Abu Zubaydah (whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn) is perhaps the most egregious victim of the U.S. national security apparatus that ran amok after the September 11 attacks and still grinds on. He appeared in a Guantánamo courtroom Thursday, listening to his attorney Solomon Shinerock tell a board of U.S. officials that a “redacted” country could admit Abu Zubaydah and monitor his activities indefinitely. The detainee will agree to any form of surveillance by the host country, said Shinerock, who did not name the country during the unclassified portion of the hearing.

The prisoner, looking healthy at age 52 in a business suit and tinted glasses, did not sport the piratical eye patch he carried the first time he was seen in a public setting in 2016. At that time, the government was still insisting that Abu Zubaydah had been an important Al Qaeda operative who had advance knowledge of 9/11 and other attacks and was only cooperating with Guantánamo staff as a subterfuge. Since then, the claim that he was “No. 3” in Al Qaeda has been abandoned. The U.S. government’s assessment of Abu Zubaydah has shrunk to a brief statement that he “probably” served as one of Osama bin Laden’s “most trusted” facilitators.

Unlike Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three other alleged 9/11 plotters, Abu Zubaydah has never been charged with any crime. The U.S. assessment notes that he never swore allegiance to bin Laden because the Saudi militant leader focused on attacking the United States while Abu Zubaydah “had wanted to attack Israel for its treatment of Palestinians.”

Abu Zubaydah has the funds to support himself upon release, Shinerock told the panel. The detainee was awarded more than $200,000 by the European Court of Human Rights in 2022 as compensation for CIA torture at black sites located in Lithuania and Poland. In 2023, a United Nations human rights panel, U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, urged the United States to immediately release Abu Zubaydah.

“Bin Laden is dead,” Shinerock said, insisting his client “has no radical or violent tendencies.” He said Abu Zubaydah now believes that “violence is not answer to the problems of the oppressed.”

The fact that Abu Zubaydah is a stateless Palestinian makes his case more complicated. He comes from a Palestinian Bedouin family whose village near Jericho was seized by Israeli settlers in 1948. His grandparents wound up in Gaza, where Abu Zubaydah’s father was born.

According to Cathy Scott-Clark, who communicated with Abu Zubaydah and his family for her book “The Forever Prisoner,” his father could not return to Gaza after the 1967 war, but the family visited his grandparents living in a house in Gaza near the beach.

Abu Zubaydah was born in Saudi Arabia in 1971. Of the five Palestinians detained by the U.S. at Guantánamo, he was the only one designated as being from Gaza. The other Palestinian detainees have been released to Hungary, Germany, and Spain.

Abu Zubaydah was captured by U.S. agents after a gun battle in a so-called Al Qaeda guesthouse in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002. Over the course of four years, he was held prisoner at CIA black sites in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland, Lithuania, and Morocco, before being sent to Guantánamo in 2006. He was the first detainee to be waterboarded, and he endured that “enhanced interrogation technique” 83 times.

The 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the U.S. torture program stated, “After taking custody of Abu Zubaydah, CIA officers concluded that he ‘should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life,'” which “may preclude [Abu Zubaydah] from being turned over to another country.”

The Department of Defense’s Periodic Review Secretariat — comprised of officials from across the federal government — reviews “whether continued detention of particular individuals held at Guantanamo remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

Since 2016 — the first time Abu Zubaydah appeared in public after his capture — the board has reviewed his file or held a hearing to review with him present, nine times. After every review, the board has found that “his continued detention is warranted,” and “remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

It took two years for a final determination to be made after Abu Zubaydah’s last full review hearing in June 2021. Now he awaits a determination on Thursday’s full review and the outcome of ongoing negotiations with an unknown country on his resettlement. If he ever was a threat to U.S. security, has that threat finally subsided?

The post Negotiations Are Underway for Guantánamo’s “Forever Prisoner” From Gaza to Be Released appeared first on The Intercept.

I would spend the next two decades learning those prisoners’ names and covering the story of America’s not-so-secret terrorism detention complex. It started as a research challenge: to uncover the secrets of what some have called the “American Gulag.” Later, as hundreds more nameless “enemy combatants” were brought to the remote U.S. naval base on the south coast of Cuba, I followed the story through the brief wax and long wane of the Guantánamo news cycle. I wanted to know who was detained and why — and when the “war on terror” would end.

I collected boxes of files and spreadsheets of data, building a trove of Guantánamo research as I moved to new jobs and new cities. Along the way, I encountered other reporters and researchers with similar habits and disparate methods, all seeking to understand what was going on down there.

Some 780 Muslim men have been held at Guantánamo since 2002. More than 500 were released during the Bush administration, about 200 under President Barack Obama, one by President Donald Trump, and one so far by President Joe Biden. Many have been repatriated, while others have been transferred to countries that negotiated with the U.S. to accept them. Nine died in custody. Thirty-nine remain at Guantánamo today. Of those, 18 have been approved for transfer to other countries, including five approved by the Biden administration on Tuesday.

In 2004, the Post appended my list of detainees and added my name to the Page 1 byline of a story headlined “Guantánamo — A Holding Cell In War on Terror.” Reporters Scott Higham and Joe Stephens had visited the U.S. enclave in Cuba while I stayed behind in the newsroom. They brought me back a baseball cap with the logo of the Joint Detention Operations Group, known as JDOG, from the Guantánamo gift shop.

In September 2006, President George W. Bush acknowledged the CIA’s secret detention program, saying that 14 “high-value detainees” in CIA black sites had been brought to Guantánamo. (“I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world: The United States does not torture,” Bush pledged in the same speech. “It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it — and I will not authorize it.”)

“So I’m announcing today that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and 11 other terrorists in CIA custody have been transferred to the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay,” the president said to applause from a supportive audience in the White House. “They are being held in the custody of the Department of Defense. As soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September the 11th, 2001, can face justice.”

Fifteen years later, the organizers of the 9/11 attacks still have not faced justice.

The Obama Years

On January 22, 2009, Obama’s second day in office, he signed an executive order to shut down Guantánamo within a year. He wanted to try the 9/11 architects in U.S. federal courts, but a Democratic-controlled Congress blocked him. In 2011, the government initiated a new procedure for reviewing the status of the remaining detainees, and the military commission trials were reset. I was following the “war on terror” as it came home.

At NPR, where I had by then joined a new investigative team, I worked with criminal justice reporter Carrie Johnson to expose another secretive prison system right here in the U.S., where convicted terrorists, mostly Muslim, were segregated in facilities known as Communications Management Units. Our editors dubbed these prisons “Guantánamo North.”

We could not visit the facilities, but we met with prisoners who had been released, including one man at his home in Washington, D.C. (The only former Guantánamo detainee I’ve met in real life, as opposed to via Zoom, is Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera journalist who was imprisoned there for six years. We talked when I was seated at his table at an awards banquet during a journalism conference in Norway in 2008.)

In April 2011, NPR and the Times collaborated to publish a trove of secret Guantánamo documents obtained by WikiLeaks. I went up to New York to read and process them for inclusion in the Guantánamo Docket database while reporting on the revelations for NPR.

Finally, on May 5, 2012, the 9/11 defendants were arraigned in the military courtroom in Guantánamo. I was watching on closed-circuit TV from a building in Fort Meade with a large group of reporters who had not made it onto the military-approved media trip to Guantánamo. As the hours passed, we glimpsed the accused when the camera panned over the defense tables. It was our first look at a gray-bearded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — known to everyone as “KSM” — who would appear worldwide the next day in sketch artist Janet Hamlin’s amazing drawing.

Torture was always the subtext. As months and years of pretrial hearings dragged on, the defense lawyers continued to demand evidence about the conditions under which the captives had been held, details of their “enhanced interrogations,” and the reliability of admissions made while being held underwater, locked in a box, or standing naked and sleep-deprived in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and Guantánamo.

After I joined The Intercept in 2014, I continued to trek to Fort Meade for the military commission hearings and to the Pentagon to watch the Periodic Review Board process launched during the Obama administration. Detainees who have not yet been charged — despite being held for 15 to 20 years — can make their case to a panel of U.S. defense and intelligence officials as to whether they still “pose a threat.” The “open” portion, which observers can watch on live video at the Pentagon, lasts at most 15 minutes, and the detainee doesn’t speak. I attend these so that I can see the prisoners and report back, and so that the Pentagon knows that yes, the press is still interested in how they look and the aging of the detainee population. It goes without saying that there are very few in the media room for these ongoing hearings.

When the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the torture regime was released in December 2014, my Intercept colleagues and I mined the text and footnotes to map the black sites and looked for the CIA detainees who didn’t get to Guantánamo.

The banality of the torture system shone through in 2016 as we developed Guantánamo stories from The Intercept’s archive of NSA documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. In 2003, an NSA staffer described an assignment there. As we reported:

“On a given week,” he wrote, he would “pull together intelligence to support an upcoming interrogation, formulate questions and strategies for the interrogation, and observe or participate in the interrogation.”

Outside work, “fun awaits,” he enthused. “Water sports are outstanding: boating, paddling, fishing, water skiing and boarding, sailing, swimming, snorkeling, and SCUBA.” If water sports were “not your cup of tea,” there were also movies, pottery, paintball, and outings to the Tiki Bar. “Relaxing is easy,” he concluded.

The Trump Era

In January 2017, I went to Guantánamo for the first time, as a reporter for The Intercept covering the 9/11 military commission hearings. Under the guidance of Rosenberg, the doyenne of the Gitmo press corps who was then writing for the Miami Herald, I was introduced to the amenities of the press room, the media sleeping tents, latrines, showers, and the confusing, ever-changing rules of the road. No Wi-Fi except at the supermarket complex, pay-by-the-week internet access in the press room, and don’t forget your ethernet connector. Military minders accompanying us everywhere on base. Operational security — OPSEC — reviews of every photo taken every day. Notebooks and pens only in the visitor gallery at the back of the courtroom, where we sat separated by glass from the defendants, legal teams, and judge. No drawing or doodling allowed.

I was excited to be there, in the room as the 9/11 defendants walked in, surrounded by military guards until they took their seats, then turning to chat among themselves. Five defendants, each with a legal defense team headed by “learned counsel,” meaning an attorney experienced in death penalty cases.

Also in the visitor gallery, separated from the press and nongovernmental organization representatives by a curtain, were relatives of the victims, bearing witness to the proceedings.

The admiral in charge met with us, and a contractor working as a cultural adviser lectured us about the hunger strikers “faking it.”

In June 2018, I went on the Joint Task Force Guantánamo media tour. JTF GTMO is in charge of the detention center. We were able to go inside the prison, although mostly to see a Potemkin village reproduction of a cellblock, complete with a prison library. With my former Intercept colleague Miriam Pensack and a crew from Voice of America, we were given access to parts of the mysterious facility, including lots of institutional kitchens. We even briefly glimpsed one detainee from inside the guard center, a man I was later able to identify from his physical description in the files I’d been compiling for the previous 16 years.

The admiral in charge met with us, and a contractor working as a cultural adviser lectured us about the hunger strikers “faking it.” We also went on a drive to the abandoned Camp X-Ray, where the first detainees were held in 2002 and the location of those infamous photos of men in orange jumpsuits and shackles. We took photos of the fences and weeds and drove to the lonely border with Cuba, where more photos were allowed and then OPSEC’d.

On September 11, 2019, reporters and victims’ relatives joined sailors, soldiers, their families, and military commission attorneys at the base for the annual 9/11 evening run that commemorates the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the fallen jet in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. At sunset, near the turnaround mark, I saw the Windward Point Lighthouse, built in 1904 by the 1898 U.S. occupiers of Guantánamo. I was the last person to finish the race on that beautiful tropical night. The next day, back in the courtroom, motion hearings about classified evidence and discovery and potential witnesses continued.

Returning in January 2020, I watched as the defense called a reluctant and antagonistic witness, James Mitchell, a psychologist known as the architect of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques. He testified just yards from the defendants waterboarded under his orders in the black sites. “I felt my moral obligation to protect American lives outweighed the temporary discomfort of terrorists who voluntarily took up arms against us,” Mitchell said, holding back tears. “I’d get up today and do it again.”

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. The military commissions were suspended for more than a year and a half. When they restarted, the media tents were gone and public health restrictions prevailed. Wary, I watched from Fort Meade in August 2021 as the arraignment of the three alleged Bali bombers, 18 years after their capture, dissolved into disagreements over the quality of the Malaysian interpreters.

In November 2021, there were required Covid tests, masks, and takeout meals in hotel rooms and on backyard patio tables. Camp X-Ray was now off-limits, no photos were allowed, and we had to agree that any selfies from the border gate would not be published or posted. There was a new judge in the 9/11 case — the fourth — and he had a lot of catching up to do. The chief prosecutor was gone, and the chief defense officer was retiring. Some of the victims’ families were now speaking out about possible plea agreements, instead of a capital trial after 20 years of waiting.

