviewer | Have you accepted that approach? | 1:31:37 |
- | Well, I don't know. | 1:31:40 |
So I'll let them speak for themselves, but I never did. | 1:31:42 | |
I laughed it off and you know, | 1:31:47 | |
it was one day of instruction, | 1:31:49 | |
and, you know, I slapped a buddy of mine on the back | 1:31:51 | |
when we left, and I said, | 1:31:54 | |
"Well, that was pretty much a waste of our time, wasn't it?" | 1:31:55 | |
And, "Let's go back and let's do our job," | 1:31:57 | |
was kind of the attitude. | 1:32:00 | |
You know, it was unfortunate that we had to | 1:32:02 | |
waste a day that we could have actually been in the booth | 1:32:05 | |
interrogating somebody and listening to a couple | 1:32:08 | |
of knowledgeable, decent good-hearted Americans, you know, | 1:32:11 | |
patriots in my opinion, trying to help us out. | 1:32:17 | |
But they were giving us the wrong information. | 1:32:19 | |
They shouldn't have been sent down there | 1:32:22 | |
in the first place, again, whose call was that? | 1:32:23 | |
It was somebody in leadership, somebody in a position | 1:32:26 | |
of authority who was ignorant of how interrogation | 1:32:29 | |
is supposed to be done, making the calls. | 1:32:32 | |
Interviewer | Have you heard of Diane Beaver. | 1:32:36 |
- | No. | 1:32:38 |
- | Okay, well maybe you can go on, | 1:32:40 |
'cause that led, you saw some of this happening | 1:32:42 | |
and that led to what you saw happening at Abu Ghraib. | 1:32:44 | |
- | Well, that's where we start pushing the envelope, | 1:32:47 |
pushing into the gray area, | 1:32:49 | |
and it's almost like how you would boil frog. | 1:32:52 | |
They might say is you don't throw a frog | 1:32:58 | |
into boiling hot water, | 1:33:01 | |
'cause the frog will jump out. | 1:33:03 | |
You put a frog into cold water | 1:33:04 | |
and you slowly turn up the heat, pushing it | 1:33:07 | |
up every so often and let that frog get accustomed to it. | 1:33:09 | |
The frog will stay in there, | 1:33:12 | |
until it's boiling, until it dies, | 1:33:13 | |
as long as you slowly turn up the heat. | 1:33:15 | |
Well, the same thing with pushing the gray area, | 1:33:19 | |
pushing that envelope. | 1:33:20 | |
You get one iteration, one generation coming in | 1:33:21 | |
that comes in for six months | 1:33:25 | |
or 12 months or whatever for a rotation, | 1:33:26 | |
and they push it this far. | 1:33:29 | |
And then the next, the subsequent group | 1:33:31 | |
comes in and they use that. | 1:33:33 | |
Well, we pushed it as far as their baseline, | 1:33:35 | |
"Oh they push it that far. | 1:33:38 | |
We could probably go a little bit further." | 1:33:40 | |
They don't know that really, | 1:33:42 | |
that was the limit of where they should go, | 1:33:44 | |
not the starting point of where they should go. | 1:33:45 | |
This is where you get people who go from | 1:33:48 | |
"I'm going to throw some furniture around to pretend | 1:33:51 | |
like I'm angry at you," to, | 1:33:53 | |
"I'm going to hit you with a piece of furniture." | 1:33:55 | |
This is where it built up. | 1:33:59 | |
This is where you get within a fairly short period of time. | 1:34:04 | |
When we're talking about Afghanistan, 2001, Gitmo 2002, | 1:34:07 | |
Iraq 2003, so a period of just a couple of years, | 1:34:12 | |
just a few iterations where you get that pushing because | 1:34:15 | |
of the leadership focusing on what can we do | 1:34:20 | |
to the detainees, how far can we get it? | 1:34:22 | |
And only being results oriented. | 1:34:24 | |
Where are the reports? | 1:34:27 | |
I want my reports. | 1:34:28 | |
I want my actionable intelligence, not, | 1:34:29 | |
are we conforming to the Geneva Convention? | 1:34:32 | |
Are we conforming to FM- | 1:34:35 | |
What is it, 2110? | 1:34:38 | |
2710, | 1:34:40 | |
forgetting that one, | 1:34:42 | |
the international rule of law or law of land warfare, | 1:34:44 | |
where we constantly remind ourselves, | 1:34:49 | |
you're going to get whatever you can, | 1:34:54 | |
but you're going to operate in this box | 1:34:57 | |
of rules and limitations, | 1:34:59 | |
and you need to be as good as you possibly can | 1:35:01 | |
to work in that box, | 1:35:04 | |
not let's see how far out we can push the sides | 1:35:08 | |
to that box, | 1:35:12 | |
