At a Secret Interrogation, Dispute Flared Over Tactics

New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washington/10detain.html?pagewanted=all

September 10, 2006
At a Secret Interrogation, Dispute Flared Over Tactics
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - Abu Zubaydah, the first Osama bin Laden
henchman captured by the United States after the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, was bloodied and feverish when a C.I.A. security team
delivered him to a secret safe house in Thailand for interrogation in
the early spring of 2002. Bullet fragments had ripped through his
abdomen and groin during a firefight in Pakistan several days earlier
when he had been captured.

The events that unfolded at the safe house over the next few weeks
proved to be fateful for the Bush administration. Within days, Mr.
Zubaydah was being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques -
he was stripped, held in an icy room and jarred by earsplittingly
loud music - the genesis of practices later adopted by some within
the military, and widely used by the Central Intelligence Agency in
handling prominent terrorism suspects at secret overseas prisons.

President Bush pointedly cited the capture and interrogation of Mr.
Zubaydah in his speech last Wednesday announcing the transfer of Mr.
Zubaydah and 13 others to the American detention center in Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba. And he used it to call for ratification of the tough
techniques employed in the questioning.

But rather than the smooth process depicted by Mr. Bush, interviews
with nearly a dozen current and former law enforcement and
intelligence officials briefed on the process show, the interrogation
of Mr. Zubaydah was fraught with sharp disputes, debates about the
legality and utility of harsh interrogation methods, and a rupture
between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the C.I.A. that has
yet to heal.

Some of those interviewed offered sharply contrasting accounts, but
all said that the disagreements were intense. More than four years
later, these disputes are foreshadowing the debate that Mr. Bush's
new proposals are meeting in Congress, as lawmakers wrangle about
what rules should apply as terrorism suspects are captured,
questioned and, possibly, tried before military tribunals.

A reconstruction of Mr. Zubaydah's initial days of detention and
interrogation, based on accounts by former and current law
enforcement and intelligence officials in a series of recent
interviews, provides the first detailed account of his treatment and
the disputes and uncertainties that surrounded it. The basic
chronology of how the capture and interrogation unfolded was
described consistently by sources from a number of government
agencies.

The officials spoke on the condition that they not be identified
because many aspects of the handling of Mr. Zubaydah remain
classified and because some of the officials may be witnesses in
future prosecutions involving Mr. Zubaydah.

This week, President Bush said that he had not and never would
approve the use of torture. The C.I.A. declined to discuss the
specifics of the case on the record. At F.B.I. headquarters,
officials refused to publicly discuss the interrogation of Mr.
Zubaydah, citing what they said were "operational sensitivities."

Some of the officials who were interviewed for this article were
briefed on the events as they occurred. Others were provided with
accounts of the interrogation later.

Before his capture, Mr. Zubaydah was regarded as a top bin Laden
logistics chief who funneled recruits to training bases in
Afghanistan and served as a communications link between Al Qaeda's
leadership and extremists in other countries.

As interrogators dug into his activities, however, they scaled back
their assessment somewhat, viewing him more as the terror network's
personnel director and hotelier who ran a string of guest houses in
Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mr. Zubaydah's whereabouts in Pakistan had been determined in part
through intercepted Internet communications, but for days after his
capture his identity was in doubt. He had surgically altered his
appearance and was using an alias. But when agents used a nickname
for Mr. Zubaydah, he acknowledged his true identity, which was
confirmed through analysis of his voice, facial structure and DNA
tests.

By all accounts, Mr. Zubaydah's condition was rapidly deteriorating
when he arrived in Thailand. Soon after his capture, Mr. Zubaydah
nearly died of his infected wounds. At one point, he was covertly
rushed to a hospital after C.I.A. medical officers warned that he
might not survive if he did not receive more extensive medical
treatment.

According to accounts from five former and current government
officials who were briefed on the case, F.B.I. agents - accompanied
by intelligence officers - initially questioned him using standard
interview techniques. They bathed Mr. Zubaydah, changed his bandages,
gave him water, urged improved medical care, and spoke with him in
Arabic and English, languages in which he is fluent.

