The Longest War

by Peter L. Bergen

  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.

  Contrast Abu Jandal’s treatment and the wealth of information he quickly gave up with that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of the 9/11 attacks. When KSM finally goes on trial, the most potent challenge his lawyers will surely raise is that their client was waterboarded 183 times. In the mid-1980s, President Reagan’s Justice Department prosecuted a group of police officers who had waterboarded prisoners; they were convicted and served long sentences.

  The mistreatment of KSM was entirely unnecessary insofar as the 9/11 case was concerned. Before he was captured, KSM and his colleague Ramzi Binalshibh had laid out in great detail the entire 9/11 operation in a 2002 interview with Yosri Fouda, an Al Jazeera correspondent. Fouda’s interviews resolved key questions that investigators still had about the plot—for instance, that United Flight 93, before it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, was on its way to destroy the U.S. Capitol, rather than the White House. KSM and Binalshibh also explained how they had kept bin Laden informed about the timing of the attacks, and they discussed the coded correspondence they had conducted with Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 pilot, when he was living in the States.

  The CIA provided detailed summaries of the interrogations of KSM and Binalshibh to the 9/11 Commission. There was little or no difference between the account that KSM and Binalshibh had freely volunteered to Fouda in the spring of 2002 and the version the commission published in its 2004 report. Nor was Fouda’s reporting difficult to find: he hosted a documentary on Al Jazeera about KSM and Binalshibh and wrote a long piece in London’s Sunday Times about the terror duo. By the time CIA officials started interrogating the pair, a full account of their 9/11 plotting was only a Google search away.

  Following his arrest in Pakistan in 2003, KSM was taken to the secret CIA prison in northern Poland, where he initially proved resistant to interrogation, saying he would talk only when he was provided a lawyer. Following his defiance, KSM was subjected to a number of coercive interrogation techniques besides being waterboarded the 183 times: he was kept up for seven and a half days straight while diapered and shackled, and he was told that his kids, who were now being held in American custody, would be killed. KSM then provided a wealth of information about al-Qaeda’s inner workings as well as details about past and future plots. In the words of the CIA’s inspector general, “Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete.”

  Over time, KSM would become so compliant that he would treat his interrogators to seminars on a wide variety of topics. A senior Agency official recalled that KSM “used to take great pride in holding lectures for us on the jihad … He’d come in; he’d say, ‘Can we talk on Sunday? You know, I’ve got another idea I want to put in front of you guys.’ Some of it was bullshit and a lot of it was sort of not operationally useful, but it reinforced the condition of him talking and sharing with us, which was really useful.” In short, the water-boarding of KSM worked, but what did it really reveal?

  Bush administration officials often asserted that coercive interrogation techniques, especially those used on KSM, had saved many American lives. After he left office, former vice president Dick Cheney vehemently defended the practices of the Bush administration, saying in February 2009, “If it hadn’t been for what we did—with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth—then we would have been attacked again.”

  In a speech he gave three months later at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C., Cheney said, “In top-secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program.” Cheney gave this speech the same day that President Obama was giving his own major speech on his administration’s revamped detention and interrogation policies just a couple of miles away at the National Archives. Giving such a dueling policy speech was something of a first for a just-stepped-down vice president, a role that is generally supposed to entail a comfortably obscure retirement spent fly-fishing and attending rubber-chicken fund-raisers. But Cheney did not go gently into that vice presidential night. At AEI, he amped up his usual sky-is-falling rhetoric, claiming that the coercive interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees had “prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.”

  This speech was essentially a remix of the arguments that Cheney had made in the run-up to the Iraq War: that if only ordinary American citizens had seen the top-secret information he had access to, they would be even more alarmed than he was. And the Bush administration had only prudently taken every measure necessary to keep Americans safe.

  Hiding behind a wall of classification had been a quintessential Cheney trope. But that wall crumbled in August 2009 when the CIA released two secret documents that assessed the information derived from its “high value detainees,” which showed that while al-Qaeda leaders like KSM had indeed provided information under duress to their American interrogators, the content of that information was less than earth-shattering. One of the CIA reports stated that “reporting from KSM has greatly advanced our understanding of al-Qa’ida’s anthrax program,” in particular about the role of a Malaysian scientist named Yazid Sufaat, who was recruited by al-Qaeda to research biological weapons. But what the CIA report did not say is that Sufaat was never able to buy or produce the right strain of anthrax suitable for a weapon. And so while KSM may have helped the CIA to understand something of al-Qaeda’s anthrax program, either he had little understanding of the science of biological weapons or the Agency officials who wrote the report were also similarly handicapped. In fact, al-Qaeda’s anthrax program was a dud that never produced anything remotely threatening, a point that the CIA report was silent on.

