Spencer Ackerman reports from Guantanamo Bay about the way one of Omar Khadr's interrogators tried to get him to talk while he was at Bagram, in 2002:
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.”
Somehow I'm not sure Khadr, a Canadian national who was 15 at the time, quite had the cultural baggage to fully appreciate the scariness of the "four big black guys" who were going to rape him the boy in the story. Nevertheless, the interrogator said he told the story because "Afghans were terrified of getting raped and general homosexuality, things of that nature.” Right. Those exotic Afghans and their weird ways.
This, by the way, is an example of the interrogator "not" threatening a 15-year-old boy with rape. What information or actionable intelligence did the interrogator glean from doing this? None. As for the interrogator, according to Ackerman, he "was later court-martialed and served time for detainee abuse" in a different case.
-- A. Serwer
