A new, unredacted version of a book about the FBI and CIA’s pursuit of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups will be published by W.W. Norton, the New York Times reports.
The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, written by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan and Daniel Freeman, was originally published in 2011. The memoir, in which Soufan recounts his investigation of al-Qaeda in the years before and after 9/11, was heavily redacted by the CIA.
“Some pages contain nothing but crossed-out lines,” noted a reviewer for Kirkus, calling the book “a sobering, sometimes maddening view from the front lines.”
The CIA objected to passages in which Soufan writes about his interrogations of two suspected al-Qaeda members, and ordered them censored. Soufan sued, and the CIA has now allowed him to print the book’s original contents. A new version of the book, titled The Black Banners (Declassified): How Torture Derailed the War on Terror After 9/11, will be published next week.
The new version of the book “corrects the record on how vital intelligence was obtained from al-Qaeda suspects and brings forth important new details on the controversial use of enhanced interrogation techniques (torture) to extract information from terror suspects” and “documents the intelligence failures that lead to the tragic attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., and subsequently how torture derailed the fight against al-Qaeda,” Norton says.
The Black Banners (Declassified) is slated for publication on Sept. 8.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
