Abu Zubaydah is the Rosetta Stone to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture of detainees. Abu Zubaydah was the most important early Al Qaeda captive. Originally, he was questioned by FBI interrogators using rapport-building techniques. He cooperated with the FBI, and he was a wealth of information about Al Qaeda's personnel, organization and tactics. He generated more intelligence reports than any other captive after 9/11. But, after the FBI was successful in obtaining mountains of intelligence from Abu Zubaydah, the CIA took him over, entirely cut out the FBI, and subjected him to torture - 187 different times, by contractors who literally had never conducted an interrogation before in their lives. Why? What was the CIA trying to achieve?
The only plausible explanation is below the fold.
The FBI questioners of Abu Zubaydah were experienced, trained interrogators, who were experts on Al Qaeda, with extensive Arabic language skills and a strong cultural understanding of the Muslim world. The CIA took Abu Zubaydeh from the FBI, and placed him in isolation for 47 days during which he wasn't questioned at all. Then Abu Zubaydah was handed over to two CIA contractors who had never before in their careers conducted a single interrogation of any kind. The two CIA contractors did not have Arab language skills, did not have any relevant background on Al Qaeda, and had not studied the Muslim world. Instead, they had been Department of Defense staffers who trained US troops in preparation for former East Bloc torture techniques which were designed to obtain false confessions of the sort used by the North Koreans during the Korean War.
Why would the CIA turn over their most valuable captive to interrogators who had no reasonable possibility of obtaining useful intelligence information from that captive? According to the Senate report, the CIA feared that Abu Zubadyah had information about sleeper cells in the United States that he had not disclosed. Despite being tortured 187 times, he never disclosed any such information, and the intelligence community eventually concluded that he was truthful in denying that he had any such information.
But that explanation doesn't fully hold water. If the CIA believed Abu Zubadyah still had undisclosed relevant intelligence, they could have used interrogators who could have plausibly obtained it from him. There was never any possibility that two contractors with no interrogation background, no understanding of Al Qaeda and who didn't even speak Arabic were going to get actionable intelligence from Abu Zubaydah.
The answer is, by 2003, the CIA had already concluded - accurately - that Al Qaeda no longer posed a serious threat to the United States. The so-called "Second Wave" assault often cited in support of the torture program had already been disrupted - the mastermind of that notional attack had been captured in 2002 before Abu Zubaydah even was turned over to the CIA. The 17 supposed "foot soldiers' for that attack were not even members of Al Qaeda - they were members of a different Islamicist organization that Al Qaeda had identified as possible recruiting targets at some time in the future. And the "shoe bomb" tactic for that attack had already been attempted, had failed, and (as a result of new security measures) was no longer possible. Moreover, by 2003, Al Qaeda had lost its safe haven in Afghanistan, and the administration knew it no longer had significant international capabilities, certainly not against the US.
Most important, by 2003, the Bush/Cheney administration had already moved on from Al Qaeda. Soon President Bush would be publicly dismissing the still-free Osama bin Laden as irrelevant and unimportant. By 2003, the Bush administration had essentially stopped trying to disrupt Al Qaeda or its Taliban allies in Afghanistan itself. The focus of the Bush/Cheney administration in 2003, instead, was to create a justification for the invasion of Iraq. By 2003, the administration knew that Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda - indeed, that Al Qaeda viewed Saddam Hussein as a mortal enemy. But the Bush administration cared more about Iraq than it did about Al Qaeda, because, of course, Iraq has oil, and Al Qaeda never did. I will concede the possibility that the Bush/Cheney administration hoped to torture Abu Zubaydah into providing support for the invasion of Iraq. But by 2003 even they probably knew that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and any such confession they tortured him into would be false.
The primary point about the Senate Intelligence Committee report that Cheney and his fellow torturers most hate is its demonstration that the torture never obtained useful information. That has always been the smoke-screen justification they have used for their torture (including, it now turns out, anal rape - one new piece of information in the report). They have always bent over backwards to claim informational benefits from the torture.
The best example of leaning over backwards to justify torture in the Senate report: one captive was tortured repeatedly based on a report from a single uncorroborated source. That source turned out to have fabricated the report, as the source himself eventually admitted. The administration cited this example to Congress and the press as a "success" of its torture program - because the torture had successfully demonstrated that the source was not to be believed. Some comfort for the person tortured in error to prove this point.
The only plausible explanation is that Bush/Cheney weren't trying to get new information from Abu Zubaydah at a all. They simply wanted to punish him for having been associated with Al Qaeda in the first place. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in particular wanted to vindicate their view of an imperial presidency from their time in the Nixon administration - that the executive branch had unfettered ability to do whatever it wanted without oversight and without consequences. They wanted to torture people to prove that they could, and establish a precedent for the ongoing imperial presidency they desired.
Torture never got any new useful information from Abu Zubaydah, nor did it ever get any actionable intelligence from any other Al Qaeda captive. That's the key takeaway from the Senate report. Torture wasn't intended to get useful information. Torture was meant as a sadistic punishment, without due process or oversight, for people who were then expected to die in permanent confinement with no recourse and no access to the outside world. One minute watching Dick Cheney today and you will understand his intent. Torture was designed to fulfill the Cheney/Rumsfeld design for an unconstrained, unaccountable imperial presidency. Torture didn't "work" to obtain actionable intelligence, because it was never designed to obtain actionable intelligence - something the CIA had known for decades. And that's what you most need to understand from the Senate Intelligence Committee report.