The Black Banners

by Soufan, Ali H.

  The interrogator also uses the fear that the detainee feels as a result of his capture and isolation from his support base. People crave human contact, and this is especially true in some cultures. The interrogator turns this knowledge to advantage by becoming the one person the detainee can talk to and who listens to what he has to say. He uses this to encourage the detainee to open up.

  Acting in a nonthreatening way isn’t what the terrorist expects from a U.S. interrogator. This adds to the detainee’s confusion and makes him more likely to cooperate. Our approach also utilizes the need the detainee feels to maintain a position of respect and value to the interrogator. Because the interrogator is the one person speaking to and listening to the detainee, a relationship is built—and the detainee doesn’t want to jeopardize it. This was very much the case with [1 word redacted] and Abu Zubaydah, and [1 word redacted] were able to capitalize on it.

  As [3 words redacted] were in the middle of writing our report on Padilla, Abu Zubaydah’s plan to fill American apartment buildings with bombs, and the other intelligence he had given [1 word redacted], Boris walked into our room with a big smile. He came up to [1 word redacted], shook [1 word redacted] hand, and said, “I had you all wrong. It was great.”

  [3 words redacted] looked at each other in surprise. [1 word redacted] success had undermined his entire approach and had shown that our technique was the effective one. All [1 word redacted] could say in response was: “There is a lot of work to do here.” [1 word redacted] suspected that [1 word redacted] had told Boris to come to [1 word redacted] to try to repair the relationship. At that point [1 word redacted] was still higher up than Boris, as he was a CTC employee and Boris was just a contractor.

  Based on the intelligence [1 word redacted] got, on May 17, 2002, FBI headquarters sent out threat warnings to American apartment building owners generally, and extra security was added to the Brooklyn Bridge. At the same time, the international manhunt launched for Padilla was closing in on him. The Pakistanis knew that he had headed to Egypt. From there [1 word redacted] discovered that he had gone to Switzerland. He was tracked to Zurich, where he boarded a plane for Chicago. A contingent of Swiss officials followed him onto the plane. FBI agents based in New York headed to Chicago to pick him up.

  The New York office was given the Padilla case because of his al-Qaeda connection. Kenny Maxwell and the JTTF were in charge, and on a secure line [1 word redacted] spoke to Kenny about Padilla. Kenny told [1 word redacted] that they planned to arrest him as soon as he landed. He sounded annoyed with this decision. His preference, he said, was to instead monitor Padilla and see who met up with him in Chicago.

  [1 word redacted] fully agreed with Kenny. [1 word redacted] found it strange that Padilla was heading to Chicago. He was raised in Florida and lived in New York. “What is the Chicago connection?” [1 word redacted] asked.

  “That’s what I’d like to find out,” Kenny agreed. He said that headquarters had decided to pick up Padilla on arrival out of fear of losing the tail. They didn’t want to take any risks and thought it was safest to just arrest him. [1 word redacted] understood their concerns.

  As Padilla stepped off the plane at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, FBI agents pulled him aside, executing a material witness warrant issued by the Southern District of New York. He was searched and was found to have ten thousand dollars with him, along with a cell phone and a personal telephone book. (Padilla is in a U.S. jail today, while Binyam Mohamed is a free man in Britain.)

  The material witness warrant was issued based on an affidavit sworn to by Joe Ennis—Alabama Joe. While the “Ennis affidavit” remains classified, parts of it have been quoted in unclassified court documents: “on or about April 23rdCS-1 ([2 words redacted]) was shown two photographs.” The affidavit states that [2 words redacted] identified the men in the pictures as being Padilla and Binyam Mohamed. Both the Ennis affidavit and the material witness warrant were signed by the then chief judge of the Southern District, Michael Mukasey, who went on to become President George W. Bush’s third attorney general.

  After Padilla was apprehended, John Ashcroft, Bush’s first attorney general, held a press conference on the arrest in Moscow, where he was traveling at the time. He described Padilla as a “known terrorist” who was pursuing an “unfolding terrorist plot” to launch a dirty bomb in an American city. This wasn’t true; the former attorney general was misinformed. While Padilla was a committed terrorist set on trying to harm America, he was a brain transplant away from making a dirty bomb, and there was no unfolding plot. Padilla was the plot. Later, when [1 word redacted] returned to New York, [1 word redacted] was shocked to see Padilla on the cover of magazines labeled as “the dirty bomber.”

