The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [200]
[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