The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [194]
Boris’s first action was to order Abu Zubaydah to be stripped naked. Nudity would humiliate him, Boris said, and he’d quickly become compliant in order to get his clothes back. [27 words redacted]
Ed went into the cell, [15 words redacted]
[6 words redacted]
[18 words redacted]
Boris announced that loud music would be blasted into Abu Zubaydah’s cell. The nudity would continue as well. The music, Boris said, would become so unbearable that Abu Zubaydah would start speaking to end the noise. The same track of rock music was blasted into the cell, over and over, for a whole day. Those of us listening in the monitoring room soon got sick of the music, and we could only imagine what Abu Zubaydah was going through. Boris sent Ed into the cell. [9 words redacted]
[9 words redacted] Ed walked out.
A [3 words redacted] that Boris had requested arrived. Boris told [1 word redacted] that the reason the loud music had failed [9 words redacted]. He had intended to use the [3 words redacted] all along—he was just using the loud music [8 words redacted]. It was about three feet tall, and [1 word redacted] thought that perhaps it must be something special. But when it was switched on, [16 words redacted]. “This will make him talk?” [1 word redacted] asked [1 word redacted]. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
[1 word redacted] said, “They could have just turned on the air-conditioning, [5 words redacted].” This went on for [3 words redacted] days, [29 words redacted]
Boris then said that what was needed to make Abu Zubaydah talk was sleep deprivation. [3 words redacted] questioned whether sleep deprivation would actually harm Abu Zubaydah and render him less useful to [1 word redacted]. The CIA officers on the ground were in agreement with [1 word redacted] about the risk of such an approach, and they requested guidance from Langley.
The message came back that Boris could deprive Abu Zubaydah of sleep, but for no more than twenty-four hours. Boris was jubilant, and said that after the sleep deprivation, Abu Zubaydah’s will would be broken and he would automatically give up all the information he knew.
The sleep deprivation lasted for twenty-four hours. But like the nudity, the loud noise, and the white noise, it didn’t work. [10 words redacted] And Ed would walk out. [9 words redacted]
Every moment that [3 words redacted] had previously spent with Abu Zubaydah, from [3 words redacted] with him, [1 word redacted] had gained intelligence from him. Slowly but surely he had cooperated, giving information that saved lives. Now [1 word redacted] had to sit and watch for days as nothing was gained through techniques that no reputable interrogator would even think of using.
[1 word redacted] tried reasoning with the CIA officers present in the hope that they would appeal to their headquarters. Terrorists are trained to resist torture. As shocking as Boris’s methods might be to us, the training terrorists receive in training camps prepares them for much worse—the sort of torture they would expect if caught by dictatorships, for example. Being attacked by dogs, being sodomized, and having family members raped in front of them are some of the things they are physically and mentally prepared to endure. And Abu Zubaydah was not an ordinary terrorist trainee. He was the external emir of Khaldan; he had supervised the training process there. Sleep deprivation and nudity would be unlikely to work on a regular terrorist, let alone someone of Abu Zubaydah’s stature and experience.
After the failure of sleep deprivation, [1 word redacted] began having doubts about Boris. He contrasted [1 word redacted] previous successes with the dearth of information under Boris’s regime. He