camp chaos: u.s. counterterrorism operations at guantanamo bay, cuba

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Camp Chaos: U.S. CounterterrorismOperations at Guantanamo Bay, CubaJames R. Van de VeldePublished online: 23 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: James R. Van de Velde (2005) Camp Chaos: U.S. Counterterrorism Operations atGuantanamo Bay, Cuba, International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 18:3, 538-548,DOI: 10.1080/08850600590945470

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COMMENTARY

JAMES R. VAN DE VELDE

Camp Chaos: U.S. CounterterrorismOperations at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

Photographs of men in chains and orange jumpsuits waddling towardunmarked buildings have repeatedly given the impression that the terroristprison camp at ‘‘Camp Delta,’’ Guantanamo Bay (GTMO), Cuba, isoppressive and legally autonomous. Many innocent people are said to bewrongly imprisoned. Given the strange and ambiguous mission there, thisimpression is not surprising.

The real situation at GTMO is not that some innocents are perhaps beingheld wrongly (though that may also be an important, true story), but thatthose in charge have a poor idea of what they are doing and theintelligence collection mission is failing. Crucial information is not beinglearned from the assets who are there, and the camp management is sohaphazard that it borders on chaos. Given that many detainees at GTMOlikely have crucial intelligence information related to past and possiblycurrent terrorist planning, this reality is as important as the likelihood thatmany now imprisoned at the United States facility in Cuba do not belongthere.

Of the over 600 detainees in prison in GTMO, perhaps dozens ofindividuals are innocent of terror-planning against the U.S. (although they

Dr. James R. Van de Velde, a Lieutenant Commander in the United StatesNaval Intelligence Reserves, completed a year of voluntary mobilization withthe Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Weapons (CBRN)Branch of the Joint Task Force for Combating Terrorism of the DefenseIntelligence Agency. He traveled to the detention facility at GuantanamoBay, Cuba, twice in 2003 for duties as a mobilized intelligence officer, andreturned again in 2003–2004 as a contractor for Lockheed Martin. The viewsexpressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect the official policyor position of the Department of Defense or the United States government.

International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 18: 538–548, 2005

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc.

ISSN: 0885-0607 print=1521-0561 online

DOI: 10.1080/08850600590945470

538 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENCE

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associate with the wrong company and are hardly friendly to America).Many were in the wrong place at the wrong time, associating with thewrong people. Some carried AK-47 weapons and were defending Talibanenclaves in Afghanistan that were defending al-Qaeda personnel. They maybe guilty of some crimes, but not necessarily conspiracy to murderAmericans. Should such people remain there? That issue is complicated—but secondary to the larger focus of the camp: intelligence collection.

Few complaints can be heard about high-level al-Qaeda prisoners heldaround the world in places unknown. No pictures of them in chains orcells are seemingly available. Yet they are offering invaluableinformation, and the detention programs managing them are completely‘‘black,’’ i.e., secret. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and onlythe CIA, runs those minicamps and individual detention centers. Howthe prisoners are being interrogated has not been the subject ofspeculation within the American punditry (and they are beinginterrogated quite differently). There are no pictures of such camps;there is no criticism of detainee treatment there, largely because they areblack programs.

A JOINT OPERATION

Overall, the GTMO setup is rather strange. As concerns high-level terroroperatives, the public does not even know where they are being held—andfew seem to care about them. But medium- to low-level individuals aresent to GTMO, where their rights and existence become legallyambiguous—not quite covert, but not open either, and open to publicscrutiny.

At ‘‘Camp Delta,’’ prisoners are controlled by three major U.S agencies:the CIA, the Department of Defense (DOD), and the Federal Bureau ofInvest igat ion (FBI) , a l though the Army’s Southern Command(SOUTHCOM) has control over the entire mission. This immediatelycauses ambiguity and confusion: officials from all three agencies (andmany more) will talk to prisoners controlled by the other agencies.‘‘Controlled’’ means an agency will place a detainee on DOD, CIA, or FBI‘‘hold,’’ supposedly meaning that only that agency can interrogate thedetainee without permission from the controlling agency though that ruleis applied inconsistently. And those agencies will not necessarily knowwhen and if another official talks to their prisoner or why, if they do allowothers to interrogate their detainee. And some agencies do not give thecontrolling agency access to the interrogation, or let it know what waslearned, if they are permitted to meet with a detainee. So, while someagencies are running sensitive and complicated interrogations on certainsubjects, other U.S. (and sometimes non-U.S.) officials visit the camp and

CAMP CHAOS: U.S. COUNTERTERRORISM OPERATIONS IN CUBA 539

AND COUNTERINTELLIGENCE VOLUME 18, NUMBER 3

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start talking to the same detainees about similar subjects—often tipping offthe subject matter to the prisoner. Sometimes, this is even donepurposefully, given the rivalries among the intelligence services; most ofthe time it is just bad organization. The result, intuitively, is ofteninterrogation confusion or failure.

