500 Days (74 page)

When James arrived at Guantanamo, he was shocked by Leso’s appearance. Once a bundle of eager energy, he had become a haggard, listless hulk of his old self. James couldn’t imagine what had happened but recognized the signature symptoms of trauma.

Leso had escorted James to his quarters and the two men had sat down. James waited for Leso to tell him what had happened.

Then the tears began.

“I was pressured to teach interrogators procedures and tactics that were a challenge to my ethics as a psychologist and my moral fiber as a human being,” he said. “Being part of this has been just devastating to me.”

Leso had witnessed bodies twisted in pain, sexual humiliation, the snarling of attack dogs used to frighten defenseless detainees. He had spent two days observing the interrogation of al-Qahtani, a near bystander with no authority to put a halt to even the most abusive treatment. The senior officers had not uttered a murmur of protest—in fact, they got their marching orders from higher-ups back home. He had tried to persuade the interrogators to ease up, and while they sometimes relented for a while, they always went back to playing rough. They were convinced that abusive tactics worked, even though detainees clammed up when they were used.

For the better part of the evening, Leso spilled his stories, and James played the role of caring sage to suffering patient. By the end of the discussion, Leso’s frayed nerves seemed to have steadied. He proposed a quick trip to the mess hall before the place closed. The two headed outside to the SUV.

As they bounced along, Leso stole a glance at his visitor. The hurt in his eyes, James thought, was startling.

“Colonel . . .” Leso began, and then stopped.

He paused, then started again.

“Colonel, you need to be real careful down here,” he said. “You can step in a minefield every hour of the day at this place.”

Buried explosives, at Guantanamo? Then, in a flash, James realized that Leso wasn’t talking about munitions. He was warning him to step carefully, because at any moment he might confront a direct attack on his values—not only as a psychologist, but also as a human being.

•  •  •  

Alberto Mora walked into the kitchen in his mother’s Key Biscayne home and picked up the phone. It was David Brant, the head of NCIS.

“I’m sorry to be calling you during your vacation,” Brant said. “The abuse is still going on in Guantanamo.”

Mora took a deep breath and glanced out the window at his mother’s swimming pool, collecting his thoughts.

Nothing had changed?
Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe this policy of abuse wasn’t some fumbling mistake.

“I’ll have to deal with this when I get back,” Mora said. He returned that same week.

•  •  •  

At his fifth-floor office in the heart of historic Old Town Alexandria, Frank Dunham Jr. was reading the ruling just handed down in the Hamdi case. More than two months had passed since Dunham, the federal public defender, had argued before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that the administration had to provide evidence that its detention of Hamdi was legal. But the three-judge panel disagreed.

Since Hamdi was picked up on a battlefield in Afghanistan, the administration had the legal right to designate him as an enemy combatant, the ruling said. An American could go to court to compel the government to justify his detention, but that required officials only to provide the basic facts and legal authority for the determination. Of course, the panel’s decision did not grant
the government unlimited power—their ruling, the judges said, applied only when the detainee had been seized in a theater of war.

By the time Dunham reached the final page of the ruling, he knew the case was far from closed. It was heading to the Supreme Court.

•  •  •  

“Jim,” Mora said, “I was really surprised when I got back to hear that the detainee abuse is still going on.”

It was the afternoon of January 9. Mora was in Haynes’s office again, this time ready to make a stink. Since his return to the Pentagon six days earlier, Mora had been consulting navy officials and reviewing a legal analysis about the issue written by the navy’s legal arm, the Judge Advocate General Corps. The brief was detailed and lawyerly, and its conclusion was straightforward—what was going on in Guantanamo was beyond the legal pale.

Mora handed Haynes a copy of the navy’s new legal opinion. Haynes gave it a glance; more advice on the pile of conflicting information.

“I understand your position, Alberto,” Haynes said. “But there are people here who believe these techniques are necessary to get information out of a few Guantanamo detainees.”

