An Infidel in Guantanamo
January 2003
The first Saturday I was “on Island,” as they say there, Major Leso took me to the intel headquarters building for a 9 a.m. meeting with the commanding general of JTF Guantanamo, Major General Geoffrey D. Miller. He was now the bigwig at Gitmo, the head honcho in charge of the military prison and anything else in Cuba that came with an American flag attached. It was clear who was in charge, there was never any debate about who had veto authority on General Miller’s post. Unlike the previous two-star general, Miller was in charge of everything in a typical Army hierarchal style. Second in command was a one-star brigadier general who was the deputy commander at Gitmo. This mirrored both the typical Army hierarchal command in structure and process. In other words, when Miller spoke, we never, ever heard the one-star general disagree or second-guess him.
The room was packed with the key leaders of the command, and the psychologist—that would be me from now on—was required to sit right behind the general. Major Leso introduced me to General Miller while he and I stood up to talk.
“Welcome, Colonel,” he said, with a nod toward me. “You’ll have big shoes to fill as the new biscuit.”
That caught me off guard and I’m sure everyone saw the puzzled look on my face. Outside of a cheerleader I once knew back in college, I had never been called “biscuit” before, let alone by a male, two-star general artillery officer. Major Leso saw the confusion on my face and leaned over toward me.
“I’ll explain later, sir,” he whispered. “Trust me, it’s actually a good thing, Colonel.”
The meeting lasted exactly one hour, and after years in the halls of Walter Reed, it was a pleasure to be among infantry and operational officers again. This appealed to the soldier side of me. General Miller was the kind of commander you wanted to be around—a soldier’s soldier, all business and no bullshit. A minute with him was worth two hours with any PhD or MD. He was focused, and could provide more information with eye contact alone than any medical-officer general I had ever worked for in the past. But at the same time, he had a keen awareness of the value of what the psychologist brought to the fight. In a hospital, we were only called when a patient had committed suicide, a staff physician had a meltdown, or one of our patients was seen on post with no pants or talking to his shoe. Not so under General Miller. He knew that an Army psychologist could contribute much more than that. His meeting was organized, and I saw that everyone serving under him had already learned a key lesson: one better not stutter when questioned by General Miller. Fulfilling objectives within his timeline and bringing your “A game” to his meeting were the only things accepted by him. General Miller made it clear that he expected you to put your feet on the line but not to cross it. Spending all your time on interoffice politics, as was common in some Army medical centers, was not an option. I loved it.
Later on in the meeting it became clear that a special mission was about to occur in February 2003 and I was going to play a key role. Our guys in Afghanistan had captured three teenage terrorists and I was chosen to fly to Afghanistan with a special unit to secure them and return them to Gitmo. This mission was to jump off in less than a month. “Colonel James, you got flight lead on a plane for the juveniles,” Miller told me. He made it clear that he did not want them in the general population, and that I needed to plan how to interrogate these “juvenile enemy combatants” (JECs) posthaste.
“Got it, sir,” I replied, quickly and with conviction. “I’ll have the plan by next Saturday.”
“No, I need it by close of business on Monday.”
“Roger, General,” I said without hesitation. “I’m tracking on it, sir. Consider it done.”
During the meeting, General Miller had discussed how I would be replacing Major Leso, and that it would be my job to teach the interrogators how to get intel without yelling, slapping, sleep deprivation, humiliation, or food deprivation. There was no comment or discussion during the meeting, of course, but as I sat there looking out at the other officers in the room, I knew I had been given a tall order and that not everyone was going to welcome my guidance. After all, the yelling, slapping, and other abuse that I was supposed to help them avoid was actually allowed by the Army Field Manual on intelligence collection. I knew some of the men and women in this room would at some point ask me, “Hey, the manual says it’s okay, so why not?”
When the meeting was finished, Leso explained to me that “biscuit” was an affectionate nickname taken from the initials for Behavioral Science and Consultation Team (BSCT). It was the special behavioral science unit formed when Major Leso was brought over by the previous general to work with the interrogators. Anytime someone needed me or Major Leso, they said, “Where’s the biscuit?” I was the senior psychologist, so I was known as Biscuit 1.
“Okay, I get it,” I told Leso. “I’ve been called worse.”
Everything about General Miller screamed “action.” You felt like you should always be on the move around him, doing something productive, getting things done, not standing around like a slack-ass. So with that in mind, I didn’t waste any time getting to my main task at Gitmo—improving the way we interrogated prisoners. I had already had a long talk with General Miller and I knew that our views on this issue were not too far apart. We had a much better understanding than I would have had with the previous commander. Though General Miller looked at interrogations through the eyes of a soldier, relying largely on the Army Field Manual to determine what was and wasn’t acceptable, I was able to explain to him how an Army psychologist sees it.
“Here’s the problem with the field manual,” I told him. “There’s a difference between what’s legal for a soldier to do under the field manual and what a doctor can do under his ethics code. Now, I’m a soldier, sir, and that guides everything I do here, but the ethics code for a psychologist says we can do no harm to a human being.”
“So you can’t do both,” he said, tracking with me.
“I can’t, but the thing is, there isn’t really a reason to do it that way anyway,” I explained. “What’s in the field manual isn’t necessarily the best way, and what I can bring to the table, sir, is my knowledge of psychology and how to best get people to talk. There are better ways, more effective ways, to get this intel.”
The conversation went on for some time, but luckily for me I wasn’t starting with a superior officer who thought the only way to get intelligence was to beat it out of the prisoner. General Miller knew from the outset that we needed to reform the interrogation process and that was the main reason I was on his island. He was looking for me to get to it and make it happen.
Major Leso showed me around Gitmo over the next few days, starting with Camp Delta, the permanent 612-unit detention center that replaced the temporary facilities of Camp X-Ray, used when the detainees first started arriving in 2002. Leso explained to me how Camp Delta was broken down into four areas with different levels of security. Newly arriving detainees were first sent to Camp 3, the maximum-security camp, then to Camp 2 if they cooperated with the guards. After more cooperation they might be moved to Camp 1. Prisoners who were considered to be a minimum security risk and who cooperated with interrogators were moved to Camp 4.
