That attack used “rockets, small arms and grenades” and sought to use four operatives as suicide bombers. They were killed before they could detonate.

One U.S. contractor is dead. Nine U.S. servicemembers are wounded. Two of those nine are said to have returned to duty, and the rest ”are currently in stable condition,” according to an ISAF press release. But it’s been a long time since there was an attack this large on Bagram. Coming a day after the Kabul attack, the message the Taliban seek to deliver is that there aren’t any safe areas for the allies of the Afghan government.

That’s been a concern of Holt’s for a while. He’s argued that not only will videotaping interrogations function as a measure to prevent detainee abuse, but it’ll create a useful lessons-learned library for training interrogators or honing their skills. Last October, he got a measure requiring the videotaping into the conference report for the defense appropriations bill.

“The Pentagon’s long awaited regulation of the provision I secured in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act continues the process of putting our detainee policies back on sound legal footing while improving our ability to get actionable intelligence,” Holt said in response to a request for comment from TWI (and subsequently emailed out in a press release). “As President Obama and local law enforcement officials across the country already know, we get better intelligence and protect both the interrogator and the person being interrogated by requiring recordings.”

Omar Khadr and the Guantanamo Bay detention center (ZUMA, Spencer Ackerman)

GUANTANAMO BAY — Two weeks’ worth of testimony in a pre-trial hearing for the military commission of Omar Khadr, a 23-year old Canadian detained by the U.S. for nearly eight years, ended Thursday with two major declaratory statements. One was from the first man ever to interrogate Khadr, who testified that he threatened then-15 year old detainee in 2002 with rape and even death. The second was from the chief prosecutor in both Khadr’s case and the military commissions, who told reporters that the commissions “produce justice” and “produce fairness.”

[Security1] Testifying from a remote location, a former interrogator at the Bagram detention center in Afghanistan, identified to the court only as Interrogator #1, said that on August 12, 2002, he became the first U.S. military officer to interrogate Khadr, who was then restrained to a stretcher after suffering near-fatal gunshot and shrapnel wounds during his capture two weeks prior. Khadr, he said, was untruthful, providing Interrogator #1 with misleading statements, including about his identity. A few days later, Interrogator #1 began using techniques that he said were designed to illicit fear from the young detainee.

One of them involved telling a “fictitious story” to Khadr at an unspecified date in either September or October 2002, something Interrogator #1 said the interrogators at Bagram came up with after noticing Afghan detainees were “terrified of getting raped and general homosexuality.” According to the story, a “poor little 20-year old kid” found to be lying to interrogators about trivial matters was sent to a U.S. prison, where “four big black guys” and “big Nazis” eye up the fictitious detainee and the black inmates rape him in a shower — a brutalization that proves to be fatal. Army Col. Patrick Parrish, the military judge in Khadr’s military commission, said at the end of hearing, “I will stipulate as fact that the rape [threat] was said.”

Interrogator #1 later pled guilty to abusing a different detainee in a court martial and served five months in prison.

Threatening a detainee with death is a potential war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Interrogator #1′s free and open testimony raised questions — cited by the defense — that the government provided him with immunity, even though he was a defense witness. But Joe DellaVedova, a spokesman for the Office of Military Commissions, stated categorically that Interrogator #1 “did not testify today under immunity.”

Barry Coburn, Khadr’s lawyer, decried Interrogator #1′s account as an “implicit, perhaps really explicit, sort of a death threat” against his client. Eight previous military and law-enforcement officials who interrogated or questioned Khadr have said that Khadr — who is charged with the murder of Army Special Forces SFC Christopher Speer and with material support to terrorism — was a forthcoming and compliant detainee. Most of them talked to Khadr after Interrogator #1 did: one of them, FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller, may have interviewed him contemporaneously with the rape and death threat, and another, known only as Interrogator #2, participated in the first interrogation of Khadr in support of Interrogator #1.