Further, the officials who visit have diverse backgrounds in intelligence.Some possess very sensitive clearances and see the big picture; others havelow-level clearances and understand little. Still others have no clearance,and are mainly law enforcement officials. The result is varying opinions ofthe detainees’ intelligence value and culpability, since many think theyunderstand an issue but really don’t know what they don’t know, giventheir clearance levels. So, instead of having one organization run the show,at least three do so, more or less, although no organization really does it well.

The Army’s Southern Command seems ignorant of this fundamentalproblem. The Command may be caught in a bureaucratic web. Politicalpressures continue from each of the bureaucracies involved to have asmuch access as they can and to control as many prisoners as possible, sospeculation is that the Southern Command may be trying to please toomany. But instead of recognizing that the overall mission is undermined bysuch ambiguity, the Command has continued the current structure. Othersthink that those immediately below the commander simply tell him thingsare going well when they are not.

To complicate matters further, although the Department of Defense sharesjust about everything with the larger intelligence community, overall the CIAtends to keep its most meaningful information from the other agencies. Andthe FBI keeps almost everything it learns from the rest of the intelligencecommunity, though what it learns is usually far less important than itthinks it is. The FBI, overall, is still more or less clueless about terrorism,and especially about the context of the intelligence being derived atGuantanamo.

To add to the confusion, the vast majority of military personnel runningthe camp are reservists on temporary or one-year assignments. By the timean individual interrogator learns his=her subject matter, is introduced tothe targeted prisoners, and begins an interrogation plan, he or she is oftenmoved or replaced by another rotating reservist. The detainees notice thisinstability, take advantage of it as much as possible, and often test thereplacement. They often snidely remark that the previous interrogator hadalready learned the subject matter being discussed.

AN ILL-DEFINED MISSION

The second large problem with GTMO is that the Southern Command isschizophrenic in its mission. SOUTHCOM cannot decide whether the

540 JAMES R. VAN DE VELDE

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENCE

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mission is prison for prison’s sake, or gathering intelligence from those beingheld. As a result, instead of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of theDepartment of Defense itself, and not one of its regional combatantcommands being in charge, SOUTHCOM thinks its job is to imprisonfirst, and gather intelligence second.

Yet, GTMO’s mission is unequivocally intelligence gathering. Detaineesmay also be there to serve incarceration time away from the theaters inwhich they were conspiring to kill Americans, but the need to accrue asmuch information as possible from each and every detainee is supreme.No degree in military strategy is required to recognize that in any war,especially one against terrorists, intelligence gathering is the overarchingmission, trumping all others. Yet this eludes some officials. The factthat some senior military officers do not agree is astonishingly strangeand inexplicable. They oppose the DIA’s being in charge. GTMOdetainees may be of varying degrees of intelligence value, but what theyhave contributed to the total picture sometimes includes actionableintelligence. Those detainees having little or no intelligence value,though perhaps deserving to serve time here, probably do not belong atGTMO at all.

The Camp’s mission should be intelligence collection. The sole custodianshould be the DIA. No other agencies should be allowed to controldetainees. Just as the CIA controls detainees abroad and the FBI at home,only one agency and one mission should prevail at GTMO.

Ironically, as a sad example of the existing schizophrenia, while many inthe United States fear that the U.S. military is using extraordinary meansto extract intelligence from the detainees—beyond those permitted by theGeneva Convention governing the treatment of prisoners of war—SOUTHCOM, in fact, prohibits just about any interrogation plan thatinvolves any form of detainee stress. For instance, the interrogationtechniques the Israelis are so well adept at performing are just aboutuniversally prohibited at GTMO currently—and the detainees all know it.In short, the U.S. military is not permitted to perform interrogation; onlyelicitation is permitted.

STANDARD OPERATING CONFUSION

The third large problem is that, with no direction having been given to thosedoing intelligence work at GTMO, no standards, established writtenproducts, supervision for the quality of the products, or StandardOperating Procedures (SOPs) are available for anything. In the field, anintelligence officer or specialist normally writes Intelligence InformationReports (IIRs). At a regional command, such as the European Command,a Joint Intelligence Center often analyzes and writes reports—finished



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intelligence reports that are posted on the classified Web for reading bypolicymakers and military leadership. These finished products are based onthose IIRs, along with numerous additional sources of intelligence. Otherintelligence divisions at other commands read these finished reports aswell, for their own general or specific understanding of the matters involved.

