GST was also the vehicle for snatch operations, known as extraordinary renditions. Under GST, the CIA began coordinating with intelligence agencies in various countries to establish “Status of Forces” agreements to create secret prisons where detainees could be held, interrogated and kept away from the Red Cross, the US Congress and anything vaguely resembling a justice system. These agreements not only gave immunity to US government personnel, but to private contractors as well. The administration did not want to put terror suspects on trial, “because they would get lawyered up,” said Jose Rodriguez, who at the time ran the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, which was responsible for all of the “action” run by the Agency. “[O]ur job, first and foremost, is to obtain information.” To obtain that information, authorization was given to interrogators to use ghoulish, at times medieval, techniques on detainees, many of which were developed by studying the torture tactics of America’s enemies. The War Council lawyers issued a series of legal documents, later dubbed the “Torture Memos” by human rights and civil liberties organizations, that attempted to rationalize the tactics as necessary and something other than torture. “We needed to get everybody in government to put their big boy pants on and provide the authorities that we needed,” recalled Rodriguez, who, with Black, would become one of the key architects of the torture policy. “I had had a lot of experience in the Agency where we had been left to hold the bag. And I was not about to let that happen for the people that work for me.”
The CIA began secretly holding prisoners in Afghanistan on the edge of Bagram Airfield, which had been commandeered by US military forces. In the beginning, it was an ad hoc operation with prisoners stuffed into shipping containers. Eventually, it expanded to a handful of other discrete sites, among them an underground prison near the Kabul airport and an old brick factory north of Kabul. Doubling as a CIA substation, the factory became known as the “Salt Pit” and would be used to house prisoners, including those who had been snatched in other countries and brought to Afghanistan. CIA officials who worked on counterterrorism in the early days after 9/11 said that the idea for a network of secret prisons around the world was not initially a big-picture plan, but rather evolved as the scope of operations grew. The CIA had first looked into using naval vessels and remote islands—such as uninhabited islands dotting Lake Kariba in Zambia—as possible detention sites at which to interrogate suspected al Qaeda operatives. Eventually, the CIA would build up its own network of secret “black sites” in at least eight countries, including Thailand, Poland, Romania, Mauritania, Lithuania and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. But in the beginning, lacking its own secret prisons, the Agency began funneling suspects to Egypt, Morocco and Jordan for interrogation. By using foreign intelligence services, prisoners could be freely tortured without any messy congressional inquiries.
In the early stages of the GST program, the Bush administration faced little obstruction from Congress. Democrats and Republicans alike gave tremendous latitude to the administration to prosecute its secret war. For its part, the White House at times refused to provide details of its covert operations to the relevant congressional oversight committees but met little protest for its reticence. The administration also unilaterally decided to reduce the elite Gang of Eight members of Congress to just four: the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. Those members are prohibited from discussing these briefings with anyone. In effect, it meant that Congress had no oversight of the GST program. And that was exactly how Cheney wanted it.
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION did not create the CIA’s rendition program. It started under Clinton in the mid-1990s when he signed a presidential directive authorizing the CIA and US Special Operations Forces, in conjunction with the FBI, to snatch terror suspects from across the globe without the need to respect bilateral extradition agreements or international conventions. But the Clinton directive also allowed for these US officers to send terror suspects to Egypt, where, far removed from US law and due process, they could be interrogated by mukhabarat (secret police) agents not constrained by US prohibitions against torture. The program required direct authorization for each snatch operation. Under Clinton, more than seventy renditions were conducted. In some cases, US planes would land in countries and ferry their targets back to the United States for trial. Among these high-profile renditions conducted under Clinton were: Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani national who had shot and killed two CIA employees outside the Agency’s headquarters in 1993 and was rendered from Pakistan in 1997; Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Wali Khan Amin Shah, who plotted to blow up multiple US airlines on a single day in 1995; and Japanese Red Army member Tsutomu Shirosaki, who bombed the US Embassy in Jakarta in 1986 and was eventually snatched in 1996. All of these renditions involved court orders from US judges and ended in civilian trials. However, in cases where the United States wanted intelligence rather than justice, it would render them to third countries where they would have no legal rights. In 1998, the US Congress passed legislation declaring that it is “the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” Bush’s post-9/11 presidential directives threw those concerns out the door, and the CIA intensified its use of what human rights advocates came to call “torture taxis.”