Coburn and his team hope that Parrish considers that sequence to be as crucial as they do. The purpose of the last two weeks’ proceedings has been to determine whether statements Khadr made to his interrogators occurred in an environment so coercive as to render them inadmissible before the commissions, if and when Khadr’s case ultimately goes to trial. If Parrish rules that Khadr’s statements are considered inadmissible, then other detainees facing charges before the commissions may seek to have their own statements to interrogators excluded. While the commissions do not consider precedent to be as controlling as federal courts do, a favorable outcome for Khadr in the suppression hearing could still jeopardize a system that the Obama administration and Congress consider to be a necessary tool for trying terrorism detainees.

“There was a taint in this case, back from Bagram,” said Kobie Flowers, Coburn’s partner in representing Khadr. “That taint is still there, and [the government] cannot get away from it. Interrogator #1 brought you that in full color.”

Both Khadr attorneys cast doubt on the military commissions’ ability to provide justice for their client. “The system, the process” has been found “woefully lacking,” Coburn said. Flowers, formerly a federal prosecutor, denounced the government’s use of “secret evidence” assembled from Khadr’s interrogators, dozens of whom the defense has not been able to interview.

Navy Capt. John Murphy, the chief prosecutor for the military commissions and a prosecutor in Khadr’s case, dismissed the defense’s characterization of the state of the case during a press conference after the hearings recessed. “We are ready to move forward with our case. We are ready to go to trial,” Murphy said. Over the last two weeks, both the government and the defense have publicly confirmed that negotiations are ongoing to settle Khadr’s case out of court. Murphy said he is “generally confident in our case,” a confidence that “grows every day.”

Defending the military commissions as “part of our national legal structure,” Murphy denied that their viability was threatened if Parrish strikes Khadr’s statements to interrogators from use at trial. “Every case is assessed on its own unique facts,” said Murphy, a Naval reservist and federal prosecutor in civilian life. “I think what you see is a very fair process in terms of assessing the admissibility of these statements. I often think at times if you took away the uniforms and you didn’t realize we were at Guantanamo Bay and just walked into the middle of these proceedings, you would think you were in a traditional courtroom.”

Tom Parker, the director of Amnesty International’s counterterrorism and human rights program, disagreed with Murphy’s defense of the commissions. “I’m not entirely convinced the defense has had a completely fair shake,” Parker said, citing the difficulty the defense has had in gaining access to interrogators who spoke with Khadr, and the government’s repeated and successful attempts to suppress testimony about the general tenor about detainee treatment at Bagram and Guantanamo during Khadr’s detention in both places.

Parker cited Obama administration statements that raise the prospect of continuing to detain someone even after a court or a military commission acquits them. “The fear is that if he’s not convicted here, you know what the government’s position is, you’ve heard it in court: they will presumably decide to hold him,” Parker said. “They’re confident in their case, they don’t think it’s been diminished in any way, Capt. Murphy gets more and more confident every day. So I think we have to assume that if he’s acquitted, it’s quite likely that the government would then exercise this unconstitutional right that they now assert.”

In congressional testimony last July, Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon’s general counsel, said that the government’s right to detain someone “under the law of war” exists “irrespective of what happens on the prosecution side,” raising the prospect that the government could continue to detain someone even after acquittal. And Attorney General Eric Holder pledged last month to work with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on a statute to hold some terrorism detainees indefinitely without trial.

Shortly after the pre-trial hearing recessed for the week, the Pentagon announced that four journalists — Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald, Paul Koring of the Globe & Mail, Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star and Steve Edwards of Canwest — would be barred from returning to Guantanamo Bay after they published the name of Interrogator #1. The reporters in question all used public evidence entered into trial to determine the identity of Interrogator #1, as did several of their colleagues who did not receive a ban, including The Washington Independent. Statements released by their news organizations vowed to appeal the ruling, which Shephard, author of a biography of Khadr, called “absurd.”

Ironically, Col. Dave Lapan, a representative of the Office of the Secretary of Defense who issued the ban, justified the ban in a letter by saying the reporters all “mention[ed] ‘Interrogator #1′ by his real name,” thereby publicly confirming Interrogator #1′s identity himself.

Parrish will likely not decide whether any or all of Khadr’s statements to interrogators must be stricken from the government’s case until at least June. On Monday, he ordered that the government can proceed with a mental-health evaluation with Khadr anticipated to last four weeks — after which the so-called suppression hearing will resume, as the defense presents its own mental health experts. Next week, Parrish will issue a ruling formally setting a schedule for Khadr’s military commission to begin.