These were some of most dangerous enemies faced by the United States, the worst of the worst. They had been entwined in the 9/11 plot and were privy to al-Qaeda’s designs to kill more innocents. This wasn’t a simple, black-and-white issue, and the administration was doing its best to walk the fine line between respecting their rights and protecting American lives.

“I understand,” Mora replied. “I recognize that the ethical issues here are very difficult.”

He raised the classic “ticking bomb” scenario. What if a captured terrorist knew of an imminent nuclear attack on an American city? What limits should be placed on interrogating him? Mora said he didn’t know.

“If I were the interrogator, I would probably apply the torture myself,” Mora said. “And I would do so with the full knowledge that I could face potentially severe personal consequences.”

But none of that had any bearing on Guantanamo, Mora said. There was no ticking bomb. There was no justification for abandoning America’s cherished laws and values.

“Does the threat of one common criminal against the life of one citizen justify torture or mistreatment?” Mora asked. “If not, how many lives have to be
in jeopardy? Where’s the threshold? I just don’t think that that’s something we should be deciding in the Pentagon.”

As Mora pressed his case, Haynes gave him his full attention, but his face was inscrutable. Mora’s frustration got to him.

“Jim, these policies could threaten the secretary’s tenure and could even damage the presidency,” he said. “Protect your client.”

•  •  •  

In a closed session that day, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei briefed the U.N. Security Council on the weapons inspectors’ progress in Iraq.

The inspections had been under way since late November, and the team had searched a long-suspect presidential palace. In early December, Iraq had issued what it called a complete accounting of its weapons programs. The Americans had dismissed the disclosure as a sham. Iraq, they claimed, was hiding information about nerve gas, anthrax, fuels for ballistic missiles, mobile labs for biological weapons, and its efforts to obtain uranium from Niger—a false allegation that later would be proved to have been based on forged documents.

The U.N. inspectors spent several weeks reviewing Iraq’s twelve-thousand-page assessment, and also weren’t happy with what they found.

Blix opened the briefing with a rundown of the inspectors’ recent findings. “If we had found any ‘smoking gun,’ we would have reported it to the Council,” he said. “Similarly, if we had met with a denial of access or other impediment to our inspections, we would have reported it to the Council. We have not submitted any such reports.”

The Iraqi declaration, however, was far from adequate. “It is rich in volume but poor in new information about weapons issues and practically devoid of new evidence on such issues,” he said. Almost all of the supporting documents were nothing more than rehashes of what had been provided to the U.N. during the inspections of the 1990s.

“Iraq must present credible evidence,” he said. “It cannot just maintain that it must be deemed to be without proscribed weapons so long as there is no evidence to the contrary.”

Years later, looking back on the declaration, Blix acknowledged that Iraq had been in a difficult bind.

“It was very hard for them to declare any weapons,” he said, “when they didn’t have any.”

•  •  •  

The next day, Larry Di Rita, a Pentagon spokesman, burst into Haynes’s office with urgent news.

“There was an enema administered to al-Qahtani in his interrogation,” Di Rita said.

“What?”

“They gave al-Qahtani an enema.”

Haynes sat back in his chair.
Not good.
Using enemas for interrogation, that would be
way
over the line. He doubted it was true; there were plenty of rumors flying around. Then again, maybe it did happen, maybe there was something to this concept of force drift after all. Whatever the case, jitters were spreading through the Pentagon. They needed to step back and take a closer look at the interrogation policies.

As soon as Di Rita left, Haynes walked down to Rumsfeld’s office.

“Boss, I just received a report that al-Qahtani was given an enema as part of his interrogation,” Haynes said. “We have to stop this and take another look.”

“Why? Just tell them not to do that.”

He’s blowing this off.
“No,” Haynes said. “Even if this is just indicative of a rumor, that alone isn’t good. There is too much friction in the system.”

He told Rumsfeld about Mora’s misgivings. If the general counsel of a military branch was alarmed, they couldn’t ignore this growing storm without feeding even more damning rumors.

Haynes left Rumsfeld’s office uncertain whether the defense secretary was taking the matter seriously. No matter—it was imperative to call an emergency meeting of everyone involved in this controversy. Then he would get back to Rumsfeld and force the issue before it spun out of control.

