500 Days (42 page)

Today, Hamdan was accompanying investigators into Kandahar for the second time. A few weeks earlier, he had taken them to two former bin Laden residences and a safe house; American bombing had destroyed the largest of
the three structures. This time, the Americans wanted Hamdan to guide them through Tarnak Farms, the main al-Qaeda training camp, near the airport.

First, Hamdan showed the investigators another guesthouse and a cemetery. It was there, he said, that he had buried the body of Abu Hafs, also known as Mohammed Atef, the al-Qaeda military commander. Then it was on to Tarnak Farms, reduced by the American air campaign to a landscape of destruction. Hamdan pointed to the ruins of one building.

“This was a mosque,” he said. Shortly before the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, now the terrorist leader’s second in command, had gathered about two hundred people inside the mosque. There, they announced the merging of al-Qaeda with Zawahiri’s terrorist group, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Hamdan said.

The two FBI special agents—Robert Fuller from New York and William Vincent from Los Angeles—inspected the wreckage of the mosque, strewn alongside a bomb crater fifty feet wide and fifteen feet deep.

Something caught their attention: two booklets, their pages fluttering in the wind. Before picking up the documents, the agents photographed them with a Sony FD Mavica digital camera to show where they had been found and how they looked.

One was an address book, handwritten in Arabic, with thirty entries of names and organizations that included home, business, and fax numbers. Within thirty-six hours, the NSA would begin monitoring all of them.

The other document was even more intriguing—a checkbook issued by a Saudi bank. It contained detailed information about all deposits and withdrawals. The balances ranged from 20,000 to 185,000 Saudi riyals, or about $5,000 to $50,000. Five men’s names were listed on the account.

The bank name had just weeks before come to the attention of American intelligence, which had traced flows of cash from extremist groups and suspect charities through accounts there. Already, members of the administration were debating how hard they should push the Saudi government to crack down on the institution. And soon, thanks to one of bin Laden’s trusted assistants, CIA officials would be able to provide fresh evidence to spark the Saudis’ interest.

•  •  •  

That night in Washington, Condoleezza Rice sat down for dinner with David Manning, the chief foreign policy advisor to Tony Blair. The calls for action against Iraq had been growing louder, some European leaders were slamming Bush for considering such an idea, and the meeting with Cheney that month
had sown confusion about the administration’s view of Britain’s role. In a few weeks, Blair would be visiting Bush at his ranch in Crawford to discuss Iraq, and had sent Manning to impress upon the administration his concerns and suggestions about how to manage world opinion on the issue.

Blair fervently believed that Saddam posed a serious threat to the West and had been publicly sounding the alarm for years, beginning with a 1999 speech he delivered in Chicago. But his stance, and his allegiance to Bush, had already aroused hostility in Parliament and in the British press, which had taken to deriding him as the president’s “poodle.” The Americans had to understand the political minefield that Blair was attempting to negotiate.

“The president is deeply appreciative of your government’s support,” Rice said. “And he’s strongly aware of the criticism the prime minister is getting.”

Manning expressed his thanks. “The prime minister will not budge in his support for regime change,” he said. “But he does have to manage a press, a Parliament, and a public opinion that is very different from anything in the States.”

Bush could help Blair keep the upper hand in the debate, Manning said, by giving Britain a role in the formulation of policy, both diplomatic and military, aimed at driving Saddam from power. Blair would, in fact, insist on a carefully calibrated collaboration between the two countries.

“Failure is not an option,” Manning said.

Bush was still wrestling with numerous questions, Rice said. How could he persuade the international community that military action against Iraq was necessary? What value should be put on Iraq’s opposition in exile? And, perhaps most important, after war succeeded, what then?

Other factors needed to be considered, Manning said. “We realize that the administration could go it alone if it wanted,” he said, tipping his hat to Cheney’s breezy assertion of American autonomy. “But if it wants company, it will have to take into account the concerns of its potential coalition partners.”

