500 Days (41 page)

This was a sign of how badly 9/11 had battered the American psyche, he
thought. The journalists were making assumptions—for example, that the men had been fighting Americans in Afghanistan—that no one, not even the lawyers, knew to be true or false. Yet he had been all but accused of betraying the United States for seeking to hold the government accountable to a fundamental precept of common law and the Constitution: the state must prove that prisoners were being lawfully detained.

Stafford Smith arrived home late that night. The light on his answering machine was blinking. He pushed the play button.

A voice snarled. “You fucking faggot liberal, you’re fucking ruining this country, you fucking pro-terrorism piece-of-shit faggot.”

Stafford Smith stared at the machine.
Quite articulate
, he thought.

Message after message spewed the same hatred and contempt. So much fear, so much anger about the dictates of the American Constitution, he thought. The whole experience left Stafford Smith wondering.

How did they get my phone number?

•  •  •  

Somebody needed to take charge of the interrogations at Guantanamo. Paul Wolfowitz thought he knew the perfect candidate.

Major General Michael Dunlavey was an army reservist and trial lawyer working with the NSA. He had thirty-five years’ experience in counterintelligence and had recently served as the army’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence. Over his career, he told associates, he had conducted three thousand interrogations.

Dunlavey was ordered to meet with the defense secretary in a week. On February 21, he arrived at Suite 3E880 on the E-ring of the Pentagon and was escorted into Rumsfeld’s office. He noticed a twisted piece of aluminum on a nearby coffee table; it was debris from American Airlines flight 77 that Rumsfeld had picked up outside of the Pentagon on September 11.

Rumsfeld gestured toward a chair at a round table, and Dunlavey plopped down into it. A satellite photograph beneath a glass covering on the table depicted Asia at night, with Japan and South Korea speckled white from the burning lights of their bustling societies and North Korea sunk in complete darkness. Rumsfeld called the line between black and white the “knife edge” of civilization, where tens of thousands of American soldiers stood guard, separating the flames of freedom from the dark gloom of tyranny. The metaphor captured Rumsfeld’s vision of the American military’s calling not only in Asia but in the ongoing conflict as well.

Wolfowitz and several other Pentagon officials joined the meeting. Rumsfeld spoke bluntly.

“We need you to set up the interrogation operations for the war on terror,” he told Dunlavey.

Five days earlier, he said, Southern Command had been ordered to establish Joint Task Force 170 as the coordinator of all American interrogation efforts. Dunlavey, Rumsfeld said, would be the commander of the unit, working in Guantanamo Bay.

“We’ve picked up a lot of bad guys,” he said. “These people are very well schooled on resistance to interrogation. We want to identify the senior Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives and find out about what they were planning, what operations they had going.”

This mission, Rumsfeld said, was about getting the information America needed to prevent another 9/11. “I want the intelligence,” he said, “and I want it now.”

•  •  •  

Several members of Guantanamo’s Initial Reaction Force were lolling about in a large wooden shed at the back of the detention center. As a small-scale riot squad, the soldiers were under orders to steamroller any detainee who posed a threat to the military or to other prisoners. But when the camp was quiet, there was nothing for them to do but wait.

A call came in on the radio. The team was needed immediately at Bravo Block. The soldiers snatched up their equipment and scrambled over; the officer in charge was waiting alongside a member of the military police. The MP pointed at one of the detainees.

“This guy over here called me a bitch a couple of times,” she said angrily. “Whip his ass!”

The response team decided to storm the detainee’s cage and hog-tie him. The squad assembled at the door. Inside, the man was screaming.

“Shut up and lie down!” one of the soldiers yelled.

The detainee stared at the team, unmoving.

One of the officers unlocked the cage door. Immediately the detainee turned around, dropped to his knees, and put his hands behind his head. The lead soldier tossed aside the protective plastic shield he was holding, ran a couple of steps, and hopped into the air. His knee slammed into the detainee’s back, smashing his face onto the cement floor. With the first soldier still on top of the man, the other team members ran in and piled on, slugging and kicking him.

