Inside Interrogations in Afghanistan

DATE July 20, 2004 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Chris Mackey and Greg Miller discuss their book, "The
Interrogators"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Chris Mackey, was an Army interrogator in Afghanistan who had to
decide how far to go to get information from prisoners. He says when he
learned of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, he was stunned, sickened and angry.
Mackey was deployed to Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and became the
supervisor of all military interrogations conducted at the detention facility
at Bagram air field. His unit was not technically bound by the Geneva
Conventions because the Bush administration had ruled that the prisoners were
unlawful combatants. Nevertheless, according to Mackey, his unit understood
from the beginning that they were to behave as if the conventions did apply.

Mackey was a reservist who had joined the military in 1989 at the age of 17.
He's written a new book called "The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War
Against al-Qaeda." His co-author, Greg Miller, who is also with us, is a
national security correspondent for the LA Times. He reported from Bagram air
field and interviewed other interrogators from Mackey's unit. By the way,
Chris Mackey is a pseudonym. The former Army sergeant avoided using his real
name for security reasons.

Chris, one of the things you say in the book is that one of the most
interesting documents to surface from the Abu Ghraib investigation is a
one-page sheet outlining the Interrogation Rules of Engagement. And you say
on the left side of the page is a list of the 16 standard interrogation
approaches; on the right side is a list of nine additional techniques that
require prior approval, including the use of military dogs, sleep deprivation
for up to 72 hours, sensory deprivation and stress positions for as long as 45
minutes at a time. What did you find so interesting about this document?

Mr. CHRIS MACKEY (Co-author, "The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War
Against al-Qaeda"): When I was in Afghanistan, we never operated with these
additional sets of rules. We were armed with the interrogation approach
strategies that we had been taught in school. And although these certainly
did evolve in order to sort of accommodate the cultural issues and a lot of
realities that we encountered on the ground, we never had sort of envisioned
the idea that there were a whole 'nother set of rules. We never formalized
these. We certainly did have techniques that evolved while we were there, but
we never formalized these or had that level of oversight. We were really
self-policing.

GROSS: Now you found ways of bending the rules a little bit, so that you
could do things slightly more severe than the rulebook specified? Like you
say with sleep deprivation, the techniques got more lenient for the
interrogators as time went on. What were some of the changes that happened
under your watch?

Mr. MACKEY: When we first got to Afghanistan, we were confronted with an
ideologically steeled enemy that was not reacting at all; in fact, it was
easily thwarting the techniques that we had learned that were principally
dedicated towards getting members of the Warsaw Pact to cooperate with us.
And so we had to come up with ideas that were going to evolve those strategies
in a way that was still consistent with the conventions but then would become
more effective.

So one of the things that we did was sort of--we'd get very much more
sophisticated ruses, very much more sophisticated trickery. And these were
the main thrust of how we had new takes on things. But we also flirted with
things like a modified form of sleep deprivation. And specifically that was
the idea that you could have one interrogator speaking with one prisoner, and
as long as that interrogator wasn't tag-teamed out, as long as that
interrogator was opposing a single prisoner and they had the same breaks and
the same schedule, that would be a good measure to ensure that it didn't
violate the Geneva Conventions' prohibition on coercion. Of course, the main
thrust of the conventions is that you'd never treat someone in any way that
might be compared unfavorably with your own soldiers. So the longest we ever
did that was for about, I don't know, maybe 26 or 27 hours, and we probably
did that about 13 or 14 times and that was the longest.

GROSS: Did you ever participate in one of those marathon interrogations?

Mr. MACKEY: I supervised all of the marathon interrogations.

GROSS: So you were awake for the 24 to 26 hours, too?

Mr. MACKEY: Yes, I was. It was one of the reasons why we didn't use this
technique very often--was because it was debilitating on our own troops. You
have to understand that when prisoners were in the holding facility, they
could basically do whatever they wanted for the entire 24 hours a day, unless
they were being questioned. Interrogators, on the other hand, had maybe 15,
16 hours of straight interrogations to go through and then had to write
reports after that and still had military responsibilities to tend to. So the
opportunity to question somebody for a longer period of time, we felt,
was--and just trying to even up some of the odds, but at the same time we
realized that we had to be very, very careful and not cross over the line of
the conventions. And that was the sharpest arrow in our quiver.

GROSS: Greg Miller, you're the national security correspondent for the Los
Angeles Times. How much time did you spend in Afghanistan, and how closely
were you able to actually see what happened during interrogations?