Saddam’s 1998 decision to throw U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq was not enough to justify a military action
now
, almost four years later, he said. The Americans would have to work with the U.N. in an attempt to get the weapons inspectors back into the country. If Saddam refused to grant them unfettered access to suspect sites, his obstructionism would be a persuasive argument, even to a hesitant Europe, for a military solution.

The time had come to raise the issue that had been brushed aside by Cheney; the most important element of any strategy, Manning said, was tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Unless we do,” he said, “we could find ourselves bombing Iraq and losing the Gulf.”

•  •  •  

The next day, Manning sent a private memo to Blair.

“My talks with Condi convinced me that Bush wants to hear your views on Iraq before taking any action,” he wrote. “He also wants your support. He is still smarting from the comments by other European leaders about his Iraq policy.”

Bush’s diplomatic near-isolation gave Blair tremendous leverage for influencing American policy, Manning wrote, not only on getting U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq but also on planning for any military action. Clearly, Manning suggested, the United States could also use outside guidance to help trim back its expectations.

“I think there is a real risk that the Administration underestimates the difficulties,” he wrote. “They may agree that failure isn’t an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it.”

•  •  •  

Bedlam reigned at Guantanamo Bay.

The intelligence interrogators were untrained. Translators barely had the fluency to order a cup of coffee in Saudi Arabia, much less to bridge language barriers with the detainees. No one seemed to grasp Arab culture or religion. The interrogation hut—built by members of Construction Battalion 423, known as the Seabees—allowed anyone, even prisoners, to see who was inside.

Major General Dunlavey was appalled. He had just arrived at Guantanamo to assume control of Joint Task Force 170, the coordinator of detainee interrogations, and it didn’t take him long on his first walking tour of the detention center to grasp the magnitude of the disorder.

Even security was lax—to him, the facility looked like nothing more than a dangling fence. He learned that there had been a small riot. One detainee had sharpened a spoon into a knife, while others had gotten their hands on pieces of metal, like welding rods, and fashioned weapons out of them. Defense Department photographers wandered around unimpeded, snapping pictures for publication without showing the slightest concern about the potential of disclosing valuable information to al-Qaeda.

Then there were the detainees themselves. Only 5 percent of them had been picked up by the United States. It soon became obvious that far too many of them weren’t terrorist masterminds, but dirt farmers turned over by Afghanis and Pakistanis seeking a bounty. One was hard of hearing and appeared to be
over a hundred years old; guards nicknamed him “al-Qaeda Claus.” Three others appeared to be in their seventies and eighties.

Dunlavey decided that spending time interrogating—or even guarding—these old-timers was a waste of resources. He pushed the Defense Department to send the men home. The Pentagon refused for ten months, then quietly released them. No information had ever been discovered suggesting that the old men had any connection to terrorism.

•  •  •  

At a conference table in Jim Haynes’s office at the Pentagon, David Addington was fidgeting with a black binder. He was there for a briefing from Haynes about the Pentagon’s progress in setting up military commissions and—as expected—the news was infuriating.

The binder alone provoked Addington’s rage; he wouldn’t even bother to open it, and refused to pay much attention to Haynes’s explications of its contents. The thickness of the file told him all he needed to know—the Pentagon had produced a nightmare of bureaucratic red tape. This policy had been rammed through the decision-making process in a matter of days so that the tribunals would be ready to go immediately. All for nothing.

The document that Haynes was presenting described, in excruciating detail, the procedures the tribunals would have to follow and the responsibilities each participant would have to shoulder. It covered every base, from defining the rules of evidence to setting the qualifications of the presiding judge to prohibiting the filming of the proceedings.

Addington stewed. Franklin Roosevelt had managed to pull together his military commissions in a matter of days. Why was the Pentagon dragging out the process for what seemed to be an eternity?

Part of the problem, Addington knew, was that Rumsfeld uncharacteristically had abandoned his usual decisiveness. Instead, he appointed “the wise men”—people like former attorney general Griffin Bell, who knew both the law and the ways of Washington. Predictably, creating this group led to more consultations, debate, and delay.

