CIA interrogators believed they had already extracted everything useful from detainee Abu Zubaydah, a top al Qaeda official, when agency leaders in Washington, DC, ordered the use of harsher techniques in August 2002. Zubaydah, whom the CIA believed was a “senior lieutenant” to Osama bin Laden, had already provided valuable intelligence to interrogators using less severe treatment when the call came in from headquarters to subject the detainee, who was kept at a secret location in Thailand, to waterboarding, confinement in a box and slamming him into walls. Senior CIA officials were sure there was more to obtain from Zubaydah, but it turned out they were wrong, and those actually present at the interrogations had to witness the unnecessary brutal treatment. One CIA official admitted how traumatic it was to witness such “human misery and degradation” for no real purpose. The most important piece of intelligence the CIA obtained from Zubaydah, before being tortured, was learning the name of the main organizer of the 9/11 attacks: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.