Focus 580; The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against Al Qaeda

Probably before September 11th of 2001 a few Americans gave much thought to the question of interrogation of suspects of terrorism but certainly people after that have thought about it and particularly if not then since this past spring when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke just where do you draw that line between appropriate methods of interrogation and something that would have to be classified as torture. How far do we go in pursuit of information about terrorism. That's a question we'll try to consider in this part of the focus 580 as we talk with Greg Miller. He's a national security correspondent for The Los Angeles Times in the paper's Washington D.C. bureau and he was the only American reporter who had access to American interrogators and document exploitation teams working in Afghanistan and terror getting people who were suspected of being involved in. And he's authored a book coauthored in fact with another man identified in the book as Chris Mackey who was one of the Army's senior interrogators in the

book is out recently it's titled The interrogators inside the secret war against al-Qaida and it's published by Little Brown. It's out now in bookstores if you want take a look at it of course questions are welcome we just ask people to be brief so we can keep the program moving. Get as many different people as possible. But of course questions are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 here in Champaign Urbana. We do also have the toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us. Eight hundred to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Mr. Miller Hello. I David. Thanks for talking with us. Thank you for having me. So how is it that you managed to have this kind of access to the people who are doing this work. Well it is partly by design and partly by accident as that's typical of these sort of situations. Had spent a couple months just arranging for a trip to Afghanistan with the Army to get some access to their document exploitation team so I was just very curious about how these people go about doing what they do. These are the guys who

who. They get big documents dumped on on desks and they're in their tents after a Special Forces raid and things like that and they sift through them the materials looking for information and while I was there. I just kept meeting additional people and and sort of maybe talked my way into getting to talk to some of the interrogators or working at the prison and I'm I'm really struck by you know some of the introductory comments that this this fellow that you got a chance to know and a lot of that is about his stories of his experiences you know this Chris Mackey who talks about the fact that people who were assigned to do this kind of work were trained to do it in a certain context that is the context of the Cold War. And I guess we're trained to do interrogation of Soviet soldiers. People like that that and that the kind of training that they had didn't translate very well to this new situation with a new kind of person

that they're trying to get information out of obviously one issue here is language. That that's that's that. But that may be a less of an issue than. Then tailoring your approach to a different a very different kind of situation because a you know a lot a Soviet line soldier and someone who was involved in al Qaeda. For a variety of reasons these are very different kind of people and the same approach apparently won't work. What exactly is the difference as far as you understand it between doing those interrogations in those of those two different kind of individuals. Well there's that there are numerous points in which they're different. I mean at a very basic level as you say these these interrogators who are with working with Chris and we interviewed and many of them for the book. These were among the first interrogators to arrive in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks and they had been trained in largely in Cold War methodology in anticipating a conflict of conventional armies situations where you would have

a prisoner of war camps with you know thousands of troops perhaps all wearing uniforms all wearing rankings. Exactly. All easily sort of identified by their jobs in whatever their unit was and you and you were just sort of expected to question these people directly and much of them. Emphasis on the training for Army interrogators. In this regard was just knowing where Russian soldiers fit into his unit so you could ask intelligent questions. Well in Afghanistan they were getting a completely different kind of prisoner. These were prisoners who were coming in not only without any uniforms just wearing ordinary Afghans garb or Arab clothing. Often they didn't have any form of identification or would claim to not to know their full name their last name would claim not to know their actual birth date. And so at a very basic level I mean all of the all of the initial sort of analysis that you're trying to do as an Army interrogator was not going to work on these prisoners. And beyond that I would say that you know another

critical difference is that. You would these these prisoners that the United States was taking into custody in Afghanistan many of them were ideologically steeled they were religious fanatics they were motivated by a deep belief in their cause unlike a a and a typical Soviet East German some sort of Eastern Block soldier who might be patriotic and loyal to his country but isn't going to see it as a as a as a Hispanic as a cause with the same vigor as a member of al-Qaida or the Taliban. And I suppose another difference it would be is that for example if you're talking about American soldiers and Soviet soldiers here we have two countries that are signatories to the Geneva Convention so at least they're a Soviet soldier might be afraid of what might happen to him but at least I would think well if they follow the rules I'm not going to be tortured. Well it apparently the people in al Qaeda were actually told

