Guantánamo Diary (46 page)

*
This appears to be the German-speaking interrogator who assisted in the earlier interrogation.

*
Department of Justice. This is not true, of course. The Guantánamo Bay detention camp is located on the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and is run by a U.S. military joint task force under the command of the U.S. Southern Command.

*
This could refer to agents of the German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). Press accounts indicate that MOS was interrogated by both German and Canadian intelligence agents in Guantánamo; later in the manuscript, in the scene where he meets with what appear to be BND interrogators in GTMO, MOS specifically references such a prohibition on external interrogations. See footnote
here
; see also http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/from-germany-to-guantanamo-the-career-of-prisoner-no-760-a-583193-3.html; and http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2008/07/27/csis_grilled_trio_in_cuba.html.

*
The interrogator’s remark about military interrogators and MOS’s reference to an interagency competition for control of his interrogation suggest that the interrogator may be from one of the civilian agencies, likely the FBI. The protracted interagency conflict between the FBI and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency over the military’s interrogation methods has been widely documented and reported, most notably in a May 2008 report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General titled
A Review of the FBI’s Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq
(hereafter cited as DOJ IG). The report, which is available at http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s0805/final.pdf, includes substantial sections devoted specifically to MOS’s interrogation.

*
It is clear from an unredacted date later in this chapter, as well as from official in-processing records, that MOS arrived in Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, which would make this scene the morning of August 4, 2002.

*
In-processing height and weight records indicate that thirty-five detainees arrived in Guantánamo on August 5, 2002. The records of that group are available at http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/operation_and_plans/Detainee/measurements/ISN_680-ISN_838.pdf. An official list of all Guantánamo detainees is available at http://www.defense.gov/news/may2006/d20060515%20list.pdf.

*
In this passage, MOS describes a five-hour flight, a change of airplanes, and then a much longer flight. A 2008 investigation by the British human rights organization Reprieve found that transfers of prisoners from Bagram to Guantánamo typically involved a stop at the U.S. air base in Incirlik, Turkey, and the Rendition Project has found that a C-17 military transport plane, flight number RCH233Y, flew from Incirlik to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, carrying thirty-five prisoners. See http://www.libertysecurity.org/IMG/pdf_08.01.28FINALPrisonersIllegallyRenderedtoGuantanamoBay.pdf; and http://www.therenditionproject.org.uk/pdf/PDF%20154%20[Flight%20data.%20Portuguese%20flight%20logs%20to%20GTMO,%20collected%20by%20Ana%20Gomes].pdf.

*
MOS may be referring here to his German-speaking interrogator in Afghanistan.

*
The FBI led MOS’s interrogations for his first several months in Guantánamo, waging a well-documented struggle to keep him out of the hands of military interrogators. “The FBI sought to interview Slahi immediately after he arrived at GTMO,” the DOJ Inspector General reported. “FBI and task force agents interviewed Slahi over the next few months, utilizing rapport building techniques.” At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS described an “FBI guy” who interrogated him shortly after his arrival and told him, “We don’t beat people, we don’t torture, it’s not allowed.” That would appear to be the lead interrogator in this scene—and perhaps also the “older gentleman” who appears in a subsequent session. DOJ IG, 122; ARB transcript, 23.

*
The March 3, 2003, Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures instructed that arriving prisoners be processed and held for four weeks in a maximum security isolation block “to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process” and “to [foster] dependence of the detainee on his interrogator.” The document is available at http://www.comw.org/warreport/fulltext/gitmo-sop.pdf (hereafter cited as SOP).

*
The number has already appeared unredacted, and the Department of Defense has officially acknowledged that MOS’s ISN is 760. See, e.g., the publicly released DOD detainees list available at http://www.defense.gov/news/may2006/d20060515%20list.pdf.

†
MOS may be referring here to Mohammed al-Amin (ISN 706), who was born in Mauritania but moved to Saudi Arabia for religious studies, and Ibrahim Fauzee (ISN 730), who is from the Maldives. Both arrived in GTMO with MOS on August 5, 2002; both have since been released. See http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/706-mohammad-lameen-sidi-mohammad; and http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/730-ibrahim-fauzee.