To convince him they knew details of his activities, the agents
brought a box of blank audiotapes which they said contained
recordings of his phone conversations, but were actually empty. As
the F.B.I. worked with C.I.A. officers who were present, Mr. Zubaydah
soon began to provide intelligence insights into Al Qaeda.

For the C.I.A., Mr. Zubaydah was a test case for an evolving new
role, conceived after Sept. 11, in which the agency was to act as
jailer and interrogator for terrorism suspects.

According to accounts by three former intelligence officials, the
C.I.A. understood that the legal foundation for its role had been
spelled out in a sweeping classified directive signed by Mr. Bush on
Sept. 17, 2001. The directive, known as a memorandum of notification,
authorized the C.I.A. for the first time to capture, detain and
interrogate terrorism suspects, providing the foundation for what
became its secret prison system.

That 2001 directive did not spell out specific guidelines for
interrogations, however, and senior C.I.A. officials began in late
2001 and early 2002 to draw up a list of aggressive interrogation
procedures that might be used against terrorism suspects. They
consulted agency psychiatrists and foreign governments to identify
effective techniques beyond standard interview practices.

After Mr. Zubaydah's capture, a C.I.A. interrogation team was
dispatched from the agency's counterterrorism center to take the lead
in his questioning, former law enforcement and intelligence officials
said, and F.B.I. agents were withdrawn. The group included an agency
consultant schooled in the harsher interrogation procedures to which
American special forces are subjected in their training. Three former
intelligence officials said the techniques had been drawn up on the
basis of legal guidance from the Justice Department, but were not yet
supported by a formal legal opinion.

In Thailand, the new C.I.A. team concluded that under standard
questioning Mr. Zubaydah was revealing only a small fraction of what
he knew, and decided that more aggressive techniques were warranted.

At times, Mr. Zubaydah, still weak from his wounds, was stripped and
placed in a cell without a bunk or blankets. He stood or lay on the
bare floor, sometimes with air-conditioning adjusted so that, one
official said, Mr. Zubaydah seemed to turn blue. At other times, the
interrogators piped in deafening blasts of music by groups like the
Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sometimes, the interrogator would use simpler
techniques, entering his cell to ask him to confess.

"You know what I want," the interrogator would say to him, according
to one official's account, departing leaving Mr. Zubaydah to brood
over his answer.

F.B.I. agents on the scene angrily protested the more aggressive
approach, arguing that persuasion rather than coercion had succeeded.
But leaders of the C.I.A. interrogation team were convinced that
tougher tactics were warranted and said that the methods had been
authorized by senior lawyers at the White House.

The agents appealed to their superiors but were told that the
intelligence agency was in charge, the officials said. One law
enforcement official who was aware of events as they occurred reacted
with chagrin. "When you rough these guys up, all you do is fulfill
their fantasies about what to expect from us," the official said.

Mr. Bush on Wednesday acknowledged the use of aggressive interview
techniques, but only in the most general terms. "We knew that
Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he
stopped talking," Mr. Bush said. He said the C.I.A. had used "an
alternative set of procedures'' after it became clear that Mr.
Zubaydah "had received training on how to resist interrogation.

"These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws,
our Constitution and our treaty obligations,'' Mr. Bush said. "The
Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and
determined them to be lawful.''

In his early interviews, Mr. Zubaydah had revealed what turned out to
be important information, identifying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - from a
photo on a hand-held computer - as the chief planner of the Sept. 11
attacks. Mr. Zubaydah also identified Jose Padilla, an American
citizen who has been charged with terrorism-related crimes.

But Mr. Zubaydah dismissed Mr. Padilla as a maladroit extremist whose
hope to construct a dirty bomb, using conventional explosives to
disperse radioactive materials, was far-fetched. He told his
questioners that Mr. Padilla was ignorant on the subject of nuclear
physics and believed he could separate plutonium from nuclear
material by rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with
fissionable material.

Crucial aspects of what happened during Mr. Zubaydah's interrogation
are sharply disputed. Some former and current government officials
briefed on the case, who were more closely allied with law
enforcement, said Mr. Zubaydah cooperated with F.B.I. interviewers
until the C.I.A. interrogation team arrived. They said that Mr.
Zubaydah's resistance began after the agency interrogators began
using more stringent tactics.

