Marcy Wheeler notes that Ali Soufan appears to have gotten actionable intelligence out of Ramzi Bin al-Shibh while he was chained to the floor, and within the 45-minute window given to him by the CIA. Wheeler comments:
I'm interested in this revelation for two reasons. First, if Soufan's claims are correct then it shows that the FBI repeatedly got intelligence the CIA was unable to get -- and that the CIA, on at least two occasions, shut down the FBI access when they were succeeding.
It's not just that; the CIA denied the IG access to Abu Zubaydah for the report, with the CIA's general counsel "asserting that OIG had not persuaded him" that the OIG had a "'demonstrable and immediate need to interview Zubaydah at that time' given what the Acting General Counsel understood to be OIG's 'investigative mandate.'" The footnote in the IG report goes on to explain:
In addition, the CIA Acting General Counsel asserted that Zubaydah could make false accusations against CIA employees. We believe none of these reasons were persuasive or warranted in denying us access to Zubaydah. First, neither the FBI nor the DOD objected to our access to Zubaydah at that time. In addition, neither the FBI nor the DOD stated that an OIG interview would interfere with their interviews of him. Second, at GTMO we were given access to other high value detainees. Third, we did have a demonstrable and immediate need to interview Zubaydah at that time, as well as the other detainees who we were given access to, nonwithstanding the CIA Acting General Counsel's position that we had not persuaded him. Finally, the fact that Zubaydah could make false allegations against CIA employees--as could other detainees--was not in our view a legitimate reason to object to our access to him. In sum, we believe that the CIA's reasons for objecting to OIG access to Zubaydah were unwarranted, and its lack of cooperation hampered our investigation.
So why didn't the CIA want the OIG to interview Zubaydah? It's unclear, but as the IG notes, the excuse the CIA gives is pretty flimsy. Maybe it had to do with Soufan again scoring information through traditional methods that the CIA couldn't get through torture. Or maybe it was that Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times, and the CIA didn't want that information ending up in something like the FBI's "war crimes" file (this IG report was first issued in May 2008, almost a year before the torture memos were released, but for all I know, the IG already knew what happened). It's also possible that, as Zubaydah's lawyer claims, he's in a debilitated mental state partially as a result of his treatment, which is the kind of thing you'd like to keep under wraps.
But this is all speculation. I'm not sure why the CIA didn't want Zubaydah interviewed by the IG; it's just clear they didn't give a good explanation why he shouldn't be.
-- A. Serwer
