Mother Jones
By Adam Serwer
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What is the best way to break a terrorist? Waterboarding? Stress positions? What about pizza, ice cream, or sugar-free cookies?
The most surprising element of former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan‘s memoir, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, is how receptive terrorists are to food. When Soufan takes L’Houssaine Kherchtou, an Al Qaeda fixer, out for pizza, Khertchou tells him he’s “not an Al Qaeda guy anymore.” Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-Owhali, who helped facilitate the bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi in 1998, spills the beans after being plied with cookies and Meals Ready to Eat. Tariq el-Sawah, captured at Tora Bora and currently detained at Guantanamo Bay, has a fondness for ice cream. And in the desperate hours immediately following the 9/11 attacks, Soufan wears down the diabetic Abu Jandal, a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, with sugarless cookies, establishing that Al Qaeda was indeed responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
There are other levers Soufan uses, of course, to get information out of his subjects. Khertchou is furious over bin Laden’s refusal to pay for his wife’s cesarean section. Owhali is overwhelmed by the quality of information the FBI has assembled. Abu Jandal, despite his fondness for bin Laden, is shocked at the scale of the attacks—particularly after Soufan manipulates him into believing that hundreds of Yemenis died in the assault on the towers. Soufan also exploits regional resentments between Al Qaeda members; the “Gulf Arabs” were frequently resentful of Egyptian members’ superior influence and financial benefits, to the point that Al Qaeda would divide into Egyptian and Gulf teams for their Friday soccer games. Soufan leverages their ignorance of the Koran and uses their fidelity to extremist ideology to manipulate them into talking.
Because Soufan played a key role in investigating Al Qaeda’s most successful strikes against the United States, from the East Africa embassy bombings to the 9/11 attacks, his account reads a bit like a first-person version of…
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