The Longest War (21 page)

On August 1, 2002, the White House lawyer John Yoo wrote a classified memo narrowly defining the crime of torture. According to Yoo, American interrogators could legally inflict pain short of that “
accompanying serious physical injury
such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even
death.” Interrogators could also inflict mental pain, but only short of the point where it resulted “in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.” The memo also concluded that inflicting “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment on a prisoner wasn’t necessarily something that American interrogators risked being prosecuted for. This seemed more the reasoning of a mob enforcer than an official in the Office of Legal Counsel, the White House’s elite group of in-house lawyers, whose opinions guide the actions of the executive branch. (And if these were the opinions of a Harvard-educated, Supreme Court clerk turned law professor, as Yoo was, it is not entirely surprising that, as these ideas filtered down to soldiers in the rank and file, you ended up with the human pyramids of naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.)

Zein al-Abideen Mohamed Hussein, generally known as Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian al-Qaeda logistician in his early thirties, was believed to be the highest-ranking member of the terror group to be taken alive in the first months after 9/11. That made him the subject of intense interest from American officials, since, by early 2002, there was no one as yet in custody who they believed could tell them about what form the next terror attack might take. As a result, many of the Bush administration’s coercive interrogation techniques would first be applied to Abu Zubaydah.

In February 2002, the CIA station in Islamabad had learned that Abu Zubaydah was either in Lahore or Faisalabad, Pakistani cities with large populations in the east of the country. Intelligence officials also discovered Abu Zubaydah’s cell phone number, but he used it only briefly and infrequently. Agency officials narrowed down to fourteen the possible locations where Abu Zubaydah might be living. At 2
A.M
. on March 28, 2002, Pakistani army units
hit all of them
.

Abu Zubaydah was captured
in a shoot-out in Faisalabad in which he was shot three times and critically wounded, losing a testicle in the firefight. So grave was Abu Zubaydah’s condition that the
CIA arranged for a leading surgeon
from the Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore to fly to Pakistan to save his life and revive him to the point that he could be interrogated.

The interrogation of Abu Zubaydah set the stage for a carefully concealed battle between the FBI and elements of the CIA, backed by senior Bush administration officials, about how best to obtain information from suspected terrorists in American custody. The Bureau favored traditional rapport-building techniques, while some Agency and White House officials successfully pushed for coercive interrogations that verged on torture.

Abu Zubaydah was the first detainee to be placed in a secret overseas CIA prison, this one
located in Thailand
. There he was interrogated by Ali Soufan, one of the few Arabic-speaking FBI agents. Soufan softened up Abu Zubaydah by
calling him “Hani,”
the childhood nickname his mother had used for him, a fact that the FBI agent had gathered from intelligence files. The approach started yielding quick results.

When Abu Zubaydah was shown a series of photos of
al-Qaeda
members by Soufan, he identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as “Mukhtar,” meaning “the chosen” in Arabic. This was a key to unraveling one of the great mysteries of the attacks on New York and Washington, because in an al-Qaeda videotape recovered by American forces in Afghanistan a few months after 9/11, bin Laden had referred to a “Mukhtar” as someone who had
some sort of a plan
for a “tall building in America.”

Soufan remembers puzzling over the bin Laden videotape. “It was annoying the shit out of me:
Who is Mukhtar
?” Abu Zubaydah had now identified Mukhtar to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. KSM had been known as a jihadist to U.S. authorities since 1993, when his name surfaced in the FBI’s investigation of the World Trade Center bombing; but
his central role
in 9/11 came as a complete surprise to investigators.

Abu Zubaydah’s confirmation of KSM’s role in 9/11 was the single most important piece of information uncovered about al-Qaeda after the attacks on the Trade Center and Pentagon, and it was discovered during the course of a standard interrogation, without recourse to any form of coercion. Soufan recalled that Abu Zubaydah gave up the information about a week or so into his interrogation.