“I told him a fictitious story we had invented when we were there,” Interrogator #1 said. It was something “three or four” interrogators at Bagram came up with after learning that Afghans were “terrified of getting raped and general homosexuality, things of that nature.” The story went like this:

Interrogator #1 would tell the detainee, “I know you’re lying about something.” And so, for an instruction about the consequences of lying, Khadr learned that lying “not so seriously” wouldn’t land him in a place like “Cuba” — meaning, presumably, Guantanamo Bay — but in an American prison instead. And this one time, a “poor little 20-year-old kid” sent from Afghanistan ended up in an American prison for lying to an American. “A bunch of big black guys and big Nazis noticed the little Afghan didn’t speak their language, and prayed five times a day — he’s Muslim,” Interrogator #1 said. Although the fictitious inmates were criminals, “they’re still patriotic,” and the guards “can’t be everywhere at once.”

“So this one unfortunate time, he’s in the shower by himself, and these four big black guys show up — and it’s terrible something would happen — but they caught him in the shower and raped him. And it’s terrible that these things happen, the kid got hurt and ended up dying,” Interrogator #1 said. “It’s all a fictitious story.”

Every other interrogator testifying so far has testified that Khadr was cooperative and forthcoming. But Interrogator #1, who interrogated Khadr “20 to 25 times” as his primary interrogator at Bagram in 2002, said that Khadr would lie to him. And he was the first interrogator to interrogate Khadr during the now-23-yea- old Canadian citizen’s nearly eight years in U.S. detention. So the other interrogators, with perhaps the exception of an FBI interrogator who questioned Khadr in October 2002, talked to Khadr after he heard a “fictitious story” about a young Afghan who lied to U.S. interrogators and as a result was raped and killed in jail.

Interrogator #1 was later court-martialed and served time for detainee abuse.

Soldiers at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan (army.mil)

GUANTANAMO BAY — His nickname wasn’t “Monster,” he admonished the lawyer. It was “The Monster.” That was what the Bagram Collection Point’s interrogators, guards — and most especially detainees — called Army interrogator Damien Corsetti. And it was important to him that the court correctly record his story.

Back then — in 2002 at Bagram, and later at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison — Corsetti was as fearsome as his handle. Although acquitted, he went before a court-martial proceeding related to the abuse of a detainee in Iraq. Now, Corsetti is an unemployed veteran of two wars, unable to work because of post-traumatic stress disorder, and an infamous figure in the U.S.’s post-9/11 history of torture.

[Security1] But he testified on Wednesday morning from a remote location on behalf of one of the former inmates at Bagram whom he used to intimidate and brutalize: Omar Khadr, the 23-year old Canadian citizen who has been in U.S. custody for nearly eight years. The large man once known as “The Monster” — the nickname is tattooed in Italian on his stomach — provided rare sworn testimony about the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in the Afghanistan war’s early days, the product of what he described as command pressure for intelligence and unclear rules about permissible interrogator behavior.

Corsetti didn’t directly interrogate Khadr, he told the court, but he spoke to Khadr at least two to three times a week from August to October 2002, after which Khadr was transferred here. “He was a child,” said an occasionally emotional Corsetti. “He was a 15-year old child who had been blown up, shot and grenaded. He was in one of the worst places on the earth. How could you not have compassion for that? … He was in the wrong place for a 15-year old child to be.”

It was the first moment during seven days of Khadr’s pre-trial hearing, meant to determine whether the statements Khadr gave to his interrogators may be used against him in his July military commission, that an interrogator described Khadr as a “child.” Other interrogators, testifying for the prosecution, described him clinically as a “15-year old” or “mature” or otherwise resisted the characterization of Khadr as a juvenile. Almost simultaneously with Corsetti’s testimony, Radhika Coomaraswamy, the United Nations special representative for children and armed conflict, called for Khadr’s release and decried the “dangerous international precedent” the Obama administration is setting by prosecuting him for war crimes.

