Opinion
Torture, Lies and Hollywood
By ALI H. SOUFAN
Published: February 22, 2013
I WATCHED “Zero Dark Thirty” not as a former F.B.I. special agent who
spent a decade chasing, interrogating and prosecuting top members of Al
Qaeda but as someone who enjoys Hollywood movies. As a movie, I enjoyed
it. As history, it’s bunk.
Associated Press
An unidentified detainee standing on a box with a bag
on his head and wires attached to him in late 2003 at the Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq.
The film opens with the words “Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual
Events.” But the filmmakers immediately pass fiction off as history,
when a character named Ammar is tortured and afterward, it’s implied,
gives up information that leads to Osama bin Laden.
Ammar is a composite character who bears a strong resemblance to a
real-life terrorist, Ammar al-Baluchi. In both the film and real life he
was a relative of Bin Laden’s lieutenant, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. But
the C.I.A. has repeatedly said
that only three detainees were ever waterboarded. The real Mr. Baluchi
was not among them, and he didn’t give up information that led to Bin
Laden.
In fact, torture led us away from Bin Laden. After Mr. Mohammed was
waterboarded 183 times, he actually played down the importance of the
courier who ultimately led us to Bin Laden. Numerous investigations,
most recently a 6,300-page classified report by the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence, have reached the same conclusion: enhanced interrogation didn’t work.
Portraying torture as effective risks misleading the next generation of
Americans that one of our government’s greatest successes came about
because of the efficacy of torture. It’s a disservice both to our
history and our national security.
While filmmakers have the right to say what they want, government
officials don’t have the right to covertly provide filmmakers with false
information to promote their own interests. Providing selective
information about a classified program means there is no free market of
ideas, but a controlled market subject to manipulation. That’s an abuse
of power.
John O. Brennan, a former C.I.A. official and now President Obama’s
nominee to head the agency, recently testified that the classified
report raised “serious questions” about information he received when he
was the agency’s deputy executive director. Mr. Brennan said publicly
what many of us — who were in interrogation rooms when the program was
devised — have been warning about for years: senior officials, right up
to the president himself, were misled about the enhanced interrogation
program.
For instance, a 2005 Justice Department memo claimed that waterboarding
led to the capture of the American-born Qaeda member Jose Padilla in
2003. Actually, he was arrested in 2002, months before waterboarding
began, after an F.B.I. colleague and I got details about him from a
terrorist named Abu Zubaydah. Because no one checked the dates, the
canard about Mr. Padilla was repeated as truth.
When agents heard senior officials citing information we knew was false,
we were barred from speaking out. After President George W. Bush gave a
speech containing falsehoods in 2006 — I believe his subordinates lied
to him — I was told by one of my superiors: “This is still classified.
Just because the president is talking about it doesn’t mean that we
can.”
Some of these memos, and reports pointing out their inaccuracies, have
been declassified, but they are also heavily redacted. So are books on
the subject, including my own.
Meanwhile, promoters of torture get to hoodwink journalists, authors and
Hollywood producers while selectively declassifying material and
providing false information that fits their narrative.
The creators of “Zero Dark Thirty” attempted to document the greatest
global manhunt of our generation. But they did so without acknowledging
that their “history” was based on dubious sources.
The filmmakers took the “firsthand accounts” of a few current and former
officials with an agenda and amplified their message worldwide —
suggesting to Americans in cinemas around the country, and regimes
overseas, that torture is effective and helped lead to Bin Laden. There
is no suggestion in the movie that another narrative exists.
Hollywood is primarily about entertainment. The moral responsibility for
setting history straight, ensuring the public isn’t misled, and making
sure mistakes aren’t repeated falls to Congress and the president. Yet
the Senate report remains classified, and only those with security
clearances, like Mr. Brennan, can read how the public was misled.
It’s the duty of the president and Congress to responsibly declassify
the report — and the other documents that advocates of torture don’t
want released.
That’s the only way to ensure that future generations won’t ever go down
that dark and dangerous path again. As Senator John McCain has said,
the Senate report “has the potential to set the record straight once and
for all” and end “a stain on our country’s conscience.”
Once that’s done, it won’t be long before another Hollywood movie comes
along to tell the real story about how America killed Bin Laden.
Ali H. Soufan is a former F.B.I. special agent who interrogated Qaeda detainees and the author of “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda.”
Op-Ed Contributor
My Tortured Decision
FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims
magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation
techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government
hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of
four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light
on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned.
One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on
which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants
authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking
terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t
been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods
as a justification for their continued use.
It is inaccurate,
however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with
another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I
questioned him 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.
We
discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind
of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the
so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout
my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are
successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.
There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced
interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have
been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these
alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few
occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness
behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the
methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of
the terrorists, and due process.
Defenders of these techniques
have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading
to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to
Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative
who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the
dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo
of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.
One of
the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it
reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I.,
similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working
together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ
these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the
terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague
of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the
government was not allowed to speak to him.
It was the right
decision to release these memos, as we need the truth to come out. This
should not be a partisan matter, because it is in our national security
interest to regain our position as the world’s foremost defenders of
human rights. Just as important, releasing these memos enables us to
begin the tricky process of finally bringing these terrorists to
justice.
The debate after the release of these memos has centered
on whether C.I.A. officials should be prosecuted for their role in harsh
interrogation techniques. That would be a mistake. Almost all the
agency officials I worked with on these issues were good people who felt
as I did about the use of enhanced techniques: it is un-American,
ineffective and harmful to our national security.
Fortunately for
me, after I objected to the enhanced techniques, the message came
through from Pat D’Amuro, an F.B.I. assistant director, that “we don’t
do that,” and I was pulled out of the interrogations by the F.B.I.
director, Robert Mueller (this was documented in the report released
last year by the Justice Department’s inspector general).
My
C.I.A. colleagues who balked at the techniques, on the other hand, were
instructed to continue. (It’s worth noting that when reading between the
lines of the newly released memos, it seems clear that it was
contractors, not C.I.A. officers, who requested the use of these
techniques.)
As we move forward, it’s important to not allow the
torture issue to harm the reputation, and thus the effectiveness, of the
C.I.A. The agency is essential to our national security. We must ensure
that the mistakes behind the use of these techniques are never
repeated. We’re making a good start: President Obama has limited
interrogation techniques to the guidelines set in the Army Field Manual,
and Leon Panetta, the C.I.A. director, says he has banned the use of
contractors and secret overseas prisons for terrorism suspects (the
so-called black sites). Just as important, we need to ensure that no new
mistakes are made in the process of moving forward — a real danger
right now.
Ali Soufan was an F.B.I. supervisory special agent from 1997 to 2005.