At GTMO, because of the lack of original direction, analysts of varyingabilities and backgrounds are producing various written products—but notfinished intelligence reports. And these written reports conform to noknown written products used anywhere else. Worse, they are not subject-based (such as ‘‘chemical weapons,’’ or ‘‘Cole plot,’’ or ‘‘World TradeCenter’’). They are merely reports of information based on interviews—usually just information. IIRs are written, but they represent a fraction ofthe Camp’s written product. In other words, a lot of writing is going on,but not a lot of intelligence production.

Although an initiative to change this has been taken (in fact constantattempts are made to change procedures), the new database to be used tostore information is not used anywhere else. And although it may becomethe de facto data-gathering tool for these and other detainees worldwide,the old methods still linger at GTMO. Information is stored on harddrives, in hard copy files, in databases, and in individual interrogators’safes. Relevant information may be found in several places, and no one filecontains (yet, at least) everything. Since the database was introducedalmost two years after the camp was established, a lot of information isnot yet in the database.

GTMO analysts are writing reports of discussions and interrogations, butnot putting the obtained information in any larger intelligence context. Theresult is that the reports are either read by only a handful of people or noone at all. These reports sit in a shared computer drive. And since thereports are not true IIRs (although IIRs are written if the information isconsidered substantive), they are not sent out as message traffic to allowanalysts worldwide to make name, place, or item connections to otherintelligence leads. Worse, these reports are not even pushed up to theDefense Intelligence Agency in Washington. And lately, given the revelationsof possible espionage by individuals formerly associated with GTMO, aneffort has been made to place a special clearance requirement on thereports—the very reports that are not even read by many in the first place.Doing so will make the reports (which are in a format not used anywhereelse in the world, and which are not driven specifically by an intelligenceagency inquiry) even less likely to be read by anyone. But much worse, theywill become even harder to use for intelligence collection and analysispurposes, unless the database is embraced and becomes a successful tool.

The intelligence goal in the war on terrorism is to reveal previouslyunknown associations in order to anticipate events. But, instead of



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protecting information, the GTMO written product works to hide fromintelligence centers the very information that is invaluable to the overallintelligence effort.

PERSONNEL, MORALE, AND THE RISK OF MISSION FAILURE

Numerous tertiary problems exist at GTMO as well, many of which arecertainly not minor.

a. The Military Does Not Have Enough Interrogators

Most personnel sent to GTMO are really ‘‘strategic debriefers,’’ notinterrogators. Strategic debriefers are trained to elicit information fromwilling individuals—defectors, mostly, or cooperative prisoners. There is anart to such work, but the strategic debriefers the U.S. Army produces havelittle real-world experience. Yet, the United States is not collecting manydefectors in the current war.

Interrogation is most certainly an art not easily learned in the classroom.Although it, too, is taught by the U.S. Army (to Army, Navy, Air Force, andMarine personnel), because just completing a class does not mean anindividual is competent at interrogation. It is an art perhaps bestdeveloped by years of experience. The interrogation mission at GTMOrequires an all-star team of interrogators, those with a consummateunderstanding of the intelligence issues related to the detainee, and theskill to elicit intelligence from (in most cases) extremely unwilling andhostile foreign combatants. Very few such skilled individuals are posted atGTMO. In fact, most of the interrogators at the Cuba base, despite aresume of experience, have litt le real experience in successfullyinterrogating anyone. Worse, the Army is now sending younger, even lessexperienced replacements to GTMO. These individuals have little-to-nointelligence backgrounds, and are typically especially ignorant of thecomplicated world of al-Qaeda. They are mainly reservists plucked fromtheir civilian careers, told to read a book or two on al-Qaeda, given thefour-week Army interrogation class, and sent to duty at GTMO.

Current interrogators, perhaps reflecting their environment, appeardisorganized, sloppy, verbose, and often confusing. In the presence ofdetainees who often think they are superior to Americans (such as Saudidetainees), such sloppiness only empowers the prisoners.

Since a high percentage of detainees are uncooperative, manyinterrogators have concluded that such individuals will never cooperate.Thus, subsequent interviews become self-fulfilling: the interrogatorsanticipate uncooperativeness, and when they get a push back, they take it,write it up, and move on to the next person. The end result is that the



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detainee is empowered. Not enough thought is given as to how to approachand perhaps crack difficult cases.