The Biden administration could take some relatively simple steps to increase transparency around Guantánamo. To begin with, it could declassify the 6,000-page Senate torture report. A second courtroom now being built at Guantánamo for $4 million could have facilities for press to observe the proceedings in person, which are not in the current plans. And it could speed up the Freedom of Information Act process. My 2017 request for State Department documents relating to the detainee transfer process is still open, with a projected delivery date in 2023.

I signed up for this month’s session at Guantánamo so that I could be there on the 20th anniversary of the first detention, which was Tuesday. But the hearings in the 9/11 case were canceled. So I didn’t take an Uber to Joint Base Andrews at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday for a Covid test and a charter flight to Cuba a few hours later. I didn’t need my ethernet connector or my bug spray or my T-Mobile phone because that’s the only carrier on the base.

And my press ID? I hung it on a hook with an old Capitol Hill pass, where it’ll stay until the trial of the 9/11 defendants begins in 2023.

The post I Spent 20 Years Covering America’s Secretive Detention Regime. Torture Was Always the Subtext. appeared first on The Intercept.

The lawyers, including one representing accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, told a war court in Guantánamo Bay this month that the sanitized summaries of CIA cables provided to defense attorneys for the five alleged attackers do not contain critical details such as dates and which torture techniques were used. Meanwhile, journalists for The Intercept and other publications, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, have received fuller access to the cables by requesting them directly from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act.

“We have a distinct difference between what’s available to the defendants in this capital case in discovery on the one hand and to the general public under FOIA in another,” David Nevin, an attorney for Mohammed, told the court. “And apparently there are situations in which security-cleared lawyers defending people in this capital case on trial for their life are entitled to less information than is available to the general public.”

The omissions – the result of a numbing bureaucratic process by which government prosecutors essentially rewrite the cables before sharing them with lawyers for the accused, leaving out material they view as overly sensitive or unimportant – are the latest sign of the government’s failures to ensure a robust defense for the men charged in the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people more than 20 years ago.

The CIA cables documenting the interrogation and torture of Mohammed and the other defendants are redacted before being released, meaning that some information is blacked out, with indications of the legal justification, which can include concerns about national security, personal privacy, or that the release could compromise trade secrets. But even those redacted documents often include more detail than the sanitized summaries produced by the prosecution in the 9/11 case.

For example, summaries provided to the defense about the CIA’s interrogations of Mohammed at black sites between his capture on March 1 and March 22, 2003 — a critical three-week interval — include no dates. Yet independent journalist and Intercept contributor Daniel DeFraia used FOIA to obtain more than 50 CIA documents related to Mohammed’s questioning and torture with dates prior to March 22. The cables provided under FOIA also include details and original narratives in the words of the CIA interrogation teams; in the sanitized summaries, those words have been rephrased by the prosecution. In 2019, The Intercept published cables from DeFraia’s trove containing information that is still not available to defense lawyers in the military commission case charging Mohammed and his four alleged accomplices with plotting the September 11 attacks.

“Inconsistent redactions demonstrate that the government is not taking real care to redact only what is necessary, and it’s in fact very clearly over-redacting things that are public,” Dror Ladin, staff attorney at the ACLU National Security Project, told The Intercept.

“What they are withholding is less about national security and more about protecting information that could prove to be embarrassing to the agency.”

The omissions are particularly important in the 9/11 case because the defendants could face the death penalty if convicted. Their sentence could depend in large part on what U.S. intelligence agencies did to them, Ladin said.

“For the defense counsel to fully investigate that question, they need a full picture of what was done to them. When the CIA obstructs the dates, the locations, the people who were involved, the people responsible, it becomes very, very difficult to make that a really concrete picture,” Ladin said. “It’s one thing to just throw around the words ‘torture’ or ‘degrading treatment.’ It’s another thing to really walk through what it was like every day for a person who is being waterboarded over and over and over, or being starved, or being hung from his hands.”

James Connell, lead attorney for 9/11 defendant Ammar al-Baluchi, has used documents provided to the public under FOIA and other declassification orders to supplement the court-regulated discovery and challenge gaps in the information he received from prosecutors.

“Sometimes [the cables released under FOIA] have information in them that the government has invoked national security privilege over,” Connell told The Intercept. “In those situations, the public gets more access to once-classified information than the defense does.”

So why is the government withholding this information, under the eyes of attorneys and judges, in a high-profile capital case?

“The records ultimately show the bad acts of the government,” said Jason Leopold, the BuzzFeed News reporter whose FOIA lawsuits have led to the release of thousands of redacted pages of CIA documents related to the Senate torture report. “What they are withholding is less about national security and more about protecting information that could prove to be embarrassing to the agency.”

In Guantánamo earlier this month, pretrial hearings in the 9/11 case focused on efforts to discover more information about coordination among government agencies in the interrogation and torture of the five men being tried jointly.

“If documents turn up after a representation that there’s nothing there, it wouldn’t be the first time,” said David Bruck, lead attorney for Ramzi bin al-Shibh. “It wouldn’t be the 50th time in the course of these proceedings, as near as I’ve been able to reconstruct.”

The defense teams have been seeking documents and witnesses from the prosecution since the pretrial hearings began in 2012. The prosecution has turned over more than a half-million pages, including 23,000 relating to the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation, or RDI, program. But discovery litigation continues into its ninth year, as the government controls what the defense will see. The issue of national security classification further restricts access to the full record of events that took place in the black sites and later. Arguments over what can be produced are frequently heard in closed sessions, which neither the defendants nor the public may attend, and the filings are not available on the docket.

Over the 20 years since the attacks, documents and information on the 9/11 plots and the CIA rendition program in the hunt for Al Qaeda have been publicly released in government reports like the 2005 9/11 Commission Report and the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. They have also entered the public record as evidence in criminal and civil trials; through FOIA requests by journalists, human rights organizations, and citizens; through declassification requests to government agencies; and in records maintained at the National Archives and books published by members of the intelligence community, like CIA contract psychologist James E. Mitchell’s “Enhanced Interrogation.”

Just this September, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the Department of Justice to oversee the declassification of documents related to the FBI’s September 11 investigations. Among the documents posted on the agency’s web site in response was an FBI intelligence requirements document that has come up previously in the 9/11 military commission testimony. According to Connell, Baluchi’s attorney, the newly released version differs from the one he was able to use in court in October 2019.

“The FBI intelligence requirement released under the Executive Order includes more than a dozen elements redacted from the version provided by the prosecution in discovery, including what appears to be the code name of the investigation,” Connell told The Intercept this month.

Getting any documents at all is often a long and exhausting process for the 9/11 defendants. Defense lawyers file motions to compel the government to give them information, which are then argued in court for months before a judge decides. And then, as heard in court this month, the documents may not be provided after all.

“The government is taking the approach that they’re not going to turn over discovery unless we fight everything document by document with motions to compel and document requests,” Sean M. Gleason, attorney for Mustafa al-Hawsawi, told Col. Matthew N. McCall, who was appointed in August and is the fourth judge to preside over the case. “If that is their tact, Your Honor, we’re going to be trying this case forever.”

When the hearings resumed this September, at the 20th anniversary of the attacks, McCall faced a trial record with more than 10,500 filings on the docket. This month’s hearings, which adjourned on November 19 at Guantánamo Bay, are the 43rd pretrial session since the five defendants were arraigned in May 2012.

In January 2020, before the proceedings came to a halt due to the pandemic, the psychologists who designed the CIA’s torture techniques, Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, testified as the defendants watched just yards away, and 9/11 victim family members and reporters viewed from a glass-walled gallery. The methods, including waterboarding, were designed to “condition” prisoners to provide information to interrogators and debriefers.

Any statements and confessions the defendants made while they were in the black sites from 2002 to September 2006 have already been suppressed from the trial record. Now the defense is seeking to suppress statements the accused made in January 2007, when a so-called clean team from the FBI restarted the interrogation process in Guantanamo. The court learned this month that FBI agents were detailed to the CIA’s RDI program, a fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee that produced the 2014 torture report apparently did not know.

Defense attorneys told the court that the FBI interrogations should be thrown out, arguing that statements the accused made at Guantánamo were not voluntary because of the profound impact of their prior torture. The prosecution’s stance is that the men’s statements to the FBI should be allowed because four months passed between the end of their black site torture and their reinterrogation at Guantánamo.

Connell is pursuing his own FOIA lawsuits to produce documents he has been denied in discovery. On October 18, in a U.S. District Court filing in Washington, D.C., the CIA stated it had identified 765 responsive documents, representing 3,125 pages of material that it will process and release to Connell on a quarterly basis starting in January 2022.

In the Guantánamo courtroom, lead prosecutor Clayton G. Trivett Jr. volunteered to review classified CIA documents previously provided to the defense. “In no circumstance should the public be getting more information about the same topic than a capital defendant does,” he stated. “We are in violent agreement on that.”

Daniel DeFraia contributed reporting.

The post Lawyers for Accused 9/11 Plotters Say Government Withheld Public Information appeared first on The Intercept.

Welcome to Guantánamo Bay, where an unused shackle is a small reminder of the abnormal fusing into the normal, nearly two decades after the first prisoners of the “war on terror” began arriving here. The defendants now are not chained, and they appear for court in clothing of their choice, often camouflage jackets or traditional garments worn in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Yemen; there are no more government-issued jumpsuits.

At the U.S. naval base that hosts the extraordinary military commissions for the prosecution of post-9/11 detainees, a view of the Sierra Maestra in the distance is one of the few reminders that you are in Cuba. There’s also a souvenir shop with trinkets that show sites in Havana you can’t drive or fly to from here. This is not that Cuba.

The U.S. military has attempted for years to devise a system for trying the men accused of organizing or aiding the terror attacks against America, but without giving them the benefit of a trial in federal court. This case has dragged on for almost eight years without a trial formally getting underway. There have been 40 pretrial hearings and extended arguments over what evidence can be introduced — and, for instance, whether the word “torture” can be used in relation to the interrogations that took place at the CIA’s notorious “black sites.”

The large contingent of prosecution attorneys and staff are on the right, led by Martins, always crisply uniformed, with a chest full of medals and badges. His pedigree is unassailable: Martins has degrees from West Point, Oxford, and Harvard Law School. Air Force military judge Col. W. Shane Cohen, sitting on the bench, is the third judge to preside in this case; he was appointed last June.

The jury box is empty for now. These hearings on pretrial motions have been going on since 2012. When the trial begins, now set by Cohen for January 11, 2021, the panel will be made up of military officers flown in for the proceedings.

At the rear of the court, behind a glass wall, is a gallery with four rows of seats for media, nongovernmental observers, and their military escorts. There is also a section reserved for the families of the victims of the attacks. Ten family members attended daily last week, and a curtain was drawn between them and the other observers.

The gallery sees the live scene, but hears the proceedings on a 40-second delay, with the exchanges switching to white noise if classified issues are mentioned. It’s a confusing spectacle: Gestures seen on the monitors in the gallery, and the words that go with them, lag behind what’s happening in front of your eyes. When the judge calls for a break, we’re told by our escorts to rise, even though the monitors above our heads show the judge still seated.

It is a strict atmosphere. Observers are monitored by cameras mounted on the walls and military minders in the gallery. No electronic devices are permitted. Reporters scribble furiously in their notepads as a sketch artist wields her pastels (her sketches must be approved and stamped by an information security officer before she can take them out of the courtroom, and they can’t be altered afterwards).

Last week, Connell, the defense lawyer, pursued questions taken from Mitchell’s 2016 book “Enhanced Interrogation,” and other books by former CIA employees which had undergone prepublication review by the agency. But in a strange twist, a new classification guidance redacts categories of information in those books. This means that although the books contain information that is available to anyone with a library card or enough money to buy a copy, the defense lawyers try not to mention the forbidden categories.

The countries where the accused and others were held at black sites are cloaked by the classification guidance as Location 2, Location 3, Location 4, and so on. They are identified in the Senate’s 2014 torture report by colors, for instance, COBALT, GREEN, and BLUE. News stories and books about the CIA torture program place those three black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand, and Poland (there were at least five others in various countries).

The black site that held some of these prisoners in Guantánamo in 2003-2004 was only a rumor until the Senate’s report, but now can be named in court. Mitchell was a debriefer at that site for several months, making a distinction from the locations  where, in his words, “enhanced interrogation techniques” were “applied.” Mitchell and Jessen’s multiple roles as interrogator, debriefer, and psychologist, and their status as contractors in the black sites, are questioned by the defense as potential conflicts.

Euphemism is a foundation of the torture structure. Even Mitchell railed against some of the words used by the government to describe the program he was pursuing: “You want to watch the use of euphemism for what you’re doing. Don’t be fooled by ‘enhanced interrogation,’ you are doing coercive physical techniques,” he said last week. So there is a euphemism for the euphemism, which in plain English is torture.

