What's on Those Destroyed CIA Tapes

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Of the 92 al Qaeda interrogation tapes the agency vaporized, one may have contained the “Rosetta Stone” of 9/11, Gerald Posner reports. Now, it’s up to President Obama to demand justice.

The Justice Department announced yesterday that the CIA had destroyed 92 videotapes from the agency’s interrogations of high-ranking captured Al Qaeda suspects. In the case of one, Abu Zubaydah, that should not be surprising, because as one American intelligence source has told me, what Zubaydah says on those tapes is the “Rosetta Stone” of what really happened behind the 9/11 terror attacks.

In a short monologue that one investigator told me was the “Rosetta Stone” of 9/11, Zubaydah laid out details of how he and the al Qaeda hierarchy had been supported at high levels inside the Saudi and Pakistan governments.

In my 2003 book, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, I set forth how Zubaydah initially refused to help his American captors. I also disclosed how US intelligence established a "fake flag" operation, in which the wounded Zubaydah was transferred to Afghanistan under the ruse that he had actually been turned over to the Saudis. The Saudis had him on a wanted list, and the Americans believed that Zubaydah, fearful of torture and death at the hands of the Saudis, would start talking when confronted by US agents playing the role of Saudi intelligence officers.

But when confronted by his "Saudi" interrogators, Zubaydah showed no fear. Instead, according to the two US intelligence sources that provided me the details, he seemed relieved. The man who had been reluctant to even confirm his identity to his US captors suddenly talked animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would kill him. He then asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. And Zubaydah provided a private home number and a cellphone number from memory. "He will tell you what to do," Zubaydah assured them

That man was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of King Fahd's nephews, and the chairman of the largest Saudi publishing empire. Later, American investigators would determine that Prince Ahmed had been in the US on 9/11.

American interrogators used painkillers to induce Zubaydah to talk—they gave him the meds when he cooperated, and withdrew them when he was quiet. They also utilized a thiopental sodium drip (a so-called truth serum). Several hours after he first fingered Prince Ahmed, his captors challenged the information, and said that since he had disparaged the Saudi royal family, he would be executed. It was at that point that some of the secrets of 9/11 came pouring out. In a short monologue that one investigator told me was the "Rosetta Stone" of 9/11, Zubaydah laid out details of how he and the al Qaeda hierarchy had been supported at high levels inside the Saudi and Pakistan governments.

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