Guantanamo detainees, in white, and U.S. military guards walk around Camp 4 detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay. (photo: AP)
NSA
Closely Involved in Guantánamo Interrogations, Documents Show
By Cora Currier, The
Intercept
17 May 16
Personnel
from the National Security Agency worked alongside the military, CIA, and other
agencies on interrogations at Guantánamo in the early days of the war on
terror, new documents show.
Entries
from an internal NSA publication, which were among the documents provided by
whistleblower Edward Snowden, described staffers’ deployments to Guantánamo Bay
during a time period when prisoners were subjected to brutal questioning and
mistreatment. An NSA employee also described participation in a rendition, when
U.S. forces seized six men in Bosnia and secreted them off to Cuba.
In
October 2003, a post in SIDtoday, the online newsletter of the
NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, or SID, advertised the “chance to get to GITMO for 90 days!”
The
NSA’s liaison, or NSA LNO, would “coordinate” with interrogators “to collect
information of value to the NSA Enterprise and Extended Enterprise” and be
“responsible for interfacing with the DoD, CIA, and FBI interrogators on a
daily basis in order to assess and exploit information sourced from detainees.”
In some instances, the relationship would go the other way, with the NSA
providing “sensitive NSA-collected technical data and products to assist
JTF-GTMO [Joint Task Force Guantánamo] interrogation efforts.”
The
post’s title was “Can You Handle the Truth?” — a reference to Jack
Nicholson’s famous line in the
courtroom drama A Few Good Men, set in Guantánamo.
Two
months later, in another post,
an NSA liaison reported back on his trip. “On a given week,” he wrote, he
would “pull together intelligence to support an upcoming interrogation,
formulate questions and strategies for the interrogation, and observe or
participate in the interrogation.”
Outside
work, “fun awaits,” he enthused. “Water sports are outstanding: boating,
paddling, fishing, water skiing and boarding, sailing, swimming, snorkeling,
and SCUBA.” If water sports were “not your cup of tea,” there were also movies,
pottery, paintball, and outings to the Tiki Bar. “Relaxing is easy,” he
concluded.
Other
accounts of Guantánamo around the same time were not so sunny.
FBI
agents there internally protested the
interrogation tactics they witnessed, describing them as “torture techniques”
and “beyond the bounds of standard FBI practice,” including detainees being
chained in fetal positions on the floor, without food or water, and the use of
strobe lights, loud music, and dogs.
The
International Committee of the Red Cross charged in a 2004
confidential report that treatment of some prisoners at Guantánamo was
“tantamount to torture.” In a June 2004 visit, its investigators reported
“humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced
positions” and “some beatings,” according to a New York Times report.
The
George W. Bush administration began bringing prisoners to Guantánamo in early 2002, and by the end of the year, over
600 men had been processed at the prison. Over the next few years, over a
hundred more would arrive. Despite the Bush administration’s rhetoric that
Guantánamo held “the worst of the worst,” many of them were innocent men, some
of whom had been sold for bounty to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Only a handful of them would
ever be charged with a crime by the U.S. government.
It’s
not a surprise that the NSA would send representatives to support military
operations (as detailed in this Department of Defense doctrine), but its role during this controversial
period remains murky. In the many investigations into detainee treatment, the
NSA has hardly surfaced.
Neither
the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s
detention and rendition program (which confirmed the existence
of two CIA facilities at Guantánamo) nor a 2008 Senate Armed Services
Committee report on detainee
abuse by the military addresses the role of the NSA, at least in the heavily
censored versions that have been made public.
The
NSA declined to comment for this story.
The
NSA documents made explicit reference to the CIA working on interrogations at
Guantánamo. At the time of the documents, in late 2003, the CIA had just brought four of its
“high-value” prisoners to Guantánamo: alleged al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah,
Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who helped plan the 9/11 attacks, and
Abd Al-Rahman al-Nashiri, accused of planning the bombing of the USS Cole in
Yemen in 2000. These men had been subjected to torture in other overseas CIA
prisons; Zubaydah, for instance, was waterboarded 83 times. They
were moved out of Guantánamo again in March 2004, when it appeared imminent
that the Supreme Court was going to give detainees access to U.S. courts (all
four came back in 2006, after Bush acknowledged and closed the CIA black
sites).
Midnight
Convoy in Sarajevo
Another SIDtoday entry described a rendition in
which six men were bundled away from Bosnia to Guantánamo in early 2002. Most
renditions were CIA-run; this is one of the only such operations known to have
been carried out by the military outside
Afghanistan.
The
men — natives of Algeria who became known as “The Algerian Six” — had
been linked to a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, but a Bosnian judge
had ordered them released for lack of evidence. But the United States leaned on
the Bosnian government to hand them over instead.
The
NSA staffer who wrote the SIDtoday piece recounted the
operation as part of a series of anecdotes provided by NSA employees about
working overtime.
“Because
much of the evidence against them came from U.S. intel, the Bosnian government
didn’t have access to it, and after a couple of months in custody, the six
prisoners were scheduled to be released without trial,” she wrote. “The U.S.
did not want to let them go back into the general population,” so the commander
of the unit in charge, Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, “planned to take the prisoners
into U.S. custody as soon as they were released by the Bosnians. The prisoners
would be taken from Sarajevo up to Tuzla.”
The
staffer was tasked with watching for the possibility of an ambush on the
military convoy. The men’s release, she wrote, “was delayed for several hours
due to a large demonstration outside the building they were being held in,” and
“the convoy did not leave Sarajevo until after midnight.”
“The
‘gentlemen’ in question are still guests of the U.S. government, at Guantánamo
Bay,” she wrote in the entry dated September 3, 2008. In fact, just a few
months later, a federal judge ordered five of the
six men released on lack of evidence. One of them, Lakhdar Boumediene, had
brought a suit that led to a landmark decision in
June 2008 that Guantánamo detainees had the right to challenge their detention
in federal court. The last of the men, Belkacem Bensayah, was released to Algeria in
2013.
“A
Unique Opportunity Awaits You” in Iraq
NSA
analysts were also intimately involved in interrogations in Iraq; a December
2003 call for volunteers to
deploy to Baghdad as counterterrorism analysts with the Iraq Survey Group, which was leading the search
for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, said that “the selectee will, in all
likelihood, be involved in the interrogation/questioning of potential leads,”
as well as “the evaluation and analysis of interrogation reports and other
HUMINT-based reports.”
A June
2003 SIDtoday article described snapshots of a trip
with Maj. Gen. Richard J. Quirk III, then the agency’s director for signals
intelligence. The photos for the entry are missing from the file, but one
caption described a visit to Abu Ghraib prison, where “the group discussed the
role of interrogations and how they can provide links for SIGINT.” In an ironic
addition, given that Abu Ghraib would soon become the notorious symbol of
prisoner abuse, the newsletter noted the group “also visited one of Saddam’s
torture chambers.”
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment