The Black Banners

techniques not get any valuable information, they hadn’t even managed to get the basic stuff.

I spoke to Qahtani and he gave me details we wanted about his training and his interactions with KSM and other plotters, among other information. He told me about his difficulties in learning English phrases and using e- mail, and KSM’s frustrations, and told me that when Mustafa al-Hawsawi was training him, he would go to the beach at sunset to pray.

“What did you pray about?” I asked.

“I asked God to give me a sign showing whether he agreed with my mission. I told him if he agreed with my mission then he should facilitate my trip. If he didn’t, then he should stop it.”

Contrary to Bush administration claims about Qahtani’s importance, nothing gained from Qahtani while he was subjected to the coercive techniques could have saved a single life. The 9/11 Commission concluded that he was a “muscle hijacker,” as we had predicted from the start. To date, Qahtani has not been charged for his role in 9/11. All previous charges against him have been dropped. That he was subjected to the use of harsh techniques makes any trial legally difficult. As we warned when the techniques were being introduced, not only are they unreliable, ineffective, and un-American, they also ignore our long-term goals and make prosecution unlikely.

When the Department of Justice’s inspector general investigated detainee abuse and asked Qahtani about me, he complained that I had put him in the brig and let no one else see him, but he said I had “some sense of humanity.” The IG noted that the logs showed that I wasn’t the only person who saw Qahtani; other agents saw him, including members of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.

Agents reading the report told me that it seemed as if the IG were almost trying to get Qahtani to say something negative about me. And Qahtani had reason to hate me: I was the face that he associated with his having been identified and taken from the general population—but I had “some sense of humanity.” What was strange, however, was that the IG only asked Qahtani, the would-be twentieth hijacker, about me, and never asked for my version of what had happened. Perhaps because Qahtani didn’t say anything negative, the IG didn’t feel he needed to.

While Secretary Rumsfeld and members of his team such as Haynes, Wolfowitz, and Feith were busy approving the use of these techniques, they were also getting in the way of successful interrogations. FBI and CITF investigators identified detainee No. 37 as a Yemeni al-Qaeda operative called al-Batar, based on information and a description I had gotten from Abu Jandal. Batar was the person to whom Abu Jandal had delivered money—the sum turned out to be five thousand dollars—to procure a Yemeni wife for bin Laden. As Abu Jandal had told me, he went into the errand thinking that the money was for a mission. At the airport in Sanaa, he was met by Nibras, one of the Cole suicide bombers, and Batar, and together the three men went to the al-Jazeera Hotel. There Abu Jandal gave the five thousand dollars to Batar, who thanked him and told him that the money was for a dowry. Disillusioned and chagrined, Abu Jandal returned to Afghanistan shortly after.

Given his connection to bin Laden’s Yemeni wife, I thought that Batar would be especially valuable in tracking down the al-Qaeda leader. After I had introduced myself to Batar, he said to me, “So you’re the FBI agent Ali?”

“Yes.”

“Saqr told me about you,” he said, referring to Hamdan by his alias.

“What did he say?”

“He told me that originally he wouldn’t cooperate, but he met you, and said you are trustworthy and said he cooperated with you.”

“That’s true.”

“Saqr told me he releases me from my oath so that I can speak to you.”

“What was the oath?”

“When we were captured, we both swore to each other that whatever happened in interrogations, we would never admit to knowing each other.” (Hamdan had kept that oath, as he had never mentioned Batar’s name to me.)

“And?”

“Hamdan told me that you treated him well, and were honest, and let him check on his family to see that they were okay.”

“I did.”

“Hamdan told me he thought it was in our interest to cooperate. And so we canceled the oath.”

“Great,” I said. “Let’s start with your background.”

“I’ll tell you everything, but I would also like to check that my family is okay.”

“We can arrange that.”

“What I’ll do is that I’ll tell you half my story. From what Hamdan told me, you know al-Qaeda well and will know whether I’m telling the truth. And then I will tell you the other half after I make a phone call.”

I spoke to the FBI and the CITF commanders. They agreed that it made sense to let Batar make a call and said they’d get permission from General Miller. (Miller had instructed that any calls had to have prior approval from him.) I returned to Batar and told him he had a deal.

He admitted, for the first time, his true identity, and detailed his background, his path to al-Qaeda, and his connection to bin Laden. The investigators had recovered a document that appeared to be a handwritten martyrdom letter, signed by “Al-Battar,” which he admitted was his. As promised, he was cooperating.

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