As he listened to the briefing, Flanigan pondered all the energy being expended on these rules. Haynes was a good friend, so Flanigan was trying to find a nice way of asking the question on his mind:
What the hell are you doing?

Addington beat him to the punch. “Well,” he said sharply, pushing the binder away, “this looks like just a repeat of the Prosper Commission.”

That task force, chaired by Pierre Prosper, had dawdled for weeks delving
into the minutiae about how to try terrorists, Addington said. That was why he, Flanigan, and Gonzales had stepped into the breach to get an order out.

“All you’re doing is replaying those issues,” he said. “And by the way, when are you going to be ready to stand up one of those tribunals you’re talking about?”

Not to worry, Haynes said. “It won’t take very long to do. We’ll get them up and running quickly.”

“But you have the president’s order,” Addington said. “Why not just use a simple, streamlined process for constituting a tribunal and get moving?”

“You know we can’t do that,” Haynes said. “The secretary wants it done this way.”

Addington shook his head. “Does the secretary read the president’s military order as an order? Or does he read it as a license to create a new judicial system?”

This wasn’t about keeping things simple for the sake of simplicity. The military had plenty of detainees at Guantanamo, Addington said. He had no sympathy for them, but they at least should be given a chance to go to trial.

Gonzales held up a hand. Addington, he thought, was being too brusque. This was not a way to handle the situation.

“It looks like you’re doing a very good job,” he said to Haynes, smiling. “Looks like you’re talking to the right people. Keep us informed.”

The meeting came to an end and the lawyers went their separate ways, confident that the Pentagon would abandon its sluggish approach and get the military commissions running soon. They could not have imagined that years would pass before the first trial would be held.

•  •  •  

A group of boys laughed and shouted as they played soccer on a street alongside a sprawling beige villa in Faisalabad. A misplaced kick sent the ball flying into the gated yard of the house, called Shabaz Cottage. A man sprang to the door.

“Get out!” he yelled at the boys in Arabic.

A passing policeman heard the ruckus and took a look. Not only did the man in the house speak a foreign language; he was too pale-skinned to be Pakistani. A little more surveillance, a few quiet questions around the neighborhood, and the policeman learned that a large contingent of Arabs lived there, kept the shutters closed at all times, and never left the property. Something suspicious was going on, the policeman decided. He reported the information to his superiors, who relayed it to Pakistani security forces. They passed it on to the Americans.

•  •  •  

The NSA was conducting electronic surveillance of Shabaz Cottage, the surrounding neighborhood, and thirteen other houses identified through intelligence gathering as terrorist havens. The report from the Pakistani policeman confirmed many of their suspicions. At least two of the locations—Shabaz and another called Issa—were determined to be safe houses operated by Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, one of the largest Islamist organizations in South Asia. Some of the initial intelligence indicated that the two were part of a network of houses and operatives enlisted by Zubaydah after the fall of Kandahar to help al-Qaeda fighters escape from Afghanistan.

Analysts listened in on satellite calls from those residences to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other countries. Evidence piled up; authorities grew confident that Zubaydah was hiding at Shabaz Cottage.

•  •  •  

At the Civil Lines Police Station in Faisalabad, Pakistan, officers were readying themselves for a raid. The assignment seemed routine—the industrial and agricultural city was a magnet for illegal immigrants, and police often arrested crowds of them in late-night sweeps.

Just past midnight on March 28, the police chief, Tsadiqui Hussain, was busying himself in his colonial-era office when a throng of men clad in bulletproof vests paid him a visit. They included officials with Pakistani intelligence, the CIA, and the FBI; they told Hussain that they needed his help.

The raid tonight would not be a typical roundup, one of the Pakistani agents told Hussain. It involved much bigger prey than usual, a Middle Eastern terrorist that the United States wanted locked up. One of the Americans brought out a stack of photocopies and passed them around. Each page contained a picture of an Arab man and many showed how the man might look if disguised—clean-shaven, with a goatee, with long hair, with short hair.