Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

Is that the case with KSM, on whose statements much of the 9/11 Commission Report relies? The prisoner positively spewed information, and that is a part of the problem. At a rough count, he confessed to having carried out or plotted some thirty crimes—more than is plausible, surely, even for a top operative.

Transcripts of interrogation sessions with KSM were reportedly transmitted to Washington accompanied by the warning: “Detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead.” In a combined confession and boast, the prisoner himself told the Red Cross: “I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop.… I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent … wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.”

A parallel issue is what torture may have done to KSM’s mental condition. His defense attorney at the initial military tribunal proceedings at Guantánamo in 2008, Captain Prescott Prince, thought KSM appeared to have suffered “some level of psychological impairment” as a result of the mistreatment.

When the 9/11 Commission was at work, KSM had yet to admit that he had lied under torture. Nor, at that time, did the Commission know that he or others had been tortured. “We were not aware, but we guessed,” executive director Philip Zelikow has said, “that things like that were going on.”

If Zelikow and senior colleagues guessed it, they seem not to have shared their guess with Commission members. “Never, ever did I imagine that American interrogators were subjecting detainees to waterboarding and other forms of physical torture,” Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste has said. “No one raised such a possibility at a Commission meeting. In hindsight we were snookered.”

The 9/11 commissioners were not told that “enhanced techniques” were used to interrogate prisoners. The brutal treatment they received taints the prisoners’ admissions

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The commissioners asked the CIA to allow its own staff access to detainees, only to meet with a flat refusal. If security was the issue, they then offered, staff could be taken to the prisoners’ location wearing blindfolds. Could Commission people at least observe CIA interrogation sessions through a one-way observation window? The CIA blocked all such suggestions.

Commission senior adviser Ernest May thought the CIA’s summaries of the results of interrogations “incomplete and poorly written.” “We never,” he wrote later, “had full confidence in the interrogation reports as historical sources.” Former Commission counsel John Farmer warns that, even now, “reliance on KSM’s version of events must be considered carefully.”

The issue was and remains a huge problem, a blemish on the historical record. As the Report was being assembled, the Commission attempted to resolve the concern by inserting a paragraph or two on a page deep in the text—a health warning to the American public about the product of the CIA interrogations.

“Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses,” it read, “is challenging.… We have evaluated their statements carefully and have attempted to corroborate them with documents and statements of others.”

THERE IS, however, a measure of considerable consolation. Long before they were caught, KSM and a fellow operative freely volunteered much the same version of events to an Arab television journalist. The scoop of a lifetime had come to Yosri Fouda, former BBC journalist and at the time star reporter for the satellite channel Al Jazeera—the way scoops are supposed to come, in a mysterious phone call to his London office.

Seven months after the 9/11 attacks, Fouda found himself listening to an anonymous male voice on the telephone proposing “something special for the first anniversary … exclusive stuff.” Then, four days later, came a fax offering to provide him with “addresses of people” for a proposed documentary. Then another phone call, asking him to fly to Pakistan. Fouda did so, without confiding even in his boss.

After a harrowing process, an internal flight to Karachi, a change of hotels, a journey by car and rickshaw, then—in another car, blindfolded, the final leg—the reporter was ushered into a fourth floor apartment. The blindfold removed, Fouda found himself looking into the eyes of the fugitive who was being hunted more feverishly than anyone in the world except Osama bin Laden.

KSM and Ramzi Binalshibh, a key accomplice, told Fouda their story—the story, at any rate, as they wanted to tell it—over a period of forty-eight hours. “I am the head of the al Qaeda military committee,” KSM said that first night, “and Ramzi is the coordinator of the Holy Tuesday operation. And yes, we did it.”

After prayers together the following morning, the two men shared their version of the preparation and execution of 9/11. Their accounts largely match the version subsequently extracted from KSM by the CIA. Binalshibh pulled from an old suitcase dozens of mementos of the operation: information on Boeing airplanes, a navigation map of the American East Coast, illustrations on “How to perform sudden maneuvers”—a page covered in notations made, Binalshibh said, by the hijackers’ leader, Mohamed Atta.

The interview over, blindfolded again, reporter Fouda was taken back to the airport. He had—and has—no doubt that the men he had met at the safe house in Karachi were who they said they were, that what they told him was credible. The three-page account of Fouda’s work in the London Sunday Times , and his TV documentary, The Road to 11 September , on the Al Jazeera network, caused a sensation on the first anniversary of the attacks.

Unaccountably, 9/11 Commission staff failed to interview Fouda and mentioned his breakthrough interview only in an obscure footnote. It was included, however, in evidence presented during the military tribunal proceedings at Guantánamo. Two distinguished award-winning reporters, The Wall Street Journal ’s Ron Suskind and CNN contributor Peter Bergen, who both interviewed Yosri Fouda, found his reporting of the Karachi encounter authentic and compelling.

During the reporter’s meeting with KSM and Binalshibh, a mysterious visitor had arrived, a man who could not be named. He was, Fouda was told, “a close companion of Sheikh Abu Abdullah, God protect him.”

“Abu Abdullah” was one of the several names associates used to refer to Osama bin Laden.

Had al Qaeda been a company in the West, Fouda concluded from what he learned that day, KSM would have been its CEO. The post of chairman belonged to bin Laden.

TWENTY-TWO

AFTER FIRST MEETING TOWARD THE END OF THE ANTI-SOVIET CONFLICT in Afghanistan, Bin Laden and KSM had for years followed separate trajectories. Until the mid-1990s, KSM plotted terror with his nephew Yousef, then traveled the world networking with fellow jihadis. Bin Laden stayed most of the time in Sudan, presenting an innocent face to the world.

To Time magazine’s Scott Macleod, who saw him there, the Saudi seemed “very calm, serene, almost like a holy man. He wanted to show that he was a businessman, and he was a legitimate businessman.” Major road-building projects aside, bin Laden’s enterprises included a trucks and machinery importing company, a tannery, and more than a million acres of farmland. Rumor had it, too, that bin Laden produced a fabulous sum to capitalize a bank.

Bin Laden the tycoon tended his business empire, but bin Laden the jihadi was never far away. To his guesthouse in Khartoum came all manner of men, rich and poor, powerful and humble, all focused on Muslim causes. In 1992, following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the beginning of strife between Christians and Muslims, Bosnia became the cause of the moment. The embattled Bosnian regime accepted massive financial support from Saudi Arabia and volunteer fighters, Arab veterans of the war in Afghanistan.