The trouble with creating timelines is that once you get into it, contradictions start showing up. In trying to pin down when Abu Zubdayeh was first tortured, I studied the following documents:
- The Red Cross Report on "High-Value Detainees" Feb 2007
- CIA agent John Kariakou's interview with ABC News' Brian Ross (part 1 and part 2) 10 Dec 2007
- FBI supervisory agent Abu Soufan's New York Times op-ed 23 Apr 2009
There are contradictions between all 3 accounts.
[Update 26 Apr 15:00] A fourth story has emerged which clears up some of the contradictions. See at the bottom of the diary.
Let's start with the Red Cross report, which I take to be the most authoritative because it is least likely to have a partisan or personal interest in the data. On the other hand, the report is based on interviews with the detainees, who definitely do have a personal interest, and in addition their memories may have been damaged by years of confinement and torture. However, the data I am primarily interested in here is dates and places, and Abu Zubaydeh would have had no interest in falsifying those, since he was almost certainly unaware of any controversy over them.
According the Red Cross report, then, Abu Zubaydeh (AZ from here on out) was captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on 28 March 2002. Annex 1 of the report states that AZ was held
in Afghanistan ... for approximately nine months from May 2002 to February 2003. He had previously been held in hospital for what he believes were several weeks and had several operations to severe gunshot injuries sustained at the time of arrest.... [Emphasis added]
AZ appears to have spent the first period of his captivity, 28 March to May, in a hospital recovering from wounds sustained in the gun battle when he was captured. As best I can determine from the report, he was questioned then, but not subjected to any torture until he was moved to Afghanistan, where it appears that "enhanced interrogation techniques" were started immediately on his arrival:
"I woke up naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. ... After some time, I think it was several days, but I can't remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks. ..."
During that entire period, he says, the cell was kept very cold and loud music was constantly playing. This would cover the time from sometime in May to the end of May or early June.
During that time, he says, American interrogators would question him through the bars of the cell; the music was turned off during the questioning.
At some point in June, the questioning stopped for about a month.
"Then, about two and a half or three months after I arrived in this place [July or August 2002] the interrogation began again, but with more intensity than before. Then the real torturing started."
These included confinement in a black box, head slams with a towel wrapped around his neck. and waterboarding. This went on for about a week, and at the end of it "two women and a man came to interrogate me. I was still naked, and because of this, I refused to answer any questions." So he was slapped and thrown against the wall again. But then, he says, conditions slowly began to improve. Although his account does not say, presumably he also began to answer questions.
To sum up, according to AZ's account as reported by the Red Cross, he was captured at the end of March, treated for wounds until sometime in May, shipped to Afghanistan and subjected to moderate torture (noise, cold, sleep deprivation) until sometime in June. Then he was left alone until sometime in July or August, when he was severely tortured, including head slams and waterboarding. Later in August his treatment improved.
Now, let's look at what CIA agent Kariakou has to say in his interview with Brian Ross:
[Ross :] And what happened to [AZ]? The initial interrogation was done in Pakistan?
[Kiriakou :] No. He was-- he was in such terrible physical condition in Pakistan that aside from a one- or two-minute conversation that we would have every four or five hours, which was really about nothing-- he-- he was-- interviewed in-- in the-- the third country that he moved onto from there.
The third country being Afghanistan. Kariakou says that he himself left at this point, and others did the heavy work.
[Ross: ] As you began to talk to him-- was time of the essence? Did you feel you had to get him to talk?
[Kiriakou :] Yes. Because in the beginning, while, like I say, he was friendly-- and he was willing to talk about philosophy, he was unwilling to give us any-- any actionable intelligence.
[Ross :] And what in your mind was your way you were gonna get him to give that up?
{Kiriakou :] We had a group of folks-- at the agency who were trained in-- what had been reported in the press, we called enhanced techniques. I came back to the-- to the United States to headquarters to move onto a different job. But we had these trained interrogators who were sent to his location-- to use the enhanced techniques as necessary to get him to open up-- and to report some threat information. ...
Water boarding was one of the techniques, yes. ...
He was able to withstand the water boarding for quite some time. And by that I mean probably 30, 35 seconds [interruption] which was quite some time. And a short time afterwards, in the next day or so, he told his interrogator that Allah had visit [sic] him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate because his cooperation would make it easier on the other brothers who had been captured. And from that day on he answered every question just like I'm sitting here speaking to you.
Three things stand out for me from this clip:
- Time was of the essence here. Elsewhere, Kariakou says they were concerned about more imminent attacks and felt AZ had imformation about them.
- According to Kariakou, the CIA already had interrogators trained in torture techniques. Bear in mind that it was the Defense Department, not the CIA, that asked JPRA to help them reverse-engineer the SERE techniques:
In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum [that Common Article 3 did not apply to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban], the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel's Office had already solicited information on detainee "exploitation" from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions. Senate Armed Services Cmte report
- Kariakou does not give a date when AZ was waterboarded, but he says AZ began to cooperate the next day.
