[Vision2020] Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots

[Chasuk]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/28/AR2009032802066_pf.html

Waterboarding, Rough Interrogation of Abu Zubaida Produced False
Leads, Officials Say

By Peter Finn and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 29, 2009; A01

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu
Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they
were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who
knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing
increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of
him.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of
al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing
leads.

In the end, though, 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.
Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly
evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida --
chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained
before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained
evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President
George W. Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaeda's chief of
operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate"
of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning
of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate,
the new evidence showed.

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to
a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews
with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military
sources. Rather, he was a "fixer" for radical Muslim ideologues, and
he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 -- and
that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

Abu Zubaida's case presents the Obama administration with one of its
most difficult decisions as it reviews the files of the 241 detainees
still held in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Abu
Zubaida -- a nom de guerre for the man born Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed
Hussein -- was never charged in a military commission in Guantanamo
Bay, but some U.S. officials are pushing to have him charged now with
conspiracy.

The Palestinian, 38 and now in captivity for more than seven years,
had alleged links with Ahmed Ressam, an al-Qaeda member dubbed the
"Millennium Bomber" for his plot to bomb Los Angeles International
Airport on New Year's Eve 1999. Jordanian officials tied him to
terrorist plots to attack a hotel and Christian holy sites in their
country. And he was involved in discussions, after the Taliban
government fell in Afghanistan, to strike back at the United States,
including with attacks on American soil, according to law enforcement
and military sources.

Others in the U.S. government, including CIA officials, fear the
consequences of taking a man into court who was waterboarded on
largely false assumptions, because of the prospect of interrogation
methods being revealed in detail and because of the chance of an
acquittal that might set a legal precedent. Instead, they would prefer
to send him to Jordan.

Some U.S. officials remain steadfast in their conclusion that Abu
Zubaida possessed, and gave up, plenty of useful information about
al-Qaeda.

"It's simply wrong to suggest that Abu Zubaida wasn't intimately
involved with al-Qaeda," said a U.S. counterterrorism official,
speaking on the condition of anonymity because much about Abu Zubaida
remains classified. "He was one of the terrorist organization's key
facilitators, offered new insights into how the organization operated,
provided critical information on senior al-Qaeda figures . . . and
identified hundreds of al-Qaeda members. How anyone can minimize that
information -- some of the best we had at the time on al-Qaeda -- is
beyond me."

Until the attacks on New York and Washington, Abu Zubaida was a
committed jihadist who regarded the United States as an enemy
principally because of its support of Israel. He helped move people in
and out of military training camps in Afghanistan, including some men
who were or became members of al-Qaeda, according to interviews with
multiple sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He was
widely known as a kind of travel agent for those seeking such
training.

That role, it turned out, would play a part in deciding his fate once
in U.S. hands: Because his name often turned up in intelligence
traffic linked to al-Qaeda transactions, some U.S. intelligence
leaders were convinced that Abu Zubaida was a major figure in the
terrorist organization, according to officials engaged in the
discussions at the time.

But Abu Zubaida had strained and limited relations with bin Laden and
only vague knowledge before the Sept. 11 attacks that something was
brewing, the officials said.

His account was echoed in another U.S. interrogation going on at the
same time, one never previously described publicly.

Noor al-Deen, a Syrian, was a teenager when he was captured along with
Abu Zubaida at a Pakistani safe house. Perhaps because of his youth
and agitated state, he readily answered U.S. questions, officials
said, and the questioning went on for months, first in Pakistan and
later in a detention facility in Morocco. His description of Abu
Zubaida was consistent: The older man was a well-known functionary
with links to al-Qaeda, but he knew little detailed information about
the group's operations.

The counterterrorism official rejected that characterization, saying,
"Based on what he shared during his interrogations, he was certainly
aware of many of al-Qaeda's activities and operatives."

One connection Abu Zubaida had with al-Qaeda was a long relationship
with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind behind the
Sept. 11 attacks, officials said. Mohammed had approached Abu Zubaida
in the 1990s about finding financiers to support a suicide mission,
involving a small plane, targeting the World Trade Center. Abu Zubaida
declined but told him to try bin Laden, according to a law enforcement
source.

Abu Zubaida quickly told U.S. interrogators of Mohammed and of others
he knew to be in al-Qaeda, and he revealed the plans of the low-level
operatives who fled Afghanistan with him. Some were intent on
returning to target American forces with bombs; others wanted to
strike on American soil again, according to military documents and law
enforcement sources.

Such intelligence was significant but not blockbuster material.
Frustrated, the Bush administration ratcheted up the pressure -- for
the first time approving the use of increasingly harsh interrogations,
including waterboarding.

Such treatment at the hands of the CIA has raised questions among
human rights groups about whether Abu Zubaida is capable of standing
trial and how the taint of torture would affect any prosecution.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a confidential
report that the treatment of Abu Zubaida and other, subsequent
high-value detainees while in CIA custody constituted torture. And Abu
Zubaida refused to cooperate with FBI "clean teams" who attempted to
re-interview high-value detainees to build cases uncontaminated by
allegations of torture, according to military sources.

"The government doesn't retreat from who KSM is, and neither does
KSM," said Joseph Margulies, a professor of law at Northwestern
University and one of Abu Zubaida's attorneys, using an abbreviation
for Mohammed. "With Zubaida, it's different. The government seems
finally to understand he is not at all the person they thought he was.
But he was tortured. And that's just a profoundly embarrassing
position for the government to be in."

