The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [206]
Because of this lack of institutional experience, when President Bush ordered the CIA to institute the detention program, they needed to find someone to run it. Brought to their attention—it’s not yet publicly known by whom—were two contractors, Boris and another psychologist. Helgerson writes: “In late 2001, CIA had tasked an independent contractor psychologist [Boris] . . . to research and write a paper on Al-Qaida’s resistance to interrogation techniques.” Boris collaborated with a Department of Defense psychologist, and “subsequently, the two psychologists developed a list of new and more aggressive EITs that they recommended for use in interrogations.” (Military personnel who knew the two contractors described Boris as extremely arrogant, and his partner—whom I never met—as someone with a terrible temper. Arrogance and anger—a dangerous combination.)
I later found out from a Senate investigation that in December 2001, CIA officials had asked Boris and his partner to analyze al-Qaeda’s Manchester Manual. It was on the basis of the information in this manual that the two reportedly concluded that harsh techniques would be needed to break al-Qaeda detainees. This constituted a misreading of the Manchester Manual, and in fact Boris’s techniques played into what the manual instructed captured terrorists to do.
A few weeks after [1 word redacted] left the location, [1 word redacted] saw Pat D’Amuro. He told [1 word redacted] that Robert Mueller had had a conversation with George Tenet, during which Mueller had asked about the lack of intelligence coming from Abu Zubaydah. (This was after [3 words redacted] had left the location.) Tenet had replied, “Your guys really messed him up. We have to fix him all over again.” It was clear that after [1 word redacted] left, Boris’s experiments continued to fail. His backers were struggling to find a new excuse to explain away the failure.
In 2006, when President Bush gave a speech acknowledging the existence of the harsh interrogation program and listed its “successes,” I received a phone call from an assistant director of the FBI. “Did you see the president’s speech?” he asked.
“No,” I replied. I was overseas at the time, working on a project.
“Just remember, this is still classified. Just because the president is talking about it doesn’t mean that we can.”
I later read through the speech and understood the phone call. The president was just repeating false information put into classified CIA memos. (I believe that President Bush was misled and briefed incorrectly regarding the efficacy of the techniques.) From that speech, and from memos on the program that were later declassified, I learned that backers of the EITs in Washington went on to claim credit for having obtained the information about Padilla’s attempted operation and other intelligence from Abu Zubaydah. They also claimed credit for the news that KSM was Mokhtar, despite the fact that the CTC team wasn’t even at the location when [1 word redacted] learned that information.
The May 30 Bradbury memo states: “Interrogations of Zubaydah—again, once enhanced interrogation techniques were employed . . . identified KSM as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.” Zubaydah, according to the memo, also “provided significant information on two operatives, [including] Jose Padilla [,] who planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington DC area.” And the apartment buildings and Brooklyn Bridge plots that [1 word redacted] got from Abu Zubaydah, the CIA claimed to have gotten from KSM a year later. Apparently they had no success of their own at any time, and so they had to use [1 word redacted].
There are many other errors. The May 30 Bradbury memo states that Padilla was arrested “on his arrival in Chicago in May 2003.” He was arrested in May 2002. Another declassified memo states that Ramzi Binalshibh was arrested in December 2002. He was arrested in September 2002. These incorrect dates led officials to erroneously