GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — To get teen terror suspect Omar Khadr to cooperate, a former U.S. Army interrogator testified Thursday, he told the wounded Canadian a "fictitious" tale of an Afghan youth who was gang-raped in an American prison and died.
"We'd tell him about this Afghan gets sent to an American prison and there's a bunch of big black guys and big Nazis," said the former interrogator who was since convicted of detainee abuse and was identified in court only as Interrogator No. 1.
Under Pentagon ground rules, reporters covering the hearing are not allowed to include the interrogator's real name in their dispatches from Guantanamo. Canadian newspapers have published the name, however, and his testimony in other cases is available at the McClatchyDC website and elsewhere.
Interrogator No. 1 also gave an on-the-record interview with The Toronto Star in 2008 and his name was widely published in accounts of his court martial in September 2005.
Still, military escorts from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' public affairs division said headquarters was deciding whether reporters who name the former interrogator in their dispatches would be barred from the proceedings for breaking the ground rules.
Interrogator No. 1 said he told Khadr that the Afghan — "a poor little kid … away from home, kind of isolated" — had been sent to a U.S. prison because Interrgator No. 1 was disappointed with his truthfulness. When patriotic American prisoners discovered the Afghan was a Muslim, praying five times a day, they raped him in their rage over the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Interrogator No. 1 said he told Khadr, who was 15 and badly wounded at the time.
Khadr's attorneys called Interrogator No. 1 to bolster Khadr's claim that he was abused while in U.S. custody and their motion before a military judge that any confessions he made during his captivity should be considered coerced and not admissible.
Khadr, now 23, had specifically claimed in an affidavit outlining abuse that he was threatened with rape. On Tuesday, a medic identified as Mr. M testified that he once found Khadr chained by his arms to the door of his cage-like cell, hooded and in tears. That too tracked allegations included in Khadr's affidavit.
According to court testimony, Interrogator No. 1 was attached to the 519th MP Battalion, which guarded prisoners at Bagram air base in Afghanistan in 2002. Three years later, Interrogator No. 1 pleaded guilty to three acts of detainee abuse on another captive at Bagram in December 2002.
Interrogator No. 1 said he questioned Khadr as many as 25 times over 100 hours before the teen was sent to Guantanamo for more interrogations.
According to earlier testimony, Interrogator 1 questioned Khadr the first time on a stretcher while he was still under sedation on Aug. 12, 2002, hours after he was released from from an U.S. Army combat hospital and life-saving surgery.
Other testimony indicated someone from mlitary intelligence interviewed him on July 29, 2002, a day after his transfer to the combat hospital at Bagram
Interrogator No. 1 denied under questioning from defense counsel Barry Coburn that he ever threatened Khadr directly with rape.
Instead, he said, a group of U.S. interrogators dreamed up the “fictitious” Afghan rape story to utilize authorized “Love of Freedom” and “Fear Up” techniques designed to break particularly uncooperative prisoners. "It’s never about the detainee,” Interrogator No. 1 said, explaining how he used it. “It’s to make the individual … afraid of American prisons."
U.S. troops captured Khadr two weeks before his first formal interrogation, near dead and shot twice through the back during a Special Forces raid on a suspected al Qaida stronghold near Khost, Afghanistan.
Another former interrogator, who was acquitted by a court martial of detainee abuse charges, testified Wednesday that Khadr was first questioned just two days after he was wounded at the field hospital at Bagram. That interrogator, Damien Corsetti, said Khadr was tethered to a heart monitor. Soldiers held a tin of chewing tobacco to his gaping chest wound and saw that it could fit inside.
Defense attorneys argue that the military mistreated Khadr and created a coercive environment that should disqualify the truthfulness and reliability of his later confessions that he threw a hand grenade that killed U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28.
Prosecutors defend the youth's treatment and say he subsequently boasted voluntarily, and truthfully, to FBI agents conducting a criminal terror trial investigation that he threw the grenade and also planted land mines in Afghanistan meant to kill American soldiers and earn him $1,500 a head.
Veteran prosecutor Jeff Groharing, now a Justice Department attorney who got the case as a Marine major, sought on follow-up questioning to make clear that Interrogator No 1 was gleaning information from the Canadian for “actionable intelligence” in the Afghanistan combat zone -- not for a future criminal prosecution.
Interrogator No. 1 said he wanted to know about the location of weapons and mines to assist the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. His intelligence reports at the time noted that Khadr had thrown a grenade that killed a fellow U.S. soldier but Interrogator 1 said he wasn’t seeking a confession.
He also said that he didn’t think the rape tale made Khadr any more cooperative or truthful and that he only started spilling al Qaida secrets after U.S. troops went back to the scene of his capture in Khost, Afghanistan, and recovered a video of showing a young Khadr being taught how to assemble Soviet anti-tank mines.
Khadr, wearing the white uniform of a cooperative captive, watched the proceedings intently. Interrogator No. 1, in blue jeans and sporting a pony tail, testified by video hookup from Arizona. on a video monitor.