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Confessions of a Terrorist
Time | 8/31/03 | Gerald Posner

Posted on 09/16/2003 7:51:02 AM PDT by philosofy123

Confessions of a Terrorist Author Gerald Posner claims an al-Qaeda leader made explosive allegations while under interrogation By JOHANNA MCGEARY By March 2002, the terrorist called Abu Zubaydah was one of the most wanted men on earth. A leading member of Osama bin Laden's brain trust, he is thought to have been in operational control of al-Qaeda's millennium bomb plots as well as the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. After the spectacular success of the airliner assaults on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, he continued to devise terrorist plans.

Seventeen months ago, the U.S. finally grabbed Zubaydah in Pakistan and has kept him locked up in a secret location ever since. His name has probably faded from most memories. It's about to get back in the news. A new book by Gerald Posner says Zubaydah has made startling revelations about secret connections linking Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and bin Laden.

Details of that terrorism triangle form the explosive final chapter in Posner's examination of who did what wrong before Sept. 11. Most of his new book, Why America Slept (Random House), 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. Posner is an old hand at revisiting conspiracy theories. He wrote controversial assessments dismissing those surrounding the J.F.K. and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. And the Berkeley-educated lawyer is adept at marshaling an unwieldy mass of information—most of his sources are other books and news stories—into a pattern made tidy and linear by hindsight. His indictment of U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies covers well-trodden ground, though sometimes the might-have-beens and could-have-seens are stretched thin. The stuff that is going to spark hot debate is Chapter 19, an account—based on Zubaydah's claims as told to Posner by "two government sources" who are unnamed but "in a position to know"—of what two countries allied to the U.S. did to build up al-Qaeda and what they knew before that September day.

Zubaydah's capture and interrogation, told in a gripping narrative that reads like a techno-thriller, did not just take down one of al-Qaeda's most wanted operatives but also unexpectedly provided what one U.S. investigator told Posner was "the Rosetta stone of 9/11 ... the details of what (Zubaydah) claimed was his 'work' for senior Saudi and Pakistani officials." The tale begins at 2 a.m. on March 28, 2002, when U.S. surveillance pinpointed Zubaydah in a two-story safe house in Pakistan. Commandos rousted out 62 suspects, one of whom was seriously wounded while trying to flee. A Pakistani intelligence officer and hastily made voiceprints quickly identified the injured man as Zubaydah.

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's 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-bin Laden triangle.

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."

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." Zubaydah told the interrogators that the Saudis regularly sent the funds through three royal-prince intermediaries he named.

The last eight paragraphs of the book set up a final startling development. 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.

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. 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 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. 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.

There's another unanswered question. If Turki and Mir were cutting deals with bin Laden, were they acting at the behest of their governments or on their own? Posner avoids any direct statement, but the book implies that they were doing official, if covert, business. In the past, Turki has admitted—to TIME in November 2001, among others—attending meetings in '96 and '98 but insisted they were efforts to persuade Sudan and Afghanistan to hand over bin Laden. The case against Pakistan is cloudier. It is well known that Islamist elements in the isi were assisting the Taliban under the government of Nawaz Sharif. But even if Mir dealt with bin Laden, he could have been operating outside official channels.

Finally, the details of Zubaydah's drug-induced confessions might bring on charges that the U.S. is using torture on terrorism 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.

For those who still wonder how the attacks two years ago could have happened, Posner's book provides a tidy set of answers. But it opens up more troubling questions about crucial U.S. allies that someone will now have to address.