As the new kill/capture program began to kick into full gear in late 2001, the CIA’s number-three man at the time, Buzzy Krongard, declared the “war on terror” would be “won in large measure by forces you do not know about, in actions you will not see and in ways you may not want to know about.” A US official directly involved in rendering captives told the Washington Post, “We don’t kick the (expletive) out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the (expletive) out of them.” Another official who supervised the capture and transfer of prisoners told the paper, “If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job,” adding, “I don’t think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA.” Cofer Black put a fine point on it when he told Congress about the new “operational flexibility” employed in the war on terror. “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know is that there was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11,” Black said. “After 9/11 the gloves come off.”
The early stages of the post-9/11 rendition program began what would be a multiyear battle between the FBI and the CIA over who would take the lead in investigating the terror attacks. It would also bring to the surface how little regard the Bush White House had for anything vaguely resembling a law enforcement approach to the perpetrators of 9/11. As the Taliban regime crumbled and US troops poured into Afghanistan, scores of al Qaeda operatives began retreating across the border into Pakistan. In November, Pakistani forces picked up al Qaeda trainer Ibn al Shaykh Libi, who allegedly ran the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan where the would-be “Shoe Bomber,” Richard Reid, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called Twentieth Hijacker, were both trained. The Pakistanis handed Libi over to FBI agents stationed at Bagram Air Base for questioning. The FBI saw the prisoner as a potentially valuable source of intel on al Qaeda and a possible witness against Moussaoui. New York–based FBI agent Jack Cloonan told his agents in Afghanistan to “handle this like it was being done right here, in my office in New York.” He said, “I remember talking on a secure line to them. I told them, ‘Do yourself a favor, read the guy his rights. It may be old-fashioned, but this will come out if we don’t. It may take ten years, but it will hurt you, and the bureau’s reputation, if you don’t. Have it stand as a shining example of what we feel is right.’” Libi’s interrogators described him as cooperative and “genuinely friendly” and said that he
had agreed to give them information on Reid in return for promises to protect his family.
However, just as the FBI believed it was making headway with Libi, CIA operatives, on orders from Cofer Black, showed up at Bagram and demanded to take him into their custody. The FBI agents objected to the CIA taking him, but the White House overruled them. “You know where you are going,” one of the CIA operatives told Libi as he took him from the FBI. “Before you get there, I am going to find your mother and fuck her.”
The CIA flew Libi to the USS Bataan in the Arabian Sea, which was also housing the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, who had been picked up in Afghanistan, and other foreign fighters. From there, Libi was transferred to Egypt, where he was tortured by Egyptian agents. Libi’s interrogation focused on a goal that would become a centerpiece of the rendition and torture program: proving an Iraq connection to 9/11. Once he was in CIA custody, interrogators pummeled Libi with questions attempting to link the attacks and al Qaeda to Iraq. Even after the interrogators working Libi over had reported that they had broken him and that he was “compliant,” Cheney’s office directly intervened and ordered that he continue to be subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. “After real macho interrogation—this is enhanced interrogation techniques on steroids—he admitted that al Qaeda and Saddam were working together. He admitted that al Qaeda and Saddam were working together on WMDs,” former senior FBI interrogator Ali Soufan told PBS’s Frontline. But the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) cast serious doubt on Libi’s claims at the time, observing in a classified intelligence report that he “lacks specific details” on alleged Iraqi involvement, asserting that it was “likely this individual is intentionally misleading” his interrogators. Noting that he had been “undergoing debriefs for several weeks,” the DIA analysis concluded Libi may have been “describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.” Despite such doubts, Libi’s “confession” would later be given to Secretary of State Powell when he made the administration’s fraudulent case at the United Nations for the Iraq War. In that speech Powell would say, “I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda.” Later, after these claims were proven false, Libi, according to Soufan, admitted he had lied. “I gave you what you want[ed] to hear,” he said. “I want[ed] the torture to stop. I gave you anything you want[ed] to hear.”
The pattern that was emerging early on with the rendition and interrogation program centered on two primary objectives: dismantling al Qaeda’s network and preventing any further attacks, and supporting the case for an invasion of Iraq. In pursuit of these goals, no options or tactics would be left off the table. While the State Department cautioned against declaring an ill-conceived global war and pushed for a narrow, law-enforcement response to 9/11, Cheney began drawing up plans for ambitious global kidnapping and assassination operations in which certain elements of the CIA would initially take a leading role. Cheney, according to former senior CIA and State Department officials, began effectively directing a global manhunt using a mesh of Special Operations Forces and operatives from the CIA’s Special Activities Division, the paramilitary arm of the Agency. The former officials described a culture that permeated these operations in which ambassadors, the conventional US military commanders and even CIA station chiefs around the world were kept in the dark about clandestine or covert activities. To execute this program, Cheney relied on the gray area in US law and command authority between the jurisdiction of the CIA and the military.