Moving from one camp to another had its advantages, and Camp 4 was the choice accommodation, with showers and four communal living rooms for ten detainees each. In Camp 4, each detainee had a bed and a locker for personal items. It even had small common recreational areas for playing board games and team sports. The detainees at Camp 4 also shared communal meals, and wore white uniforms instead of the orange worn by other detainees.
The next two weeks went by fast. I became occupied with the plan for the JECs and Leso was already out-processing. During this time period, I met up with an old friend, Dr. Mike Gelles, who was in Gitmo for an official visit. Mike and I had been interns together many years ago at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, D.C. He had long since left Navy active duty, but he had worked his way up to be chief psychologist for the Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) Behavioral Science Unit. Mike was not happy with the abuses at Gitmo and filed a formal complaint through Navy channels. It pissed off a ton of people. He and I agreed to work together to turn this ship around and teach interrogators how to interview with respect, decency, and humanity. I trusted Mike as a person and as a forensic psychologist. Likewise he trusted me, and so we charted a course for the future of the BSCT at Gitmo.
As I took on more of Major Leso’s duties by the day, he began to detach himself from the Joint Task Force, which is the normal process for a departing soldier. Over the course of the next two weeks, he and I had many talks and I helped him work through and process the emotions, ethics, and morality of what he had been through. Through hard work, consultation, and the relationships he established, Major Leso was able to help right a sinking ship out in the middle of the Caribbean. I reminded him that it was through his efforts and determination to do the right thing that he was able to help craft a command policy to outlaw the harsh and abusive tactics. Rather than focusing on the net negative, I emphasized to Major Leso the importance of what he had done. He had convinced the chain of command that there was another way to get a prisoner to talk instead of employing harsh tactics. I felt it vital that he could hear this and grasp this emotionally. Otherwise, he would return to Walter Reed a broken man and a shell of a human being. Unknown to him at the time, he had paved the road for me, and the interrogators were ready for more guidance on how a psychologist could help them accomplish their mission and get detainees to talk without abuse.
He had a huge going-away party on a Friday night put on by the Intelligence Control Element staff, and I was pleased to see that he actually enjoyed himself. He was immensely relieved to be leaving Gitmo, and I was glad he could go back to the States and get himself back together. I drove him to the ferry Saturday morning, on his way to the airport. When we said our good-byes, he repeated his earlier warning to me.
“Sir, you gotta be careful down here,” he said. “Don’t step in anything.”
I promised him I’d watch out. As I watched him leave, I was both heartened to see that his mood had improved somewhat and dismayed that such a short time at Gitmo could do that to a man. I wondered if he would ever bounce back to the bright-eyed officer I knew at Walter Reed. John did not know it at that time, nor did I, but in the coming years many horrible things would be written about him without any data to back up the charges. I would not see Major Leso nor have any contact with him again for four months. For his own well-being he just needed to fade away, but his time in Cuba would continue haunting him.
“Larry, you got flight lead. You’re the tip of the bayonet for the juveniles.” Those words from Major General Miller rang in my head over and over. “Flight lead” meant that I was responsible for putting together a team to handle the three juvenile enemy combatants who would arrive in February 2003 at Guantanamo Bay, and the building of a specially designed facility for them to live in.
How am I supposed to work with teenagers in this place?
There was not a computer lit search I could do, nor were there any other PhD colleagues I could consult with on how to manage teenage terrorists. There was no one in the country with any experience on this.
You’re it. You gotta figure out something.
I didn’t have the time it would take to develop the usual PhD planning committee. There was no time. The plane was leaving for Afghanistan in a matter of three weeks and the general demanded a plan by yesterday.
Don’t panic, Larry. You spent a few years growing up in a New Orleans housing project where you became good friends with some hardcore teenage sociopaths. Surely that’s got to be some help here.
Plus, I decided to draw upon my experience working with male juvenile patients I had encountered earlier in my career. Some of these boys were genuine in their desire to hurt others—they liked it and felt no remorse. From these experiences I would build the components of the rehabilitative plan. I realized early in my thinking that I would need a child psychologist to provide the needed psychotherapy, and a pediatrician to serve as the medical director.
With every passing day I ramped up my involvement in planning for the arrival of the three juveniles. My recommendation was to house these teenagers separately from the adult prison population. Major General Miller agreed. Next, I coordinated with a reservist who in civilian life was the warden of an Indiana state prison. Command Sergeant Johnson was the senior-ranking enlisted adviser for the military police brigade in Gitmo. He brought with him nearly thirty years of experience in the prison field. His task was the physical reconstruction and rehabilitation of a house separate and away from the main prison facility, much like a halfway house, and I was charged with building a team for the academic, medical, psychological, and intelligence collection efforts for the juveniles. My guidance to everyone was that we could never house these teenagers in the general adult prison population—not for a minute and no matter how inconvenient it was to keep them separate. We busied ourselves with the plan to retrofit an already existing house that was isolated from the rest of the camp. We named it Camp Iguana, after the two- to three-foot-long lizards that are as common in Gitmo as squirrels are back home, to differentiate it from the rest of the prison known as Camp Delta.
We needed to devise a plan for the correctional custody, medical care, and psychological treatment of these young people, and we had to determine just how one can safely and morally interrogate teenage terrorists. And they were indeed terrorists, according to the intel we had on them. Their age didn’t make them any less so. Fortunately, there was a Navy child psychologist assigned to the hospital, Dr. Tim Dugan, who was an old friend of mine. I valued his judgment and trusted him, so he would be ideal for this task. Tim’s skills would be especially useful because our intel indicated that two of the three boys had been brutally raped, were clinically depressed, and suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These prisoners were in bad shape.
