I later found out from a Senate investigation that in December 2001, CIA officials had asked Boris and his partner to analyze al-Qaeda’s Manchester Manual. It was on the basis of the information in this manual that the two reportedly concluded that harsh techniques would be needed to break al-Qaeda detainees. This constituted a misreading of the Manchester Manual, and in fact Boris’s techniques played into what the manual instructed captured terrorists to do.
A few weeks after [1 word redacted] left the location, [1 word redacted] saw Pat D’Amuro. He told [1 word redacted] that Robert Mueller had had a conversation with George Tenet, during which Mueller had asked about the lack of intelligence coming from Abu Zubaydah. (This was after [3 words redacted] had left the location.) Tenet had replied, “Your guys really messed him up. We have to fix him all over again.” It was clear that after [1 word redacted] left, Boris’s experiments continued to fail. His backers were struggling to find a new excuse to explain away the failure.
In 2006, when President Bush gave a speech acknowledging the existence of the harsh interrogation program and listed its “successes,” I received a phone call from an assistant director of the FBI. “Did you see the president’s speech?” he asked.
“No,” I replied. I was overseas at the time, working on a project.
“Just remember, this is still classified. Just because the president is talking about it doesn’t mean that we can.”
I later read through the speech and understood the phone call. The president was just repeating false information put into classified CIA memos. (I believe that President Bush was misled and briefed incorrectly regarding the efficacy of the techniques.) From that speech, and from memos on the program that were later declassified, I learned that backers of the EITs in Washington went on to claim credit for having obtained the information about Padilla’s attempted operation and other intelligence from Abu Zubaydah. They also claimed credit for the news that KSM was Mokhtar, despite the fact that the CTC team wasn’t even at the location when [1 word redacted] learned that information.
The May 30 Bradbury memo states: “Interrogations of Zubaydah—again, once enhanced interrogation techniques were employed . . . identified KSM as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.” Zubaydah, according to the memo, also “provided significant information on two operatives, [including] Jose Padilla [,] who planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington DC area.” And the apartment buildings and Brooklyn Bridge plots that [1 word redacted] got from Abu Zubaydah, the CIA claimed to have gotten from KSM a year later. Apparently they had no success of their own at any time, and so they had to use [1 word redacted].
There are many other errors. The May 30 Bradbury memo states that Padilla was arrested “on his arrival in Chicago in May 2003.” He was arrested in May 2002. Another declassified memo states that Ramzi Binalshibh was arrested in December 2002. He was arrested in September 2002. These incorrect dates led officials to erroneously state that Padilla was captured because of waterboarding that began in August 1, 2002. In reality, this would have been factually impossible.
With the declassification of several memos, I had a chance to see the CIA’s “psychological assessment” of Abu Zubaydah. The assessment was used by Jay S. Bybee (then assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel) to write a memo for Rizzo on August 1, 2002, giving the CIA permission to use the enhanced interrogation techniques.
The Bybee memo states, referencing the psychological assessment: “According to this assessment, Zubaydah, though only 31, rose quickly from very low level mujahedin to third or fourth man in al Qaeda. He has served as Usama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenant. In that capacity, he has managed a network of training camps. . . . He also acted as al Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications. Additionally, he has acted as al Qaeda’s counter-intelligence officer and has been trusted to find spies within the organization. . . . Zubaydah has been involved in every major terrorist operation carried out by al Qaeda. . . . Moreover he was one of the planners of the September 11 attacks.”
To this day, I don’t understand how anyone could write such a profile. Not only did we know this to be false before we captured Abu Zubaydah, but it was patently false from information obtained after we captured him. Yet this psychological assessment was cited for the next couple of years in internal government memos.
The psychological assessment also says that Abu Zubaydah wrote al-Qaeda’s manual on resistance techniques and that he is “a highly self directed individual who prizes his independence.” Apparently they didn’t even pay attention to their own rhetoric. Why would someone who “prizes his independence” (which is true) join an organization that requires blind obedience to a leader? And if he wrote al-Qaeda’s manual on resistance techniques, why would they think harsh techniques (which pale in comparison to what they expect) would work? It seems they just put down on paper whatever they could to show that Abu Zubadyah was “twelve feet tall.”
According to the CIA inspector general’s 2004 report by Helgerson, official CIA memos about Abu Zubaydah not only hid the successes [1 word redacted] had with him before [1 word redacted] left but even made it look as though [1 word redacted] had never been there: “To treat the severe wounds that Abu Zubaydah suffered upon his capture, the Agency provided him intensive medical care from the outset and deferred his questioning for several weeks pending his recovery. The Agency then assembled a team that interrogated Abu Zubaydah.” In fact, questioning wasn’t deferred at all, and it was successful.
What’s especially notable about the memos authorizing the techniques is their unquestioning acceptance of information from CIA officials. Bradbury acknowledged that “he relied entirely on the CIA’s representations as to the effectiveness of the EITs, and did not attempt to verify or question the information he was given.” He told the OPR: “It’s not my role, really, to do a factual investigation of that.” With such an attitude, the watchdog was little better than a lapdog.