That wasn’t the only time Corsetti contradicted earlier testimony. The witness before Corsetti, Army Col. Donna Hershey, the former chief nurse at Bagram, testified that she never allowed any interrogators to question detainees in Bagram’s hospital. But Corsetti testified that the first time he met Khadr, and the only time he was present for any questioning of Khadr, occurred in the hospital, on July 29, 2002, two days after Khadr suffered near-fatal wounds during his capture after a Khost, Afghanistan firefight.

“I would assume from his condition he was under excruciating pain,” Corsetti said. Despite the pain, and despite the questioning’s presentation to the court as a preliminary, in-processing brief, the questioning appeared to involve the acquisition of intelligence information, including “what kind of military training” Khadr had; what Khadr believed his offenses were that landed him in Bagram; his “knowledge of Soviet-issued weapons”; and general questions to assess “his cooperation and knowledgeability.” That spoke directly to the purpose of the hearing: To determine whether Khadr’s statements to interrogators, and information that followed from them, were coerced from him to a point rendering them unusable by the government at trial.

The pressure to acquire intelligence information was the overriding theme of Corsetti’s testimony. His unit, Alpha Company of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, then stationed at Bagram, had to file between “20 to 40 reports a week” or hear from higher command to complain about them “stagnat[ing].” That pressure, Corsetti said, came from the Afghanistan war command and the “Office of the Secretary of Defense” — and produced a command environment that encouraged detainee abuse.

“The only clear cut rules I remember was we weren’t allowed to strike the prisoners,” Corsetti said, and that interrogators couldn’t directly threaten detainees. “But we could do what we called ‘plant the seed’” of threats, and “let their imagination run wild with it.” One example, consistent with an affidavit Khadr submitted about his treatment at Bagram, was to suggest that detainees cooperate with interrogators to avoid being sent for more brutal treatment in other countries. “Egypt and Israel were the two big ones,” he said.

Corsetti also testified that detainees at Bagram were “regularly” placed in forced contorted positions known as “stress positions” (and, later, “safety positions,” according to an interrogator who testified on Tuesday). “Stress positions were used to inflict pain on the prisoners, to elicit information from them,” Corsetti said, rocking back and forth in his chair. “At any given time, there was always one airlock occupied by a prisoner shackled, blindfolded, earmuffed with his hands above his head.” That description came close to matching one given by an anonymous Bagram medic, known as Mr. M, who testified Monday to seeing Khadr shackled to the outermost door of his cell — known as an airlock or sallyport — with his hands shackled at about forehead-level. The level of positioning for a detainee’s restrained arms would “depend on the length of the chain they used from the top of the cage,” Corsetti calmly recounted.

Asked if he knew if Khadr would have been put in a stress position, Corsetti replied, “I can’t say if it was done to him, but it was something I would have done.”
Corsetti’s lack of direct knowledge of Khadr’s treatment repeatedly aroused objections from the chief government prosecutor, Jeffrey Groharing, a retired Marine major, pushing Corsetti’s testimony to nearly two hours. Groharing argued that the defense could only question Corsetti about any treatment of Khadr that Corsetti directly observed. But Col. Patrick Parrish, the judge presiding over Khadr’s military commission, responded that the hearing’s admission of hearsay evidence — ironically, one of the biggest civil-libertarian objections to the commissions — could work in the defense’s favor, as it had for the prosecution.

Groharing has called eight interrogators to testify so far about direct interactions with Khadr. All have largely portrayed their interrogations and interviews with him as free and uncoerced. But later this week, the defense intends to call to the stand someone known to the court as “Interrogator #1,” who interrogated Khadr at Bagram and who is expected to testify to threatening Khadr with rape.

For all the command pressure for intelligence and the harsh treatment that resulted at Bagram, Corsetti said he wasn’t sure whether it resulted in accurate intelligence. “I got some very good information while I was there and I got some very bad information while I was there,” he said.

He last saw Khadr shortly before the detainee’s October 2002 transfer to Guantanamo Bay. “I can’t say if he was afraid or not,” Corsetti said. “I remember he went from a smiling 15 year old kid to a look of defeat before he left.”