Copyright © 2003 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: alqaeda; binladen; bookreview; clintonlegacy; geraldposner; pakistan; saudiarabia; saudisareguilty; whyamericaslept; x42
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1 posted on 09/16/2003 7:51:02 AM PDT by philosofy123
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To: philosofy123
Posner's work on JFK and MLK shows that he is a shill for US Intel apologists. I am not saying he doesn't have some good info, but you should take into consideration the source...
2 posted on 09/16/2003 7:53:17 AM PDT by Keith
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To: Keith
News flash! Lee Harvey Oswald murdered Kennedy.
3 posted on 09/16/2003 7:56:55 AM PDT by RichardW
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To: RichardW
When I read the headline I thought it was about Jethro and the Beast.
4 posted on 09/16/2003 7:58:05 AM PDT by ConservativeMan55 (If it weren't for double standards, liberals would have no standards at all!!!)
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To: philosofy123
Interesting... but Posner's defense of the Warren Report proves that he is intellectually unchaste.
5 posted on 09/16/2003 8:10:05 AM PDT by Lexington Green (FREE TOMMY CHONG)
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To: Keith
I don't know the guy, but I remember there used to be a Russian guy on TV called Posner? He used to be a comentator on CNN?
6 posted on 09/16/2003 8:11:03 AM PDT by philosofy123
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To: philosofy123
Posner is a liberal with respect to domestic issues, but he is a solid hawk on national and homeland security. More importantly he is sharp as a tack, and one of the most thorough investigative reporters in the country. His training as a lawyer has served him well in that he can spend weeks focusing on a trail of data that would be too mind-numbingly boring to the average newspaper hack to be able to follow through on, until he reaches the pots of gold. I think Posner's definitely on to something, and it is very likely the same trail that Danny Pearl was following when he was killed.
7 posted on 09/16/2003 8:12:38 AM PDT by Paladin2b
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To: Lexington Green
Posner didn't "defend" the Warren Commission...he pointed out numerous flaws in their analysis, not the least of which was the total refutation of which bullet did what. His argument was that the Commission reached the right conclusion (Oswald acted alone) for all the wrong reasons.
8 posted on 09/16/2003 8:15:36 AM PDT by Paladin2b
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To: philosofy123
I don't know the guy, but I remember there used to be a Russian guy on TV called Posner?

That was Vladimir Posner, a different guy.

9 posted on 09/16/2003 8:20:49 AM PDT by Ichneumon
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To: philosofy123
I don't know the guy, but I remember there used to be a Russian guy on TV called Posner?

That was Vladimir Posner, a different guy.

10 posted on 09/16/2003 8:20:49 AM PDT by Ichneumon
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To: Keith
Posner's work on JFK and MLK shows that he is a shill for US Intel apologists.

I haven't read his work on MLK, but I've read his book on the JFK assassination, and unless one is a conspiracy nut who feels the need to demonize anyone who pokes holes in favorite conspiracy theories, it's hard to escape the conclusion that in fact Posner is one of the most painstakingly thorough, intellectually honest investigators alive. He's frank about conflicting evidence, things which can't be known, gaps in various theories (including his own), and opposing claims or explanations. He doesn't overstate his case or jump to conclusions. In fact, for the most part he simply spends years gathering massive amounts of evidence (often unearthing long-lost reports or interviews, or finding still-living witnesses to re-interview), then organizing it and presenting it in a coherent manner, letting the reader draw their own conclusions. And thanks to his incredibly thorough job in "Case Closed" (his book on the JFK assassination), his title is entirely justified. I have, quite literally, never seen such an immensely well-researched, comprehensive, convincing book on a historical dispute.

I am not saying he doesn't have some good info, but you should take into consideration the source...

I shall, after having determined for myself that this source is extremely credible, fairminded, and meticulous.

11 posted on 09/16/2003 8:32:54 AM PDT by Ichneumon
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To: Keith
What proff do you other than he holds an opinon on the JFK murder different that yours?
12 posted on 09/16/2003 8:35:08 AM PDT by FlatLandBeer
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To: Lexington Green
but Posner's defense of the Warren Report proves that he is intellectually unchaste.

Excuse me? He defended the Warrent Report against several unjust criticisms by providing massive amounts of evidence that it was, on the whole, correct. And he openly pointed out the things that the Warren Report had gotten wrong (most notably, when the three shots were fired and which ones went where).

In my view, that makes him intellectually honest.