Mr. GREG MILLER (National Security Correspondent, Los Angeles Times): Well, I
was there, I think, all of two weeks and, while I was there, interviewed Chris
and a number of his colleagues in the unit. That's how we met. And,
actually, I was never allowed inside the facility. All of the interviews were
conducted at another facility on the base under supervision of military
minders or Chris' superior officers there. And so it was only a very partial
glimpse into what was happening inside the prison at Bagram air base when I
was there. The press tent that they had set up for us was just around the
back side of it, so we sort of stared at it and looked at it all day. But you
could never see inside it, never really knew what was happening in there. And
I can't recall ever seeing even prisoners delivered there because they were
brought in on another side, to which nobody had access.

GROSS: And, Greg, how confident are you that you really have a complete
picture of a really closed system? I mean, you never got inside the system,
so you were relying on what people told you.

Mr. MILLER: That's right. My confidence stems from the amount of time that
I've spent with Chris and other members of his unit talking with them. I
don't have any firsthand knowledge what happened inside this place. I am only
relaying what I am told from others, and their stories are very consistent.
And I think if you spend time with these people, these interrogators, who
worked at Bagram, you can't help but see that they took their job very
seriously, and they saw their upholding of the principles of the conventions
as the most important thing in their job.

Terry, I should add, I mean, obviously, human rights organizations and a
number of prisoners have come out of Bagram and the prison at Guantanamo Bay
and said that they were abused. And we tried to handle that in this book by
including some of the materials from some of the Human Rights Watch
organizations that have interviewed these prisoners. We don't--I'd be the
last person to dismiss what these prisoners have to say, and obviously Abu
Ghraib has showed us that horrible things can happen in an American-run
facility.

GROSS: Chris Mackey, you write that, you know, `A lot of people say we
shouldn't use torture because it doesn't work.' You say, `That's not
necessarily true. We shouldn't use torture because it's wrong. It
dehumanizes us. It undermines our cause.' But you're implying here that
harsh techniques can actually be pretty effective.

Mr. MACKEY: I would say that after our experience, the reflection that we had
was when we went up to the very edge of what we thought we could do--and, I
think, in retrospect, it seems sort of unintentionally enlightened, what we
thought was the very precipice of how far we could go--we were getting the
best results when it came down to trying to break somebody who was very, very
important, who had a lot of information and who had sort of a knowledge that
would be able to save the lives of American soldiers or help strategically in
the war on terror--when we went to the very edge of what we thought was
legitimate and that we could do with good consciences.

GROSS: Can you give me an example of a technique that qualifies as being on
the edge that got results?

Mr. MACKEY: We tell the story in the book of a case of a prisoner who was,
basically, holding--he had had in his compound in Afghanistan a bunch of
poison called ricin, which is something like anthrax. And we questioned this
guy, and, of course, he came back with sort of the resistance techniques that
we saw all the time, which was sort of the blatant denial of the obvious. You
know, `It wasn't my house,' and things like that. And, of course, all the
other people were telling us it was his house. And, you know, there was, you
know, a lot of information that suggested that this guy was a really bad guy.
And that was the guy that we exercised the longest interrogation that we ever
did, that 27- or 26-hour interrogation. And an extraordinary interrogator
called Fitzgerald(ph) in the book conducted that interrogation, and we were
able to get information out of that prisoner, which enabled us to make some
great strides and to eliminate that very really detrimental, very dangerous
threat.

GROSS: Now what are considered stress positions? This is an expression we've
all learned from the Abu Ghraib story. What were considered stress positions
when you were doing interrogations, and what were your rules about that?

Mr. MACKEY: Well, it's important to know that under the conventions--this is
something that's not really talked about very much, but it ought to be. Under
the conventions if you're a person who's seeking the protection of the
conventions, you also have responsibilities under the conventions. One of
them is to obey the lawful orders of your captors. And in respect to that,
the captors have a responsibility to keep good order and discipline in the
camp. And when prisoners would get out of hand--for example, you know, spit
at someone or simply refuse to, you know, do something lawful like move from
one point of the camp to the other to take a shower or, in our case, when they
would shout or, you know, throw a chair or something in the interrogation,
during the questioning--the MPs or interrogators would engage in something
called a stress position, which is something that we use in like basic
training in the Army, where you hold your hands above your head or you kneel
on the floor and put your arms out. In our case, we never did this for more
than what you would get in basic training, maybe 10 or 15 minutes at the most,
mainly because we had no recourse. If the prisoner refused to do it, there
was no way to force him to continue to do it. And you could really lose a lot
of credibility.

