The Black Banners

by Soufan, Ali H.

  “Tell me again, why did you go to Afghanistan?” I asked.

  “I came to teach the Quran, as I told you,” he said. I gave him a big smile. “Why are you smiling?”

  “The problem with you guys is that you didn’t come up with better stories. If you and the friends you were captured with were smart, you would have divided yourselves up, saying numbers one to fifteen were studying the Quran, while numbers sixteen to thirty were teaching it. Saying you all are teaching the Quran is just stupid.” Bahlul said nothing, but a smirk crossed his face.

  I returned to talking about Islam, but I still wasn’t taking any notes. At a certain point Bahlul could no longer contain himself and asked me sharply: “What?”

  “What?” I asked back.

  “Why aren’t you taking notes anymore?”

  “Did I do anything but respect you here?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “You did respect me.”

  “I did. I came here and dealt with you respectfully as one human being to another. But when you are not honest with me, I take that as sign of disrespect.”

  “But I’m telling you the truth,” he protested.

  “Please, please don’t go down that route. You don’t know what I know. I know who you are. I came here especially to speak to you.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Look, you may consider yourself an important soldier in the war against the infidels, but as you sit here and give arguments that contradict what you swore you’d give your life for, you make me wonder how much you really believe in your cause. My question to you is: Do you really believe in these things?” Bahlul was silent. “If you do truly believe these things,” I continued, “then your jihad is not over yet. It is your duty to continue advocating what you were fighting for.

  “I have a deal for you,” I continued. “It is time for noon prayers. We should stop and you should go and pray. And when you pray I need you to do an istikhara—I need you to ask God for guidance. Ask God if you should continue to hide behind your shadow, or whether you should be a real mujahid and admit to what you believe in.” Bahlul gave a slight, somewhat uncomfortable-sounding laugh, as if trying to show he was still confident, and then left for prayers.

  When he returned, he sat back down in his place on the couch, but this time I sat down next to him. He clasped his hands together between his knees and stared down at the table. “Taqabal Allah,” I said—May God receive your prayers: a common saying among Muslims after prayer.

  “Minna wa minkum,” he replied: May God accept them from us and you. Then neither of us said anything for a minute.

  “Would you like a cookie?” I said, breaking the silence. On the coffee table in front of us I had put some tea and a plate of cookies.

  “Thank you,” he said, removing a cookie from the plate. He took a bite and then said slowly, “I am Anas al-Mekki. I am mas’oul”—someone with responsibilities. “I am one of the officers of al-Qaeda. I am bin Laden’s personal assistant. What do you want to know?”

  I had heard the name Anas al-Mekki many times, in different investigations, and knew he was indeed important. “Would you like some tea?” I replied.

  Bahlul coughed up some of the cookie that was still in his mouth. “I told you my position in al-Qaeda and you ask whether I’d like some tea?” He looked at me in disbelief.

  “Well, I already knew that,” I told him. “It didn’t surprise me. As I told you, you don’t know what I know. But now I know you’re at least being honest and respecting me, which is why I’m offering you some tea.”

  I spent the next day and a half interviewing Bahlul. His story is very similar to many other Yemeni al-Qaeda members. Their families had lived and worked in Saudi Arabia until they were expelled in the aftermath of the first Gulf War due to Yemen’s support of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. We covered everything from his path to al-Qaeda—he, too, was inspired first by Abdullah Azzam—to specific roles he’d had. At one stage Bahlul had roomed with Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah, two of the 9/11 hijackers. We spent time discussing the video he had produced celebrating the USS Cole bombing, which had led to his appointment as bin Laden’s personal propagandist. We went through the tape, looking at the different scenes, and he outlined where he had taken them from: bin Laden’s speeches, military training exercises at al-Farouq, scenes from Saudi Arabia, and the press conference at which bin Laden and others had expressed solidarity with the Blind Sheikh.

