Abu Zubaydah: Waterboarded 83 Times for 10 Pieces of Intelligence

[BlueJessamine]

Abu Zubaydah: Waterboarded 83 Times for 10 Pieces of Intelligence

By Marcy Wheeler

The torture apologists are out in force, insisting that torture produces useful information. Cheney's even promising to release information from CIA cataloging all the useful information that came from torture.

But we don't have to wait for Cheney to make good on his promise. We already have a way to assess how much intelligence we got directly from torturing Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: the 9/11 Report. After all, the 9/11 Report integrates a huge amount of information from interrogation reports, and cites them all meticulously. As early as June 6, 2003, the 9/11 Commission asked for, "“all TDs and other reports of intelligence information obtained from interrogations” of forty named individuals, including Abu Zubaydah and (apparently) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and they used what they got in return to write their report. So if there was useful information in those reports, they presumably got it.

Here was a bipartisan group--including many staffers and members with extensive national security backgrounds--attempting to learn everything it could about al Qaeda, poring through interrogation reports produced as a result of torture, tracking inconsistencies in the intelligence, corroborating that intelligence where possible with documents and other testimony, and ultimately selecting what it felt was useful in telling the story of al Qaeda. While certainly not a perfect assessment of what was useful (I'll explain why below), it provides one of the best unbiased ways to measure how useful this intelligence was.

And in the case of Abu Zubaydah, such an assessment is horrifying.

In the entire 9/11 Report, just ten pieces of information are sourced to Abu Zubaydah's interrogation reports.

Ten.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/04/22/abu-zubaydah-waterboarded-83-times-for-10-pieces-of-intelligence/

[Democracyinkind]

1. That's 8.3 water-boardings for 1 piece of intel. What's the price on the free market?

[Diclotican]

2. BlueJessamine

BlueJessamine

They could just have asked him, politely?.. You know, nice, warm and polity ask him what he know.. Maybe over a coffee or a tea cup if he wanted that instead.. In real police work, you tend to get far more information over time, when using politely attitude than to torture... As many in the FBI and other police forces have told the world many cases after the first love for torture was over..

Okay, that is maybe naive.. But if you treat the other person with some kindness, they tend to trust you more, and then you might tend to make them talk..

On the other hand, if you beat them, treat them badly, you tend to not be trusted, and then given information that can be wortless....

It is little as grown up a little child, if you misuse or treat the children bad you tend to get a child who not trust you, and who doesn't want to inform you when thing is bad..

On the other hand, if you treat the child with love and understanding, they tend to trust you, and to tell you thing when they are in trouble... I might not have children on my own - even that I hope one day to have it.. But I do have some experience with children, and as long as you treat them with fairness, then they tend to also trust you as sutch..

Off course, it is different with grown up, but I believe that some principles is there to be followed..

Diclotican

[spiritual_gunfighter]

8. You are exactly right

We did it in WWII, US officials were asked after the war how they got so much information from Nazi prisoners and their answer was "we played chess with them". Through playing chess and treating them like human beings they built up a relationship of trust with their prisoners, they were much more apt to give usable information. Some of them after the war actually became American citizens. All torture gets you is false confessions, it is garbage.

[Diclotican]

9. spiritual_gunfighter

spiritual_gunfighter

It is an ironic twist of history that in world war two, even as evil as that war indeed war, the US managed to get information from germans they captures - who many of them indeed had blood on their hands.. And got the information by civilized methods.. Like plying chess and build up relationship of trust.. 60 year after the grand parents of them haven't learn the basic to do the same, to build some trust between prisoner and guard.. And you doesn't need to tell everyone what you family are to doing that either.. Just be polite with the dam prisoners... And maybe play chess with them.. After all chess came from this area of the world, and I guess many iraqis and arabic people are pretty good in the game...

And as you point out, after the war, many of them became american citizens, with all the perks, and all the responsibility that are there.. How many iraqis and others would do the same - if the americans had just treated the prisoners with some respect?:. Or at least have a favorable idea of US.. That was the case with german and rest of West Europe after the war. Most of us had, and have even today after the two times of Bush jr still a favorable idea of US, even that it is little more guarded this time.. We admire in many prospect still the UNITED states of America... And we are in many way still in love with you all there...

Diclotican

[yurbud]

10. Soviets had a very simple technique. Put someone in solitary for a couple of weeks, don't let...

guards who deliver their food talk to or even be seen by them. Then bring them in and sit them across the table from the interrogator, who doesn't even have to ask any questions--the prisoner will spill the beans as the price for human contact.

