- A former FBI interrogator who questioned al-Qaida prisoners testified Wednesday that the Bush administration falsely boasted of success from extreme techniques like waterboarding, when those methods were slow, unreliable and made an important witness stop talking.
Ali Soufan, testifying to a Senate panel behind a screen to hide his identity, said his team's non-threatening interrogation approach elicited crucial information from al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah, including intelligence on "dirty bomb" terrorist Jose Padilla.
Soufan said his team had to step aside when CIA contractors took over. They began using harsh methods that caused Zubaydah to "shut down," Soufan said, and his team had to be recalled the get the prisoner talking again.
Soufan appeared before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee holding the first hearing on extreme interrogation methods since the Obama administration last month released Bush administration legal opinions authorizing them.
Memos by the Bush Justice Department contended that waterboarding — a form of simulated drowning — as well as sleep deprivation and other extreme techniques were legal under U.S. and international law, but Democrats said they amounted to torture.
President Barack Obama has said he wanted to avoid partisan hearings over the interrogations, but the hearing turned partisan in its opening seconds.
Subcommittee Chairman Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., promised at the outset to unravel "our country's descent into torture" and vowed to expose "a bodyguard of lies" by the Bush administration.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asked whether "we would have this hearing if we were attacked this afternoon."
Graham called the hearing a "political stunt" and said Democrats were trying to judge officials who — soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks — "woke up one morning like most Americans and said, 'Oh, my God, what's coming next?'"
He also joined in the frequent Republican criticism that members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were briefed on the interrogation program and raised no protest at the time.
Graham appeared irate, commenting at one point, "The people we're prosecuting didn't rob a liquor store."
He said former Vice President Dick Cheney has suggested there was valuable information obtained from the extreme methods. "I would like the committee to get that information. Let's get both sides of the story here," Graham said.
Soufan countered that his personal experience showed that the harsh interrogation techniques didn't work even when there wasn't a lot of time to prevent an attack.
"Waiting 180 hours as part of the sleep deprivation stage is time we cannot afford to wait in a ticking bomb scenario," he said.
Soufan said the harsh techniques were "ineffective, slow and unreliable and, as a result, harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaida."
Soufan testified that "many of the claims made" by the Bush administration were inaccurate or half-truths.
He cited these examples:
_The administration said Abu Zubaydah wasn't cooperating before Aug. 1, 2002, when waterboarding was approved. "The truth is that we got actionable intelligence from him in the first hour of interrogating him" before that date.
_The administration credited waterboarding for Zubaydah's information that led to the capture of Padilla, who received a 17-year, four-month sentence, although prosecutors did not present any dirty-bomb information. Padilla was arrested in May 2002, months before waterboarding was authorized, Soufan said.
_Bush officials contended that waterboarding revealed the involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks of al-Qaida mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Soufan said the information was discovered in April 2002, months before waterboarding was introduced.
Another witness, Philip Zelikow, was a top adviser to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He described his efforts within the Bush administration to argue that the harsh interrogations violated the Constitution.
In early 2006, Zelikow said, he circulated his own analysis that dissented from the Justice Department view that the methods were legal under U.S. and international law.
"I later heard the memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my memo should be collected and destroyed," he said. "That particular request, passed along informally, did not seem proper and I ignored it."
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters Wednesday that the memo has been found.
"We did locate a document that appears to be responsive to a request that came from Sen. Whitehouse... We've also received a request for the same document from other members of Congress. It is classified, so we are conducting a review, but we're unable to release it to the public because of its classification at this time," he said.
U.S. Circuit Judge Jay Bybee has declined to give Senate testimony on the memos he approved while at the Justice Department that concluded the interrogation program was legal, said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
Leahy announced the refusal at the hearing but provided no details. Bybee serves on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
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