Euphemism is a foundation of the torture structure.

As the testimony continues, euphemisms abound. There are code words for locations as well as code numbers and pseudonyms for names. An overlay of psychological terminology tries to give method and reason to examples of physical abuse. These phrases are used: “intelligence requirements,” “abusive drift,” “countermeasures to resistance,” “Pavlovian response,” “learned helplessness,” “negative reinforcement,” “conditioning strategy,” a chart of “moral disengagement.” Torturers used a technique known as “walling,” in which a detainee is thrown against a wall that is described as “safe” because it is made of plywood and constructed to have “bounce.” When walling was used, a beach towel was protectively wrapped around the prisoner’s neck and later became a “Pavlovian” tool that the detainee could be shown to remind him of the suffering he’d endured. This is how torturers speak, cloaking their actions in anodyne language.

During the hearings, CIA cables were either flashed on the overhead monitor if they had been declassified, or remained hidden from our view if they were still secret, recounting the number of slaps, the hours and days of sleep deprivation, the stopwatch counts of waterboard drownings, the rounds of “walling.” The effect is deadening to the observer; it seems part of a bureaucracy of nightmares.

Just yards away from the witnesses, the accused are listening to an Arabic translation of the proceedings. What are they thinking? A lawyer for Hawsawi, Walter Ruiz, said that when he asked his client for a reaction to Mitchell as a witness, Hawsawi said: “Arrogant.”

On Friday, Hawsawi had to leave the courtroom to receive a dose of Tramadol for the pain he has suffered since his detention at a black site in Afghanistan (known as COBALT in the Senate report, or Location 2 in the courtroom’s lingo). Other defense lawyers had no comment from their clients, but said that seeing the interrogator was difficult for them, even more than a decade after their torture.

Mitchell’s testimony last week focused on the treatment of Ammar al Baluchi at a CIA black site in Afghanistan. Mitchell did not participate in that interrogation and was willing to discuss the “abusive drift” of another CIA interrogator. This man, who died soon after his retirement in 2003, was identified by the Washington Post more than five years ago as Charlie Wise, but was not named in court during multiple questions and answers about his actions. In court he was referred to only as “NX2,” and Mitchell called him the “new sheriff.” Wise conducted this session of “walling” along with four of his trainees.

“It looked like they used your client as a training prop,” Mitchell told Baluchi’s lawyer. Mitchell sought to put distance between his team and Wise, saying: “We didn’t have them practice on detainees.”

A declassified CIA report, shown to the witness and on monitors in the courtroom and gallery, described what happened that day: “After the session Ammar was returned to his cell naked and placed in the standing sleep deprivation position, hands at eye level, where he will remain until the next interrogation session the following day.” Baluchi apparently stood in that position for 44 hours.

On Friday, after many allusions to an October 2001 statement by an anonymous George W. Bush administration official that “the gloves are off,” the word “torture” was finally spoken by Ruiz, learned counsel for Hawsawi, over objections by the prosecution.

“I know torture’s a dirty word,” Ruiz said. “I’ll tell you what, judge, I’m not going to sanitize this for their concerns.”

Ruiz described what was done to Hawsawi during his interrogations (not by Mitchell, but allegedly by another CIA interrogator). Hawsawi underwent a “bath” where his “ass” and “balls” (the words used by Ruiz in court) and then face were scrubbed with a stiff brush; he was hung naked from the ceiling; his face was slapped; he was placed in stress positions; and he was doused with cold water. Mitchell subsequently participated in a psychological assessment of Hawsawi, which was displayed in the courtroom. Hawsawi was the only defendant in the courtroom watching at the time.

“Did it matter in your assessment that Mr. Al Hawsawi had been tortured in this many ways?” Ruiz asked. “Did it matter to you?”

Mitchell objected to the characterization of Hawsawi’s treatment as “torture.”

Cohen, the judge, responded, “Of course he says no because he doesn’t think it is torture.”

Ruiz then showed a video clip of a 2018 podcast in which Mitchell said: “We never used the word torture. Because torture’s a crime.”

Guantánamo is on a tropical island that tends to be balmy, but extreme weather is not unknown. On Wednesday and Thursday last week, the canvas tents housing nongovernmental observers and journalists were whipped by apocalyptic winds, and on Tuesday at 2:10 pm, tremors from an earthquake in the Caribbean sea rocked the courtroom. After a brief pause, the hearing continued.

The post At Guantánamo Bay, Torture Apologists Take Refuge in Empty Code Words and Euphemisms appeared first on The Intercept.

“I suspected from the beginning that I would end up here,” James Mitchell told a Guantánamo Bay courtroom. Dressed in a charcoal suit and bright red tie, Mitchell stated that although he could have testified over a video link, he had chosen to come in person. “I did it for the victims and families,” he told James G. Connell III, an attorney for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the accused plotters. “Not for you.”

He added: “You folks have been saying untrue and malicious things about me and Dr. [Bruce] Jessen for years.”

Mitchell and his colleague Jessen were previously questioned in videotaped depositions in a civil case, but the proceedings underway at the military court complex in Guantánamo represent the first courtroom appearances by the two psychologists as witnesses. On Tuesday, the accused architect of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, sat just yards from the men who waterboarded him 183 times in a CIA black site in Poland in March 2003.

The topic of Tuesday’s hearing was a motion to suppress statements made by the 9/11 defendants while they were being held in detention, even after they were brought from the CIA’s black sites to Guantánamo. The defense attorneys allege that the statements the men made at Guantánamo were not voluntary because of the profound impact of their prior torture, which was overseen by Mitchell and Jessen.

The torture techniques, approved by the George W. Bush administration, were used by the CIA as part of the rendition, detention, and interrogation program from 2002 to 2008. These methods, including waterboarding, were designed to “condition” prisoners to provide information to interrogators and debriefers.

The CIA renounced the harsh interrogation techniques in 2009, and the Senate’s torture report later found that the program was a violation of U.S. and international law that failed to generate usable information for counterterrorism operations.

Mitchell and Jessen ran a contracting company that provided interrogators and security personnel to the CIA program at a cost of $81 million over several years. During that time, the psychologists personally conducted interrogations, trained interrogators, participated in debriefings, and observed interrogations.

In 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the pair in federal court in Spokane, Washington, on behalf of two former detainees, as well as the family of another prisoner who died in custody at a black site. The two psychologists provided testimony in that case, which was settled out of court in 2017. The terms of the settlement remain confidential. In a joint statement released by the parties, Mitchell and Jessen acknowledged “that they worked with the CIA to develop a program … that contemplated the use of specific coercive methods to interrogate certain detainees,” but asserted that the abuses occurred without their knowledge or involvement and that as a result, they were not responsible.

Mohammed’s co-defendants Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, and Mohammed’s nephew Baluchi also endured torture techniques proposed by Mitchell and Jessen, and they, too, were present in the courtroom on Tuesday. There were no audible reactions from the defendants during the morning testimony, which is expected to continue through next week.

Mitchell proved an antagonistic witness. He confirmed that his book had undergone an intensive pre-publication review by the CIA and the Department of Defense, and said that prior to the new restrictions, no one had suggested that he had disclosed classified information. The book has sold 40,000 to 50,000 copies, Mitchell estimated.

When asked what his reaction would be to the claim that the information in his book could harm national security, he responded, “My reaction would be: Buy the publication rights and take it off the market.”

Separated by a curtain from the press and observers from nongovernmental organizations, relatives of 9/11 victims could be heard voicing their agreement with some of Mitchell’s testy responses.

The post Architect of CIA’s Torture Program Testifies Just Yards From Accused 9/11 Plotter He Waterboarded appeared first on The Intercept.

In the second row, Mohammed’s co-defendant Walid bin Attash, a native of Yemen, draped a scarf displaying a Palestinian flag over his computer monitor. Rows three to five were occupied by defendants Ramzi bin al-Shibh; Mohammed’s nephew Ammar al-Baluchi; Mustafa al-Hawsawi; and their defense teams.

For years, the defense had been seeking access to witnesses who could testify about whether detainees’ statements to FBI “clean teams” were sufficiently separated in time from their “enhanced interrogations” to make their statements voluntary. But the structural integration of the FBI into the RDI described by Connell casts doubt on the “cleanliness” of those teams.

Connell intends to call Mueller to testify in the case.

Additional unclassified information Connell pulled from the new classification guidance included confirmation that detainees Hawsawi, bin al-Shibh, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were held and questioned at a specific black site in Guantánamo called Echo 2 between late 2003 and early 2004. That is the same location where they were questioned after being returned to Guantánamo in September 2006 and where detainee meetings with defense attorneys are still held.

The post The FBI Was Deeply Involved in CIA Black Site Interrogations Despite Years of Denials, Guantánamo Defense Lawyer Says appeared first on The Intercept.

The problem had been brewing for nearly a decade, intelligence sources had warned, as the National Security Agency vacuumed up more and more surveillance information into computer systems at its Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters: There just wasn’t enough power coming through the local electric grid to support the rate at which the agency was hoarding other people’s communications.

“If there’s a major power failure out there, any backup systems would be inadequate to power the whole facility,” a former NSA manager told the Baltimore Sun in August 2006.

“It’s obviously worrisome, particularly on days like today.”

It turns out that manager, and other sources quoted in the Sun piece, were even more correct than was publicly known at the time: The NSA had, just the prior month, already experienced a major power outage and been forced for the first time to switch over its most critical monitoring — its nerve center, the National Security Operations Center — to a backup facility in Augusta, Georgia, according to an internal report classified “secret.” The culprit: hot weather and electric company problems generating sufficient power, according to an article posted on the internal agency news site known as SIDtoday.

For the NSA, the relatively smooth handoff was a triumph. But the incident marked an important turning point, underlining how the NSA was collecting too much information for its facilities to handle. The agency would go on to build a massive data center in a barren stretch of Utah desert, estimated to be capable of holding billions of gigabytes of information.

Indeed, the story of the 2006 Fort Meade brownout is one of several stories of overwhelming mass surveillance to emerge from a review of 287 SIDtoday articles, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Other tales, collected below, include how an NSA intern working in the English countryside marked for killing or capture nine people in Iraq; how a secret team of NSA commandos deployed to foreign countries to break codes; and how the NSA spied on satellite internet systems in the Middle East.

The Intercept is publishing three other articles taken from this cache of documents, including an investigation by Henrik Moltke into how revolutionary intelligence pooling technology first used by the U.S., Norway, and other allies in Afghanistan spread to the U.S.-Mexico border — raising questions about over-sharing at home and abroad. In another article, Miriam Pensack reveals how the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000 was closely monitored by Norwegian (and eventually U.S.) intelligence, which knew more about the tragedy than was initially revealed. And Murtaza Hussain shows how the NSA drew up new rules in response to a request from its Israeli counterpart, which had sought to use U.S. intelligence to target killings, apparently at Hezbollah.

NSA Commando Unit Promised “Any Target, Anywhere, Any Time”

In 1966, a new NSA project was hatched to figure out why an electronic signal under surveillance was “exhibiting parameters outside normal operating conditions,” as an NSA history later put it. Members of “WEREWOLF,” as the project was to be called, concluded that the equipment used to monitor the signal was causing the abnormalities.

The team behind WEREWOLF would go on to conduct other “special deployment” missions, but not before a change of cover name. The unit chief decided that WEREWOLF, atop a list of automatically generated possibilities, wasn’t quite right and, reading further down, settled on the more heroic-sounding “MUSKETEEER.” At some point, the unit took on the credo “Any Target, Anywhere, Any Time.”

While technology, as well as the NSA’s mission, would change dramatically over the next 40 years, MUSKETEER teams would steadily “deploy on special collection and survey missions,” according to the NSA history, which ran in SIDtoday. They fixed signal monitoring problems, ran boutique surveillance operations from inside U.S. embassies, and surveyed transmissions in far-off places, often invited by other U.S. government entities.

In more colorful moments, they foiled an assassination attempt against a U.S. special operations commander in the Philippines and discovered vulnerabilities in a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile system, known as SA-6, as used by Bosnia during the Balkans conflict. The latter work resulted in the “neutralization of multiple batteries” of the missiles by U.S. fighter aircraft, according to the history. (The article does not mention whether MUSKETEER’s involvement was linked to the 1995 downing of U.S. fighter pilot Scott O’Grady by a Serbian SA-6 missile. The NSA was harshly criticized for failing to relay intelligence that could have prevented the shoot-down. )

One SIDtoday article recounts how a MUSKETEER team, having deployed to the U.S. embassy in Beijing, struck gold during a survey of Wi-Fi signals from “the embassies of India, Singapore, Pakistan, Colombia, and Mongolia.” At the Indian Embassy, the team discovered that someone, possibly sponsored by the Chinese government, had hacked computers inside and was transmitting “approximately 10 sensitive diplomatic documents” every day (“often Microsoft Office-compatible files or Adobe PDF documents”) to drop boxes on the “public internet.” The NSA began regularly collecting the information from these drop boxes for itself and “analyzing the Indian Embassy’s diplomatic communications,” according to SIDtoday.