  Bahlul’s roles were wide-ranging. He had researched and written speeches for bin Laden, set up the satellite that had allowed bin Laden to listen to the details being reported about the 9/11 attacks, and kept minutes of meetings held by al-Qaeda’s leaders.

  When al-Qaeda members confessed their roles and gave us information, often it was because they were repentant, or wanted to pretend they were, in order to lessen their punishment. Bahlul was different in that he was not embarrassed about anything he had done for al-Qaeda, and he confessed with pride. He appeared convinced of my argument that if he truly believed in al-Qaeda’s aims, he shouldn’t lie and deny his involvement.

  In a stomach-turning and appallingly cold manner, Bahlul detailed why al-Qaeda considered the World Trade Center a legitimate target. “The World Trade Center was the center of those who control the world economy and the World Bank, those who destroy other countries’ economies and even deny small farmers their lands, and those who prevent Islamic banks and financial institutions from flourishing because they want to control all capital.

  “The World Trade Center was the center of globalism, and exemplified the American domination of the world and its people.” Bahlul went on to claim that anyone “who worked in it participated in crimes against politically and economically oppressed people all over the world.”

  “But the world economy and market prices are not controlled by the innocent people who worked at the World Trade Center,” I countered.

  He wouldn’t even acknowledge the death of innocent people on 9/11: “They were legitimate targets because they paid taxes and so are funding America’s wars against Muslims. We should kill Americans exactly as they kill us, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We should keep killing them until every liter of blood they wasted from us is equaled by the liters of blood we waste from them.” It was his hope, he said, that America would kill him, as his death would anger bin Laden. And if he was killed by Christians and Jews, his reward would be even greater than that of a regular martyr.

  Bin Laden was very interested in the effects of the 9/11 attacks. He had instructed Bahlul to conduct research pertaining to what experts were predicting would be the economic results of the attack.

  At one point, Bahlul asked me to send the message to President Bush that America should invade Iraq and “finish his father’s unfinished job.” To convince me, he told me that Saddam Hussein was a bloodthirsty individual who killed his own people, and that the Arab world would support an American attack. Like other al-Qaeda members, Bahlul was a firm believer in the hadith that said that the eventual victory of Islam would come after the final battle of Armageddon. According to his belief, the invasion of Iraq would be an important stepping-stone to fulfillment of the prophecy.

  We showed Bahlul many photographs of al-Qaeda members, and he identified them. When he saw a picture of Abu Zubaydah, he said that he remembered seeing him in Afghanistan and had heard a lot about him as early as 1990. When he had asked Abu Hafs if Abu Zubaydah was a member of al-Qaeda, Abu Hafs had said no.

  Bahlul also provided times and dates for information we had recovered in Afghanistan. When I showed him a video that our analysts believed was filmed after 9/11, he corrected them: “That’s from before the attacks on New York.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because Abu Hafs is in the film. After the attacks on New York and Washington, everyone else left Kandahar, but Abu Hafs stayed because he had a herniated disc and couldn’t move.”

  I worked with the
prosecution to prepare for the Bahlul trial, as I was to be the main witness. The only difficulty came from certain people within the CIA, who objected to the prosecution’s use of the phone book that had Bahlul’s fingerprints on it and contained the reference to the 9/11 summit meeting in Malaysia.

  “You can’t use that in the trial. The fact that there was a Malaysian meeting is classified,” a CIA representative told one of the prosecutors.

  “What do you mean?” the prosecutor asked. “The Malaysian meeting isn’t a secret. It’s in The 9/11 Commission Report.”

  “Just because the commission revealed the information doesn’t mean it isn’t still classified.”

  “But your former director, George Tenet, also references it in his book.”

  “He’s not the director anymore.”

  “But it had to be declassified for him to write about it.”

  “You can’t use it.”

  The prosecutors were shocked by how far the CIA would go to limit any public mention of the Malaysia meeting. There was no mention of it in the trial.

