The new issue of Time contains an article on the upcoming book by Gerald Posner. According to the book, one of bin Ladens main men, Abu Zubaydah, after his capture a year and a half ago, laid out a picture of the al Queda network that included a complicit Saudi royal family and Pakistani government. Heres a clip from the article detailing how the U.S. broke Zubaydah down.
Posner elaborates in startling detail how U.S. interrogators used drugsan unnamed “quick-on, quick-off” painkiller and Sodium Pentothal, the old movie truth serumin a chemical version of reward and punishment to make Zubaydah talk. When questioning stalled, according to Posner, cia men flew Zubaydah to an Afghan complex fitted out as a fake Saudi jail chamber, where “two Arab-Americans, now with Special Forces,” pretending to be Saudi inquisitors, used drugs and threats to scare him into more confessions.
Yet when Zubaydah was confronted by the false Saudis, writes Posner, “his reaction was not fear, but utter relief.” Happy to see them, he reeled off telephone numbers for a senior member of the royal family who would, said Zubaydah, “tell you what to do.” The man at the other end would be Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a Westernized nephew of King Fahd’s and a publisher better known as a racehorse owner. His horse War Emblem won the Kentucky Derby in 2002. To the amazement of the U.S., the numbers proved valid. When the fake inquisitors accused Zubaydah of lying, he responded with a 10-minute monologue laying out the Saudi-Pakistani-bin Laden triangle.
The most interesting part of the article (I think we all already knew that the Saudis were paying off al Queda) is the section where the author details the almost simultaneous untimely deaths of the three Saudi princes identified by Zubaydah (heart attack, car accident, and death from thirst while crossing the desert). Was it a coincidence?