Later, by analyzing “how the Chinese conduct computer-to-computer (C2C) operations against foreign targets,” the team was able to find hacking by China “in several other locations.”

This type of operation, in which a spy agency piggybacks off the work of a different spy agency against a shared target, is referred to as “fourth-party collection.”

Snooping on diplomatic communications is a violation of Article 27 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which states that the “the official correspondence of the mission shall be inviolable.”

The Secret History of the NSA’s Joint Venture with the CIA

A two–part interview in SIDtoday provides new details about the Special Collection Service, the covert NSA joint effort with the CIA to collect signals intelligence from U.S. embassies abroad. The revelations include information on SCS’s history and examples of its missions.

Der Spiegel disclosed important details about SCS in 2013 using Snowden documents, including that SCS tapped the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Before SCS was created in 1979, the NSA and CIA ran independent, covert signals intelligence programs — sometimes “at opposite ends” of the same building — serving different missions, the director and deputy director of SCS told SIDtoday in the interview. Congress intervened, directing the CIA and NSA to run the SCS program together, presumably to save money and avoid duplicated efforts.

At the Indian Embassy in Beijing, the NSA discovered that someone, possibly the Chinese government, had hacked computers inside. The NSA began regularly collecting the information for itself.

Since then, the number of SCS sites has ebbed and flowed depending on budgets and operational needs. In 1988, before the Berlin Wall came down, SCS reached a peak of 88 sites worldwide, the director said. In the following years, the number decreased, only to drastically increase in the aftermath of 9/11, when no fewer than 12 new sites were added. At one point, the SCS Caracas site was shut down when it was no longer needed, only to be reopened when “anti-American Venezuelan President” Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998.

A separate SIDtoday article, written by two NSA managers, described an SCS operation conducted against Venezuelan communications. For years, an NSA facility in Yakima, Washington, had been spying on Venezuelan satellite signals, but the “large regional satellite beams” visible from there provided “only moderately successful results.” So agents from SCS, along with an NSA analyst from Yakima, traveled to an undisclosed location, presumably close to or in Venezuela, for a clandestine three-week survey of narrow “spot beam” satellite signals sent to the country. As they collected data from over 400 newly discovered signals, team members sent this information back to analysts in Yakima, as well as San Antonio, Texas, where “dozens of links carrying traffic for Venezuelan targets of interest” were discovered.

The most important SCS site is probably its headquarters, located in an “attractive (…) rural location outside Laurel, MD,” according to the interview. While the address of the “tree-lined corporate campus” was included in James Bamford’s 2008 book “The Shadow Factory,” and is identified as “Special Collection Service” on Google Maps, the SIDtoday article is the first public document confirming the existence of the joint NSA-CIA facility.

“You can’t tell NSAers and the CIA people here apart” as all SCS staff wear “purple badges, a sign of our status as a joint organization,” Ron Moultrie, the deputy SCS director, told SIDtoday.

The CIA uses SCS sites as places from which to monitor foreign intelligence services as they attempt to track CIA assets, a practice known as counterintelligence, according to the SCS directors. The NSA, meanwhile, uses SCS sites as a “platform” for a number of operations, including computer hacking, carried out in 2006 by a unit known as Tailored Access Operations (and today called Computer Network Operations).

Throughout the nine years of the SIDtoday archive, SCS is promoted as an assignment for those with “a sense of adventure” and a taste for “attractive” locations. Sometimes, as was the case at SCS Damascus on September 12, 2006, things get “a little hectic.”

According to a firsthand account by an SCS staffer of an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, published in SIDtoday, the sound of an explosion sent the SCS staff into lockdown mode and triggered “full emergency destruction” preparations. The attack was eventually subdued by Syrian security forces and the attackers killed. One casualty was SCS’s microwave search system: Bullets penetrated “maintenance sheds” on the embassy roof, which were actually concealing SCS antennas. One slug “severed a control cable” for the microwave searcher, “rendering the antenna inoperable,” according to SIDtoday.

The SCS staffer’s account stated that “two explosive-laden cars” were involved in the attack.

Publicly available media reports describing the incident painted a dark picture of what would have happened if a truck “loaded with pipe bombs strapped to large propane gas canisters outside the embassy” had not failed to detonate.

NSA Pioneers Use of “Stingray” Cellphone Spy Towers

In May 2006, the NSA made an early — and largely fruitless — attempt to use so-called Stingray devices to monitor local mobile phone conversations in Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius, where Vice President Dick Cheney had traveled to attend a conference with regional leaders, according to an account in SIDtoday.

Stingrays mimic cellphone towers, tricking mobile phones into connecting to them instead of to legitimate towers. This allows the Stingrays to intercept calls and texts. Two NSA linguists, as part of an SCS team, used this Stingray-type device to try and eavesdrop on local cellular networks. They did not have much luck; SIDtoday noted that the device “did not provide a capability against the primary cellular systems found,” although agents were able to identify “relevant airport communications and police networks.”

It is not clear if the effort violated laws against wiretapping in Lithuania, a U.S. ally and member of NATO.

Unlike similar operations in which “teams need to work from unsecured hotel rooms or out-of-the-way locations such as unimproved attics,” SIDtoday said, this team worked from the comfort of a shielded enclosure within the U.S. Embassy, from which they could survey the “local wireless and [radio frequency] environment.”

Beginning a few days before Cheney landed in Vilnius, the SCS team monitored police communication 24 hours a day looking for “any indications of threats or problems on which the Secret Service might need to act.”

It didn’t find any.

Weather Takes Down NSA Headquarters

In summer 2006, a heat wave rendered the intelligence nerve center within the NSA’s headquarters inoperable. As the record-setting wave toasted the East Coast and brought triple-digit temperatures to the spy agency’s home in Fort Meade, Maryland, conditions “in the Baltimore area and problems with Baltimore Gas and Electric power generation caused server and communications failures around the NSA Washington complex,” SIDtoday reported. For the first time, the agency’s time-sensitive watch center functions were taken over by a backup installation of the National Security Operations Center at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia.

The story of the NSA’s overall struggle to supply power to Fort Meade was reported by the Baltimore Sun around the time of the outage. Author James Bamford further discussed the issue in his book “Body of Secrets,” noting that energy problems at the NSA dated to the late 1990s and seemed to be coming to a head by 2006. Bamford wrote that abundant power and a “less vulnerable” electric grid in Texas led the NSA to decide in 2007 to place a new data center there.

“Problems with Baltimore Gas and Electric power generation caused server and communications failures around the NSA Washington complex.”

But the 2006 outage and the switchover to Fort Gordon are revelations.

The National Security Operations Center, or NSOC, operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, managing critical functions concerning possible foreign threats to national security.

What could have been a calamity was avoided by the emergency switch over to NSA Georgia, located at the Fort Gordon Army base near Augusta. On August 1, 2006, a backup high-priority operations center there, codenamed DECKPIN, was activated at 4:00 Zulu (Greenwich Mean Time), according to the SIDtoday story, written by the DECKPIN coordinator at Fort Gordon. Four hours later, Baltimore-area power was stabilized, and operations switched back to the NSOC at Fort Meade. The Georgia staff was put on standby again on August 3, “to ensure availability while the [electric company] work was completed.” The NSA around this time was Baltimore Gas and Electric’s biggest customer, using the same amount of power as half the city of Annapolis, according to Bamford.

Since 2006, new NSA facilities in Texas, Hawaii, Georgia, and Utah are sharing the load of the agency’s enormous power requirements.

U.K. Base, and NSA Intern, Facilitated Death or Capture of “Chicken Man” and Other Iraq Militants

In mid-2006, the NSA was closely watching a “most wanted” militant organization with a presence in Iraq, known as the Moroccan Islamic Fighting Group. The agency was struggling to eavesdrop on the group’s communications, which it said had led to a “critical gap” in intelligence.

However, the NSA got lucky when an intern working at the agency’s Menwith Hill surveillance base in England uncovered a network associated with the group. By tracking the communications of an Algerian bombmaker associated with the Moroccan organization, the NSA was able to identify other Islamist fighters working to manufacture explosives in Iraq, according to a July 2006 SIDtoday article. The NSA discovered chatter between militants, who were apparently fighting with the Moroccan jihadis against the U.S. and its allies in Iraq. One of the militants on an intercepted phone call referred to “chickens” falling from the sky, an apparent coded reference to the downing of U.S. helicopters that previous May. The man on the phone call became known to the NSA as “Chicken Man,” and his communications proved invaluable to the U.S. spies who were listening in.

The NSA passed the intelligence it gathered from the phone calls to U.S. forces in Iraq. The analysts at Menwith Hill — working with NSA employees at the agency’s base in Augusta, Georgia — continued to keep tabs on the jihadis. Then, between May 23 and May 25, 2006, the U.S. military launched operations that resulted in the killing and capture of nine mostly foreign fighters, including Chicken Man, according to the SIDtoday article.

Menwith Hill is the NSA’s largest overseas surveillance base and continues to play a key role in U.S. military operations around the world. As The Intercept has previously reported, the spy hub has been used to aid “a significant number of capture-kill operations” across the Middle East and North Africa, according to NSA documents, and is equipped with eavesdropping technology that can vacuum up more than 300 million emails and phone calls a day. Human rights groups and some British politicians have demanded more information about the role of Menwith Hill in controversial U.S. drone strikes and other lethal operations, arguing that the base is unaccountable to British citizens and is shrouded in too much secrecy.

Breakthroughs in Locating Internet Cafes in Iraq

During the Iraq War, suspected insurgents often accessed the internet from public computers at internet cafes, as previous SIDtoday reporting described. Even when the NSA could intercept internet traffic from a cafe, the agency couldn’t always determine where the cafe was located. But in 2006, the NSA had two separate breakthroughs in how it conducted surveillance against internet service providers in Iraq, allowing them to pinpoint the exact location of many more cafes.

“We’ve had success in targeting cafes over the past year,” a July 2006 article stated, “but until recently there was a major gap in our capabilities.” The network run by a popular provider of internet service to cafes across Iraq was so complicated that, even when analysts knew the IP addresses of the cafes, they couldn’t narrow down their locations beyond what city they were in.

By surveilling satellite signals, and with the help of hackers at a division known as Tailored Access Operations, the NSA managed to intercept the internet service provider’s customer database. The agency also installed its system for searching signals intelligence, XKEYSCORE, at a new field site in Mosul, allowing it to conduct bulk surveillance of internet traffic traveling through the region. With the knowledge of who the ISP’s customers were, combined with internet surveillance, “previously un-locatable cafes have been found and at least four ‘wanted’ [alleged] terrorists have been captured.”

Another SIDtoday article, from December 2006, credited analysts working in the NSA’s British base at Menwith Hill with locating internet cafes in the Iraqi city of Ramadi that were allegedly used by associates of Al Qaeda leader Abu Ayyub Al-Masri. It did this through an intiative known as GHOSTHUNTER, which mapped locations of small, “VSAT” satellite dishes throughout the region.

“Terminals from the current top three VSAT technologies in the Middle East — DirecWay, Linkstar, and iDirect — have
all been successfully located as part of the GHOSTHUNTER initiative,” the article said, including 150 terminals “on networks of interest… in Baghdad, Ramadi, and neighboring cities.”

Intellipedia: the Intelligence Community’s Classified Wiki

A November 2006 article in SIDtoday described Intellipedia, a wiki for analysts throughout the intelligence community, with information limited based on clearance level. At the time, the tool had “only about 20 registered users” from the NSA, compared with over 200 at the CIA, which had been leading the charge to promote the wiki, even offering staff a six-day sabbatical to study it and other collaboration tools.

After hearing “rave reviews” about a CIA’s Intellipedia sabbatical, plans to adopt the training for NSA employees were in the works, according to an early 2007 article, and one of the CIA’s Intellipedia “pioneers” gave presentations to NSA analysts about the platform.

On January 28, 2014, the top-secret version of Intellipedia had 255,402 users and 113,379 pages; the secret version had 214,801 users and 107,349 pages; and the unclassified version had 127,294 users and 48,274 pages, according to the NSA’s response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

As part of an investigation into cyberattacks that target hardware supply chains, The Intercept published multiple top-secret Intellipedia wiki pages. These include the “Air-Gapped Network Threats” page, the “BIOS Threats” page, and “Supply Chain Cyber Threats” page.

According to SIDtoday, Intellipedia was introduced alongside two other tools to bring classified information into the internet age: a classified instant messaging system linking the NSA, CIA, and other intelligence agencies, as well as blog platform “for sharing your knowledge and your point of view with others.”