to expect to be tortured. Well they were told. I think you're referring to a chapter in the book this is one of the critical discoveries for the Americans during that part of the war. One day a special forces team I believe brings back a pile of documents and they do not pull it out on the table. And in that pile is an al-Qaida training manual that talks about that which offers instruction on how to resist interrogation. Building from the United States interrogators but from interrogators and other countries as well. And there's a very dark contrast there between what these al Qaeda members are taught to expect from American captors vs. say innate Gyptian interrogator. And in fact they're the manual basically says you can expect not to be mistreated by the Americans in fact they're weak they won't mistreat you this is their vulnerability and in fact if you do your job you should seek to provoke some sort of confrontation in the booth. See if you can draw your interrogator to

commit some act of violence so that you can complain to the Red Cross and store and start some sort of outcry over your treatment. That's the best thing you can do in that same manual it goes into detail about the various methods of torture you might expect to encounter. If you were taken into custody in an Arab nation or another nation that does engage in torture it basically advises you and there are certain cases in which all you can do is pray to Allah. In the United States is signatory to the convention. Also there is an international convention against torture. So there are certain things that we have promised that we would not do that also in addition to violating those international agreements would be violations of United States law. So and at the same time though there seem to be this understanding that there is a certain level of I don't know what you want to call it coercion about aggression. Something is going to be necessary to get people to give you the information that you want so

I guess here in thinking about all the questions that have been raised about what goes on in Guantanamo what's happened in Afghanistan what's happened in Iraq from your talking with the people that you talked to that are charged with doing this kind of interrogation. Were they told very clearly and explicitly what they could and could not do. So in a sense David I mean. The Geneva Conventions are our lengthy legal documents that basically stipulate that you know you are not to be punished prisoners for refusing to cooperate. You're not to gauge and humiliation of prisoners there are a number of provisions. But despite all that language there is a lot of wiggle room there there's a lot of room for interpretation and we've seen it just in recent months. Now there were memos flying around the legal offices at the Pentagon the Justice Department here in Washington trying to coming up with their own interpretations of these documents and what it meant to abide by

them. I know that Chris and the other members of his unit and the interrogators that we write about in Afghanistan when they got to Afghanistan they were playing by very strict rules. They were not using things like sleep deprivation or stress positions as a means of getting information out of prisoners. But over time as they became increasingly frustrated with the their inability to get useful information from these prisoners they start to embrace versions of these methods and they start to really. Try to figure out how they can how they can move in that direction without abandoning the Geneva Convention still sort of convince themselves that they're in compliance with the conventions and yet and yet use harsher methods and we write at length about this I mean this is one of the central themes of the book is that in these prisons there's always this tension between getting the information that could save lives not only those of your soldiers in or in terrorism but those of Americans and citizens of other countries versus

the the here and the Geneva Conventions and doing what's right. And one of the one of the ways they sort of rationalized this in in Afghanistan is to come up with a role where you can question a prisoner for hours hours on end as long as you don't swap out interrogators on him. In other words an interrogation can last as long as the interrogator can hold up. You can't tag team a prisoner and try to keep them up for days on end as a as a means of of extracting information that therefore these interrogators internally they could reach the system. You know I would argue you're you're not treating the prisoner any worse than you are your own soldier. Well I'm sure that they feel as you say that in their pursuit of information there is a lot at stake. Would you say that if you ask them about their methods they would say we went up to the line but no further or would they say well you know maybe occasionally we stepped over that line a little bit. But it we felt

that what we were doing was so important the pursuit of this information was so vital that we could justify Tora selves the fact that we had stepped over the line. All of the interrogators that we write about in this book and part or part of this unit in Afghanistan would point to the former. They would argue that they stepped up to that line but didn't cross it. They never touched prisoners never gauged in physical coercion. But the same time in a sort of tag this onto your last question David to me if you read the army field interrogation manual it spells out for you. You're not to engage in physical torture you're not to punish prisoners physically or things like that but psychological games are fair play. I mean those are those are allowed and so even though these Army interrogators who are you know complying with the Geneva Convention they were still engaging in what some would call coercive behavior because they were

