Straight Outta Houston

Today's Washington Post:

The U.S. military staged the interrogations of terrorism suspects for members of Congress and other officials visiting the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to make it appear the government was obtaining valuable intelligence, a former Army translator who worked there claims in a new book scheduled for release Monday.

Former Army Sgt. Erik Saar said the military chose detainees for the mock interrogations who previously had been cooperative and instructed them to repeat what they had told interrogators in earlier sessions, according to an interview with the CBS television program "60 Minutes," which is slated to air Sunday night.

"They would find a detainee that they knew to have been cooperative," Saar told CBS. "They would ask the interrogator to go back over the same information," he said, calling it "a fictitious world" created for the visitors.

Which is just an old Enron trick, (link via BBC):

Enron created a fake trading room in order to impress Wall Street analysts, a former top executive at the firm has admitted.

Four years ago [1998], the company built a command centre for its Enron Energy Services (EES) power supply arm, and ordered staff to pretend they were doing deals as analysts gathered in Houston for their annual meeting with the firm ...

Mr Phelan said that staff were brought in from other floors to the EES "war room", and telephone calls into the centre were scheduled in order to create a buzz. The whole operation was carefully choreographed in order to provide the most buoyant impression on analysts.