The post Meltdown Showed Extent of NSA Surveillance — and Other Tales From Hundreds of Intelligence Documents appeared first on The Intercept.

Most of these laws were created in response to the 9/11 attacks. In all, 27 states passed anti-terrorism legislation in 2002.

In some states, terrorism is vaguely defined. Arkansas outlaws “terroristic acts” but does not say that such acts must be ideologically motivated, a requirement under the federal terrorism law. Maine prohibits what lawmakers term a “catastrophe” of “terroristic intent,” which can include releasing a chemical or biological toxin or causing an explosion, fire, flood, building collapse, or even an avalanche.

Since 9/11, state lawmakers have continued to be reactionary in drafting and amending anti-terrorism laws. Georgia created a law in 2017 to define “domestic terrorism” following Dylann Roof’s mass shooting at a black church in South Carolina. After Omar Mateen’s massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, lawmakers amended the state’s 2002 anti-terrorism law to strengthen criminal penalties for acts of terrorism, adding a life sentence for terrorists whose violence results in death, among other changes. Kentucky and Michigan provide even harsher penalties: life in prison for anyone convicted of committing an act of terrorism.

Here’s a look at anti-terrorism laws in the 50 states and the District of Columbia:

Sources: National Conference of State Legislatures, Justia

The post How Individual States Have Criminalized Terrorism appeared first on The Intercept.

It began not by tapping enemy insurgents’ phones or capturing their emails, but by following the money.

When the National Security Agency discovered that Iran may have been buying computer chips from the United States, routing them through a U.S. ally, and potentially supplying them to detonate bombs against U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, it credited so-called economic intelligence with the find.

And the solution was not a death blow delivered by the military, but rather a new regulation on the export of certain technologies via the Commerce Department, which the spy agency said would end up “saving American and coalition lives.”

The unusual strategy of tracing monetary flows to stop explosions is one of many significant disclosures contained in a batch of 328 internal NSA documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden and released by The Intercept today after research and redaction.

Also included in the material, which originates from SIDtoday, the newsletter of the agency’s core Signals Intelligence Directorate, is the untold story of how intelligence related to Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was finally acquired; an assessment that a “vast … network of Iranian agents”  operated in Iraq and influenced its government; a major push to hone the agency’s voice identification technology; details on how NSA staff deployed abroad viewed, and sometimes stereotyped, their host countries; and grumbling about having to comply with public-records laws.

Those stories and others are detailed in the highlights below; the NSA declined to answer questions about them. Also with this SIDtoday release, drawing on the same set of documents, Peter Maass profiles the NSA’s “SIGINT Curmudgeon,” Rahe Clancy, who wrote a beloved set of articles for SIDtoday, trying to instigate change from within the agency and riling up his fellow spies against its corporatization. Alleen Brown and Miriam Pensack, meanwhile, detail instances in which the NSA has spied on environmental disputes and around issues like climate change, overfishing, and water scarcity. And Micah Lee reveals that the NSA infiltrated virtual private computer networks used by various airlines, the Al Jazeera news network, and the Iraqi government.

U.S. Army Gen. George W. Casey, Jr., commander for Multi-National Force-Iraq, speaks with U.S. Army Maj. Sean Bastian, commanding officer of a military transition team, during a Thanksgiving Day visit Nov. 23, 2006, at Combat Outpost Rawah in Iraq’s Al Anbar province.

In Iraq, a “Vast and Disperse Network of Iranian Agents”

The NSA caught Iran smuggling American microprocessors that may have been used to bomb U.S. troops in Iraq, according to a May 2006 SIDtoday article. To import the chips, Iran set up front companies in the United Arab Emirates, an agency staffer wrote; the front companies then sent the microprocessors to customers in Iran and Syria.

The chips had both civilian and military capabilities and “have been used or are capable of being used” in the improvised explosive devices used extensively against U.S. forces in Iraq, the report concluded. Intelligence on the chip smuggling came not from intercepted military or diplomatic communications, as is typical at the agency, but rather through “economic reporting.”

Earlier the same year, an NSA representative who was embedded with U.S. Special Operations Command stated in a top-secret SIDtoday report that analysts had discovered “a vast and disperse network of Iranian agents in Iraq serving the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence or the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.”

In Kuwait, different NSA units deployed a satellite interception system to hear conversations between Iranian agents, according to SIDtoday. This produced new intelligence reports that “have focused on Iran’s (and specifically Iran’s external paramilitary and intelligence forces’) activities in Iraq and the influence they wield on important figures in the new Iraqi Government.”

SIDtoday’s 2006 reporting on Iran’s involvement in Iraq buttressed comments by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American military commander in Iraq, who told reporters in June that year that the military was “quite confident that the Iranians, through their covert special operations forces, are providing weapons, I.E.D. technology and training to Shia extremist groups in Iraq.” By 2017, the New York Times would say that Iran dominated Iraq: Iran-sponsored militias dominated in Iraq’s south, and cabinet politicians who resisted Iran lost their jobs, while U.S. efforts in Iraq primarily focused on chasing the Islamic State in the country’s north.

U.S. Army soldiers make radio contact after arriving by helicopter at night at an undisclosed location south of Baghdad, where they believed a top leader of the insurgency and close associated of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was hiding, June 5, 2005.

How Key Al-Zarqawi Intelligence Was Obtained

In Iraq, at a strategic level, the U.S. was concerned about Iran; at the ground level, its top priority in 2006 was finding the Jordanian Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — the most wanted terrorist in the country. Al-Zarqawi was the leader of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq and a fugitive from a Jordanian death sentence. The reward for information resulting in his capture or death reached $25 million.

Zarqawi was brutal to Iraqis as well as Americans. According to Joby Warrick, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS,” “The Jordanian also would seek to strike fear into Americans and other Westerners in Iraq with a series of kidnappings and videotaped beheadings. The first victim, Pennsylvania businessman Nicholas Berg, was butchered on camera by a hooded Islamist that CIA officers later confirmed was Zarqawi himself.”

NSA specialists were able to figure out the location of the internet cafe in Baghdad where the courier was about to access an email account.  An important message from al-Zawahiri to al-Zarqawi, “outlining al-Qaeda’s strategic vision for Iraq,” was obtained.

A major breakthrough had come in 2005, when NSA analysts intercepted, via a courier in Iraq, emails that were intended for al-Zarqawi from Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri in Pakistan. In partnership with U.S. forces, NSA specialists in geospatial intelligence and counterterrorism were able to figure out the location of the internet cafe in Baghdad where the courier was about to access an email account. The courier and a “traveling partner” were caught, and an important message from al-Zawahiri to al-Zarqawi, “outlining al-Qaeda’s strategic vision for Iraq,” was obtained. The 15-page document was made public by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2005, but the circumstances under which it was obtained appear to have not been previously reported. (Warrick’s book said “the CIA’s acquisition of the letter was a closely-guarded secret” and stated only that “the surveillance net” around al-Zarqawi “had snagged a singular piece of correspondence.”)

By early 2006, SIDtoday continued to report on how signals intelligence successes helped capture lesser-known figures. But the primary target remained at large and continued to issue propaganda videos. An intelligence analyst described the intensity of an assignment to a task force in Mosul, Iraq: “We worked for 14 to 18 hours a day, pouring over traffic and piecing together data to find threats or information that would help us locate and go get bad guys. You would feel every minute of those days, but you’d wake up one morning and it would be August.” 

Back at NSA headquarters, new mathematical analysis tools supplemented old-school language expertise in the process of reviewing audio recordings of al-Zarqawi posted on the open web, confirming his voice.

At last, on June 7, 2006, the “primary PC,” which stands for “precious cargo,” was found and dealt a death blow. In SIDtoday, an analyst from the NSA Cryptologic Services Group described the work of the Special Operations Task Force leading up to the targeted bomb strike that killed al-Zarqawi and others, reportedly in a two-story house near Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad, saying that a combination of signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, human intelligence, and “detainee reporting” uncovered the identity and location of al-Zarqawi’s “personal religious advisor,” Sheikh ‘Abd-al-Rahman, who was followed to al-Zarqawi’s hiding place and perished with him.

In this television image from Arab satellite station Al Jazeera, Osama bin Laden, right, listens as his top deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri speaks at an undisclosed location, in this image made from undated video tape broadcast by the station, April 15, 2002.

Fervor for Voice Matching Technology

By the end of 2006, the NSA had come to believe that audio fingerprinting as performed against al-Zarqawi could be used as a simple fix for a host of complex problems, from freeing hostages to curbing nuclear weapons proliferation, according to a series of SIDtoday articles.

Despite repeated setbacks, the NSA remained enthusiastic about voice matching technology, which identifies people by the sound of their voice. The agency had help: According to SIDtoday, voice matching techniques were developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory on the back of efforts to confirm the authenticity of broadcasts by Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

A February 2006 SIDtoday article described some of the difficulties inherent in voice matching, noting that Al Qaeda second-in-command al-Zawahiri displayed more “tonal diversity” than usual following a botched drone strike against him. (The attack killed at least 18 in the Pakistani village of Damadola but missed al-Zawahiri, reportedly due to faulty intelligence on his location.)

“During the 30 Jan message — lasting about three minutes — the terrorist never quite settled down, probably rattled by the attempt on his life and the vehement content,” the article stated. Despite al-Zawahiri’s shaky voice, “mathematical voice matching produced a perfect score of 99% upon comparison with previous soundfiles on this speaker from the same source.”

Six weeks later, another article described how two of five transmissions by al-Zawahiri in a nine-month span failed to yield a high-confidence voice match with previous transmissions. This was solved with new technology from MIT, which “allows optimal combination of vocal-tract models from contentious intercepts,” according to SIDtoday. The lesson to NSA: “Careful modeling” is “critical” for making voice identification actually work — and particularly important once voice matching is applied on a “large scale” to identify those “bent on terrorist activities against U.S. forces or the local populace.”

The same article goes on to describe a hand-held device, close to going into production, which would provide field access to MIT’s “mathematical engine” and voice matching estimates in “hostile environments.”

A May 2006 article describes another voice recognition stumble, when an October 2003 audio recording of bin Laden could not identify the Al Qaeda chief’s voice because it “proved to be of too low quality.” The file was later “enhanced” using software from a “local vendor … to yield a perfect match.” Still, there were successes, credited to the MIT software, with which “voice matching has become simplicity itself.” For example, an April 2006 recording of bin Laden was successfully matched against a January 2005 recording of bin Laden and against multiple other recordings.

The May SIDtoday article included references to screenshots of the MIT software’s “Speaker Comparison Algorithm” interface. Though those screenshots were not included in the SIDtoday articles as provided by Snowden, two images from an article on Lincoln Laboratory’s webpage — which were removed during the course of reporting this article — refer to a similarly named interface:  

Screenshots of MIT Lincoln Lab’s VOCALinc tool, which was “sponsored by the Department of Defense” and developed “utilizing U.S. government operational data.”

The MIT voice identification software was so important to the NSA that the agency approved a four-hour course on it based on MIT documentation and added the class to the National Cryptologic School syllabus, according to a July 2006 SIDtoday article.

The code, or an MIT-updated version of it, appears to have still been in use nearly eight years later. According to publicly available documentation from 2014, MIT Lincoln Lab’s VOCALinc tool was “already in use by several entities,” including “intelligence missions concerning national security” in areas such as terrorism. The document also references the development of “unseen devices such as body microphones and multirecording systems.” (Lincoln Lab did not provide responses to questions in the weeks leading up to publication of this article, although a spokesperson indicated he would try to get a response from a staffer “if sponsors allow him to discuss these topics.”)

Perhaps the clearest example of the enthusiasm for audio fingerprinting at the NSA in 2006 comes from an article written in March by the agency’s “Technical Director, Operational Technologies,” Adolf Cusmariu.

In the article — titled “Nuclear Sleuthing — Can SIGINT Help?” — Cusmariu took the idea at the base of the NSA’s voice matching technology to a new level of optimism.

What if, Cusmariu asked, the NSA scanned intercepted phone calls for the distinct sound generated by centrifuges used in uranium enrichment facilities? Could this help identify hidden nuclear weapons facilities in “rogue states like Iran and North Korea?”

What if, Cusmariu asked, the NSA scanned intercepted phone calls for the distinct sound generated by centrifuges used in uranium enrichment facilities?

There were several problems with the idea. First, there was the issue of background noise — the sound of the centrifuges inevitably mixing with other audio sources — “making unequivocal fingerprinting problematic.” Then, there was the fact that “the person making the call would have to be located inside, or at least near, the centrifuge compound for the acoustical signature to be audible.”

“Yes, a needle in a haystack!” Cusmariu admitted, but nonetheless, “algorithms have been developed … looking for just such signatures.” Unfortunately, “no convincing evidence has been found so far.”

