500 Days (57 page)

Kollar-Kotelly had, in essence, established Guantanamo as a lawless land. American courts had no role, no controlling sovereign had ever signed a treaty on its behalf, and no one held there was protected by the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions. Detainees could be imprisoned without trial, without charge, forever—and no one could stop it. Could Bush order detainees shot without trial? Under Kollar-Kotelly’s decision, why not? Was there much difference between taking people’s liberty without charge and executing them without trial?

Kollar-Kotelly’s decision wasn’t just preposterous, Wilner thought; it was obnoxious. She dismissed out of hand Wilner’s attempt to give his clients legal
redress for the conditions of their confinement. In hostile language, the judge essentially called Wilner a liar, saying his filing was a habeas corpus petition written deceptively to make it appear like something else. And, she wrote, since it was really a habeas petition, the precedents demanded that she toss it out.

Wilner swiveled in his chair toward his computer. He wanted to send an e-mail to Kuwait for one detainee’s father, Khalid al-Odah, to update him on the developments.

“We believe it is a very unsophisticated and uncourageous opinion,” he wrote. “We really thought we had outdone the government, but it seems not to have mattered to this judge. Hopefully, the judges on the court of appeals will have more courage.”

An e-mailed response from al-Odah arrived in Wilner’s in-box at about four o’clock the next morning. “We were prepared for such a ruling,” he wrote. “We should have the same spirit when we started and we should continue with the same spirit to the end.”

•  •  •  

Jim Haynes was developing a lot of impatience for the work of Doug Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy. Everyone in the administration knew that harmless Arabs had been inadvertently snatched up in Afghanistan and Pakistan, then delivered to Guantanamo. Dunlavey was complaining that some of those elderly and sick detainees—the ones who had been given nicknames like “half-dead Bob” and “al-Qaeda Claus”—ought to be released, and it was Feith’s job to get it done. But nothing was happening.

Not by design, though. Haynes believed that Feith was too disorganized to successfully manage a birthday party, much less the policies for a detention center. His dithering wouldn’t matter much if he was put in charge of the Pentagon dining room, but it mattered a great deal when he was assigned the task of establishing policies to free innocent nobodies locked up at the naval base.

Finally, Haynes had enough of waiting and went to see Feith.

“This system at Gitmo isn’t working,” Haynes said. “We have
got
to get a review process that’s better than what we’re doing. If we’ve got any mistakes, we ought to find them.”

Feith nodded. “Okay, yeah. Fine.”

Months passed, with Haynes riding Feith for a proposal. They finally hammered one out and sent it to Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary and a celebrated procrastinator in his own right. But this time he signed off on the document quickly and transmitted it to Rumsfeld for final approval.

The new process was in place for dispatching the luckless men from Guantanamo who had been inadvertently caught up in the hunt for terrorists. Many had languished in their cells for more than eleven months.

•  •  •  

Abu Zubaydah stood flat against a concrete wall with a thick roll of cloth draped around his neck. The CIA officer in front of him grabbed the cloth and forcibly jerked him forward. The interrogator immediately shoved Zubaydah back, slamming his shoulder blades into the hard wall. He moaned in pain.

This was the first time that the CIA used “walling” on any detainee, and the interrogator was, inadvertently, doing it wrong. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had approved exploiting the technique only if the subject was thrown against a false and flexible wall. That detail had escaped the attention of the CIA officers at the secret prison where Zubaydah was being held. The tactic they were using was not authorized; it would not be the last time interrogators went beyond the legal restrictions provided by the Office of Legal Counsel. The semantic fine points that the lawyers had invoked to separate potentially illegal acts from lawful ones had been lost in a big-league game of telephone—from the Justice Department to the CIA general counsel to the agency’s Directorate of Operations, and finally to the interrogators on the ground.

The manhandling had been going on for just under an hour. At the start of the session, the CIA officer had told Zubaydah that he would do whatever it took to squeeze important information out of him. He had begun by slapping Zubaydah in the face or the abdomen whenever he seemed to be putting up resistance.

