Posts Tagged ‘Al Qaeda’

The 9/11 Decade, The Big Issue and al Jazeera
Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

Four planes. Nineteen hijackers. Three thousand dead. Ten years on, what are we to make of 9/11? One-off atrocity? Or historical watershed? Act of terrorism – or The Day the World Changed?

What about the reaction to 9/11? Afghanistan. Bali. Iraq. Madrid. London. Hundreds of thousands more dead. Summarising 9/11 and its aftermath, one is reminded of the Peanuts cartoon in which the hapless Charlie Brown faces the exam question: ‘Explain World War II (use both sides of the page, if necessary)’.

Eight months ago, following 4 years’ research, I thought I had pretty much knocked this subject on the head. I’d interviewed hundreds of policymakers, been to Iraq, come to a few conclusions; delivered a manuscript on time (well, sort of). The book was out. It was over.

Then came the call. Al Jazeera wanted a documentary series. A big one.  I was summoned to London and introduced to a deceptively quiet, smartly-suited chap who turned out to be the Head of Programmes. We drank coffee. Then I went home. The next day some personnel-type in Qatar, whose name I still can’t pronounce, emailed me a contract to produce a three hour series. Someone was in a hurry.

For non-TV people, a catch-me-up: a three hour documentary series takes a long time to make. Probably the best part of a year. Al Jazeera wanted this one in four months. Clearly, it was going to be tight. But then, Al Jazeera is a news organisation, with experience of turning around breaking stories in a matter of minutes. The company probably knew what it was doing. I signed the contract, moved up to London and started research.

Then came The Discussion.

It happened in a cafe near Al Jazeera’s Knightsbridge offices, shortly after the death of Osama bin Laden. The Head of Programmes, for once, was in casual mode: wearing a short-sleeved shirt. He grabbed me by the arm and ushered me outside. The ensuing exchange went almost exactly like this:

Head of Programmes: (thoughtfully): Dominic, you know what we’re missing in this series?

Me: No. What are we missing?

HoP: Al Qaeda.

Me (with some trepidation): Aha…

HoP: I think we need them. You’ll have to arrange interviews.

Me (guarded now): Won’t al Qaeda be hard to find at the moment, after the death of bin Laden and all?

HoP: We’ve got three months till transmission, though, haven’t we?

I should perhaps add here. I had only had one interaction with al Qaeda up to this point. It was in Baghdad in 2008 and was so nerve-jangling that even my Iraqi fixer shortly afterwards changed his line of work.

How we eventually got al Qaeda to talk to us – and what, exactly, they said – is perhaps a subject for another time. But we did get some interviews. Six, in fact.

We used them sparsely, slotted amongst other individuals that we thought might help to put a human face to events since that fateful September day. Bin Laden’s next door neighbour in Jalalabad (Osama never attended parties, apparently); the CIA officers who captured al Qaeda logistics chief, Abu Zubaydah, in Pakistan in 2002 (Zubaydah had accidentally been shot three times: ‘we had to keep him alive’ recalled one ‘so we could interrogate him’.)

The interviews came slowly at first, then in a glut. The Danish artist responsible for the bomb/turban cartoon whose publication led to rioting and two hundred deaths in 2006; the guards at the al Askari shrine in Samarra, Iraq – whose bombing the same year kick-started the civil war. The al Jazeera journalist incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay for 6 years while US intelligence tried to persuade him to spy for them against the news organisation.

Others were less well-known. The Afghan boatman who ferried bin Laden away from Tora Bora in 2001. The American soldier who plucked a fatally wounded Iraqi child from the back of a minivan his colleagues had just attacked – and ran him to safety. The Palestinian-born journalist who took bin Laden to one side in 1996 and suggested that single-handedly declaring war on the United States was perhaps not such a wise idea.

So now the series is finished. What emerges? What are we to make of the 9/11 Decade? For me, the overriding impressions: chaos. Destruction. And, above all, casualties. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Jordan. Spain, London. And, of course, in New York and Washington.

It’s an old cliché that those who do not learn their history are condemned to repeat it. Hopefully we have learned something from the last ten, bloody, years. Let’s hope the next ten are a bit better.

