by Fahad Faruqui, Yemen Times

Detainee number 063, Mohamed Al-Kahtani, was one of the many hundreds housed in the Guantanamo (known as “Gitmo”) Bay detention camps who was subjected to 20 hours of interrogation on only four hours of sleep.

The Haynes memo, which approved controversial and harmful interrogation techniques, was signed by Donald Rumsfeld, the former United States Secretary of Defense, in early December of 2002. Entitled, “Counter-Resistance Techniques,” this was the memo that opened the door for partial drowning (called water boarding), along with humiliation, mental destabilization and other illegal methods of obtaining information from detainees.

Al-Kahtani, a citizen of Saudi Arabia, is the alleged 20th hijacker, but the U.S. Military Commissions dropped key 9/11 suspect charges against him on May 11 this year.

The treatment towards Al-Kahtani was exposed in Philippe Sands’ book Torture Team, which is a result of a focused investigation to expose those who conspired in favour of Haynes memo. To find out more about the Haynes memo and those it affected, the author travelled around the world and sought interviews with key figures to pin-down the motives – and the legality – behind the aggressive techniques.

Sands, a British Queen’s counsel lawyer by profession, said he was particularly interested in the lawyers who drafted this memo, since they were trained in reputable institutions, and what made them sign off on this memo that approved such aggressive techniques of interrogation.

The book was turned into a play, performed last month at the Tricycle Theatre in London, UK. Proceeds from tickets sales, which totalled £7000, went to the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and Reprieve. All the actors worked without pay in support of the cause.

The Department of Defence list confirms that around 111 Yemeni detainees were also kept in Gitmo. But Maryam Hassan, the executive director of Cageprionsers, a lobbying group based in the United Kingdom, said that there is an additional list of 76 names who are not on the list.

Al-Jazeera network’s Sudanese cameraman Sami Al-Hajj who was released from Gitmo on May 1 after being detained for around seven years confirmed that 85 Yemenis in Gitmo were awaiting release and extradition to Yemen for the past year.

Sands’ initial befuddlement leads to further investigation

Sands’ inkling not to trust the piece of paper, the Haynes memo, that intrigued him in the beginning was right – and it led to a major discovery.

The basis of that was the memo that William J. Hayes, General Counsel to U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, wrote to his boss. Rumsfeld applauded and undersigned the paper, which categorically overrides the Geneva Conventions, the international treaties outlining humane treatment of prisoners.

After investigating the Haynes memo, reviewing Al-Kahtani’s interrogation logs, discussions with his lawyer and a psychiatrist who helped him discern whether the treatment of detainee number 063 amounted to torture or not, Sands concluded that a crime had been committed.

The book Torture Team is a battle between the official story – that aggressive interrogation techniques were a request from the “decent people on the ground ” – and the truth, which showed that the request came from the top: U.S. President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. These men imposed their will on through their lawyers.

The Haynes memo was communicated much later but the lawyers who were down at Guantanamo in September 2002, shortly before the first anniversary of 9/11 attacks, had already given their verdict. They asked questions about interrogation techniques, Al-Kahtani, and U.S. Military Commissions. They reviewed interrogations and left with a straightforward message for the combatant commander at Guantanamo Major, U.S. General Michael Dunlavey: Do whatever needs to be done to get information out of the prisoners.

The blanket immunity given to 15 of the 18 techniques that were approved by Rumsfeld and communicated on December 2, 2002 gives the opportunity to the interrogators to apply what they called the “onion strategy,” in which a detainee “will be stripped of all control over his life, layer by layer by layer,” said Sands.

These techniques were in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, which is primarily why the play recounted the atrocities committed in Gulag concentration camp in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Simple and bare but powerful

The theatrical version of Torture Team narrates Sands’ investigation process without any interrogation scenario with Al-Kahtani.

The play was a thriller, like Sands’ book, though less because of its theatrical merit than because it walks the audience through the Western post-9/11 world in less than two hours. The play also glimpses at the entire era that has passed since the ratifying of the Geneva Conventions—an era from which the U.S. has evidently learned nothing.

The manner and form of interrogation techniques used in Stalin’s Russia are surprisingly similar to what Al-Kahtani endured and no one knows how many more were used at Gitmo. Gitmo’s techniques even went a tad further, where the use of forced grooming and female presence in private spaces is also a form of humiliation and abuse for Muslim prisoners.

The play was produced on a modest stage, where all the actors sat on chairs with their cues in their hands, facing the audience, awaiting their turn to have a dialogue with Sands, which was representative of his bottom-up investigation process to pinpoint the “decent men on the ground” who requested the approval of these techniques. The script reading worked because the conversation Sands had with some of these key figures, ranging from Dunlavey in Gitmo to Haynes in Washington, was in itself troubling, gripping and tense, all of which are ingredients of good theatre.

Did nearly 20 hours a day for six weeks in an interrogation room, months in solitary confinement and six years of detention for al-Kahtani bear any fruit? Did Dunlavey, who was asked “to do whatever it takes” to extract intelligence from the detainees about their affiliation with Al-Qaida or Taliban and their modus operandi, get what they wanted? Did coercion work? Sands’s answer to the question is a simple no.

He explains why he thinks it doesn’t work: “The serious interrogators I spoke to – and I spoke to a lot – were all agreed on one thing: that force never works. You need to establish a rapport with the prisoner.”

Instead, the interrogators repeatedly called the detainees “dogs” and made sure to have female soldiers present while the detainees were being strip searched.

U.S. President George W. Bush took all preventive measures to override the Geneva Conventions under the pretext that the provision that they are not applicable to their conflict with either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. However, it is obvious that something unfortunate has happened because of this.

The upper echelons of the U.S. military who should have known about the Haynes memo, its wording and the limitations (if there were any) of the techniques first hand, were either blindfolded or preferred to remain aloof. When Sands questioned these military leaders, they claimed – or feigned – ignorance.

For instance General Richard Myers, Chairman of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff [explain in brief TK]

In the play, Myers tells Sands that all the techniques had come out of US Army Field Manual on Interrogation 34-52, which says that the interrogators can’t touch the detainee and cannot inflict physical harm, since it is not condoned.

Sands then informs Myers that the techniques were nowhere to be found in that manual.

Myers is perhaps unaware that detainees were dragged to the interrogation room hooded, with their hands and legs tightly cuffed; that Al-Kahtani was dehydrated to the point of needing regular intravenous replenishment; that he was constipated and was forced to receive enemas; that he urinated on himself and was watched over by a German shepherd (dog) named Zeus.

According to Sands, the interrogation room was even more dramatic. Hung with pictures of 9/11 victims taped on the walls and video footage of the 9/11 attacks playing, the detainees were forced to watch while restrained in a chair, again with their hands and legs tied up for the entire 20-hour duration of the interrogation. All these descriptions were made gruesomely vivid to the audience as they watched the play.

The means to what end?

Sands found that detainees like Al-Kahtani suffered due to the negligence of lawyers who didn’t evaluate the repercussions of the open-ended Haynes memo. Once approved, that memo allowed for endless interpretations that suited the U.S. administration’s desires.

A memo approving interrogation techniques without clear limits doesn’t befit a nation like the United States that values democracy, human rights and upholding the rule of law.

Fahad Faruqui is a writer who studied philosophy of religion at Columbia University and pursued a Masters Degree in journalism. He anchored a talk show on Aaj TV and can be reached at mff11@columbia.edu.