they were playing using ruses that would you know designed to convince these prisoners that if they make that they may their future might be being transferred to it to a country like Egypt or something like that. Well let me ask you one more question. We have a caller We'll get to that of course other people are. Are Welcome. I think it particularly since the Abu Ghraib story broke but perhaps even before that people were raising this question of the use of coercion in interrogation and have suggested something like the the value of the information that you get is inversely proportional to the to the degree of coercion in the interrogation that if you get into what anybody would call torture you get to the point where the individual will tell you whatever it is they think you want to know. And that would cast that you know make you raise a big question about well what are are they telling you something that is true. Are they giving you genuine information or they just want you to stop

whatever it is that you are are doing. Yeah so having said all that if you look at the kind of information that we have gotten for example for the kind of information that the people that you have talked to have turned up about al Qaeda the organization and its activities. Can we really say that we have gotten very much in the way of valuable information. Well I think that they've gotten a great deal of valuable information. There are certain. Pieces of information that they haven't gotten. I mean nobody has been able to point to the U.S. or other countries to the specific location of Osama bin Laden for example. But but as we documented in this book they they gather a great deal of very useful intelligence on all all manner of such subjects ranging from the the bad that Arabs were following as they tried to flee Afghanistan to get to safer ground. The organizations of so-called charities that were conduits

for money to al-Qaida they uncovered plots that did target civilians including a plot involving the U.S. Embassy in Rome and so there were lots of lots of cases where they got very valuable information. I mean you touched on it. A fairly fundamental question sort of. Doesn't this torture work to coercion work in getting information. If you talk to interrogators as you say many of them will will tell you that it only leads to bad information because a prisoner will say anything to ease the pain. As we say in our book or not sort of I'm not sure that that's necessarily the case. For instance right now we're told that the CIA which is holding very senior al-Qaida figures at undisclosed locations is using a method of interrogation called called waterboarding in which prisoners are strapped to a board and submerged to make them believe that there might be drowning means to get them to give up information. The agency went to a lot of trouble to get permission to use this

method of getting special permission from the Justice Department so forth that wouldn't go to that trouble to do that if they didn't consider that an effective method. The the reasons for not going that far however are profound. I mean you can't. The argument against torture is not that it's ineffective it is that it undermines your cause in more fundamental ways. It's that it knocks you off the moral high ground and it says that it it freezed breeds more enemies. I mean if you think the impact of Abu Ghraib I think is going to be felt for a generation and that as many people have said that is those pictures that we saw of the abuse of those prisoners are will function as recruiting posters for al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations for years to come. Our guest in this hour focused 580 is Greg Miller. He's a national security correspondent for The Los Angeles Times in the paper's Washington D.C. bureau and was the only American reporter who got access to U.S. interrogators working in Afghanistan and he has coauthored along with a

man named in the book as Chris Mackey who is a senior interrogator in the military. They're authors together of the book the interrogators inside the secret war against al-Qaida and it's published by Little Brown. We do have a couple of callers here. Let's talk with him starting with someone who is listening this morning in Indiana line for Hello. Actually the question I was going to ask is the one that they would just ask you in which you sort of answered about what sort of information you get after you try to kill somebody to tell you something so I ask a less important question perhaps of how much information can you get from somebody who's been away from the battlefield for two years. That's a that's a very good question. And so I think the answer is that obviously there are current intelligence grows stale very quickly. I mean it's not very long after prisoners captured that his knowledge of current plots that are set in motion the whereabouts of his colleagues

expires because it becomes not useful what the Pentagon has argued about the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and I think that's what the caller's probably referring to because a number of those prisoners have now been in custody for years and we're often asking what value can they be now. The Pentagon argues that certain prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were senior enough in al-Qaida or the Taliban that even now when we get new intelligence on say a self that's uncover new information about a cell somewhere in the world a terrorist cell that those prisoners in Guantanamo might know the identities of those people might know the background. Suppose people might be able to confirm when they came through Afghanistan when they came to the al Qaeda training camps and so they can they can help sort of flesh out some scraps of more current information by providing background. All right let's go to the next caller and I believe that they are in a battle

line number one. Well I would like that makes you question with the United States go on in to Iraq. Did that help the people that had those prisoners in Cuba to get them made in that hot in them. And another thing on the To Do you have enhanced to make it about the prisoner abuse in in in in Iraq and all. So I would like to know where and what countries did those people do it and stick with gators come from that question. These people that I was wondering why. They treated Iraq just like they were.

