"Most of these Gomers didn’t know shit"

"Most of these Gomers didn’t know shit"

by digby

Here's a question I haven't seen asked before? It comes from an old CIA hand talking with The Intercept's Ken Silverstein:

“It doesn’t matter what tactics you use, you’re not going to get information if people don’t know anything and most of these Gomers didn’t know shit,” he said. “Who in the leadership was stupid enough to think they would? Why would these guys have detailed knowledge about plans and targeting? Even if they were hard-core jihadis who took part in operations, that doesn’t mean they would have knowledge of upcoming attacks.”

And, as we know, many of these guys were "sold" to the US troops for a bounty by local rivals, were low level grunts at best or were completely innocent. Some were children, some were very old men.

Remember this?

The BBC's Gordon Corera, in Guantanamo Bay, says the US's interviews with the three children - aged between 13 and 15 - reveal they may have been coerced into fighting in Afghanistan.

General Geoffrey Miller who leads operations at the camp is seeking to have the children released in recognition of their age and co-operation, our correspondent says.

"These juvenile enemy combatants were impressed, were kidnapped into terrorism. They have given us some very valuable intelligence. We are very close to making a recommendation on their transfer back to their home countries," General Miller said.

Big of him. I shudder to think what was done to elicit this "valuable intelligence."

And then there's this famous case:

Omar Ahmed Khadr is a Canadian Islamic Jihadist who was one of the youngest captives and the last Western citizen to be held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Captured at the age of 15 years and 10 months on July 27, 2002 by American forces in the village of Ayub Kheyl, Afghanistan, he was detained, interrogated and sent to Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. He was convicted of killing a U.S. medic by throwing a hand grenade and planting mines to target U.S. convoys [...]

The unconscious Khadr was airlifted to receive medical attention at Bagram. After he regained consciousness approximately a week later, interrogations began. He remained stretcher-bound for several weeks. Col. Marjorie Mosier operated on his eyes after his arrival, though fellow detainee Rhuhel Ahmed later said that Khadr had been denied other forms of surgery to save his eyesight as punishment for not giving interrogators the answers they sought. His requests for darkened sunglasses to protect his failing eyesight were denied for "state security" reasons.
that his confession was gained after it was revealed that Americans had discovered a videotape of Khadr and others making IED's.

Khadr arrived at Guantanamo Bay on October 29 or 30, 2002, suspected of being an enemy combatant. He was recorded as standing 170 cm (5' 7") and weighing 70 kilos (155 lbs), and recalled the guards said, "Welcome to Israel". Despite being under 18, he was treated as an adult prisoner from the beginning at Guantanamo. Officials considered him an "intelligence treasure trove," as his father was suspected of al-Qaeda activities, and the youth had personally met Osama bin Laden. They thought he might be able to offer answers about the al-Qaeda hierarchy, although Omar Khadr was 10 years old when he met bin Laden. 

On January 21, 2003, American military interrogators received a new standard operating procedure, and were told that they had to "radically create new methods and methodologies ... needed to complete this mission in defense of our nation".

In February 2003, Canadian Foreign Affairs intelligence officer Jim Gould and an official from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) were allowed to interrogate Khadr. For three weeks prior to the Canadian visit, the US guards deprived Khadr of sleep, moving him to a new cell every three hours for 21 days in order to "make him more amenable and willing to talk".

Khadr eventually pled guilty and got 8 years --- on top of the time he spent being tortured and waiting for a "trial."

Amy Davidson at the New Yorker wrote this after the Wikileaks revelations:

Here are some of the reasons we’ve held people at Guantánamo, according to files obtained by WikiLeaks and, then, by several news organizations: 

A sharecropper because he was familiar with mountain passes; 

an Afghan “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khost and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver”; 

an Uzbek because he could talk about his country’s intelligence service, and a Bahraini about his country’s royal family (both of those nations are American allies); 

an eighty-nine year old man, who was suffering from dementia, to explain documents that he said were his son’s; 

an imam, to speculate on what worshippers at his mosque were up to; a cameraman for Al Jazeera, to detail its operations; 

a British man, who had been a captive of the Taliban, because “he was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics”; 

Taliban conscripts, so they could explain Taliban conscription techniques; 

a fourteen-year-old named Naqib Ullah, described in his file as a “kidnap victim,” who might know about the Taliban men who kidnapped him. (Ullah spent a year in the prison.)

Our reasons, in short, do not always really involve a belief that a prisoner is dangerous to us or has committed some crime; sometimes (and this is more debased) we mostly think we might find him useful.

I don't know the degree to which these people were tortured but you can bet that no matter what happened to them, it wasn't pretty.

In fact, the transport ritual alone was a form of torture. (This is from Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side")

"A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the 'takeout' of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location. A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to 'sodomy.' He said, 'It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.' The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, 'because it’s demoralizing."

Even these idiots in charge of the CIA and the White House couldn't have believed that all these prisoners had valuable information. They did this stuff because they could. To punish. With torture.


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