We were lucky that the prisoners were--you know, generally had, somewhere
lurking in the back of their minds, that they were very, very fearful that
something worse would happen to them, even though the actual fact is nothing
could. And they usually complied with, you know, knocking out some push-ups
or something, which was--you know, in the end it may seem a little absurd
because we had to teach them how to do the push-ups before we could ask them
to do them.

GROSS: (Laughs) Is nudity considered a stress position?

Mr. MACKEY: No. I've read about this in the newspapers, and I think Greg
will confirm the fact that when we were talking to--both when he was speaking
with me and with the other interrogators, we just don't understand quite how
this evolved as a technique for interrogation. We would hold--when prisoners
first came in, they might have been--they were, of course, given a doctor's
visit, and they had their photograph taken. And they, during that doctor's
visit, might have been naked for a few minutes. But, yeah, the concept of
having somebody naked as a humiliation technique or a technique to help
progress the questioning, I just don't understand it, and we certainly never
practiced it.

GROSS: And you didn't use dogs for interrogations?

Mr. MACKEY: Well, it's funny that that would come up because the idea was
proposed while we were there. One of the MPs said, `Hey, you know, these guys
are really terrified of dogs. You really should consider that.' And that
sparked off an intense debate among the interrogators. You know, we
were--there was only about seven or eight of us in this prison, and we were
considering this proposal. And we were not unanimous in our decision, but the
end--what we came to was there was no way that we could use this without the
violation of the rules of coercion that are prescribed in the convention,
so we declined to use that. I don't know why, exactly, or how, exactly, much
smarter people than I am came to the conclusion that that was OK, but at the
time, we thought that that was beyond the pale.

GROSS: My guests are former Army interrogator Chris Mackey and LA Times
national security correspondent Greg Miller. Their new book is called "The
Interrogators." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guests are Chris Mackey and Greg Miller.
They collaborated on the new book, "The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War
Against al-Qaeda." Sergeant Chris Mackey was the head of interrogations at
Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and Greg Miller is national security
correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.

Chris, you say the Army manual is explicit on torture: `The use of force,
mental torture, threats, insults or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane
treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor
condoned by the government.' But you also say that the manual tiptoes around
what is allowed by saying that `The use of force should not be confused with
psychological ploys, verbal trickery or other non-violent and non-coercive
ruses used by the interrogator in questioning hesitant or uncooperative
sources.' What are some of the deceptions or psychological ruses that you used
that seemed to be effective in getting information?

Mr. MACKEY: On one occasion, which is described in the book, we wrote up an
entire newspaper article which suggested that we were setting up terrorist
courts in the United States, and these terrorist courts had already condemned
three well-known prisoners to death for their roles in the 9/11 attacks, and
when we--you know, we sort of set this in a very realistic-looking frame of,
you know, an Internet, for the Los Angeles Times, as a matter of fact, and I
don't know how we came up with that idea, but anyway, we brought that
newspaper in and gave it to a prisoner, and he was so scared that he actually
was sick, physically sick. So we used to come up with as many clever things
as we possibly could to try to unsettle or create anxiety in prisoners that
would help us. But we had to be always careful about the so-called dagger on
the table, which was a prohibition to actually threaten the lives of
prisoners, like for instance, `If you don't cooperate, I'm going to kill you.'
You could never, ever come even close to that, so we had to make sure that we
were staying on the right side of the rules, but anything that we could do for
sophisticated tricks was always on our minds, always trying to evolve new
ideas.

GROSS: Greg Miller's the national security correspondent for the LA Times.

How do you feel about the ruse that Chris just mentioned where they wrote up a
false story, false newspaper story saying that prisoners had been
court-martialed and sentenced to death, implying that, you know, if you don't
give us information you might be sentenced to death, too?

Mr. MILLER: Well, it's a method that's sort of not explicitly sanctioned in
the Army Field Interrogation Manual, but it's sort of alluded to in the
language in that manual that suggests that that sort of trickery is within the
rules, and I'm not sure as a journalist how I feel about having my newspaper
become an instrument of that. On the other hand, it certainly was effective.

There's another elaborate ruse that we describe in the book in some detail,
and one of the members of Chris' unit spoke fluent Arabic, was from an Arab
Gulf state and could pass himself off as an Egyptian or a member of another
Gulf state, and at one point, Chris and other members of the unit set up
a--staged an event, basically, on the prison floor where they had this
interrogator posing as an officer from an Arab military force who was coming to
fetch some prisoners and take back to his home country. Well, many of the
prisoners in the compound would certainly know what would be in store for them
if that were really the case. And so they started pulling prisoners out of
the cages one by one and putting duct tape across their chests saying, `This
so-and-so is bound for this country, and so-and-so is bound for X country,'
making the prisoners believe that they were being prepared for transport to a
state where it's widely known that they would be tortured.