Don't want any one more than you and I know that you have done some reporting for the paper for your paper the L.A. Times about the whole Abu Ghraib situation. So let's talk about them. Well I mean the caller was asking whether the invasion of Iraq has hardened the opinions of any of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay at some possible to know the possible. It's impossible to even know whether they are aware that the United States invaded Iraq I mean they live in very controlled circumstances and they. And not sure how that would play and I mean the the order Iraq certainly stretched the resources of the ranks of the U.S. interrogators as we say at the beginning of the book. One of the fundamental lessons of of September 11 was that the United States had had become far due to too dependent on sophisticated expensive technical means of intelligence collection satellite signals intercepts that kind of thing and

had lead its human intelligence gathering capabilities really atrophy. So when the war in Afghanistan started there were only a little more than 100 interrogators who spoke Arabic and. And that's. For a country that was about to go to war in Afghanistan and also for a country at war or in a war in Iraq on the horizon. That's a mind boggling number. It's just such a low number. The caller was asking also asking a question about the the people who were doing the interrogation. And I I'm not sure whether she was talking about Afghanistan or going to animal Bay or Iraq but maybe in all three of those cases were are are these people all Americans or are there other people who are involved in the interrogations that are non-Americans. Well at the prison at Bob Graham I mean the US Army interrogators they are all U.S. citizens. Some of them were not born in the United States. Our there are a couple who wore or spoke Arabic as

their native language but most learned Arabic or another language after enlisting in the Army and going off for a year of language training at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey California. But there were members of other. There were others who were also at the prison who were also working at other prisons. The U.S. runs in Iraq and elsewhere. I mean there were. Interrogators and intelligence professionals from from from Britain Germany and other Australia and other countries who are also coming in and out of this facility questioning prisoners. The facility was run by the United States it was a United States Army run prison but in a war like Afghanistan where you have a number of international partners you're here working alongside interrogators from other countries. Many cases are thinking about Ghraib and what has happened there were at least our pursuit of trying to find out

what happened there. The the military on their side seems to continue to say that that what happened there was the result of a small number of people who were out of control. You're bad actors or bad apples there in that that that it didn't go that far up the chain of command. Other people have said they find a hard time believing that that it could simply be those people some of them. Who is who have spoken about what happened there have said they felt that they were just doing what they were told to do. And there have been some some journalists and I guess primarily I'm thinking of Seymour Hersh in the stuff that he wrote for The New Yorker who suggested that what happened at Abu Ghraib can be traced back to essentially to Afghanistan because he makes this argument that you know in Afghanistan we discovered that we had to use some level of coercion to get usable information. It worked there. So we took that kind of technique those techniques and we export them from Afghanistan

to Iraq and there again that raises the issue of where up the chain of command the decision to do that came from and raises that again put calls into question this idea well that these people who were doing it just woke up one day and decided they were going to start to abuse the prisoners. So having said all that and again I know you're having done some reporting on this. What do you think about that. How do you how do you sort all that out and trying to determine who ultimately who is responsible. Well I think there's two pieces that we're looking at here actually I think. You can look at the TV and see clearly an escalation in approved interrogation methods when you look at the the list of approved interrogation methods in place that ought to Graeme. There were methods that were far more aggressive than the interrogators in Afghanistan were allowed to employ including use of dogs to intimidate prisoners putting hoods on them for extended periods as a form of sensory deprivation. And

so that's clearly coming from leadership at the prison at least at the prison and probably higher. The other piece of it is the is what we've all seen in these in these horrible photos of prisoners being stripped naked and stacked up in pyramids and placed on boxes and those sorts of things. I mean seven military police soldiers have been charged in that case. And most of them have said that they felt they were encouraged to do this or directed to do this by military intelligence soldiers who for their part would deny any such thing. We haven't solved that part of it. I mean that's still that's still the fundamental question hovering over the scandal. We don't know for instance very much about the extent to which all of these memos that were circulating at high levels in Washington about interrogation methods. To what extent any of that trickled down to the ability of Abu Ghraib. I will say this as well I mean.