In the top-secret memoranda prepared by the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel that authorized coercive interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah, he was variously described as “one of the
highest ranking members
of al-Qaeda,” either the number three or four in the terror group, and as one of the planners of 9/11. In fact, within weeks of Abu Zubaydah’s capture it became clear to at least some U.S. officials that he was not “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations,” as he had been publicly described by President Bush on June 6, 2002, but rather someone who was a logistician for militants in Pakistan on their way to training camps in Afghanistan. Daniel Coleman, the al-Qaeda expert at the FBI, says that Abu Zubaydah was simply a “travel agent; he wasn’t a member of the inner circle” who would know about future operations, although he did know many members of al-Qaeda by virtue of his role as a “safe house keeper.”

But believing that Abu Zubaydah was, in fact, a very big al-Qaeda fish, the
White House lawyers authorized
continuous sleep deprivation of up to 180 hours (one week), face slapping, extended nudity (including in front of females), dietary manipulation, confinement in cramped boxes, being slammed into a flexible wall and, of course, “the waterboard.” The Office of Legal Counsel noted that these techniques were supposed to induce “a state of learned helplessness” in the detainee, who would then supposedly be putty in his interrogator’s hands.

This piece of pseudoscience was the brainchild of
James E. Mitchell
, a retired psychologist who had worked with the military’s SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape), which is used to train American soldiers how to resist coercive interrogations, in the event that they are captured. In late 2001, Mitchell had coauthored a classified paper, “Recognizing and Developing Countermeasures to Al-Qaida Resistance to Interrogation Techniques.” Mitchell
had never conducted a real interrogation
and so had no sense of what worked in the real world to elicit information from prisoners, but that did not stop him from helping to develop aggressive “
Enhanced Interrogation Techniques
” to be used on al-Qaeda detainees. Those techniques included confinement in a small box, stress positions, sleep deprivation for days, and waterboarding; one or more of these were later used on
a total of twenty-eight detainees in American custody
.

In mid-April, around ten days after Soufan had first started interrogating Abu Zubaydah, and over the FBI agent’s vociferous objections, a CIA contractor stepped in to take over the interrogation. The FBI’s standard, noncoercive techniques were jettisoned and Abu Zubaydah was stripped naked, deprived of sleep, subjected to loud noise and wide variations in temperature, and isolated from Soufan and other professional interrogators. The CIA contractor would now appoint Abu Zubaydah’s “God,” who would exercise total control over him. Soufan recalls: “
Only one person and one person only
from now on would have access to Abu Zubaydah. … The interrogation style was to go in and tell him, ‘Tell me what I need to know.’”

The CIA contractor, a psychologist, had not interrogated anyone before, nor did he know anything about Islamist extremists or the Middle East. Soufan and the other professional interrogators with him watched the new approach unfold with astonishment. Soufan says that at one point Abu Zubaydah was sitting naked on the floor, and the CIA contractor insisted that his new experimental interrogation techniques were working on the prisoner:
“He’s like, ‘See! See! He tilted his head to the right: That means it’s working. He’s contemplating, he’s thinking, because he tilted his head to the right—he’s in agreement, he’s going with the program.’ … The contractor gets so excited he had a fucking boner.’” Abu Zubaydah then promptly fell asleep, snoring loudly.

Soufan objected to the CIA that Zubaydah was being subjected to “borderline torture,” and “other people who were on the ground were going on the computers and shooting cables back to Washington” to complain about the new interrogation regime. By now Abu Zubaydah was no longer giving up any significant information.

Eventually, Soufan and the other professional interrogators were
allowed to resume their questioning
of Zubaydah. It was then that he described an Hispanic al-Qaeda wannabe whose physical description
jibed with that of Jose Padilla
, an American small-time hood who would later be arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in May 2002, supposedly planning to detonate a radiological “dirty bomb” in the United States.

Scott Shumate, a psychologist working with the CIA who was present during Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations, was so disgusted by the interrogation regime instituted by the Agency contractor that he flew home. On May 25, almost two months after he had first started interrogating Abu Zubaydah, so too did Ali Soufan, pulled out on the orders of his FBI superiors, who did not want the Bureau’s agents to be involved in coercive interrogations.

