GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – Interrogators got intelligence from detainees that helped U.S. troops in Afghanistan attack Taliban fighters last summer – and they did it through casual questioning and not torture, the military's chief interrogator at the base said.
In a rare interview, veteran interrogator Paul Rester complained that his profession has gotten a bad reputation because of accounts of waterboarding and other rough interrogation tactics used by the CIA at “black sites.”
“Everybody in the world believes that they know how we do what we do, and I have to endure it every time I turn around and somebody is making reference to waterboarding,” Rester said. He said his work is “a business that is fundamentally thankless.”
Rester said only two detainees were given relatively rough treatment in Guantanamo, and that was during the earlier days: Mohammed al-Kahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker, who was turned away from the United States by immigration officials just before the Sept. 11 attacks, and an unidentified man who Rester said recruited lead hijacker Mohamed Atta.
Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees, however, say their clients have been subjected to temperature extremes, sleep deprivation and threats at the U.S. military base in southeast Cuba.
Rester said Guantanamo interrogators have had many successes using rapport-building and that the technique is the norm there.
For security reasons, he would discuss only one of the successes, and that was only because his boss, Rear Adm. Mark Buzby, already had described it in a speech last month. Buzby said several detainees, using poster-board paper and crayons, drew detailed maps of the Tora Bora area in eastern Afghanistan that enabled coalition forces to wipe out safe houses, trenches and supplies last summer as Taliban forces were returning to the stronghold they had abandoned more than five years ago.
Buzby, in a separate interview, said a U.S. commander in Afghanistan had requested the information on a Friday and that it was obtained and sent to Afghanistan that weekend.
Rester indicated the interrogators casually asked the detainees about their knowledge of Tora Bora, not letting on that it was tactically important for a pending military strike. “And it may in fact, since it was five years old, have seemed totally innocuous to the persons we were talking to,” he said.
