Word: zubaydah
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State of War doesn't follow a clear narrative arc. The action kick-starts midway through the first chapter, in March 2002: days after the arrest of Abu Zubaydah, at the time the highest-ranking al-Qaeda operative in U.S. custody, Bush summoned CIA director George Tenet to the White House to ask what intelligence Abu Zubaydah had provided his captors. According to Risen's source, Tenet told Bush that Abu Zubaydah, badly wounded during his capture, was too groggy from painkillers to talk coherently. In response, Bush asked, "Who authorized putting him on pain medication?" Risen makes the leap...
...Iraq to ask their relatives about Saddam's arsenal. According to Risen, all of them reported that Iraq had abandoned its WMD program--but the CIA never informed the White House. Among the other intelligence foibles described in the book: the U.S. discovered Western-style ATM cards on Abu Zubaydah after his capture, but "there is little evidence that an aggressive investigation" into the bank accounts was ever made, and a gaffe by a CIA officer in Washington last year blew the cover of spies in Iran and enabled Tehran to "roll up" the CIA's network of agents there...
Missing from the indictment are allegations that Padilla planned to detonate a dirty bomb or blow up apartment buildings. Evidence for those charges came from captured al-Qaeda helmsmen Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, who have undergone the sort of coercive interrogation treatment, including waterboarding, that can induce people to lie. "It would have been very difficult to use that in court," said a Justice Department official. Expect pretrial skirmishes over such issues as access to classified information and, possibly, the effects of three years of isolation on Padilla's psyche. Said Patel: "He's been alone, with...
...quickly became clear that the 17 techniques might not crack some among the well-trained gang at Gitmo. As the U.S. began to round up high-value targets like al-Qaeda's chief operating officer, Abu Zubaydah, who were held in undisclosed locations, CIA officials turned to Washington for guidance about how far interrogators could go against the new terrorist enemy. In the summer of 2002, the CIA and Gonzales asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for an opinion on the definition of illegal interrogation methods. On Aug. 1, 2002, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee sent Gonzales...
...impediment to torturers. Handing someone over to a nation where torture is common--say, Egypt or Syria--is against international law. It remains impossible to know what rules the CIA is following when it conducts interrogations in "undisclosed locations" outside the U.S. In March 2002, when authorities grabbed Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, the CIA whisked him to a secret facility outside Bangkok and asked the FBI to send some agents to Thailand to assist in "sweating" him, as it's known in the trade. Leery of that idea, FBI boss Robert Mueller declined and issued a verbal order that...