Lets see…..the court room was closed so that a “top secret” video which has been viewed on YT 215,000 times could be shown. Black out goggles and sound blocking earmuffs must be worn for a trip of a few hundred yards in a windowless van. Sounds like the old joke about military intelligence being an oxymoron. Seriously though if the goggles and earmuffs thing has it’s origin in Mitchell and Jessen’s quack interrogation techniques the military should drop it like a bad habit.

Your first hand reports are very valuable. I do not think a 16 year old would be trusted with many military secrets. But of course Al Qaeda is a wacky terrorist group.

All have testified that they asked Khadr questions about al-Qaeda’s organizational structure, command structure and safehouses and training camps. Some have said that they received information of some specificity from Khadr about those locations.

These interrogators did not know the location of the organizational structure, command structure and safehouses and training camps of AQ? It was Saudi Arabia. Of course the Taliban affiliate of AQ had their own fortresses. And Rumsfeld said there were many fortesses of Al Qaeda Solitude. With tanks. But I cannot find the Meet The Press Video. You can bet that it was Tim Russert’s finest interview.

Russert: This is a fortress. This is a very much a complex, multi-tiered, bedrooms and offices on the top, as you can see, secret exits on the side and on the bottom, cut deep to avoid thermal detection so when our planes fly to try to determine if any human beings are in there, it’s built so deeply down and embedded in the mountain and the rock it’s hard to detect. And over here, valleys guarded, as you can see, by some Taliban soldiers. A ventilation system to allow people to breathe and to carry on. An arms and ammunition depot. And you can see here the exits leading into it and the entrances large enough to drive trucks and cars and even tanks. And it’s own hydroelectric power to help keep lights on, even computer systems and telephone systems. It’s a very sophisticated operation.

Rumsfeld: Oh, you bet. This is serious business. And there’s not one of those. There are many of those. And they have been used very effectively. And I might add, Afghanistan is not the only country that has gone underground. Any number of countries have gone underground.

The goggles and earmuffs — in place of hooding, which is banned — were the stuff of incarceration techniques at Long Kesh and used by the British. But way before that, such sensory deprivation techniques were fine-tuned by the Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, having derived this and other torture techniques from studying Russian, Chinese, Korean, Indo-Chinese, French (as used in Algeria), and British techniques, and possibly some ones picked up from their Latin American allies. Some of the techniques came from the brutal back alleys behind U.S. police stations, or used on Native Americans, and Black Americans years before.

But the continual repetition of sensory deprivation as a key component of the torture/interrogation/detention program was the special addition of the Americans and British to the torture pantheon. Its close cousin, solitary confinement and isolation, was a European invention. The water torture and other physical techniques have a wide-flung and ancient derivation.

Mitchell-Jessen are relative newcomers. Moreover, it appears to me unlikely that they alone were responsible for the construction of the EIT torture program as it finally developed and is described by Bradbury in May 2005. My guess is that the ultimate codifications were made by the Office of Technical Services in the CIA, which is in charge of “new technologies.”

And torture is, if nothing else, a technology.

And I hope that everyone takes my last statement in the comment above with the deep irony in which it was made.

“By using this as a strategy to avoid talking to us… I want the Omar I saw yesterday…. That’s not true. People do care about you…” Said to the boy in the cell… as the female interrogator tells him, “Put your shirt back on.”

“Do you want to go back to Canada. Well, there’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t want to stay in Cuba with you. Is there anything I can do about that?”

Well, Mr. and Ms. Interrogator. You tortured a child. That should qualify you to come back to America and get a TV talk show on Fox. Congratulations, if there were a moral order in this world, you’d gotten your one way ticket to Hell.

That should qualify you to come back to America and get a column on the Washington Post’s op-ed page.

Fixed it for you.

An altogether too common absence or void.

Spencer

Can you expand a bit on what you mean by the repatriation stuff?

I wonder whether Khadr gave them disinformation? That is, I wonder if he told them a consistent, but false, story, and once they learned it was false they decided against repatriation?

