Guantánamo Detainees Deliver Intelligence Gains

Friday, March 19, 2004
By Neil A. Lewis

New York Times Writer

The detention system at Guantánamo is intended to make the prisoners as compliant as possible. The detainees are schooled in a system of rewards and penalties calibrated to their behavior, including potential access to books and puzzles or being deprived of towels and a toothbrush. For instance, most prisoners are not allowed to exercise in their 6-by-8-foot cells, but get twice-weekly 20-minute periods for exercising and showering. But if the camp authorities decide that detainees are becoming cooperative, they are given more time out of their cells. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outside group that visits the detainees, has not publicly complained about physical mistreatment. But it has said the prolonged detention without any certainty for the inmates about their future is inhumane and psychologically debilitating.

A guard at Guantánamo, Cuba, gives water to a detainee. Military officials say some detainees have provided clues about Al Qaeda.

Image Credit: Angel Franco -- NYT

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba -- NYT
Military officials say prisoners at the detention center here have provided a stream of intelligence to interrogators during the past two years, including detailed information about Al Qaeda's recruitment of Muslim men in Europe.

Military and intelligence officials also said those detainees who were cooperative had provided information about Al Qaeda's chemical and biological weapons efforts, had spoken about the training of suicide bombers, and had described Al Qaeda's use of charities to raise money for its aims.

"We have been able as a result of information gained here to take operational actions, even military campaigns," said Steve Rodriguez, a veteran intelligence officer who oversees the interrogation teams. "There are instances of learning about active cells, and we have taken action to see that the cell was broken," he said, in one of a series of interviews given to a reporter on an arranged tour.

Another American official said analysts had been able to understand a kind of network in Europe that selected young Muslims, who were later drawn into Al Qaeda by imams and Islamic cultural centers and eventually sent to Afghanistan. He said this information has been sent on in recent months to European counterparts.

The sweeping assertions about the value of the detention center at Guantánamo respond to criticism of the operation, in the United States and abroad. Released detainees have also made allegations of mistreatment.

Apparently in an effort to counter the criticism, officials offered to talk in far greater detail than before about their interrogation techniques and what they say are important intelligence harvests from the detainees.

The officials denied the specific allegations of mistreatment made by prisoners recently returned to Britain whose accounts appeared in British newspapers and from Afghans who spoke to The New York Times in Kabul. Their accounts detail enforced privation, petty cruelty, beatings and planned humiliations.

There is no way so far to verify the situation of the detainees as described by the American officials, nor the charges of mistreatment.

(More: NYTimes.com / International)

2004 © The New York Times Company.

Dan