and having interrogators who are inexperienced, | 1:35:14 | |
who aren't getting proper mentorship, | 1:35:21 | |
who aren't getting senior advice and senior leadership, | 1:35:23 | |
and the senior leaders who are making suggestions on well, | 1:35:27 | |
we can do these active mentoring programs, | 1:35:32 | |
not getting feedback, | 1:35:34 | |
not getting cooperation from the leadership. | 1:35:36 | |
I know that for a fact, | 1:35:38 | |
where senior leaders, | 1:35:40 | |
senior experience interrogators were not getting the support | 1:35:41 | |
from leadership to have active mentoring programs | 1:35:46 | |
or to have area of specialization, | 1:35:49 | |
or to have a reinforced training that wasn't just, you know, | 1:35:51 | |
the quarterly mandatory, you know, | 1:35:55 | |
sexual harassment fire drill type of training programs, | 1:35:58 | |
talking about real excellence in the field, | 1:36:01 | |
get to know the detainees, | 1:36:03 | |
get to know the area where they're from, | 1:36:05 | |
get to know the politics, the society, the history, | 1:36:06 | |
you know, this sort of thing that this is where | 1:36:10 | |
you get people dropping the ball constantly because, | 1:36:13 | |
again, we go back to that deadly duo | 1:36:16 | |
of ignorance and arrogance, where the arrogant leaders | 1:36:22 | |
won't listen to the people | 1:36:26 | |
who are trying to tell them, | 1:36:27 | |
look, sir, or ma'am, you're in charge, | 1:36:28 | |
and you're the one who will make the decisions, | 1:36:32 | |
but you don't have all the facts and you're basing | 1:36:34 | |
your judgment upon wrong agenda and upon probably | 1:36:38 | |
wrong criteria, | 1:36:41 | |
and it's filtering down to these inexperienced people who | 1:36:42 | |
then go into the booth and then subject the detainee | 1:36:47 | |
to some sort of mental or physical coercion. | 1:36:50 | |
That's your responsibility, that's your fault, | 1:36:53 | |
because you did not put the skid on it, put the, you know, | 1:36:55 | |
put a stop to it before it ever started. | 1:37:02 | |
Had you been not ignorant, meaning had you been aware | 1:37:05 | |
that this could occur, | 1:37:11 | |
and that if you don't do something proactively about it, | 1:37:13 | |
had you been aware of that you would have made sure | 1:37:18 | |
that it would never have happened | 1:37:22 | |
under your watch to begin with, | 1:37:24 | |
but because you were in that position, | 1:37:25 | |
you were ignorant and you were too arrogant to listen | 1:37:27 | |
to a senior personnel, senior experienced personnel, | 1:37:29 | |
to take their advice, this falls on your responsibility, | 1:37:34 | |
this falls on your shoulders. | 1:37:38 | |
Interviewer | Why have you came to talk to us? | 1:37:40 |
- | Why? | 1:37:43 |
Same reason that I've spoken to a lot of different people. | 1:37:44 | |
I love interrogation. | 1:37:47 | |
I love what we can do, | 1:37:49 | |
and I believe that keeping a record of | 1:37:51 | |
what we've experienced, both the good and the bad | 1:37:55 | |
is the best way for future generations to make sure | 1:37:59 | |
that they don't make these same mistakes, | 1:38:02 | |
and the more we talk about it, the better we're going to be. | 1:38:04 | |
Like I said, we had the same problems, | 1:38:07 | |
and these same issues or similar issues back in Vietnam, | 1:38:09 | |
and 40 years later, 50 years later, we're still | 1:38:14 | |
making the same mistakes or making them even worse. | 1:38:17 | |
Maybe if we had had leadership that had actually listened | 1:38:20 | |
to those guys back in those days, to the same extent | 1:38:24 | |
that we can maybe get people to listen to us now, | 1:38:28 | |
this never would have happened. | 1:38:32 | |
- | You didn't start seeing problems, | 1:38:33 |
deep problems with what you just described, | 1:38:36 | |
what you described today, until post 9/11, right? | 1:38:38 | |
I mean, I guess what you're saying | 1:38:42 | |
is when you were in Guantanamo, | 1:38:44 | |
you saw things that were not structured, | 1:38:46 | |
they were on the fly, if you will, | 1:38:49 | |
and you began to see that it wasn't working | 1:38:51 | |
the way you had been trained, | 1:38:53 | |
and the way you feel people should be trained, | 1:38:54 | |
and you saw that going forward, | 1:38:57 | |