Soon I boarded a small military C-12 prop plane out of GTMO and headed to a classified military location on the East Coast of the United States. The next morning we loaded up a huge C-17 with a medical team, military police, and a team of Air Force Special Forces shooters. These guys were a special reserve unit with two purposes in life: 1. Kill anyone who messes with our plane, and 2. Kill anyone who messes with the runway while the plane is on it. Those guys were focused.
The Army MPs were on board for the custody and control of the prisoners. They had more damn guns and weapons than any SWAT team I had ever seen in any city in America. We took off and were in the air for twenty hours, which required us to refuel in midair two or three times. In the darkness, an Air Force KC-135 refueling tanker showed up out of the clouds for the rendezvous with our C-17. From the cockpit I watched the steady hands of the pilots and crew connect these two huge aircraft and complete this dangerous task. We landed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and remained on the runway for a short while, with the Special Forces shooters on high alert, watching for any sign of trouble. Then the back ramp in the tail of the plane was lowered and a truck approached with prisoners, both adults and the teens I was there for. We separated the teenagers out from the other prisoners. I immediately felt sympathy for the young prisoners, though I knew they were far from innocent. They looked not only terrified but also disheveled and lost. The adult detainees looked and smelled repulsive. They smelled like shit or a foul stench of body odor—it was hard to tell the difference. Their hair was uncut, raggedy and long, with long, unkempt beards. The tailgate was closed and we headed back to Cuba.
Twenty or so hours later we landed and I had the teenagers separated according to plan, away from the general adult population. They were in fact never seen by any of the adult prisoners. The command gave me two male interpreters who were fluent in the specific language spoken in the villages where these three boys were raised. The two interpreters had master’s degrees in education, were soft-spoken, and had in fact been teachers in Afghanistan for many years prior to emigrating to the United States. Their age was also an important factor. Both were in their fifties, which would engender some respect. They were kind, well educated, and dedicated to helping these three fragile boys. They were exceptional as surrogate fathers, teachers, and protectors.
Back in Cuba, after we had fully processed the incoming prisoners, I was able to get a really good look at the teenagers. I couldn’t help but ask myself how these pitiful-looking boys could be a threat to any U.S. soldier. Did they just wake up one day and say, “I want to be a terrorist” or “I want to kill soldiers”? I couldn’t connect the dots in my head, so I started to simply ask each of them the questions “how?” and “why?”
The answers that came back through the interpreters were shocking. In the United States we do not use what are known as conscripts. In today’s military, you have to volunteer to fight. And even in the past in our country, we drafted people legally and usually not at gunpoint, at least in modern times. But in Afghanistan, young boys are literally dragged from their homes by the local tribal gang lord in a conscription of sorts. Parents watch helplessly in horror, knowing that to intervene would only end in death for the parent, child, or perhaps both. The young teenage boy would usually be brutally raped on the first night of captivity and afterwards made to perform female domestic chores like cooking, washing dishes, and performing sex favors for the gang lord or visiting male guests. It would not be unusual for a thirteen-year-old boy in Afghanistan, after he was forcibly taken at gunpoint, to wear girls’ clothes and live in a sex harem.
Bizarre, I thought. I thought these guys were all supposed to be religious fanatics. How do they do that to young boys?
All three boys were fragile psychologically, and my job was to ensure that they were never harmed in any way whatsoever. Also, it was a requirement by Major General Miller that in order for any interrogations to be conducted, I had to be present the entire time. We found out that the youngest of the three, who was approximately twelve years of age, had been kidnapped by his province’s Taliban gang lord and forced into sex slavery. He was required to wear Afghani girls’ clothes, to walk and talk like a girl, and to do domestic chores such as cooking and washing dishes as well as bathing male guests and performing sexual duties as required. The next oldest was approximately fourteen and also had been kidnapped by another Taliban gang lord at gunpoint, literally dragged from his home while his parents watched helplessly, and forced to be the houseboy at the home of the gang lord. On the first night of his captivity, he was held down by three members of this Taliban gang and brutally raped all night. He and the youngest boy would have nightmares and other symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. The homosexual rape seemed incongruous with what I knew of strict Islamic culture, but sadly, our intelligence from Afghanistan indicated that the boys’ experience was not that unusual. It was hard for my mind to process how terrible it must have been. The third teenage terrorist was physically healthy and unharmed sexually, but he was academically the most illiterate of the group.
I asked Hassan, one of the older Afghani translators, to explain more about the prevalence of homosexual rape in the Afghani culture.
“It just doesn’t jibe with what I thought about Muslim culture,” I said. “When does it stop? Can the boys ever stop being sex slaves?”
“Sir, the custom is that once the boy grows a beard he is no longer seen as attractive to his captors,” Hassan told me.
I was being introduced to a new type of enemy we were encountering in this new war, the global war on terrorism. In Afghanistan at least 10 to 20 percent of the soldiers were teenagers. The boys were either forced into the service of a gang lord or were indoctrinated at a younger age at a mosque by radical fundamentalist religious training. Perhaps in a manner similar to the brainwashing of the Ku Klux Klan in our country, radical religious teachers taught these young boys that anyone who was not Muslim was an infidel, and that it was his duty to kill all infidels. Just like the indoctrination of the KKK at the height of its membership in the United States, or the Nazi Party in Germany, the youth members were taught to hate with such ferocity and certainty that it became second nature. For the KKK, all nonwhites and non-Christians were the enemy, and in the group’s interpretation, the ethnic, racial, and religious cleansing was justified by scripture. Similarly, the Muslim fundamentalists believed that all nonbelievers had to be put to death.
What developed was a rigid, almost delusional mind-set, so that by the time the boy became a young adult all who believed differently were evil. To complicate the scenario, the rest of the Afghani culture could be cold and brutal. Killing, torture, rape, the opium drug trade, bombmaking, and weapons trafficking were normal for many teenage boys in Afghanistan. After their initial experience with the gangs, these young boys often graduated into trafficking weapons and on to actual war fighting.