And in the end of the chapter, we describe the aftermath of this. I mean,
that night, a number of prisoners come to the edges of the cages. They know
they're supposed to get on a plane the next morning. They come to the edge of
the cages holding their bellies and pretending to be sick just so they can be
let out so they can try to shed whatever shreds of information they have left
in a last-ditch effort to come clean and avoid that fate. In fact, there
never was that option. This was just another plane that was bound for
Guantanamo. But that's the sort of elaborate ruse that they were coming up
with, a sort of psychological ploy to trick prisoners into thinking that they
were bound for a truly harrowing ordeal.

GROSS: Chris, did you have like brainstorming sessions where you'd sit
around and come up with creative ruses that might be effective in tricking
people into giving up information?

Mr. MACKEY: We did. We developed a standardized format where every morning
and every evening, all the interrogators would get together, discuss what they
had learned from the prisoners, discussed what was working in the booth, in
the room where we were questioning them, and what was not working. And we
would also brainstorm ways to overcome people who were reluctant to speak, and
those discussions were always actually very entertaining as people came up
with sometimes some pretty outlandish ideas about how they might be able to
convince somebody to cooperate with us.

Mr. MILLER: And Terry, in fact--this is Greg--that ruse we just described
about staging an event on the prison floor to make a large number of prisoners
believe that they were going to be transported to Egypt or some other country,
that was the result of one of those brainstorming sessions, and in fact, it
came at the end of--you know, it was heavily orchestrated, where it started
five or six days earlier, with just the delicate sort of planting of rumors in
the cages, using snitches and using cooperative prisoners as well as the MPs
to plant rumors in the cages that this sort of thing was coming, that a
colonel from a Gulf state was coming to look over the prisoners, and it was
obviously very carefully cultivated, this fear. It built up over a period of
five or six days, and culminates in this event on the prison floor that just
sends many of the prisoners into a state of panic.

GROSS: Well, Chris Mackey, when you are able to get a prisoner to become, you
know, a snitch or an informant or just help you spread a rumor, or if you just
get them to, you know, give up information and confess, can you offer
protection so that they are not attacked by fellow prisoners?

Mr. MACKEY: Well, we took measures to ensure that it was very difficult for
anyone to ever know who was being cooperative. For example, we would take
prisoners that we weren't even speaking to up into the interrogation rooms and
just have them sit there with an MP or with an interrogator who was just
reading a book for a couple of hours, just so that everybody was being rotated
through. We wanted to make sure if we had people that we were speaking to
routinely because they were cooperating, we wanted to make sure that they
didn't appear among their fellows to be cooperative. It would be detrimental
to us and to them. So everything that we could do to camouflage those who
were being helpful was useful.

We also used sort of an inverted part of that as method to get people to talk.
If we had somebody who was very resistant to questioning, who was being very
uncooperative, we would simply bring them up and bring them up and bring them
up and bring them up, you know, once or twice a day for a couple of hours, so
it looked like they were being cooperative to their peers.

GROSS: Chris Mackey is a former Army interrogator. Greg Miller is the
national security correspondent for the LA Times. Their new book is called
"The Interrogators." They'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm
Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, tips from al al-Qaeda manual about how to thwart US
interrogators. We continue our conversation with former Army interrogator
Chris Mackey and journalist Greg Miller, authors of the book, "The
Interrogators." Also, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews a new CD from P.J.
Harvey.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Chris Mackey and Greg
Miller, the authors of the new book, "The Interrogators: Inside the Secret
War Against al-Qaeda." Mackey is a former Army interrogator who was sent to
Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and supervised interrogations at the detention
facility at Bagram air field. Miller is a national security correspondent for
the LA Times.

Chris Mackey, you say that in Afghanistan, you found an al-Qaeda--not you
personally--but an al-Qaeda manual was found that trained its members to
resist interrogation from the Americans. What were some of the things that
you learned from this manual about the techniques that some of your prisoners
would be using to resist your interrogation techniques?

Mr. MACKEY: Well, for us, it was kind of like capturing the other team's
playbook. We began to translate this document that came in on a so-called
site exploitation by the Special Forces, and they were coming in routinely
with huge, huge bags full of materials. You know, while some of it was
absolutely useless and--some of it was hugely valuable, and sifting through it
became one of the banes of our existence, 'cause of the effort that it took to
translate all that material. One day we pulled out from this huge stack of
paperwork this manual and discovered that it was, in fact, part of their very
programmized, very sophisticated classroom training for resistance to
interrogation. And although it really concentrated more on what they might
expect from Gulf states or from north Africa or from the Levant, had they
been detained or questioned by the authorities in those countries, it did also
have information about what to expect if you were questioned by the Americans.