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Interview with US Army Interrogator #1
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: London
Date: TBC
Interviewee: US Army Sergeant / Interrogation Instructor

This interrogator, a young sergeant in the US Army, worked in Afghanistan at the start of the War on Terror. Here he talks about his training and describes some of his experiences at Kandahar and Bagram. This guy is almost the exact opposite of what the general public might expect of an NCO involved in the interrogation business: highly intelligent, clearly well-trained – and with very strong ethical views regarding what is, and is not, acceptable in interrogation.

Download: Download Interview (PDF)

Is interrogation a dark art?

It’s a public perception. I don’t think that it’s a dark art. It was never, all the time that we trained and all the preparation that we had, it was never – we thought that we were part of something really special and cool and out in the open. And because our training manuals were never classified and stuff, we never felt that we were part of something weird.

Not secret-secret, then?

There was a bit of elitism about it. They kept telling you that you were special to be selected for the corps. We then found out that there’s nothing that special about it at all… So, when you’re very young you buy into that.

Ever come across ‘truth drugs’ in your training?

I think that they’ve changed a bit about the instruction. I remember it being much more categoric when I was going through the training as a private. Versus what I remember teaching as a staff sergeant. The training that I got when I was very young, sort of 1990, 17 years old, was – the theme was that we went through the different classes of drugs, we went through what was their official pharmacological classification and we talked about what the effects were on people, but it was always in the context of either: a) This is what our enemies do; or b) They don’t work. This is what was told us, and it was repeated over and over again.

I think that as novice interrogators, educated in films – as we were – people thought that this would be a panacea, you know? I think a lot of us actually thought that we would learn how to give shots. There were rumours in basic training that they would teach us to give sodium pentothal shots by using oranges – you practised giving shots of the truth serum on oranges. That was the first I ever learned of it. Then we had this half-day class, maybe a three hour block of instruction.

Later when I went to instruct, the course had been revised in 1993, the course had been changed and there was a much more in-depth piece about it with practical examples, and they talked more about the American experience using truth serum.

Where?

It was never in a military context, it was always talked about as police investigations or the CIA. It was not talked about in terms of ‘does the army do this?’ And there were actual cases cited. Again the bias was always that it was not something that was applicable, not something that would work. It was taught to us as a kind of awareness thing.

What about sensory deprivation? What were you taught about that?

I have experienced it because I went to train at the Evasion and Escape School at Fort Polk, Louisiana. So I learned about it there. The first time I learned about it was as an instructor because it was a part of a block that was added. I was not taught that as a private but when I went back to teach as a sergeant, they talked about it. They talked about evolution of it – sensory deprivation, like isolation, darkness. Then they went into these funky things like water stasis chambers. It was stuff that we were talking about. Although there was a video, a movie about it that had the look of one of those 1960s nuclear bomb stories. But again it was never in the context of ‘we use it’. It was awareness. It was in the context of ‘you’re an army interrogator and you have 10 approaches. Use them.’

The film you saw featured somebody in a helmet?

No, not like that. It looked like it was a documentary not prepared by the army, it was too high quality for the army. It looked like somebody was in a Jacuzzi with a lid. There was a square-looking thing, much bigger than a bathtub and there were people looking down, because they were up high, on walkways that were around it.

They were looking down on the person in the tank?

It was up high and there was this tank surrounded by these walkways that must have been at their chest level. These platforms with staircases leading to it, and these people with clipboards.

Spooky or funny?

I didn’t find it comedic or spooky. It looked like something that had been done at a university. A research project.

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Interview with British Interrogator #1
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Context: Research for Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control
Location: London
Date: 19th July 2005
Interviewee: British Intelligence Officer

A senior British ex-military officer, who spent years working on intelligence issues and was trained to interrogate by the Royal Intelligence Corps in the early 1960s. This officer explains the training he received, and some of the techniques used to interrogate.

He also discusses violence and interrogation, sensory deprivation and the difference between resistance to interrogation training and interrogation training itself. His comments on the use of hoods by the British Army in Iraq are particularly noteworthy. All names in this interview – including the units he served with, and where – have been removed.

Download: Download Interview (PDF)

How did you come to be taught to interrogate?

