Wonder what it’s like to be on the receiving end of CIA enhanced interrogation? CIA-FBI Gitmo detainee Zayn al-Ibidin Muhammed Husayn, a.k.a. Abu Zubaydah, lays out the experience in chilling detail in his previously unreleased eight-page narrative, supporting documentation to Zubaydah’s 2009 writ of habeas corpus. In “CIA’s First Captive,” Vice News’ Jason Leopold walks through both Zubaydah’s own story of confinement and an abridged version of Zubaydah’s history with the FBI and, then, the CIA.
As the story goes, Zubaydah was the agency’s first prisoner to endure their new enhanced interrogation program. But he was not the guy the CIA was at first convinced he was. So, knowing that in Zubaydah the CIA, indeed, did not have their man, it’s hard to read the open-source details of Zubaydah’s story.
CIA vs. the Senate
Zubaydah turned out to be one of the CIA’s worst post-9/11 nemesis. According to Leopold, the CIA’s handling of Zubaydah was indirectly responsible for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s deep dive into the CIA’s torture and extraordinary rendition program. That Senate investigation produced the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. As Leopold explains, it was a motion for sanctions against the government for destruction of Zubaydah-related evidence that sparked Senate interest.
Enhanced interrogation has picked up steam again over the course of the 2016 election cycle. Forced to defend the CIA’s interrogation techniques after the 2014 Senate report, CIA Director John Brennan conceded enhanced interrogation produced useful information, including the information used in the raid against Osama bin Laden. And while he didn’t defend the agency for overstepping its legal reach, he did defend the difficult choices made during a post-9/11 era.
In his most recent remarks, however, Brennan has noted the CIA has no desire to return to the use of enhanced interrogation – even if allowed to do so.