One of the boys talked about being raped and seemed to have reframed his experience. He believed that his rape was a “rite of passage” and really had nothing to do with him. The older men had a physical need and he was there to meet that need, he explained. It was no more than that, not sexual, and most certainly not homosexual. The men who raped him were not gay, he said, and they had not committed a homosexual act on him. When the interpreters related the boy’s way of looking at his rape, I couldn’t really understand.
“Hassan, how can he think that? I mean, he’s not homosexual because he was raped by other men, but how can he defend them and say they didn’t commit a homosexual act?”
I could tell that Hassan was struggling to explain a part of his culture that was very difficult for outsiders to understand. Without trying to defend the boys’ attackers, he patiently explained to me that Afghanis and Americans look at the situation from very different perspectives. In a fundamentalist Muslim culture, homosexuality is strictly forbidden and can result in death, he said, but sex with another man or boy was not seen as homosexual if it was done simply to satisfy a physical need and there was no female around to use instead. In the mountains of Afghanistan, particularly with the tribal gangs that often lived in remote locations and were on the run, looking for women or keeping a woman around camp was not practical. The boys served that role instead.
“But if a man has the opportunity to be with a woman and chooses to be with a boy or a man, that is different,” Hassan explained. “That is not the same thing.”
I was reminded of a similar philosophy that can be found in prisons worldwide. Sex with a same-sex cellmate doesn’t necessarily make you gay, many prisoners will tell you; it’s just the only option. It was a lesson in how one’s cultural perspective can shift how different people view the same set of facts. But at the same time, my Afghani friend acknowledged that the boys were also just denying some of the terror they had experienced. Hassan explained to me that in their country, good fortune was rare, and putting firm boundaries or compartmentalizing their bad emotional experiences was a requirement to survive. “Colonel, there are no Oprah talk shows in my country. In the U.S. you got a talk show for everything, and if an American can’t see it on TV you even have people calling in to strangers on radio shows talking about their personal problems. That’s not how it is in my country,” he said. “First, you don’t talk about your problems with strangers in public, and second, why talk about it or think about it at all? It will not make your problems go away. Sir, this is why it seems like these kids have just put this away in the back of their minds.”
Once we learned a little about their pasts, we decided that it was important to get the juveniles healthy before we did anything else. Gathering any intelligence from them would have to wait. Like many children from rural Afghanistan, these three boys could not recall the last time or if ever they had been seen by a doctor. So we had our pediatrician conduct thorough physical examinations and follow them for their medical care.
After getting their health on track, we then had to focus on interrogating them. I realized that talking to these kids was going to be different from the way we talked to most prisoners. How can you interrogate teenagers who can’t read and write and who have little exposure to anyone or anything outside their immediate family and village? Most Americans have never even talked to a person who cannot even spell “cat” or add one plus one, but none of the boys could read or write, not even in a rudimentary way. None of the three had ever ridden an escalator, an elevator, or a plane, and they had never even heard the phrase “video game.” They were the most fragile—psychologically, medically, and academically—children I had ever met. Whatever problems they had when they were picked up in Afghanistan, language and cultural barriers exacerbated the problems. Most schizophrenic teenagers in the United States were in better shape.
The biggest problem I had was selecting interrogators who would not be abusive, raise their voice, or use any fear tactics with these boys whatsoever. More so than with other prisoners, we had to approach the interrogation of these boys gently. They were young, scared, and very traumatized, so any harsh tactics would have exactly the opposite of the desired effect, making the boys shut down even more and tell us nothing. I soon realized that these boys exemplified why the methods I wanted to employ at Gitmo were necessary, a case study in how a softer approach will yield more results than brutality. Major General Miller had handed me exactly the type of prisoners I needed to test my philosophy on interrogation.
Fortunately there was an FBI agent on the island who had some limited experience with teenage gangs in Texas, and his experience and style served the process well. We also had a civilian contract interrogator who had many years working with adolescents and teenage boys. The Army did not have enough military interrogators so it hired contractors to do this job, most of whom were retired military or had had many years of military experience as interrogators. The two interrogators bonded with the juveniles like they were their younger brothers.
Though we were dedicated to a gentle approach with these juveniles, there was no mistaking our intentions. We needed these boys to talk to us, and we established a program that would help us get to know them and encourage them to trust us. The boys worked with the Muslim chaplain from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m., were seen by the interrogators from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., and then they would break for lunch and rest. The rest of the afternoon was reserved for academics, recreation, group prayer, visits as needed with the pediatrician, and instruction on the Koran. Though I hoped they could provide intel that would be useful, I still cringed at using the word “interrogation” with these three boys. The word typically denotes terror, torture, or abuse. After some thought, I instructed everyone at Camp Iguana to use the word “interview” instead—to change both the attitude of those doing the interrogation and the perception of the boys.
My days were intense, trying to make sure the boys were not abused or unnecessarily stressed while also facilitating their interrogation. Each morning I went to physical training, showered, ate breakfast, and spent 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. at Camp Iguana with the teenage terrorists. Afternoons from approximately 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. would be reserved for meetings and consultations with military police, interrogators, and other staff members. It was a daily struggle to keep the staff who had contact with these teenagers mindful and hypervigilant. One of my greatest fears was that, in my effort to help these juveniles heal from their traumatic experiences and to trust us, I would inadvertently encourage the staff to relax too much around them and let their guard down. I worried that I might sound like I was trying to talk out of both sides of my mouth, but I frequently reminded the staff that these juveniles were not sweet kids. All three had been captured while fighting in a combatant role against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It was easy, because of their youth, disheveled appearance, illiteracy, and poor health, to see them as innocent little boys. This was not the case. On occasion, I had to remind staff that a thirteen-year-old right index finger could pull the trigger on an AK-47 or fire a rocket-propelled grenade as easily as a thirty-year-old finger. It was a constant struggle to find the right psychological balance between seeing them as either terrorists who happened to be fourteen or harmless boys caught up in the tragedy of their third world nation’s plight.