  What Ashcroft said just didn’t fit with the information [1 word redacted] had cabled to Langley. The exaggeration of Padilla’s expertise and ability unnecessarily instilled fear in the American people. Ashcroft’s statement was not only inaccurate, it also made us look foolish in the eyes of al-Qaeda and others who knew their real intentions. The message was that it was easy to fool the United States.

  While [1 word redacted] continued to question Abu Zubaydah, CIA officials at the location whom [1 word redacted] had grown close to told [1 word redacted] that Boris and his backers in Washington were agitating for him to retake control. They were still pushing for a longer period of sleep deprivation, having settled on the argument that the only reason his experiments on Abu Zubaydah had failed was because sleep deprivation hadn’t gone on for long enough. In the meantime Boris tried interfering with [1 word redacted] interrogation a few times.

  One morning [3 words redacted] walked into Abu Zubaydah’s cell for a session, and [1 word redacted] shivered. The room was very cold. [10 words redacted] It was clear that the room temperature had been deliberately lowered. Boris was trying temperature manipulation, even though [1 word redacted] were in control of the interrogation and had been assured that his experiments would be stopped.

  [1 word redacted] walked out and told Boris that Abu Zubaydah was cold. “Are you playing with the temperature?” [1 word redacted] asked directly.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Go check.” [1 word redacted] told him, “The room is very cold.” Boris [8 words redacted] to play his [23 words redacted]—and went through the motions of checking the temperature and Abu Zubaydah’s pulse. Boris then walked out, past [3 words redacted], and announced to the team of CIA analysts, “Everything’s fine.” There was a hint of sarcasm in his tone, as though he thought [3 words redacted] had been making things up.

  [1 word redacted] wasn’t going to play games with Boris. “Just turn it up right now,” [1 word redacted] said. [1 word redacted] checked with the local CIA officers; none of them were aware of Boris’s having received permission for temperature manipulation. [1 word redacted] told Boris as much, and he walked off, muttering, and said he’d turn the temperature up.

  [1 word redacted] made some tea [44 words redacted]

  [7 words redacted]. [1 word redacted] knew he was playing a game. [6 words redacted]; nor could the chill in the room [6 words redacted].

  [8 words redacted]

  [17 words redacted] Nor did the CIA support staff watching through the cameras have any idea.

  [1 word redacted] smiled, because [1 word redacted] knew. [44 words redacted]

  Mahmoud el-Meligi was a famous Egyptian actor. Not many people know Egyptian actors, so the name meant nothing to [1 word redacted] or the others. But [1 word redacted] recognized the name and [60 words redacted]

  [1 word redacted] poured [1 word redacted] a cup of tea and walked back into Abu Zubaydah’s cell. [21 words redacted]

  [3 words redacted]

  [10 words redacted]

  [99 words redacted] [1 word redacted] all laughed.

  22

  * * *

  “We Don’t Do That”

  Boris wasn’t the only person at the location giving [1 word redacted] difficulties. He was in m
any ways just the front man for powerful backers in Washington. By this time, the Department of Justice was giving verbal permission to Langley to use the coercive interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah. The powers behind Boris in Washington had lots of other minions at the location as well. Every day, the contingent of wisecracking CIA analysts who sided with Boris challenged what [1 word redacted] were doing and lectured [1 word redacted] about how [1 word redacted] were failing to get Abu Zubaydah to cooperate fully. In their minds, Abu Zubaydah was a senior member of al-Qaeda. Based on this assumption, they believed that he should be able to give detailed information on the leadership, down to bin Laden’s hiding places. Therefore, to them, the information [1 word redacted] were getting from Abu Zubaydah wasn’t significant enough, and Boris and his tech-niques were necessary.

  To people who knew what they were talking about, the insistence that Abu Zubaydah was the number three or four in al-Qaeda was flatly ridiculous, as were the claims that he wasn’t cooperating. But the analysts kept writing reports that Abu Zubaydah was the number three or four in al-Qaeda, and they managed to get that announced to the American people.

