Guantanamo -- A Holding Cell In War on Terror

U.S. Army Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who commanded the detention operation until recently, dismissed speculation about false confessions and bad information. He said that each piece of information is vetted by a variety of domestic and foreign intelligence sources and databases, and that 90 percent of the intelligence ultimately proves to be valid. Miller is now in charge of the detainee operation in Iraq, where 8,000 prisoners are being held and six American soldiers have been charged with mistreating some of the captives.

Establishing Rapport

Intelligence at Guantanamo is collected by five-member "Tiger Teams." They are composed of interrogators, analysts, translators and representatives from agencies such as the FBI and the CIA. The teams can question captives at any time, escorting them into interrogation rooms in squat white buildings near the cell blocks. The rooms have tables, a few chairs and one-way mirrors. In some, posters in Arabic tell detainees that they are missed by their families and needed back home. The captives can be shackled and chained to steel rings fastened to the floor.

The sessions are not videotaped or tape recorded, Miller said. The interrogations are designed primarily to yield intelligence, not evidence for a court, he said, adding that taping "causes us legal problems." Detainees might gain access to tapes through court proceedings. "Then, it becomes exculpatory," Miller said.

Tiger Team members may not hit or slap a detainee, said Jacobson, the former Pentagon official, who has observed some of the sessions. In fact, the most effective interrogations involve establishing rapport, not intimidation. For example, Jacobson said, an interrogator may praise a detainee's ingenuity in designing a particular bomb. "Interrogation is not screaming at someone for hours," he said.

In one case, an interrogator used a blackboard to list every counterintelligence technique employed by a particular detainee -- such as staring intently at a wall to block out his questioner's voice. Next to each technique, the interrogator listed the page number in a standard al Qaeda manual from which the technique was taken. The detainee eventually lost his composure and smirked, Jacobson said, and a tenuous bond was achieved.

"It is a game; you are playing back and forth," Jacobson said. "And some of these detainees are very tough."

Back in the United States, the value of the intelligence has been met with mixed reviews. While administration officials said it has been significant, some intelligence officers and others familiar with the interrogation sessions said they are not impressed.

One former CIA officer, Peter Probst, said he believes the Tiger Teams at Guantanamo have wrung the detainees dry. Probst said the captives might be of more use after they are released because intelligence agencies could monitor them.

"Even if they were marginal, they would be of interest when released," Probst said. Some released detainees might actually have been enticed into becoming double agents, he said, while others could carry misleading intelligence back to al Qaeda leaders. That could create paranoia and disrupt terrorist operations.

Another U.S. source familiar with Guantanamo said Pentagon officials are in a lose-lose situation with the less-valuable detainees. "After a while, intelligence gets stale and you begin to get the sense that we're just holding these people forever," the source said. "They weren't building cases against them. They were just holding them and keeping them off the street because they were afraid that one or more would do something bad."

The secrecy surrounding the operation has also provided ammunition to critics of the administration. The military has permitted hundreds of journalists to visit the base, but they must adhere to strict rules and be accompanied by handlers at all times. Journalists are required to sign contracts not to speak to detainees. Last year, a detainee shouted to a group of visitors, asking if they were journalists. When the visitors replied that they were from the British Broadcasting Corp., military escorts quickly ended the tour.

Even members of the Senate have had trouble getting responses from the Pentagon. Last December, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) visited the base and asked Rumsfeld when the detainees' status would be resolved.

"We firmly believe it is now time to make a decision on how the United States will move forward regarding the detainees," the senators wrote to Rumsfeld on Dec. 12.

Two months later, Rumsfeld replied that a determination on the status of the detainees was up in the air because "our nation continues to be in an armed conflict. As with any armed conflict, no one can predict when its end will occur."

Butler, the Pentagon official who oversaw Guantanamo, said the administration is doing the best it can under difficult circumstances. He said that nearly a third of the captives are "hard-core" terrorists and Taliban fighters, and that interrogators have collected valuable information from them, enabling intelligence officers to disrupt terrorist cells and figure out how al Qaeda is organized and financed.

"You are balancing two very important concepts: The notion of wanting to provide security and not allowing people to go back to terrorism and do harmful things, against recognizing the fact that we have people in custody . . . and we've got to do something with them," Butler said.

Though the Pentagon remains reluctant to disclose much information about the captives and the intelligence they have provided, Butler released limited descriptions of 10 suspected terrorists without identifying them by name.

One is believed to have links to a financier of the Sept. 11 hijackings. Another is a suspected al Qaeda member who was allegedly planning attacks on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. A suspected member of an al Qaeda-supported terrorist cell in Afghanistan allegedly took part in a grenade attack on a foreign journalist's car. A fourth is suspected of serving as an explosives expert for al Qaeda and allegedly designed the prototype of a shoe bomb that could bring down an airliner.

Butler called the group "merely illustrative" and "not comprehensive."

The captive with the Sept. 11 link appears to be Mohamed al Qahtani, who investigators suspect was planning to meet lead hijacker Mohamed Atta in Orlando a month before the attacks. Qahtani was prevented from entering the country by an alert U.S. Customs agent and later captured in Afghanistan.

U.S. officials have never disclosed where they are holding their most-valued detainees, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, both suspected of masterminding the 2001 terrorist attacks. In addition to Guantanamo, captives are being held at Bagram air base and Kandahar in Afghanistan, and the government has placed others in undisclosed locations.