The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [207]
With the declassification of several memos, I had a chance to see the CIA’s “psychological assessment” of Abu Zubaydah. The assessment was used by Jay S. Bybee (then assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel) to write a memo for Rizzo on August 1, 2002, giving the CIA permission to use the enhanced interrogation techniques.
The Bybee memo states, referencing the psychological assessment: “According to this assessment, Zubaydah, though only 31, rose quickly from very low level mujahedin to third or fourth man in al Qaeda. He has served as Usama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenant. In that capacity, he has managed a network of training camps. . . . He also acted as al Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications. Additionally, he has acted as al Qaeda’s counter-intelligence officer and has been trusted to find spies within the organization. . . . Zubaydah has been involved in every major terrorist operation carried out by al Qaeda. . . . Moreover he was one of the planners of the September 11 attacks.”
To this day, I don’t understand how anyone could write such a profile. Not only did we know this to be false before we captured Abu Zubaydah, but it was patently false from information obtained after we captured him. Yet this psychological assessment was cited for the next couple of years in internal government memos.
The psychological assessment also says that Abu Zubaydah wrote al-Qaeda’s manual on resistance techniques and that he is “a highly self directed individual who prizes his independence.” Apparently they didn’t even pay attention to their own rhetoric. Why would someone who “prizes his independence” (which is true) join an organization that requires blind obedience to a leader? And if he wrote al-Qaeda’s manual on resistance techniques, why would they think harsh techniques (which pale in comparison to what they expect) would work? It seems they just put down on paper whatever they could to show that Abu Zubadyah was “twelve feet tall.”
According to the CIA inspector general’s 2004 report by Helgerson, official CIA memos about Abu Zubaydah not only hid the successes [1 word redacted] had with him before [1 word redacted] left but even made it look as though [1 word redacted] had never been there: “To treat the severe wounds that Abu Zubaydah suffered upon his capture, the Agency provided him intensive medical care from the outset and deferred his questioning for several weeks pending his recovery. The Agency then assembled a team that interrogated Abu Zubaydah.” In fact, questioning wasn’t deferred at all, and it was successful.
What’s especially notable about the memos authorizing the techniques is their unquestioning acceptance of information from CIA officials. Bradbury acknowledged that “he relied entirely on the CIA’s representations as to the effectiveness of the EITs, and did not attempt to verify or question the information he was given.” He told the OPR: “It’s not my role, really, to do a factual investigation of that.” With such an attitude, the watchdog was little better than a lapdog.
It wasn’t only the Justice Department that really slipped up. A footnote to Bradbury’s comments to the OPR that his role was not to check the facts states that one official “urged AG Gonzalez and White House Counsel Fred Fielding to have a new CIA team review the program, but that the effectiveness reviews consistently relied on the originators of the program.” Is it fitting for the backers of EITs to be tasked with evaluating their own effectiveness? That would be a sure, and easy, way to guarantee the conclusion they wanted.
The Bybee memo, which authorized the techniques, states: “Our advice is based upon the following facts, which you have provided to us. We also understand that you do not have any facts in your possession contrary to the facts outlined here, and this opinion is limited to these facts. If these facts