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Waterboarded Al-Qaida Captive's Impact Questioned

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By DAN EGGEN and WALTER PINCUS, The Washington Post

Published: December 21, 2007

Updated: 12/20/2007 05:22 pm

WASHINGTON - Al-Qaida captive Abu Zubaydah, whose interrogation videotapes were destroyed by the CIA, remains the subject of a dispute between FBI and CIA officials over his significance as a terrorism suspect and whether his most important revelations came from traditional interrogations or from torture.

Although CIA officials have described him as an important insider whose disclosures under intense pressure saved lives, some FBI agents and analysts say he is largely a loudmouthed and mentally troubled hotelier whose credibility dropped as the CIA subjected him to a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding and to other "enhanced interrogation" measures.

The question of whether Abu Zubaydah was an unstable source who provided limited intelligence under gentle questioning, or a hardened terrorist who cracked under extremely harsh measures, goes to the heart of the current Washington debate over coercive interrogations and torture.

House Torture Bill Stalls

The House has approved legislation that would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow Army rules adopted last year that explicitly forbid waterboarding and other harsh measures, but the legislation has stalled in the Senate under a veto threat by Bush.

A public assessment of Abu Zubaydah's case has been complicated by the newly revealed destruction of the videotaped record of his questioning, according to congressional sources. Intelligence officials say no verbatim transcripts were made, although classified daily summaries were prepared.

President Bush has sided publicly with the CIA's version of events. "We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking," Bush said in September 2006. "And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures," which the president said prompted Abu Zubaydah to disclose information leading to the capture of Sept. 11 attacks plotter Ramzi Binalshibh.

Former FBI officials privy to details of the case continue to dispute the CIA's account of the effectiveness of the harsh measures, making the record of Abu Zubaydah's interrogation hard for outsiders to assess.

There is little dispute, according to officials from both agencies, that Abu Zubaydah provided some valuable intelligence before CIA interrogators began to rough him up, including information that helped identify Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla. Footnotes in the Sept. 11 Commission report attribute information about a variety of al-Qaida personnel and activities to interrogations of Abu Zubaydah beginning in April 2002 and lasting through February 2004.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou - who participated in Abu Zubaydah's capture, was present for the next three days and later saw classified reports of the agency's harsh interrogations - attracted attention last week when he said that information obtained from Abu Zubaydah under measures that Kiriakou now regards as torture "probably saved lives."

Former CIA Director George Tenet, in his book recounting his tenure at the CIA, also said claims that Abu Zubaydah's importance was overstated were "baloney." Tenet wrote: "Abu Zubaydah had been at the crossroads of many al-Qaida operations and was in position to - and did - share critical information with his interrogators."

FBI officials, including agents who questioned him after his capture or reviewed documents seized from his home, have concluded that even though he knew some al-Qaida players, he provided interrogators with increasingly dubious information as the CIA's harsh treatment intensified in late 2002.

In legal papers prepared for a military hearing, Abu Zubaydah himself has asserted that he told his interrogators whatever they wanted to hear to make the treatment stop.

Retired FBI agent Dan Coleman, who led an examination of documents after Abu Zubaydah's capture in early 2002 and worked on the case, said the CIA's harsh tactics cast doubt on the credibility of Abu Zubaydah's information.

"I don't have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted," Coleman said, referring to the harsh measures. "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."

Abu Zubaydah's journey through the U.S. government's secret prison system began on March 28, 2002, when U.S. and Pakistani authorities conducted a series of night raids at 14 suspected terrorist safe houses aimed at capturing him. The CIA designed the operation with Pakistan's intelligence service and special forces police, and the FBI had agents at each location to take custody of any physical evidence, officials said.

Documents, cell phones and computers were seized at multiple sites. After a gunfight in a second-floor apartment in Faisalabad, Abu Zubaydah was shot three times while attempting to leap from the roof of one apartment to another. Still unidentified, he was placed in the back of a pickup and taken to a local hospital. An FBI agent in the truck was the first to suggest he might be Abu Zubaydah.

In his book, "At the Center of the Storm: My Years in the CIA," Tenet wrote that a trauma physician from Johns Hopkins Medical Center was flown to Pakistan to help keep Abu Zubaydah alive during his transfer to the new interrogation site.

Padilla Disclosure 'Accidental'

During his first month of captivity, Abu Zubaydah described an al-Qaida associate whose physical description matched that of Jose Padilla, leading to Padilla's arrest at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago in May 2002.

A former CIA officer said in an interview that Abu Zubayah's "disclosure of Padilla was accidental." The officer added that Abu Zubaydah "was talking about minor things and provided a small amount of information and a description of a person, just enough to identify him because he had just visited the U.S. Embassy" in Pakistan.

Other officials, including Bush, have said that during those early weeks - before the interrogation turned harsh - Abu Zubaydah confirmed Mohammed's role as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

A rift nonetheless swiftly developed between FBI agents, who were largely pleased with the progress of the questioning, and CIA officers, who felt Abu Zubaydah was holding out on them and providing disinformation. Tensions came to a head after FBI agents witnessed the use of some harsh tactics on Abu Zubaydah, including keeping him naked in his cell, subjecting him to extreme cold and bombarding him with loud rock music.

FBI Director Robert Mueller eventually ordered the FBI team to withdraw from the interrogation, largely because bureau procedures prohibit agents from being involved in such techniques, according to several officials familiar with the episode.

The videotaping of Abu Zubaydah in 2002 went on day and night throughout his interrogation, including waterboarding, and while he was sleeping in his cell, intelligence officials said. "Several hundred hours" of videotapes were destroyed in November 2005, a senior intelligence officer said. The CIA has said it ceased waterboarding in 2003.

Coleman, a 31-year FBI veteran, joined other former law enforcement colleagues in expressing skepticism about Abu Zubaydah's importance. Abu Zubaydah, Coleman said, was a "safehouse keeper" with mental problems who claimed to know more about al-Qaida and its inner workings than he really did.

Looking at other evidence, including a serious head injury that Abu Zubaydah had suffered years earlier, Coleman and others at the FBI believed that he had serious mental problems that called his credibility into question. "They all knew he was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone," Coleman said, referring to al-Qaida operatives. "You think they're going to tell him anything?"

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