The techniques that they described in there were, you know, more or less on
the money. They said that the Americans will not hurt you, but you have to be
prepared to try to bait them into hitting you and things like this in order to
create outrage. And some of the other things that they were saying were right
on the money and things that we could actually trace directly to what we had
been facing in the early months and days of our operations there--for example,
using only the Muslim dates on the calendar so that no interrogator could
create a good time line unless they had a notebook with all of those dates so
they could quickly translate it into the Gregorian calendar. Everyone was
always telling us that they didn't know absolutely anyone by their actual
names and that only their kunyas, their sort of nom de guerre, was made known
to them.

So every single method that they could use to slow down, to prevent us from
the quick acquisition of knowledge or to simply confuse us was part of their
techniques, and it worked in the early days. It was only after we'd been
there a few months that we became conversant in, for example, the Muslim
calendar or began to really understand the significance of someone's kunya
before we were able to make progress and make quick progress with prisoners.

GROSS: Now some of your prisoners turned out to truly just be farmers who--I
mean, they didn't know anything. They're weren't the enemy of the United
States. At what point could you say to yourself confidently, `This person is
not a threat to us. We should let this person go'?

Mr. MACKEY: It was a very difficult thing to arrive at a conclusion like
that, but I think that there's sort of a popular image that we would rather
have kept people than not, and that isn't true. I mean, especially a bunch of
reservists and National Guardsmen; we have no, you know, incredibly firm
ideological commitment to, you know, this concept that we are always, always
right. We realize, because of our own--you know, we're not so enclosed to the
military all the time--that we were perfectly aware that we might have made a
mistake, and we wanted to try to set those things right. We wanted to return
people who had no business in that prison as quickly as we could, not just
because it was the right thing to do, but also because we knew that it was
something that could only help promote our cause in the end, to get the
innocent out of there as quickly as possible.

But making the decision was very hard. In the early days at Kandahar, we had
a terrible time trying to determine who was who because they all had stories
that were identical. The people who were the worst of the worst would get to
Cuba, and eventually we'd find out by a message that they would relay to us
that, `Hey, this guy that you said was a low-level fighter was, in fact,
really, really important.' That was very humiliating for us. Fortunately, it
didn't happen too often. But the ability to try to screen prisoners, the
ability to try to separate the innocent from the guilty, was a preoccupation
that we had and not something we got good at until much later in our term
there.

GROSS: So your options were keep interrogating the prisoner, send them home,
send them to Guantanamo for further interrogation or--were there other
options, too?

Mr. MACKEY: Well, in the early days, if someone fell into one of about four
or five categories, we really didn't have an option on what to do with them.
They were simply caught in the system and they went back--they went on to
Cuba. And other times when we had prisoners that we thought we were on the
verge of breaking or we had broken and that they were cooperating and
providing good information, we wanted to delay their transport on to Cuba, and
we couldn't do that because of the--you know, once they were on that list, it
was impossible to get them off.

Later on, towards the spring of 2002, we started to develop a system in
cooperation with the broader army and the provost marshal's office and other
folks to have an outlet for people that we could quickly get them out of the
system, get them out of the red tape and get them home. So those were not our
only options, but they were certainly the--we had more options as time went
on.

Mr. MILLER: Let me just add something, Terry. This is Greg. I spoke with
some of the officers who were in Kuwait who were sort of running the ground
war in Afghanistan at the time, and I was at the Pentagon as well as some of
the officers at Kandahar and Bagram while Chris was there, and they all talk
about how there was a great fear among them, those who were going to be
putting their signatures to the releases of prisoners, great fear that they
were going to somehow manage to release somebody who would later turn out to
be the 20th hijacker. So there was real concern and a real erring on the
conservative side, especially early in the war.

GROSS: Some of the interrogators at Abu Ghraib were hired through private
military contractors. They were civilians. Were there any civilians in your
operation, Chris Mackey?

Mr. MACKEY: That was a concept that we were very unfamiliar with, and when I
read it in the newspapers, I was surprised to see that they had elected to use
civilian contractors. I did know that some kind of arrangement had been made
in Guantanamo, which I could--you know, it just seemed like it was a rear
echelon enough environment that that would be OK, or at least more
understandable. When we were in Afghanistan, we only had civilians who were
translators, volunteers who came over to help us with Pashto or Dari.

