Interrogators Adapted To New Foe In Afghanistan

Chris Mackey is the pseudonym for a highly trained Army interrogator. He arrived in Afghanistan in December 2001 — just three months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The first thing he noticed after he touched down wasn't the snow, or bitter cold, it was the smell.

"I remember very clearly you could smell this burning plastic everywhere," Mackey says. "It smelled as though some sort of toy factory had melted down. It was just really kind of other worldly."

Cold War Methods Out Of Date

Mackey's story is important because he was there at the beginning. He was not just a witness, but a participant in tinkering with interrogation techniques aimed at breaking a new kind of enemy.

When Mackey was taught advanced interrogation, he learned about methods that were more suitable for the Cold War. For example, it was typical to offer resettlement in the West as a trade for information. That ploy worked in the Eastern bloc, but didn't resonate with the religiously motivated al-Qaida detainees who sat across the table from him.

"We felt a lot of skills that we had been taught, although very useful when adapted, didn't in the first instance apply very well," he says.

That's why Mackey and the interrogators working with him ended up having to, in his words, "adapt." And while the intention was always to follow the Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions to the letter, that was not, exactly, what happened.

Over the course of several weeks, Mackey "noticed that in the course of our interrogations the longer the interrogation went and the more fatigue that could be induced in a prisoner during those talks, the more likely he would be to share information."

It seemed like one way to break through, to get the detainees to tell interrogators what they needed to know. And while the interrogators in Mackey's unit knew they were not allowed to subject detainees to full-scale sleep deprivation — that was against the rules — they decided to come up with something that would let them go as far as they could go and still be in compliance with the rules.

"The idea was if you kept a prisoner up and fastidiously insisted the interrogator was likewise kept up, it would be hard for a critic to say that we were harder on our prisoners than we were on our own soldiers," Mackey says.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld rather famously used similar logic months later. When he heard about plans to force detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to stand for hours in order to soften them up before interrogation, he wrote in a Dec. 2, 2002, memo: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day… Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"

'Monstering' Technique

The interrogation teams kept careful records of these special interrogation sessions so they could prove that the detainees were not subjected to anything worse than one of their own. They called the technique "monstering" — it was essentially sleep deprivation with a loophole. Mackey says they called it monstering because, at the time, they couldn't imagine doing anything worse to a prisoner without violating the Army Field Manual and ending up in trouble themselves.

As harsh as the technique was, Mackey says, it worked. When his team needed to get immediate, actionable intelligence for the battlefield commander, they used monstering.

"Although we only used it on a handful of occasions, there was no doubt that the information that we had had a value that was unique to that approach," he says.

After about eight months in Afghanistan, Mackey and the interrogators he was with were replaced by other soldiers from their Connecticut reserve unit. The new interrogators were given a list of techniques — a history of what worked and what didn't. And monstering was included in that list. Mackey says that for the people in his unit, that technique was the ceiling — as far as they thought they could go. But for the next group, it became their starting point.

As Mackey sees it, the situation in Afghanistan became more and more difficult after he left and the interrogators that came after him used monstering more frequently.

"And then, instead of making it a special thing for special circumstances, they just rolled it into just one of the approaches they would take when they thought it was necessary," he said. It became a slippery slope.

Mackey says he is torn about his unit's brand of sleep deprivation. He says it helped get key intelligence for the battlefield, but he adds that he can't help feeling that it contributed to the escalation of increasingly harsh interrogation techniques.

"I would hate to say that I'd want to undo the advantages that we gave to the combat troops we supported by taking back monstering as an approach," he says. "But if we look at it in the context of monstering having started some sort of downward spiral ... then I would say I think its usefulness has to be questioned and, I suppose, if I had to do it again, I wouldn't."

Mackey left Afghanistan in August 2002. What he couldn't have known is that was precisely when the Justice Department issued a series of memos — the so-called torture memos — that permitted interrogation measures that went far beyond what Mackey's team ever contemplated doing.