His lawyers want the U.S. government to arrange for Abu Zubaida's
transfer to a country besides Jordan -- possibly Saudi Arabia, where
he has relatives.

The Justice Department declined repeated requests for comment.

Even before President Obama suspended military commissions at the
military base in Cuba, prosecutors had expunged Abu Zubaida's name
from the charge sheets of a number of detainees who were captured with
him and stood accused of conspiracy and material support for
terrorism.

When they were first charged in 2005, these detainees were accused of
conspiring with Abu Zubaida, and the charge sheets contained numerous
references to Abu Zubaida's alleged terrorist activities. When the
charges were refiled last year, his name had vanished from the
documents.

Abu Zubaida was born in 1971 in Saudi Arabia to a Palestinian father
and a Jordanian mother, according to court papers. In 1991, he moved
to Afghanistan and joined mujaheddin fighting Afghan communists, part
of the civil war that raged after the 1989 withdrawal of the Soviet
Union. He was seriously wounded by shrapnel from a mortar blast in
1992, sustaining head injuries that left him with severe memory
problems, which still linger.

In 1994, he became the Pakistan-based coordinator for the Khalden
training camp, outside the Afghan city of Khowst. He directed recruits
to the camp and raised money for it, according to testimony he gave at
a March 2007 hearing in Guantanamo Bay.

The Khalden camp, which provided basic training in small arms, had
been in existence since the war against the Soviets. According to the
9/11 Commission's report, Khalden and another camp called Derunta
"were not al Qaeda facilities," but "Abu Zubaydah had an agreement
with Bin Laden to conduct reciprocal recruiting efforts whereby
promising trainees at the camps could be invited to join al Qaeda."

Abu Zubaida disputes this, saying he admitted to such a connection
with bin Laden only as the result of torture.

When the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, Abu Zubaida was in Kabul, the
Afghan capital. In anticipation of an American attack, he allied
himself with al-Qaeda, he said at a 2007 hearing, but he soon fled
into hiding in Pakistan.

On the night of March 28, 2002, Pakistani and American intelligence
officers raided the Faisalabad safe house where Abu Zubaida had been
staying. A firefight ensued, and Abu Zubaida was captured after
jumping from the building's second floor. He had been shot three
times.

Cowering on the ground floor and also shot was Noor al-Deen, Abu
Zubaida's 19-year-old colleague; one source said that he worshiped the
older man as a hero. Deen was wide-eyed with fear and appeared to
believe that he was about to be executed, remembered John Kiriakou, a
former CIA officer who participated in the raid.

"He was frightened -- mostly over what we were going to do with him,"
Kiriakou said. "He had come to the conclusion that his life was over."

Deen was eventually transferred to Syria, but attempts to firmly
establish his current whereabouts were unsuccessful.

His interrogations corroborated what CIA officials were hearing from
Abu Zubaida, but there were other clues at the time that pointed to a
less-than-central role for the Palestinian. As a veritable travel
agent for jihadists, Abu Zubaida operated in a public world of
Internet transactions and ticket agents.

"He was the above-ground support," said one former Justice Department
official closely involved in the early investigation of Abu Zubaida.
"He was the guy keeping the safe house, and that's not someone who
gets to know the details of the plans. To make him the mastermind of
anything is ridiculous."

As weeks passed after the capture without significant new confessions,
the Bush White House and some at the CIA became convinced that tougher
measures had to be tried.

The pressure from upper levels of the government was "tremendous,"
driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers
would press for updates, one official remembered.

"They couldn't stand the idea that there wasn't anything new," the
official said. "They'd say, 'You aren't working hard enough.' There
was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for
retribution -- a feeling that 'He's going to talk, and if he doesn't
talk, we'll do whatever.' "

The application of techniques such as waterboarding -- a form of
simulated drowning that U.S. officials had previously deemed a crime
-- prompted a sudden torrent of names and facts. Abu Zubaida began
unspooling the details of various al-Qaeda plots, including plans to
unleash weapons of mass destruction.

Abu Zubaida's revelations triggered a series of alerts and sent
hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of
phantoms. The interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose
Padilla, the man Abu Zubaida identified as heading an effort to
explode a radiological "dirty bomb" in an American city. Padilla was
held in a naval brig for 3 1/2 years on the allegation but was never
charged in any such plot. Every other lead ultimately dissolved into
smoke and shadow, according to high-ranking former U.S. officials with
access to classified reports.

"We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms," one former
intelligence official said.

Despite the poor results, Bush White House officials and CIA leaders
continued to insist that the harsh measures applied against Abu
Zubaida and others produced useful intelligence that disrupted
terrorist plots and saved American lives.

Two weeks ago, Bush's vice president, Richard B. Cheney, renewed that
assertion in an interview with CNN, saying that "the enhanced
interrogation program" stopped "a great many" terrorist attacks on the
level of Sept. 11.

"I've seen a report that was written, based upon the intelligence that
we collected then, that itemizes the specific attacks that were
stopped by virtue of what we learned through those programs," Cheney
asserted, adding that the report is "still classified," and, "I can't
give you the details of it without violating classification."

Since 2006, Senate intelligence committee members have pressed the
CIA, in classified briefings, to provide examples of specific leads
that were obtained from Abu Zubaida through the use of waterboarding
and other methods, according to officials familiar with the requests.

The agency provided none, the officials said.