Public records show that, in the months following these articles, Cusmariu filed for patents on “identifying duplicate voice recording” and “comparing voice signals that reduces false alarms.” Both were granted and describe methods similar to those discussed in SIDtoday, but with different applications.

To be sure, there was reason for some level of optimism about voice recognition technology. A brief — and top secret — SIDtoday article from May 2006 suggested that voice identification helped free the Briton Norman Kember and two Canadian fellow peace activists, who were held hostage in Baghdad. The successful operation was widely reported at the time, but the fact that voice ID helped identify the hostage-takers was not made public.

The CIA and the NSA staff of the Special Collection Service site in Baghdad worked together to find the kidnappers for several nights leading up to March 23, 2006, the article disclosed. On the final night, British and American spies, working side by side “to eliminate incorrect targets through voice identification,” were able to isolate “the specific terrorist believed to be holding the hostages.” The article does not, however, state whether the match was made by a computer, human, or combination of the two.

Eventually, the NSA played a pivotal role in developing voice matching technology, as described in Ava Kofman’s exposé earlier this year in The Intercept.

 “Dragon Team” Helped NSA Thwart Cordless Phones Used by Insurgents

Although it lacked the technical glamour of voice matching, the NSA saw its effort against high-powered cordless phones as critical to protecting U.S. troops on the ground. Early on in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the simple, rugged devices, also known as HPCPs, were in common use by insurgents, including as a means of triggering improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. SIDtoday articles from 2003 complained that these handsets, which could communicate with other handsets that were also within a 50-mile range of the radio base station, created an “intelligence gap,” and were such a problem that the NSA hosted a “Worldwide HPCP Conference” to understand, and design attacks against, this technology.

Less than three years later, the NSA had made significant progress. A SIDtoday article from May 2006 said a “dragon team” of NSA researchers developed a tool called “FIRESTORM” that supported a denial-of-service attack capability against cordless phone networks. FIRESTORM could prevent IED attacks and support an ability to “ping” a specific device, “forcing the targeted HPCP to emit an RF signal that can be geolocated by any asset in the area.” The dragon team had been “eagerly working with potential users to move this capability out of the development lab and into the fight.”

Sugar Grove station in West Virginia.

How NSA Staff Viewed the Rest of the World

The NSA needed staff paying attention to issues, like HPCPs, that resonated only once you were outside the bubble of Washington, D.C., and Fort Meade, Maryland — or which could only be addressed effectively from another country. To do so, it needed to convince them of the benefits of relocation. The perennial “SID Around the World” series within SIDtoday described daily life on assignment to global NSA locations, often in glowing terms. With a substantial portion of agency postings in remote locations, where big satellite dishes can dominate empty landscapes, or in offices on military bases, or in the underground bunkers below them, the idea was to make working abroad for the NSA sound fun. But in just its third year, the series seemed to fall back on lazy stereotypes and imperious complaining.

The series seemed to fall back on lazy stereotypes and imperious complaining.

A lucky staffer in Bangkok, an “adventurous woman,” is most enthusiastic about the cost of living there. “You can hire a maid for less than $100 a month or $1200 per year as a single person,” she wrote. “Most domestic services include: cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, and babysitting children and/or pets. Tell me where you find that kind of help so cheaply? And the Thai domestic help are kind and trustworthy; therefore, no need to worry about your valuables.” You can live like a queen.

In 2006, to one staffer, the Japanese “fascination with technology” was notable; they carried cellphones equipped with two-way video conferencing and web browsing, and drove cars equipped with GPS. 

Yet “[d]espite having one of the oldest cultures in the world, the Japanese seem very innocent and naive.” Really?

It seems there were some ugly Americans on assignment.

Traffic was bad, or the roads are narrow, in England, Japan, and Turkey, too.

In Turkey, the cuisine was “world-class,” although lacking variety: “Probably 90 percent of Turkish restaurants offer no more than 4 or 5 traditional Turkish dishes.”

Indeed, culinary attractions, a staple of the series, seemed sparse. In fact, NSA staffers were introducing America’s Fourth of July fare and Italian dishes to the villagers of rural Yorkshire, where they tasted English boiled beef and potatoes with a “wilted sprig of parsley” on top. No really, “it is actually very good and certainly doesn’t deserve the bad reviews that it has been getting.”

But the shopping! In Ankara, the fruit was so fresh, the price was so cheap, and there were, again, “world-class” handicrafts. In Thailand, there were many “wonders for a single woman to enjoy,” like gorgeous silk fabrics, gems, and jewelry.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., one of the best parts of a Utah posting was the dusty road trip on I-15 to California. And from the Sugar Grove station in West Virginia, the nearest shopping was 40 miles away, in another state, over snow, black ice, and curvy roads in the winter. Nothing was said about the cuisine. Getting to work at the underground NSA site required driving to the top of a mountain from the U.S. Naval Information Operations Command center at Sugar Grove, a naval base in landlocked West Virginia. There were occasional bear sightings. Since its 2006 appearance in SIDtoday, the naval base has been decommissioned and sold, but the underground NSA facility continues to operate with its secret mission.

Through its sister publication Field of Vision, The Intercept covered Sugar Grove with a film and story last year. As Sam Biddle reported at the time, “antennas at the NSA listening post, codenamed TIMBERLINE, were built to capture Soviet satellite messages as they bounced off the moon, imbuing a pristine stretch of Appalachia with a sort of cosmic gravity.” The former base is scheduled to reopen in October as a substance abuse treatment center.

The most enthusiastic appraisal of daily signals intelligence life was contributed by a GCHQ staffer assigned to the NSA Fort Meade headquarters from the United Kingdom. The temporary Marylander loved the food (“crab cakes!! Maryland crab soup!”), the climate, the roads, the local countryside, and the cheap gas. They and their wife were delighted by football and baseball games, and even by deer nibbling on flower beds. The Britons also enjoyed the friendly neighbors and, in a turnaround, were the hosts for the Fourth of July barbecue, leading “several spirited renderings of the Star-Spangled Banner.” 

Informing the Public at the NSA: “A Dirty Job, But Someone’s Got To Do It”

It wasn’t just people in other countries who seemed foreign to some NSA staff; voluntarily providing information to the American public provoked some strange and not entirely welcome sensations as well. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times reported in December 2005 that the NSA had been secretly authorized to spy on U.S. communications without a warrant. The Pulitzer Prize Board, in awarding the U.S.’s highest journalism honor, credited the pair with inspiring “a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty.”

Fulfilling public information requests is a “disruption to … day-to-day operations.”

This debate, in turn, seems to have inspired a surge in Freedom of Information Act requests directed at the NSA. The requests, in which journalists and other citizens try and pry information from the notoriously secretive agency, spiked to more than 1,600 in the first half of 2006, from 800 in the course of an entire normal year, a member of the Intelligence Security Issues division disclosed in SIDtoday. The staffer did not mention Risen (now at The Intercept) or Lichtblau, but did cite “the agency appearing so frequently in the news” as the cause of the increase.

In SIDtoday, the Intelligence Security Issues staffer portrayed the NSA’s response to handling FOIA requests in terms typically reserved for a trip to the dentist for a root canal, describing his department’s work as “a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it,” and promising to make fulfilling FOIA requests “as painless as possible,” even though fulfilling the requests is a “disruption to … day-to-day operations.” One wonders what adjectives the Intelligence Security Issues division deployed seven years later to explicate the process, when the Snowden revelations prompted an 888 percent rise in FOIA requests to the agency.  

The Skype internet phone program is seen on Sept. 1, 2009, in New York City.

NSA Decided It Was Legal To Spy on Some U.S. Phone Numbers

Sometimes, if a law became inconvenient, the NSA could do more than grumble; it could change its interpretation of the rule. For most people, the arrival of online phone call services like Skype and Vonage was a boon; it allowed them to dodge long-distance calling fees and to take their number with them anywhere around the world. The NSA, however, realized in 2006 that it had a big problem with such convenience: Online calling services might allow targets to acquire phone numbers with U.S. area codes and thus become off-limits to the agency, which is not supposed to conduct domestic spying.

“A target may be physically located in Iraq but have a US or UK phone number,” an NSA staffer grappling with the issue wrote in SIDtoday. NSA had previously interpreted a federal legal document, United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, as barring the targeting of U.S. numbers, and built safeguards into various online systems, causing U.S. numbers to be “minimized upon presentation … and restricted from contact chaining,” a process in which a network of connected people is mapped, according to SIDtoday. In response to the rise of internet calling, the NSA developed techniques “for identifying the foreign status” of phone numbers, and the agency’s Office of General Counsel ruled that U.S. phone numbers affiliated with online calling services could be classified as foreign and targeted for surveillance if the number was “identified on foreign links” and was associated with an online calling service such as Vonage.

U.S. President George W. Bush holds a copy of a presidential commission’s report on pre-war intelligence on weapons of mass destruction while flanked by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Democratic Sen. Charles Robb of Virginia, co-chairs of the commission, during a press conference on March 31, 2005, in Washington, D.C.

Back to Basics: NSA Staff Instructed on Better Analyzing and Sharing Information

Whatever its success collecting and exploiting signals intelligence, the NSA was concerned its staff might not be communicating or disseminating this intelligence properly. “Write Right,” SIDtoday’s monthly column on authoring effective reports, brought to its 2006 edition a new focus on how to effectively route information to other intelligence agencies and federal entities, a process referred to officially (and dully) within NSA as “information sharing.”

The new attention to broad intelligence dissemination may have been a response to the scathing report of the so-called WMD Commission in March 2005, which stated, among other things:

The Intelligence Community’s performance in assessing Iraq’s pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure. The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers.

A maxim on intelligence from Colin Powell, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is quoted twice in SIDtoday’s 2006 “Write Right” columns, once in May and again in December: “Tell me what you know, tell me what you don’t know, tell me what you think; always distinguish which is which.” Columns previously devoted to spell-checking or capitalization began giving advice on adding context (“collateral”) and analysis (“comment”) — and on how to provide analysis without editorializing. Warnings about the use of web research as “collateral” sources included a prohibition on citing Wikipedia.

With information sharing as the new norm, the “Write Right” author (and guest authors) repeated the need to understand and follow changing policies and to make sure that a report is releasable to the intended recipients. This guidance included what could or could not be discussed on the agency’s collaborative discussion forum, called “Enlighten.” No chit-chat: “The ENLIGHTEN system is an aid to professionals in doing their jobs,” according to the forum’s primer, which is quoted in an October 2006 “Write Right.” “All information posted on ENLIGHTEN must pertain to Agency-related (official) business. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS ENLIGHTEN AUTHORIZED FOR DISSEMINATING PERSONAL OR NON-OFFICIAL INFORMATION.”

Customers queue outside the Apple Store in London for the launch of the iPhone 3G on July 11, 2008.

The NSA Goes After Newer (3G!) Phones and “Social Networks”

Rapid change was buffeting not just NSA’s information-sharing practices but some of the core communications systems the agency surveilled as well, and in early 2006 the agency held multiple internal events to explain newly developed techniques to evolve its intelligence collection in parallel with these systems.

One SIDtoday article announced a “brown bag session” about exploiting video from third-generation, or 3G, cellphones, including “basic instructions on how best to search, analyze and use camera cell phone video data.” 3G mobile data networks first became commercially available in Japan in 2001, in South Korea and the United States in 2002, and in the United Kingdom in 2003. By 2008, the United States and Europe alone had over 127 million 3G users.

Another article announced an “open house” hosted by the “Social Network Analysis Workcenter” to show off “ASSIMILATOR,” a new web-based tool for analyzing the social networks of surveillance targets. In this case, “social network” refers to the list of people a target communicates with based on signals intelligence from a variety of sources, not social networking services.

Top photo: A U.S. soldier at a press conference in Baghdad takes down an older photo in order to display the latest image purporting to show the body of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an Al Qaeda-linked militant who led a bloody campaign of suicide bombings, kidnappings, and hostage beheadings in Iraq.

The post 328 NSA Documents Reveal “Vast Network” of Iranian Agents, Details of a Key Intelligence Coup, and a Fervor for Voice-Matching Technology appeared first on The Intercept.

After arriving in Baghdad “grungy and tired,” the staffer would later write, he discovered that the CIA and its partner, the Defense Intelligence Agency, had moved beyond talking to locals and were now intent on looking through their computer files. Marines would bring the NSA man “laptops, hard drives, CDs, phones and radios.” Sometimes the devices were covered in blood — and quite often they contained pornography, deemed “extremely useful” in humiliating and “breaking down” for interrogation the people who owned them.

The story of how the National Security Agency harvested porn for use against prisoners in Iraq is just one of the revelations disclosed in the agency’s internal newsletter SIDtoday during the second half of 2005.

There’s also the tale of how some intercepts would be rushed almost instantly to the president at Camp David via golf cart “with virtually no oversight.”