  When I testified in Bahlul’s trial, he would nod as I spoke, as if confirming what I had said. At one point, when I told the court that Bahlul had told me that he had produced the video celebrating the Cole bombing, he nodded, as if saying: Yes, I said that to him.

  Bahlul was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 2008.

  In 2004, I was in a military jail in North Carolina, helping with the interrogation of an uncooperative detainee, when I received an urgent phone call from the director of the FBI: a team of specialized military interrogators in Gitmo reported a confession, from an al-Qaeda member named Tarek Mahmoud el-Sawah, exposing al-Qaeda as the group behind the series of anthrax attacks that had occurred over several weeks shortly after 9/11.

  The Pentagon had already briefed Congress on el-Sawah’s confession. Congress asked the director to brief them on the anthrax investigation. A task force of very capable FBI agents, with high-level expertise in science, terrorism, and specialized investigations, was already working diligently on the case. No al-Qaeda links had been found. But due to the briefing to Congress, the director wanted to make sure that the intelligence was reliable, and he asked me to question el-Sawah. Not only had the military interrogators reported that he was the mastermind of al-Qaeda’s anthrax program, they also said he had designed al-Qaeda’s shoe bomb program.

  I questioned el-Sawah, who was overweight and happiest when we’d bring him ice cream, and he was open about his al-Qaeda connections. He had fought in the original Afghan jihad and in Bosnia, where he had served as an explosives expert, and he knew senior al-Qaeda leaders from the period. He had decided to visit Afghanistan to see if, under the Taliban, it was a true Islamic state, as he had heard, because if it was, he would bring his family there to live. While there, he had visited old friends, among them Abu Hafs and Saif al-Adel. Abu Hafs had asked him to help train al-Qaeda operatives in explosives. “But you’ve got trainers,” el-Sawah had said.

  “At Banshiri,” Abu Hafs replied, “we’re graduating more people to heaven than out of the class.” He explained that they had Yemeni trainers who really didn’t know what they were doing. One blew up an entire class of Chinese Uighurs who had joined al-Qaeda. El-Sawah agreed to help, and he received specialized explosives training, including instruction in building improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and remote detonation devices, from Abu Abdul Rahman al-Muhajir. He went on to receive advanced explosives/electronics training from Abu Tariq al-Tunisi, learning how to make timers for IEDs using Casio watches as remote detonators.

  Then, from June 2001, he gave instruction in explosives and wrote a four-hundred-page bomb-making manual. After the United States invaded Afghanistan, el-Sawah fought with al-Qaeda against the United States in the Tora Bora region before being wounded and caught.

  When I asked him about al-Qaeda’s anthrax program, he didn’t even understand the question. We were speaking in Arabic, and he didn’t know what the word anthrax was in Arabic. When I questioned him further, trying to work out where the military interrogators had got their information from, I learned that he had told them that once, when he was having lunch in Kandahar with Abu Hafs and Saif al-Adel, the two had asked him if he remembered a mutual friend who had a degree in chemistry and whom they had known in Egypt. El-Sawah said that he remembered the expert, and Saif al-Adel asked if he was still in contact with him; el-Sawah said he wasn’t.

  On that basis the interrogators wrote a report about “the anthrax program.” As for el-Sawah’s being the mastermind of any shoe bombing operation, I found out that the military interrogators had said to him: “You’re an explosives expert. If you were to build a shoe bomb, how would you do it?” He had drawn them a diagram. That diagram constituted their “proof.” It turned out that it was a bad drawing, unrepresentative of the shoe bomb Richard Reid used.

  I went with FBI colleagues to the interrogators who had extracted the “confession” and told them that, based upon my interrogation, their claims didn’t add up. They were novice interrogators and didn’t understand that you can’t just jump to those kinds of conclusions. They admitted that they had messed up.

