FBI Agent’s Account of Interrogations Conflicts With Report

Justice Department Account Depicts More Complicated Relationship Between FBI, Abusive Practices Than Agent
By Spencer Ackerman
Washington Independent
5/12/09

As former FBI agent Ali Soufan prepares to testify publicly for the first time about the FBI’s role in the torture policies of the Bush administration, some aspects of his testimony are already clear. Torture doesn’t work, Soufan wrote in a high-profile New York Times op-ed in late April, and he knows because he, as part of the team interrogating al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah “from March to June 2002,” got reliable information out of him “before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August.” Alongside accounts of FBI agents resisting torture at Guantanamo Bay and with another al-Qaeda detainee named Ibn Shaikh al-Libi, Soufan’s account has gone a long way toward portraying the FBI as a lonely institutional outpost of opposition to harsh interrogations.

The truth, according to a 400-page Justice Department inspector general’s report, released in May 2008, is more complicated. According to the report, the FBI did frequently refuse to lend support to abusive interrogations. But FBI officials did take part in interrogations where abuse occurred, even after senior FBI officials issued orders against agents participating in detainee interrogation sessions that went beyond the FBI’s traditional non-physical style of eliciting information. And the report reveals some discrepancies from the account Soufan gave — and which he may be asked about in his testimony before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Wednesday morning.

Soufan’s account does not entirely match up with the inspector general’s, both in terms of the timeline he gave, and his participation in a subsequent interrogation that went beyond traditional FBI interrogation techniques. He wrote in his op-ed that “the harsh techniques” used on Abu Zubaydah — such as waterboarding, to which Abu Zubaydah was subjected 83 times, according to a recently-declassified 2005 Justice Department memorandum — only occurred in August 2002, after “I objected to the enhanced techniques” and was subsequently withdrawn from the interrogation by senior FBI management.

The inspector general’s report tells a somewhat different story. Using the pseduonyms “Thomas” and “Gibson,” it gives the account of two agents who participated in Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation during its early phase, which occurred at a CIA facility, most likely in Thailand. (”Thomas” is most likely Soufan.) FBI headquarters evidently knew that the interrogations would not result in a criminal prosecution of Abu Zubaydah, which is the typical outcome of FBI interrogations, as their supervisor informed the two agents not to Mirandize him, and to “leave the [CIA-run] facility and call Headquarters” if the CIA — which had custody of the detainee — “began using techniques that gave the agents discomfort.” The report corroborates Soufan’s account that “relationship-building techniques” with the detainee, — going so far as personally administering medical care when Abu Zubaydah still required it for injuries sustained in his capture — resulted in Abu Zubaydah positively identifying Khalid Shaikh Muhammed as the architect of the 9/11 attacks.

(More here.)

The New Yorker piece referred to in the above article about Soufan is also very interesting.