The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [227]
In the meantime, the CITF and FBI commanders had put through a request for permission from General Miller to make the call. He responded: “No prisoner can make a phone call without approval from Paul Wolfowitz,” Rumsfeld’s deputy secretary of defense. The commanders argued that there was a precedent in Hamdan; in that case, approval had come from General Dunlavey.
The approval never came, and we never heard the second half of Batar’s confession. We could have learned important information about bin Laden’s Yemeni wife, which would have helped us track bin Laden and others. When bin Laden was finally tracked down and killed, in May 2011, his Yemeni wife was among those with him. Who knows how much more quickly we could have gotten to bin Laden and what lives could have been saved?
While General Miller wouldn’t approve a phone call, he had no qualms about employing harsh interrogation techniques on Qahtani without proper formal approval from the secretary of defense. The same is true of his bosses: they wouldn’t let a detainee use a phone for a minute, which would have led to bin Laden, but they didn’t mind disregarding the U.S. Constitution.
“Ali, you’re heading to Gitmo, right?” asked a member of the 9/11 Team. It was August 2002, and I was leaving headquarters, preparing to head back to interrogate Hamdan further.
“Yes, I’m leaving shortly.”
“While you’re there, will you take a look at prisoner No. 39?”
“Sure, who is that?”
“His name is Ali Hamza Ahmed Suleiman al-Bahlul.”
“What has he done?”
“We don’t know. In fact, we don’t know anything about him. He’s been in Gitmo for several months, and, according to the military, he’s fully cooperative. They do not believe he is a member of Al-Qaeda.”
“But?”
“But we recovered, in Afghanistan, a phone book with the names and numbers of al-Qaeda operatives. Its contents range from the contact details of the terrorists involved in the USS Cole bombing, such as Quso and Nibras, to the address and phone number in Malaysia where the 9/11 planning summit was held. It’s probable that whoever had access to the phone book knew about 9/11 and was a central figure in al-Qaeda. After it was tested for fingerprints, one got a positive hit: Bahlul.
“There’s one more thing about Bahlul,” the agent continued, “that makes us suspicious about him. He was picked up with the dirty thirty.”
“Can I see the phone book?” I asked.
“Sure,” the agent said, and handed me a copy. It was filled with the numbers of high-level operatives, including Khallad, identified by his alias Silver.
“Where did this book come from?”
“It was found in the car Hamdan was driving when he was arrested.”
“And Bahlul’s fingerprints?”
“They appear on pages eight and nine, so he had access to it. My gut feeling is that this person is important in al-Qaeda.”
“I think you’re right. I’ll speak to him at Gitmo and see what I make of him.”
Also found in Hamdan’s car were two SAM-7 missile launchers, along with cards detailing numerical codes used internally to refer to al-Qaeda members, entities, locations, and specific tactical words: bin Laden was 4; Zawahiri, 22; Saif al-Adel, 11; and KSM, 10. The military command was 33; the al-Banshiri camp, 31; bin Laden’s bodyguards, 47. Number 77 referred to families; 115, to chemicals; 129, to an ambush; 100, to a tank; 67, to food. Different locations at which fighters were based also had numbers: 108, for example, meant “in town.”
When I arrived back at Guantánamo I requested access to Bahlul from the military, but the interrogators who had been handling him refused. He had been put in a restricted-access location, as he was deemed to be cooperating. The military interrogators explained that he had told them everything he knew, and that any questioning “by you guys from the FBI” was “unnecessary.”
I talked to General Dunlavey about the phone