About two hundred pages into the newly released summary of the Senate’s report on interrogation techniques used by the CIA, the fact-checking procedure for a Sept. 6, 2006, speech by President Bush is closely parsed. In the speech, Bush stated that the interrogation procedures in question had helped the CIA capture top terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. However, questions quickly arose over whether important information had actually come from interrogation, or if it had been found out through other methods.
One of the responses to the speech mentioned in the Senate Report is a 2006 TIME article, “The Unofficial Story of the al-Qaeda 14.” The CIA, the Report states, “was concerned about an article by Ron Suskind in Time Magazine that also challenged the assertions in the speech about the captures of Ramzi bin al-Shibh and KSM.” (Other TIME articles cited in the Senate report are a 2002 story about an attack in Bali and a 2011 interview with Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.)
The Suskind article, published shortly after Bush’s speech, questions the justifications and usefulness of torture — and, yes, questions the speech:
…Bush, in the East Room, did what has consistently landed him in trouble–take creative liberties with classified information. Specifically, he ran through a simplified progression of how each successful interrogation led to the next capture, another interrogation, another capture and so forth. He put special emphasis on Zubaydah–the insane travel agent–saying that, under duress, he gave interrogators information that identified Binalshibh and “helped lead” to the capture of both Binalshibh and the prized K.S.M. This is the sort of thing that has steadily eroded Bush’s relationship with the intelligence community: presidential sins of omission, or emphasis, that would be clear only if you happened to know lots of classified information. In fact, according to senior intelligence officials past and present, Zubaydah helpfully confirmed that “Mukhtar” was K.S.M.’s code name–something key intelligence officials already suspected–and had nothing to do with identifying Binalshibh, who had come to the attention of investigators a few weeks after 9/11 because he had sent wire transfers to Zacarias Moussaoui.
Read the full article, free of charge, here in TIME’s archives: The Unofficial Story of the al-Qaeda 14. Follow Suskind at www.ronsuskind.com and @RonSuskind.
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Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com