a book just written by gerald Posner.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,480240,00.html
New York - A new book by Gerald Posner says Abu Zubaydah has made startling
revelations about secret connections linking Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and
Osama bin Laden. The book, Why America Slept (Random House) is reviewed
exclusively in this week’s issue of TIME. “Most of his new book is a lean,
lucid retelling of how the CIA, FBI and U.S. leaders missed a decade’s worth
of clues and opportunities that if heeded, Posner argues, might have
forestalled the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” TIME’s Johanna McGeary writes in
the review.
Posner elaborates in startling detail how U.S. interrogators used drugs - an
unnamed “quick-on, quick-off” painkiller and Sodium Pentothal, the old movie
truth serum - in a chemical version of reward and punishment to make
Zubaydah talk. When questioning stalled, according to Posner, CIA men flew
Zubaydah to an Afghan complex fitted out as a fake Saudi jail chamber, where
“two Arab-Americans, now with Special Forces,” pretending to be Saudi
inquisitors, used drugs and threats to scare him into more confessions.
Yet when Zubaydah was confronted by the false Saudis, writes Posner, “his
reaction was not fear, but utter relief.” Happy to see them, he reeled off
telephone numbers for a senior member of the royal family who would, said
Zubaydah, "tell you what to do."The man at the other end would be Prince
Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a Westernized nephew of King Fahd and a
publisher better known as a racehorse owner. His horse War Emblem won the
Kentucky Derby in 2002). To the amazement of the U.S., the numbers proved
valid. When the fake inquisitors accused Zubaydah of lying, he responded
with a 10-minute monologue laying out the Saudi-Pakistani-Osama triangle,
according to the book.
Zubaydah, writes Posner, said the Saudi connection ran through Prince Turki
al-Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, the kingdom’s longtime intelligence chief.
Zubaydah said bin Laden “personally” told him of a 1991 meeting at which
Turki agreed to let bin Laden leave Saudi Arabia and to provide him with
secret funds as long as al-Qaeda refrained from promoting jihad in the
kingdom. The Pakistani contact, high - ranking air force officer Mushaf Ali
Mir, entered the equation, Zubaydah said, at a 1996 meeting in Pakistan also
attended by Zubaydah. Bin Laden struck a deal with Mir, then in the military
but tied closely to Islamists in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI), to get protection, arms and supplies for al-Qaeda. Zubaydah told
interrogators bin Laden said the arrangement was “blessed by the Saudis,”
according to Posner.
Zubaydah said he attended a third meeting in Kandahar in 1998 with Turki,
senior ISI agents and Taliban officials. There Turki promised, writes
Posner, that “more Saudi aid would flow to the Taliban, and the Saudis would
never ask for bin Laden’s extradition, so long as al-Qaeda kept its
long-standing promise to direct fundamentalism away from the kingdom.” In
Posner’s stark judgment, the Saudis “effectively had (bin Laden) on their
payroll since the start of the decade.” Abu Zubaydah told the interrogators
that the Saudis regularly sent the funds through three royal-prince
intermediaries he named, according to the book.
The last eight paragraphs of the book set up a final startling development,
McGeary writes. Those three Saudi princes all perished within days of one
another. On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed was felled by a heart attack at age
43. One day later Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, 41, was killed
in what was called a high-speed car accident. The last member of the trio,
Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, officially “died of thirst” while
traveling east of Riyadh one week later. And seven months after that, Mushaf
Ali Mir, by then Pakistan’s Air Marshal, perished in a plane crash in clear
weather over the unruly North-West Frontier Province, along with his wife
and closest confidants, Posner writes.
Without charging any skulduggery (Posner told TIME they “may in fact be
coincidences”), the author notes that these deaths occurred after CIA
officials passed along Zubaydah’s accusations to Riyadh and Islamabad.
Washington, reports Posner, was shocked when Zubaydah claimed that “9/11
changed nothing” about the clandestine marriage of terrorism and Saudi and
Pakistani interests, “because both Prince Ahmed and Mir knew that an attack
was scheduled for American soil on that day.” They couldn’t stop it or warn
the U.S. in advance, Zubaydah said, because they didn’t know what or where
the attack would be. And they couldn’t turn on bin Laden afterward because
he could expose their prior knowledge. Both capitals swiftly assured
Washington that “they had thoroughly investigated the claims and they were
false and malicious.” The Bush Administration, writes Posner, decided that
“creating an international incident and straining relations with those
regional allies when they were critical to the war in Afghanistan and the
buildup for possible war with Iraq, was out of the question.”
The book seems certain to kick up a political and diplomatic firestorm,
McGeary writes. The first question everyone will ask is, Is it true? And
many will wonder if these matters were addressed in the 28 pages censored
from Washington’s official report on 9/11. It has long been suggested that
Saudi Arabia probably had some kind of secret arrangement to stave off
fundamentalists within the kingdom. But, McGeary writes, this appears to be
the first description of a repeated, explicit quid pro quo between bin Laden
and a Saudi official. Posner told TIME he got the details of Zubaydah’s
interrogation and revelations from a U.S. official outside the CIA at a
“very senior Executive Branch level” whose name we would probably know if he
told it to us, McGeary writes. He did not. The second source, Posner said,
was from the CIA, and he gave what Posner viewed as general confirmation of
the story but did not repeat the details. There are top Bush Administration
officials who have long taken a hostile view of Saudi behavior regarding
terrorism and might want to leak Zubaydah’s claims. Prince Turki, now Saudi
Arabia’s ambassador to Britain, did not respond to Posner’s letters and
faxes.
Finally, the details of Zubaydah’s drug-induced confessions might bring on
charges that the U.S. is using torture on terror suspects. According to
Posner, the Administration decided shortly after 9/11 to permit the use of
Sodium Pentothal on prisoners. The Administration, he writes, “privately
believes that the Supreme Court has implicitly approved using such drugs in
matters where public safety is at risk,” citing a 1963 opinion.