If you read our book you'll you'll get a real feel for the tension that exists in a prison. As we talked about earlier in the program between doing the right thing and trying to get information and how easy it is to sort of slip. And this is at a facility where At most you have a couple hundred prisoners in custody at any point in time. Abu Ghraib was magnitudes larger 6000 7000 prisoners in custody at any point in time a sprawling compound. I mean if you if you were inclined to if you were a sadistic person and wanted to get away with it torturing prisoners it would be easier to do it in a place like ABA gray than it would be in a place like Bob Graham. Another one of these questions at least it seems difficult for me and I think it also it seemed difficult for some of the people who in the Congress and others who are again trying to figure out what happened at Abu Ghraib was that we we do seem to have the two two different groups working in the prison we have people who essentially

were sent there to be guards to to be the equivalent of the guards that we have in correctional institutions here in the United States. And then other people who were. We're involved in trying to collect intelligence right. And the question is and on the one side we have these people who are guards and there was a general who was in charge of this prison but even she seemed to say that she didn't feel a feel that she was in charge or wasn't sure who was in charge. And that that perhaps in instead of the incentive as actually the military corrections people being in charge it was the military intelligence people who were in charge which seemed to be just a slightly more shadowy and more difficult to determine who exactly again where that that chain of command goes. Yeah obviously there was a great deal of confusion about the chain of command at Abu Ghraib the to Quba report cited that as one of the main breakdowns in the leadership at that prison. And one of the main contributing

factors was just a confusing chain of command where it wasn't clear whether the Amyas were running the place. As we can often call military intelligence officers or MP military police now. I mean the fact is that it. At a prison if it's going to function correctly it's going to produce useful intelligence in the war on terrorism. They're going to have to work together to some degree. You can't have the sort of real hard walls dividing these two different groups of soldiers because the military intelligence troops do rely on MP to a large extent not only for sequestering prisoners isolating prisoners who they want to be kept away from the rest of the detainees in the cages or something like that and moving them back and forth from the cages up to the booth where the interrogations take place. But military intelligence troops if they're doing their job are also constantly quizzing the employees about the prisoners behavior in the booth or in the in the cells trying to learn something about them. I mean if you get a new group of prisoners in the

the NPF will often be asked to pay careful attention to see who is who seems most frightened because that might be a candidate for a quick interrogation a person might be a prisoner might be easy to break. Who is the one that the other prisoners are sort of turning to for leadership and sort of deferring to because that might be the most important prisoner in that group. There has to be an ever relationship there. And and this is another issue that we really haven't completely resolved in the context of Abu Ghraib is how how significant a factor was it that that the that there were some so much confusion over who was in charge of that place. In Afghanistan was that was that confusion present. I think it was less so partly because partly because as I said a minute ago it's a smaller facility. I think the provost marshal which is not a military intelligence job runs the prison. But there was there were these are small units of interrogators in a fairly small number of employees and

and they they met with each other two or three times a day. They knew each other because they worked at such close quarters. So they were all sort of part of the same team it was not quite like ABA grade where you had the sprawling place and you had one group of employees who would come in for the night shift to the interrogators might never even work with or deal with. We have some callers here let's talk with them. Line for Hello. I'm really having problems with your logic about water torture is effective in that they struggle to to get it approved. I think that sadism is simply addictive and people who are torturing someone get addicted to that power and I think Abu Ghraib is the perfect example of that. Because according to a Newsweek article at least half of those identified in those photographs were petty criminals. They were in no way going to give us any type of military intelligence. My other question is about the value of the information or the reason why they were peddling such difficulty getting information in

