Gitmo, Terrorism and Dunkin' Donuts
Monday's NY Times had a long investigative article that undermines the Bush Administration's inflated claims about the value of inmates at Gitmo.
In interviews, dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda. They said only a relative handful -- some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen -- were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization's inner workings.
While some Guantánamo intelligence has aided terrorism investigations, none of of it has enabled intelligence or law-enforcement services to foil imminent attacks, the officials said. Compared with the higher-profile Qaeda operatives held elsewhere by the C.I.A., the Guantánamo detainees have provided only a trickle of intelligence with current value, the officials said. Because nearly all of that intelligence is classified, most of the officials would discuss it only on the condition of anonymity.
''When you have the overall mosaic of all the intelligence picked up all over the world, Guantánamo provided a very small piece of that mosaic,'' said a senior American official who has reviewed the intelligence in detail. ''It's been helpful and valuable in certain areas. Was it the mother lode of intelligence? No.''
But let's suppose the sources for the article are wrong. Let's suppose that Dick Cheney was right when he described the Guantanamo inmates as "the worst of a very bad lot."
Then the article is equally damning, if not more, because the inmates were not treated as "the worst of a very bad lot." The interrogators originally sent to Guantanamo to get intelligence from them were hardly qualified to do their jobs:
Senior military officials now readily acknowledge that many members of the intelligence team initially sent to Guantánamo were poorly prepared to sort through the captives. During the first half of 2002, they said, almost none of the Army interrogators had any substantial background in terrorism, Al Qaeda or other relevant subjects.
One Army intelligence reservist had previously been managing a Dunkin' Donuts. Many younger Army interrogators had never questioned a real prisoner before. As in Afghanistan, interrogators at Guantánamo asked the same basic questions again and again, many former detainees recalled.
''They asked me, 'Do you know the Taliban? Do you know Mullah Muhammad Omar? Do you know bin Laden?' '' said Jan Muhammad, 37, a farmer from Helmand Province who said he had been forcibly conscripted into the Taliban. ''I said, 'I have never seen bin Laden; I have not even seen bin Laden's car driving past.' ''
Interpreters were in such short supply that the Army turned to private contractors, most of whom knew nothing about intelligence. The Southern Command, responsible for military operations in Latin America, had no particular experience with Al Qaeda or Afghanistan, either. Nonetheless, its intelligence analysts often rewrote reports on the detainees as they saw fit, former interrogators complained.
One of the few American intelligence sectors to show any early interest in the detainees was an obscure defense intelligence unit that traced weapons around the world, one interrogator said. As a result, interrogators were required to question detainees about the serial numbers on rifles they had used and the markings on their bullets. ''Of course, they had no idea,'' the interrogator said.
So sticking to the official record, either the Bush administration has been lying about the intelligence value of the Gitmo inmates, or it woefully mismanaged their intelligence value. Which one is it?
I prefer a third, unofficial option: the administration didn't ultimately care whether the Gitmo inmates had intelligence value or not. Iraq was their primary concern.
12:47:21 AM 
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