Then there’s one about how the NSA declared it could find “not many” Arabic translators it could trust among “the largest Arabic-speaking population in the United States.”

Or the story of how the agency listened as the Egyptian government dictated through its communication channels the final results for an election that had barely begun.

Told in more detail below, these are highlights from some 297 SIDtoday articles published today by The Intercept as part of an ongoing project to release, after careful review, material provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

From the same SIDtoday release — our sixth thus far — we are publishing three other articles. One is an investigation into a secretive global intelligence-sharing alliance led by the NSA, comprising 18 members and known as the SIGINT Seniors. Another looks at increased surveillance in the United Kingdom following the London bombings in 2005 — and discloses for the first time a secret agreement to share metadata harvested from the vast data repositories of the NSA and its counterparts in the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Also today, in collaboration with the Norwegian Broadcaster NRK, we shine light on a large spy base located outside Oslo. The base was built with the NSA’s help to aid Norway’s military and counterterrorism operations overseas. But it has also swept up Norwegian citizens’ phone and email records – and is now at the center of a dispute over illegal surveillance.

The NSA declined to comment for this article.

Porn Recovered by NSA Used to “Break Down Detainees” in Iraq

An NSA staffer deployed to Iraq led a counterterrorism and counterintelligence mission involving forensic investigations on computers seized in raids. The staffer’s “Media Exploitation” team found pornographic videos and photos alongside thousands of audio files of the Quran and sermons, and recruitment and training CDs with video of bombings, torture, and beheadings. The team “jokingly” referred to the content as the “three big ‘P’s – porn, propaganda and prayer.”

Reports and files were distributed to the NSA and other intelligence agencies; the staffer was detailed to the Iraq Survey Group, a joint venture between the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to find weapons of mass destruction and disrupt terrorist activities. But among the customers of the material gathered by the NSA staffer were the military units interrogating captured insurgents and suspects. Special Forces interrogators found the pornography “extremely useful in breaking down detainees who maintained that they were devout Muslims, but had porn on their computers,” according to an account by the NSA staffer in SIDtoday. (The account makes no acknowledgment of the human rights abuses by staff at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, which were in the news starting in April 2004, nearly four months before the account was published, and which were, at the time, still under investigation.)

As the conflict with insurgents escalated in Fallujah into Operation Phantom Fury/Al Fajr, NSA staff with “top-secret” clearances were deployed to the combat zone. Marines gave the NSA staff seized computers, CDs, phones, and radios directly from the battlefield, some “covered in blood.” This material, too, was used in interrogations that helped keep the “bad guys” behind bars. No “smoking WMD” evidence was found, according to the SIDtoday account.

A former interrogator at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said, in a statement obtained by the New Yorker, that pornography was used at the facility to reward some detainees and as a tool against others, who were forced to look at the material. The Associated Press has also reported on the use of pornography at Guantánamo as an inducement.

The intelligence community has also used seized pornography as a form of propaganda. In November 2017, the CIA released files recovered from the fatal raid of Osama bin Laden’s hideaway in Abbottabad, Pakistan “in an effort to further enhance public understanding of al-Qa’ida.” The agency noted that the overall trove recovered from the compound contained pornography that it was not releasing with the other files. The discovery of pornography on bin Laden’s computers in 2011 was leaked to the media within days of the raid, and a New York Times story focused on the porn reported that the adult material “will be welcomed by counterterrorism officials because it could tarnish his legacy and erode the appeal of his brand of religious extremism.”

Evidence of Election Fraud in Egypt

The NSA used signals intelligence to uncover apparent fraud in a referendum on how Egypt’s presidential elections would be run.

Rules supported by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would allow direct election of the president, abolishing the old system, in which the parliament forwarded a single candidate to voters for approval. But the rules also imposed major barriers to appearing on the ballot, including a requirement that independent candidates win support from 65 of 444 members of parliament and that other candidates come from a party with at least 5 percent representation in parliament — which at the time no opposition party held. These requirements engendered significant opposition, including a call to boycott the referendum.

The agency apparently intercepted government communications early on election day, instructing underlings to report a “yes” vote of about 80 percent and turnout of 40 to 50 percent. Official results then showed a “yes” vote of 83 percent and turnout of 54 percent, “pretty much in line with the instructions. Most foreign observers on the scene described actual voter turnout as very light, nowhere near 50 percent,” SIDtoday reported.

The referendum was followed by Egypt’s historic first multi-candidate presidential election, on September 7, 2005. Although the winner, Mubarak, was a “foregone conclusion,” there was “much interest” about whether this vote count would be honest. With only 23 percent voter turnout, Mubarak won 88.6 percent of the vote. The NSA’s analysis? “SIGINT provided good evidence that there was no massive fraud in the vote count,” according to the same “senior reporter/subject matter expert” who described the suspicious referendum. “Local vote totals reported on the day of the election by Egyptian authorities conformed closely to the final results.” Also, the runner-up, Ayman Nour, with 7.6 percent of votes, was a surprise to “top Egyptian officials” who had wanted a different candidate to come in second, the NSA staffer added. The opposition claimed there were irregularities, but Egypt’s electoral commission was satisfied with the process.

Just three months after the election, surprise favorite Nour was jailed on charges of election fraud and imprisoned for the next five years.

NSA Trusts Few Arabic-Speaking Americans It Finds at Detroit Job Fair

As the NSA swept up Arabic communications from Iraq and other hotspots in the “global war on terror,” it found its translation capabilities severely lacking. “This shortcoming must be rectified,” an NSA senior language authority wrote in 2004.  In September 2005, the agency convened a “career invitational” in Detroit, hoping to draw on the high proportion of Arabic-speaking residents in the area and recruit them as linguists for a language center on nearby Selfridge Army National Guard Base.

But the invitational “may not yield many hires” due to unspecified agency concerns about the candidates, an NSA assistant deputy directory wrote in SIDtoday. After gathering 750 resumes, the NSA homed in on 145 potential candidates through “preliminary processing,” and of these, at least 43 passed two placement exams. These finalists were subjected to “special source checks”; other documents throughout the Snowden archive use the phrase “special source” in connection with surveillance operations, including by the agency’s Special Source Operations unit, which at one point was said to be responsible for 80 percent of NSA collection, including its notorious PRISM program — implying that signals intelligence may have been used to vet the candidates. The “special source checks” caused eight individuals to be removed from the applicant pool and led to plans for “significant and lengthy investigation[s]” into at least some of the remaining candidates — investigations that “may not sufficiently resolve the identified issues,” SIDtoday noted. Although the language center on the Selfridge base could accommodate 85 linguists across four daily shifts, the assistant deputy director made clear that filling the seats was far from imminent and wrote, “We will continue to review other sites” to fill the need for linguists.

The NSA’s aggressive probing of Americans of Middle Eastern descent was not confined to job applicants or to Detroit; earlier Intercept reporting on documents supplied by Snowden revealed that the agency used the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor the communications of prominent Muslim-American community leaders and politicians. Internally, the intelligence community continues to lag in employee diversity, with a 2015 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence showing that racial and ethnic minorities comprise less than a quarter of the agencies’ staff.

“Smoking Gun Evidence” Against Yasser Arafat

In the course of arguing for more new hires, the deputy chief of the NSA’s Middle East and North Africa line told an interviewer in SIDtoday that intelligence provided by the unit had “shaped history.” One way this occurred was through “golf cart reporting.” During the 2000 peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians at Camp David, the NSA intercepted communications on the stances of participating diplomats in “near real-time,” the deputy chief said, and would “stamp ‘draft’ on it and fax it to a CIA liaison officer up in Thurmont, Maryland who in his own golf cart would race across the grounds to give it directly to the President or Secretary of State. Imagine the thrill and the responsibility of providing — with virtually no oversight — intelligence going directly to the President!”

U.S. negotiators would know the Israeli and Palestinians’ positions prior to the teams’ arrival.

The deputy chief further credits his unit’s reporting as the basis for the U.S.’s refusal to negotiate with Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, stating the division “had smoking-gun evidence that Arafat was still supporting terrorism.” It’s unclear to which precise chapter of Middle East peace talks this claim refers, but President George W. Bush formally refused to accept Arafat as a negotiation partner in 2002, amid speculation that the Palestinian leader was implicated in the 2000 outbreak of the second Intifada.

The Camp David talks were hardly the first instance of NSA diplomatic spying, a key activity for the agency. Previously published documents have shown the agency spying on heads of state, U.N. headquarters, and representatives to a climate change summit.

Czech Partnership

In 2006, then-U.S. Ambassador William J. Cabaniss was worried and unburdened himself to Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek, saying he hoped intelligence-sharing between the two nations would not be adversely affected by structural changes in how Czech intelligence was managed. Topolánek assured the ambassador that things would be fine, despite a transition of a key spy agency to parliamentary control. As described in a State Department cable published by WikiLeaks, “the Prime Minister said that UZSI, the foreign intelligence branch, ‘has been effective and we don’t want to change that.’”

U.S. concern over changes at UZSI was understandable, as at least one element of the American intelligence community had spent the prior year gushing over the benefits of newly secured access to UZSI intel. The NSA, as previously reported, was essentially let inside UZSI’s “SIGINT vault” in early 2005. By late 2005, the U.S. and Czech Republic appeared to have officially solidified their “Third Party” signals intelligence-sharing partnership and UZSI, over the course of at least three visits in six months, presented their American counterparts with a slew of information, largely about Russian government and business interests according to two articles in SIDtoday. These files included information about the communications of Russian and Belarusian arms dealers, banking networks, and counterintelligence targets. They also gave the Americans a program designed to identify Russian words in voice communications. “Our ability to jointly produce valuable SIGINT while enjoying each other’s company and learning about our cultural differences may indeed make this the start of a beautiful friendship,” wrote a staffer from the central European branch of the NSA’s foreign affairs directorate.

(One of the SIDtoday articles alleged that the Belarus company, BELTECHEXPORT, was involved in weapons proliferation. The U.S. State Department in 2011 imposed, but in 2013 lifted, sanctions against the company for weapons proliferation.)

Anti-Imperialist Camp

A previous SIDtoday release noted the NSA’s interest in a European leftist group called the Anti-Imperialist Camp. The NSA had accused the group of toeing a line between “legitimate political activity” and abetting terrorism. In a later SIDtoday article, titled “Terrorism or Political Action? The Anti-Imperialist Camp Crosses the Line,” a member of the NSA’s “indigenous European terrorism branch” describes the AIC as a “duplicitous organization” and touts the NSA’s interception of Anti-Imperialist Camp’s communications as a pathway into “[an] expansive network of extremists and terrorists.” The article alleged that the organization maintained contacts with such individuals, and said that “insights into [this] expansive network” led to the identification of “a Jordanian extremist with extensive links to other extremists,” “a new organization that calls itself the Resistant Arab People’s Alliance,” and several other individuals and groups.

Longtime Anti-Imperialist Camp member and spokesperson Wilhelm Langthaler told The Intercept that he could not “identify one single activity, participant, or interlocutor” from this list of what SIDtoday strongly implied were contacts of the group.

The SIDtoday article further stated that the U.S. government had “recent[ly],” as of August 2005, approached the Italian government and “demanded the arrest of individuals involved with the Italian wing of the AIC.” Several individuals associated with the AIC had been arrested in April 2004 as part of a multinational effort against the Turkish militant organization, DHKP-C. The three AIC members, initially charged with conspiracy or “subversive association” with an alleged member of the terrorist group, were released and ultimately absolved of all charges in September 2010. In her decision, Judge Beatrice Cristiani observed that if the AIC did indeed help the DHPK-C, it was because they intended to assist “a dissident and not a terrorist” —essentially verifying the group’s legitimate political intent, which the NSA so adamantly decried.

Breakthrough in Cellphone Tracking

NSA analysts can often identify and track particular mobile phones by monitoring cellular networks for 15-digit handset identifiers called the International Mobile Subscriber Identities. Events on the network, like making a call, receiving an SMS text message, or connecting to a new cell tower, are normally tagged with such numbers.

But starting in the 1990s, NSA analysts had struggled whenever cellular networks implemented Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identities (TMSIs), according to a July 2005 SIDtoday article. “TMSIs obscure the true identities of the cellular subscribers being referenced in call records, location events, and SMS,” the author wrote, because “TMSIs can change every few hours or even with every phone call.” And, to make matters worse, two cellular networks in Iraq had just implemented TMSIs, obscuring the NSA’s collection efforts there.

The ASSOCIATION program solved this problem. With advances in metadata collection, processing, and storage, the NSA discovered that it could use individual metadata records to work backward from a TMSI to obtain the original IMSI and thus, associate cellphone events with the exact phone that made them.

Early on, Skype Posed Challenges

At the end of 2005, the NSA faced serious new challenges in spying on Skype calls. At the time, Skype was a 2-year-old service that was growing in popularity. “At this time, SIGINT targets have a method to freely obscure their communications on the global Internet,” an analyst wrote in SIDtoday, “thus hindering our ability to collect vital communications intelligence.”