  Around the time I was interrogating el-Sawah, Matrafi—the head of al-Wafa, whom I had interrogated in the early days at Gitmo with Ed and Andre—was taken by the same specialized military team to a black site (a secret location) and interrogated. Apparently they didn’t get much intelligence from him, so they asked me to come and talk to him again. A member of the team told me, “We know he knows about a threat, but he’s not cooperating. Can you get through to him and tell him to talk to us?” I didn’t have much faith in that specialized military interrogation team after the el-Sawah incident, but I felt that if there really was a threat that Matrafi knew about, I should help.

  When I went in he was very angry, and before I could say anything, he said: “I told you everything I knew right at the start. I confessed everything. Why am I here? Why should I talk to you again?”

  “I can’t explain Guantánamo. I don’t understand how it’s being run,” I told him. By this time the detainees knew exactly where they were. “But I can tell you that cooperation is always the best tactic, so I recommend you tell them everything.”

  “But I already told you everything. Why should I repeat it again? Didn’t you write everything down?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “The other interrogators just told me to repeat to them everything I told you when you interrogated me, so they can put it in their file.”

  “I’m sorry that I wasted your time,” I told him, and walked out. It wasn’t the only time that these inexperienced interrogators tried to “reinterrogate” detainees, telling them simply to repeat what they had told the seasoned interrogators. The point was that they could then claim that their techniques were successful and that they had gotten “intelligence.”

  On August 31, 2003, General Miller flew to Iraq to advise those running a prison in Baghdad called Abu Ghraib. Mark Fallon sent a CITF agent along with him, with instructions to warn the officials meeting Miller that use of the techniques he would advocate were not the only way to run interrogations. The general wouldn’t allow the agent into any of his meetings. In April 2004, General Miller became head of all prisons in Iraq that were under U.S. control.

  In 2004, pictures of U.S. army personnel abusing detainees in Abu Ghraib were shown around the world. One of the photographs that went around the world was an image of one soldier, Lynndie England, holding a leash attached to the neck of a naked prisoner. Qahtani had endured the same treatment at Gitmo, also under General Miller’s command.

  Instructors from the JPRA SERE school also went to Iraq and participated in interrogations using SERE techniques. Col. Steven Kleinman, an air force reservist who is a highly decorated veteran of three major military campaigns (Operations Just Cause, Desert Storm, and Iraqi Freedom) and who is recognized as having been one of the most prolific in
terrogators during the first Gulf War, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2008 that in Iraq he had witnessed abusive interrogations and had intervened to stop them. In one instance the JPRA team “took a hooded detainee to a bunker at the Task Force facility, forcibly stripped him naked and left him, shackled by the wrist and ankles, to stand for 12 hours.”

  In November 2005 Secretary Rumsfeld and the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, gave a press conference during which a UPI reporter asked them about allegations of torture by Iraqi authorities in prisons under Iraqi control. General Pace told the reporter: “It is the absolute responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it.”

  Secretary Rumsfeld interrupted him and said: “I don’t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it’s to report it.”

  “If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it,” General Pace responded.

  24

  * * *

  45 Minutes

  Mid-September 2002. “How did you get this information?” Samantha, the head of the CIA’s high-value target (HVT) unit, was standing in the doorway of the office [1 word redacted] was using at a CIA safe house in Kabul. She was waving a cable [1 word redacted] had asked the chief of station to send to FBI headquarters. Samantha had been assigned to the CIA[3 words redacted] station before the 9/11 attacks, so we kind of knew each other.

  “From the [1 word redacted] al-Qaeda guys you let [1 word redacted] interrogate,” [1 word redacted] replied, referring to a group of terrorists captured in a September 11, 2002, raid on apartments in Karachi that had also, and more importantly, netted Ramzi Binalshibh and [1 word redacted]. The CIA had let [1 word redacted] and [1 word redacted] FBI colleagues [2 words redacted] and [2 words redacted] question the [1 word redacted], but had barred [1 word redacted]—on orders from Langley—from interrogating Binalshibh and [1 word redacted].