13 posted on 09/16/2003 8:35:45 AM PDT by Ichneumon
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To: philosofy123
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

Al Qaeda is a Saudi construct. Leadership, personnel, funding, cover, schooling, ideology, etc. All are Saudi.

If SA had a covert military arm to propagate Wahabbism, it would be indistinguishable from Al Queda.

14 posted on 09/16/2003 8:36:51 AM PDT by Uncle Miltie (This Islamofascism has been brought to you by Saudi Arabia!)
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To: Paladin2b
"His argument was that the Commission reached the right conclusion (Oswald acted alone) for all the wrong reasons."


... like I said - This persuades me that he is intellectually dishonest. IMHO, folks who believe that Oswald acted alone are pitifully naive and/or willfully uninformed.
15 posted on 09/16/2003 8:50:22 AM PDT by Lexington Green (FREE TOMMY CHONG)
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To: Lexington Green
"This persuades me that he is intellectually dishonest. IMHO, folks who believe that Oswald acted alone are pitifully naive and/or willfully uninformed."

Count me in as one of those people. I believe that in fact Oswald acted alone. He had the motive, means, and opportunity. 40 years have passed and not a single reliable piece of evidence points to a conspiracy. Oswald did it. It's over. It's done. Let's forget about it.
16 posted on 09/16/2003 10:03:42 AM PDT by RichardW
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To: RichardW
Oh, come, come now, where's the fun in that?
17 posted on 09/16/2003 10:44:16 AM PDT by norraad
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To: RichardW
40 years have passed and not a single reliable piece of evidence points to a conspiracy. Oswald did it. It's over. It's done. Let's forget about it.

40 years have passed and not a single reliable piece of evidence exists, or ever existed, that leads to the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy. Someone shot the President, Lee Harvey Oswald did not. It's over. It's done. Let's forget about it!

18 posted on 09/16/2003 11:05:23 AM PDT by zchip
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To: RichardW
News Flash...Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. Check his USMC riflery records. And the Warren Commission did everything they could to try to find any evidence that he ever practiced. They failed.

Former sniper and author Criag Roberts wrote a book about how this was a tough shot for an expert with good equipment if shooting from that window. This was a crappy rifle with a misaligned scope and a lousy shot gets a head and neck shot in 7 seconds? He says it could'nt have happened. Add in that the last shot was a frangible bullet, not the hard-jacketed ammo Oswald supposedly used and Posner is another card-stacking propagandist for the Intel community which had big time egg on it's face for Dallas.

His book is only well-researched if you don't know the facts he conveniently left out or misrepresented. Just imagine Posner as Al Franken and Michael Moore stitched together and you know what I mean...

I have researched this subject for 15 years and helped organize a ground-breaking conference in 1993 that included medical experts from around the USA including a panel organized by the editor of the AMA. Posner had an agenda before he even began. If you want a well-researched book on these issues, you could read John Newman's "Oswald and the CIA". Newman is a double PhD who teaches at the University of Maryland. Before that, he retired from the Army as a Major and was an analyst for the DIA. His first book "JFK and Vietnam" was highly praised by all sides in this case for it's scholarship.

Posner has been shilling for the Intel apologists for years. He made his initial fealty plain in his early books on children of the Nazi Party and his book on Josef Mengele. He needed intel connections to write those books and now is their public mouthpiece. Now don't get me wrong, I support the agencies of US intelligence and what they need to do to protect us. THere are some, however, whose screw ups in the past need to be protected by rewriting history. We don't need revisionist history. It would be better had we gotten it right the first time. And getting it right is admitting that JFK was caught in a crossfire as his secret service agents in the vehicle stated in their Warren Commission testimony instead of hiring hack writers to cover for these people 35 years later when their incompetence in rooting out this protection screw-up is finally exposed.
19 posted on 09/16/2003 11:58:06 AM PDT by Keith
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To: FlatLandBeer
for my "proff" see my post above...
20 posted on 09/16/2003 11:59:27 AM PDT by Keith
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