*
The word is likely “Reservation.” It appears unredacted elsewhere throughout the manuscript. See, e.g., MOS manuscript, 69, 112, 122.

†
Around this time, FBI-led interrogation teams often included members of the military’s Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) and military intelligence agents. The DOJ Inspector General’s report records that “in May 2002, the military and the FBI adopted the ‘Tiger Team’ concept for interrogating detainees. According to the first GTMO case agent, these teams consisted of an FBI agent, an analyst, a contract linguist, two CITF investigators, and a military intelligence interrogator.” The IG found that “the FBI withdrew from participation in the Tiger Teams in the fall of 2002 after disagreements arose between the FBI and military intelligence over interrogation tactics. Several FBI agents told the OIG that while they continued to have a good relationship with CITF, their relationship with the military intelligence entities greatly deteriorated over the course of time, primarily due to the FBI’s opposition to the military intelligence approach to interrogating detainees.” DOJ IG, 34.

*
As the DOJ IG report makes clear, the FBI maintained overall control of the interrogation of MOS throughout 2002 and early 2003. DOJ IG, 122.

*
Context here suggests that the same Camp Delta block where arriving detainees were held for the first month also served as a punishment block for detainees from the general population.

*
By “plain,” I think MOS may mean the Cuban landscape surrounding the camp. It appears from the manuscript that MOS was held in two or three different blocks in Camp Delta over the next several months, including one block that housed detainees from European and North African countries. MOS manuscript, 62. MOS indicated at his ARB hearing that he was being held in Camp Two’s Mike Block as of June 2003. ARB transcript, 26.

*
Because this occurred within the period during which the FBI had overall control of MOS’s interrogation, this would likely be another FBI-led interrogation team; see footnote
here
.

*
This interrogator might be from the CIA. In 2013, the Associated Press reported that between 2002 and 2005, CIA agents in GTMO sought to recruit detainees to serve as informants and double agents for the United States. The CIA also helped facilitate interrogations by foreign intelligence agents in Guantánamo. Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, “Penny Lane, GITMO’s Other Secret CIA Facility,” Associated Press, November 26, 2013, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/penny-lane-gitmos-other-secret-cia-facility.

*
Likely the “older gentleman” or one of his other FBI interrogators.

†
The quotations appear to be directed to two different detainees. The unredacted “Turkistan” in this passage suggests that MOS may be referring to the interrogations of ethnic Uighur detainees by Chinese intelligence agents in GTMO. These interrogations, which were reportedly preceded by periods of sleep deprivation and temperature manipulation, were first revealed in the May 2008 DOJ Inspector General’s report,
A Review of the FBI’s Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq
. McClatchy Newspapers reported that the interrogations took place over a day and a half in September 2002. See http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/07/16/72000/uighur-detainees-us-helped-chinese.html.

*
The visitors are likely German. In 2008,
Der Spiegel
reported that in September 2002, two members of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and one member of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, interviewed MOS for ninety minutes in Guantánamo. MOS appears to refer to two of those visitors, one older and one younger. John Goetz, Marcel Rosenbach, Britta Sandberg, and Holger Stark, “From Germany to Guantanamo: The Career of Prisoner No. 760,”
Der Spiegel,
October 9, 2008, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/from-germany-to-guantanamo-the-career-of-prisoner-no-760-a-583193.html.

*
Probably “Herr Salahi.” “Salahi” is a variant spelling of MOS’s last name that is generally used in court documents in the United States.

*
The first picture is likely of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was captured in a shoot-out in a suburb of Karachi, Pakistan, right around this time, on September 11, 2002. At his 2005 ARB hearing, MOS told the panel, “September 11th, 2002, America arrested a man by the name of Ramzi Bin al Shibh, who is said to be the key guy in the September 11th attacks. It was exactly one year after 9/11, and since his capture my life has changed drastically.” ARB transcript, 23.

