Book Review: The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda

 

The Black Banners is a book about the investigations against and attempts to capture members of al-Qaeda, really from the time it began to become a threat to the United States, up to the killing of Osama bin Laden. It was written by Ali Soufan who was an FBI agent stationed in the NY office, who worked for John O'Neil, and who was one of the lead investigators of the bombing of the US Cole and heavily involved in the interrogations of various al-Qaeda members after the 9/11 attacks. 

In the book Soufan provides his perspective on the fight between the FBI and the CIA before 9/11 and the two agencies' refusal to cooperate with each other. Of course, Soufan is coming at the issue from the FBI's point of view, but he is convinced that if the CIA had shared relevant information with the FBI (especially after the FBI requested information that Soufan states the CIA claimed to know nothing about, but actually had a lot of intelligence on) before 9/11 that the attacks could have been stopped. He also rails against the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that were authorized by the Bush administration and were largely carried out by the CIA and military contractors. Soufan is convinced it amounted to torture and did not yield any useful information, whereas the traditional interrogation techniques that he and other FBI agents used garnered a lot of useful information from detainees, including the identity of Osama bin Laden's courier, and led to the discovery of bin Laden's location in Pakistan. Soufan also alleges that one of the detainees that he initially questioned probably could have provided information that would have led to finding bin Laden sooner, had Soufan been allowed to let the detainee make a phone call to his family, which was overruled.

The material can be quite dense, and it is hard to keep all the people that Soufan mentions in the book straight. There is an appendix in the back of the book that does detail who the key players mentioned in the book are (or were), but even if you read that first, keeping all of the names straight can be difficult. There are some portions of the book that are redacted with black bars. In a note at the beginning Soufan states that while the FBI cleared the material in the book, he was required to submit the book to the CIA for review (which he argues should not have been the case), and the redactions are largely due to the CIA. Frankly, some of them are very stupid, such as a sentence like "I interviewed so and so, and I asked him about [insert topic]," and the only thing that would be redacted were the two Is in the sentence. In some cases, however, entire pages of material got redacted. Most of the redactions are in the final 2/3 of the book in which Soufan discusses the interrogations that occurred after 9/11. 

The book is over 500 pages long and is not what I would call a quick read. If you have read other books such as The Looming Tower (or have seen the Hulu miniseries of the same name, in which Soufan and O'Neil are basically the main characters), you will know some of the material in the book. However, Soufan provides a lot of behind-the-scenes information that would otherwise not be known if you haven't read this book. It is very informative and definitely worth reading.