Other officials, more closely tied to intelligence agencies,
dismissed that account, saying that the C.I.A. had supervised all
interviews with Mr. Zubaydah, including those in which F.B.I. agents
asked questions. These officials said that he proved a wily
adversary. "He was lying, and things were going nowhere," one
official briefed on the matter said of the early interviews. "It was
clear that he had information about an imminent attack and time was
of the essence."

Several officials said the belief that Mr. Zubaydah might have
possessed critical information about a coming terrorist operation
figured significantly in the decision to employ tougher tactics, even
though it later became apparent he had no such knowledge.

"As the president has made clear, the fact of the matter is that Abu
Zubaydah was defiant and evasive until the approved procedures were
used," one government official said. "He soon began to provide
information on key Al Qaeda operators to help us find and capture
those responsible for the 9/11 attacks."

This official added, "When you are concerned that a hard-core
terrorist has information about an imminent threat that could put
innocent lives at risk, rapport-building and stroking aren't the top
things on your agenda."

Douglas Jehl contributed reporting.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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CIA Can Still Get Tough on Detainees
New interrogation rules will apply only to the military.
The harsh tactics remain secret.

By Julian E. Barnes
Times Staff Writer

September 8, 2006

WASHINGTON - New U.S. policies on the treatment and interrogation of
terrorism suspects outlined this week by the Bush administration mean
that the military no longer will resort to harsh or extreme methods
to obtain information - but that the CIA could.

The new administration approach, first presented by President Bush in
a speech Wednesday and detailed later by administration and military
officials, followed an internal administration debate over the
question of how best to extract intelligence from the most notorious
suspects apprehended in the war on terrorism.

But by assigning the CIA to use tough, undefined methods on some
detainees, the policy outlined by Bush may raise new questions about
U.S. procedures and invite more criticism from human rights advocates
and allies.

For the five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration's
top leaders and senior policymakers have supported the use of harsh
methods to obtain information that could head off future attacks and
save lives. But military officers have insisted that such
interrogation tactics are unproductive - and inevitably lead to
abuse.

On Wednesday, after years of internal debates, the administration
outlined a compromise meant to reconcile the position of hard-liners
and military traditionalists.

The Army, morally and culturally averse to using unorthodox
interrogation methods, will get out of the business of using tough
tactics against detainees under the compromise. The new Army field
manual authorizes only 19 interrogation techniques and bans the most
controversial tactics that critics said amounted to torture - hooding
prisoners, conducting mock executions, and strapping detainees to
boards and using water to simulate drowning.

But the CIA will reserve the right to use the tougher tactics. Bush
said such methods had been effective in getting some of the 14 top Al
Qaeda suspects held by the agency to talk. Administration officials
said the CIA tactics would be legal and fall well short of torture
and abuse. But the president and others have pointedly refused to say
what those tougher methods might be.

The compromise may satisfy the military, which can now say its
soldiers will always comply with international treaties and steer
well clear of torture. But it is not certain whether the new policy
will satisfy those who have raised questions about American
interrogation practices, including human rights advocates and members
of Congress.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers and aides have expressed frustration that
they have not been told what the CIA techniques were and whether the
agency would adhere to the ban on torture.

"We don't know what the methods are; that is where the difficulty
lies," said a congressional aide who asked not to be identified
because of the sensitivity of the debate. "Although the Department of
Defense techniques, bar none, are articulated openly, with the CIA
there is no way to judge whether those techniques satisfy the ban on
cruel and degrading treatment."

Human rights advocates applauded the military's embrace of Geneva
Convention protections and the Army's decision to make public its
interrogation tactics. But they worried that congressional approval
of a CIA detention program that was secret and allowed a broad range
of harsh techniques would be a step backward.

"They have decided to take the military out of the torture business
and leave that to the CIA, and that is extremely problematic," said
Jumana Musa, an advocacy director for Amnesty International.

Administration officials said the new policy ensured that the
toughest techniques were reserved only for the most experienced
interrogators and used only on the most notorious suspects.