am I correct in saying that's kind | 1:38:59 | |
of what led you to speak out? | 1:39:00 | |
- | Well, the couple of different things, | 1:39:03 |
Guantanamo was the center point | 1:39:05 | |
for a new type of war for us at the time, | 1:39:08 | |
we were used to conventional warfare, | 1:39:10 | |
we're used to fighting armies, | 1:39:12 | |
the fourth largest army in the world, the Iraqi army. | 1:39:13 | |
We're used to fighting the republican guard units | 1:39:16 | |
and capturing them and getting order of battle information, | 1:39:19 | |
we're used to Noriega's forces. | 1:39:22 | |
This kind of what we were used to. | 1:39:24 | |
Law enforcement was used to organized crime, | 1:39:26 | |
or drug dealers or, you know, | 1:39:28 | |
that sort of thing. | 1:39:31 | |
So we had a lot of experienced people, | 1:39:33 | |
but we weren't really used to on a wide range, | 1:39:36 | |
on the military side toward some sort of global insurgency, | 1:39:40 | |
some sort of theologically minded | 1:39:45 | |
violent uprising that was quasi criminal | 1:39:51 | |
in nature and in its activities, | 1:39:58 | |
but also quasi, you know, or paramilitary as well, | 1:40:01 | |
where it crosses a lot of areas that create confusion, | 1:40:06 | |
because we weren't experienced with it, | 1:40:10 | |
and that's where you get the confusion. | 1:40:12 | |
So how do you conduct the interrogations? | 1:40:14 | |
Who's going to conduct the interrogations? | 1:40:18 | |
Who's going to be in command? | 1:40:21 | |
We didn't know if it was a CENTCOM, | 1:40:23 | |
central command area or if there's a south comm, | 1:40:25 | |
you know, Southern command area. | 1:40:28 | |
We didn't know if it was special forces should be involved | 1:40:30 | |
or if they should be separate, you know, this sort of thing. | 1:40:33 | |
We were trying to figure it out as we went along, | 1:40:35 | |
and so the war gaming beforehand | 1:40:37 | |
that probably should have taken place, | 1:40:40 | |
I guess, I guess, I don't know. | 1:40:41 | |
Again, I was just a buck Sergeant time, | 1:40:43 | |
didn't take place. | 1:40:47 | |
So the results that we see are a lot of semi experienced, | 1:40:48 | |
I'm not going to say inexperienced, | 1:40:53 | |
semi experienced well-meaning people being put | 1:40:55 | |
in a place that really should have | 1:40:58 | |
been reserved for again, cream of the crop, | 1:41:00 | |
if we had them, I believe we did have them. | 1:41:02 | |
I think that we still do have some cream of the crop people, | 1:41:06 | |
I've run into them from time to time | 1:41:08 | |
in my various deployments, but they're few and far between, | 1:41:11 | |
and because of the, for example, the decisions that were | 1:41:14 | |
made post 9/11 as towards how we're going to | 1:41:19 | |
take human intelligence and interrogation, | 1:41:22 | |
and we're just going to ramp up the numbers | 1:41:26 | |
of interrogators out there. | 1:41:28 | |
We're going to throw a whole bunch of them, | 1:41:29 | |
brigade after brigade of these kids that know nothing | 1:41:31 | |
in the hope that they will be able to get a nugget | 1:41:35 | |
of information somewhere amongst all the chaff, | 1:41:38 | |
that poor decision we're still facing | 1:41:41 | |
the repercussions of that to this day, | 1:41:45 | |
and it will continue to get worse. | 1:41:47 | |
Interviewer | How are we facing repercussions? | 1:41:49 |
- | Because those kids that were just shoved | 1:41:52 |
into the Interrogator Corps, | 1:41:55 | |
as opposed to the previous way, | 1:41:58 | |
was that this was a very elite group, | 1:42:00 | |
1200 people worldwide for the entire army prior to 9/11, | 1:42:03 | |
that you could be kicked out at any time | 1:42:08 | |
if they just felt like you didn't have what | 1:42:10 | |
it took to be an interrogator, no questions asked. | 1:42:12 | |
The senior interrogators had that authority | 1:42:16 | |
to be able to just, no he's not interrogator, | 1:42:18 | |
she's not interrogator. | 1:42:20 | |
Make them something else. | 1:42:22 | |
We didn't have that authority anymore, | 1:42:23 | |
prior to 9/11 or post 9/11, | 1:42:25 | |
we would go from training 100 to 200 interrogators | 1:42:27 | |
per year at the schoolhouse, | 1:42:32 | |
per year, to training 1500 to 3000 students per year. | 1:42:35 | |
