Entries from an internal NSA publication, which were among the documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, described staffers’ deployments to Guantánamo Bay during a time period when prisoners were subjected to brutal questioning and mistreatment. An NSA employee also described participation in a rendition, when U.S. forces seized six men in Bosnia and secreted them off to Cuba.
In October 2003, a post in SIDtoday, the online newsletter of the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, or SID, advertised the “chance to get to GITMO for 90 days!”
The NSA’s liaison, or NSA LNO, would “coordinate” with interrogators “to collect information of value to the NSA Enterprise and Extended Enterprise” and be “responsible for interfacing with the DoD, CIA, and FBI interrogators on a daily basis in order to assess and exploit information sourced from detainees.” In some instances, the relationship would go the other way, with the NSA providing “sensitive NSA-collected technical data and products to assist JTF-GTMO [Joint Task Force Guantánamo] interrogation efforts.”
The post’s title was “Can You Handle the Truth?” — a reference to Jack Nicholson’s famous line in the courtroom drama A Few Good Men, set in Guantánamo.
Two months later, in another post, an NSA liaison reported back on his trip. “On a given week,” he wrote, he would “pull together intelligence to support an upcoming interrogation, formulate questions and strategies for the interrogation, and observe or participate in the interrogation.”
Outside work, “fun awaits,” he enthused. “Water sports are outstanding: boating, paddling, fishing, water skiing and boarding, sailing, swimming, snorkeling, and SCUBA.” If water sports were “not your cup of tea,” there were also movies, pottery, paintball, and outings to the Tiki Bar. “Relaxing is easy,” he concluded.
Other accounts of Guantánamo around the same time were not so sunny.
FBI agents there internally protested the interrogation tactics they witnessed, describing them as “torture techniques” and “beyond the bounds of standard FBI practice,” including detainees being chained in fetal positions on the floor, without food or water, and the use of strobe lights, loud music, and dogs.
The International Committee of the Red Cross charged in a 2004 confidential report that treatment of some prisoners at Guantánamo was “tantamount to torture.” In a June 2004 visit, its investigators reported “humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions” and “some beatings,” according to a New York Times report.
The George W. Bush administration began bringing prisoners to Guantánamo in early 2002, and by the end of the year, over 600 men had been processed at the prison. Over the next few years, over a hundred more would arrive. Despite the Bush administration’s rhetoric that Guantánamo held “the worst of the worst,” many of them were innocent men, some of whom had been sold for bounty to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Only a handful of them would ever be charged with a crime by the U.S. government.
It’s not a surprise that the NSA would send representatives to support military operations (as detailed in this Department of Defense doctrine), but its role during this controversial period remains murky. In the many investigations into detainee treatment, the NSA has hardly surfaced.
Neither the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s detention and rendition program (which confirmed the existence of two CIA facilities at Guantánamo) nor a 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse by the military addresses the role of the NSA, at least in the heavily censored versions that have been made public.
The NSA declined to comment for this story.
The NSA documents made explicit reference to the CIA working on interrogations at Guantánamo. At the time of the documents, in late 2003, the CIA had just brought four of its “high-value” prisoners to Guantánamo: alleged al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who helped plan the 9/11 attacks, and Abd Al-Rahman al-Nashiri, accused of planning the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. These men had been subjected to torture in other overseas CIA prisons; Zubaydah, for instance, was waterboarded 83 times. They were moved out of Guantánamo again in March 2004, when it appeared imminent that the Supreme Court was going to give detainees access to U.S. courts (all four came back in 2006, after Bush acknowledged and closed the CIA black sites).
A Bosnian riot police officer in front of Sarajevo’s central prison guards a car containing some of the six Algerian men suspected of having terrorist links, Jan. 18, 2002.
Photo: Sava Radovanovic/AP
Midnight Convoy in Sarajevo
Another SIDtoday entry described a rendition in which six men were bundled away from Bosnia to Guantánamo in early 2002. Most renditions were CIA-run; this is one of the only such operations known to have been carried out by the military outside Afghanistan.
The men — natives of Algeria who became known as “The Algerian Six” — had been linked to a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, but a Bosnian judge had ordered them released for lack of evidence. But the United States leaned on the Bosnian government to hand them over instead.
The NSA staffer who wrote the SIDtoday piece recounted the operation as part of a series of anecdotes provided by NSA employees about working overtime.
“Because much of the evidence against them came from U.S. intel, the Bosnian government didn’t have access to it, and after a couple of months in custody, the six prisoners were scheduled to be released without trial,” she wrote. “The U.S. did not want to let them go back into the general population,” so the commander of the unit in charge, Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, “planned to take the prisoners into U.S. custody as soon as they were released by the Bosnians. The prisoners would be taken from Sarajevo up to Tuzla.”
The staffer was tasked with watching for the possibility of an ambush on the military convoy. The men’s release, she wrote, “was delayed for several hours due to a large demonstration outside the building they were being held in,” and “the convoy did not leave Sarajevo until after midnight.”