  One young CIA analyst, to “prove” to [3 words redacted] that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in al-Qaeda, took to lecturing [1 word redacted] about Abu Zubaydah’s role in the millennium plot in Jordan. [1 word redacted] listened to what he had to say. He had all his facts wrong. As politely as [1 word redacted] could, [1 word redacted] told him: “Listen, you’ve got the millennium plot all wrong, and maybe that’s why you’ve got the wrong idea about Abu Zubaydah.” [1 word redacted] began to list his mistakes.

  As [1 word redacted] corrected him, he got increasingly annoyed, his face registering a who-the-hell-are-you look. “How do you know you’re right?” he demanded. “I’ve read all the briefing notes.”

  [46 words redacted]

  Even on the smallest of things, the CIA analysts would challenge [1 word redacted], to demonstrate their expertise and point out [1 word redacted] “failings.” During one interrogation session, [14 words redacted]. The CIA analysts told [1 word redacted] afterward that Abu Zubaydah was tricking [1 word redacted], and that the [7 words redacted]. Evidence, they said, that Abu Zubaydah wasn’t cooperating.

  [1 word redacted] had [1 word redacted] gone through Abu Zubaydah’s personal effects upon his capture. Among the documents was a letter from the [5 words redacted], which clearly indicated that they were [1 word redacted]. Since the document was in Arabic and the CIA analysts couldn’t read it, [1 word redacted] patiently explained to them what the document said.

  “You’re wrong,” one of the analysts responded. “Our translators in CTC did not say what you’re saying.”

  “Go back and ask them to review it again,” [1 word redacted] told them. For the next few days, even more tension than usual existed between [1 word redacted] and the CIA analysts.

  A few days later, their supervisor, Jen, came up to [1 word redacted] and gave [1 word redacted] a hug. [1 word redacted] was shocked. What was this about? “They were [1 word redacted]. I’m sorry, you were right. The linguists back at Langley had it wrong,” she said.

  That apology was a rare one, and for the most part the analysts were skeptical of anything [3 words redacted] said. There were one or two exceptions, but their voices were drowned out. The analysts felt they knew it all and had no need for [1 word redacted]. They’d read the briefs. That was enough. But because they had no experience with terrorists beyond reading some memos about them, they really didn’t understand the broader terrorist network. [1 word redacted] put it this way: “These guys read a lot of Tom Clancy novels, but they have no idea about how things work in the real world.”

  [6 words redacted] my personal conclusion regarding [1 word redacted] problems with the people running the CIA interrogation program; later, it was confirmed by John L. Helgerson, the inspector general of the CIA. Helgerson investigated the program at the urging of CIA professionals who spoke out against the mistakes being made. His report, published in 2004 and declassified a few years later, details the lack of experience among the CIA people running the program. The report states: “According to a number of those interviewed for this Review, the Agency’s intelligence on Al-Qa’ida was limited prior to the initiation of the CTC Interrogation Program. The Agency lacked adequate linguists or subject matter experts and had very little knowledge of what particular Al-Qa’ida leaders—who later became detainees—knew. This lack of knowledge led analysts to speculate about what a detainee ‘should know,’ [which] information the analyst could objectively demonstrate the detainee did know.”

  The report goes on to state: “When a detainee did not respond to a question posed to him, the assumption at Headquarters was that the detainee was holding back and knew more; consequently, Headquarters recommended resumption of EITs.” It was a case of the blind leading the blind. It was because of this lack of knowledge in the CIA that Boris was introduced, because they didn’t understand that Abu Zubaydah was cooperating, and that he wasn’t “twelve feet tall”—a term my friends in the FBI used to refer to the insistence, on the part of Boris’s backers in Washington, that Abu Zubaydah was a senior al-Qaeda member. It was another reference to Braveheart; in one scene, William Wallace, the Scottish revolutionary leader played by Mel Gibson, appears before the Scottish army and announces: “Sons of Scotland, I am William Wallace.” A young soldier, having never met William Wallace before and having only heard stories about him, tells him that he can’t be Wallace, because “William Wallace is seven feet tall.” Wallace replies: “Yes, I’ve heard. Kills men by the hundreds. And if HE were here, he’d consume the English with fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightning from his arse.”