When you get that type of numbers, I mean, | 1:42:43 | |
we're multiplying it by a factor of 10. | 1:42:45 | |
When you get those type of numbers, | 1:42:48 | |
you don't have the authority now to say, | 1:42:50 | |
this person can't be an interrogator. | 1:42:53 | |
Interviewer | Why is that a problem? | 1:42:56 |
- | Because they needed to fill the quotas. | 1:42:57 |
They just needed bodies. | 1:43:00 | |
So we had students, we had students who went through | 1:43:02 | |
the school house, who didn't want to be interrogators, | 1:43:05 | |
who were forced to be interrogators, | 1:43:08 | |
who would say, "I don't want to do this. | 1:43:10 | |
I don't know how to do this. | 1:43:11 | |
How do I get out of this job?" | 1:43:12 | |
And as an instructor at the school house, | 1:43:14 | |
I had no authority to be able to say, | 1:43:16 | |
"You know what? | 1:43:18 | |
I agree with you, you're out." | 1:43:19 | |
We did not have that power | 1:43:21 | |
or that decision-making ability anymore. | 1:43:25 | |
And- | 1:43:29 | |
Interviewer | Why is that a problem now | 1:43:32 |
that we have these people in there | 1:43:35 | |
who don't want to be interrogators? | 1:43:36 | |
- | Because, | 1:43:40 |
they're getting rank, | 1:43:43 | |
they're moving up and they didn't have what it took | 1:43:45 | |
to be a basic interrogator to begin with, | 1:43:49 | |
and now they're instructing people the next generation, | 1:43:53 | |
and yet, they don't even understand their job, | 1:43:58 | |
let alone even like doing their job. | 1:44:01 | |
If you don't like doing interrogation, | 1:44:03 | |
it's very difficult for you to be a good interrogator. | 1:44:04 | |
I'll tell you it's next to impossible | 1:44:09 | |
to be a good interrogator if you don't | 1:44:10 | |
like being interrogator. | 1:44:12 | |
Yet, these people are the ones | 1:44:14 | |
who are now training, teaching, advising, | 1:44:15 | |
mentoring, and promoting the next generation. | 1:44:19 | |
So we have a lot of sub quality interrogation out there | 1:44:24 | |
and it needs to be weeded out. | 1:44:30 | |
Recently, we have gotten some good news | 1:44:33 | |
in the sense that they are at least administratively, | 1:44:37 | |
they're making it more difficult. | 1:44:40 | |
I think they're cutting back the numbers. | 1:44:41 | |
I haven't been to school house again, | 1:44:42 | |
the the interrogation school down in Fort Huachuca | 1:44:44 | |
Arizona for a number of years, | 1:44:48 | |
so I don't know what the numbers are as far | 1:44:50 | |
as the number of students nowadays, | 1:44:52 | |
but overall I believe that they are in the military, | 1:44:55 | |
mainly in the army, | 1:44:59 | |
trying to cut down on the number of interrogators. | 1:45:00 | |
So they're making it more difficult for them to be promoted, | 1:45:03 | |
and they're actually bringing back the language requirement, | 1:45:06 | |
which they got rid of, | 1:45:10 | |
and language requirement is a good way to weed out people, | 1:45:12 | |
because it is difficult to learn a foreign language | 1:45:15 | |
to a high enough testable level, | 1:45:19 | |
that if you really want the job, | 1:45:22 | |
you're going to work hard | 1:45:25 | |
to be able to get that foreign language. | 1:45:26 | |
So that's one way to weed it out. | 1:45:28 | |
Interviewer | Should Obama close Guantanamo? | 1:45:31 |
- | Absolutely, he should have done that the first year. | 1:45:33 |
Interviewer | Why? | 1:45:35 |
- | Mainly because it kills more Americans, simple enough. | 1:45:37 |
Guantanamo being open kills Americans. | 1:45:42 | |
Interviewer | How's that? | 1:45:45 |
- | It is the Mecca, if you will, for the global jihad. | 1:45:48 |
I mean, a good Muslim is supposed to | 1:45:54 | |
face Mecca when they pray. | 1:45:56 | |
I think most global jihadists, especially in leadership, | 1:45:59 | |
probably face Mecca and give a little passing nod or a wink | 1:46:02 | |
to Guantanamo as a daily thank you, | 1:46:05 | |
because every day that that sucker is open, | 1:46:09 | |
they've got new recruits, they've got a line | 1:46:12 | |
of people ready to put their lives on the line, | 1:46:14 | |
just because Guantanamo exists. | 1:46:19 | |
They don't know anything about Guantanamo. | 1:46:22 | |
