Torture did not yield significant leads, officials say

WASHINGTON — When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaydah, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced they had in their custody an al-Qaida leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaida terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Zubaydah's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Zubaydah — chiefly names of al-Qaida members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Zubaydah. President Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaida's chief of operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate" of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence shows.

Zubaydah was not even an official member of al-Qaida, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law-enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a "fixer" for Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaida only after Sept. 11 and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

Never charged

Zubaydah's case presents the Obama administration with one of its most difficult decisions as it reviews the files of the 241 detainees held in the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Zubaydah — a nom de guerre for the man born Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein — was never charged in a military commission in Guantánamo Bay, but some U.S. officials are pushing to have him charged now with conspiracy.

Zubaydah, 38, who has been in captivity for more than seven years, had alleged links with Ahmed Ressam, an al-Qaida member dubbed the "Millennium Bomber" for his plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Eve 1999. Ressam, an Algerian national, was caught by Customs agents with explosives in the trunk of his car when he drove off a ferry in Port Angeles, Wash.

Jordanian officials tied him to terrorist plots to attack a hotel and Christian sites in their country. And he was involved in discussions, after the Taliban government fell in Afghanistan, to strike back at the United States, including with attacks on U.S. soil, according to law-enforcement and military sources.

Others in the U.S. government, including CIA officials, fear the consequences of taking a man into court who was waterboarded on largely false assumptions, because of the prospect of interrogation methods being revealed in detail and because of the chance of an acquittal that might set a legal precedent. Instead, they would prefer to send him to Jordan.

Some U.S. officials remain steadfast in their conclusion that Zubaydah possessed, and gave up, plenty of useful information about al-Qaida.

"It's simply wrong to suggest that Abu Zubaydah wasn't intimately involved with al-Qaida," said a U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "He was one of the terrorist organization's key facilitators, offered new insights into how the organization operated, provided critical information on senior al-Qaida figures ... and identified hundreds of al-Qaida members."

Al-Qaida connection

One connection Zubaydah had with al-Qaida was a long relationship with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said. Mohammed had approached Zubaydah in the 1990s about finding financiers to support a suicide mission, involving a small plane, targeting the World Trade Center. Zubaydah declined but told him to try bin Laden, according to a law-enforcement source.

Zubaydah quickly told U.S. interrogators of Mohammed and of others he knew to be in al-Qaida, and he revealed the plans of the low-level operatives who fled Afghanistan with him, according to military documents and law-enforcement sources.

Such intelligence was significant but not blockbuster material. Frustrated, the Bush administration ratcheted up the pressure, for the first time approving the use of increasingly harsh interrogations.

The Justice Department declined repeated requests for comment.

Even before President Obama suspended military commissions at the military base in Cuba, prosecutors had expunged Zubaydah's name from the charge sheets of a number of detainees who were captured with him and stood accused of conspiracy and material support for terrorism.

When they were first charged in 2005, these detainees were accused of conspiring with Zubaydah, and the charge sheets contained numerous references to him. When the charges were refiled last year, his name had vanished from the documents.