Blank Spots on the Map Page 25

  All the Americans at the Mustafa Hotel were named Bob. At least, that’s what they said their names were. A collection of mostly mustachioed white men in jeans and rumpled polo shirts, the Bobs were mostly friendly but had an edge that could come out in the blink of an eye. “You’re not a journalist, are you?” barked one of the Bobs after we’d been drinking and chatting together for a while. I’d made the mistake of asking what he did for a living, who he worked for. I thought the question had come up naturally, but that question, maybe more than any other one, was a red flag. He’d paused for a moment before regaining his composure and broadly smiled. “The U.S. government.”

  I knew the Bobs from a previous life. As we sipped beers one Thursday night (Friday is the traditional Muslim holiday; whatever they did, the Bobs also had it off), the Bobs mentioned some of the other places they’d worked. These men spent their lives in the vicinity of major military installations, but not necessarily on them, places like Bad Aibling near Munich, Germany, or Misawa, Japan.

  Growing up in the Air Force, I’d lived in Germany during the height of the Reagan administration. A lot of the other kids who went to the base high school had parents who were “civilians” working in things like “communication.” I never thought this was unusual until my brother told me he’d gone with a civilian friend to drop his father off at work. The family car pulled up to a corn-field, the father disappeared into the field, and the family car drove away. We both agreed that was weird. My high school girlfriend’s father was a civilian, not assigned to any specific base, who would answer all of our questions about his career in cryptic mumblings about “radar” and “communications.” Another friend’s father piloted C-130s and eventually confessed that his “supply plane” was actually stuffed with surveillance equipment. My teenage life was filled with Bobs. Coming to Kabul was, in this small way, like coming home.

  The relational geography between Afghanistan and the United States began taking its contemporary form on September 17, 2001. That day, George Bush signed the new war on terror’s birth certificate. Its contents are still secret.

  In the hours after 9/11, it became clear to everyone in the Bush administration that there would be a war. “Any barriers in your way, they are gone,” he told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” Someone—one agency or another—would be given extraordinary powers in the coming days. It was less clear who would be out front.

  CIA director George Tenet envisioned his own agency acting as the sharp tip of the war’s spear. Immediately after the attacks, he began frantically assembling a top-secret dossier: the CIA’s proposal for what this war on terror might entail. Working together with CIA director of operations James Pavitt, Tenet sent cables to the CIA’s regional stations around the world asking for “wish lists.” What new powers would his operatives like to have? Tenet encouraged his agents to imagine “novel, untested ways” that the CIA might conduct overseas operations. The global covert action Tenet anticipated would “include paramilitary, logistical, and psychological warfare elements as well as classical espionage.”

  The weekend following the attacks the Bush administration’s principal cabinet members met at Camp David. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, handed out a packet entitled “Going to War”—the result of the agency’s fast brainstorming and wish-listing. It called for a wide-ranging campaign of financial espionage, paramilitary operations, and surveillance. But “Going to War” contained much more.

  Tenet’s proposal was a vision of the future, a future in which the CIA would have “exceptional authorities,” as he called them. New secret wars would begin across the world. Old ones would expand. Strict rules about congressional and executive oversight of covert operations would be a thing of the past. The agency would no longer have to get individual covert actions approved by the president. Age-old complaints about covert actions getting “lawyered to death” would now be gone. The CIA would be able to snatch people from around the world at will, and would now be able to kill.

  The CIA director’s vision saw new relationships and deeper collaborations with foreign intelligence services in Egypt, Jordan, and Algeria, whose cooperation the CIA would encourage with generous subsidies. There would be new covert relationships with regimes like Libya and Syria. Foreign intelligence services would serve as CIA proxies and force multipliers. At the same time, cooperation with states like Egypt and Morocco would help keep American fingerprints off the nastiest incidents that were bound to occur.

  On Monday, September 17, the president announced that he intended to support every one of Tenet’s requests for expanded power. Bush scrawled his name on Tenet’s memorandum of notification.

  The CIA, an agency designed to operate outside the law, was now free to pursue its vision of a new world, to create new geographies, and to keep that world’s details far from the public record. The black world was supercharged with newfound life and purpose.

  The CIA spearheaded the American invasion of Afghanistan. On September 26, veteran officer Gary Schroen led a team of operatives in an old Russian helicopter from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, over the Hindu Kush and into the Northern Alliance stronghold in the Panjshir Valley. Schroen’s connections to the Northern Alliance went back to the days when he served as the CIA’s Kabul station chief (posted in Pakistan) in the 1980s. As CIA station chief in Islamabad in the late 1990s, Schroen reestablished his connections to the mujahideen commanders to prepare for the upcoming campaign. Recalling the old British saying “You can’t buy Afghan loyalty, but you can rent it,” Schroen started handing out millions of dollars in fresh hundred-dollar bills to the U.S.’s prospective allies.

