Ali Soufan Claims He Had Success with Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Too
While I’ve been taking my sweet time getting around to the ACLU document dump from Friday, Adam Serwer has been picking up the slack. Check out these posts on the FBI’s approach to torture here and here.
One of the things included in the document dump is a re-release of DOJ’s IG Report on torture, with some new disclosures. Of particular interest are details about Ali Soufan’s (recall the IG Report refers to him by the pseudonym Thomas) brief participation in the interrogation of Ramzi bin al-Shibh.
According to the, [sic] Assistant Chief for the FBI’s Counterterrorism Operational Response Team (CTORS), he and several agents, including Thomas, traveled to a CIA-controlled facility to conduct a joint interview of Binalshibh [redacted] with the CIA. The Assistant Chief said that the detainees were manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock. He said the FBI agents worked with the CIA in developing questions for Binalshibh, but were denied direct access to him for 4 or 5 days, until Thomas was given 45 minutes with him. Thomas stated that Binalshibh was naked and chained to the floor when Thomas was given access to him. Thomas told the OIG that he obtained valuable actionable intelligence in a short time but that the CIA quickly shut down the interview. According to the notes of FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni, Deputy Assistant Director T.J. Harrington told her that the FBI agents who went to the CIA site saw Binalshibh [redacted].
I’m interested in this revelation for two reasons. First, if Soufan’s claims are correct then it shows that the FBI repeatedly got intelligence the CIA was unable to get–and that the CIA, on at least two occasions, shut down the FBI access when they were succeeding.
But I’m also interested because the National Archives has been in the process of declassifying Soufan’s interview with the 9/11 Commission since April. Some agency appears to be sitting on it.
Among the thing Soufan said in that interview is that the FBI’s Khalid Sheikh Mohammed expert was unable to interview KSM. But I wonder how many more details like this were in his interview?
Won’t the torture folks at the CIA just claim that the torture worked and that Soufan was just the “good cop” in a perverted version of “good cop–bad cop” so that the torture is what allowed Soufan to get good information?
Yes. And they may well be right to do so. That said, it would still be the second time that CIA shut down FBI access when they were succeeding.
It says as much about the intra-agency pissing contest as it does about torture, I guess.
but we know (according to wilerson) the cia that agreed with the torture programs numberd less then a few percent
I have always said this is team b, I believe we need to find those involved in the torture program nad trace their journey into the cia, I believe it will originate at cheney/rumsfeld/wolfowitze door and the beginnings of their alternative cia team specifically recruited for the purpose of creating false data
” have always said this is team b, I believe we need to find those involved in the torture program nad trace their journey into the cia, I believe it will originate at cheney/rumsfeld/wolfowitze door and the beginnings of their alternative cia team specifically recruited for the purpose of creating false data”
I suspect you can intuit this from what Obama seems to have done as a reform. He took CIA out of the lead role in interrogations, made FBI the lead, but also structured composite joint teams that would have sole responsibility for interrogation. What this seems to mean is that FBI is in control of the mode of questioning, but CIA, DIA and other agencies have input into the content of the questions and general themes.
I rather think that Obama solves problems fairly directly, doesn’t have much patience with long and involved turf wars among and between agencies, so I suspect one can reliably work backward from any solution announced, such as this one.
Just as with Zubaydah, Soufan does drop in as the “good cop” while sleep deprivation, nudity, shackling, etc. is dictated by the CIA.
The ethical thing to do was NO interrogation under these circumstances, and to report these crimes against the prisoners immediately. But as with Zubaydah, it’s not clear Soufan reported the abusive conditions immediately, nor did he find it unacceptable to work around these conditions.
So, Soufan got better “actionable” info out of al-Shibh? How did he know? Such evaluations of the worth of intel is commonly not made by interrogators at the scene, but by those who evaluate the material the interrogators produce. Even so, is “actionable” intel from a naked shackled man an acceptable FBI technique?
Meanwhile, off-thread, but important:
I’m still curious about Steve Gaudin, Soufan’s partner, who stayed behind during Zubaydah’s interrogation saying that he didn’t find some of the interrogation techniques immoral because he underwent similar methods during SERE training.
It makes me wonder whether Soufan and Gaudin clashed at all over this. Obviously, a minor point but it would be interesting to find out what some of these other SERE techniques were Gaudin appeared to be OK with
A whole lot of people, it seems, went through SERE training, especially in the national security business, since the latter agencies draw heavily upon those who formerly worked in military intelligence/counterintelligence, special operations, etc.
As we shall come to see, there was an entire period of degenerating boundaries between SERE inoculation and SERE counter-engineering, and that occurred in the 1990s. Some of this happened because of pressure from the special operations side, as Steven Kleinman described in the Educing Information document, since the SO people were impressed by the SERE mock-interrogators “professionalism”. On the other hand, the JSSA/JPRA/SERE leadership got more and more greedy, trying to expand their territory within the national security environment post-Cold War. Nor was this development happening without notice by some at CIA.