In November 2001, Cheney convened a meeting at the White House to put the finishing touches on a presidential order, drawn up by Addington and other lawyers, that outlined how prisoners captured around the world would be tried. As had become custom, War Council lawyers were invited to the meeting, but senior State Department and National Security Council officials were shut out. Powell and the State Department’s lawyers had told President Bush that they believed that, under the Geneva Convention, Taliban and al Qaeda detainees were entitled to legal protections and humane treatment while in enemy custody. They furthermore warned that in not offering America’s enemies such protections, it would endanger the lives of US military personnel captured in the war. On February 7, 2002, President Bush made his decision. He signed another directive, based on a notion that the Geneva Convention was “quaint” and did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban prisoners held by the United States. The order was issued just after the Bush administration began sending detainees snatched in Afghanistan and elsewhere to a US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Although Congress was largely asleep at the wheel in its oversight responsibilities early on in the war on terror, the administration knew that would not last. By early 2002, some on Capitol Hill were already demanding that the CIA and administration brief them on the range of tactics being used by the Agency in pursuit of terror suspects. The full details of how those early post-9/11 “Cheney Program” operations were run and who exactly was operating them will likely never be fully revealed. “We deliberately kept the circle of people who knew where the black sites were to a very small number. We didn’t tell the FBI,” recalled Rodriguez, the CIA official who coordinated the construction and use of the black sites. “Many people, even those within the Agency with the highest security clearances, were not clued in. As far as I know, the location of the black sites was not even shared with the president.” Rodriguez added that it was not that those senior officials kept outside the circle of knowledge were untrustworthy, “but rather that they simply did not have a ‘need to know.’”
The strategies that fueled this force’s ascent would become a model for a secret program that Rumsfeld would build at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld was watching as the CIA became the alpha dog in the GWOT under Cheney’s direction. Rumsfeld became determined to break what he called the Pentagon’s “near total dependence on CIA” and to build an iron curtain around the most sensitive activities of America’s most elite warriors. This project was envisioned as a parallel intelligence operation to the CIA, but also as the most effective kill and capture machine the world had ever seen—one that, by its very nature, would answer to no one but the president and his inner circle.
Anwar Awlaki: An American Story
THE UNITED STATES AND YEMEN, 1971–2002 —The world was a different place when George W. Bush was campaigning for president in 2000. The date 9/11 held no particular significance for Americans and Osama bin Laden was not the center of attention for the US military and intelligence machine. For many Arabs and Muslims, the Clinton era had resulted in crushed hopes that the Palestine issue would be negotiated in their favor. Many Muslim Americans saw Bush, not Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, as their best hope in the 2000 presidential election. But it wasn’t just Palestine. Many Muslims also shared the conservative social values embraced by evangelical Christians like Bush, on issues of marriage, gay rights and abortion. One such American Muslim was a young imam from New Mexico named Anwar al Awlaki. “Yes, we disagree with a lot of issues when it comes to the foreign policy of the United States,” Awlaki said in 2001. “We are very conservative when it comes to family values. We are against the moral decay that we see in the society. But we also cherish a lot of the values that are in America. Freedom is one of them; the opportunity is another.”
In many ways, Awlaki’s story was a classic tale of people from a faraway land seeking a better life in America. His father, Nasser Awlaki, was a brilliant young student from Yemen who came to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship in 1966 to study agricultural economics at New Mexico State University. “I read a lot about the United States when I was only fifteen years old,” Nasser recalled. “My impression of the US, when I was young boy in elementary and junior high school, was that America is a land of democracy, and the land of opportunities. I yearned all the time to have my studies in the United States of America.” When he arrived, Nasser went first to Lawrence, Kansas, to study Eng
lish and then headed for New Mexico. “I wanted to know and meet people of the New World who built one of the most progressive nations the world has ever known,” he declared in an essay introducing himself to fellow classmates in the United States. Nasser wrote that he wanted to get an education “in order to help my people become more progressive and advanced.” He had married right after he completed high school but could not afford to bring his wife, Saleha, to live with him in the United States on his $167 monthly stipend. “Because I wanted to get my wife back, I finished my schooling for a bachelor’s degree in agriculture in only two years and nine months,” he told me when we met in his large, modern home in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital in December 2011. After graduating, Nasser headed back to Yemen, got his wife a visa and returned to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he completed his master’s degree. On April 22, 1971, their baby boy, Anwar, was born. “In those days, it was OK to distribute cigars to your fellow graduate students,” he laughed. “It was written on it: ‘It’s a Boy.’ And it was an unbelievable day for me, when Anwar was born. In Las Cruces Memorial Hospital.”
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