Someone yelled out for the MP. She walked inside the cage, approached the man, then punched him twice in the head. Once the detainee was handcuffed, the soldiers stood. The man didn’t move; blood seeped onto the concrete. One of the soldiers pushed him to get up. No response.

A stretcher was brought into the cage and the detainee was carried to a military ambulance. Response team members climbed inside the vehicle for the ride to the main medical facility at Guantanamo. No one spoke during the drive.

Later that night, the soldiers returned and sat down with a few friends. The group recounted the confrontation inside the cage. The detainee was in bad shape. One of the team members said that the man had gone into cardiac arrest in the ambulance.

The conversation was laced with anxiety. All of the soldiers knew that video cameras kept watch on the detainees. Could the attack this evening have been recorded? One of the soldiers reassured them that all would be fine.

“The videotape has been destroyed,” he said. “So we have nothing to worry about.”

•  •  •  

In the hamlet of Chapri on the western border of Pakistan, an ancient stone arch marks the border between the country’s settled areas and its tribal wild lands. On one side, modernity and democracy had taken root. On the other, lawlessness and the rule of the gun held sway.

In late February, two militiamen with the Khattak, a Pashtun tribe, stopped a battered Mitsubishi Pajero jeep. Inside were four men and three women wearing burkas. One of the militiamen asked where they were going. No response, apparently because the man he was questioning didn’t understand the Pashtu language. He was a Yemeni, fleeing Afghanistan.

“Get out,” the militiaman said, signaling with his hands.

The seven emerged from the jeep, and the soldiers noticed that the women were unnaturally tall; one was wearing men’s sandals. Pointing their guns, the militiamen shouted at the group, demanding that they drop to the ground. A quick inspection revealed that the women were not women at all, but three African men in disguise—two from Sudan and one from the island nation of Mauritius off Africa’s southeast coast.

This was quite a find. Pakistani officials were sure to want to question these suspicious people. Inquiries were made, money changed hands, and the seven were turned over to agents from the intelligence service. The driver and the other three men—all Pakistanis—answered whatever was asked of them once
their palms, too, were greased. The driver revealed that the foreigners had been headed to his hometown of Faisalabad.

The questioning of the three Africans got nowhere and they remained mute. Perhaps, the intelligence agents decided, FBI officials working in a nearby town would have more success. They drove the suspects there and handed them over.

Again, out came the money, and again, tongues were loosened. They were part of al-Qaeda, the men said, and were heading to Faisalabad to join confederates hiding out in safe houses. One of them, the Africans said, was a man named Abu Zubaydah.

The agents were stunned. Abu Zubaydah was considered by the intelligence community as one of bin Laden’s most trusted—and dangerous—lieutenants. If they moved quickly, the Americans might be able to snag him.

•  •  •  

The news about Zubaydah was flashed to Washington, then back to the senior CIA officer in Pakistan, Bob Grenier. He summoned his subordinates and told them that there was now strong intelligence that Zubaydah was in Pakistan, most likely in Faisalabad.

“We’ve got to catch him,” he said. “And we want him alive.”

But first, they had to find the safe house where Zubaydah was holed up.

•  •  •  

Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador to the United States, was fuming.

Since the 9/11 attacks, no government leader had been a more steadfast ally than Tony Blair. Britain was second only to the Americans in the number of troops it had committed to the multination coalition fighting in Afghanistan. The Pentagon already knew that the Royal Marines were days from deploying one of their elite fighting units, 45 Commando, which specialized in mountain and cold-weather warfare.

Then, the inexplicable. On March 5, as British and American forces fought side by side, the White House announced new tariffs on steel imports, including British specialty steel.

It defied political reason. Bush was a
conservative,
and conservatives were supposed to abhor tariffs as an assault on free trade. It was also diplomatic lunacy. The British
needed
a healthy steel industry; war demanded weaponry, and that required steel. How could the White House embrace Britain as its closest partner in Afghanistan—and even now begin wooing the Blair government to join in its efforts to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq—while simultaneously treating it so disdainfully as an economic adversary?