In a sense, the final plunge of SERE into the torture business was the outcome of a number of factors, most of which pre-dated 9/11. 9/11 itself gave the impetus for these developments to come together, midwifed by the Offices of the President and Vice-President.
There are plenty of people who are chafing at the bit to come forward on this. They only want to know their government won’t let the whistleblowers hang twisting slowly in the wind. They want this to happen…. Maybe it will.
I didn’t answer your question. My point is that Gaudin’s view re the use of SERE techniques was not a heterodox view at that point in the intelligence community. There was definitely a constituency for the use of SERE techniques, children of the Aldrich era, so to speak.
I recall that something like 2% of those who went through SERE training were waterboarded…while the others observed, I assume…to demonstrate the rapidity in which the method would elicit “breakdown”. I suspect that Gaudin was an “observer” rather than one that received the application of water.
I’m still wondering who the other suspect whose name was redacted would be. The CIA tried to eliminate the fact that there was even a second suspect by removing the “and” in their redaction. But it’s still clear from the rest of the content elsewhere in the paragraph that Binalshibh was not the only one chained up naked.
on a separate note, hope you have been doing well.
this seems like an old story, I forget where I read it before but here’s what I specifically remember which never got enough play;
cheney was told repeated told the captives were co-operative…he was also told repeatedly there was no connection between al-qaeda and saddam
cheney would have none of that, said he wanted information along those lines anyway
the easiest method for gettng that false “evidence” would be through torture
it’s clear cheney knew they were getting quality information with conventional methods that did not include torture, it’s also clear that information was not what cheney was looking for
cheney ordered torture and is now on his torture tour as a pre-emptive defense so his crimes are not prosecuted
All this bureaucratic infighting. It’s like tight ends shouting at point guards and wide receivers. They’re all on the same team trying to protect us from harmful little brown people. It might lead a cynic to believe that the CIA wasn’t protecting its turf so much as its funding for new programs that demonstrably didn’t work. It was probably attempting to keep Mr. Cheney off their backs, too, because those programs – torture chief among them – were the keystone of Dick Cheney’s unprincipled command of government. The complement to that was a chief executive who thought his only job was to let others do his.
You also have to wonder about the reason the CIA shut down the interrogation that was getting intel. Obviously there’s always a turf war, but that would seem to have kicked in before the FBI got there, not after. So what changed on the CIA front? Had they decided to start using “enhanced” methods on KSM’s children, taken in that same raid IIRC, and they didn’t want the FBI to start asking so many questions that they would find out about the kids and maybe ask to see them or try to follow up on them? Maybe not – I’m a bit too fixated on that point, but you do have to wonder. Majid Khan, who had the second hand info on the children, was the guy they originally went to town on not being able to dicuss his torture with his own lawyer, and I always wondered if that was to keep that episode buried. Who knows?
This is a test, just a test. If this had been a real democracy, you would have seen the FBI emerging publicly in 2003 and decrying torture by other entities…
EW, because the ACLU redid their website design today, your link to “ACLU document dump” at the start of your post no longer exists (404 error).
The new website link for that stuff is now here:
Released Government Documents Responsive to 2004 Torture FOIA
Oh Jeebus. The links are dead at that level? My entire site is screwed, I guess.
That was my reaction as well. *g*
Any idea who the other detainee was being kept with Binalshibh? It’s clear that the redaction must be “and [name]”.
So Thomas also was supposed to meet with a second inmate…not just Ramzi.
More anecdotal eveidence of the uselesness of torture for gathering intelligence. The FBI is good at interrogating because they have decades of experience. Also, they work in an environment (U.S criminal justice system) where torture is illegal, even a reasonable suspician of its spontaneous use and will get an entire criminal case dismissed.
Meanwhile, Souifan, who you can probably tell I despise, keeps retailing the same government line about the operational importance of Abu Zubaydah, and hence of the intel the FBI got from AZ. Of course, AZ was nothing of the kind, and yesterday’s decision to allow the release of the early AZ diaries should prove that. Of course, I’m sure the government will try to delay this as much as possible. See J. Leopold’s excellent article on the subject yesterday.
Hint: the FBI are not the good guys. Some of the agents are stand-up people. But the agency as a whole fell way down after 9-11, including on the torture issue. EW points to Serwer’s article (one of two), and it’s well worth reading, noting how the FBI filed away what it knew were “war crimes”, and had no particular method of reporting them, until Abu Ghraib pushed everyone’s buttons. In some cases, in fact, agents may have been told to suppress what they knew.
Just from an organizational perspective, if I would have been DCI* Panetta I would have probably been talking to the agency from the git-go telling that there was gonna be a shakeout (aka cover your ass).
Added benefit of whistles being blown.
*or whatever they want to call it now.
C
The CIA is continuing to cover their backsides, just like they did in the destruction of the waterboarding videos.