Note: Kariakou says he was never told that Zubaydeh had been repeatedly waterboarded; ABC added this update to the interview article:
"When I spoke to ABC News in December 2007 I was aware of Abu Zubaydah being water boarded on one occasion. It was after this one occasion that he revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack. As I said in the original interview, my information was second-hand. I never participated in the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner, nor did I witness the use of such techniques."
Because of all this, I find it difficult to accept Kariakou's version of events, especially in the details he heard about secondhand. (The purpose of Kariakou's interview, it should be noted, was to discuss the need for and the efficacy of waterboarding, more than to go into details of what was specifically done to AZ and when.)
Finally, we have Abu Soufan's account of his interrogation of AZ:
Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned [Abu Zubaydeh] from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence. [Emphasis added]
The first problem here is that, according to both AZ and Kariakou, AZ was so badly wounded in the gun battle of 28 March that he could not be questioned for more than a few minutes until sometime in May, when he had healed enough to be moved.
The second problem, of course, is that according to AZ's testimony, he was subjected to humiliation, sleep deprivation, extreme cold and loud music starting sometime in May. His only relief was that the music was turned off during the questioning.
AZ had no reason to know that the timing of his tortures would be controversial, nor would he necessarily have known which of his interrogators was FBI and which was CIA. His description of the details also has the sense of verisimilitude.
It is highly unlikely that Soufan thought that sleep deprivation, etc., constituted "traditional interrogation methods." So that still leaves me with a conundrum: I cannot accept that Soufan just made up his op-ed out of whole cloth, so I accept that he was present and interrogating AZ prior to June.
One possibility is that, since AZ was confined to his cell and interrogated there, the CIA was able to conceal its harsh methods from the FBI. AZ mentions only that the music was turned off, not the cold, but he may have inadvertently omitted that. Or the FBI may have accepted the cold conditions as not abnormal. Or Soufan may not have considered it overly harsh. Any way you slice it, however, it still looks ugly for somebody.
Finally, there is the issue of cooperation. Soufan says AZ was cooperative the whole time - March (or May) through June. Kiriakou says he was not until he was waterboarded once, probably in July or August, but was cooperative thereafter. AZ says he was waterboarded several times and only cooperated when he was no longer kept naked.
Summing up: Kariakou has some of his second-hand data wrong, as he admitted in the ABC update. But as a direct witness to the early events, his story matches AZ's and clashes with Soufan's. AZ's account of his time in Afghanistan from May through June also contradicts Soufan's version, though it is possible the CIA concealed its methods from him.
Time for some more questions to both Kariakou and Soufan, for starters. Time also to question why the CIA was training its people in torture techniques, apparently long before DoD was asking for training from SERE. (As to why Rumsfeld wanted his people trained in the same techniques, we know that he did not like or trust the CIA and wanted his own intelligence channel the so-called "Feith-based intelligence".)
The timeline shown here also shows that the CIA was torturing AZ before they had legal cover from the OLC memos. (They did have Bush's memo of 7 Feb 2002 that the Geneva Conventions did not apply.) But that's for another diary.
[Update continued] Newsweek has just published an exclusive interview with Abu Soufan which clears up some of the discrepancies. In essence, it goes like this:
Soufan started talking to AZ while he was still recovering from his wounds. (The article says it was Thailand, but AZ's testimony to the ICRC says it was Afghanistan. Soufan won't say where this was.) So that allows for a March (or early April) start date.
Then, sometime in May, Soufan discovered CIA agents were starting to use the techniques AZ had described in his Red Cross testimony:
[T]he tenor of the Abu Zubaydah interrogations changed a few days later, when a CIA contractor showed up. Although Soufan declined to identify the contractor by name, other sources (and media accounts) identify him as James Mitchell, a former Air Force psychologist who had worked on the U.S. military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training—a program to teach officers how to resist the abusive interrogation methods used by Chinese communists during the Korean War. Within days of his arrival, Mitchell—an architect of the CIA interrogation program—took charge of the questioning of Abu Zubaydah. He directed that Abu Zubaydah be ordered to answer questions or face a gradual increase in aggressive techniques. One day Soufan entered Abu Zubadyah's room and saw that he had been stripped naked; he covered him with a towel.
Soufan says he objected, both on the spot and to FBI HQ. This led to the FBI, in late May or early June, telling Soufan to come home.
So that clears up much of the contradiction. The details here are more significant than the scantier version in the op-ed, which implies that Soufan did not see any torture. Now it turns out that he did, along the timeline suggested by Kariakou and confirmed by AZ, that he objected at the time and that the FBI, out of caution, frustration, or both, pulled him out.
The Newsweek story also has valuable insight into the differences in the whole FBI and CIA approaches to intelligence, which also bear reading.