  A piece of useful information that KSM did offer up to his CIA interrogators after he had been waterboarded concerned a man named Hambali who was the interface between al-Qaeda and its Southeast Asian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiyah. Hambali was the mastermind of the October 12, 2002, bombing of two nightclubs in Bali, which killed around two hundred people, many of them Western tourists. Former CIA director George Tenet says that KSM’s information about Hambali led to the latter’s capture in Thailand. In his memoir, Tenet writes that the coercive interrogation techniques used on KSM were necessary because “none of these successes would have happened if we had treated KSM like a white collar criminal—read him his Miranda rights and got him a lawyer who surely would have insisted his client simply shut up.” Hambali’s capture then also led to the arrest of more than a dozen Southeast Asian operatives slated for attacks against the U.S. homeland.

  A 2005 top-secret memo by the White House Office of Legal Counsel released by the Obama administration pointed out that KSM had only given up his plans for the
“Second Wave” of attacks on the United States after he had been subjected to “enhanced techniques,” that is, waterboarding and the like. But did KSM’s coerced interrogations really lead to any substantive plots against the American homeland being averted?

  A fact sheet that the government released around the time that KSM was transferred out of his secret CIA prison to Guantánamo in 2006 offered details on the plots he had hatched against the United States:

  KSM launched several plots targeting the U.S. Homeland, including a plot in late 2001 to have … suicide operatives hijack a plane over the Pacific and crash it into a skyscraper on the U.S. West Coast; a plan in early 2002 to send al-Qa’ida operatives to conduct attacks in the U.S.; and a plot in early 2003 to employ a network of Pakistanis … to smuggle explosives into New York and to target gas stations, railroad tracks, and a bridge in New York.

  While this “Second Wave” of attacks all sounded very frightening, there is no indication that these plots were ever more than just talk. The chances of success, for instance, of al-Qaeda’s plan to attack the skyscraper on the West Coast—since identified as the 73-story Library Tower in Los Angeles—were described by KSM in one court document to be “dismal.” KSM also explained in the same document that the “Second Wave” of al-Qaeda attacks on the United States was put on the “back burner” after 9/11.

  A CIA inspector general’s report on al-Qaeda detainees stated that KSM “provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen who Khalid Shaykh Muhammad planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks [redacted]. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad’s information also led to the investigation and prosecution of Iyman Faris, the truck driver arrested in early 2003 in Ohio.” However, based on a review of KSM’s plots aimed at the United States, whom the CIA inspector general “did not uncover any evidence that these plots were imminent.”

  The man identified by the CIA as “Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York” whom KSM gave up to his interrogators was in fact Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who had been arrested on December 12, 2001, in Peoria, Illinois, a year and a half before KSM was captured, and was by then already imprisoned in a New York jail awaiting trial on credit card fraud charges. He was someone that the feds had already identified as being in contact with members of al-Qaeda. The Parachas are a father-and-son team; the former was arrested in Thailand in the summer of 2003 and was transferred to Guantánamo and has yet to face trial, while his son was convicted of providing “material support” to al-Qaeda in 2006. Majid Khan was arrested in Pakistan only four days after KSM was captured, suggesting that this lead came not from interrogations but from KSM’s many computers and cell phones that were picked up when he was captured.

  Of the terrorists, alleged and otherwise, cited by the CIA that KSM fingered during or after his coercive interrogations, only the Ohio truck driver Iyman Faris was an actual al-Qaeda foot soldier living freely in the United States with the serious intention to wreak havoc in America. However, he was not much of a competent terrorist: in 2003 he researched the feasibility of bringing down the Brooklyn Bridge by using a blowtorch to cut through its cables, an enterprise akin to demolishing the Empire State Building with a firecracker.

  If this was the most threatening plot the United States could discover by waterboarding the most senior al-Qaeda member in American custody, it was thin stuff. And when the FBI director Robert Mueller was asked in 2008 if he was aware of any attacks on America that had been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through “enhanced techniques,” Mueller replied: “I don’t believe that has been the case.” The CIA’s inspector general arrived at a similar conclusion when he judged that: “it is difficult to determine conclusively whether enhanced interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks,” which was the supposed standard necessary for the imposition of coercive measures on the al-Qaeda prisoners in the first place.

