Dark Art
Interrogation should be a powerful tool in the war on terror, but too often it is thwarted by abuse and interagency conflict.
Prisoner 237 was delivered to the Army interrogation facility at Bagram airfield in northeastern Afghanistan in the middle of a June day in 2002. The thin Arab in his early 20s with the receding hairline and black beard had apparently been picked up across the border in Paki-stan by tribal forces, then turned over to the "OGA" - the euphemistic acronym (for "other government agency") given by military personnel to the CIA - before being transferred to the Special Forces team that deposited him at Bagram.
Prisoner 237 immediately went to the top of the interrogators' priority list: He was a Saudi national who had attended high school in the United States and studied aeronautical engineering in Arizona, just 100 miles from the Scottsdale, Ariz., flight school attended by Hani Hanjour, the Sept. 11 hijacker who nine months earlier had piloted the jet that crashed into the Pentagon. There were indications he had ties to a couple of different terrorist organizations. The mood at Bagram was electric: Prisoner 237 might reveal crucial information about al Qaeda.
That the interrogation team was told anything about this prisoner made the case unusual. Frequently, prisoners were simply dropped at the facility, usually by Special Forces personnel, sometimes following a battle, other times after spending some amount of time being held by the CIA in locations that were never disclosed, under circumstances that were never explained. According to one senior military officer formerly assigned to the U.S. embassy in Kabul, the CIA "was running its own game," sometimes to the detriment of broader U.S. objectives. "Basically, they were arrogant. They didn't see themselves as part of a multiagency team," he says.
http://www.govexec.com/features/0405-01/0405-01s3.htm
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