The FBI’s interrogators are the least successful. Their experience, if theyhave any in interrogation, is mainly in confronting bank robbers—notbreaking terrorists. And, typically, an FBI agent at GTMO has little-to-nointerrogation experience whatsoever, just interview experience (they are notthe same—in fact they are somewhat in tension). One FBI interrogatorbecame so sympathetic with his detainee that he was rumored to haveconverted to Islam. Later, another interrogation team determined that thedetainee in question had actually been involved in the World Trade Centerattack and a follow-on plot. But the FBI interrogator, despite months ofdiscussion with the individual, had no idea.

The best interrogators at GTMO tend to be the career police officersmobilized by their reserve units to visit on a military tour of three-to-sixmonths. Their experience at solving local crimes through close questioningof suspects serves them well. In constrast, the trained interrogators atGTMO, both military and civilian, have book knowledge but few realsuccess stories to claim. Overall, their performance record is spotty topoor. Their attempts to break hardened terrorists (and there are plenty atGTMO) are usually met with failure. The cops at GTMO are so muchmore successful that they became specialists in approaching hard cases,especially cases where detainees are suspected of possessing actionableintelligence.

Because the military does not have enough interrogators, it has contractedout many interrogation billets to a private sector Washington contractor.These individuals, who are supposed to provide continuity and expertise,are resented by the military interrogators who receive only about one-thirdtheir salary. Although the Army is unable to provide a sufficient numberof interrogators, the contract personnel are unwelcome by some in thereserve officer corps, and are often viewed by those who resent them asless committed to the overall military mission.

b. Short-Term Tours

Many of the military interrogators sent to GTMO come for only 6–12 monthtours. Unless they happen to be specialists in the field, and understand at leastthe general intelligence surrounding an individual detainee, the interrogatorswill have little time to become familiar and proficient in the field before theyrotate home. The contract personnel, meanwhile, are there for longer tours,and provide continuity and institutional memory. Yet, the militaryleadership has a tough time figuring out a consistent, logical, andcooperative mission for these civilian contractors. Since most individuals atGTMO are reservists and are effectively at the camp for only 6–8 months



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(a one-year rotation includes an in-processing and out-processing period andtwo trips home), many major equipment purchases do not arrive until thosebuying them have left Cuba. In some cases, computers, scanners, and otherexpensive equipment have arrived to a middle management that did notknow why such equipment was even ordered.

c. The Interrogators at GTMO, Both Military and Civilian,Are Not Intelligence Analysts

The military analysts sent to support the interrogators have little-to-nointelligence or terrorist experience. Yet, the war on terror is to a greatextent an intelligence war. It requires the deepest and best analysts tosupport the interrogators in making associations and following leadsworldwide. Thus, an inexperienced interrogator merely asking anuncooperative detainee questions provided or suggested by a list of generalrequirements from Washington is likely to fail. The overall interrogationeffort is hampered by a military analytical support team that has a weakunderstanding of the background intelligence, and interrogators who arerarely specialists in terrorism.

d. Morale Is a Problem

The military housing for the active duty enlisted personnel is two to a bedroom,with bath and, in some cases, showers across the street. In the temporaryhousing used for new arrivals, whenever someone returns from a shift orwakes for a new shift, everyone is awakened. The few common rooms thatexist for the incoming enlisted personnel are not air-conditioned, nor do theyall have televisions or telephones. Those who rotate out of GTMO have suchlow morale and so little respect for what they are doing that they barelytrain their incoming replacements. In some cases, there is no overlap at all.And since middle management changes the operating procedure of the campsevery rotation (which means just about every 6–8 months), interrogatorsrotating home have little to say to the incoming group, and instead murmurcriticisms about the constant change. As a result, low morale is affecting theoverall success of the mission.

e. Mid-Management Ineffectiveness

At the analyst=interrogator working level, just about everything needsimprovement. The interrogators are mediocre-to-poor; the analysts have littlebackground in terrorism or intelligence; team leaders are short-term, havelittle experience in intelligence, and little feel for this type of leadership;middle management is ineffective in addressing the problems; and leadershipappears blind to the problems that exist. (Incredibly, despite the U.S.spending millions on the GTMO prison, there are not enough headphones



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for all the interrogators and analysts to monitor interviews; arriving personnelare recommended to buy their own at the base exchange.)

f. Database Incompatibility

Although the new database is designed to be more easily researchable, itis unique and does not talk with other agencies’ databases. Thedata-warehousing format seems to be changed by the military managementevery 6–8 months. And although the idea of a standardized database maysound good, for the past two years all analysts and interrogators havebeen populating a hard drive Word file. When the new database wasintroduced, only a few turned to the new system. Most analysts andinterrogators simply continued to add to their existing hard-drive files;they were comfortable with them. And since directives come and go, manyhad no faith that the new database would survive (and it may not).Further still, no one wanted to spend the huge number of hours copyingnotes from the hard drive into the new database.

