The effort to obtain information from al-Qaida and Taliban fighters detained at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba has been hampered by inexperienced interrogators and linguists, military bureaucracy and squabbles among private language contractors, according to sources familiar with the government’s mission there.

With many of its best interrogators and speakers of Middle Eastern dialects dispatched to Afghanistan, the military has been forced to rely on some underqualified officers who have found themselves overmatched by captives trained in methods of evasion, according to people familiar with the interrogations. In a few cases, questioners were conducting their first interrogations.

“Some of the interrogators are very inexperienced, nervous,” said one linguist stationed at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, where 299 detainees are being questioned. “They twist their pen 2,000 times a minute. The detainee is in full control. He’s chained up, but he’s the one having fun.”

Bureaucratic limits

Compounding the problem is a lack of familiarity with Middle Eastern terrorism among officers of the military’s Miami-based Southern Command (Southcom), which at times has impeded the flow of key intelligence to Guantanamo Bay interrogators, sources said. That has occasionally limited questioners’ ability to pursue lines of inquiry with the detainees, they said.

Moreover, two companies that have supplied linguists for some of the interrogations have squabbled bitterly with each other, according to knowledgeable officials in the public and private sectors.

These assessments by military officers and private contractors are the first glimpse of obstacles facing interrogators at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray, the hastily built military jail where some of the fiercest enemy captives are being held.

Officials are trying to shake loose critical information to thwart future acts of terror, and perhaps build criminal cases against the fighters.

Mano-a-mano

Army Col. Ron Williams, spokesman for Southcom, said that problems with interpreters and interrogators are temporary, and he denied that any of them have been unable to handle the captives.

“I don’t know of cases where the detainee was in charge,” Williams said. “He may not give up information. It’s a mano-a-mano thing.” Rookie interrogators are getting better, he said, adding that “it takes a while to be competent in any field.”

Williams strenuously denied that Southcom has in any way stalled the movement of intelligence data to interrogators.

“In today’s world, moving intelligence information is almost instantaneous,” he said. “They build databases over in Afghanistan, and it’s shared by us, by Washington. Everybody knows the same things.”

But he acknowledged interrogators sometimes don’t get answers to intelligence queries sent up the chain to Southcom if they are deemed irrelevant.

Williams also conceded that Guantanamo Bay intepreters, along with linguists throughout the U.S. intelligence community, lack facility with the widely varying regional dialects of Arabic and other languages used by detainees, because military linguistic programs have de-emphasized them for a decade.

Some successes

Even critics of the Guantanamo Bay interrogations said that most of the American personnel there are motivated and competent, and that some are top quality. U.S. officials point out that the interrogations have yielded a number of successes some made public and some kept secret that likely have prevented terrorist attacks.

In one grueling, session in February, a pair of Arabic-speaking FBI agents pried loose information from one detainee that led to a worldwide alert for Fawaz Yahya Al-Rabeei, a Yemeni national, and 16 other al-Qaida members suspected of plotting an attack in the United States or Yemen.

And last week, U.S. prosecutors who charged American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh with conspiracy to murder Americans said in court papers that at least 20 of the detainees have given statements to interrogators.

But little else has emerged about what is being learned at Guantanamo Bay and how interrogations are conducted.