From:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1169122,00.html
"Last year the Americans introduced a formal system of rewards for co-operation with interrogators, so that detainees would be given an increasing number of so-called ‘comfort items’ such as books, extra clothes and utensils in return for their testimony. (The books, best-selling novels, usually came with pages torn out, which the censor had deemed too subversive or exciting.)
"Experts on the psychology of interrogations and false confessions say that for pris oners who were already depressed and isolated by more than a year of arduous incarceration, this system seems almost calculated to produce fantastical accounts. Professor Gisli Gudjonsson of King’s College London is perhaps the world’s leading authority in this area, and he has testified in dozens of trials and helped expose numerous miscarriages of justice. One of the methods which his research has shown to be particularly prone to generating unreliable testimony is the use of deception, where an interrogator will claim he has incontrovertible proof of a suspect’s guilt when in reality this does not exist.
“Such methods, the three men say, were employed against them time and time again. For example, Rasul says, he was told that photographs of him and an ‘al-Qaeda membership form’ and his passport had been found in a raid on an Afghan cave. ‘Actually I’d left my passport in Pakistan. Then the interrogator told me that next to my file they’d found my brother Habib’s al-Qaeda file. The interrogator said he wasn’t lying, and that next time he’d bring it with him. When it came to the next time, he claimed he’d made a mistake.’”
"However, last summer the situation of the Tipton Three suddenly took a seri ous turn for the worse. The Americans had a video of a meeting in August 2000 between Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers. Behind bin Laden were three men, and in May 2003 someone alleged they were none other than Iqbal, Rasul and Ahmed.
"For the previous two weeks, Rasul had been in the relatively comfortable conditions of Camp Four, the lower-security section of Guantanamo where prisoners are freely allowed to associate and play football and volleyball. Suddenly he and the others found themselves in solitary confinement in the isolation block for three months. Finally, Rasul says, a senior interrogator arrived from Washington and played him the video. He protested that the men in the video looked nothing like him and his friends, and none of them had worn beards. More to the point, in August 2000, when the video was shot, he had been working in a branch of the electronics store Curry’s, and was enrolled at the University of Central England - a fact, he suggested, his interrogators could easily check. Instead, he says: ‘They told me I could have falsified those records, that I could have had someone working with me at Curry’s who could have faked my job records.’ I’d got to the point where I just couldn’t take any more. Do what you have to do, I told them. I’d been sitting there for three months in isolation so I said yes, it’s me. Go ahead and put me on trial.’ The other two made similar confessions.
"Last September it was MI5 which for once helped them when they arrived at the camp with the documentary evidence which showed they could not have been in Afghanistan at the relevant time. Rasul says: ‘We could prove our alibi. But what about other people, especially from countries where such records may not be available?’
“There is also the danger that false testimony from one inmate, extracted by the Guantanamo incentives system, may breed a false confession from another. Iqbal recalls: ‘One inmate said I had been in the Farouk terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. It led to a whole series of interrogations where they tried to persuade me that I had been. The way the system is it’s accusation after accusation; if this one won’t work maybe this one will, if that won’t work try this one, until they finally get their confession.’”
So, given the above, how effective do you think that Guantanamo is in getting any true information.
If the techniques (which the rest of the article makes clear are close to torture techniques) can get three Brits to confess to someting that was not possible, how effective is it for people who do not have the Western Infrastructure to prove where they were then.
Can we assume that the information coming out of Guantanamo is just a crock of shit?