The juvenile prisoners consumed much of my time and energy, but they were not my only tasks. While working with them, I was still expected to oversee the rest of the interrogation process at Gitmo and to fix what had gone so wrong in the past. It was clear to me that if I was going to stumble across the abuses and torture Major Leso talked about, I wouldn’t find it during the daytime when supervisors were around. I needed to walk the grounds and see what went on at the interrogation booths in the late night. One day I decided to pay an unannounced visit that night to observe interrogations.
However, before leaving work to rest prior to my midnight return, I began to see what Major Leso was concerned about. I went into an office to talk with an interrogator by the name of Luther. Luther was a good old boy from Georgia, a retired warrant-officer interrogator who stood about five feet five inches tall and was built like a fire hydrant. He had trouble in his eyes, anger that he directed at anyone in his path. He was pissed about something, but I didn’t know him well enough to broach the subject. I had a brief conversation with Luther as we went over some of his notes from his previous interrogations. As I turned and left his office, I noticed a pair of women’s pink panties and a pink nightgown hanging on the back of his office door. Thinking I might do better than to simply ask what the lingerie was for, I made a point to find the schedule for interrogations instead. I wanted to observe Luther’s next interrogation, and as luck would have it, he was scheduled for that night. Interrogations were regularly conducted at night as a way to screw with the prisoner’s head, to keep him off balance when he was tired.
That night at about 1 a.m. I was making my rounds in the building that housed most of the interrogation booths. The interrogation buildings were prefab trailers with several small rooms about ten feet by ten feet in size. Each had a table, usually three or four chairs, and a metal hook welded to the floor. The hook served as the anchor to fasten a detainee’s leg irons during the interrogation.
As I walked toward the observation room with its one-way mirror that would allow me to peek into the interrogation booths, I heard lots of yelling, screaming, and furniture being thrown around. I saw Luther and three MPs wrestling with a detainee on the floor. It was an awful sight. I wanted to run back to my room and wash my eyes with bleach. The detainee was naked except for the pink panties I had seen hanging on the door earlier. He also had lipstick and a wig on. The four men were holding the prisoner down and trying to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown, but he was fighting hard.
My first instinct was to rush in and start barking orders at the men, demanding they stop this ridiculous and abusive wrestling match. But I managed to quell that urge and wait. I opened my thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and watched the episode play out, hoping it would take a better turn and not wanting to interfere without good reason, even if this was a terrible scene. I waited several minutes, but with no good end in sight I had to act.
Someone is gonna get hurt, I thought. I need to stop this right now.
I knocked on the door and stepped in, trying hard to look like this crazy scene didn’t bother me in the least.
“Hey Luther, you want some coffee?” I asked in a calm, low voice.
Luther, who looked like he’d been wrestling a pig and wasn’t coming out ahead, got up off the floor and walked over to me. “I sure do, Colonel,” he said, breathing hard. “I’ll take you up on that, sir.”
I asked the MPs to let the detainee up and put him in the chair for a break. Luther and I poured coffee from my thermos and went outside. We talked about catfishing and the criteria for determining when a hog is properly roasted. This segued into hunting and then why the 1911 .45 caliber pistol is a far better weapon than a 9mm pistol. I never once said anything about the lingerie or the interrogation. My purpose was to build a relationship with Luther rather than to attack him as being wrong or as a human being. What eventually came out was that he was frustrated because the detainee, two days ago, had spit in his face and screamed something lewd at him.
“‘I’m gonna butt-fuck your wife’ is how I think the interpreter said it, sir,” Luther told me. I could tell he took it seriously, probably bundling up all his frustrations and anger about a dozen different things into that one obscene sentence from a prisoner.
He asked me if I would be willing to review the case tomorrow with him and I said yes. We had the detainee taken back to his cell for the night.
The next day, Luther and I met for about two hours. I had read all the background files on the detainee prior to our meeting, so I knew this prisoner was a hardcore terrorist and had been difficult during interrogations. But I asked Luther how the interrogation process had been going.
“Sir, the problem is that the fucker just won’t talk to me,” Luther said. Just answering my question brought back the frustration for him, and I could see that he was starting to get anxious and angry again. I responded as calmly as if we were just talking about how to get your dog to come when called.
“Hey, I have a couple of questions for you. What is this guy eating every day?”
“The bastard is getting MREs, Colonel,” he said, referring to the Meals, Ready-to-Eat that soldiers eat in the field when hot meals aren’t available. In some areas, the U.S. military also hands them out to locals in need of food. They’re nutritious, but not exactly tasty. “He hasn’t had a hot meal in a while because he keeps throwing piss and shit on the guards every time they try to serve him food on a tray.”
“Okay,” I replied, still avoiding any hint of criticism in my voice. “Are any of the guards pretty females?”
“No way,” he said. “He hasn’t seen a woman in at least a year. All the corpsmen and medics are fat ugly dudes.”
“Well, Luther, here’s what I recommend. Go to McDonald’s and get a hot fish sandwich. Just one. Then stop off at the PX and get a Sports Illustrated, the swimsuit edition.”
Luther looked at me like I was crazy. “Where you going with this one, Colonel?” he asked. “You don’t want me to give that stuff to him, do you? ’Cause that just ain’t right, sir . . .”
“Just stay with me, Luther,” I replied. “Luther, I would like for you to go and see this detainee two or three times next week. But don’t even bother trying to get anything out of him. Just put him in the booth, eat your sandwich with some pistachio nuts and some fresh hot tea. You know how they all crave tea. And read the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Don’t say a word to him, but repeat this each time you bring him in the booth. Don’t yell at him or be rough in any way.”
Luther was looking at me like I’d lost my mind. He didn’t see where this was going. I told him to make sure he sat so that the detainee would be able to look over his shoulder and see the hot girls in the magazine, close enough that he could really smell the fish sandwich and the tea. Mind you, the prisoner wasn’t being denied food or left hungry. The detainees were fed quite well at Gitmo and almost all of them put on “Gitmo pounds” during their stay. The meals were regular, filling, and culturally appropriate, but a fish sandwich from McDonald’s would be a real treat, especially for this guy who was eating MREs at the moment because of his behavior.
