The Appalling Treatment of a Prisoner at Guantánamo

“The Ceaselessly Prisoner” is a complete and at occasions excruciatingly detailed narrative about Abu Zubaydah and the individuals who ordered and oversaw his interrogation. The authors managed the extraordinary feat of speaking with him by a “circuitous route” that they don’t describe, presumably as a result of it violated the foundations of his confinement. Additionally they spoke at size with the army psychologists who tried on Abu Zubaydah the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation methods” — a revolting euphemism for beatings, sleep deprivation, near-drownings and different types of torture.

The broad outlines of this story at the moment are depressingly acquainted. The Bush administration, beneath immense stress after the Sept. 11 assaults, gave the C.I.A. lead authority to seize and detain terrorism suspects; “the gloves are off” turned a mantra. The company had by no means run a jail or finished interrogations, so it started procuring round. “That they had already determined they needed to harm individuals, and so they have been searching for psychologists prepared to approve it,” in accordance with one researcher who was consulted early on.

The C.I.A. discovered their man in James Mitchell, who along with his companion, Bruce Jessen, had spent a long time instructing American service members tips on how to behave after being captured by the enemy, in a program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE. Mitchell and Jessen had finished solely mock interrogations, and so they knew nothing concerning the Center East. However they agreed to reverse-engineer their survival-training programs, with the purpose of horrifying terror suspects right into a state of “realized helplessness” that might encourage them to disclose all their secrets and techniques.

The C.I.A. was nonetheless assembling its interrogation plans when Abu Zubaydah was captured, so the primary individuals to talk to him have been two F.B.I. brokers, one among them a Lebanese-born man named Ali Soufan, who was fluent in Arabic. They rapidly constructed a rapport with the badly wounded Abu Zubaydah, serving to to take care of him and eliciting some very beneficial info, together with the id of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 assaults. When George Tenet, who was then the C.I.A. director, discovered the F.B.I. was asking the questions, he was livid. Mitchell and the remainder of the C.I.A. crew have been despatched to Thailand to take over.

Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy — who’ve revealed a number of earlier books on related themes — interweave the tales of captive and interrogator, displaying how fatally unprepared they have been to grasp one another. It wasn’t simply that almost all of what the Individuals knew about Abu Zubaydah was fallacious. Mitchell’s SERE coaching led him to interpret all the pieces his prisoner mentioned as an indication of devious and calculated resistance. “What do you wish to know?” Abu Zubaydah mentioned pleadingly after the primary session. The interrogators weren’t listening. They insisted on believing he was hiding the important thing to the imagined “second wave” of terrorist assaults. They chained him up, threw him towards partitions and finally waterboarded him 83 occasions. Many individuals, inside and outdoors the C.I.A., noticed this catastrophe for what it was. They have been all overruled.