Harsh interrogation techniques ineffective,' former FBI agent testifies

Harsh interrogation techniques ineffective,' former FBI agent
testifies

By WARREN P. STROBEL
McClatchy Newspapers
A former FBI special agent who interrogated senior al-Qaida captives
told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that harsh
interrogation techniques are "ineffective, slow and unreliable," and
disputed claims by former Vice President Dick Cheney and others that
they helped uncover major terrorist plots.

Ali Soufan, a veteran FBI investigator, said that CIA officials and
others responsible for the extreme measures inflated the program's
successes and downplayed the consequences of physical abuse.

"The situation was, and remains, too risky to allow someone to
experiment with amateurish, Hollywood-style interrogation methods that
in reality taints sources, risks outcomes, ignores the end game and
diminishes our moral high ground," Soufan said.

"It was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our
efforts against al-Qaida," he said.

Former State Department official Philip Zelikow, who in 2005 was
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's point man in a battle to
overhaul the Bush administration's detention and interrogation
policies, joined Soufan in criticizing the use of techniques such as
waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that's widely considered
torture.

Zelikow said the U.S. could combat terrorism without resorting to
extreme methods.

"Others may disagree," he said. "The government, and the country,
needs to decide whether they are right. If they are right, our laws
must change, and our country must change. I think they are wrong."

Cheney has argued that the now-defunct CIA program, which included a
global network of secret prisons, produced valuable intelligence that
thwarted terror attacks and saved American lives.

Cheney, who's scheduled to give a major speech on the subject next
week at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington
policy organization, has called for the release of two classified CIA
memos that he says detail the program's successes.

However, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., a member of the Senate Judiciary
and Intelligence committees, said he's seen the two documents and they
don't prove Cheney's case.

Soufan's testimony apparently was the first public appraisal by a
senior U.S. government interrogator who dealt directly with suspected
terrorists in CIA custody.

It came a month after President Barack Obama released four Bush-era
Justice Department legal memos justifying methods that included
confinement boxes, sleep deprivation and slamming detainees into
walls. That reopened the debate over whether top Bush officials should
be investigated and prosecuted for their actions.

Adding to the drama, Soufan testified from behind a screen where the
senators, but not the audience, could see him. Since at least one
photo of Soufan is available on the Internet, the reason for the
security measures wasn't readily apparent.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who's also an Air Force Reserve lawyer,
said the Bush administration erred in its reading of the law but
argued that harsh interrogation techniques sometimes produce valuable
information.

He challenged Soufan to dispute that.

"I can only speak to my experience," the former FBI agent replied.

"That's the point, isn't it?" Graham retorted.

Soufan was a lead FBI interrogator of Abu Zubaydah, one of the first
major al-Qaida figures to be captured after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks. The initial interrogation of Zubaydah, using the
bureau's traditional, rapport-building techniques, yielded valuable
intelligence, including the role of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the
mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, he said.

Then-CIA director George Tenet congratulated the interrogators - until
he learned that they were from the FBI, not the CIA, Soufan said. A
team from the CIA's Counterterrorism Center that included a government
contractor quickly replaced him and his colleagues. They introduced
harsh interrogation techniques, and Zubaydah's cooperation stopped,
Soufan said.

After complaints from officials in Washington about the dried-up
intelligence flow, Soufan and colleagues reverted to the traditional
approach, and Zubaydah began talking again.

To bolster the Democrats' case against torture, Sen. Sheldon
Whitehouse, D-R.I., released summaries of Soufan's interrogations of
another al-Qaida figure, Abu Jandal, who was a bodyguard to Osama bin
Laden. Without being tortured, Jandal divulged intimate details and
personal histories of bin Laden's inner circle, the 100 pages of
documents appear to show.

The hearing took place amid an escalating political fracas over what
congressional Democrats knew at the time about the CIA program.
Republicans say that documents call into question House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi's contention that she wasn't briefed about waterboarding.

Zelikow called the CIA program "a collective failure, in which a
number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers), of both
parties, played a part."

Zelikow wrote a classified February 2006 memo challenging the legal
reasoning of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The
White House responded by ordering copies of the memo destroyed, but
Zelikow said his six-page document has been retrieved from State
Department files and is undergoing declassification review.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/v-print/story/1047093.html

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/hearing.cfm?id=3842