“Well hell, I don’t mind eating and looking at girls, sir, but that’s not doing my job. I’m supposed to be getting intel from this guy. You telling me to just forget that?”
“Only for a while,” I told him. “At the end of the week, bring an extra hot fish sandwich. Let’s just see what happens.”
Luther grinned just slightly and I could tell he was starting to understand the point I was making.
Two weeks went by and Luther reported back to me that that during the first week the detainee seemed as confused as Luther had been at first, then he started showing some interest in the McDonald’s fish sandwich. When Luther held the magazine so that the prisoner could get a glimpse of the scantily clad women, the prisoner perked up and strained to see.
After a week of those silent sessions, with no interaction at all, Luther brought in a second fish sandwich and offered it to the detainee in a casual way, not like a bribe but just as a nonchalant gesture from one person to another—“You want this? Here you go.” He continued bringing sandwiches for the prisoner, and on one of those visits he also left the magazine on the table for him. On my instructions, Luther soon told the prisoner, in a very hushed, conspiratorial tone after checking to make sure no guards were watching, “Here, you take this magazine back to your cell. Just hide it in your pants. I understand you’re a man like me, and you need this.” The guards, of course, were in on the ruse and didn’t “find” the hidden magazine.
The prisoner’s attitude improved so much that he looked forward to his interrogation sessions and enjoyed seeing Luther walk into the room. Slowly over that second week, Luther started talking to him.
It wasn’t long before the rapport between Luther and the detainee led to useful intel. There was no need for me to lecture and hammer home how this approach could work so much better than trying to wrestle a detainee into a pink nightgown; Luther saw the results for himself. Luther shared his experience with the other interrogators and soon most of the noncompliant detainees became cooperative. Incentive-, respect-based interrogations began to catch on. I saw Luther in the parking lot late one afternoon and he told me the new strategy was continuing to work.
“But Colonel, I still can’t figure out why your recommendations worked so well with that son of a bitch,” he said. “I mean, it sure as hell worked, but why would a mean bastard like that open up just because I gave him a sandwich?”
“Luther, my momma taught me that a good meal among enemies can cast good fortune,” I told him. “Luther, remember all human beings have the capacity to appreciate and understand acts of decency and kindness, even that dude who says something nasty about your wife. ‘Treat a man the way you want to be treated’ is what Reverend Johnson would say.”
“Sir, who in the hell is Reverend Johnson?”
“Luther, he was my Baptist minister many years ago,” I said. “I learned a lot from him.”
The technique I taught Luther was just one way we got prisoners to talk without anything remotely abusive. Much of the culture at Gitmo in 2002 and 2003, perhaps due to the anger over 9/11, involved projecting one’s rage onto the detainees. My role was to teach rapport and relationship-building approaches between the detainee and the interrogators without the abuse. Simple things like kindness, sweets, pizza, cigarettes, movies, tea, and magazines went a long way in fostering these relationships. If a fish sandwich and a girlie magazine didn’t work, then there were other plans we could implement. For instance, if the prisoner was an older male it would sometimes be effective to have a young, petite female interrogator work with him in a very calm and reassuring manner, rather than a more aggressive male interrogator.
I had a hundred scenarios we could try. No matter which strategy we employed, the goal was always the same: get the prisoner to say something in response. Anything. Once the prisoner said, “Okay,” or “Thank you,” or “Praise Allah,” I knew we had him. From there it was only a matter of time before he told us something useful.
There would be many more challenges to come at Gitmo, and I had no idea at the time that how we handled those challenges would shape the future role for military psychologists in this global war on terrorism. For example, one afternoon I was having lunch in the chow hall and a female nurse who was a Navy lieutenant commander came to see me in a fit of anger. Her name was Lieutenant Commander Pearl Henderson from northern California. “Commander, I have been hearing about you and I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” I said with a smile. “Pour yourself a cup of coffee and let’s see if we can work this thing out.”
She began talking really fast and I regretted offering her coffee. This was an intense woman. I captured enough of what she was saying to understand that she was upset with how interrogators were coming over to the medical clinic and demanding unhindered access to detainees’ medical records. This was a surprise to me, and a disturbing concept to a psychologist. I had to ask her to slow down and give me a better understanding of what was going on.
“I’m not tracking with you at all,” I said. “They’re doing what with the medical records?”
She explained to me that there was a federal regulation that made it perfectly legal for any interrogator, regardless of rank, educational background, or age, to have legal open access to any detainee’s medical record. What I discovered was that on any given day, FBI, CIA, Army, Navy, and contract interrogators would go to the hospital and demand to see detainees’ records immediately. If any of the doctors or nurses hesitated—and they naturally would as medical professionals—these interrogators, some of them only eighteen or twenty years old, would simply walk into the medical records room and help themselves. It was allowed by federal law but it ran counter to everything the doctors and nurses held sacred about the privacy of medical records.
I told the lieutenant commander that in spite of what the regulation or law said, from a practical standpoint this system just didn’t seem to be working. Not only was I sympathetic to the staff’s desire to protect those records, but I also could see that the animosity generated by interrogators snatching records from the clinic was counterproductive to our overall mission. So Lieutenant Commander Henderson and I devised a plan that would keep the interrogators from having any physical access to the records. We painted an invisible red line around the entire medical hospital by declaring that the hospital and all doctors and nurses were completely off-limits to anyone from the intel community. The biscuit staff were the only members of the Joint Intelligence Group or the entire intel community who would have any access or discuss any medical information with the doctors and nurses. Even though the interrogators were incredibly pissed at this, and though technically it circumvented federal law, the plan actually worked. It streamlined the process and stopped thirty or forty interrogators on any day of the week from storming over to the hospital and creating havoc.