Weeks after the database was introduced, the base commander directedthat an assessment paper be written for all detainees. The fields of themodel provided to the analysts and interrogators were more or lessidentical to the hard-drive fields and the new database fields. Instead ofprinting off the existing forms, all analysts had to take weeks off their jobsof analyzing intelligence to cut and paste from either the hard drive or thedatabase or both, as well as copy from the old hard copy files thatincluded FBI and other reports, to write the assessment papers. No one inmiddle management bothered to argue that the effort was duplicative, orthat it was the third such initiative since the Camp opened to determinewho should and should not be held for continued detention at GTMO.

g. A Replacement Crew Writes the Assessments

In many cases, new analysts and interrogators were writing assessments ondetainees that they had never seen. Worse again, the resulting overallpaper, written at the Secret level, is then reviewed by more senior analystsat the Top Secret (TS) level, who may recommend action in contrast tothe initial recommendation, given the TS analyst’s more classifiedperspective. The analyst at the Secret level is left wondering why he or sheshould bother writing the assessment in the first place. Stranger still, theCamp set up a Detainee Assessment Branch, which takes the assessment(rewritten at the Top Secret level), reviews it, and makes its ownassessment, leaving the original analyst wondering why he bothers to comeinto work at all. But, then, that assessment is sent to the Office of theSecretary of Defense at the Pentagon, which makes yet another judgment,



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leaving everyone at the lower levels wondering whether his or her judgment isappropriately valued.

h. Major Problems at the Top

The senior civilian leadership of the Department of Defense at GTMO isineffective in making any changes or offering observations to theprocedure because the military leadership, like most military leaderships, isuncomfortable listening to any civilians in their command. And the juniorofficer corps, made up of mostly short-term reservists, wants, of course, toget a good Officer Evaluation Report, and so follows military direction, nomatter how inefficient it may seem.

MINOR PROBLEMS, BUT PROBLEMS NONETHELESS

The cult of technology, as in many other aspects of the U.S. military today, isinfecting and inhibiting the traditional intelligence officer. Requests forinformation on detainees are being generated worldwide. These make theirway into formal messages, then into tasking databases, which make theirway to the analyst and interrogator. The analyst=interrogator team thenspends most of its time responding to questions that are computer-driven,rather than thinking about what each individual detainee may know.Thinking for oneself is being replaced by following directions from above,and from a computer-generated list of requirements. This may reflect alack of confidence in the interrogators=analysts at the Camp level. But italso encourages the very laziness in analysis and preparation feared bythose who instituted the outside requirements procedure.

Physically, too, the Camp offices that house the analysts and interrogatorslook horrible. There are not enough chairs for the personnel. None of theoffices has enough computers. Many rooms are disorganized, dirty, andreek of disinterest. Seemingly, little sense of military pride is present. Mostof the interrogators are Army; this may not suggest something about theArmy, though an Air Force Command would likely look very different.

THE RESULTS OF INCOMPETENCE

Despite having undergone training, current interrogators are often, if notusually, defeated by counter-interrogation techniques and just plaindetainee noncooperation. Interrogators are constantly pressured to producewritten products, and often generate near identical reports, or reports oflittle new substance, after having met with uncooperative detainees timeafter time. Team leaders are pressured by the Camp commander toproduce IIRs. The commander often gets his IIRs, but they usuallycontain little of substance.



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Most of the most-hardened prisoners at GTMO have not been broken.Attempts at breaking them to date (through the use of loud music, sleepinterruption) have proven feeble. Detainees know well what Americans willand will not do. They know that U.S. interrogators will never physicallyharm them. The only current lever available to GTMO interrogators is thethreat to keep a detainee indefinitely. But since so few detainees have beenhandled with skill, and interrogations are more ‘‘interview’’ than‘‘interrogation,’’ and since the detainees have typically seen a half-dozendifferent interrogators to date, and most detainees have been at GTMOfor two years already, no detainee feels much confidence that anything hesays or does not say will necessarily advance his departure.

As with most Washington problems, incompetence explains more thanconspiracy. Although the overall mission has had many successes, theinterrogations conducted at GTMO are not as good as they should be, andthat is a U.S. national security concern. But, other than those who arethere, no one seems to know this.



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camp chaos: u.s. counterterrorism operations at guantanamo bay, cuba

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