  Within a few weeks, Schroen’s team of CIA officers in northern Afghanistan was joined by Special Forces “A-Teams” from Task Force Dagger, based at Karshi-Khanabad (“K2”) Air Base in Uzbekistan. One of the Special Forces soldiers’ primary missions was to “paint” Taliban positions with SOFLAM (Special Operations Forces laser marker) target designators, which Air Force bombers used to guide their “smart bombs.” The vast majority of the boots on the ground, however, did not come from American infantry divisions or joint Special Forces units, but from mujahideen commanders holed up in the northern regions of Afghanistan that the Taliban had failed to take.

  The Northern Alliance was a loose federation of northern warlords and former mujahideen who had fought the Soviets in the 1980s and banded together out of necessity when the Taliban came to power in the mid-1990s. Their leader had been Ahmad Shah Masood, the “Lion of Panjshir,” who led the dominant Tajik faction of the alliance from his base in the Panjshir Valley. After Masood’s September 9, 2001, assassination by al-Qaeda operatives posing as journalists, a trio of Masood’s deputies, including Mohammad Qasim Fahim Khan, Yunus Qanooni, and Abdullah Abdullah (Dr. Abdullah), took over the alliance leadership.

  Other major Northern Alliance commanders included Ismail Khan, the Iranian-supported leader of Heart province, and General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord with a reputation for brutality. One story holds that when Dostum caught one of his soldiers stealing, he had the man bound to a tank tread, then drove the tank around, grinding the soldier into a bloody mass of meat. Another Northern Alliance commander was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a friend of Osama bin Laden from the anti-Soviet war in the 1980s. In 1985, Sayyaf started Dawa’a al-Jihad, a university in an Afghan refugee camp near Peshawar with a reputation for training terrorists. Its alumni include Ramzi Yousef, who led the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Sayyaf was also a mentor to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 “planes operation.” The two “journalists” who’d assassinated Masood had been able to gain the commander’s audience with a recommendation from Sayyaf. When Schroen met with Sayyaf in preparation for the war, he handed the commander a $100,000 brick of cash.

  As American teams of Special Forces, CIA officers, and Northern Alliance commanders and foot
soldiers marched south with American B-52s, B-2s, fighters, and cruise missiles overhead, the ad hoc federation of fighters began taking prisoners. The immediate question was what to do with them. The answer was shipping containers: “low-value” prisoners went into shipping containers controlled by Northern Alliance warlords for transport to a prison in the northern city of Sheberghan; “high-value” prisoners went to the CIA, who put them in a collection of shipping containers surrounded with barbed wire at the recently captured Bagram Air Base for interrogation. Back in Washington, decisions about the fate of those battlefield prisoners would begin a radical transformation of American political institutions and culture.

  At the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, lawyers working with Dick Cheney’s counselor David Addington discussed several interrelated questions about how to conduct this new secret war: What legal status (if any) would prisoners in the war on terror occupy? Where would they be held? How would they be held and interrogated? Whose jurisdiction would they fall under?

  Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, and Jay Bybee, accompanied by Addington, began outlining what they would call a “new kind of war” and a “new paradigm.” They concocted new legal definitions carefully crafted to circumvent existing laws, institutions, and international norms. Chief among these new legal entities was the “unlawful enemy combatant.” Gonzales opined that the Geneva Conventions would be little more than a “quaint” relic from a bygone era. In effect, the White House was institutionalizing the Afghan battlefield’s informality. The ad hoc extralegal structure they outlined closely resembled the CIA’s newly found “extraordinary powers.”

  For the Bush administration lawyers working on these issues, the questions were not only about policy but about geography. Where would this “new paradigm” be exercised? Creating new spaces in (or outside, as it were) of the law, was also a spatial question: If you want to create a space beyond the purview of national and international legal institutions, and if a nation’s soil imparts certain rights upon anyone standing on it, then this question of geography becomes paramount. It was a new version of the black world’s original contradiction: how to create a “nowhere” when even nowhere must exist somewhere?

  The White House devised three solutions.

  The first was Guantánamo Bay, a space that fit the paradoxical requirement of being beyond the purview of the U.S. federal court system (it was, strictly speaking, not a part of the United States) but nevertheless under the control of the United States. In a no-man’s-land like Guantánamo, the White House insisted it could suspend some laws while enforcing others, all without the oversight of the other branches of government. Justice Department memos note that the island prison would be a place where the Bush administration could “detain and try suspects ‘for violation of the laws of war and other applicable laws’ ” while simultaneously suspending “ ‘the principles of law and rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts.’ ” But Guantánamo Bay was only one solution to this problematic intersection of legality and geography. Bizarre as it may sound, Guantánamo was the closest thing to a white version of the war on terror’s prison geography.

  A second solution to the White House’s geography problem came in the form of the rendition program—terror suspects kidnapped by teams of CIA officers and contractors who would bring them and other prisoners to third-party countries like Egypt, Syria, and Morocco, where local intelligence services (which were substantially funded by the CIA) could hold them in relative secrecy.

  The third solution was the black sites.

  From the beginning, Guantánamo Bay made the CIA nervous. The facility would be run by the Department of Defense, a potential political rival. Furthermore, there were too many competing agencies, too many different agendas at Guantánamo. Finally, Guantánamo was out in the open—no doubt journalists and human rights advocates would soon be demanding access. Federal courts might try to exert influence over the prisons. For the CIA, Guantánamo Bay was a “goat fuck,” the last place the CIA wanted to keep its high-value prisoners.