GROSS: Chris, I'm going to ask you, if you could, to tell us the story of one
prisoner who you interrogated or whose interrogation you oversaw and what they
were like when you first met them and what the turning point was in which they
started to give you important information.

Mr. MACKEY: A prisoner that we spoke to--to try to describe it from one
example, we ran into a prisoner who came into custody in probably late January
who was an Algerian but had spent most of his life in Germany. And because I
have two languages--I was taught German and Arabic by the Army--I thought that
I might have a chance to use the better of the two--my German was quite
good--to go in and talk to this prisoner. And we first met one another while
he was being in-processed, and then subsequently I was assigned to his case.
And he had a real sort of--he was well-trained in that al-Qaeda manual,
although at the time I didn't know it. He wouldn't answer any questions
directly. He couldn't remember any dates. He used everybody's kunya rather
than their actual name, and all dates were given to me in the Islamic
calendar.

So it wasn't until the very end of a very long interrogation, which at that
time was about six hours--most interrogations at that point were only going an
hour or two. At the end of a six-hour interrogation, just by complete
accident, I asked him a question in Arabic rather than in German, the language
in which we had been speaking the entire time, and he dropped a real name. He
dropped a name that was actually useful to us. And the two of us looked at
each other. We were absolutely shocked, and I think that that was another
moment, as the discovery of the al-Qaeda interrogation manual, the
resistance-to-interrogation manual was--it was another moment where sort of
the veil of ignorance was lifted, and I realized that, my God, we can actually
work with these people. They are not perfect, and we can break through this
wall of silence.

Later on, the discussions that we had were growing in their rapport, growing
in their success, and after a while, we actually developed kind of a
relationship, this guy and I, and we were able to discover some fairly
important information about his time in, for instance, Hamburg, where he knew
some of the 9/11 hijackers on Marienstrasse in Hamburg. And this discussion
was fairly fruitful, and I thought that I had really gotten to the bottom of
this guy's case, and I was really pleased with myself that I had persuaded
somebody who, you know, had some very good insight into things as important as
the 9/11 hijacking, all the way down to some ideas of where some escape routes
might be of foreign fighters who were trying to get out of Afghanistan, even
in January.

Then about a month and a half later, one of the interrogators who worked with
me came in and said, `I'd like to have a word with that German, that Algerian
German,' and before you know it, I was struck with the unfortunate realization
that I had only really peeled back one or two layers of this guy's sort of
enigmatic onion, and, in fact, the guy had a much larger role. And their
interrogation, which was more vigorous, although certainly not physical,
actually revealed much more valuable information than I ever got. And it was
an unfortunate realization for me.

GROSS: My guests are former Army interrogator Chris Mackey and LA Times
national security correspondent Greg Miller. Their new book is called "The
Interrogators." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guests are Chris Mackey, who supervised Army interrogations of
prisoners at Bagram air field in Afghanistan, and Greg Miller, a national
security correspondent for the LA Times. Their new book is called "The
Interrogators."

The picture that you both paint of the interrogations at Bagram Air Force base
detention center, where, Chris Mackey, you oversaw interrogations, is the
picture of people kind of working really hard to get information, trying to
work within the guidelines and muddling through and doing their best, a very
different picture than the one that has emerged from Abu Ghraib. And I'm
wondering how you think the Abu Ghraib story is going to affect future
interrogations, both American interrogations of prisoners and other people's
interrogations of Americans.

Mr. MILLER: Well, I guess I would say two things. Perhaps the only silver
lining here is that because of Abu Ghraib, the United States is having a real
serious discussion over what is appropriate and what isn't in terms of trying
to get information from potential terrorists. It's a debate that the country,
I think, needs to have to work through what we think is appropriate in this
new war we find ourselves in. In terms of how this might be reciprocated,
it's sort of scary to contemplate that. But when US servicemen or just
Americans in general are captured overseas or held in the custody of another
country, how can the United States point to its behavior as upstanding in
light of what we've all seen coming out of Abu Ghraib?

GROSS: Chris?

Mr. MACKEY: Well, the consequences of a handful of MPs who were operating
without oversight and the negligence of the officers and non-commissioned
officers that were appointed above them to make sure that this sort of thing
didn't happen, has been catastrophic to the cause as far as how it affects the
interrogators. And I hasten to add that, although there's sort of been one
interrogator who's been accused of doing something this humiliating to a
prisoner--and we must never countenance that, and I'm sure that she will be
punished for having done that--and another interrogator, a couple or one or
two, ought to have reported stuff that they saw--they're not directly involved
with what happened there. But still, just by the proximity that we have--in
fact, all soldiers, because we wear the uniform of our country and bear the
same flag on our shoulder when we're on campaign, we all have to accept that
the consequences of this are going to be very, very far-reaching.

