Soufan, testifying behind a screen to shield his identity, painted a picture of incompetence by outside contractors hastily flown in from Washington using "amateurish, Hollywood-style interrogation methods." He also accused Bush administration officials of making false claims about their success.
Soufan said his own interrogations of captured al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah, using proven methods of psychological manipulation, had within one hour yielded the identity of the Sept. 11 mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Until then, he said, "we had no idea of KSM's role in 9/11 or his importance in the al Qaeda leadership structure."
Within a few more hours of questioning, Soufan said, he and other interrogators elicited information about alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla.
Inexperienced contractors
But Soufan said he was pulled off the interrogation within a few days, to be replaced by contractors with no expertise in al Qaeda. They soon introduced nudity and sleep deprivation, loud noise and temperature manipulation and confinement in a small box. Zubaydah stopped talking, Soufan said. As the methods progressed, Soufan testified, FBI Director Robert Mueller pulled his agents off the case, saying, "We don't do that (torture)."
Soufan said the harsh techniques ignore knowledge of the detainee, his mind-set, culture and vulnerabilities, trying to force submission rather than elicit cooperation.
Aside from legal and diplomatic complications, he said, torture poses practical problems. Terrorists are trained to resist it. That is why, he said, "the contractors had to keep getting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods until they reached waterboarding and there was nothing they could do but use that technique again and again." Abu Zubaydah was subject to waterboarding 83 times, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times.
Information gleaned from torture may be unreliable and lead agents on goose chases. Its use also resurrected the "Chinese Wall" between the FBI and the CIA, obstructing information sharing, one reason the Sept. 11 plot went unnoticed in the first place.
Atmosphere of terror
If Soufan gave the Senate an inside view of interrogations, Zelikow provided a look into fierce debates within the Bush administration over the techniques and an atmosphere of terror inside the White House, which was fielding reports of apocalyptic threats that have never been made public.
Zelikow described a strange dynamic between bearded undercover agents overseas and deferential officials in wood-paneled Washington suites who were "rarely aware" of arguments in the field over what to do.
He said the CIA had no institutional capability to question enemy captives and so "improvised an unprecedented, elaborate, systematic program of medically monitored physical torment." It ostensibly was based on U.S. military training to help soldiers resist torture, and then "sold to policymakers as being no more than 'what we do to our own trainees.' "
He said the government's top legal officers "assured the government's leaders that the proposed program was lawful." The history of interrogation techniques, and valuable experience gained in World War II when the stakes were every bit as high, may have been ignored during critical White House debates, he said.
The question is not whether the CIA program produced useful intelligence, he argued. It did, as would be expected from an agency that had exclusive custody of top terror suspects for years. He said the question is in comparison to what, including interrogations in Iraq that produced valuable information without torture.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has opened an aggressive public crusade to challenge such arguments, insisting on declassifying memos that show the harsh interrogations saved potentially hundreds of thousands of American lives.
Pelosi, back from a trip to Iraq, has scheduled her weekly news conference for today. She is unlikely to veer from her position that she was told in a briefing Sept. 4, 2002, that the administration had legal grounds to use the techniques but had not begun using them, a position at odds with a CIA timeline that said Pelosi has been briefed on techniques that "had been employed."
