The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [210]
What happened at the secret location with Abu Zubaydah was originally taped by the CIA. The tapes were destroyed by the CIA before investigators could see them. Declassified internal CIA e-mails show senior CIA officials stating the urgency and importance of destroying the tapes. [44 words redacted]
One of the most damning condemnations of the CIA program came with the declassification of the CIA inspector general’s 2004 report. John Helgerson examined all the claims about the effectiveness of the techniques, and he had access to the CIA classified memos. He states that while regular interrogation (our approach) achieved many successes, “measuring the effectiveness of the EITs . . . is a more subjective process and not without some concern.” Moreover, he said he couldn’t verify that a single threat listed by the CIA as having been thwarted was imminent. Unfortunately, the report came two years too late.
In early 2008, in a conference room that is referred to as a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF), I gave a classified briefing on Abu Zubaydah to staffers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The staffers present were shocked. What I told them contradicted everything they had been told by Bush administration and CIA officials.
When the discussion turned to whether I could prove everything I was saying, I told them, “Remember, an FBI agent always keeps his notes.” Locked in a secure safe in the FBI New York office are my handwritten notes of everything that happened with Abu Zubaydah [4 words redacted].
PART 7
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SUCCESSES AND FAILURES
23
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Guantánamo Bay
February 2002. “So tell me,” I asked the elderly Afghani man sitting across from me in a detention cell in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, “what do you know about New York and Washington?”
“I don’t know what they’ve done,” he replied, “but I’m sure they are good people.”
The Afghani knew nothing about al-Qaeda or 9/11, and even thought “New York” and “Washington” were the names of people. Our first challenge at Guantánamo was to distinguish al-Qaeda and Taliban members from those wrongfully rounded up.
I arrived at Gitmo in early February 2002. The United States had just begun bringing detainees captured in Afghanistan to the U.S. detention facility. Little was known about our new prisoners, and U.S. government agencies had sent their top investigators and interrogators to help the military question and sort them. Among those gathered at the base were Bob McFadden; Ed, the CIA officer with whom I later worked [3 words redacted]; and Andre Khoury and John Anticev.
We had all heard stories of how Northern Alliance fighters would drive in their trucks though Pashtun tribal areas in Afghanistan and offer villagers a ride. Many had never been in a car before and eagerly took the ride. The Northern Alliance fighters, who were mostly Tajiks and hated Pashtuns, would then drive to a nearby U.S. base and tell officials that their passengers were “Taliban/al-Qaeda,” and receive a reward of fifty dollars a head for their efforts.
Other detainees, however, were important figures in the al-Qaeda and Taliban networks. Early on, Andre, Ed, and I interrogated Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, head of the Afghan offices of al-Wafa, an NGO listed as a terrorist-affiliated entity by the United States. We knew that he was viewed in the Islamic world (and that he viewed himself) as an important person, so we treated him with a great deal of respect in order to make him feel comfortable. We steadily established rapport with him, first discussing non–al-Qaeda-related matters, like his family. When we asked about his children, he started crying and told us that he missed his daughters. We then started prodding him to see if he had had any disagreements with bin Laden.
He soon told us that bin Laden had upset him, and many Saudi clerics, when he had declared that traveling to Afghanistan with one’s family was the Hijra of