The Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, the first by Congress on the Bush administration's use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, also revealed some new details about how the harsh tactics were authorized and used.
Ali Soufan, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent and interrogator, testified that President George W. Bush and Justice Department lawyers were wrong when they said that waterboarding and other tactics used on one suspect provided key pieces of intelligence about Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Testifying from behind a screen to protect his identity, Soufan said the techniques, touted by the Bush administration as perhaps its most effective weapon against terrorism, were actually slow, ineffective and unreliable.
He said that he and a CIA agent gleaned much, if not all, of the crucial information from suspected Al Qaeda chieftain Abu Zubaydah before the coercive techniques were initiated, including information on the key role of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in the Sept. 11 attacks and the plot by alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla.
Soufan, now a private security consultant, also said that outside contractors working for the CIA were the ones who used the coercive tactics, and that he and the CIA official working with him protested. The use of harsher methods by the contractors backfired, Soufan said, prompting Zubaydah to stop talking.
"I totally disagree with the assertion that there was a conflict between FBI and CIA. They were 100% supportive," Soufan said of the on-site CIA officials. "The chief psychologist objected to these techniques and left the location even before I did."
Asked whether Bush's public comments in 2006 about the effectiveness of the "enhanced" techniques were accurate, Soufan said, "My impression is that the president was told a half-truth."
Another witness, Philip D. Zelikow, who was a legal advisor to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, provided new details about what he said were his efforts to aggressively protest the use of the techniques in meetings in the White House situation room and elsewhere.
In each case, he said, he was routinely blocked by more senior administration officials and ordered to destroy a lengthy legal memo in which he outlined his concerns about the "unsound, even unreasonable" legal justifications for the tactics.
Zelikow, now a history professor at the University of Virginia, called the interrogation campaign "an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment to extract information." It was, he added, "a mistake, perhaps a disastrous one" that should be investigated so the country can learn from it.
latimes.com
