who Zubaydeh recruited as part of a CIA-sponsored operation against the Russians in Chechnya and Bosnia in the late 1990s. Zubaydeh was later central to planning the 9/11 and Cole attacks, attending a major Al Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur which was videotaped by the CIA and "a half-dozen" allied agencies, according to testimony by George Tenet. After that meeting, the head of the CIA Directors Counter-Terrorism Center allowed two of the primary 9/11 hijackers into the US, one of whom had been trained by AZ, and ordered a FBI liason officer to withhold a warning cable that had been drafted that would have alerted the Bureau's anti-terrorism squad.
There is a concerted effort going on to diminish AZs importance and misportray him as nothing more than a crazy gofer. Nothing could be further from the facts.
AZ indeed told the CIA everything he knew. Almost immediately after his capture, he gave up the names and telephone numbers of three Saudi Sheikhs and the Pakistani Air Marshal who had been the sponsors of the al Qaeda operations he headed - all three suffered suspicious deaths within months. All that waterboarding and sensory "driving" torture months later was to scramble and erase a wealth of details in AZ's memory, including his role (perhaps unwitting) as part of a high-risk, long-term CIA operation. See,
THE CIA OFFICER WHO OVERSAW TORTURE: Cofer Black
Posted by leveymg in General Discussion
Sun Dec 23rd 2007, 01:44 PM
Cofer Black Headed Unit Alleged to Torture Detainees and Withhold Pre-9/11 Warning Memo to FBI
In the Osama bin Laden story, a former CIA official with the unlikely name “J. Cofer Black” is the character who seems to pop up in the most interesting places.
Indeed, Mr. Black is the one person at CIA who admits to having dealt with bin Laden, face-to-face, after the Soviets departed Afghanistan in the early 1990s.
During the last few years of his CIA career, Cofer Black had an extraordinarily focused, unusual assignment. Until he retired from CIA in late 2002, Cofer Black was one of the few officers within the clandestine service with a real subject matter expertise. Black’s specialty was Usama bin Laden, “UBL”, as he’s known in U.S. intelligence circles.
From 1999 until May 2002, Black was in charge of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center, at which some historic decisions and catastrophic failures took place.
While Chief of Station in Sudan in the early 1990s, Black oversaw CIA contact with UBL, at the time that UBL was a major organizer of Mujahaddin veterans fighting in Bosnia; al Qaeda flowed in a straight line through Cofer Black to 9/11 and to the present day privatization of intelligence as Vice Chairman of Blackwater, LLC, and as Mitt Romney’s advisor on national security.
***
Most career officers in the CIA clandestine division are generalists who move from station to station, assigned to fill slots in countries where their foreign languages and backgrounds are needed. Not Cofer Black. He was a specialist.
Before his reassignment, announced in a back-page Washington Post article on May 17, 2002, Black, Chief of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC), was in charge of renditions and the interrogation of detainees captured and held abroad. That puts Black at the immediate head of the chain-of-command for operational decisions made up until that date in the torture of CIA prisoners held at “black sites” around the world.
James Risen writes in his book about the CIA’s counter-terrorism operations, State of War, cited at,
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2007/12/... The CIA assigned a group of agency officials to try to find alternative prison sites in countries scattered around the world. They were studying, said one CIA source, "how to make people disappear."
There were a number of third world countries, with dubious human rights records, willing to play host. One African country offered the CIA the use of an island in the middle of a large lake, according to CIA sources, and other nations were equally accommodating. Eventually, several CIA prisons were secretly established, including at least two major ones, code-named Bright Lights and Salt Pit. A small group of officials within the CIA's Counterterrorist Center was put in charge of supporting the prisons and managing the interrogations.
SNIP
Bright Light is one of the prisons where top al Qaeda leaders--including Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the cenral planner of the September 11 attacks--have been held. Bright Light's location is secret, and it has been used for only a handful of the most important al Qaeda detainees. (30)(emphasis added)
Under Cofer Black’s Command
“A small group of officials within the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center was put in charge of supporting the prisons and managing the interrogations.”
By most accounts, Abu Zubaydah was taken into custody in March, 2002 in Pakistan, and after initial U.S. interrogation and treatment for gunshot wounds, sent to a secret CIA torture center in Thailand, where he was waterboarded, in April or May 2002. (FTN. 1) See, e.g., Larry Johnson’s timeline,
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2007/12/10/di... /
If the Johnson timeline is indeed accurate, at the time Abu Zubayda torture was videotaped, Cofer Black was CTC Director, and he shares command responsibility for that action with his CIA superiors right up through McLaughlin and Pavitt to George Tenet and the President.
Nonetheless, the really significant thing about Cofer Black is that he was also in charge of CTC on 01/15/2000 when Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, the Flt. 77 Pentagon hijackers, entered the U.S. What’s so significant about that? The pair’s entry into the U.S. was noted by CTC after they attended an al-Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumur – monitored by the CIA -- where 9/11 and the USS Cole attacks were mapped out in January 5-8. Just so happens, al-Hazmi had earlier trained at Abu Zubayah’s camp in Afghanistan, along with five of the other 9/11 hijackers. There is, indeed, a striking symmetry to this. See,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/17/8... The second al-Qaeda figure tortured at that time, Abd al-Nashiri, also had a role in recruiting and training the 9/11 attack cell, and was the architect of the Cole bombing. These two worked closely with another trainer, Sakkra, who now states that he was a double-agent working for U.S. and Syrian intelligence in organizing al-Hazmi and the others as part of the CIA’s secret war in Chechnya. See,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/10/1... Here’s the kicker. Cofer Black was CIA Chief of Station in Khartoum at the same time bin Laden made his base of operations there. Abu Zubaydah was with bin Laden in Sudan. Black admits he had a confrontation with UBL shortly before they both left Sudan in 1996. Bin Laden went to Afghanistan. Black was later made commander of CIA CTC, where he maintained his focus on UBL.
Bottom-line: Cofer Black was in immediate command of CTC at the time CIA let the Flt. 77 hijackers into the U.S. — and an intentional decision was then made at CTC not to alert the FBI when they came in — and Cofer Black was in immediate command of the CIA unit that tortured those who knew the details of the CIA’s role in training at least six of the 9/11 hijackers. Both of those tortured under Black’s command were waterboarded, which cuts off oxygen to the brain, and can result in long term memory loss. Abu Zubaydah is said to have been driven mad by waterboarding and sensory driving techniques, as was Jose Padilla, who AZ fingered during interrogation. See,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/18/1... Why torture detainees and then “erase” the tapes? In the context of the CIA’s long relationship with Zubaydah and al-Nashiri, this begins to make sense now, doesn’t it?
SNIP
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