The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [205]
[1 word redacted] had a conversation with Ed about this, and [1 word redacted] asked him, “What’s the endgame with Abu Zubaydah after using these techniques?”
“I guess they intend that he’ll go to a military commission.”
“Military commissions may have a lower standard of evidence than regular courts,” [1 word redacted] replied, “but we both know that they’re not kangaroo courts.”
Ed and [1 word redacted] were familiar with the operation in Guantánamo Bay, and the preparation used in other cases for military commissions. Already, in early 2002, military lawyers were telling investigators to be careful with evidence, and to keep notes. There was also the discovery process; and anything [1 word redacted] had [1 word redacted] were required to share with the defense. It was clear to [1 word redacted] that even in a military commission, evidence gained from harsh techniques wouldn’t be admissible. Ed agreed.
Coercive interrogations are also slow. [1 word redacted] were spent on each unsuccessful technique, with nothing to show for it. [1 word redacted] were, in effect, playing right into the hands of the enemy. The Manchester Manual instructs captured terrorists to hold off answering questions for forty-eight hours, so that their comrades can change safe houses and phone numbers, even flee the country. There is always the possibility of a “ticking time bomb” scenario hanging over any interrogation of a terrorist, which is why wasting minutes or hours, let alone whole days, is completely unacceptable.
A July 29, 2009, report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) stated that Boris’s techniques “were not expected or intended to produce immediate results. Rather, the goal of the CIA interrogation program was to condition the detainee gradually in order to break down his resistance to interrogation.” I wonder if the person who wrote the word “gradually” had any idea of the urgency of counterterrorist operations.
I later learned that Boris’s path from being an independent contractor with no interrogation or Islamic extremism experience to running one of the most crucial fronts in our battle against al-Qaeda—our interrogation program of high-value detainees—had its origins on September 17, 2001. On that day, President Bush gave the CIA the authority, in an authorization known as a memorandum of notification, to capture, detain, and interrogate terrorism suspects.
In previous decades, the CIA had primarily operated as an intelligence collection agency. It was the FBI, along with military outfits such as the NCIS, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, and the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations, that had interrogated suspects. John Helgerson’s 2004 report on detention and interrogation activities explains in detail that the post-9/11 CIA detention program “began with almost no foundation, as the Agency had discontinued virtually all involvement in interrogations after encountering difficult issues with early interrogation programs in Central America and the Near East.”
In their July 29, 2009 report, OPR investigators wrote that CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo had told them that throughout most of its history the CIA had not detained subjects or conducted interrogations. Before 9/11, CIA personnel debriefed sources (these portions were censored and do not appear in the report), but the agency was not authorized to detain or interrogate individuals. Consequently, the CIA had no institutional experience or expertise in that area. (Rizzo was incorrect. Before 9/11, the CIA’s polygraph division, formerly known as the interrogation branch, was responsible for interrogations