It wasn’t only the Justice Department that really slipped up. A footnote to Bradbury’s comments to the OPR that his role was not to check the facts states that one official “urged AG Gonzalez and White House Counsel Fred Fielding to have a new CIA team review the program, but that the effectiveness reviews consistently relied on the originators of the program.” Is it fitting for the backers of EITs to be tasked with evaluating their own effectiveness? That would be a sure, and easy, way to guarantee the conclusion they wanted.
The Bybee memo, which authorized the techniques, states: “Our advice is based upon the following facts, which you have provided to us. We also understand that you do not have any facts in your possession contrary to the facts outlined here, and this opinion is limited to these facts. If these facts were to change, this advice would not necessarily apply.”
The “facts” granting authorization to use the harsh techniques were that Abu Zubaydah was not cooperating (he was) and that he was a senior al-Qaeda member (he wasn’t). While the authors of the memo may not have been aware of the truth, those providing the content for the memos, and those requesting the authorization to initiate Boris’s experiments, certainly were. Because the advocates of the harsh techniques were allowed to state these lies and claim [1 word redacted] successes as their own, Boris and his partner (under the guidance of their sponsors in Washington) were then granted control over all future high-value detainees captured. Abu Zubaydah was the first person on whom the techniques were used. It was in many ways a trial or test run for the techniques. And because people in Washington rewrote the results to show that they passed the “test case,” they could successfully argue that the techniques be used in the future. Boris and his partner were given control of other high-value detainees.
Back in FBI headquarters, the situation was clear. We gained information using a tried and tested and scientific approach, while what Boris was doing was un-American and ineffective. We were confident that the contractors and their crazy ideas
would soon be abandoned. Little did we know that there was a wider effort to disseminate misinformation even to Justice Department officials.
I later learned—from the July 29, 2009, OPR report—that the CIA had initially requested that twelve EITs be used in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. They were as follows (the descriptions are from the report):
1. Attention grasp: The interrogator grasps the subject with both hands, with one hand on each side of the collar opening, in a controlled and quick motion, and draws the subject toward the interrogator.
2. Walling: The subject is pulled forward and then quickly and firmly pushed into a flexible false wall so that his shoulder blades hit the wall. His head and neck are supported with a rolled towel to prevent whiplash.
3. Facial hold: The interrogator holds the subject’s head immobile by placing an open palm on either side of the subject’s face, keeping fingertips well away from the eyes.
4. Facial or insult slap: With fingers slightly spread apart, the interrogator’s hand makes contact with the area between the tip of the subject’s chin and the bottom of the corresponding earlobe.
5. Cramped confinement: The subject is placed in a confined space, typically a small or large box, which is usually dark. Confinement in the smaller space lasts no more than two hours and in the larger space up to eighteen hours.
6. Insects: A harmless insect is placed in the confinement box with detainees.
7. Wall standing: The subject may stand about four to five feet from a wall with his feet spread approximately to his shoulder width. His arms are stretched out in front of him and his fingers rest on the wall to support all of his body weight. The subject is not allowed to reposition his hands or feet.
8. Stress positions: These positions may include having the detainee sit on the floor with his legs extended straight out in front of him with his arms raised above his head or kneeling on the floor while leaning back at a forty-five-degree angle.
9. Sleep deprivation: The subject is prevented from sleeping, not to exceed eleven days at a time. [Note: as initially proposed, sleep deprivation was to be induced by shackling the subject in a standing position, with his feet chained to a ring in the floor and his arms attached to a bar at head level, with very little room for movement.]
10. Use of diapers: The subject is forced to wear adult diapers and is denied access to toilet facilities for an extended period, in order to humiliate him.
11. Waterboard: The subject is restrained on a bench with his feet elevated above his head. His head is immobilized and an interrogator places a cloth over his mouth and nose while pouring water onto the cloth. Airflow is restricted for twenty to forty seconds; the technique produces the sensation of drowning and suffocation.
12. [When the document was released, this paragraph was redacted by the government.]
According to the OPR report, on July 24, a Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, “telephoned Rizzo and told him that the attorney general had authorized him to say that the first six EITs (attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, and wall standing [which is actually number seven]) were lawful and that they could proceed to use them on Abu Zubaydah.”
Only on August 1, 2002, at around 10:00 PM, did the Department of Justice give the agency its written legal approval that ten specific enhanced interrogation techniques would not violate the Geneva Convention torture prohibition and could be used on detainees. The memo was primarily the work of Jay Bybee and John Yoo. (There are actually two versions of the memo, classified and unclassified, and together they are referred to as the Bybee memos.) According to CIA records, the classified Bybee memo was faxed to the CIA at 10:30 PM on August 1, 2002.
