Title: TCM Originals
Show: TCM
Date: 2026-01-13
URL: https://youtu.be/ybQ-x4y8ZEo
Duration: 10:00

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[00:00] If I were going to take down a terrorist safe [music] house, how would I do that? Number one, I would want it to be dark. So, I wrote 0200 at the type at the top of the paper, 2:00 in the morning. The team has to be ISI, FBI, CIA. So, I wrote all that down. We need [music] battering rams to break down the door. We need guns, ammunition, night vision goggles, money, handcuffs. I came up with a very long list which I ordered and was delivered to the embassy soon

[00:31] after. And then a couple of days later, I got a call from ISI and they said, "We have a lead. What do you want to do with it?" And I said, "Ah, I just came up with this operational plan. Let's get together." And then at 2:00 in the morning, we break down the door. Okay. So, we put our team together and at 2:00 in the morning, we took the battery ram and we broke down the door of the house. There were two al-Qaeda fighters, low-level young fighters in this house. One from

[01:02] Tunisia, one from I think he was from Algeria, 18 years old and 19 years old. They immediately started crying, both of them. And one begged us to let him call his mother. So we put handcuffs. I gave them to ISI and they took them to a rubble pindi jail. And I said, "Hey." We were giving each other high fives. Hey, that worked. That was great. It was easy. Then a week later, I got a call from a friendly Arab intelligence officer and he said that he had a lead. He gave me he gave me the address and I

[01:35] called ISI and they said, "Okay, let's just do the same thing again tonight." So, we did. We broke down the door. This time we caught two members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, very dangerous people. That worked too. And so we started doing these, you know, from once a week, then twice a week, then three or four times a week, and sometimes two in the same night. We would have split teams until the opposite capture in which we did 13

[02:06] raids simultaneously. We believed at the time that Abu Zubedo was the number three in al-Qaeda. He was not. He was a he was a bad man. But he was never the number three in al-Qaeda. In fact, he had never joined al-Qaeda. He worked along with al-Qaeda. He created the House of Martyrs safe house in Peshawar and he created the two al-Qaeda training camps in Kandahar and Helma. If you wanted to get into Afghanistan to

[02:38] fight, he would get you in. If you wanted to get out of Afghanistan and go home, he would get you out. So, he was a facilitator. but he was not an al-Qaeda leader. The second problem that we had with the intelligence uh on Abu Zuba was we did not know at the time that he had a cousin also named Abu Zuba. And so we're collecting intelligence from all around the world and we're saying Abu Zuba is

[03:08] planning an attack in Afghanistan. Abu Zuba is planning an attack in Jordan. Abu Zuba was in the United States 2 years ago. Abu Zuba is this. Abu Zubet is that it's there are two Abu Zubas. And I remember one of my colleagues saying, "This guy must be some kind of terrorist Superman. If he's all over the world doing these operations, we can't find him." Well, it's because there were two of them. We had very, very specific orders that we had to take him alive because he was this terrorist superman and that he

[03:40] could lead us to Bin Lad. And we caught him in Fisalabad. And it turned out that none of the rest of it was true. None of it. And so I've become very much an activist over the last 20 years to release Abu Zubeda and to apologize to him. I actually met with his attorney just a week ago. And the attorney had very good news that that the American government is in talks with his attorneys to release him from uh Guantanamo if we could find a country

[04:12] that's willing to take him. After I left the CIA, the uh CIA inspector general released a report that was written in 2005 that had been declassified. And that's when the information came out. And I said, "My god, we risked our lives for a lie. The whole thing was a lie. I was ready to die for my country out there. And it was all based on a lie. And so I connected with a guard, a former guard from Guantanamo who actually guarded Abu Zubeta. And we

[04:43] wrote a book together called The Convenient Terrorist Abu Zubeta and the Weird Wonderland of America's Secret Wars. [music] The night that we caught him, after I specifically said, "Do not shoot him, a member of the Fiselabad police shot him three times with an AK-47, no less, in the thigh, the groin, and the stomach. We ended up having to airlift him to uh

[05:14] Lahore to a military base. And um I was the only one there at the hospital with him. And George Tennant called the director of the CIA and he told me these were his exact words. He said 24/7 CIA eyes on which means 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, do not stop looking at him. Well, I was already awake for 24 hours at that point and I was exhausted [music] and I was afraid I would fall asleep. So, I tore up a sheet and I tied

[05:45] him to the bed from his wrists and his ankles. And then I put the ceiling fan on high to make it uncomfortably cold so that I wouldn't fall asleep. And I sat there like this in a chair at the foot of his bed. And I just stared at him. He was bleeding to death. As fast as they could pump the blood into him, it was leaking out. And it was on the floor in a pool. It was all over him. It was all over the nurses and doctors. It was He was bleeding to death. It looked like a

[06:16] like a a scene from a horror movie. And so after 24 hours, [music] he finally came out of his coma tied to the bed like this. And he was looking at me and I was looking at him and he went like this for me to come close. So I went up to him and I moved his oxygen mask off to the side and I said to himme, "What is your name?" And he shook his head like this. So I said it again, "Shume."

[06:46] And he said, "In English, I will not speak to you in God's language." And I said, "That's okay, Abu Ba. We know who you are." And he started crying. And he said, "Please, brother, kill me. Take the pillow and kill me." And I said, "Oh, nobody's going to kill you. we've been looking for you for a long time. He said, "What's going to happen to me?" And I said, "Honestly, I don't know, but I'm going to give you some advice. I am the nicest guy that you're going to

[07:17] meet in this experience. My colleagues, they're not nice like I am. So, if there's just one thing that you do, it's that you have to cooperate." And he said, "You seem like a nice man, but you're the enemy." and I'll never cooperate. I said, "Suit yourself." I sat with him for 56 hours and we talked a lot. He cried a lot. He said he would never know the touch of a

[07:47] woman. He would never know the joy of fatherhood. And I said, "Wait a minute. You're not the victim here. There were 50,000 people in those towers. What did you think we were going to do? Did you think that that we wouldn't try to find you and and kill you or kill Bin Laden? You're not the victim. That's why I'm saying you have to cooperate. We talked about his family. He was very close to his mother. Um we talked about poetry. He wrote very

[08:18] extensive poetry. He would even write plays, little one act plays. We talked about the differences between Christianity and Islam and and the similarities between Christianity and Islam. And finally, I said to him, you know, I should hate you. I should want to kill you and I don't I don't. You're just a man and that's why you should cooperate. Finally, a CIA jet flew in and he was very nervous because he didn't know where he was going and and

[08:48] we didn't [music] know where he was going. So, three FBI agents and I carried him out to the plane. He asked me to hold his hand. So, I I was holding the gurnie with one hand and holding him his hand with my other hand. We maneuvered him onto the plane. We laid him across the luggage rack at the back and we tied him down and he squeezed my hand and I said I said, "Good luck and remember, you have to cooperate." And then I never saw him again.

[09:21] The entire interrogation program uh at the CIA uh they called it enhanced interrogation techniques. I called it a torture program. The entire program was a criminal act. This was a a war crime or a crime against humanity. It's a dark stain on the modern history of the United States. And not only was it morally, ethically, and legally wrong, it was a failure in that literally no

[09:51] actionable intelligence was collected using these torture techniques. The only actionable intelligence that was ever collected was collected by the FBI by sitting across the table from opposite Var and giving him a cigarette and a cup of tea and some dates and a pen and paper to write a letter to his mother. That's the only way he gave actionable intelligence. But to beat him and waterboard him and drown him and try to shoot him in the head and slam his head against the wall and put him in a coffin, none of that worked. [music]
