Michael Isikoff: How Ali Soufan, an FBI agent, got Abu Zubaydah to talk without torture.

[babylonsister]

‘We Could Have Done This the Right Way’

How Ali Soufan, an FBI agent, got Abu Zubaydah to talk without torture.

By Michael Isikoff | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 25, 2009


The arguments at the CIA safe house were loud and intense in the spring of 2002. Inside, a high-value terror suspect, Abu Zubaydah, was handcuffed to a gurney. He had been wounded during his capture in Pakistan and still had bullet fragments in his stomach, leg and groin. Agency operatives were aiming to crack him with rough and unorthodox interrogation tactics—including stripping him nude, turning down the temperature and bombarding him with loud music. But one impassioned young FBI agent wanted nothing to do with it. He tried to stop them.

The agent, Ali Soufan, was known as one of the bureau's top experts on Al Qaeda. He also had a reputation as a shrewd interrogator who could work fluently in both English and Arabic. Soufan yelled at one CIA contractor and told him that what he was doing was wrong, ineffective and an affront to American values. At one point, Soufan discovered a dark wooden "confinement box" that the contractor had built for Abu Zubaydah. It looked, Soufan recalls, "like a coffin." The mercurial agent erupted in anger, got on a secure phone line and called Pasquale D'Amuro, then the FBI assistant director for counterterrorism. "I swear to God," he shouted, "I'm going to arrest these guys!"

D'Amuro and other officials were alarmed at what they heard from Soufan. They fretted about the political consequences of abusive interrogations and the Washington blowback they thought was inevitable, say two high-ranking FBI sources who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. According to a later Justice Department inspector general's report, D'Amuro warned FBI Director Bob Mueller that such activities would eventually be investigated. "Someday, people are going to be sitting in front of green felt tables having to testify about all of this," D'Amuro said, according to one of the sources.

Mueller ordered Soufan and a second FBI agent home. He then directed that bureau personnel no longer participate in CIA interrogations. In the corridors of the White House, Justice Department and U.S. intelligence agencies, heated debates ensued. Three months later, on Aug. 1, 2002, Justice lawyers issued a chilling memo blessing everything the CIA contractors had proposed—including waterboarding, or simulated drowning, a ghoulish technique that was administered to Abu Zubaydah 83 times.

This was a decisive moment in the campaign against Al Qaeda—the point at which, in the eyes of many critics, the Bush administration took a fateful step away from the rule of law. The administration, believing it faced an extraordinary threat that justified extreme measures, shifted toward what former vice president Dick Cheney once grimly called "the dark side." But the debates that began in that spring of 2002 never really ended.

Last week Soufan, 37, now a security consultant who spends most of his time in the Middle East, decided to tell the story of his involvement in the Abu Zubaydah interrogations publicly for the first time. In an op-ed in The New York Times and in a series of exclusive interviews with NEWSWEEK, Soufan described how he, together with FBI colleague Steve Gaudin, began the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. They nursed his wounds, gained his confidence and got the terror suspect talking. They extracted crucial intelligence—including the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the architect of 9/11 and the dirty-bomb plot of Jose Padilla—before CIA contractors even began their aggressive tactics.

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http://www.newsweek.com/id/195089?digg=1?ref=fp3

[Duer 157099]

1. Do we know if it was Soufan who initially interviewed al-Libi?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Shaykh_al-Libi#cite_note-Newsweek050705-3

There was a segment in Jane Mayer's book (The Dark Side) about al-Libi, and how when the FBI had control of him, they were able to elicit a whole lot of valuable information, using the "good guy" approach. Then the CIA appeared and whisked him off to Egypt (extraordinary rendition) and later got the confession from him linking al-Qaeda and Iraq. Shortly thereafter the FBI completely dissociated themselves from these interrogations.

Quoted from the wiki entry:

The DIA concluded in February 2002 that Libi deliberately misled interrogators. Some speculate that his reason for giving disinformation was in order to draw the U.S. into an attack on Iraq, which al Qaeda believes will lead to a global jihad. Others suggest that al-Libi gave false information because of the use of excessively harsh interrogation methods. Al-Libi is believed to have been one of the high value detainees who prompted the Bush administration to initiate interrogation methods of questionable morality and legality. These critics suggest it wasn't hard for al-Libi to figure out what his interrogators were sure he knew, and that they wouldn't stop, until he told them what they wanted to hear.