INTELLIGENCE EXPERTS WHO ANALYZED AL-QAEDA DETAINEE'S STATEMENTS ABOUT "LINKS" WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN WERE NEVER TOLD THAT HE HAD BEEN TORTURED
NEW YORK, N.Y.--Two Bush administration intelligence analysts who wrote reports on the C.I.A.'s interrogation of a "high value" al-Qaeda detainee were never told he had been subject to waterboarding and other coercive methods, Vanity Fair contributing editor David Rose reports.
The analysts' reports on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002, were used to make the case within the administration for invading Iraq, Rose reports, and selectively leaked to journalists.
Yet the reports' authors had no idea that Abu Zubaydah had been questioned using methods that the International Committee of the Red Cross has categorized as torture.
Jane Mayer's recent book The Dark Side (Doubleday) cites a Red Cross investigation report as evidence that Abu Zubaydah was locked into a box the size of a "tiny coffin," beaten, and waterboarded. Because this was torture, the Red Cross said, it exposed those responsible to possible prosecution.
Some of what Abu Zubaydah said after this treatment was leaked to the media by the administration before the Iraq invasion: for example, the claim that Osama bin Laden and his ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were working directly with Saddam Hussein in order to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.
There was much more, says the first analyst, who worked at the Pentagon: "There was a lot of stuff about the nuts and bolts of al-Qaeda's supposed relationship with the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be."
Within the administration, Abu Zubaydah's interrogation was "an important chapter," the second analyst says. Neither analyst had any idea that he had been tortured.
The claim that there was an operational relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam has since been authoritatively dismissed, in reports by bodies including the 9/11 commission and the Senate intelligence committee. Rose quotes the former F.B.I. counterterrorism expert Dan Coleman, who worked on the Abu Zubaydah case, and says that his true position in the terrorist hierarchy means that he would not have known whether such a relationship existed or not. But under torture, Coleman says, "you can lead people down a course and make them say anything."
"As soon as I learned that the reports had come from torture, once my anger had subsided I understood the damage it had done," a Pentagon analyst says. "I was so angry, knowing that the higher-ups in the administration knew he was tortured, and that the information he was giving up was tainted by the torture, and that it became one reason to attack Iraq.
"We didn't know he'd been waterboarded and tortured when we did that analysis, and the reports were marked as credible as they could be." However, approval for Abu Zubaydah's treatment had been given at the highest level.
"The White House knew he'd been tortured. I didn't, though I was supposed to be evaluating that intelligence," the analyst says. "It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective. I cannot believe that the president and vice president did not know who was being waterboarded and what was being given up."
Rose's article includes an interview with Peter Clarke, the head of Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Branch from the spring of 2002 until May 2008. As the U.K.'s chief counterterrorist official, he succeeded in stopping several jihadist attacks that were far advanced.
Asked to comment on claims made by President Bush in 2006 that waterboarding and other "enhanced" techniques had "thwarted a plot to hijack passenger planes and fly them into Heathrow [airport] or the Canary Wharf in London," Clarke, who has not discussed this issue in public before, says that if al-Qaeda had really discussed a plot of this kind it was nowhere near fruition. "It wasn't at an advanced stage in the sense that there were people here in the U.K. doing it. If they had been, I'd have arrested them."
Rose also interviewed F.B.I. director Robert Mueller. The article states that Rose reminded him of some of the attacks planned against targets on American soil since 9/11 that his agents were said to have disrupted--for example, a plot to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and another to wreak mayhem at army recruiting centers in Torrance, California.
Rose asks Mueller whether, so far as he is aware, any attacks on America have been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls "enhanced techniques."
"I'm really reluctant to answer that," Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate, "I don't believe that has been the case."
