The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [204]
“I’m going to stay.”
“Be careful,” [1 word redacted] told him, and said good-bye.
A few weeks later [1 word redacted] returned to Washington for a meeting on Abu Zubaydah. It was only then that Pat found out that [1 word redacted] had stayed. (Pat was based in Washington, and [1 word redacted] returned to New York and so didn’t see him, and no one else briefed him on [1 word redacted]’s decision.) Pat was furious that [1 word redacted] had not followed his orders, and to this day he hasn’t forgiven him. He ordered [1 word redacted] not to return to the location. The FBI would not be party to the harsh techniques.
While others in headquarters disagreed with Pat and felt [1 word redacted] needed to be part of the CTC program, Robert Mueller sided with Pat and [1 word redacted]. He understood that things had already gone too far, and that those pushing these techniques were not prepared to turn back. And he had the final say. [1 word redacted] stayed in Washington. That was the end of the FBI’s involvement in Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation.
After [1 word redacted] left, Boris had to keep introducing harsher and harsher methods, because Abu Zubaydah and other terrorists were trained to resist them. In a democracy such as ours, there is a glass ceiling on harsh techniques that the interrogator cannot breach, so a detainee can eventually call the interrogator’s bluff. And that’s what Abu Zubaydah did.
This is why the EIT proponents later had to order Abu Zubaydah to be waterboarded again, and again, and again—at least eighty-three times, reportedly. The techniques were in many ways a self-fulfilling prophecy, ensuring that harsher and harsher ones were introduced.
Cruel interrogation techniques not only serve to reinforce what a terrorist has been prepared to expect if captured; they give him a greater sense of control and predictability about his experience, and strengthen his resistance. By contrast, the interrogation strategy that [3 words redacted] employed—engaging and outwitting the terrorist—confuses him and leads him to cooperate. The art of interview and interrogation is a science, a behavioral science, and [1 word redacted] were successful precisely because we had it down to a science.
Evidence gained from torture is unreliable. There is no way to know whether the detainee is being truthful, or just speaking to either mitigate his discomfort or to deliberately provide false information. Indeed, as KSM, who was subjected to the enhanced techniques, later told the Red Cross: “During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop.”
Boris’s methods were aiming at compliance rather than cooperation. In compliance you get someone to say what he thinks you’ll be happy hearing, not necessarily the truth. A good example of this is the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Liby, Abu Zubaydah’s partner at Khaldan. Liby later confessed that he “decided he would fabricate any information the interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government].” For the same reason, after undergoing waterboarding, Abu Zubaydah “confessed” to being the number three in al-Qaeda, which was a lie and a dead end for the investigators. A 2006 investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) found that the CIA relied heavily on information from Liby to assess connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda. This information played a crucial role in making the Bush administration’s case for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, outlined in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN weeks before the invasion.
In contrast, the Informed Interrogation Approach yields information that is accurate, actionable, and useful in our legal process. A major problem with Boris’s techniques is that they ignore the endgame. After getting intelligence from terrorists, at some