After the walling, Zubaydah was placed inside a confinement box for several hours. While he was there, one of the CIA officers realized they were supposed to have used a false wall; they fetched some plywood and leaned it against the concrete. When Zubaydah was removed from the box, he was walled again into the sheet of wood.

When the first session ended, the interrogators chained Zubaydah into a standing position with his arms above his head so that he couldn’t sleep. He was naked, except for a diaper. In part to ensure that he had no solid food in his stomach, he was placed on a liquid diet—the doctors on-site feared he might throw up when he was waterboarded later and inhale chunks of his own vomit.

Before the interrogation resumed, a doctor and psychologist checked Zubaydah. Then, questioning, slapping, walling. This time, though, a new tactic was introduced—cold water was poured on him repeatedly for several minutes. Afterward, it was back to the chains, the diaper, and the liquid diet.

With each session, the aggressiveness increased. But still, the CIA officers believed he was not telling the full truth. He was saying nothing about the possible attack on a nuclear reactor, and administration officials believed that was imminent. Zubaydah, they felt sure, knew of information that could stop a 9/11 sequel, but he wouldn’t talk. So the interrogators checked with Langley and got the green light to waterboard him.

Zubaydah was brought into a room and strapped down on a gurney, which was leaned back about fifteen degrees. After Zubaydah exhaled, leaving his lungs collapsed, one of the interrogators held a black cloth against his mouth while another poured water from a plastic bottle onto his face. The liquid flowed into his mouth and nose; the cloth acted like a one-way valve, allowing water to run in but preventing Zubaydah from coughing it out. The fluid filled his head, sinuses, and throat. Even though, because of the incline of the gurney, no liquid could enter his lungs, Zubaydah sucked in the water as he struggled to breathe, experiencing an uncontrollable sense of impending death. He was a drowning man who could not drown.

After less than thirty seconds, the interrogator stopped pouring the water, the cloth was removed from Zubaydah’s face, and the gurney was elevated to a vertical position. Liquid flowed out of his head as the straps dug into his injuries. As expected, he vomited.

A moment passed. Then the gurney was leaned back again, the cloth placed over Zubaydah’s mouth, and water poured on his face. Terrified, Zubaydah urinated on himself.

He would be waterboarded eighty-three times during August.

•  •  •  

Colin Powell could feel it. The administration was rushing toward a unilateral military showdown in Iraq. Several advisors were urging the president to disregard the talk about international coalitions; decisive action was called for, they argued—every minute of delay increased the threat Saddam posed to American security. Fretting over world opinion was a dangerous waste of time.

On the evening of August 5, Powell seized his chance to make the case for diplomacy. He met with Bush and Rice at the White House residence, prepared to spell out in the starkest terms the potentially ruinous, yet rarely stated, consequences of an invasion of Iraq.

It could well destabilize Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan—all allies in the war on terror. Bush would become the Western autocrat of a proud Muslim nation until some sort of indigenous government could be cobbled together.

Then there were the British. If Bush refused to pursue a diplomatic solution, he would be virtually thumbing his nose at the Blair government. The prime minister
needed
cover from the U.N. Jack Straw, the foreign affairs minister, had hammered home that point repeatedly to Powell. Ignoring the political minefield Blair was stepping through would not only imperil his political future, it would raise unnecessary tensions between Britain and America. Blair had, in many ways, become an indispensable ally. He could not be taken for granted.

Bush looked at Powell. “What should I do?” he asked. “What else can I do?”

“You can still make a pitch for a coalition or U.N. action to do what needs to be done,” Powell said.

But, he said, the president had to be aware of one possibility: The U.N. might resolve the problem by disarming Iraq and leave Saddam in power.

•  •  •  

At Guantanamo, Ali Soufan was sitting in front of Qahtani, conducting another interview. The FBI agent was handling the interrogation in his usual style—trying to establish a relationship, discussing Islam, speaking about Arab culture—all in a calm but firm tone.

