Just because Ron Suskind writes the kinds of things we like to read doesn’t mean that his information is any better that the information we received from CIA-apologist and anti-Oliver Stone activist Gerald Posner. But, we can be sure that their information about much touted terrorist Abu Zubaydah is in sharp contrast. Zubaydah was mentioned in the famous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing entitled, Bin-Laden Determined to Strike in the United States.
The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Ladin’s first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.
If I were you, I wouldn’t believe a word of anything I am about to tell you. But, here is some information from Abu Zubaydah’s wikipedia profile:
In March of 2001, United States Condoleezza Rice was informed by the CIA that Zubaydah was planning a major operation in the near future. This was one of the first of many reports in the Spring of 2001 that increased the threat level and indicated that an attack was coming. Many of these reports mentioned Zubaydah by name. The attack finally came in the form of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The U.S. government believes he became al-Qaeda’s top military strategist following the death of Muhammad Atef in November 2001. A later plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Paris failed, as did an alleged plot to attack a target in Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Zubaydah was probably a conspirator in both of those plots.
U.S. intelligence located Abu Zubaydah in 2002 by tracing his phone calls. He was captured March 28, 2002, in a two story apartment in Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was shot three times in a firefight, including a wound to the groin and a wound to the thigh, but survived. While in U.S. custody, he has given a great deal of information about the 9/11 attack plot, detail that led to the indictments of over one hundred people, including Mohamed Harkat. Critics however have claimed that several of the interrogations may have bordered on torture to pressure Abu Zubaydah into fingering other suspects.
Abu Zubayda is held within the CIA prison system, where many have claimed that he is subjected to torture. His statements under interrogation have provided a very large amount of the information used around the world as ‘definitive’, and he is the sole person to make many of the claims.
After Zubaydah was captured Gerald Posner got a scoop about his interrogation. Since I hate Posner, I’ll link to Craig Unger’s article about Posner’s acticle.
On Sunday, March 31, three days after the raid, the interrogation of Zubaydah began. For the particulars of this episode there is one definitive source, Gerald Posner’s “Why America Slept,” and according to it, the CIA used two rather unusual methods for the interrogation. First, they administered thiopental sodium, better known under its trademarked name, Sodium Pentothal, through an IV drip, to make Zubaydah more talkative. Since the prisoner had been shot three times during the capture, he was already hooked up to a drip to treat his wounds and it was possible to administer the drug without his knowledge. Second, as a variation on the good cop-bad cop routine, the CIA used two teams of debriefers. One consisted of undisguised Americans who were at least willing to treat Zubaydah’s injuries while they interrogated him. The other team consisted of Arab-Americans posing as Saudi security agents, who were known for their brutal interrogation techniques. The thinking was that Zubaydah would be so scared of being turned over to the Saudis, infamous for their public executions in Riyadh’s Chop-Chop Square, that he would try to win over the American interrogators by talking to them.
In fact, exactly the opposite happened. “When Zubaydah was confronted with men passing themselves off as Saudi security officers, his reaction was not fear, but instead relief,” Posner writes. “The prisoner, who had been reluctant even to confirm his identity to his American captors, suddenly started talking animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would torture and then kill him. Zubaydah asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the ruling Saudi family. He then provided a private home number and cell phone number from memory. ‘He will tell you what to do,’ Zubaydah promised them.”
The name Zubaydah gave came as a complete surprise to the CIA. It was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the owner of so many legendary racehorses and one of the most westernized members of the royal family.
Zubaydah spoke to his faux Saudi interrogators as if they, not he, were the ones in trouble. He said that several years earlier the royal family had made a deal with al-Qaida in which the House of Saud would aid the Taliban so long as al-Qaida kept terrorism out of Saudi Arabia. Zubaydah added that as part of this arrangement, he dealt with Prince Ahmed and two other members of the House of Saud as intermediaries, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, a nephew of King Fahd’s, and Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, a 25-year-old distant relative of the king’s. Again, he furnished phone numbers from memory.
According to Posner, the interrogators responded by telling Zubaydah that 9/11 changed everything. The House of Saud certainly would not stand behind him after that. It was then that Zubaydah dropped his real bombshell. “Zubaydah said that 9/11 changed nothing because Ahmed … knew beforehand that an attack was scheduled for American soil that day,” Posner writes. “They just didn’t know what it would be, nor did they want to know more than that. The information had been passed to them, said Zubaydah, because bin Laden knew they could not stop it without knowing the specifics, but later they would be hard-pressed to turn on him if he could disclose their foreknowledge.”