Yesterday and today, Army Col. Donna Hershey, the head nurse at the Bagram hospital back then, said that she forbade interrogations from occurring in the hospital. But Corsetti said that interrogators asked Khadr about “what kind of military training” he had, as well as his “knowledge of Soviet-issued weapons” and other questions that “would have also assessed his cooperation and knowledgeability.”

The government raised numerous procedural and relevance-based objections to Corsetti’s testimony, delaying it from moving forward. But Corsetti did begin to testify about a “ton of pressure” his company was under at the time.

“This is less than a year after 9/11, so we’re all still pretty heated about that,” he said. “There was a lot of pressure to get intelligence information. This was life and death stuff we were supposedly dealing with. Just a ton of pressure on us to get information out there to save lives and to generate reports.” Unless the unit generated “20 to 40 reports a week,” it would hear complaints from higher command.

Like who? “CJTF180, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, coming from everybody,” he said, using an acronym for what was then the Afghanistan-war command. “The only clear cut rules I remember was we weren’t allowed to strike the prisoners.”

Corsetti was acquitted in 2006 of charges related to detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Still, Finley said that Khadr told him in a November 2002 interview at Guantanamo that sometime soon after he was captured — maybe by a soldier who captured him in Khost, maybe in Bagram — someone threatened him with torture. “That piqued my interest,” Finley told the prosecution. “I specifically asked him point blank [if he was] tortured — he was not tortured, only that he was told he was going to be tortured.” Finley said that he never found corroboration of Khadr’s account.

During cross-examination, Khadr attorney Kobie Flowers reminded Finley that an old report written by Finley’s FBI partner recounted that Khadr was “paranoid about guards” at Guantanamo. “In this situation, I’m sure he probably was, but I don’t recall him saying anything specific,” Finley said. “I don’t know why the statement was put in the notes, and I don’t know if you’re talking about Bagram or Guantanamo Bay.”

Why might Khadr fear Bagram guards? “If he was talking about — he was just captured, wounded, he was having some surgery and if someone told him ‘you are going to be tortured,’ I can understand why he might be concerned about that,” Finley said, but repeated that he was never able to corroborate Khadr’s account.

Far from the picture of coercion painted by Khadr’s attorneys, Number 11 testified, “It was a very relaxed, open, very friendly atmosphere. He smiled a lot. Always willing to talk.” As part of what was called a Tier Three interrogation team, she interrogated Omar twelve times, first in a hospital ward and later in one of 20 interrogation rooms in two trailers in the detention facility’s early days. Number 11 said she was specifically assigned to Khadr because she could be “more of a mother figure for him, and he could relate to me.”

In Number 11′s telling, it worked. She said Khadr told her, “I would rather be with you than bored in my cell … anytime, call me.” She said she never heard a thing about Khadr being in any way abused, and specifically talked about seeing what she called the “Rumsfeld Memos” authorizing more abusive treatment for detainees — and said she specifically forswore using any. In return, she said Khadr provided “detailed information” about al-Qaeda’s training camps, guest houses and chain of command. “He would always say to me his father was fourth in command for UBL,” the military acronym for Osama bin Laden. “He’s met Osama bin Laden. He’s met his wives, his children, at the Jalalabad compound. … He played with his children.”

“Omar,” she said, was a cooperative and talkative interlocutor, even correcting spellings, pronunciation and timelines when she misstated them in her notes or mis-recited them to him. On several occasions, Number 11 testified, she would “not even have to ask follow-up information because he [gave] such detailed information. He was very alert.”

Navy Capt. John Murphy, one of the prosecutors, asked FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller, who interrogated Khadr six times at Bagram in October 2002, if Fuller ever heard Khadr discuss “rape, being shipped to Egypt” or anything of the sort. ”No, I did not,” Fuller replied.

Did Khadr have the opportunity to raise such threats with Fuller? “Certainly at the beginning or end of interviews or even during interviews,” Fuller said. “But we typically asked him at the end of interviews well-being questions.”

It is unknown why Interrogator #1 plans on potentially incriminate himself on Khadr’s behalf. The defense claims that another pseudonymous intelligence operative, known as Interrogator #3, materially misrepresented a report that would have corroborated Interrogator #1′s account and discovered that misrepresentation in a Justice Department inspector general’s report.