We focused our interrogation efforts on detainees whose information might lead to follow-on targets. This compelled us to be precise in whom we captured in the first place and discriminating when choosing to hold a detainee. The average detainee stayed in the screening facility for a matter of days. We quickly moved detainees deemed not to have information or unlikely to cooperate to Camp Bucca or Abu Ghraib. Once there, they joined and were subject to the influences and coercion of a large population of other detainees.
Using material retrieved from the site and triangulating their answers, the Yusufiyah detainees’ identities grew clearer. They were mostly subcommanders. We decided to focus the interogators’ efforts on four of the twelve:* Abu Omar, a senior lieutenant cutout who helped run the religious wing; Abu Sayyif, a leader of the Combined Extremist Media Forum who ran all the media operations in Baghdad; a man at first believed to be working for him on the day of their capture, Abu Mubassir; and finally, most promising, Abu Felek, who had been in the car that went from NAI 152 to Mayers. Called “Taha” by the other detainees, Felek was Ansar al-Sunnah’s emir of the north, where he was in charge of all Iraqis. We soon discovered that Felek, older than the others picked up that day, who were in their thirties, was one of Zarqawi’s emissaries to bin Laden.
For a variety of reasons, most detainees chose to cooperate. Some had egos and could not resist taking credit for what they had done—eager to show their importance. Others found themselves uncomfortable with AQI’s tactics—especially the targeting of Shia civilians. Some arrived to the interrogation booths with regret and shame. Still others burned with raw anger that Iraqi lives were expendable to Al Qaeda in Iraq’s leadership. Confronting them in moral language was often powerfully persuasive. They were quick to offer up information on impending attacks if we could convince them it was the right thing to do. Early on we learned that our worst mistake with a detainee was to confirm the negative stereotypes of Americans that animated the enemy’s mosques and safe houses.
The Yusufiyah detainees were a special challenge because only two had been on the task force’s radar before the raid. We put three of our best interrogators against them. During the day, Amy partnered with Jack. A young, petite woman, Amy was pulled out of one of the outstations and given the priority of the detainees. She devoted four years of her life, starting at age twenty-six, to working for the task force. Her partner, Jack, was another longtime interrogator with the command. Paul conducted the interrogations in the evenings. Paul had served in the navy in the late 1980s, but after watching the Twin Towers collapse from New Jersey, where he was working an IT job, he returned to service.*
Amy, Jack, and Paul slowly began to triangulate the detainees’ answers and play them against one another. The interrogators were immediately suspicious of Abu Sayyif. A pediatrician from Baghdad, he was also known as Dr. Mahjub. Soft-spoken and well educated, he was quite smug and appeared to hold himself above the others. When questioned, he was resistant and angry—at times, it seemed, with himself. At first he spoke only in Arabic, answering through the translator. But the interrogators intuited he knew more than he was letting on. They could see a glint in his eyes when they said something in English, before it was translated. And while most detainees needed a few moments to process the question after the interpreter finished speaking, Dr. Mahjub launched into his answers right away. At one point the interrogators brought all the detainees—commanders and their drivers—into one booth and had them write on a piece of paper the name of the most important man among them. Everyone, including Dr. Mahjub, wrote down Dr. Mahjub.
Dr. Mahjub remained prickly and maintained that he had hired the fourth detainee, Mubassir, as a one-off to help with media operations that day. Mubassir repeated this account and was less of a priority than the others. As many hard-core members did, Taha continued to be obstinate, while Abu Omar continued simply responding to questions with a laugh or a wide, menacing smile.
Toward the end of April, however, a couple weeks into the interrogations, the task force grew more suspicious of Mubassir. He was tall and heavyset, in contrast with many of the scrawnier, shorter Iraqis. In his youth he had been a soccer player and a wrestler, which accounted for his bulk. Now in his thirties, he cast a playful look at his interrogators. Shortly after the initial capture, Paul had sat down with Mubassir for the first time in the Baghdad outstation. When his blindfold was removed, Mubassir’s face had twisted into a wide, toothy smile.