It was 1963, April, May–time. I’d been sent to [the Royal Intelligence Corps’ HQ at] Maresfield. All I was told was: ‘You will go on an interrogation course’.

You didn’t choose this?

No. I was summoned to an office in GCHQ and off we went. And I found out on arrival that I was the only candidate on the course – for 2 weeks. And I was told it was the standard course. The only difference was that I was the only guy there. So I had 100% attention from the instructors and from, very interestingly, the ‘stoolie’, the guy who was the subject for the interrogation. Who was a member of … the Glosters [regiment] and he had been captured – like several hundred of the battalion had been – in Korea, so his experiences were absolutely brilliant for use by the Maresfield centre. Now, at that stage, it was completely new to me. I knew other people who had done the [Russian] interpreter course who had been sent on the interrogation course, but it wasn’t a standard sequence, and none of my colleagues on the Russian interpreter course actually did an interrogation course. So I didn’t know at that stage why I’d been sent.

So I went back to Cheltenham and I found out after a couple of days that I had passed the course. I was summoned into my boss’ office and told I was going to be sent to **** **** for a 6 month posting, and the purpose of my posting would not be told to me. I should take nothing military, nothing associated with the military. On arrival in *** *** I would be given a briefing and I would discover what I would do. I assumed of course my interrogation course was something to do with this. I toddled off to **** ****… where I used my skills. I used my Russian interpreter skills, and also my newly-acquired interrogation skills…

Can you talk about the interrogation course?

Yes, I think this is now – I think it was probably graded ‘restricted’ in 1963 and that’s now 40 years ago. I would particularly like to counter a statement I read in the press a couple of weeks ago when they were talking about the abuse in Iraq that techniques of deprivation and hooding were taught in the army interrogation centre in Chicksands – ie, it’s part of the syllabus. I can say that in 1963, when the whole world was far less sensitive and nervous about physical violence of all sorts, the techniques of interrogation as taught at the then-interrogation centre were entirely what you would call respectable, in other words they covered the methods, the organisation, the personal organisation, the way you run an interrogation session, how to work in a team, what to look for in the subject, of an interrogation. And basically, you’ll be surprised to know – how to behave like a British gentleman and still be a successful interrogator.

For the rest of my life under various circumstances, I’ve been able to apply those various techniques without fear or favour. I would have thought that if we’d had brutality as part of our SOPs in the centre where we’re taught all this in 1963, on a one-person course, I would have gained some inkling of those. I didn’t.

But of course I did when I did a counter-interrogation course two years later in Aden.

The [Aden] Emergency involved people, there were several cases of British forces being caught, tortured and decapitated. I remember a horrid incident at Sana where the heads of the British military that had been captured were cut off and impaled on pikes and displayed to the public on pikes. You were dealing with – as today in Iraq – with medieval attitudes and nobody on the other side adhered to the Geneva Conventions. So officers and NCOs – I was by then the patrol officer of a company of *** [regiment] who were on duty there – officers and NCOs were sent on a counter-interrogation course by a visiting team who briefed us on the techniques used by nations that did not sign up to the Geneva Conventions.

This was an army team?

An army team. And this was by now almost exactly three years later. About February-March 1966. There we were told all about hooding and brutality.

They hadn’t taught you about sensory deprivation and how to apply it to prisoners in your interrogation course?

No. I think this was clear to me: what we were being taught, as I think we knew, were methods which our SAS recruits went through. All regiments supply recruits for the SAS and some pass and some fail. And it is accepted that the SAS selection course, which is – I’m glad to say, very tough indeed – does include the volunteers being put through the techniques, the sorts of techniques that we were taught about at Aden. So within the British forces there is first-hand experience by going on SAS courses, where resistance to interrogation – your resistance, your psychological abilities – is tested.

But the technique that all of us in Aden listened to agape was a method that had been developed allegedly very recently, which was to suspend the prisoner in a tank of liquid gelatine which was at 94.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Naked. With your arms and legs tied and your head encased in a sort of diver’s helmet, through which you were breathing. You were hung into this tank, so all you could hear was the [breathing noise] of your own breath. And in theory you would go bonkers. Because you didn’t know which way was up, you had no sense.

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