Two weeks later, Zubaydah was moved to an undisclosed location. When he figured out that the interrogators were really Americans, not Saudis, Posner writes, he tried to strangle himself, and later recanted his entire tale.
As for Prince Ahmed, on July 22, 2002, he died mysteriously of a heart attack at the age of 43, so he was never interviewed about his connections to al-Qaida and his alleged foreknowledge of the events of 9/11. Not that the FBI didn’t have its chance at him. On Sept. 16, 2001, after the Bush administration had approved the Saudi evacuation, Prince Ahmed had boarded that 727 in Lexington, Ky. He had been identified by FBI officials, but not seriously interrogated. It was an inauspicious start to the just-declared war on terror.
So, that was the original story, told by Gerald Posner, a well known shill for the CIA. But Ron Suskind has a much, much different story to tell.
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.
And just for completeness, and to fill out your understanding of George Walker Bush, the MAN:
Tenet and his loyalists also settle a few scores with the White House here. The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”
Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. “I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
Take all of this with a giant grain of salt. The intelligence community is looking to exact a measure of revenge on Bush and to cover up their mistakes and lack of courage. But, one thing is clear: Suskind and Posner cannot both have their stories right. Quite posssibly, neither of their stories are correct. Don’t believe anything you read at face value.
Did Bush really tell his briefer that he had covered his ass after telling him Usama wanted to attack? I have no idea. What’s important is that someone in the CIA wants us the believe that. And Abu Zubaydah may have a split personality and be totally insane, or he may have been working hand in glove with Saudi princes, including Bandar Bush. We’ll probably never know. The disinformation continues.
available in orange
Why so much hatred toward Posner? (And, yes, this is an honest question…I’m just interested in knowing where you’re coming from here.)
Because he made it is career to marginalize the JFK researchers, David Atlee Phillips can posthumously explain away whatever he wants. Posner is still as guilty as they come of doing shill work.
…what one thinks of the work of the JFK researchers?
I found Case Closed fairly convincing. But even if you don’t find it convincing, why conclude that Posner is not merely honestly wrong about the assassination? I’m an historian, and there’s a world of difference between people who make honest mistakes and those (very few in the world of professional history) who are duplicitous in some way.
Because Posner dramatically misrepresented the record of the assassination in his book Case Closed. He lavishes praise on historian David Wrone, in his book. But what does David Wrone think of Posner?
You have to read the sources that Posner quotes to understand how dishonest he has been in his representation.
For example, he cites that Kennedy’s arms flew up as part of “Thorburn’s reaction”, based on an old medical case from the 1800s. Well, one of my friends, Milicent Cranor, dug up the original article. Yes, there was a man who had fallen from a ladder, whose arms had moved to that position…over a period of DAYS. Not seconds! That kind of thing, over and over. Really useless.
Of course you would find it convincing, if you don’t know “the rest of the story.” Several connected facts can still make up a lie by omitting the facts that would make the story clearer.
Wrone has written that to even link Oswald to the Kennedy assassination is the equivalent of believing that the Earth is flat.
Perhaps belief in a lone gunman or a conspiracy ultimately boils down to what William James (in Pragmatism) calls “temperament”:
At any rate, the argumentation of people on all sides of the Kennedy assassination issue often seems to me — like argumentation in philosophy seemed to James — to be about something other than simply the evidence.
No, it really boils down to the evidence – something you can’t understand until you actually dig into it. I’ve never met an honest person yet who truly looked at the evidence, and came away thinking Oswald acted alone. It’s that obvious. Which is why the case is that important. If it’s that obvious, and the media pretends otherwise, what does that say about our country?
Btw – you should see my comment here re the Pelicans in Santa Monica Bay. I fear that applies here. Because you haven’t studied the case for 15 years, I don’t think we have a common “reality”. And if you WERE to study it fifteen years, how many more years would I have studied by then? It’s a problem.
And I would add – this is not a thread about the Kennedy assassination. It’s about Booman’s post. There are lots of places to debate the Kennedy assassination, if you feel so inclined. A simple search will provide them.
…the assassination, either (though you seem to be).
One of the premises of Boo’s post is that Posner is a despicable figure who in general deserves nothing but contempt.
I asked a reasonable question: why are you treating the guy with such disdain. The answer I received suggested to me that the issue simply that Posner came down on the wrong side of the Kennedy assassination issue.
