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American Morning

Interview with Cliff Van Zandt

Aired April 22, 2002 - 07:20   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: The Big Question at this hour: Is the latest al Qaeda threat for real? Banks are on alert this morning after being warned they might be a target of a terrorist attack somewhere along the Eastern seaboard. U.S. officials say Abu Zubaydah, the key al Qaeda lieutenant captured last month in Pakistan, offered up the information. But they also admit that the terrorist is not a big fan of the U.S.

So how did they know they could even trust him? Well just yesterday, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Bob Graham, said he was concerned that the interrogations of the detainees held in Guantanamo were not generating any useful information, and raised the possibility that U.S. interrogators did not have the necessary language skills and the ability to draw the information out.

Joining us now from Washington is a 25-year veteran of the FBI, former Army Intelligence Officer Clint Van Zandt -- welcome to AM, your first appearance here.

CLINT VAN ZANDT, FORMER ARMY INTELLIGENCE OFFICER: Hi, Paula.

ZAHN: Good to see you again, sir.

VAN ZANDT: Good to see you. Hey, Paula, my wife said to tell you she loves your hair, so I had to pass that on to you.

ZAHN: Oh, wow, thank her very, very much.

VAN ZANDT: OK.

ZAHN: OK, on to more serious business here.

First of all, do you agree with Senator Graham's criticism that these interrogators down at Guantanamo are seriously unprepared?

VAN ZANDT: Well, we've got a split hairs here a little bit, Paula. Number one, you just spoke about Mr. Zubaydah. He's not at Guantanamo, to my knowledge. So there's a different interrogation team working with him.

The challenge in Guantanamo is just multiple. When I was in the Army in Vietnam, we did interrogations of prisoners of war. And the challenge at Guantanamo, number one, is that you have all of the detainees, as you know, in separate cells. But there is just wire between them, so they talk back and forth all the time.

As an interrogator, that's the worst possible scenario. Because you take one of the 300 and talk, you bring him back, he tells the other 299 what took place. They encourage him, "Hang in there, brother. Don't give up." You know, "Hold steady." And it's very hard to break through that level of camaraderie just to begin with because of the circumstances there.

ZAHN: I want to put on the screen now what one linguist told "The Washington Post" about this process. The quote is, "Some of the interrogators are very inexperienced nervous...They twist their pen 2,000 times a minute. The detainee is in full control. He's chained up, but he is the one having fun."

Now, having gone through this process in Vietnam, what are these interrogators up against and what kind of mind control is being used against them?

VAN ZANDT: Well, they are up against a lot. Part of the challenge is we don't have a whole lot of professional interrogators, interviewers, who are also conversant, not in the multiple languages. As you know, Paula, we've got detainees there from Chechnya. We've got them from Afghanistan, Pakistan, maybe Saudi Arabia.

So even though there may be a semblance of a common language, we have multiple dialects there that we have to have not only someone who knows the language, but who knows the techniques of interrogation. We usually don't have that.

So what you wind up with is, first, someone from the military who will interview them, trying to get real-time combat information to help our troops overseas. And then you've got the counterparts. You've got the FBI agents, naval intelligence agents, others that are down there who normally have to work through an interpreter.

Now how good that interpreter is, whether he can translate as you're running, whether he tries to take over the interview, it -- this is -- there's a new play book being written, Paula. It's just like dealing with the Anthrax investigation, where the FBI, the Center for Disease Control -- when the Anthrax matter first broke after September 11, we did not have a play book that said how these agencies should work together. So it took a while to get that up and running.

We see the same thing at Guantanamo now. We never anticipated 300 plus detainees. They need to interview them for both real-time combat information, as well as long-term strategic information. And FBI agents and others have to get enough information to make a decision who to charge in these tribunal type of hearings that we're contemplating. So we've got multiple detainees, multiple agencies, and we're writing the play book as we go.

ZAHN: And, Clint, because of some of the handicaps you've just outlined, I know you believe that in some cases the detainees are actually getting more information than the U.S. is extracting out of them. VAN ZANDT: Yeah, and I think that can really be the challenge, Paula. Where we -- many times we'll use multiple teams to run at the same person, which I think is wrong. I think it's best to take one team of interviewers, assign them to one detainee, develop some rapport with that person and talk to them every day.

But what's happening is that we're having different teams do different interviews, and then when the detainees come back again there's this tremendous support system, that number one, says, "Hang in there, brother. You're doing all right." And number two, says, "Whatever you do, don't give information to the Americans or we'll get you."

So with all of that going on, our ability in Guantanamo to extract information is challenged. Now we've got men down there -- men and women down there -- doing training sessions all the time. We're working with the MPs, we're working with the interviewers. We're really trying to bring this along.

And when this new facility, Range Radio or Camp Radio is put together, it will be much more conducive to do the interviews. But, as you know, these three or four months, there's probably information we should have obtained because of the conditions down there and because of the structure or lack thereof of the interview teams. We've probably lost critical combat information and the strategic information that we need to develop, as well as tribunal information. Who to charge with what offense is coming very, very slow.

ZAHN: Clint, before we let you go this morning, I wanted to ask you about this new tape with Osama bin Laden that's just surfaced. The tape was found by a Kabul resident who says he found the tape in an abandoned al Qaeda safe house. And in the tape, bin Laden criticizes the presence of U.S. troops in the Gulf, especially women serving in the Gulf.

And U.S. officials are now telling us they think this tape was probably made last year. But, certainly, further evidence of how much bin Laden used videotape to communicate. How significant is this new snippet, when you add it on to the new tape that we saw last week for the first time?

VAN ZANDT: Well, to me, Paula, what is very significant is that we have yet to see a fresh, new tape from bin Laden. So this suggests one of two things. Number one, either al Qaeda is attempting to reconstitute itself by running these tapes and saying, "Look, here is bin Laden. Here's our hero. Everybody listen to him and fall behind him," or else they're trying to prove somebody who is dead may be alive.

They may be running these old tapes because that's all they have. And that's the only think they have to fight against information or suggestions that may be bin Laden was killed in a bombing attack or something.

But the lack of new tapes making fresh reference to anything that's going on says, at least we've hampered their ability to do something like that. And, number two, bin Laden may be critically injured or dead.

ZAHN: And we should make it clear before we let you go completely that apparently in Arabic, if you interpret this properly, he repeats his charge once again that waging war is the best way for everyone to go to heaven.

Clint Van Zandt, thanks for your maiden voyage here on AMERICAN MORNING -- always good to see you.

VAN ZANDT: Thanks, Paula -- good to see you.

ZAHN: Tell your wife I said hello.

VAN ZANDT: I will.

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