Meyer contacted Karl Rove, a senior advisor to Bush. The two men had been friends since they first met years before in Austin, Texas, but today that relationship took a backseat. The ambassador made no attempt to hide his anger.

“What in Christ’s name do you think you’re doing?” Meyer snapped.

The United States had no choice, Rove calmly replied. “The steel industry is in terrible trouble. And it’s in states that are important to the president’s reelection effort.”

Reelection?
Was Rove kidding? The White House was willing to strain relations with the British to win a political chit for an election more than two years away?

“It’s just politics,” Rove went on. “But what we’ll try to do is pass this tariff thing and we’ll try to mitigate the consequences for you afterward.”

Meyer ended the conversation more exasperated than ever. Not only was the Bush administration sandbagging Britain, it was doing so under the pretense that it was all about economic necessity, when in fact the decision was being driven by petty politics. And, it didn’t seem that the administration cared if the tariffs accomplished anything. The implicit pledge to make up for any losses his country might incur—probably by ordering more steel from Britain—made the policy pointless. It was a zero-sum game, an economic nonevent, but one that allowed Bush to crow about his concern for the nation’s Rust Belt.

These tariffs were a public slap in the face to America’s most loyal friend, delivered with a private wink that it was really just a charade. This decision, Meyer fumed, was reprehensible.

•  •  •  

The next week on March 11, Cheney arrived at Number 10 Downing Street in London for a meeting with Tony Blair. He was on an international tour, trying to gauge the support in foreign capitals for military action against Iraq. Britain was the first stop; from there, the vice president would travel to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, and eight other Middle Eastern countries.

Cheney’s best bet for winning over the Arabs, Blair said, was to present the administration’s plans on Iraq as part of an overall Middle East peace strategy. Treating Iraq as just one piece in a giant puzzle the administration was seeking to solve, and not as the puzzle itself, was the key to the success of his mission.

“We’re very conscious of the importance of a peace plan,” Cheney responded matter-of-factly.

His manner was quiet, his tone calm, but for all his air of gravitas, the words he spoke seemed almost flippant, as if Blair’s advice were bothersome. Neither
the prime minister nor his aides believed that Cheney or Bush
got it,
could see the Middle East forest beyond the Iraq tree.

Nevertheless, Blair pushed ahead. “If you are going to deal with something like Iraq,” he said, “you have to think ahead about what might happen and include things you might not expect. The best-laid plans disappear in the fog of war.”

Not a problem, Cheney said. The administration would plan for all contingencies. However, it would not compromise its mission of regime change in Iraq simply to gain the support of other nations. America could go it alone.

“A coalition would be nice,” Cheney said. “But it’s not essential.”

Later, Blair’s team retired to the prime minister’s residence for dinner. Cheney’s final words had hit hard, their message inescapable. The vice president wasn’t dismissing just the Arab nations in his calculus of power. He was also saying that the British didn’t matter much to the outcome of the coming conflict.

•  •  •  

On the morning of March 13, the sun peeked through a double-size guard tower looming over the detention center inside Kandahar Airport, now the main base for American and allied military operations in the Afghan provincial capital.

A truck accompanied by a military escort drove out of the compound, turning onto a road toward the city. Inside the first vehicle, four investigators—two FBI agents, a member of the Army Criminal Investigation Division, and an interrogator with the army 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion—rode with a slightly built Yemeni man. He was Salim Hamdan, the bin Laden driver taken into custody at the eastern border of Afghanistan several months before.

Soon after his capture, Hamdan had been transported to Kandahar, where military interrogators and FBI agents questioned him repeatedly. He offered little resistance; after two days of attempting to deceive his interrogators, he tried to answer whatever he was asked, although sometimes he struggled to understand the poorly translated queries. He had pointed out al-Qaeda safe houses and other facilities on maps of Afghanistan. He had identified a picture of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, and linked him to al-Qaeda. And he recounted statements bin Laden had made and actions he had taken before 9/11 that showed the al-Qaeda leader knew a major attack was coming.