New York Magazine
By Chris Smith
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Ali Soufan put the pieces together in 1997, long before most other American investigators had even heard the name of the wealthy Saudi radical: Osama bin Laden was an enormous terrorist threat. For the next eight years, and with accelerated urgency after 9/11, Soufan traveled the world, from the smoldering wreckage of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen to the interrogation rooms at Guantanamo Bay, teasing out crucial clues to the shadowy structure of Al Qaeda. When word came that bin Laden was finally dead, Soufan was at home in New York, assembling something nearly as puzzling: a swing set for his newborn twin sons.
Soufan quit the FBI in 2005, in large part because of his outrage over the introduction of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Last weekend, as congratulatory messages from friends and colleagues rolled in, Soufan was flooded with emotion: joy at bin Laden’s demise, sadness that it hadn’t happened sooner. Then advocates of enhanced interrogation began claiming that waterboarding had yielded pivotal information. In a moment of national celebration, it raised the queasy possibility that Dick Cheney was right, that an occasional visit to the dark side really is necessary. That argument makes Soufan furious.
“It is pathetic,” he says. “This case is the biggest proof that waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques did not work at all. And I saw it firsthand. It actually delayed the hunt for bin Laden. A name of his courier came up…”
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