I responded that simply coming down on the wrong side of an issue shouldn’t make you the object of such scorn. You seem to think that it should.
Let’s just leave it there and agree to disagree.
You didn’t read my comment below, evidently. It’s not just the Kennedy case. He’s been shilling for the Agency for years.
Yes, Posner has a long history, and Case Closed is a fine piece of convincing.
Bottom line? Don’t take anything he writes at face value. And I said, don’t trust Suskind either.
Choosing between Posner and Suskind is easy for me, having read a great deal of Posner’s work.
He came to fame with the book Mengele, which served as an apology for the CIA’s never being able to find Mengele, despite their efforts. Yeah right.
He wrote a novel early on, too, called “The Bio-Assassins.” It’s a good read! If you’re into spy fiction, I would recommend it. Fun. Fast. And predictably, given his closeness to the CIA, the hero is a Cold Warrior CIA type fighting the more modern bureacracy the CIA was becoming at that point in time (and has become, one could probably say now.) His bias is clear. And in spy fiction, that’s great! I love it! But in history? It’s out of place to take the CIA’s side without questioning motive. After all, as Craig Unger quoted Josh Marhsall of Talking Points Memo saying recently, “Most of the people you are dealing with [in the covert/intel world] are professional liars, which really leaves you with your work cut out for you as a reporter”.
Posner also wrote a book called “Hitler’s Children,” thanking profusely his intelligence sources that helped him get in contact with the children of high-ranking Nazi officials from Hitler’s regime.
And he thanked the intel community again when he wrote his book on the Chinese drug trade.
Given that the CIA’s record in the JFK case is one of lies and deceit (and we know this because what they told the Warren Commission and what they knew at the same time were radically different – according to recently released files), Posner’s willingness to take their line unquestioningly makes him at best, a pretty lousy reporter, and at worst, a CIA asset himself.
Lisa and Booman what is your take on Frontline’s “The Dark Side”. An Ode to the CIA that had a good Operation going against Osama until Rumsfeld and Cheney did them wrong. Then Tenant totally blows it saying Iraqi WMD Intelligence is a slam dunk. As a consequence the USA is stuck in a never ending quagmire. The CIA has been castrated and is about as important now under Negroponte, the Intelligence Czar, as the Interstate Commerce Commission. This quite a come down for the Bogyman of all conspiracy theorists since WWII.
I haven’t seen the Frontline.
The CIA has been stripped of its power under Cheney. Tenet did his best to protect the agency, but his reward was to be thrown under the train. Sorry George, here’s a medal of freedom to make you feel better.
Why did Cheney interpret Wilson’s trip as a cynical attempt to cover the agencies ass? Because Cheney looked to the agency not for intelligence but for propaganda. Negroponte is probably much more willing to fill that role. God help us.
My skepticism on this is that the CIA has claimed this sort of evisceration before when it didn’t prove to be true.
That said, there’s clearly a war between some of the people in the CIA and the Bush Administration. But it wasn’t the neocons on the ground that let bin Laden get away. Someone had to help him slip through the net, and that could have been a CIA person as well. It’s not a monolith – there are people in the CIA who probably worked for Bush’s father when he was CIA director. And there are others, like Larry Johnson, a Republican, who see that what Bush Jr. is doing is so harmful to our country that he’s been willing to speak out.
I think it is real this time.
First, the DCI no longer brief the President directly, second, the Directorate of Intelligence no longer writes for the President directly, and third, Rummy has stepped up the DIA’s role dramatically, and his activities are no longer subject to the DCI’s oversight. Take all of that, and the CIA is a shadow of its former self.
Frankly, I don’t think the CIA has a real role to play in intelligence anymore. Negroponte is stripping away their analysts and the covert side is no longer under their complete control.
Could be. And the new people coming in are not respected by the people below. That means a lot of turnover. That’s a negative in huge ways in terms of losing experience.
But bottom line – I don’t think the intelligence community will perform any less heinously, in terms of promoting the corporate agenda at the expense of the human agenda, no matter how it’s organized. The same forces will always be there, trying to bend it to its will. Shuffling the cards and tacking up new names changes everything, and yet nothing, in the end, I feel.
Actually, what I guess I’m really trying to say is, it doesn’t matter. The trend is exactly the same as it’s always been. We get more and more money disappearing down a dark hole, and no evidence that it’s really protecting our security. Naturally, I want to believe it is. But it seems every other intel community on the planet knew we were about to be attacked on 9/11. It defies belief that if we didn’t know, our money has been well spent.