Now, we thought this was a fine solution to a real problem. But then the media got hold of the story and, of course, they completely distorted what was happening. We later saw and heard reports in the news media about how biscuit was supposedly stealing medical information and using it to help interrogators craft interrogation plans. On June 10, 2004, the Washington Post reported that “Military interrogators at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been given access to the medical records of individual prisoners, a breach of patient confidentiality that ethicists describe as a violation of international medical standards designed to protect captives from inhumane treatment.”
The newspaper went on to say, “How military interrogators used the information is unknown. But a previously undisclosed Defense Department memo dated Oct. 9 cites Red Cross complaints that the medical files ‘are being used by interrogators to gain information in developing an interrogation plan.’”
The October 9 memo, however, contained no information or proof to support these accusations. In fact, the intent of the biscuit was to be the keepers of the relevant medical information so that no detainee would ever be harmed. We had to have that information because if someone in our position did not know of a detainee’s disease or medical condition, detainees could be harmed. So we, the biscuit, became the gatekeepers of this information in order to protect it. We used the information to make sure all prisoners received their medications and that detainees with major psychiatric illnesses, such as psychotic patients, were not interrogated at all. Most importantly, we used this information to eliminate the possibility that any ill or fragile detainee would be harmed as a result of some abusive interrogation technique. So what came out of the new arrangement was that any time interrogators needed to know if there were any medical complications, they would first come to us before starting their interrogations. But the International Committee of the Red Cross and the media reported the exact opposite—that we were hoarding the information for nefarious reasons and using it, in effect, to tell interrogators exactly where to poke the prisoner with a sharp stick.
The next month seemed to go by in a blur. I was starting to feel some satisfaction that we were making progress in turning this ship around, and especially when I stepped out into the dark Caribbean night air, the stillness and quiet could lull me into thinking that all was well. On one particular night, I learned this was just an illusion. I decided to make some rounds on one of the cellblocks. It’s always good to see what’s going on at night, I thought.
I entered the prison building and started looking around. Everything seemed relatively calm, nothing out of the ordinary. I figured I would look through the rest of the cellblock and then head back to my place for some sleep. But as I walked toward the cellblock the detainees started throwing feces, urine, and other bodily fluids all over the place. It was a full-scale, all-out riot. I had heard this was a pretty common occurrence, sometimes sparked by an action like one of the detainees being taken out of his cell for interrogation, but just as often by nothing at all. The cellblock would be quiet and suddenly erupt into chaos. On this night, I had no idea what started the riot, if anything, but I could see that the guards and other staff were trying to dodge urine, feces, and other bodily fluids thrown at the nineteen- to twenty-one-year-olds. I was amazed at the level of discipline shown by the guards. There was no yelling, no cursing, and none of the guards threw the cups filled with feces back at the detainees. They were better Americans than me, I thought as I watched. Night after night for twelve-hour shifts, the guards stood steadfastly on duty to cope with the horror of these attacks. There was no way at nineteen I could have handled this, a foreign prisoner spitting in my face only to be followed by the same knucklehead hitting me in the back of the head with a cup of feces. On many nights I asked myself, where did we get these young Americans from? As I watched, a Styrofoam cup filled with feces and urine hit a young female sergeant directly in the face. She calmly turned and instructed the detainee to “knock it off.”
I was tense and worried about what else might come flying through the air, maybe something that would do some real damage instead of just disgusting me. One of the guards ran to me and took me by the arm in a firm grip, yelling in my ear to be heard over the noise of the riot in the background.
“Don’t worry, Colonel. We’ll get these shitheads under control. And Colonel, it will get a whole lot uglier before it gets better.”
My escort rushed me to the exit and I burst outside, the door slamming behind me as the guards continued their efforts to quell the riot. Standing there alone in the Cuban breeze, covered in Taliban feces and urine, I was utterly disgusted and couldn’t decide if it was better to ride in my car to my hooch or walk. I decided walking was a better option to avoid getting this foul smell permanently imprinted into my car. As I walked, I had to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation I found myself in, and it was actually a relief to laugh at myself and give myself a few moments of respite from the deadly serious thoughts that occupied my mind the rest of the time at Gitmo. I kept coming back to the young men and women we had serving as the guards on the cellblocks. They were an amazing, untold story, steadfastly doing their duty without ever retaliating. By the time I reached my hooch, I had created a new term for the military—the TOW. The TOW acronym was not new to the Army, but it usually stood for “tank offensive weapon,” a missile launched from a Humvee designed to kill Russian tanks. After that night, I always thought of TOW as the Turd Offensive Weapon. I learned from talking to the MPs afterward that the prisoners also had a variation we came to call the SOW—the Semen Offensive Weapon. No matter which primary ingredient was used, the methodology was the same: make the deposit in a cup, add some toilet paper for stability when throwing, douse liberally in urine, and hide the concoction in your cell for a while to let it ferment. Then wait for an opportune moment when the guard lets his attention wander and suddenly—wham!— fling the TOW or SOW by reaching through the “bean chute” used to pass in meals. One detainee explained to a guard that he omitted the toilet paper in his preparations because that promoted a better dispersal on impact. And he insisted that he had done “scientific studies” to confirm the benefits of his approach.
I went home and took the longest shower of my entire time in Cuba. As I stood there scrubbing and scrubbing, I realized that though I could laugh about the insanity of that moment, the riot reminded me that I still had plenty of work to do. The next day we had many long meetings to come up with safe ways of disrupting the detainees’ tendency to throw TOWs at the guards. The first move was to take away all their cups and water bottles, followed soon by the erection of Plexiglas walls that would prevent them throwing anything into the middle of the cellblock. My experience that night also gave me a newfound respect for the guards who watched over the detainees and who were subjected to that kind of abuse day in and day out, yet still found the discipline to be professional and not respond the way most people would when someone throws shit at them.
I decided I needed to get back to walking the halls of the interrogation buildings on a regular basis. A few days went by and I showed up at about 2 a.m. to see what was going on in a particular building. Like on many of the nights before, I heard a noise, yells and screams, and decided to check it out.