*
The extended redaction that follows is one of two multipage redactions in the manuscript. The second one, which occurs at the end of
chapter 6
, seems to correspond to a polygraph examination that MOS took in the late fall of 2003 (see footnotes
here
and
here
). It is possible that this first extended redaction concerns a polygraph examination as well. At his 2005 ARB hearing, as he is describing his FBI interrogations through the winter of 2002, MOS said, “Then I took a polygraph and [Ramzi bin al-Shibh] refused to take a polygraph for many reasons. It turns out he is very contradictory and he lies. They said that to me themselves. They said my credibility is high because I took the polygraph.” After his capture on September 11, 2002, Ramzi bin al-Shibh was held and interrogated at several CIA black sites. News reports suggest that bin al-Shibh was interrogated in a CIA-run facility near Rabat, Morocco, in late September and through the fall of 2002, and in 2010 the U.S. government acknowledged it possessed videotapes of bin al-Shibh’s 2002 interrogation in Morocco. See, e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/world/18tapes.html; and http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/wdc/binalshibh/content.swf.

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Later in the manuscript, MOS writes that he participated in a hunger strike in September 2002, and news reports document a hunger strike in late September and October of that year (see, e.g., http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/multimedia/guantanamo-hungerstriketimeline.html, quoting an FBI document attributing that protest to anger over treatment by guards and the ongoing detention without trial or legal process). That hunger strike occurred toward the end of the tenure of Major General Michael E. Dunlavey, who was the commander of JTF-170, the intelligence operations in Guantánamo, from February through October 2002. He was succeeded by Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, who became commander of JTF-GTMO, which encompassed all Guantánamo operations, in November 2002. The Senate Armed Services Committee has documented at length the trend toward more abusive interrogations in October and November 2002, which included the development of the military’s first “Special Interrogation Plan” for Mohammed al-Qahtani. On December 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed a memo authorizing interrogation methods including nudity, forced standing and stress positions, and twenty-hour interrogations. U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, “Inquiry in the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody,” November 20, 2008, http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Detainee-Report-Final_April-22-2009.pdf (hereafter cited as SASC).

*
It is now around the end of 2002.

†
The 2008 DOJ Inspector General’s report identifies the two FBI agents who interview MOS from this point until he is turned over to the JTF-GTMO task force in May 2003 by the pseudonyms “Poulson” and “Santiago.” Context suggests that the group in the room also includes a military interrogator and a French-speaking translator. According to the DOJ IG report, the team at this time also included a detective from the New York Police Department’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, who interrogated Slahi with “Poulson” in January 2003. DOJ IG, 295–99.

*
In this and the next paragraph, the subject could be Ahmed Ressam. Ressam was arrested as he tried to enter the United States from Canada in a car laden with explosives on December 14, 2000; he was convicted the following year of planning to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Day 2001 as part of what became known as the Millennium Plot. In May 2001, after entering a guilty plea and before sentencing, Ressam began cooperating with U.S. authorities in exchange for assurances of a reduced sentence. A U.S. Court of Appeals later wrote that “Ressam continued cooperating until early 2003. Over the course of his two-year cooperation, he provided 65 hours of trial and deposition testimony, and 205 hours of proffers and debriefings. Ressam provided information to the governments of seven different countries and testified in two trials, both of which ended in convictions of the defendants. He provided names of at least 150 people involved in terrorism and described many others. He also provided information about explosives that potentially saved the lives of law enforcement agents, and extensive information about the mechanics of global terrorism operations.” As MOS indicates here, Ressam never named or implicated him in any way in all those sessions. Ressam later recanted some of his testimony implicating others in the Millennium Plot. He originally received a twenty-two-year sentence with five years’ supervision after his release. In 2010 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that sentence was too lenient and violated mandatory sentencing guidelines, and remanded the case to a federal judge for resentencing. The court’s opinion is available at http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/02/02/09-30000.pdf.