“The ‘gentlemen’ in question are still guests of the U.S. government, at Guantánamo Bay,” she wrote in the entry dated September 3, 2008. In fact, just a few months later, a federal judge ordered five of the six men released on lack of evidence. One of them, Lakhdar Boumediene, had brought a suit that led to a landmark decision in June 2008 that Guantánamo detainees had the right to challenge their detention in federal court. The last of the men, Belkacem Bensayah, was released to Algeria in 2013.
“A Unique Opportunity Awaits You” in Iraq
NSA analysts were also intimately involved in interrogations in Iraq; a December 2003 call for volunteers to deploy to Baghdad as counterterrorism analysts with the Iraq Survey Group, which was leading the search for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, said that “the selectee will, in all likelihood, be involved in the interrogation/questioning of potential leads,” as well as “the evaluation and analysis of interrogation reports and other HUMINT-based reports.”
A June 2003 SIDtoday article described snapshots of a trip with Maj. Gen. Richard J. Quirk III, then the agency’s director for signals intelligence. The photos for the entry are missing from the file, but one caption described a visit to Abu Ghraib prison, where “the group discussed the role of interrogations and how they can provide links for SIGINT.” In an ironic addition, given that Abu Ghraib would soon become the notorious symbol of prisoner abuse, the newsletter noted the group “also visited one of Saddam’s torture chambers.”
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All those resources. All those years. All those three letter agencies.
For maybe 200 guys?
“Doing special things to special people in special places”
power madmen and lunatics:
Bush Administration Convicted of War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity
and the United States loses face around the world…
the latest joke is: of the remaining 80 prisoners / 10 of which have been tried and found guilty. They will be allowed to plead GUILTY….but have not said what the charges are……
It’s too bad there don’t seem to be documents on the interrogations carried out from late 2001-2002, which is when the CIA took over from the FBI’s more criminal-style interrogations of captured Al Qaeda suspects. This is a critically important period (John Yoo’s torture memo, David Addington’s briefs, etc.) when the torture program was initiated. See for example:
http://tortureaccountability.org/david_addington
It’s important to be clear about why the torture program was implemented – by all accounts, the FBI was getting good information from Al Qaeda suspects without torture (including a lot of politically problematic info about links to some of the Saudi Royals and other 9/11 financiers) – but what they were not getting, what the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team wanted, was links between Iraq and 9/11. Recall, that was the initial effort to justify an invasion of Iraq, that Saddam had some link to the hijackers.
As with Soviet show trials of the Stalin era, the goal of the torture was not ‘accurate information’ but rather, false confessions that could be used to justify a course of action that Bush and Cheney already had in mind (see the Cheney Energy Task Force reports on Iraqi oil contracts from March 2001, pre-9/11). This is why the CIA destroyed all its interrogation tapes from that period, I think – they would have shown that the Saddam-9/11 link was at the top of their agenda; that’s what the interrogators would have been asking about in those tapes.
Torture is useless for getting reliable information; it’s used to obtain false confessions, or as when it was expanded throughout Iraq by Rumsfeld, Miller, etc. from 2004 onwards, to terrify civilian populations at a time when the Iraq insurgency was exploding in response to the neocolonial occupation administration of Paul Bremer.
tapes of the tortures were under court order not to be destroyed – and they were destroyed. Those involved were charged but the Statute of Limitations was allowed to expire making prosecutions impossible….(remember George H.W.Bush was head of the C.I.A. before he became President)
Interestingly, the FBI is credited, more than the CIA, with specializing in torture tactics as mentioned in an authorized J. Edgar Hoover bio, “…The Man and the Secrets”.
This means the FBI’s torture methods documented at Guantanamo are also readily accessible for use against domestic political dissenters within the US.
Throw the NSA into the mix? The picture of a domestic gestapo police state continues to emerge. Thanks for the reporting.
Did the NSA collect brain wave files of the prisoners while being tortured? Were these brain wave files, or the information gleaned from them, used by technicians and psychologists to make a computerized program of remote no-touch torture by signals technologies? That can be used on anyone, anywhere, anytime the oligarchy wants? With complete impunity?
Is GTMO really a research facility for the most sophisticated computerized program of torture ever developed, to be used on the entire world’s populations? Is the reason they don’t close GTMO because they need standing to justify the old imperial concept of guilty until proven innocent – on anyone in the world? No fair trials. No trials at all. Just torture and brainwashing? Indefinite detention. The end of Habeas Corpus?
We can’t know because we can’t get the information from FOIA. Or the Senate Torture Report. It’s all secret.
And this is all somehow okay?
See: https://everydayconcerned.net/
If ever, there was living proof, the NSA, is run and staffed by UNHINGED PSYCHOPATHS, this article is it. Moreover, this should be enough to prosecute these scumsucking maggots as WAR CRIMINALS. And here we thought the NSA’s mandate was collecting foreign SIGNINT. In reality, they are no less war criminals than those other pond scum cockroaches in the CIA, as they CONSPIRED and witnessed the torture of human beings with impunity.
