“Where from?”
“I don’t know.”
It was soon clear that Qahtani didn’t have a well-thought-out cover story. All he’d say was that he was in Afghanistan for falconry and had gone to the United States to buy “cars.” To any additional questions about the U.S. episode, he answered, “I don’t know.” When we discussed nonterrorism-related matters, I saw that he wasn’t very intelligent. I concluded that at best his intended role in 9/11 must have been as a muscle hijacker.
“We’ll stop for now,” I told him, “but you should realize we know who you are. You can play all the games you want to, but eventually you’ll realize it’s in your interest to talk to me.”
Before my interview with him the next day, I put pictures on the wall of al-Qaeda members I knew he’d recognize, including KSM, Mohammed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. They were all central planners of 9/11. We doctored the pictures, except the one of Atta, so that all the men appeared to be wearing orange jumpsuits, indicating that they were in our custody.
“Do you know these people?” I asked, gesturing to the pictures as he walked in. “We’ve got all your friends in custody. That’s how we know all about you.” He froze for a moment, and his face went red, but then he shook his head and said, “I don’t know anything.”
“I need to step out,” I told him, “but I’ll be back soon.”
I left and went into the room where others were watching the interrogation through a video link. As we watched, Qahtani got out of his bed and slowly approached the wall where we had taped the photographs. He stared at them for a few minutes and then touched them gently, as if trying to communicate with the subjects.
I returned to the room and found Qahtani shaking. “Are you okay?” I asked him.
“I’m going on a hunger strike,” he replied. When he was among the general population, some detainees had gone on hunger strikes to protest prison conditions. He thought that it might absolve him from cooperating.
“You are being silly,” I told him. “You can play this game if you want to, and we’ll wait for you to stop, but I’d prefer it if you just started being honest and stopped wasting both our time.” He folded his hands and wouldn’t say anything else, and he was taken to his cell.
I went and got hummus, tabouli, and kebab and brought it to him with some pita. “Here’s food for you,” I told him. “If you want, you can eat.” I placed it in front of him and left the cell. From the room where the video cameras were, I watched him jump up and start eating the food. That was the end of his hunger strike.
Showing a detainee that I knew all about him and that further denial was a waste of time often worked if he had initially denied his role or refused to cooperate. It took time to wear down al-Qaeda members’ resistance, because when silence didn’t deter us, they would make small talk and deny wrongdoing, hoping to prove their “innocence” that way. That’s when we would start questioning them on small details: Why did they go to Afghanistan? How had they traveled there? Who had arranged their trip? Who had convinced them to go? How was the trip funded? How did they get the money? Who vouched for them? Who picked them up at the airport? How did they enter Afghanistan? Where did they stay in Afghanistan? Whom did they meet?
In their minds, these were questions that weren’t directly relevant to terrorism and could fit with their cover story, but their answers would eventually trap them in a lie, and they would have to revise their story, usually so that it was closer to the truth. Even so, we wouldn’t just ask a question like “Did you meet bin Laden?” Instead, we’d tease out details. We’d ask: Who did you first meet in Afghanistan? Where did you first stay? How did you get there? Who was the driver? What route did you take? Who was in that guesthouse? Whom did you submit your passport to? Who was the emir of the guesthouse? What did you talk about? Where did you go next? When asked about specific details, it’s very hard for anyone to maintain a false cover story.
Once the detainee named the emir, or the person who’d trained him, we’d begin to hear names we knew from past interrogations and investigations, which gave us an indication of how the detainee fit into the al-Qaeda chart. If, for example, the detainee said that his emir was Abu Musab al-Yemeni, one of the many regular instructors in al-Qaeda’s camps, it was likely that he had done only basic training. If Saif al-Adel was involved, however, he might have been used for a special operation.
The process could take one hour or a week; each detainee was different. Eventually they’d start telling us what really happened. But to get to that point, the interrogator needs to be an expert in the subject, and you have to show you are familiar with what the detainees are talking about. You can’t stop to ask them to start spelling names of people or places, as that would make it clear that lies aren’t being picked up.
I got to the small talk stage with Qahtani and started developing a relationship with him. We even prayed together. I then had to leave Gitmo on another mission that was viewed as a higher priority, so I handed his case back to the agents who had originally handled him.
In my experience, people like Qahtani would only be able to tell us their specific role in a plot: how they were recruited and trained, the people they interacted with. All of which would be useful information to convict Qahtani and give us information on the plot itself, but it was unlikely to give us much information about other plots.
When KSM was later arrested, he told interrogators that Qahtani was “an unsophisticated Bedouin,” and derided him for being unable to learn English phrases or even use e-mail. Al-Qaeda had also tried to put Qahtani through a special training course in the al-Banshiri camp, named after the al-Qaeda military leader and
After I had left, other FBI agents worked on Qahtani and continued to make progress. But military interrogators, backed by political appointees in Washington, wanted to get “juicy” intelligence from Qahtani. They didn’t understand that someone like Qahtani didn’t have it. They argued that the FBI had been unsuccessful and that harsher interrogation techniques were needed. If you don’t know what a detainee should know—and political appointees in Washington certainly didn’t—there is no way to know what is success and what is failure.
While CITF and FBI members were having problems with the military command over interrogations, there was also friction within the two strands of the military—JTF 170, under General Dunlavey, and JTF 160, under General Baccus. The separation of responsibility into interrogations and base organization frustrated nonmilitary personnel at Gitmo, too, with the lack of a coherent command structure making it difficult to produce decisions. General Dunlavey felt that General Baccus was too soft on the detainees, and at one point he even asked the NCIS to investigate him for “consorting with the enemy.” General Baccus was in fact just treating the detainees as required by military rules and regulations. While I was frustrated with both the lack of organization at the base and the way detainees were being handled, I never had any problems with General Dunlavey and always found him to be receptive to suggestions.
The complaints about the difficulty of the two command structures reached senior U.S. military leaders, and on October 9, 2002, General Baccus was relieved of his command, and JTF 160 and 170 merged. The military felt that someone else was needed to run both commands, and on November 8, 2002, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller was placed in charge of the base. A few days later, General Dunlavey left.
General Miller was a strange choice for command of an operation whose focus was interrogating and sorting detainees. His background was in artillery, and he had no interrogation or intelligence experience. He had never even sat in on an interrogation, as he openly admitted. This inexperience showed when he ordered that interrogations be run like military operations: there had to be a fixed start time and end time, and he wanted a fixed number of interrogations to be conducted each day.
CITF tried explaining to him that interrogations don’t work like that. Each detainee is different, knows different things, and has different triggers that will get him to cooperate. Giving fixed end times to interrogations is better for the detainee, as he knows he only needs to hold out for a certain period of time, after which the interrogation will be over.
I learned years later that the move to employ aggressive interrogation techniques at Gitmo started long before Qahtani was alleged to be not cooperating. The November 2008
SERE was established to teach U.S. military personnel how to withstand interrogation techniques considered