"The president made clear this is a small program targeting a certain
category of high-level Al Qaeda members," said a senior
administration official speaking on condition of anonymity because of
the deliberations involved.

Senior Pentagon officials suggested that creating separate rules for
the CIA and the military represented a logical division of labor.

"Each of us has our task to do," Stephen A. Cambone, the
undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, said in an interview
Thursday.

For the uniformed military, disclosing interrogation tactics and
outlining protections detainees will be afforded was vital to
assuring the public that the military was doing all it could to
ensure there would be no repeat of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse
scandal.

"The military really felt it has been tarnished by events at Abu
Ghraib and other detainee abuses," said an administration official.
"They want to restore a certain image, and so for them there is a
greater interest in being able to speak with a great deal of
transparency."

Military leaders argued this week that they did not believe abusive
tactics worked in extracting information.

"No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I
think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the
last five years, hard years, tell us that," said Lt. Gen. John
Kimmons, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence.

Information extracted by abusive tactics was of questionable
credibility, Kimmons said. Moreover, any good that came from the
information would be undercut by the damage to America's reputation
once the abuse became known.

"And we can't afford to go there," he said.

Kimmons' comments reflect a common refrain among instructors at the
Army intelligence academy at Ft. Huachuca, Ariz. Nevertheless, many
interrogators privately acknowledge that coercive methods that stop
short of torture have proven effective in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Afghanistan, for instance, interrogators who questioned prisoners
early in the war complained that they had little success with
straightforward approaches, and only began to get meaningful
information from prisoners after embracing harsher methods, including
short-term deprivation of sleep.

Over time, those harsher techniques came to include putting prisoners
in "stress positions" and placing hoods on their heads - all
explicitly banned by the new Army field manual.

The new manual allows 19 interrogation methods. Cambone said officers
were asked if they needed more than the 19 approved techniques. They
said they did not.

"They are of the view that the manual gives them what they need to do
the job," Cambone said.

Most of the Army's methods are traditional approaches that were
included in the old manual - techniques called "ego-up," where
detainees with low self-esteem are flattered into revealing
information; or "fear-up," where interrogators try to play off a
pre-existing fear or anxiety of a detainee and suggest that the
soldier could help the detainee.

New techniques include one called "Mutt and Jeff" - essentially a
good cop, bad cop routine - and "false flag," in which an
interrogator pretends not to be a U.S. citizen.

The new manual includes one restricted technique that will only be
used on so-called unlawful combatants - such as Al Qaeda suspects -
not traditional prisoners of war.

That technique, called "separation," involves segregating a detainee
from other prisoners. Military officials said separation was not the
equivalent of solitary confinement and was consistent with Geneva
Convention protections.

A four-star general would need to approve the use of the separation
tactic to ensure it was not abused, Kimmons added.

Disclosing the Army's techniques was controversial within the
Pentagon, and Kimmons acknowledged that the military had wrestled
with the idea of keeping some of them secret. But he said the reality
was that the interrogation techniques were not the kind of secret
that could be kept forever.

"Even classified techniques, once you use them on the battlefield
over time, become increasingly known to your enemies, some of whom
are going to be released in due course," Kimmons said Wednesday.

For the CIA, immersed in a culture of secrecy, the sort of disclosure
the Army made this week is anathema.

Agency officials believe that talking about what methods are allowed
or not allowed undercuts their ability to question terrorists.

Administration officials acknowledged Thursday that as long as the
CIA did not follow the Pentagon lead and disclose its methods,
questions would persist.

"The fact that they are not disclosing means there is going to be
skepticism," said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity
because of government rules.

Nonetheless, the CIA is better equipped to seek intelligence from
difficult suspects, others said.

"With the CIA, you are only talking about a narrow group," the senior
administration official said. "You don't have a problem of techniques
falling in the hands of an interrogator who doesn't have a lot of
training."

But Musa, the Amnesty lawyer, said several CIA contractors had been
accused of beating detainees to death, and there was little evidence
that the agency's interrogators could be trusted with tougher
tactics.

"Anytime anyone has danced up to the line," she said, "they have
crossed over it."

julian.barnes@latimes.com

Times staff writer Greg Miller contributed to this report from
Washington.