  The CIA analysts at the location, however, were representative of the views of their masters back at Langley, and soon an order came through that Boris was to be put back in charge. The line taken by experts was the same as before: Abu Zubaydah was not cooperating; he hadn’t given up the information that the number three in al-Qaeda would know, and so Boris was allowed to experiment further.

  While Boris in [1 word redacted] first meeting had confidently said that Abu Zubaydah would open up easily and quickly with one or two of his techniques, telling [1 word redacted], “It’s science,” by now his tone and explanations had changed. It was as if he had come to realize that working with terrorists in person was different from classroom theory. He began speaking about how his methods would be “part of a systematic approach to diminish his ability to resist.” He announced that Abu Zubaydah would be deprived of sleep for forty-eight hours now, and that they would reintroduce nudity and loud music at the same time. He had the approval from Langley. [3 words redacted] Abu Zubaydah was stripped naked, loud rock music was blasted into the cell, and he was forcibly kept awake.

  [1 word redacted] had assumed that the madness of Boris’s experiments was over. He protested vigorously to his superiors in Langley but got no satisfactory response. Finally, he announced that he was leaving. He packed up his things. As he waited for a car to pick him up, [1 word redacted] sat with him. He told [1 word redacted], “We are almost crossing the line. There are the Geneva Conventions on torture. It’s not worth losing myself for this.” [1 word redacted] was referring to his morals and his license to practice. He returned to the United States.

  The CTC polygrapher, Frank, repeatedly voiced his disapproval. Ed, the CTC interrogator who was playing Abu Zubaydah’s “god,” was also worried. Over the weeks that [1 word redacted] were together, Ed and [1 word redacted] had many conversations. [1 word redacted] asked him, “Is this all approved? You do know we could get into trouble for even witnessing it if there is no approval.”

  “It has been approved,” Ed replied, “by Gonzalez.” Alberto Gonzalez, George W. Bush’s White House counsel, was the author of a controversial January 2002 memo questioning Geneva Convention protection for al-Qaeda detainees and other terrorists. He went on to serve as Bush’s second attorney gener
al, resigning in 2007 amid allegations of perjury before Congress on a separate matter.

  “Who the hell is Gonzalez?” [1 word redacted] asked, as [1 word redacted] had never heard of him before.

  “They say he’s Bush’s lawyer,” Ed told [1 word redacted].

  “So he’s not from the Department of Justice?”

  “No, he’s from the White House.”

  “That’s not enough. We need DOJ clearance for these types of things.”

  “You’re right.”

  A few days later Ed came to [1 word redacted] and said, “Our guys met with the DOJ lawyers and briefed them, and they said there’s no problem with what’s happening.” Ed had apparently demanded a written DOJ clearance from his CIA superiors. He showed [1 word redacted] the cable he had received. The identities of the DOJ lawyers were not mentioned in the cable, which just noted that the techniques had been verbally approved by the DOJ.

  “I’d like to see something in writing from the DOJ,” [1 word redacted] told Ed. “I wouldn’t rely on their word.” There is a saying in government that if it’s not on paper it doesn’t exist: “One day the pendulum will swing the other way and someone will be blamed for this.”

  Ed agreed. He told [1 word redacted]: “I’m keeping a record of every order they give me, because one day this is going to be a bad thing.”

  As to why Boris himself insisted on reintroducing experiments that he had seen fail firsthand, perhaps the high fees the government was paying him had something to do with it. Reports later indicated that he was paid a thousand dollars a day.

  During the period of forty-eight hours of sleep deprivation, Ed would go in and tell Abu Zubaydah, [19 words redacted] Ed would walk out.

  Once, Ed went through Boris’s routine and told Abu Zubaydah, [37 words redacted]

  [4 words redacted], we watched through the CCTV system as [8 words redacted]. He was simply exhausted from the sleep deprivation. [1 word redacted] would have laughed if there hadn’t been lives at stake.