I heard that the guys who were in the Abu Ghraib prison are called the six
guys who lost the war. And, you know, that's not entirely untrue. And the
effect that it's going to have on interrogators is it's going to question
people who once used to consider the intelligence field as something that they
want to get into--no doubt that they're going to reconsider that because of
the negative press, deserved or undeserved in our particular case. And also
it's going to affect sort of the creativity that people go into an
interrogation to practice against a very ideologically steeled and very evil
enemy. However, the scrutiny that the media has placed on this is a positive
thing, because we have to above all make sure that the actions that soldiers
take, in particular soldiers that--take when they have the custody of enemy
prisoners, is consistent with the values of our country and what we're trying
to carry when we deploy our forces, the idea that we're trying to carry when
we deploy our forces abroad.

GROSS: So, Chris, you seem confident that what happened at Abu Ghraib was
just the actions of a few individuals and not the result of a larger policy.

Mr. MACKEY: I can't entirely explain--you talked about it early in the
interview. I can't entirely explain what the newspapers say was on the right
side of that list of approved techniques, including the approved techniques
that they had to seek higher authority to do. I could tell you from my
own--and I don't mean to impugn the decisions that were made there, but on the
surface, they do not seem consistent with the thinking that we had as, you
know, a bunch of, you know, junior people trying to do the best possible thing
we could in the field in the very early stages of this war.

So I can't quite give a very good explanation of why they decided to allow
those other techniques. I can tell you that interrogators that I've dealt
with my entire life, if they stepped into an environment where that was
permitted, they would have rejected that out of hand, and not just because
it's wrong to practice that type of humiliation, that type of intimidation and
coercion on prisoners, because they're people, but also because of the
consequences of what happens if you transgress these rules. I'm very
surprised--I would be very, very surprised if an interrogator would do that,
even if he was ordered to do it, because now Nuremberg teaches us, `I was
following orders' is no excuse.

GROSS: Greg Miller, one last question for you. Chris Mackey feels--based on
what he knows, he thinks that Abu Ghraib is the result of a few interrogators
who did the wrong thing, that, you know, it's no policy; it's not systemwide.
Greg, you've been covering the story for the Los Angeles Times. From your
point of view, are you as confident that it wasn't something more systemwide?

Mr. MILLER: My take on it to date, with obviously not all the information
in, far from it, is that the abuses at tier one, the abuses that we see in
those photographs, were carried out by a unit of MPs who were doing so in the
middle of the night and who were, according to their own statements that
they've given to investigators, employing methods that they sort of imported
from prisons where they worked in the United States. These MPs have also said
that they were encouraged to do this by the intelligence troops, and I think
there's probably some truth to that. I'm skeptical, I must say, that they
were ordered to do certain things by intelligence troops. At least I would
certainly hate to think that were the case.

I also say, because of these pictures, we've also had a new window into the
interrogation methods that were being used at Abu Ghraib, which go well beyond
what Chris was allowed to use when he was in Afghanistan. And that's
something that--you could sort of see this sort of steady arc or this line
from where Chris began and to where things end up in Abu Ghraib in terms of
the harshness of the methods that they were prepared to use, and if Abu Ghraib
hadn't come to light, you wonder how long that trend line would have continued
before something else would have happened.

And the last point I would make is that it is beyond Abu Ghraib. There's no
question that, you know, you've had two deaths at Bagram air base in December
of '02, months after Chris' unit left, that have yet to be explained by the
Army. You have a number of cases of captives who were being held in custody
by the CIA and who died in custody under mysterious circumstances, and we've
seen charges brought in one of those cases now. And so it is a broader
problem, and I think it's just part of the--I mean, one of the main themes of
the book is that there is just this constant tension in these facilities
between doing the right thing and getting as much information as you can, and
those two things are at odds with one another. That's why it is such a
volatile or potentially volatile mix.