They have never seen it. | 1:46:24 | |
They've never been there. | 1:46:27 | |
They may not have a relative or a friend there. | 1:46:29 | |
They just know the name Guantanamo, | 1:46:32 | |
and they are willing to put their lives | 1:46:35 | |
on the line for that. | 1:46:36 | |
Interviewer | How do you know this? | 1:46:37 |
- | Because I've interrogated guys out in the field | 1:46:39 |
that I've actually specifically mentioned Guantanamo | 1:46:41 | |
as far as the motivation, | 1:46:44 | |
maybe not specifically their motivation, | 1:46:45 | |
but motivation for a lot of their friends, | 1:46:48 | |
for, you know, the recruitment drives | 1:46:50 | |
that are being done out in the field. | 1:46:52 | |
You know, it is a win-win for Taliban, | 1:46:54 | |
for Al-Qaeda, for Iamyul, | 1:46:59 | |
the Islamic movement of Pakistan, | 1:47:02 | |
for so many groups out there who just really, | 1:47:04 | |
really want to hate, it gives them a focal point. | 1:47:08 | |
Now, if you close Guantanamo and you move these guys | 1:47:12 | |
to a different place, could they come | 1:47:15 | |
up with a replacement as far as a recruiting tool? | 1:47:18 | |
Yeah, probably, but I don't think it would be as effective. | 1:47:21 | |
Prior to 9/11, prior to Guantanamo, | 1:47:26 | |
they were recruiting people to hate America. | 1:47:30 | |
You know, you could use the Intifada in Palestine, | 1:47:33 | |
in, you know, what was going on in the Tripoli | 1:47:40 | |
and the Lebanese civil war, you know, | 1:47:45 | |
all these sorts of things as indicators, | 1:47:48 | |
as recruiting points, but I don't think | 1:47:51 | |
it was such an easy job for them at the time, | 1:47:55 | |
given what I've studied on them since 9/11, | 1:47:57 | |
since switching over, | 1:48:01 | |
and since all my interaction with these individuals. | 1:48:02 | |
By the way, just to give another background, | 1:48:05 | |
I probably have over 2000 interrogations in my experience, | 1:48:07 | |
either personally conducted or supported, you know, | 1:48:14 | |
on an analysis level. | 1:48:18 | |
Interviewer | How many do you think you did in Guantanamo? | 1:48:20 |
- | Oh, not very many. | 1:48:22 |
I was only there for about seven months at Guantanamo, | 1:48:26 | |
2003 to February, 2004, | 1:48:28 | |
no, 2002 to 2003, sorry. | 1:48:33 | |
I would probably say a couple of hundred, | 1:48:37 | |
and when I was doing at Guantanamo, | 1:48:41 | |
we had a pretty easy pace going down there. | 1:48:44 | |
Interviewer | Can you tell us one interrogation | 1:48:50 |
that might stand out, | 1:48:52 | |
that just might be interesting for the viewer. | 1:48:53 | |
If there's anyone that you don't have to give names | 1:48:56 | |
of the detainee, but just an example is kind of interesting | 1:48:59 | |
that maybe you learned, or maybe you saw maybe his reaction | 1:49:01 | |
or something that stands out even 12 years later. | 1:49:05 | |
- | Yeah, early on, I had a Saudi who, | 1:49:08 |
I won't get into any specific names, | 1:49:13 | |
but spoke English, smart, good natured in a sense, | 1:49:16 | |
but pretty sure, pretty sure this guy was active | 1:49:26 | |
with Al-Qaeda for a number of years, | 1:49:34 | |
and had we met under different circumstances, | 1:49:37 | |
probably would've killed me easily, | 1:49:41 | |
and not even batted an eye about it, | 1:49:42 | |
but in the booth, we from like, | 1:49:46 | |
the very beginning conversation, we were like friends, | 1:49:50 | |
and he would, | 1:49:54 | |
it was almost like he was taking me under his wing, | 1:49:55 | |
talking to me about life in his country, | 1:49:57 | |
life in a couple of other countries as a foreigner. | 1:50:00 | |
But, you know, as a Muslim in a another Muslim country, | 1:50:03 | |
about the rich cultural heritage of his particular region, | 1:50:07 | |
and you know, it, wasn't just the I'm telling you this, | 1:50:11 | |
because I think this is what you want to hear. | 1:50:17 | |
It really was a much more subtle way of- | 1:50:20 | |
And he was speaking in English, mind you, all this time, | 1:50:23 | |
and his English was amazing. | 1:50:26 | |
Interviewer | How did he learn English? | 1:50:28 |
- | That I don't know, | 1:50:32 |
because I didn't work his case long enough | 1:50:33 | |
