Exposed: Al Qaeda's Rest Camp in Gitmo

May 26, 2002
Tony Allen-Mills, Washington

THE interrogation of Taliban and Al-Qaeda detainees at the American military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has turned into a politically correct farce because of Washington’s fear of the human rights lobby, according to a unique insider’s account.

Overreacting to the initial outcry at the apparently tough conditions in the Camp X-Ray detention centre — with its images of cages, chains and kneeling prisoners, and rumours of truth drugs and sensory deprivation — the Pentagon has set up a kid-glove regime.

Suspected terrorists are allowed to treat their captors with derision — lying, chanting the Koran in unison, mocking and threatening guards and throwing water at them. Americans are under orders not to react roughly. They even transport prisoners in golf carts.

Guantanamo has been nicknamed “Eggshell City” by interrogators because of the political sensitivities of dealing with 384 captives from more than 30 countries, among them at least seven British citizens. Washington has become known as “Hand-Wringers’ Central” because the Pentagon worries constantly about international reactions.

In the first breach of the military secrecy shrouding the interrogation process, William Tierney, an Arabic speaker who spent six weeks as an interpreter at Camp X-Ray, revealed the combination of inexperienced interrogators and stifling political correctness that has hampered efforts to extract intelligence about Al-Qaeda.

The Guantanamo interrogation team is led by veteran CIA, FBI and military intelligence agents. But the sheer volume of work has forced the Pentagon to recruit outside linguists with little wartime experience, Tierney said.

One interrogator is an army reservist whose previous experience was questioning passengers at San Francisco airport. Another, a young woman, was a good linguist but was treated with contempt by the inmates.

American authorities took so many measures to avoid criticism that a marine guard was removed because prisoners complained he was “too rough”. A visiting US general reassured a group of prisoners: “We don’t want anyone to say we’re mistreating you.”

After prisoners complained that leg irons cut and bruised them if they walked any distance, officers arranged for them to be wheeled to and from their interrogations on stretcher-like trolleys. But a television crew spotted a prostrate prisoner — one of the Britons — being wheeled back to his cell and suggested he might have suffered a beating. The trolleys were promptly replaced with motorised golf carts.

Tierney, a Gulf war veteran, decided to speak out after losing his job in a long-running dispute with the Pentagon.

He claimed standard interrogation techniques were making little progress against militants trained in countermeasures.

He was involved in one “good cop, bad cop” routine to win a Saudi detainee’s trust. The lead interrogator feigned a fit of temper and stormed out of the room, leaving Tierney to sympathise with the prisoner and try to ingratiate himself by talking about life in Riyadh. “It didn’t work, of course,” he said.

Other sources supported Tierney’s account of an intelligence effort hamstrung by bureaucratic breakdowns and political pressures. “The experience on interrogations has been miserable, a disaster from the very beginning,” said a congressional intelligence source.

Lieutenant-Colonel Dennis Fink, a spokesman for the interrogation team, acknowledged yesterday that interrogating hardline Islamic militants was “a very long, slow process”. He insisted, however, that “everything is going fine”.

The seventh Briton to be incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay was identified yesterday as Tarek Dergoul, 24, a former care worker from east London. He was transferred to the camp with 31 other prisoners at the start of the month after being captured in Afghanistan.

The son of a baker from Morocco, Dergoul was born in Britain and grew up in Bethnal Green, east London. He travelled to Pakistan last summer “to learn Arabic” and then moved on to Afghanistan.

His mother Rahana said yesterday: “I still don’t understand what has happened. I love my son, but I was horrified when I learnt that he had gone to Afghanistan.”
The Sunday Times (UK)
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