Mr. MACKEY: Terry, there's one other thing that Greg alludes to in that
comment, which is something that we didn't really face. The troops that are
in Iraq are facing a very, very difficult situation with their mounting
casualty lists. Every day interrogators are confronted with another unit that
hit a roadside bomb or another mortar attack that killed, you know, troops in
the first cab. And you know, although there were casualties when we were in
Afghanistan and they were certainly a motivating factor for us to get to the
bottom of things to help the battlefield commander, you know, we just didn't
have this type of intense, intense pressure that the troops over there face.
And although I would say that that's never an excuse for transgressing the
conventions, and if that does, in fact, turn out to be the case, it's
certainly one interesting insight into why, certainly in the early days when I
was in Afghanistan, the techniques remained as enlightened, if you will, if
you can say that, than they may have been compared to things that took place
afterwards.

GROSS: We're out of time. Thank you both so much for talking with us.

Mr. MILLER: Thank you, Terry.

Mr. MACKEY: It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Chris Mackey is a former Army interrogator. Mackey is a pseudonym
taken for security reasons. Greg Miller is a national security correspondent
for the LA Times. Their new book is called "The Interrogators."

Coming up, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews P.J. Harvey's new CD. This is
FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Analysis: Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews P.J. Harvey's new CD
TERRY GROSS, host:

Since her debut release in 1992, the British singer-songwriter and
multi-instrumentalist Polly Jean Harvey has established herself as a pop
changeling, switching styles and images while maintaining a fierce seriousness
undercut occasionally by a mordant sense of humor that can only be
characterized by the title of that debut album "Dry." P.J. Harvey's new
album, her seventh, is called "Uh Huh Her." And rock critic Ken Tucker says
the British performer has achieved a maturity that isn't weighed down with
self-seriousness.

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. P.J. HARVEY: (Singing) Baby, gotta, gotta bad, bad mouth. I see poison
coming out, coming out. Cheating, lying since the day you were born. Someone
ought to rinse it out with soap. Wash it out, wash it out, wash it out.

KEN TUCKER:

Polly Jean Harvey has hit her mid-30s. She's no longer the cleverly morose
young daughter of bohemian British parents, a girl who took pleasure in
mashing together poetic lyricism and post-punk noise. It's been four years
since her last album, the comparatively lush, romantic "Stories From The City,
Stories From The Sea," and on "Uh Huh Her," Harvey seems to be more blunt and
bitter. That song I just played, which opens the new album, compares a
lover's words to poison, and by the third cut, she's slinging around the "F"
word and some guitar squawk to express her extreme displeasure with the
arrogance of someone she once cared about.

Even a song as superficially pretty as this one, called the "Pocket Knife,"
maintains a razor edge in which she shoves the sharp shiv into the notion of
settling down and marrying.

(Soundbite of "Pocket Knife")

Ms. HARVEY: (Singing) Please don't think I'll wear this dress. I'm too
young to marry yet. Can you see my pocketknife? You can't make me feel wild.
How the world just turns and turns. How does anybody learn?

TUCKER: Harvey recorded this album in her home and plays everything except
the drums. She remains one of the most interesting guitarists in rock 'n'
roll, loose and savage, deceptively slapdash and right in the groove
established by her voice. Listen to the way she licks closed "The Kiss-off
Love Letter."(ph)

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. HARVEY: (Singing) ...(Unintelligible) chew the paper, impress the
envelope with my scent. Can you see, my, how I change the curve of my G?
Good longing. Oh. Oh. Oh.

TUCKER: If you skip to the end of the album, you get to a song called "The
Darker Days of Me and Him," in which Harvey rattles off a wish list of a world
with, quote, "no neurosis, no psychosis, no psychoanalysis, no sadness." It's
one of the rare moments in her career when she hasn't turned her
disappointment or anger into a more worked-up piece of art. And it comes
across as something other than raw, undercooked. Much more interesting and
involving is a song such as "It's You," about a young woman entering into a
relationship she knows is a mistake yet can't help herself.

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. HARVEY: (Singing) Go to sleep, Mama. I'm not feeling well. Can I step
out for a little while? Would I go missing or steal away when I go kissing in
the alleyway? It's all I want to do and all I want to grow up to be. It's
all caught up with you. Look what you're doing to me.

TUCKER: There are times when Polly Jean Harvey can make miserableness sound
like the most alluring mood in the world. She revitalizes the cliche about
love being a blessing and a curse. And throughout "Uh Huh Her," she counts
her blessings at extricating herself from bad love affairs, curses the men who
brought her such unhappiness and moves on to imagine new passions, new
troubles, new retorts to people who think they know her, who look at her
picture on the cover of this album and say, `Uh-huh, her.' `No,' says Harvey
throughout this album. `You don't know me that well yet, and maybe you never
will.'

GROSS: Ken Tucker is critic at large for Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
"Uh Huh Her" by P.J. Harvey.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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