in order to be able to figure that out. | 1:50:34 | |
But, | 1:50:38 | |
he was talking with me and cooperating to the extent | 1:50:40 | |
that he wanted to cooperate | 1:50:43 | |
because he really liked the idea | 1:50:45 | |
that he was in control of everything, | 1:50:48 | |
and so he felt like I'm going to, | 1:50:50 | |
I love to talk, but I'm going to talk to you | 1:50:55 | |
about what I want to talk to you about. | 1:50:57 | |
My hope with him was that I'm becoming a better interrogator | 1:51:00 | |
because this was a fellow who you could not | 1:51:03 | |
play the normal games with. | 1:51:05 | |
You couldn't just run the normal approaches. | 1:51:06 | |
"Don't you miss your family? | 1:51:08 | |
Don't you want to go home, you know, cooperate with me, | 1:51:09 | |
and answer all these questions and rat out all your friends, | 1:51:12 | |
and I'll put you on a list." | 1:51:14 | |
You know, that sort of thing? | 1:51:16 | |
This was a fellow that you actually really needed to get | 1:51:18 | |
into his head and figure out | 1:51:20 | |
what kind of motivated him first. | 1:51:23 | |
You have to identify weak points versus strong points. | 1:51:24 | |
What he's using as a strength, you can try | 1:51:28 | |
and flip that into making that his biggest weakness. | 1:51:31 | |
That's where good interrogation I believe can actually, | 1:51:35 | |
you know, make the difference | 1:51:39 | |
between somebody who's going to be cooperative anyways, | 1:51:41 | |
versus someone who is going to yank your chain | 1:51:44 | |
for a long time, | 1:51:46 | |
never give you any information, | 1:51:47 | |
waste your time and actually turn that person | 1:51:48 | |
into someone who actually either cooperates | 1:51:50 | |
or mistakenly gives you information. | 1:51:52 | |
This fellow, I would say, | 1:51:56 | |
had I been able to continue working with him, | 1:51:59 | |
I think I probably would have gotten a plethora of reports, | 1:52:02 | |
because he was so well-traveled and so knowledgeable. | 1:52:05 | |
That was at Guantanamo. | 1:52:09 | |
I have had more interesting interrogations | 1:52:11 | |
subsequent to him. | 1:52:14 | |
Interviewer | Why would he want to talk to you, | 1:52:16 |
this fellow in Guantanamo? | 1:52:17 | |
- | Why did he want to talk to me? | 1:52:19 |
He was a social animal. | 1:52:21 | |
He liked talking. | 1:52:23 | |
I know this, because the following interrogator | 1:52:26 | |
who worked with me afterwards, but took over that case, | 1:52:31 | |
what he did was he started out from the get | 1:52:38 | |
go as a hostile interrogation, | 1:52:41 | |
because he said you're not answering my intelligence | 1:52:43 | |
priority requirements, | 1:52:44 | |
from the get-go. | 1:52:48 | |
I'm going to create a level of animosity, | 1:52:49 | |
and your biggest strength is your biggest weakness, | 1:52:52 | |
is that you like to talk. | 1:52:56 | |
So I'm going to sit here in the booth, | 1:52:58 | |
and I'm going to read a book, | 1:52:59 | |
and you're going to just sit there | 1:53:02 | |
and watch me read a book and I'm not going to say anything, | 1:53:03 | |
and that's what he did, | 1:53:07 | |
and it drove this guy batty. | 1:53:08 | |
He was trying to be polite about it, | 1:53:12 | |
but it was just driving him nuts, you could tell. | 1:53:13 | |
So that again, while we may laugh about it, | 1:53:16 | |
I don't think at the end of the day, | 1:53:20 | |
he got any results with it, | 1:53:21 | |
but he did create a lot of animosity. | 1:53:23 | |
So again, if you're going, if you're an interrogator, | 1:53:26 | |
and you're going to use the hostile questioning techniques, | 1:53:30 | |
the hostile approaches, and good luck to you, | 1:53:33 | |
because if you screw it up, you burned all your bridges. | 1:53:37 | |
It's very difficult to go back to being a nice guy | 1:53:40 | |
after you, you know, come in and been a jerk, | 1:53:42 | |
and it's not like in the movies, | 1:53:45 | |
it's not like in the crime fighter novels, | 1:53:47 | |
you don't throw the guy up against the wall, | 1:53:50 | |
slapping them a couple of times, | 1:53:51 | |
and he starts crying and just telling you everything. | 1:53:52 | |
That's not how it works. | 1:53:54 | |
Real interrogation, real true life stories of interrogation | 1:53:57 | |