Afghanistan and alternative media. They've said that because the United States Army was paying for these prisoners. Quite often they get people that the warlords couldn't sell to someone else and many and perhaps some really top value quote unquote people got out but a lot of the prisoners that the United States finally gat were people who simply were caught in the crossfire people couldn't be ransom by their families or really had no information in the pie. Other Party simply wanted the reward and another problem that's really coming to mind. I'm not sure how this is going to work is that in Afghanistan people speak Farsi and they speak pasta in a lot of other tribal languages. And I would suspect under torture. Arabic as a second language with would just not work because I think the one under torture is under such stress. I don't think they're relating in their second language at all. So I'm I think just from your discussion there's a

lot of reasons why they couldn't get information and I don't know if it was the quality of the torture but Or or is it the quantity of the torture that it's simply been the quality of the interrogation. Well the callers raise a number of good points there. There was a significant problem with with the not with innocent prisoners prisoners of no intelligence value being brought into the prison because there was a reward system that prompted the warlords were collecting large known numbers the amount of money just for you know for by the head almost sort of turning over prisoners and then the Army took a long time to figure out how to sort these people and it still hasn't quite figured it out I mean we're continuing to see small batches of prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay here and there. And and it's increasingly clear that there were people who were held there who didn't need to be held there. On the caller's first point about the addictive nature of torture that's also valid and that's a that's an argument that I mean that's something that interrogators who go through the

interrogation course at Fort Huachuca Arizona for the Army and elsewhere. I mean this is a point that is repeatedly made to them by their instructors that another among their many arguments against torture and coercion and and I ticked off a few a few minutes ago. But another one is that you become dependent on that as a method if you don't if you if you if you engage in it then you then you lose the skills that you learn that enable you to get information out of prisoners through non-coercive means. And in our book documents cases where we're prisoners broke mainly because they realized that they were not going to be mistreated in American custody. And it gave them pause about what side they were on. It's sort of it snapped their wiring in a way to cause them to reconsider their allegiance to their cause because they expected to be mistreated when they learn that they warrant it to realign their views.

We hope the caller will forgive me for wanting to. Because the lines are full and we're moving into our last 15 minutes. Our guest Greg Miller is national security correspondent for The Los Angeles Times and the paper's Washington D.C. bureau. He's the co-author of the book the interrogators inside the secret war against al Qaeda and the publisher of the book is Little Brown. Next we'll go to caller in Champaign County and its line 1. Heidi I'm also somewhat skeptical. It seems to me that you're looking at one portion of the whole interrogation system and. We have the example last week Thursday when our in the new latest Army investigators said it wasn't systematic et cetera et cetera and didn't know about unmuzzled dogs being loud and didn't acknowledge that there were anything such as ghost prisoners which I think you're a colleague William Arkin that the L.A. Times was pretty instrumental in in getting that leak. So you're just looking at one. You know what the old thing about the

elephant you're looking at the trunk. I think there's another portion of the animal that needs examination and I think that the high value quote unquote prisoners probably don't see even Guantanamo. They are in there somewhere else and we have nobody reporting back about what's going on there. That's right. I mean the caller is right that there are other high value prisoners that we don't know. We simply don't know even where they're being held. They're in CIA custody and as they put it in undisclosed location there's lots of speculation about where that might be and some people think that Diego Garcia this island in the Indian Ocean would be a logical place. But. But you know clearly no reporters are allowed there not even the Red Cross is allowed to to see these facilities where these senior al-Qaida prisoners are being detained. We're talking about prisoners like Khalid Shaikh Muhammad and and so there you know there are some real questions about what is or what is happening there. And the

caller's other point about the evidence of there being a system systematic problems. I would agree with him and I think that the the report that came out earlier this week or late last week was so it was widely sort of viewed as a completely inadequate. I mean at the New York Times editorial a following day you know a whitewash on aboud grave and I know many people who agree with that assessment. I think it's clear that there are. Problems that throughout the system and not just great because there were two prisoners who died in Afghanistan in prison in December of 2002 have yet to hear an explanation as to why or how that happened. The interrogation unit that I write about in this book was it had left Bob Graham in August of that year. So they're on able to provide answers to what happened several months later. We've had cases of prisoners in CIA custody who've died under extreme interrogation methods. We have a CIA contract employee who's now