In session after session, Soufan stressed that, at some point, Qahtani would talk and that opening up now was the best choice. “You will find yourself in a difficult situation if you don’t speak with me,” Soufan said.

Qahtani refused to buckle. Soufan recommended that he be moved to an even more remote location at Guantanamo where his isolation would be complete. It was not a tactic commonly resorted to by law enforcement, but this was an uncommon case.

On August 8, after the bureau and the military approved of the plan, Qahtani was transported by ambulance from his cell in Camp Delta to the navy brig. There, his life took a desolate turn. Under Soufan’s instructions, the guards stopped speaking to him and would not allow him to look at them. When they entered his cell, they would cover their faces or order him to turn away. Seclusion, Soufan believed, would chip away at his captive’s resolve.

And indeed, Qahtani found the brig to be the most miserable place he had been detained. The windows were covered at all times. He never knew if it was night or day. He didn’t know when to pray. He didn’t know how to face Mecca.

Though Qahtani’s confinement had become more onerous, Soufan stayed respectful. He was never aggressive. He would pray with him and offer him tea. Other than his admonition that Qahtani would crack sooner or later, Soufan never said anything that could even vaguely be interpreted as a threat.

It worked. Qahtani began to open up.

He revealed that he had a relative living in Chicago. The man, named Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, had already been detained on a material witness warrant, but the statements from Qahtani convinced law enforcement that his relative was an al-Qaeda sleeper agent.

Qahtani also disclosed that he had attended the Farouq training camps in Afghanistan, where he had been taught about tactics and weapons. He had sworn his allegiance to bin Laden in early 2001 and vowed that he would do whatever the al-Qaeda leader asked of him. Then he admitted that he had planned to join the other hijackers in the 9/11 strikes. He knew little about the operation, he said, and even less about other al-Qaeda plans.

His denials struck Soufan and other FBI agents as credible—Qahtani had been recruited to serve as a “muscle” hijacker, responsible only for subduing the passengers. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s standard practice was to keep information about an attack compartmentalized, even from the participants; each was told only enough to do his job. Someone in Qahtani’s role would not have been informed of much.

Soufan’s coups from his interrogations with Qahtani were another success for the FBI. Yet once again, intelligence officials bushed aside the accomplishment, certain that the al-Qaeda terrorist was tricking law enforcement. The military told the FBI to get out of the way—Qahtani knew more and just wasn’t telling. If they were going to learn anything, the military officers said, then they were going to have to get rough.

•  •  •  

A group of FBI agents, postal inspectors, and state police approached a blue mailbox near the corner of Bank and Nassau Streets, across from Princeton University.

Numerous cases of anthrax infection had months before turned up among New Jersey postal workers connected to a sorting center in Hamilton. Since that time, investigators had gathered more than six hundred samples from mailboxes and other locations where letters might have been held, sending them to the state health department in Trenton for testing. The Princeton mailbox had just come back positive for anthrax spores. Now the investigators knew where the anthrax killer had mailed the deadly letters.

While agents and police went door-to-door along Nassau Street questioning shop owners, workers removed the mailbox. It was taken to an airport and airlifted to a laboratory for further testing.

•  •  •  

Judge Doumar summoned lawyers in the Hamdi case to a hearing on August 13. After court was called to order, he brought out the two-page declaration from Michael Mobbs that the government had filed weeks before as the explanation for Hamdi’s continued detention.

Doumar held up the document. “I’m going to be focusing exclusively in this hearing on the Mobbs declaration,” he said. “If I rely on this, then I must pick it apart.”

He glared down at Gregory Garre, the assistant solicitor general appearing on behalf of the government. “If you gave me the information,” Doumar said, “then all of this could have been avoided.”

The questions tumbled out. Who is this Mobbs person? What qualifies him to be a “special advisor”?

“He’s an undersecretary of defense,” Garre replied, “and he’s substantially involved in detainee issues.”

But Mobbs seemed to have no personal information about Hamdi. All the declaration said was that he had read documents and was familiar with circumstances in the case.