[struggle4progress]

3. The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light

By Barton Gellman,
a Washington Post staff writer who reports on intelligence and national security
Tuesday, June 20, 2006; C01

THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE
Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
By Ron Suskind
Simon & Schuster. 368 pp. $27

This is an important book, filled with the surest sign of great reporting: the unexpected. It enriches our understanding of even familiar episodes from the Bush administration's war on terror and tells some jaw-dropping stories we haven't heard before.

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind's gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war's major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques ... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/19/AR2006061901211_pf.html

[struggle4progress]

4. The truth about Abu Zubaydah

The Bush administration's false claim that my client was a top al-Qaida official has led to his imprisonment and torture
* Brent Mickum

This article was submitted to the CIA prior to publication. Passages redacted by the CIA are marked <...>

Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, more commonly known as Abu Zubaydah, is my client. After being extensively tortured by the CIA and imprisoned in various black sites around the world, Zayn may finally be approaching his day in court. I and my co-counsel welcome that day. But what if we are successful and establish that Zayn is not an enemy combatant? Would any country agree to take our client? The Bush administration's misrepresentations about Zayn make that virtually impossible unless I am allowed to tell his side of the story. This article is the first step in that reclamation process.

For many years, Abu Zubaydah's name has been synonymous with the war on terror because of repeated false statements made by the Bush administration, the majority of which were known to be false when uttered. On 17 April 2002, <...> President Bush publicly announced that Zayn had been captured: "We recently apprehended one of al-Qaida's top leaders, a man named Abu Zubaydah. He was spending a lot of time as one of the top operating officials of al-Qaida, plotting and planning murder."

Zayn's capture and imprisonment were touted as a great achievement in the fight against terrorism and al-Qaida. There was just one minor problem: the man described by President Bush and others within his administration as a "top operative", the "number three person" in al-Qaida, and al-Qaida's "chief of operations" was never even a member of al-Qaida, much less an individual who was among its "inner circle". The Bush administration had made another mistake.

These facts really are no longer contested: Zayn was not, and never had been, a member of either the Taliban or al-Qaida. The CIA determined this after torturing him extensively and <...>. Zayn was never a member or a supporter of any armed forces that were allied against the United States. He had no weapon when he was taken into illegal custody. He never took up arms against the United States nor against its coalition allies. He was not picked up on a battlefield in Afghanistan at the time of his detention, but was taken into custody in Pakistan, where he was wrongfully attacked, shot, and nearly killed. So serious were his wounds that a surgeon from John Hopkins University was flown to Pakistan to perform emergency surgery to save the life of a man the Bush administration believed to be the number three man in al Qaeda ~snip~

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/mar/30/guantanamo-abu-zubaydah-torture

[struggle4progress]

5. Did waterboarding really work on Abu Zubaydah?

By Alex Koppelman
Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007 16:25 EST

Last week, John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, was out in the media, telling the press and the country that waterboarding -- which he admitted was torture -- had been necessary and useful in the case of one suspected al-Qaida leader, the man known as Abu Zubaydah. But, reflecting the sharp divide that tends to exist between the CIA and the FBI on the issue, the Washington Post runs today with a story saying that Kiriakou's claims may not hold that much water.

Post reporters Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus talked with Dan Coleman, a retired FBI agent who worked on Zubaydah's case. Coleman told Eggen and Pincus, "I don't have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted ... He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn't believe him. The problem is they didn't realize he didn't know all that much" ...

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2007/12/18/zubaydah/

[struggle4progress]

6. Detainee Abu Zubaydah Denies Al-Qaida Ties (2007)

Morning Edition, April 17, 2007 · The U.S. government says Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah was al-Qaida's chief recruiter. But transcripts of a hearing last month show that Zubaydah denied he's even affiliated with the terrorist organization ... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9615595

[struggle4progress]

7. Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots

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; Page 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 ... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/28/AR2009032802066.html

[yurbud]

11. Even Israelis say prison snitches work better

I think it was in Atlantic Monthly, an Israeli interrogator described how they would question a prison a bit, maybe even rough him up, then say, "Whoa, you are tough. We'll have to take another shot at you tomorrow." Then turn him loose into the prison yard. Other prisoners would approach him and ask what he was asked and what he DIDN'T tell them, so they could let Palestinians on outside know. He would tell his new friends, but instead of passing the info to friends outside, they told the interrogator, and eventually would get a green card for the US in exchange.

The guy who wrote the article was amazed that the interrogator would tell him this because it might ruin the methods effectiveness, but the guy laughed and said it had been written about in their own papers and still worked.

The interrogator said for all the nasty stuff the Israelis do, they know that they will eventually have to live with these people, so they would never do the fucked up shit America did at Abu Ghraib.