  A CIA black site program could meet the same extralegal requirements that the Justice Department laid out when they picked Guantánamo Bay, but they’d have an added element: Their very existence would be secret. In late 2001, the CIA built the first black site outside Kabul, the Salt Pit. With brick laid, the black world was constructing more than an unacknowledged outpost for ghost prisoners and “disappeared” people. It was building a new economic, social, and legal infrastructure within the American state. Facts on the ground a short drive from the Kabul airport would sculpt the United States’ future.

  16

  Screaming Their Heads Off

  In the Dark, Around the World

  As A. C. Thompson; Maiwand, our aged Afghan taxi driver; and I drove past the Salt Pit, we could see that this once-isolated and nondescript outpost had grown dramatically. A brick fence topped with barbed wire surrounded a sprawling compound the size of a gated community in the American suburbs. Black SUVs with tinted windows patrolled the complex’s perimeter, and a Humvee kept watch near an entrance gate. The old brick factory that had housed the first black site looked worn and crumbled, but newer buildings had been erected all around it. If the Salt Pit began as an informal and ad hoc solution to a battlefield prisoner problem, it was now an institution, as permanent-seeming as the National Counterterrorism Center’s manicured campus near Tysons Corner.

  By the time we arrived, this had become an international destination. Rendition victims from all over the world had been brought there. Majid Khan, captured by a CIA rendition team in Pakistan in March 2003, was held at the prison. Laid Saidi, an Algerian man kidnapped from Tanzania, spent time there. American interrogators told Saidi that he was in a place that was “out of the world,” and said, “No one knows where you are, no one is going to defend you.” After sixteen months of brutal interrogations, the CIA decided Saidi was a nobody. They delivered him to Algerian intelligence officials, who promptly concurred. The Algerians then gave Saidi some money and left him at a bus stop in Algiers. When the CIA kidnapped Khaled El-Masri from Skopje, Macedonia, in early 2004, he spent months at the Salt Pit before the CIA realized that he too was a nobody. They dumped him off on a rural roadside in Albania.

  The former prisoners give similar accounts of what it was like inside the black site. El-Masri described a cell where filthy, worn clothes topped with a thin military blanket served as a bed. The drinking water was a plastic bottle filled with greenish-brown liquid. The walls were scratched with verses from the Koran, aphorisms, and dates in Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu. Masked men in black uniforms served as interrogators. One of the interrogators, who spoke Arabic with a south Lebanese accent, summed up El-Masri’s fate with a telling sentence, whose verisimilitude extended far beyond the walls of the secret prison: El-Masri, said the man, “was in Afghanistan, where there are no laws . . . ‘We can do with you whatever we want.’ ”

  By the time El-Masri and Saidi arrived in Afghanistan, the world’s attention had turned to Iraq. Afghanistan had become the forgotten war. The only people left in-country were a shady collection of Bobs. Afghanistan had, in other words, become a perfect place for blank spots on maps. With the world’s attention diverted, the black sites proliferated in Afghanistan.

  First was the Salt Pit, and then came the “Dark Prison,” the “Prison of Darkness,” the “Disco Prison.” Saidi had spent time there before being transferred to the Salt Pit. Binyam Mohammed al Habashi also spent time there. Binyam Mohammed was first captured in Karachi, Pakistan, trying to travel on a false passport, then brought to Morocco, where he was tortured for eighteen months before the CIA arrived to bring him to Afghanistan. On January 21, 2004, a Boeing Business Jet arrived in Rabat, Morocco (the same 737 from the Desert Rock Airstrip that we encountered in chapter 1). He arrived in the country within days of El-Masri.

  As he recounted in his diary, which his British lawyer Clive St
afford Smith provided to me,

  There was a hall with rooms apart from each other. I am guessing there were about 20 rooms. I was told special people were housed in it, and I was “special” which is why I was being taken there. I later found out that these special people were people like Abdulsalam Hiera, the Yemeni businessman from Sana’a, and Dr. Gairat Bahir, the former Ambassador of Afghanistan.

  They knocked my head against a wall a few times until I could feel blood, then I was thrown into a cell. It was cell number 16 or 17, the second or third last room from the shower room. The room was about 2m by 2.5m. The cell had a heavy metal door, all solid, then a second door with bars. There were speakers near the ceilings at both ends of the room. There was a watching hole low down on one wall. There was a hanging pole for people left there in a kneeling position. There was a bucket in the corner for a toilet. . . .

  It was pitch black, and no lights on in the rooms for most of the time. They used to turn the light on for a few hours, but that only made it worse when they turned it back off. . . .

  They hung me up. I was allowed a few hours of sleep on the second day, then hung up again, this time for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb. I got food only once all this time. After a while I felt pretty much dead. I didn’t feel I existed at all. . . .

  Then I was taken off the wall and left in the dark. There was loud music, Slim Shady and Dr. Dre for 20 days. I heard this non-stop over and over, I memorized the music, all of it, when they changed the sounds to horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds. It got really spooky in this black hole. . . .