charged with that crime. So I mean there are. The question is whether this is in some ways reflects the top down leadership from from the higher ups in the Pentagon or even in the Bush administration. And you can debate that. But it's clear that the signals from the administration consistently were that you know these are prisoners who aren't entitled to the Geneva Conventions aren't entitled to prisoner of war status and that that does send a message it's undeniable. Well those are two issues covered. One that you're looking at only one one. You know the army in Afghanistan there are probably other safe houses in Afghanistan itself. And the other thing about Abu Grab is that it wasn't simple intimidation. It was a calculated humiliation with the intent in some cases to try to get informers. To try to find out some of the parts of this don't fit together. I mean I think the caller's making a valid point but some of the those prisoners who are pictured in those horrible pictures of the abuse of prisoners were never interrogated even some of

them even according to all the documents that have come to light as in connection with the Goober report and others were never taken in for interrogation. They were there and some appear to have been this if it was a form of punishment that the NPC meted out for it to a group of prisoners who had raped a boy in the prison yard. So it's not clear that you know and at least in that case that that was that they were put up to this by by military intelligence troops because military intelligence troops weren't even dealing with these prisoners. I mean I I mean I'm not claiming to have any answers on the culpability of military intelligence and you know Abu Ghraib or at least not final answers I think there's there's a lot we don't know about that yet a lot that needs to be investigated and learned. Well the memo about softening up and getting a wising on Abu Grab etc. etc. I mean but it does give a sign that there was some direction to this and that it wasn't just some kind of. We do know that. Some of the perpetrators of this stuff were people who had been hired out of prison systems here who

had cases against them. Yeah I would raise another question I mean it's an it's a. Disturbing perhaps even more disturbing to think that perhaps some of these methods were imported from from U.S. prisons. I mean there is some indication that in in the in the sworn statements of some of these employees were involved in the case talking about having done this at their old jobs. Let's go to another caller here this would be Urbana and lie number three. Hello. It seems to me there's a basic problem with intelligence gathering in that it's fairly easy for a guerrilla group for resistance people to negate the value of the intelligence by simply precessing the stories that they can feed that are false. We've repeatedly bombed wedding parties. Now some more we were getting false intelligence.

Yeah I mean that yeah I mean that's always that's always a huge issue. And and I mean there are ways that interrogators try to confirm the information they're getting are multiple ways I mean when they when they question a prisoner the first thing they do is try to get a chronology of this prisoner story and then have that person go through a backwards and forwards starting at the beginning starting at the middle starting at the end to see if he can keep the if he slips up at any point you match his account with what you're hearing from other prisoners. Ideally you also are testing their information against different categories of intelligence information you're picking up over intercepts of satellite telephone conversations or or of images from Predator surveillance aircraft things like that obviously in Afghanistan as the caller points out there were often cases when there they appeared to be bombing the wrong location the wrong target at the wrong time. Well that is how and Iraq too. Yeah and a lot of that comes back to

faulty intelligence this is this is far from a perfect science. How much of this may be due to our hiring contractors. Hiring a contract interrogators Yes that's it. You know I don't know I mean in Afghanistan they simply didn't exist. There was no such thing. There were there were contract linguists an earlier caller mentioned that in Afghanistan there are other languages that they don't speak Arabic they speak posh to Farsi and they're in short supply the Arabic was those languages are even shorter supply so the United States Army relied extensively on on contract linguists to do the translation in the booth in those cases. But there were no contract interrogators in Afghanistan at least according to all of the people that I've interviewed. It was a I think that that first came about in Guantanamo Bay. I think that's where we first saw contract interrogators. Then the then you had obviously a number of them working at the facility in Abu Ghraib.

