Interrogation of Abu Zubaydah
[1] The American intelligence community asserts Khalden was a camp for training al Qaeda recruits in the 1990s, but detainees and other sources have disputed this conclusion.
However, two FBI agents, Ali Soufan and Steve Gaudin, arrived first at the black site in Thailand where Abu Zubaydah was being held.
[5] Their interrogation started with standard interview techniques and also included cleaning and dressing Abu Zubaydah's wounds.
[12] Ali Soufan was alarmed by the early CIA tactics, such as enforced nudity, cold temperatures, and blaring loud rock music in Zubaydah's cell.
[6] He was so angry that he called the FBI assistant director for counterterrorism, Pasquale D'Amaro, and shouted, "I swear to God, I'm going to arrest these guys!
[6][12][13] He alleges that the claim Abu Zubaydah only revealed actionable intelligence after the harsher interrogation techniques were applied is incorrect.
"[15] In addition, Dan Coleman, a retired FBI official and al-Qaeda expert, commented that after the CIA's use of coercive methods, "I don't have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted.
This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.
... Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla.
[13]The CIA interrogation strategies were based on work done by James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen in the Air Force's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program.
[17][18][20][21] The SERE program was originally designed as defensive in nature and was used to train American pilots and other soldiers how to resist harsh interrogation techniques and torture if they fell into enemy hands.
[25] Once Abu Zubaydah was transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in 2006, he refused to cooperate with FBI interrogators, who were attempting to build cases against the "high-value detainees" untainted by allegations of torture.
[14] In 2007, John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who was part of the team that captured Abu Zubaydah, said in an interview with ABC News that Zubaybah broke after 35 seconds of his first waterboarding session.
[26] However, in his book published in 2010, Kiriakou acknowledged he was not present and had no direct knowledge of Abu Zubaydah's CIA interrogations at the Thailand black site.
[27] During his CIA interrogation, Abu Zubaydah began to offer many names of supposed terrorist and allegations of various al Qaeda plots.
However, the Washington Post reported in 2009 that "not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations.
[30] Some of the various false leads he provided are the following: Ali Soufan testified about Abu Zubaydah's interrogation before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary on May 13, 2009.
The information was so important that, as I later learned from open sources, it went to CIA Director George Tennet who was so impressed that he initially ordered us to be congratulated.
After seeing the extent of his injuries, the CIA medical team supporting us decided they were not equipped to treat him and we had to take him to a hospital or he would die.
To remind you of how important this information was viewed at the time, the then-Attorney General, John Ashcroft, held a press conference from Moscow to discuss the news.
[38] Originally the CIA claimed it taped the interrogations to protect agents from a wrongful death suit if Abu Zubaydah happened to succumb to the injuries he suffered during his capture.
[41] In December 2019, The New York Times published an article in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting which was based upon drawings made by Zubaydah, showing how he was tortured in "vivid and disturbing ways".