almost always show where it's a guy who, | 1:54:01 | |
at the end of the day, | 1:54:04 | |
once you invite you over for dinner to meet his family | 1:54:05 | |
because he just likes you so much, | 1:54:08 | |
and honestly does. | 1:54:10 | |
It's not because he's just sucking up to you because, | 1:54:11 | |
you know, he thinks that that's what you want to hear. | 1:54:15 | |
Interviewer | Johnny, do you have any questions? | 1:54:19 |
Johnny | I don't. | 1:54:21 |
Interviewer | Are there things I didn't ask you | 1:54:22 |
that you'd like to share with this, especially since | 1:54:25 | |
the people might be watching this 50 years from now, | 1:54:28 | |
and there might be something that I didn't ask | 1:54:30 | |
that could be important for them to know | 1:54:33 | |
for you to just tell us? | 1:54:38 | |
- | Well, I would say this, like I say, | 1:54:40 |
I have 22 years experience and I've been fortunate | 1:54:44 | |
in my career to work in so many places | 1:54:48 | |
that other interrogators who | 1:54:52 | |
have experienced have only worked in one | 1:54:55 | |
or two of those similar places I've worked in whole slew | 1:54:58 | |
of the places taught at schoolhouse, | 1:55:01 | |
taught at, or worked at strategic level, | 1:55:03 | |
worked peacetime mission when I was just a grunt soldier, | 1:55:05 | |
I worked Bosnia, you know, trained for Kosovo. | 1:55:08 | |
I worked in Germany, | 1:55:11 | |
I was working in the Arms Reduction Treaty oversights. | 1:55:12 | |
It was in, you know, the end of the Cold War, | 1:55:16 | |
you know, it was still going on, | 1:55:20 | |
and I was doing walk-in source interrogations | 1:55:20 | |
at the strategic level of guys who had relatives, you know, | 1:55:24 | |
in the Kremlin and doing it in language. | 1:55:27 | |
I mean, I was really fortunate throughout my career | 1:55:31 | |
to experience all this, | 1:55:34 | |
and I learned so much from it, | 1:55:36 | |
and after 22 years, the only thing that I | 1:55:38 | |
can tell you is I have a lot more to learn. | 1:55:40 | |
I mean, honestly, | 1:55:43 | |
I think that I'm a pretty good interrogator, | 1:55:45 | |
but I know that I could be so much better, | 1:55:48 | |
and for future leaders, and these are the people | 1:55:51 | |
that I really want to speak to all the time, | 1:55:56 | |
don't ever think that your interrogators, | 1:55:59 | |
or your analysts who support your interrogators, | 1:56:02 | |
or the leaders who watch over your interrogators | 1:56:04 | |
are the best or can't improve. | 1:56:08 | |
They can always improve, | 1:56:11 | |
and most likely they have more to improve | 1:56:12 | |
on than they already have, all right? | 1:56:15 | |
Because unless they're 30 and 40 year veterans, | 1:56:18 | |
they probably haven't seen everything or done everything. | 1:56:21 | |
They probably don't have all the answers, | 1:56:24 | |
and if they act like they do all the answers, | 1:56:26 | |
they probably are suffering | 1:56:29 | |
from that same deadly dual combination | 1:56:32 | |
of the ignorance and arrogance that has afflicted | 1:56:35 | |
so many people. | 1:56:37 | |
Gitmo, in my opinion, was just the stage one | 1:56:39 | |
of how bad things can get, | 1:56:45 | |
and I believe that in the future | 1:56:47 | |
that we're going to see more conflict, | 1:56:49 | |
more intense conflict, and more brutality, | 1:56:52 | |
and the US is going to have to be involved in this | 1:56:58 | |
just because our position in the world, | 1:57:00 | |
and we cannot go back to being complacent about this. | 1:57:02 | |
We became complacent in the 1980s and the 1990s, | 1:57:06 | |
because of the rise of technology and our reliance | 1:57:10 | |
upon technology in the intelligence community and | 1:57:14 | |
the defense community, in my opinion, | 1:57:17 | |
and we slashed budgets and we slashed training, | 1:57:20 | |
and we slashed the focus of our attention on | 1:57:24 | |
the human factor in human intelligence, | 1:57:27 | |
and so I believe that we suffered tremendously from that, | 1:57:32 | |
and that's why we didn't have any operatives on the ground, | 1:57:34 | |
you know, prior to the invasion of Iraq. | 1:57:37 | |
We didn't know what was going on with Saddam's | 1:57:40 | |
forces at that time, his inner circle, | 1:57:41 | |