As if that weren’t enough, there’s the cover-up, via collusion between the Executive, the DOJ, FBI, DEA Congressional IC committee turds like Burr, the CIA and any other agency that received a copy, and then complied with Burr’s “order” not to open the report lest it become government records, and to return it to Burr so he can disappear them permanently…..in order to forever bury the names of those war criminals to prevent any future prosecution attempts, and to protect the United States Government from any and all legal remedies any victims might think of seeking.
In other words, a VAST CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY BY THE ENTIRE USG, TO KEEP PROOF OF CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY PERPETRATED BY THE USG, FROM EVER SEEING THE LIGHT OF DAY, AND TO REMOVE THE STENCH OF IT’S CRIMINAL ACTS FROM THE HISTORICAL RECORD.
IF, there is one thing to be learned here.. this government has LOST IT’S MANDATE OF HEAVEN…and it’s stature in the world as a leader in human rights. Moreover, this episode in our nations history, is living proof, the USG no longer operates under the RULE OF LAW. In fact…it MOCKS IT. And finally, if the perpetrators of this criminal act are allowed to escape prosecution by virtue of the COWARDICE of those mandated with the power to do so, this country is no longer worth saving, or pledging allegiance to. As for me…I SPIT IN THE VILE, REPUGNANT USG’s FACE.
That “water skiing and boarding” line is sooo clever. A way to say it without the keyword, kinda catchy. I wonder if it was clever and catchy enough that there are other documents that never came up on a FOIA for “water boarding” that would come up with that as a phrase.
dont kid yourself
this is not america
this is nazi germany, it’s US backed egypt, it’s US backed libya, it’s syria, it’s cia installed pinochet’s argentina, it’s cia installed shah’s iran, or cia backed marco’s regime, or any of the US & CIA backed banana republics, let’s not forget vietnam.
NOW WE ARE THEM.
Yes, we are all of THEM.
And just like people during Nazi Germany and other vile governments, most people are decent, but unable to stop the government from doing such horrible deeds. We know what is happening, we have known it for years and it is out in the open, but those responsible have not been stopped!
This government has been doing horrible deeds much longer than any other government in the past, and yet it continues killing with self righteous audacity.
When we blame Nazis and say that all the people knew what was happening, and that they should have done something, we know now how dangerous it is to do something, because the government is determined to silence those who try.
Cora, bring this to Dan’s attention if he hasn’t seen it (What Torture Report?):
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/whoops-cia-watchdog-mistakenly-destroys-its-sole-copy-senate-torture-report
No one cares that they were tortured.
We care that torture doesn’t work.
I’m sure we all know that if you start torturing someone for something they didn’t do , but you are SURE they did, they start making up stuff, thus leading you away , wasting your resources , etc etc.
Better and better torture methods are just better and better ways of wasting our time and resources.
That’s what ticks us off.
Speak for yourself, Kevin: I for one do care whether or not people who are paid with my taxes commit torture, for it is immoral, unethical, and against international law. The people doing the torturing, and those who authorized it, or justified it, are criminals, as are those who to this day refuse to prosecute them. It really is that simple.
In the above article, there are a number of parallels between what the NSA and their cronies do abroad and what is being done here at home. Manufacturing evidence, warrantless searches, torture, even murder. So even if your sole objection to torture is that it is ineffective, you should care, because it’s coming to someone you love, and soon.
Well said.
I understand what you are saying: the official emphasis is always on the waste of resources, instead of the ethics and the moral wrong of torture.
Unfortunately that is the argument of an unethical government.
NOW I understand why our man Edward Snowden will never be given leniency, much less a pardon by a U.S. president.
Because U.S. authorities have no idea what could come next from reporters for the foreseeable future. (Until they hack one of the reporter’s stashes anyway – as they inevitably will.)
Even if there is something Ed himself wouldn’t want published, at this point it’s out of his hands. And he was not able to view or understand the implications of all that he took. A gung-ho reporting team may go well beyond what he wanted, marching to the beat of their own anti-American agenda. (Yeah, I just realized this. A little late to the party.)
I held hope there may be some way for him to come back. But it is an open-ended problem, and now I see no way.
At this point, I wonder why Ed wouldn’t provide the NSA with the exact stash he took. Not that they have the luxury to believe him.
How do you un-torture somebody?
I’ve been asking for years and not a single troll has even attempted to reply.
You don’t, but the government should should stop torturing people, shut down Gitmo and prosecute war crimes ASAP. I guess the average American doesn’t mind torturing people without due process, though. So very sad.
If you ask for something impossible, even trolls can’t help you.
How insightful! I never would have thought that the NSA would be involved in interrogations. Another groundbreaking revelation thanks to the noblest of heroes, Edwards Snowden.
Amen !!!!!!!!