  The putative intelligence gains made by the abusive interrogation techniques were easily outweighed by the damage they caused to the United States’ moral standing, according to Admiral Dennis Blair, then the director of national intelligence, who wrote in April 2009, “These techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefits they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

  The U.S. government belatedly realized in 2006 that the CIA’s treatment of KSM could seriously jeopardize the trial of the man who had planned the largest mass murder in American history. FBI and military interrogators known as the “Clean Team” started independently collecting the same information from KSM and other al-Qaeda members that they had previously given to the CIA, this time using standard rapport-building techniques. Still, legal experts have questioned whether the new interrogations can entirely remove the taint of the CIA’s coerced confessions, as the al-Qaeda defendants may be able to draw on the legal doctrine known as the “fruit of the poisonous tree,” that evidence found through unconstitutional means may not be introduced at trial. (In KSM’s case this may be moot, as he has voluntarily admitted his role in 9/11 on a number of occasions.)

  Might another approach have worked with KSM, which did not involve coercion? It’s worth recalling not only that KSM had given Al Jazeera two days of interviews a year before his capture in which he laid out every detail of the 9/11 plot, but also that his nephew Ramzi Yousef had given a fulsome uncoerced confession to the FBI agent who arrested him about his role directing the 1993 Trade Center bombing. And the most well-informed American official about KSM’s case was Frank Pellegrino, the FBI agent who had been tracking him since 1993, when he had wired several hundred dollars to his nephew in the run-up to the first Trade Center attack. Pellegrino never got the chance to interrogate KSM, since by the time of his capture in 2003 such “high-value” detainees were in CIA custody, and the Bureau did not want anything to do with the Agency’s coercive interrogations.

  President Bush’s extralegal approach to the war on terrorism was not only unnecessary and counterproductive, but it also helped to torpedo America’s good reputation around the world. In a BBC survey in 2007, of the more than 26,000 people polled in twenty-five different countries, seven out of ten disapproved of the treatment of Guantánamo inmates, while half thought the United States played a mostly negative role in the world. The numbers were far worse in Muslim countries—including democratic ones that should have been natural American allies. According to another poll the same year, America’s favorability rating stood at 9 percent in Turkey (down from 52 percent before September 11, 2001) and 29 percent in Indonesia (down from 75 percent before September 11). These low numbers were, in part, because of the widely held view in the Muslim world that the Bush administration kept preaching the virtues of democracy and human rights, but hypocritically reserved the right to ignore such principles when it suited its own purposes.

  Chapter 8

  Home Front: The First Bush Term

  One by one we’re hunting the killers down.

  —President Bush on September 14, 2002, following

  the arrest of a group of Yemeni-Americans accused

  of being members of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell

  On December 21, 2001, in Paris, Richard Reid attempted to board American Airlines Flight 63 to Miami. Reid, a six-foot-four British-Jamaican with an unkempt semi-Afro and a straggly beard, attracted considerable attention from security officers, particularly when they found a magazine he was carrying that showed a picture of Osama bin Laden. A small-time criminal and convert to Islam (a type that would become increasingly common among jihadist terrorists after 9/11), Reid was flagged as a potential troublemaker and he was extensively searched. That search did not turn up the bomb hidden in his ankle-high hiking boots and the ne
xt day Reid successfully boarded the same flight for Miami.

  Reid, an al-Qaeda recruit, had instructed a friend to send an email to his mother after what he believed would be his certain death in which he told her, “What I am doing is part of the ongoing war between Islam and disbelief … Forgive me for all the problems I have caused you both in life and death and don’t be angry for what I have done.”

  Three hours into the flight, which was almost full with 184 passengers and fourteen crew members, Reid attempted to light his shoe bomb with matches. Passengers complained of a smoky smell and a flight attendant found Reid with one shoe in his lap, a fuse leading into the shoe, and a lit match. She tried grabbing Reid twice, but he pushed her to the floor each time, and she screamed for help. A second flight attendant tried to grab Reid and he bit one of her hands. Reid was disabled by passengers who tied him down with seat belts. It was later determined that Reid’s shoe bomb was made with a high explosive that likely would have ripped a hole in the outside skin of the plane, bringing it down in the middle of the Atlantic and making any investigation into the resulting crash close to impossible. Reid told investigators that bombing a U.S. passenger jet during the Christmas season would have caused substantial damage to the American economy.

  There was enough evidence of a possible second series of al-Qaeda attacks after 9/11 to merit the serious concern of the Bush administration. One of the possible perpetrators of that second wave was Zacarias Moussaoui, the French citizen who had attracted attention to himself in the summer of 2001 at a flight school in Minnesota and was already in jail during the attacks on Washington and New York. While Moussaoui was often portrayed as the “twentieth hijacker,” in fact he had nothing to do with that operation but had instead been tasked by al-Qaeda to go to the States to participate in some way in the next round of attacks.