extremism experience to running one of the most crucial fronts in our battle against al-Qaeda—our interrogation program of high-value detainees—had its origins on September 17, 2001. On that day, President Bush gave the CIA the authority, in an authorization known as a memorandum of notification, to capture, detain, and interrogate terrorism suspects.
In previous decades, the CIA had primarily operated as an intelligence collection agency. It was the FBI, along with military outfits such as the NCIS, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, and the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations, that had interrogated suspects. John Helgerson’s 2004 report on detention and interrogation activities explains in detail that the post-9/11 CIA detention program “began with almost no foundation, as the Agency had discontinued virtually all involvement in interrogations after encountering difficult issues with early interrogation programs in Central America and the Near East.”
In their July 29, 2009 report, OPR investigators wrote that CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo had told them that throughout most of its history the CIA had not detained subjects or conducted interrogations. Before 9/11, CIA personnel debriefed sources (these portions were censored and do not appear in the report), but the agency was not authorized to detain or interrogate individuals. Consequently, the CIA had no institutional experience or expertise in that area. (Rizzo was incorrect. Before 9/11, the CIA’s polygraph division, formerly known as the interrogation branch, was responsible for interrogations abroad. After 9/11, this responsibility was taken out of their hands and given to the CTC.)
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 state that Padilla was captured because of waterboarding that began in August 1, 2002. In reality, this would have been factually impossible.
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