As I watched through a one-way observation window, I saw a detainee being held straight up in a corner by two large, mean, badass-looking MPs, an interrogator, and an interpreter. The four of them yelled at the prisoner as loudly as they possibly could. The interrogator decided it was time for a break after the detainee spit in the left eye of the shortest MP. They put the prisoner down and started exiting. Once the interpreter, Hakim, came out of the room, I asked him how long had they been going at it and he told me it had been three hours.
“Three hours of that?” I asked.
“Yes sir,” he said. “This one won’t talk, so we’re on him pretty hard, sir.”
“Okay . . .” I said, trying not to signal any criticism. “Hakim, has the detainee been to the bathroom or had anything to eat or drink during this time?”
“No sir.”
When the interrogator returned from wherever he’d gone for a break, I asked if it was okay if I came into the room and simply observed. I didn’t really need his permission, but I wanted to let him retain his authority in the interrogation and not lose face in front of the other men. He replied that he wouldn’t mind. We all went into the interrogation room and the prisoner immediately noticed that there was now a fifth person to scream at him and toss him around the room. Before the interrogation began again, I pulled the interrogator aside.
“How about if you get the detainee something to eat and drink? And maybe he could be allowed to go to the bathroom?” I said. “What do you think?”
The interrogator seemed a bit surprised by the suggestion but he didn’t want to argue with a colonel, so he said yes. After about another half hour the detainee was allowed to go to the bathroom and get some water. When the MPs brought him back to the room, he looked directly at me and said something in broken English that sounded like a thank-you.
I asked the interpreter what he had said. “He said, ‘Thank you,’ sir,” the interpreter confirmed.
The comment didn’t impress me much, because I wasn’t looking to coddle the prisoner. If anything the expression of gratitude just confirmed to me that a softer touch might get more intel out of this guy. But then I looked from the interpreter back to the detainee and found him staring at me intently, with a dark, piercing look that did not convey appreciation.
The prisoner continued looking into my eyes as he began to speak to me in Arabic. When he paused, I kept my eyes on him and asked the interpreter what he had said.
“Sir, I don’t know if you really want to know what he said to you,” the interpreter said.
I turned to the interpreter and said, “Tell me exactly what he said, Hakim. Word for word.”
“Sir, the detainee told you thank you for being kind to him but he said he was going to kill you as soon as he got out of here.”
Hmmm . . . well, that’s an interesting sentence.
“Ask the detainee why on earth would he want to kill me,” I told the interpreter. “I’ve done nothing to harm him.”
The detainee responded quickly and forcefully as soon as he heard the question in Arabic. “He says you’re a Kaffir, sir.”
“A Kaffir? What does that word mean?”
Before he could reply, the detainee screamed, “Infidel!” The prisoner was growing agitated, as if he had to get through to me why I had to die.
I was a bit confused about why the prisoner would react this way after thanking me for a small kindness, though I was not unfamiliar with the mindless, singular fanaticism that possessed this man and most of the other prisoners at Gitmo. The man was talking to us, and that was progress of a sort, so I continued the exchange.
“Why am I an infidel? Is it because I’m an American?”
The prisoner shouted and slobbered some more.
“No, you’re an infidel because you’re a nonbeliever,” the interpreter said. “In order for me to get to heaven, I must kill you as soon as possible.”
“Well, okay. Good to know,” I said, getting up to leave.
I told the men to continue talking with him about whatever he was willing to talk about, which would probably be a lesson in why we’re all infidel pigs who must die, and he’s going to fuck your mother, and America is the Great Satan, blah, blah, blah. As long as he’s talking, you might be able to steer him into giving up some intel, I reminded them.
This Taliban prisoner was more confusing than most I had seen in my career, but he was not that unusual among the detainees we were encountering in the global war on terrorism. They could be disarmingly gentle and appreciative seconds before pledging to kill you and your whole family. I wondered to myself if this detainee I had just seen was a sociopath, mentally ill, or delusional. Was he unique or just goddamned crazy? I was coming to understand that America was at war with an enemy like no other we have ever faced. Moreover, it became clear that with people like that dedicated to our destruction, even if we terminated the threat from Al Qaeda tomorrow, the larger war could go on for the next fifty years. This new enemy had as its goal the total destruction of all “nonbelievers.” And if this would mean killing themselves in the process, that would be fine and be their pathway to heaven and a life of eternal bliss. That is a hell of an enemy to fight.
My work with the juvenile detainees continued, and over time the boys did start talking to us, providing some useful intelligence about their experience with the Taliban in Afghanistan. We were quite proud of the work we did with these three boys, who stayed with us in Cuba for about a year before returning home far better off academically, medically, and psychologically than when they were brought to Gitmo. When U.S. forces captured them in Afghanistan, those boys were flat-out dumber than a bag of rocks, in poor physical health, and one of the three had severe PTSD. The educational, medical, and psychological staff worked tirelessly each day to restore their humanity, mental health, and physical health. By the time they returned back to their home, they were all functioning at the sixth to eighth grade academic level. They were medically healthy and doing well psychologically.
This is how my country handles prisoners, I reminded myself. It’s not all about abuse. We can take juveniles like that and send them home better than we found them.
My tour at Gitmo flew by as we continued making progress in righting the wrongs that had brought me there. The interrogators and MPs came around to the incentive- and respect-based approach, seeing for themselves that they could get better results than they had been getting with the methods that danced on that knife edge of what was acceptable and what was abusive. On May 5, 2003, I boarded a military chartered plane and headed home. Although ultimately I enjoyed my tour at Gitmo, confident that I had done good work and accomplished a great deal, I hoped that I would never see the island again. As I walked off the plane at Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Florida, I felt I had done something meaningful in the global war on terror.
It took us a while to get it right at Gitmo, but now that the war in Iraq will be ending soon, that should be it, I thought. I’m glad we won’t be sending any psychologists to POW or detention facilities in Iraq. This global war on terror thing will end soon and my world will return to normal. I’ll be seeing patients, teaching, conducting research, and lying in the comfort of my wife’s arms each night.
I had no idea what was coming.