Abu Zubaydah's Torture and the CIA-FBI Turf War

• 36:14Tim notes that CIA officers shouldn't face prosecution if Justice Department approved their techniques, but nobody was authorized to murder people during interrogations or freeze them to death.
• 36:50Guest explains the CIA kept the most important, senior, and controversial prisoners for themselves, while grunts captured on the battlefield went to the military.
• 37:28Abu Zubaydah was shot by a Pakistani policeman with an AK-47 in the thigh, groin, and stomach, taking months to recover before interrogation.
• 37:51FBI agent Ali Sufan used rapport-based interrogation on Zubaydah and obtained actionable intelligence that disrupted terrorist attacks.
• 38:24A turf war between CIA and FBI over jurisdiction led CIA director George Tenet to ask President Bush to expel the FBI from the secret prison location.
• 39:02Within hours of the FBI's expulsion on August 1, 2002, the CIA began torturing Zubaydah, starting with waterboarding on day one despite protocols calling for least-severe techniques first.
• 39:38Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times and went into convulsions so severe they had to revive him.
• 40:44The CIA believed Zubaydah was the crown jewel who would crack Al Qaeda, but confused him with another Maher Zubaydah living in Montana.
• 41:30After waterboarding failed to produce results, interrogators put Zubaydah in a dog cage for two weeks and dumped cockroaches on him to exploit his irrational fear.
• 41:56Contractors Mitchell and Jessen insisted on continuing torture despite headquarters determining Zubaydah had given everything, claiming there might be something he hadn't revealed.
• 42:21Mitchell and Jessen took the $81 million CIA contract and falsely reported Ali Sufan's pre-torture intelligence as their own work product.
• 43:18Tim's guest says the CIA ran headfirst into the torture program with enthusiasm, unlike their reluctant participation in the Iraq War.
• 43:56The CIA deliberately asked the Justice Department for the harshest techniques possible, expecting lawyers to reject some, but the administration approved everything.
• 44:33A female CIA officer profiled in Zero Dark Thirty witnessed the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and was a chief defender of the torture program.
• 45:38Guest attributes the torture program's embrace to widespread guilt among CIA leadership about failing to prevent September 11th.
• 46:06Guest characterizes the female CIA officer as a sociopath who enjoyed watching torture, flying to secret locations to observe interrogations for pleasure.
• 46:25Despite a major intelligence failure not sharing terrorist information with the FBI, the officer was promoted and placed in the Situation Room during the Bin Laden raid.
• 46:54The officer repeatedly failed over the years but remained valued for her institutional knowledge of Al Qaeda from her time at the Bin Laden unit.
• 47:17Guest faults the CIA for keeping the officer around because she was skilled at ingratiating herself with people more important than her.
• 47:36A clique of women at the branch chief level in the Counterterrorism Center socialized together daily, likened to the Real Housewives of the CIA.

Ali SufantortureCIAAbu ZubaydahGeorge TenetMitchell and JessenJane MayerFBIKhalid Sheikh MohammedGeorge W. BushBarack ObamaOsama bin LadenDonald RumsfeldHillary Clinton