www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1318702,00.html
The Observer Prisoner interrogations at Guantnamo Bay, the controversial US military detention centre where guards have been accused of brutality and torture , have not prevented a single terrorist attack, according to a senior Pe ntagon intelligence officer who worked at the heart of the US war on ter ror. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Christino, who retired last June after 20 year s in military intelligence, says that President George W Bush and US Def ence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have 'wildly exaggerated' their intellige nce value. Christino's revelations, to be published this week in Guantnamo: America 's War on Human Rights, by British journalist David Rose, are supported by three further intelligence officials. Christino also disclosed that t he 'screening' process in Afghanistan which determined whether detainees were sent to Guantnamo was 'hopelessly flawed from the get-go'. It was performed by new recruits who had almost no training, and were for ced to rely on incompetent interpreters. They were 'far too poorly train ed to identify real terrorists from the ordinary Taliban militia'. According to Christino, most of the approximately 600 detainees at Guant namo - including four Britons - at worst had supported the Taliban in th e civil war it had been fighting against the Northern Alliance before th e 11 September attacks, but had had no contact with Osama bin Laden or a l-Qaeda. For six months in the middle of 2003 until his retirement, Christino had regular access to material derived from Guantnamo prisoner interrogatio ns, serving as senior watch officer for the central Pentagon unit known as the Joint Intelligence Task Force-Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT). This made him responsible for every piece of information that went in or out of the unit, including what he describes as 'analysis of critical, time -sensitive intelligence'. In his previous assignment in Germany, one of his roles had been to co-or dinate intelligence support to the US army in Afghanistan, at Guantnamo , and to units responsible for transporting prisoners there. Bush, Rumsfeld and Major General Geoffrey Miller, Guantnamo's former com mandant who is now in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, have repeated ly claimed that Guantnamo interrogations have provided 'enormously valu able intelligence,' thanks to a system of punishments, physical and ment al abuse and rewards for for co-operation, introduced by Miller and appr oved by Rumsfeld. In a speech in Miami, Rumsfeld claimed: 'Detaining enemy combatants... Earlier this year, three British released detainees, Asif Iqbal, Shafiq R asul Rhuhel Ahmed, revealed that they had all confessed to meeting bin L aden and Mohamed Atta, leader of the 11 September hijackers, at a camp i n Afghanistan in 2000. All had cracked after three months isolated in so litary confinement and interrogation sessions in chains that lasted up t o 12 hours daily. Eventually, MI5 proved what they had said initially - that none had left the UK that year. The disc losures come on the eve of a House of Lords appeal on the fate of the fo reign terrorist suspects held without trial in British prisons. Tomorrow, the Lords will determine whether it was lawful for the governme nt to opt out of the European Convention on Human Rights to allow for th e detention of the men at Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons. It is widely be lieved that some of the men are held on evidence obtained from prisoners at Guantnamo. An officer from MI5 admitted under cross-examination by lawyers acting for the detainees that the British intelligence services would make use of information obtained under torture by foreign governme nts. A high court appeal in August found that it was lawful for the British go vernment to use information obtained under torture by foreign government s to avert an imminent attack, but there was no evidence that it had don e so in the case of the detainees held in British jails. Speaking at an Observer fringe meeting at the Labour party conference las t week, Lord Chancellor Charlie Falconer backed the decision of the cour t but said it was 'an almost impossible ethical question'. While emphasising that Britain repudiated the use of torture he said: 'We cannot condone torture, but the basis of those incarcerations is protec tion of other people. If we thought that 'X' was going to blow up the Tu be and we thought that information was obtained by a foreign intelligenc e service, can we really say that we can't detain people because that in formation was obtained by torture?
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