…no interrogator here — so far — has testified is that information from Khadr resulted in any actionable intelligence. That catch-all term of art for information that contributes to an operation has simply not arisen during these first three interrogations.

Thanks for focusing on this “not arisen” term.

If it never gets used, it could play in favor of “making points” about his torture and the resulting value of information under such exposure.

It is criminal and tragic that any of these prisoners, most of whom never did anything “actionable” wrt/terrorism have been endlessly interrogated, tortured and held without charges all these years. What other kind of ending than a bad one in relation to “repatriation” would this sort of policy expect?

Thank you Spencer for your efforts on behalf of these people and the justice we so long to see.

This post puts them on notice for what did “not arise.”

Marcy — Interrogator #11, who testimony today now establishes was a DIA agent, testified yesterday that Khadr understood that his cooperation with her in Oct/Nov 02 could help him be repatriated to Canada. She further testified that there was some discussion during that same timeframe about sending him back to Canada. That discussion appears to be very inchoate and at a low level — and obviously he ultimately stayed in GTMO — and we have very very little detail beyond what I just wrote.

There has been no testimony from any of the five interrogators who have testified thus far that Khadr told anyone any false information. There have been discussions about the discrepancies between what he told US interrogators; Canadian interrogators; and what he swore to in his affidavit. But to the contrary, all interrogators thus far have testified to being impressed with his willingness to cooperate and provide detailed information.

Here’s another question. Originally, they said that only 3 of Khadr’s interrogators would testify. But we’ve got more than that now. Do you know who the defense didn’t expect to testify that has? And do you have a sense of why they weren’t going to testify?

Who said only three would testify? The prosecution? I don’t get the sense that defense was unprepared for any interrogator testimony — all the cross-examination is pretty detailed. But we have pretty good access to defense counsel so I can ask.

As you say, it’s important not to conflate two behaviors attributed to Khadr: being cooperative and providing actionable intelligence. The two may be wholly unrelated.

In the absence of definitive testimony accompanied by convincing physical or other evidence, one should assume there is no connection between what a fifteen year-old knew seven or eight years ago and his wish to cooperate with adult authority figures who can make him bleed.

Spencer

You are doing such a great job. Thank you

Hey Marcy, Barry Coburn, Khadr’s chief defense counsel, is giving a presser in 15-20 min. I will get you an answer and write a whole post on it. Because what the fuck. Court’s adjourned till Monday at 8 and there’s not enough downtime before the press corps goes eating/drinking to nap or something. Not afraid to be service-y.

Hey Marcy: Not afraid to be servicey.

Mr. A, thanks for your reporting.

I don’t think Omar Khadr would have been of much use for intelligence purposes because they already had his willing and talkative older brother, Abdurahman. The older brother was captured at about 19, whereas Omar was 15. The brother, who was best friends with a bin Laden son, was actively involved in AQ training camps while Omar only visited them (even according to the charges). While the father and the two older brothers, Abdurahman and Abdullah, who is wanted by the US on weapon selling charges, were absent much of the time, Omar was kept by his mother to help with the house and younger children, until the summer he was 15. His father decided it was time for a change for Omar and within two months he was in Bagram prison having survived a fire fight with the US military and a massive bombing attack.

The older brother, Abdurahman, was fed up by the time he was captured. He was old enough to know he preferred the night life of Toronto to praying and being shot at in Afghanistan. When the Northern Alliance turned him over he was more than willing to tell the Americans everything, and more. Unlike Omar, he was not reluctant to tell on his family. He says he regrets he even made them look worse than they were, to impress the interrogators.

Mysteriously, Abdurahman was soon released, telling his story to the media and receiving tv and movie offers, although just participating in the training camps has kept others at Guantanamo for years. He claims the CIA used him as a spy, that his job at Guantanamo was to get information out of other prisoners.

Abdurahman is known for his contradictory stories, but, still, it’s hard to see how Omar could add a whole lot, other than the identities of the other men in the fight who were all dead.

(Info mostly from Wikipedia and Michele Shephard’s book, Guantanamo’s Child.)

Michelle told me a lot about Abdulrahman last night. He seems like a weird muchacho.