'Very Clever Guys'
In
a speech on Dec. 11, CIA director George J. Tenet said that interrogations
overseas have yielded significant returns recently. He calculated that worldwide
efforts to capture or kill terrorists had eliminated about one-third of the
al Qaeda leadership. "Almost half of our successes against senior al Qaeda
members has come in recent months," he said.
Many of these successes have come as a result of information gained
during interrogations. The capture of al Qaeda leaders Ramzi Binalshibh in
Pakistan, Omar al-Faruq in Indonesia, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in Kuwait and
Muhammad al Darbi in Yemen were all partly the result of information gained
during interrogations, according to U.S. intelligence and national security
officials. All four remain under CIA control.
Time, rather than technique, has produced the most helpful information,
several national security and intelligence officials said. Using its global
computer database, the CIA is able to quickly check leads from captives in
one country with information divulged by captives in another.
"We know so much more about them now than we did a year ago -- the personalities,
how the networks are established, what they think are important targets,
how they think we will react," said retired Army general Wayne Downing, the
Bush administration's deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism
until he resigned in June.
"The interrogations of Abu Zubaida drove me nuts at times," Downing said.
"He and some of the others are very clever guys. At times I felt we were
in a classic counter-interrogation class: They were telling us what they
think we already knew. Then, what they thought we wanted to know. As they
did that, they fabricated and weaved in threads that went nowhere. But, even
with these ploys, we still get valuable information and they are off the
street, unable to plot and coordinate future attacks."
In contrast to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, where military
lawyers, news reporters and the Red Cross received occasional access to monitor
prisoner conditions and treatment, the CIA's overseas interrogation facilities
are off-limits to outsiders, and often even to other government agencies.
In addition to Bagram and Diego Garcia, the CIA has other secret detention
centers overseas, and often uses the facilities of foreign intelligence services.
Free from the scrutiny of military lawyers steeped in the international
laws of war, the CIA and its intelligence service allies have the leeway
to exert physically and psychologically aggressive techniques, said national
security officials and U.S. and European intelligence officers.
Although no direct evidence of mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody
has come to light, the prisoners are denied access to lawyers or organizations,
such as the Red Cross, that could independently assess their treatment. Even
their names are secret.
This month, the U.S. military announced that it had begun a criminal
investigation into the handling of two prisoners who died in U.S. custody
at the Bagram base. A base spokesman said autopsies found one of the detainees
died of a pulmonary embolism, the other of a heart attack.
Al Qaeda suspects are seldom taken without force, and some suspects have
been wounded during their capture. After apprehending suspects, U.S. take-down
teams -- a mix of military special forces, FBI agents, CIA case officers
and local allies -- aim to disorient and intimidate them on the way to detention
facilities.
According to Americans with direct knowledge and others who have witnessed
the treatment, captives are often "softened up" by MPs and U.S. Army Special
Forces troops who beat them up and confine them in tiny rooms. The alleged
terrorists are commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful
positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep. The tone of intimidation
and fear is the beginning, they said, of a process of piercing a prisoner's
resistance.
The take-down teams often "package" prisoners for transport, fitting them
with hoods and gags, and binding them to stretchers with duct tape.
Bush administration appointees and career national security officials
acknowledged that, as one of them put it, "our guys may kick them around
a little bit in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath." Another said
U.S. personnel are scrupulous in providing medical care to captives, adding
in a deadpan voice, that "pain control [in wounded patients] is a very subjective
thing."
'We're Not Aware'
The CIA's participation in the interrogation of rendered terrorist suspects varies from country to country. © 2002 The Washington Post Company
"In some cases [involving interrogations in Saudi Arabia], we're able to
observe through one-way mirrors the live investigations," said a senior U.S.
official involved in Middle East security issues. "In others, we usually
get summaries. We will feed questions to their investigators. They're still
very much in control."
The official added: "We're not aware of any torture or even physical abuse."
Tenet acknowledged the Saudis' role in his Dec. 11 speech. "The Saudis
are proving increasingly important support to our counterterrorism efforts
-- from making arrests to sharing debriefing results," he said.
But Saudi Arabia is also said to withhold information that might lead the
U.S. government to conclusions or policies that the Saudi royal family fears.
U.S. teams, for that reason, have sometimes sent Saudi nationals to Egypt
instead.
Jordan is a favored country for renditions, several U.S. officials said.
The Jordanians are considered "highly professional" interrogators, which
some officials said meant that they do not use torture. But the State Department's
2001 human rights report criticized Jordan and its General Intelligence Directorate
for arbitrary and unlawful detentions and abuse.
"The most frequently alleged methods of torture include sleep deprivation,
beatings on the soles of the feet, prolonged suspension with ropes in contorted
positions and extended solitary confinement," the 2001 report noted. Jordan
also is known to use prisoners' family members to induce suspects to talk.
Another significant destination for rendered suspects is Morocco, whose general
intelligence service has sharply stepped up cooperation with the United States.
Morocco has a documented history of torture, as well as longstanding ties
to the CIA..
The State Department's human rights report says Moroccan law "prohibits torture,
and the government claims that the use of torture has been discontinued;
however, some members of the security forces still tortured or otherwise
abused detainees."
In at least one case, U.S. operatives led the capture and transfer of
an al Qaeda suspect to Syria, which for years has been near the top of U.S.
lists of human rights violators and sponsors of terrorism. The German government
strongly protested the move. The suspect, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, holds joint
German and Syrian citizenship. It could not be learned how much of Zammar's
interrogation record Syria has provided the CIA.
The Bush administration maintains a legal distance from any mistreatment
that occurs overseas, officials said, by denying that torture is the intended
result of its rendition policy. American teams, officials said, do no more
than assist in the transfer of suspects who are wanted on criminal charges
by friendly countries. But five officials acknowledged, as one of them put
it, "that sometimes a friendly country can be invited to 'want' someone we
grab." Then, other officials said, the foreign government will charge him
with a crime of some sort.
One official who has had direct involvement in renditions said he knew they
were likely to be tortured. "I . . . do it with my eyes open," he said.
According to present and former officials with firsthand knowledge,
the CIA's authoritative Directorate of Operations instructions, drafted in
cooperation with the general counsel, tells case officers in the field that
they may not engage in, provide advice about or encourage the use of torture
by cooperating intelligence services from other countries.
"Based largely on the Central American human rights experience," said Fred
Hitz, former CIA inspector general, "we don't do torture, and we can't countenance
torture in terms of we can't know of it." But if a country offers information
gleaned from interrogations, "we can use the fruits of it."
Bush administration officials said the CIA, in practice, is using a
narrow definition of what counts as "knowing" that a suspect has been tortured.
"If we're not there in the room, who is to say?" said one official conversant
with recent reports of renditions.
The Clinton administration pioneered the use of extraordinary rendition
after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But it
also pressed allied intelligence services to respect lawful boundaries in
interrogations.
After years of fruitless talks in Egypt, President Bill Clinton cut
off funding and cooperation with the directorate of Egypt's general intelligence
service, whose torture of suspects has been a perennial theme in State Department
human rights reports.
"You can be sure," one Bush administration official said, "that we are not spending a lot of time on that now."
Staff writers Bob Woodward, Susan Schmidt and Douglas Farah, and correspondent Peter Finn in Berlin, contributed to this report.