Unlike traditional phone calls, anyone with internet access anywhere in the world could make a free, anonymous Skype account, identified only by a username. And unlike the phone network, in which calls get routed through (and eavesdropped on) at central offices, Skype calls were peer-to-peer, making central eavesdropping impossible. On top of all this, Skype calls were also encrypted, and the NSA did not yet know how to decrypt them.

A reader wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that internet calling systems like Skype also complicate the NSA’s ability to comply with USSID-18, an NSA policy through which the agency attempts to not spy on Americans. “Anyone with any brains” will register a U.S. phone number for their account, they wrote, even though this phone number can be used from anywhere in the world.

The NSA’s troubles with spying on Skype calls were eventually resolved. New York Times reporting, based on Snowden documents, revealed that in 2008, Skype “began its own secret program, Project Chess, to explore the legal and technical issues in making Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials.”

Blast from the Past

“Social networking is truly the wave of the future,” Eric Mesa, a young software engineer at the NSA wrote in a December 2005 letter to the editor of SIDtoday. “A lot of you may not know this, but college students (of which I finally ceased to be in May 2005) have been voluntarily assembling their own social networks online!”

He went on to describe a service “known as The Facebook” and explained how it worked, including that “through the link ‘visualize my social network’ they can see a diagram similar to the ones we use to map terrorist networks.”

Top photo: U.S. Marines escort nine detainees captured in Fallujah, half of them from other countries such as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Gulf states, to a local “prison” as other U.S. Marines of the 1st Battalion 3rd Marines, Alpha company engage four insurgents during house searches on Nov. 23, 2004 in Fallujah, Iraq.

The post NSA Used Porn to “Break Down Detainees” in Iraq — and Other Revelations From 297 Snowden Documents appeared first on The Intercept.

A small group of media representatives and non-governmental observers, family members of five people who died at the World Trade Center, and a survivor of the Ground Zero recovery cleanup were witnesses to the week-long proceedings, as prosecution and defense argued over procedural issues involving document declassification and weighty issues involving legality of the death penalty charges against the defendants, and the destruction, most likely between July 2014 and December 2015, of a CIA black site where at least one of the men was tortured.

That site, location unknown (to defense and observers, at least), was described as “crucial, exculpatory evidence” by the defense attorneys Friday — at a hearing the 9/11 defendants declined to attend — in arguments demanding that the military judge and prosecution be recused and the case abated (i.e. stopped).  The issue at hand was that the defense did not receive the notice of the impending destruction of the black site in time to argue against it, due to mishandling and confusion over the filing of the redacted order by the court in July 2014. While the defense continued to seek the judge’s order throughout 2015 while pursuing motions requesting access to the black site, they did not receive it until February 2016. Instead of a visit to the original site, the defense was given an edited version of a “video representation”  made of the site before its destruction.

David Nevin, attorney for Mohammed, said: “This substitution is pretty close to a joke. It gives us almost nothing of what we need to really present the impact of this crucial evidence,” in the death penalty case.

Nevin and James Connell, attorney for Baluchi, argued that the prosecution team realized the defense had not received the order and acted in bad faith. “I suggest the military commission made a mistake and the prosecution exploited that mistake,” Connell said.

Prosecutor Robert Swann responded that there was no basis for the judge’s recusal and that “nobody destroyed anything,” leading to more arguments from the defense and eventual move to a session closed to observers.

The judge, Army Col. James Pohl, maintained his cool throughout the presentation of the motion requesting his seat on the bench be vacated as a result of actions and mistakes made by his office.

But on Thursday, Pohl showed his irritation with one of the accused who defied the procedure set up to allow the defendants to waive their attendance in the courtroom. Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the detainee who in 2016 had surgery to repair rectal injuries inflicted during his torture in a black site, signed the waiver but then also sent a letter saying he wouldn’t attend because the escort drivers of his transport van drove too fast and jostled him on the trip, causing pain.  The judge halted the proceedings for two hours while the escorts were sent to fetch him. Pohl then scolded him from the bench. “If you look around this room, you see how many people are implicated in just getting these hearings conducted. At the request of the defense, I permitted you — I’m speaking to the accused here — the option to waive your presence after being advised of your rights. We have done this for years now.”

He continued, speaking directly to all the defendants: “If this scenario comes up again where a detainee signs a waiver form, and then in court finds out it really isn’t a voluntary waiver because of some other information, whether written or otherwise, that requires me to bring the detainee in here. Absent extraordinary circumstances, that individual detainee will no longer be given the option not to attend and will attend every time, no matter what he wants. I hope that is clear.”

The hearings also involved a defense motion to suppress the distribution of a statement filed by the defendants in an earlier attempt at prosecuting the case that was halted by the Obama administration. The document, in which the defendants claim responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, is called “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations,” and was published in the New York Times in 2009. The prosecution gave out the inflammatory document to families of the 9/11 victims as a “confession” by the accused.

Prosecutor Ed Ryan argued that the document is valid and should be admitted as evidence.

The prosecution filed a proposed scheduling order that would set a January 7, 2019 date for jury selection prior to trial, but it did not seem likely that the judge would accept the proposal because of its accelerated deadlines for court filings.

Family members of 9/11 victims spoke to reporters after court adjourned on Friday. In an impassioned statement, Ellen Judd, a Canadian professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba, spoke of the loss of her spouse, Christine Egan, and Christine’s brother, Michael Egan. On Sept. 11, Christine was visiting her brother, an AON insurance executive on the 105th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center.

Then Judd addressed the death penalty issue.

“I felt inexpressibly deeply how terrible it is to take a human life for the last 16 years.  Before then I was opposed to the death penalty, but I’ve understood its totality and its unfixability much more strongly since I’ve been closer to the taking of life,” Judd said. “I am unwilling to be part of an act of killing or to endorse it in any way.

“The taking of these lives would not give Chris another moment of life and would not give me any relief,” the soft-spoken professor said. “May this be a time for turning grief into compassion.”

The next session — the 25th round of pretrial hearings — is scheduled to begin October 16.

Top photo: Detainees kneel during an early morning Islamic prayer at the U.S. military prison for “enemy combatants” on Oct. 28, 2009 in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The post At Guantánamo, Men Accused in 9/11 Attacks Faced Their 24th Round of Pretrial Hearings appeared first on The Intercept.

The first military proceedings to take place at Guantánamo since Trump took office were as uneventful as they were symbolic. After more than four years of pre-trial proceedings in a stop-and-start schedule, the judge was considering yet another delay.

Hearings connected to the military prosecution of the five men charged with plotting the 9/11 attacks reconvened Wednesday, but an attorney for one of the men had been injured over the weekend. So the first issue up for discussion was whether hearings could proceed in her absence.

Former President Barack Obama had declared his intentions to “close Guantánamo,” but as Trump took office last week, 41 detainees remained, among them seven men in pre-trial proceedings. The five 9/11 defendants — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Aziz Ali, and Mustafa al Hawsawi — were arraigned in May 2012.

The chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, told the 11 journalists waiting to attend the proceedings that under the new Trump administration, the prosecution is “just as determined as ever” to try this case “however long it takes.”

It was looking to take a while longer, however. Cheryl Bormann, Bin Attash’s attorney, had broken her arm in a fall. Her role as a “learned counsel” is required for defendants in death penalty cases, unless Bin Attash were to waive Bormann’s presence and Judge James L. Pohl were to rule that the case could go on without her.

Family members of six victims of the 2001 attacks and one first responder injured at the World Trade Center site had traveled to Guantánamo to view the hearings this week. One of them, Lee Hanson, is scheduled to be deposed as a witness to phone calls made to him by his son, Peter Hanson, who was traveling to California with his wife and 2-year-old daughter on United Airlines Flight 175 when it was hijacked and flown into the south tower of the World Trade Center.

If the injured attorney were absent, Bin Attash could argue he wasn’t given adequate representation.

This week’s hearing is in many words routine, but it also provides a small window into how complex and time consuming trying defendants on Guantánamo can be — an important lesson if Trump actually plans, as he has previously said, to expand the detention center with “some bad dudes.”

The prosecutor had proposed a trial schedule that opens voir dire questioning of a military jury in March 2018, but James Harrington, learned counsel for co-defendant Ramzi Binalshibh, told reporters that “2020 is a more realistic year to start.”

The prosecutor’s “ambitious schedule” was unworkable, Harrington argued.

Preparing for trial in the offshore naval base comes with myriad logistical difficulties, like dealing with classified evidence and the security clearances required to access it, and translating material to Arabic — not to mention the numerous motions that need to be filed and argued in court.

Since charges were first filed in 2011, the parties have presented more than 270 motions.

One of the more contentious issues is the defense’s lack of access to the 2014 Senate torture report in its 6,000-page entirety, as well as supporting documents, showing how the defendants and others were treated during their captures, interrogations, and years in the CIA’s secret “black prisons” around the world.

Although the judge ruled that the Defense Department must keep its copy of the report pending further motions for its release, the documents are not currently available to defense attorneys, even though they hold security clearances. Instead, the prosecution is selecting and summarizing information from the Senate investigation that it deems relevant to each defendant, and those summaries will be made available to the defense.

That hasn’t happened yet, however.

Bin Attash appeared before the court wearing a camouflage jacket over traditional white garments and head covering. “You said I could consult with the lawyers,” he said, speaking in English. “On the record I do not have an attorney that works with me. I have people that work against me.”

Judge Pohl ruled to delay proceedings until Bormann, the injured counsel, could attend. Bin Attash, who has previously argued that he wants Borman replaced, said again after the ruling that he wanted a new “learned counsel.” It’s a request that has already been denied.

By noon on Wednesday, the public sessions in the courtroom were adjourned until March. That meant the lawyers, media, representatives of nongovernmental organizations, and several family members of 9/11 victims who arrived on a Boeing 767 from Joint Air Base Andrews on Monday, would have to pack up and go home.

The post Guantánamo in the Trump Era Moves Ahead in Slow Motion appeared first on The Intercept.

Back then, Abu Zubaydah still had his left eye.

Representatives from the media, nongovernmental organizations, and academia were permitted to view the unclassified opening portion of the hearing from a conference room at the Pentagon, but the segment does not include any statement or comments from the detainee. It was the first glimpse outside observers got of Zubaydah since a photo of his face with an eye patch was published by Wikileaks in 2011; at one point he was touted as al Qaeda No. 3.

What observers saw Tuesday was a well-groomed, youthful 45-year-old dressed in white and wearing a black eye patch around his neck; he switched between two pairs of eyeglasses to follow documents being read out loud by a translator. He was accompanied by two military “personal representatives” who spoke on his behalf, but he did not have a private attorney.

Most notably perhaps, he was waterboarded 83 times.

“He spent a total of 266 hours (11 days, 2 hours) in the large (coffin size) confinement box and 29 hours in a small confinement box, which had a width of 21 inches, a depth of 2.5 feet, and a height of 2.5 feet,” according to the Senate torture report. “The CIA interrogators told Abu Zubaydah that the only way he would leave the facility was in the coffin-shaped confinement box.”

The Tuesday review board hearing was first opportunity to make a case for his release. “Although he initially believed that he did not have any chance or hope to be released, because of the reputation that has been created through the use of his name, he has been willing to participate in the Periodic Review Process,” his military representative stated, “and he has come to believe that he might have a chance to leave Guantanamo through this process.”

The government opposes Abu Zubaydah’s release, and an unnamed official reading his detainee profile at the review alleged his participation in or knowledge of the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the USS Cole bombing in 2000, and involvement in Khalid Sheikh Mohammad’s plans to attack US and coalition forces after 9/11, among other plots.

Yet the official also stated he “has shown a high level of cooperation with the staff at Guantanamo Bay and has served as a cell block leader, assuming responsibility for communicating detainees’ messages and grievances to the staff and maintaining order among the detainees.”

That same cooperation is now being used to justify his continued detention. Abu Zubaydah, who has completed university coursework in computer programming, could be a threat because has used his time in Guantanamo to “hone his organizational skills, assess U.S. custodial and debriefing practices,” the official said, and that experience “would help him should he choose to reengage in terrorist activity.”

Abu Zubaydah’s chances of being approved for release are not good, and the future of the Guantanamo detainees who are designated for indefinite detention without trials is unclear.

Of the 61 detainees now held at Guantanamo, 20 are currently approved for repatriation or transfer to a third country. Seven men are in pre-trial proceedings and three have been sentenced. The review board has decided 18 require continued detention to protect against a continuing significant threat to the U.S. security. An additional 13 are awaiting review board decisions or an upcoming hearing.

The post A Rare Glimpse of Abu Zubaydah 14 Years After First CIA Torture Session appeared first on The Intercept.