•  •  •  

Mora didn’t know whether he should shout “Hallelujah,” but by that afternoon, he was convinced that Haynes was taking his concerns seriously. Without explanation, he had set up meetings for Mora with the top lawyers at the Pentagon, offering him the chance to lobby them to reconsider the interrogation policy.

By day’s end, Mora had met with the chief legal officers for each branch of the military, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Judge Advocate General Corps. He reviewed the contents and implications of the Rumsfeld authorization with each one and repeated the arguments he had given to Haynes about why it should be rewritten.

Late in the day, Haynes called.

“Alberto, I wanted you to know that the Secretary has been briefed about your concerns,” he said. “We’re reviewing the matter, and I think changes in the interrogation policy are in the offing. That might happen as early as next week.”

Mora smiled. “Thanks, Jim. That’s great to hear.”

•  •  •  

The next day, Saturday, Haynes went back to Rumsfeld.

“Boss, we need a breather on this policy,” Haynes said. “I strongly recommend that you rescind everything you approved so we can take a look at everything and make sure all of this is being done right,”

Rumsfeld gave a vague and noncommittal reply. His mind was elsewhere—on preparations for an invasion of Iraq. This clamor about Guantanamo was an unwanted distraction. Haynes left the office with no clue of what his boss might do to resolve the problem.

•  •  •  

Colonel Larry James, the new Guantanamo psychologist, was making the rounds at about 1:00
A.M.
in the buildings that housed the interrogation booths. From an observation room, he heard yelling, screaming, and the sounds of furniture being thrown around. He peeked into the booth from behind a one-way mirror to see what the ruckus was all about.

Inside, James saw one interrogator and three guards wrestling with a detainee. The man was wearing only pink panties, a wig, and lipstick, and now the soldiers were struggling to dress him in a pink nightgown. James felt an urge to rush into the booth and call a halt to the frightening episode but hesitated. Maybe something was happening that he didn’t understand. He opened his thermos and poured a cup of coffee, watching as he waited for the events to play themselves out.

They didn’t. After several minutes, the fighting hadn’t let up.

I need to stop this right now.

James knocked on the door and walked in. He tried hard not to register any shock or disgust on his face at the bizarre scene unfolding in front of him. He called out to the interrogator.

“Hey,” he said calmly, “you want some coffee?”

The interrogator got off the detainee, breathing hard. “I sure do, Colonel,” he said. “I’ll take you up on that.”

James looked over at the three guards. “Let the detainee up and put him in a chair,” he said. “Give him a break.”

He poured the interrogator a cup of coffee and the two of them stepped out of the booth.

The next step. James the army psychologist was about to assume the role of James the army interrogator—although he would be questioning the frustrated soldier, trying to nudge him away from the fruitless path of confrontation. And he would go about it by using relationship-building techniques.

Over the next few minutes, James spoke calmly to the soldier about everything other than the interrogation. Fishing, hunting, the relative quality of a .45-caliber pistol compared to a nine-millimeter.

Slowly, James maneuvered the conversation around to the session he had just witnessed. The interrogator was still simmering over an insult the detainee had screamed at him two days earlier after spitting at him.

“ ‘I’m gonna butt-fuck your wife’ is how I think the interpreter said it, sir,” the interrogator said, the anger boiling up.

Still, he had doubts about how he was handling the situation. “Would you be willing to review the case with me tomorrow, sir?” he asked.

“Sure,” James replied.

•  •  •  

The detainee was a very bad guy. His file revealed that he was a hard-core terrorist and had been aggressively resistant to questioning. But manhandling and humiliating him were guaranteed to fail, James knew.

When he held the promised review with the interrogator, James asked him how it was going.

“Sir, the problem is that the fucker won’t talk to me,” he replied.

Okay, James said. He asked what the detainee was being fed. The same meals that soldiers in the field get, the interrogator said. Nothing hot, nothing particularly tasty, but good enough.