Abu Zubaydah was later “waterboarded” eighty-three times by the CIA. This
form of simulated drowning
is generally considered torture, but none of it produced much in the way of useful information. General Michael Hayden, who served as CIA director in the last two years of the Bush administration, claimed that waterboarding Abu Zubaydah
did yield key information
that led to the capture of Ramzi Binalshibh, who had helped to oversee the 9/11 plot. But there may be a problem with Hayden’s chronology because water-boarding wasn’t authorized until August 1, 2002, four months
after
Zubaydah was arrested, and Binalshibh’s name was by then already well-known to the U.S. government and indeed to the world, as he was the subject of a front-page story in the
New York Times
ten weeks
before
he was captured, on September 11, 2002.

In the end the multiple waterboardings of Abu Zubaydah provided
no specific leads
on any plots, although clearly his role as an al-Qaeda logistician did give him insights into the organization and its personnel.
Dozens of videotapes
of the CIA interrogations of Abu Zubaydah were destroyed in 2005 by a senior CIA official, Jose Rodriguez, who seems to have calculated that if the tapes ever entered the public domain they would have caused the same kind of outrage that greeted the Abu Ghraib prison abuse photographs from Iraq. It is one thing to read about abuses; it is quite another to watch them unfold in front of your eyes.

Following the Supreme Court
Hamdan
decision requiring the administration to respect the Geneva Convention’s ban on “humiliating and degrading treatment” of prisoners, the CIA prohibited its operatives from waterboarding, a practice that the Agency
had ended, in any event, in 2003
. And on September 6, 2006, President Bush announced he was transferring 14 “high-value” prisoners—including al-Qaeda leaders like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM)—held in secret, overseas CIA prisons into Guantánamo. Some of the CIA’s high-value prisoners had been
held in jails in Poland and Romania
; KSM was imprisoned at a Polish facility north of Warsaw at Stare Kiejkuty.

Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote a memo describing the treatment of detainees at these CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, which included continuous solitary confinement and incommunicado detention, waterboarding, prolonged stress standing, lengthy nudity, sleep deprivation, exposure to cold temperatures, and the prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles. The Red Cross concluded that, “The ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination,
constituted torture
.”

A reader might be thinking that while the Bush administration’s approaches to incarceration and interrogation were perhaps unsavory and even unlawful—still, weren’t they necessary because of the large threat posed by al-Qaeda? To help answer that question, consider the case of Abu Jandal, who provided a vast amount of intelligence about al-Qaeda’s inner workings immediately after the attacks on New York and Washington under no duress whatsoever.

A week after 9/11, FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan and Robert McFadden, an investigator from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, interrogated Abu Jandal, who had served as bin Laden’s chief bodyguard for years and was privy to many of his secrets. Abu Jandal, whose real name is Nasser Ahmad Nasser al-Bahri, had been jailed in a Yemeni prison since 2000. The two American investigators, who both spoke Arabic and had significant experience
investigating al-Qaeda, used the “
Informed Interrogator
” approach on him while plying the diabetic bin Laden confidant with sugar-free cookies. Soufan recalls the cookies were a gesture that “kind of broke the ice.” As a result Abu Jandal disgorged a great deal of information about the terror network. Soufan recalls that he “named
dozens and dozens of people
” in the organization.

The rich intelligence haul from Abu Jandal is confirmed by the official FBI summaries of his interrogations, covering the gamut from al-Qaeda’s structure, leadership, membership, and training camps to its communication methods. The al-Qaeda insider also
picked out eight
of the 9/11 hijackers from photos and he identified ten members of bin Laden’s security detail and described how they were armed with SAM-7 missiles, Russian PK machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades. He also explained that the al-Qaeda leader usually traveled in a group of around a dozen bodyguards in a motorcade of three vehicles each containing a maximum of five armed guards. And the bin Laden confidant provided a richly detailed seven-page account of the various machine guns, mortars, mines, sniper rifles, and surface-to-air missiles possessed by al-Qaeda and the Taliban. None of this bonanza of timely intelligence was acquired using coercive measures, but all of it was especially valuable as Abu Jandal was the first al-Qaeda insider to explain the inner workings of the group during the period after bin Laden had moved his men to Afghanistan in 1996.