his military or his political inner circles. | 1:57:44 | |
That's why prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, | 1:57:47 | |
even though it was still undergoing a Civil War in 2001, | 1:57:51 | |
we had only three Pashto linguists in the entire army, | 1:57:55 | |
three in the entire world. | 1:58:00 | |
I met one of them and she was okay, | 1:58:02 | |
but she wasn't fluent to the point | 1:58:05 | |
that she could run a full blown interrogation, | 1:58:08 | |
and by the way, she's a female, a young, pretty female, | 1:58:10 | |
how is she going to interrogate a senior Taliban | 1:58:13 | |
commander who their idea of women is basically | 1:58:16 | |
kinda cattle that can be traded back and forth? | 1:58:20 | |
So again, understand that not everybody | 1:58:23 | |
in the world is American. | 1:58:28 | |
Not everybody in the world thinks like Americans, | 1:58:29 | |
not everybody in the world comes from the similar culture. | 1:58:31 | |
So as a leader in human intelligence, | 1:58:34 | |
that is going to have people working around the world | 1:58:36 | |
in these other environments, when you make your decisions | 1:58:40 | |
as to who you're going to put out there, | 1:58:43 | |
how you're going to train them, | 1:58:45 | |
how you're going to recruit them, | 1:58:46 | |
and what units you're going to put them, | 1:58:48 | |
please keep that in mind, | 1:58:49 | |
that we are not a skeleton key that goes into every lock. | 1:58:51 | |
We are a particular shaped peg | 1:58:56 | |
that only goes into one particular type of hole, | 1:58:58 | |
and if you want to put us in a Somalia type | 1:59:01 | |
of environment versus a Georgian or Chechen type environment | 1:59:05 | |
versus a Syria type of environment, | 1:59:09 | |
you better put the right people in there, | 1:59:11 | |
put them in first and foremost, | 1:59:13 | |
put your cream of the crop in there. | 1:59:15 | |
The benefits you will get, | 1:59:17 | |
whether you're a civilian leader or a military leader, | 1:59:19 | |
are astronomically more huge, | 1:59:23 | |
outweigh any detriment as far as costs or, you know, | 1:59:27 | |
energy and time that you have to put | 1:59:32 | |
into making these decisions beforehand. | 1:59:34 | |
We are not just a gun that can be put | 1:59:38 | |
into anybody's hands and fired at the same way. | 1:59:40 | |
We're like a doctor or a lawyer. | 1:59:44 | |
When you go to a doctor for very special cancer you have, | 1:59:47 | |
you're not going to go to just a general practitioner. | 1:59:51 | |
Might go to them first, | 1:59:54 | |
but then you want to go to a oncologist. | 1:59:55 | |
If you have a legal problem, you don't want to go | 1:59:58 | |
to a divorce or an injury lawyer for, you know, | 2:00:00 | |
the bankruptcy of Detroit, okay? | 2:00:03 | |
I mean, you want a specialist in those areas. | 2:00:07 | |
That's exactly what we're talking | 2:00:10 | |
about when it comes to interrogation. | 2:00:11 | |
So for future leadership, please, please, please, | 2:00:12 | |
listen to the senior interrogators out there, | 2:00:17 | |
do what they advise you, focus on specialization, | 2:00:19 | |
don't focus on what legal things you can get away with | 2:00:22 | |
on how you can push the detainees, | 2:00:25 | |
focus on what you can do to the interrogator core | 2:00:27 | |
to make it the best in the world. | 2:00:31 | |
There are examples out there. | 2:00:33 | |
There are papers that have been written | 2:00:35 | |
by people who spent years studying this, | 2:00:36 | |
they can give you some good advice. | 2:00:40 | |
Please don't be so arrogant that you can | 2:00:43 | |
that you think that you can make your decisions | 2:00:46 | |
without putting any into this in a consideration, | 2:00:47 | |
because I guarantee you, if a mistake is made | 2:00:49 | |
it will come back to bite you in the butt later on. | 2:00:53 | |
Interviewer | That was good. | 2:00:57 |
I think, if that's it, I think we're done. | 2:01:00 | |
Johnny, these 20 seconds of room tone | 2:01:04 | |
where we just sit here quietly for 20 seconds | 2:01:07 | |
before he turns off the camera. | 2:01:10 | |
- | Okay. | 2:01:12 |
Interviewer | Okay, begin room tone and room tone. | 2:01:14 |
Item Info
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund