Report: Gitmo Interrogations Shaky

The combination of inexperienced interrogators and linguists, military bureaucracy and disagreements among language contractors, has hindered the effort of authorities to gather information from al Qaeda and Taliban fighters detained at a U.S. Navy base in Cuba, according to a published report.

With many of its best interrogators and Middle Eastern linguists dispatched to Afghanistan, the military has been forced to rely on some underqualified officers who are overmatched by captives trained in methods of evasion, according to a Washington Post report citing officials familiar with the government's mission.

In a few cases, young questioners in uniform were conducting some of their first interrogations, people familiar with the interrogations told the Post.
"Some of the interrogators are very inexperienced, nervous," said one linguist stationed at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, where 299 detainees are being questioned. "They twist their pen 2,000 times a minute. The detainee is in full control. He's chained up, but he's the one having fun."

Making matters worse is a lack of familiarity with Middle Eastern terrorism among officers of the military's Miami-based Southern Command, which at times has impeded the flow of key intelligence to Guantanamo Bay interrogators, sources told the Post. That has occasionally limited questioners' ability to pursue lines of inquiry with the detainees, they said.

Additionally, two companies that have supplied linguists for some of the interrogations have squabbled bitterly with each other, the Post was told by knowledgeable officials in the public and private sectors.

These assessments by military officers and private contractors are the first glimpse of obstacles facing interrogators at Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-Ray, the hastily built military jail where the Pentagon is holding some of its fiercest enemy captives.

Officials are trying to shake loose critical information to thwart future acts of terror, and perhaps build criminal cases against the fighters. It is difficult to determine the extent to which these linguistic and bureaucratic problems have hindered the intelligence-gathering effort, but they suggest that the United States is woefully short of some of the skills needed in the war on terror.

Col. Ron Williams, spokesman for the Southern Command, told the Post that problems with interpreters and interrogators are temporary, and denied that any of them have been unable to handle the captives.

"I don't know of cases where the detainee was in charge," Williams said. "He may not give up information. It's a mano a mano thing." Rookie interrogators are getting better, he said, adding that "it takes a while to be competent in any field."

Williams denied that Southern Command has in any way stalled the movement of intelligence data to interrogators.

"In today's world, moving intelligence information is almost instantaneous," he told the Post. "They build databases over in Afghanistan, and it's shared by us, by Washington. Everybody knows the same things."

But he acknowledged that interrogators sometimes don't receive answers to intelligence queries they send up the chain if they are deemed irrelevant.

Williams also conceded that Guantanamo Bay interpreters, along with linguists throughout the U.S. intelligence community, lack familiarity with the varying regional dialects of Arabic and other languages used by detainees, because military linguistic programs have deemphasized them for a decade.

Even critics of the Guantanamo Bay interrogations said that most of the American personnel there are motivated and competent, and that some are top quality. U.S. officials say the interrogations have yielded a number of successes -- some made public and some kept secret -- that likely have prevented terrorist attacks.

Last week, U.S. prosecutors who charged so-called American Taliban John Walker Lindh with conspiracy to commit murder noted in court papers that at least 20 of the detainees have given statements to interrogators.

Camp X-Ray was assembled in January in a field at the U.S. naval base. The prisoners, flown by military transport jets from Afghanistan, are housed in chain-link pens and taken one by one to "interrogation booths" in two plywood huts.

Human rights groups have questioned the detainees' treatment, arguing that they should be deemed prisoners of war. But the government maintains that the captives are treated humanely, with access to food and medical care.
Officials said many of the captives are likely to be held indefinitely, and a more permanent prison is under construction.

For decades, U.S. intelligence officials have increasingly relied on electronic eavesdropping and satellite imagery, and interrogation skills have slowly withered, experts told the Post. While many of the 30 or so interrogators and an equal number of interpreters in Cuba are highly skilled, others lack the street smarts or strength of personality to manage an emotional confrontation, several sources also told the Post.

"A few of the interrogators just didn't have what it takes," William Tierney, a former Army intelligence officer who worked as a contract Arabic linguist at Camp for six weeks before losing his job in a dispute with superiors, told the Post. "You have to be in control in an interrogation, and that just isn't their personality. . . . Some younger interrogators addressed the detainees like they were friends at the malt shop."

The Post article cited some specific mistakes made by interrogators and linguists.

One interrogator persisted in asking Taliban detainees for details about their wives, despite admonitions from others that Afghan men are likely to view such queries as insulting and would refuse to cooperate.

One source who worked at Camp X-Ray said it was a mistake to assign women as interrogators; because of their religious and cultural beliefs, some detainees refuse to communicate with women on personal subjects. "You put a woman in front of him, he'll say, 'Go to hell,' " the source told the Post.

Among the deficient interpreters Guantanamo Bay are some whose regular intelligence jobs involve interpreting taped foreign telephone conversations day after day, sources said. A number of them find it hard to engage in the sometimes emotionally charged interrogations, sources told the Post.

One interpreter repeatedly interrupted an interrogator to remind him that he had previously posed the same questions earlier in that session -- not realizing that it is a common tactic for interrogators to double back for more detail or to test the captive's truthfulness.

In what some people called a another cultural misstep, one of the linguistic contractors, assigned an Iranian American man who speaks Farsi to interpret the replies of Afghan detainees who speak Dari. While the two languages are similar, they are different enough that the choice helped spark angry debate on the interrogation team, sources said.

"There's an animosity of culture between Iranians and many Afghans," one source told the Post. "Afghans aren't going to cooperate."