After the Abu Zubaydah interrogation, Boris and his partner and supporters in Washington were fully in control of the program. Only after that did the CIA even start “training” its interrogators. According to the 2004 OIG report, only in “November 2002” did the CIA initiate “a pilot running of a two-week Interrogator Training Course designed to train, qualify, and certify individuals as Agency interrogators.” Of course, two weeks isn’t enough to make someone a qualified interrogator. What makes someone a qualified interrogator is not only months of training but knowledge of the detainee and of terrorism.
Enhanced interrogation techniques is a term I first heard long after [12 words redacted] there was no system to what Boris and his backers were doing. They appeared to be experimenting with techniques, with no clear plan. Not only was Abu Zubaydah the first terrorist they had ever interrogated, but he was the first Islamist radical they had ever met.
The techniques that [3 words redacted] described as “borderline torture”) were later declared by George Tenet, in guidelines issued on January 28, 2003, to be “Standard CIA Interrogation Techniques.” According to Tenet, “these guidelines complement internal Directorate of Operations guidance relating to the conduct of interrogations.” His guidelines state that the standard techniques “include, but are not limited to, all lawful forms of questioning employed by US Law Enforcement and military interrogation personnel. Among Standard Techniques are the use of isolation, sleep deprivation not to exceed 72 hours, reduced caloric intake (so long as the amount is calculated to maintain the general health of the detainee), deprivation of reading material, use of loud music or white noise (at a decibel level calculated to avoid damage to the detainee’s hearing), and the use of diapers for a limited period (generally not to exceed 72 hours) . . .”—the rest is redacted.
What failed with Abu Zubaydah was later declared “standard” by George Tenet. It seems that the lesson was not learned.
For the next six years, until documents regarding this period were declassified, I had to remain silent as lie after lie was told about Abu Zubaydah and the success of the techniques. One public defender of the techniques was a CIA official named John Kiriakou, who stated on national television that Abu Zubaydah was uncooperative until he was waterboarded for thirty-five seconds. Kiriakou said he witnessed this himself. “It was like flipping a switch,” Kiriakou said; after that, Abu Zubaydah spilled everything. Later Kiriakou admitted that he had given false information, and we learned that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded eighty-three times—and that no new valuable information was gained from him. (Today Kiriakou works as a staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.)
In FBI headquarters, Boris, his partner, and their high-level backers in Washington were referred to as the “poster boys,” a reference to the FBI’s Most Wanted list, where we believed their methods would one day land them.
What happened at the secret location with Abu Zubaydah was originally taped by the CIA. The tapes were destroyed by the CIA before investigators could see them. Declassified internal CIA e-mails show senior CIA officials stating the urgency and importance of destroying the tapes. [44 words redacted]
One of the most damning condemnations of the CIA program came with the declassification of the CIA inspector general’s 2004 report. John Helgerson examined all the claims about the effectiveness of the techniques, and he had access to the CIA classified memos. He states that while regular interrogation (our approach) achieved many successes, “measuring the effectiveness of the EITs . . . is a more subjective process and not without some concern.” Moreover, he said he couldn’t verify that a single threat listed by the CIA as having been thwarted was imminent. Unfortunately, the report came two years too late.
In early 2008, in a conference room that is referred to as a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF), I gave a classified briefing on Abu Zubaydah to staffers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The staffers present were shocked. What I told them contradicted everything they had been told by Bush administration and CIA officials.
When the discussion turned to whether I could prove everything I was saying, I told them, “Remember, an FBI agent always keeps his notes.” Locked in a secure safe in the FBI New York office are my handwritten notes of everything that happene
d with Abu Zubaydah [4 words redacted].
PART 7
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SUCCESSES AND FAILURES
23
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Guantánamo Bay
February 2002. “So tell me,” I asked the elderly Afghani man sitting across from me in a detention cell in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, “what do you know about New York and Washington?”
“I don’t know what they’ve done,” he replied, “but I’m sure they are good people.”
The Afghani knew nothing about al-Qaeda or 9/11, and even thought “New York” and “Washington” were the names of people. Our first challenge at Guantánamo was to distinguish al-Qaeda and Taliban members from those wrongfully rounded up.
I arrived at Gitmo in early February 2002. The United States had just begun bringing detainees captured in Afghanistan to the U.S. detention facility. Little was known about our new prisoners, and U.S. government agencies had sent their top investigators and interrogators to help the military question and sort them. Among those gathered at the base were Bob McFadden; Ed, the CIA officer with whom I later worked [3 words redacted]; and Andre Khoury and John Anticev.
We had all heard stories of how Northern Alliance fighters would drive in their trucks though Pashtun tribal areas in Afghanistan and offer villagers a ride. Many had never been in a car before and eagerly took the ride. The Northern Alliance fighters, who were mostly Tajiks and hated Pashtuns, would then drive to a nearby U.S. base and tell officials that their passengers were “Taliban/al-Qaeda,” and receive a reward of fifty dollars a head for their efforts.
The Black Banners Page 46