And I mean the the Pentagon asserts that these are people who are trained in and subject to the same rules as as an actual active duty service member. And in fact many of them are are former active duty interrogators. But it's still. It's still a dissolute of being one of them was the South African who was. Yeah it's still a disturbing practice and it's you know I think that that's that the whole practice under reconsideration. Does that mean we really need a good professional intelligence or. I mean there's no question that we need professional intelligence and such in such short supply right now I mean the members of the unit that we write about in Afghanistan. Many of them more or their late teens or early 20s. And these are people who are being going into the booth interrogating in some cases mid-level higher level al-Qaida figures who just have more life

experience. I mean who. Forget about whether they're there resistance methods their methods of resisting interrogation are effective they they just have been around longer I mean and that poses an obstacle. I mean it's clear that the United States needs to continue to build up its human intelligence core I mean even at the CIA right now as we heard CIA director former director George Tenet testifying on the Capitol Hill earlier this year he thinks they're five years away from having the for clandestine service that is overseas spying service that this country needs to fight the war on terrorism it's a it's a huge problem. We have fortunately maybe. Three four minutes left. I'm interested in thinking about some of the things you said earlier about the fact that the differences for example between doing an interrogation of a regular army soldier and somebody who would was in al-Qaida and the fact that people at al Qaeda they're not wearing military uniforms or

insignia and you could I'm sure imagine be in a situation where you have a number of vigils who pretty much all look the same they're all dressed the same you ask them who they are why they are in Afghanistan where they come from what they do they've all got a kind of an innocuous answer that woods in it would indicate that they were picked up by mistake they had nothing to do with al Qaeda they weren't combatants and that your job as an interrogator is just even to at the very at the get go decide who of those people of whom that actually is true. Right. And then the other people that. Might be in possession of great information and then you would go from there and and do what you had to do. How do you even in the beginning start to make that assessment. To separate the people who are just. Citizen farmers individuals people who are innocent and those people who actually are combatants. Well it's a painstaking process that I mean there were a number of factors at work and particularly in Afghanistan when Arabs were captured and taken into custody in

Afghanistan they were they were just simply were not released. They were. They would end up going on to Guantanamo Bay because that be it would just they were just too much of a reluctance among them senior military officials in Afghanistan to let somebody go and then run the risk of somehow down the road learning you for at least the the 20th hijacker or something. When they when Afghans were taken into custody that it was a tougher thing because you were to write I mean you could be dealing with a farmer you could be dealing with a senior al Qaeda sympathizer Taliban operative that kind of thing. Ideally you would like to get a good deal of information on the circumstances of that person's capture. Where was this what kind of safe house was this what was found at that compound how many weapons were there are P.G. there were there. Well I mean how many how many rifles and that kind of thing. And then and it's just from there it's a painstaking process of

requiring the prisoner to give you his sort of life story and seeing if it adds up. And that's there's no easy way to do that but to dive in and continue to cast. His claims over and over with other information you get and a running back and forth through that story in the see if he slips. I know that you've also done some reporting on the 9/11 Commission and that they at least as far as Iraq is concerned they stayed away from saying too much about Iraq because essentially they said that that was not our charge but is there. But they certainly have talked a lot about the way intelligence is gathered in the way American intelligence is structured. If you look at the recommended. Sions of the of the commission is there anything there that to you really stands out as being something important and also something that really everybody in Washington D.C. is is kind of getting behind in rallying around as an idea for something that really should be done to improve intelligence. Well you know there are some of these recommendations have been kicked around for a number of years and

and I have to admit that I'm not I'm not necessarily convinced yet that they're creating a new director of national intelligence which is their principal recommendation is going to solve these problems. I mean there are lots of smart people who believe it well but there are some pretty smart people who believe it won't and that creating a new yet another layer of bureaucratic layer between the president and his principal intelligence gathering and operational agency the CIA might be a step in the wrong direction. But but I did cover this this 9/11 Commission for our paper and last Friday was was having a conversation with the chairman of the commission Governor Thomas Kean and he said. Does that I mean he said that there were a couple things that really dismayed him during the hearings that they held throughout this year. One of those moments was when I refer to a moment when George Tenet said that they were it would take five years

before the United States had the clandestine service it needs in the war on terror. And and Kean and others believe that there simply we just simply don't have five years that they're going to have to find a way to move faster. And I think that's obvious. Well I want to thank you very much for giving us your time and today we certainly appreciate it. Thank you very much. Our guest Greg Miller he is a national security correspondent for The Los Angeles Times and the paper's Washington D.C. bureau and is the co-author of the book the interrogators inside the secret war against al-Qaida and it is published by Little Brown.