- Prisoner interrogations at Guant·namo Bay, the
controversial US military detention centre where guards have been accused
of brutality and torture, have not prevented a single terrorist attack,
according to a senior Pentagon intelligence officer who worked at the heart
of the US war on terror.
-
- Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Christino, who retired last
June after 20 years in military intelligence, says that President George
W Bush and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have 'wildly exaggerated'
their intelligence value.
-
- Christino's revelations, to be published this week in
Guant·namo: America's War on Human Rights, by British journalist
David Rose, are supported by three further intelligence officials. Christino
also disclosed that the 'screening' process in Afghanistan which determined
whether detainees were sent to Guant·namo was 'hopelessly flawed
from the get-go'.
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- It was performed by new recruits who had almost no training,
and were forced to rely on incompetent interpreters. They were 'far too
poorly trained to identify real terrorists from the ordinary Taliban militia'.
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- According to Christino, most of the approximately 600
detainees at Guant·namo - including four Britons - at worst had
supported the Taliban in the civil war it had been fighting against the
Northern Alliance before the 11 September attacks, but had had no contact
with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda.
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- For six months in the middle of 2003 until his retirement,
Christino had regular access to material derived from Guant·namo
prisoner interrogations, serving as senior watch officer for the central
Pentagon unit known as the Joint Intelligence Task Force-Combating Terrorism
(JITF-CT). This made him responsible for every piece of information that
went in or out of the unit, including what he describes as 'analysis of
critical, time-sensitive intelligence'.
-
- In his previous assignment in Germany, one of his roles
had been to co-ordinate intelligence support to the US army in Afghanistan,
at Guant·namo, and to units responsible for transporting prisoners
there.
-
- Bush, Rumsfeld and Major General Geoffrey Miller, Guant·namo's
former commandant who is now in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, have
repeatedly claimed that Guant·namo interrogations have provided
'enormously valuable intelligence,' thanks to a system of punishments,
physical and mental abuse and rewards for for co-operation, introduced
by Miller and approved by Rumsfeld.
-
- In a speech in Miami, Rumsfeld claimed: 'Detaining enemy
combatants... can help us prevent future acts of terrorism. It can save
lives and I am convinced it can speed victory.'
-
- However, Christino says, General Miller had never worked
in intelligence before being assigned to Guant·namo, and his system
seems almost calculated to produce entirely bogus confessions.
-
- Earlier this year, three British released detainees,
Asif Iqbal, Shafiq Rasul Rhuhel Ahmed, revealed that they had all confessed
to meeting bin Laden and Mohamed Atta, leader of the 11 September hijackers,
at a camp in Afghanistan in 2000. All had cracked after three months isolated
in solitary confinement and interrogation sessions in chains that lasted
up to 12 hours daily.
-
- Eventually, MI5 proved what they had said initially -
that none had left the UK that year. Rasul had been working at a branch
of Currys. The disclosures come on the eve of a House of Lords appeal on
the fate of the foreign terrorist suspects held without trial in British
prisons.
-
- Tomorrow, the Lords will determine whether it was lawful
for the government to opt out of the European Convention on Human Rights
to allow for the detention of the men at Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons.
It is widely believed that some of the men are held on evidence obtained
from prisoners at Guant·namo. An officer from MI5 admitted under
cross-examination by lawyers acting for the detainees that the British
intelligence services would make use of information obtained under torture
by foreign governments.
-
- A high court appeal in August found that it was lawful
for the British government to use information obtained under torture by
foreign governments to avert an imminent attack, but there was no evidence
that it had done so in the case of the detainees held in British jails.
-
- Speaking at an Observer fringe meeting at the Labour
party conference last week, Lord Chancellor Charlie Falconer backed the
decision of the court but said it was 'an almost impossible ethical question'.
-
- While emphasising that Britain repudiated the use of
torture he said: 'We cannot condone torture, but the basis of those incarcerations
is protection of other people. If we thought that 'X' was going to blow
up the Tube and we thought that information was obtained by a foreign intelligence
service, can we really say that we can't detain people because that information
was obtained by torture?
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- 'That's the dilemma the government is faced with. The
courts have taken the view as a matter of law, that we are entitled to
rely on it and I have the awful feeling that is probably the right conclusion.'
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1318702,00.html
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