Ali Soufan on Frontline: The World Would Be Very Different Today

September 13, 2011

Frontline, PBS
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As an Arabic-speaking FBI agent, Soufan was at the center of several Al Qaeda investigations before and after 9/11. He tells FRONTLINE that critical CIA intelligence about Al Qaeda was not communicated to the FBI before 9/11, and had that information been shared, “The world would be very different today.” After 9/11, Soufan conducted interrogations of key Al Qaeda figures, including Abu Zubaydah. Soufan says he gained actionable intelligence while interrogating Zubaydah, but the information dried up after the detainee became the test case for new, harsher methods of interrogation that would come to be known as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” He argues the techniques have not worked, and in one case, even resulted in faulty intelligence that helped build the case to go to war in Iraq. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Aug. 30, 2011.

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The Black Banners. Why did you decide to write this book?

I decided to share the experiences that I went through in the war against Al Qaeda.

There is part of this story that hasn’t been told, and it is the involvement also of the law enforcement entities of the United States with the intelligence entities [and] with the people in the field and how they worked together in predicting the threat of Al Qaeda really early on and in fighting Al Qaeda when bin Laden was in Sudan, after the East Africa embassy bombing, after bin Laden went to Afghanistan, with the U.S.S. Cole.

Unfortunately, 10 years after 9/11, Al Qaeda is this ghost that people don’t know, and people usually fear the unknown. So I hope that [the] book, 10 years after 9/11, can be a small little piece of the history of what happened in the fight against Al Qaeda from 1997 until today…

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To read the full article please click on the link below:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/iraq-war-on-terror/the-interrogator/ali-soufan-the-world-would-be-very-different-today/

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To watch the interview please click here.

 

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