There have been many, many reports in recent years about Bush administration officials torturing detainees, and using barbaric tactics like waterboarding, but insiders have been reluctant to admit publicly and on the record exactly what we’ve done and to whom.
It’s one of several reasons why John Kiriakou’s perspective is of unique significance.
A former CIA officer who participated in the capture and questioning of the first al-Qaeda terrorist suspect to be waterboarded said yesterday that the harsh technique provided an intelligence breakthrough that “probably saved lives,” but that he now regards the tactic as torture.
Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein abu Zubaida, the first high-ranking al-Qaeda member captured after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, broke in less than a minute after he was subjected to the technique and began providing interrogators with information that led to the disruption of several planned attacks, said John Kiriakou, who served as a CIA interrogator in Pakistan.
Abu Zubaida was one of two detainees whose interrogation was captured in video recordings that the CIA later destroyed.
Kiriakou explained that Zubaydah was defiant and uncooperative, right up until the CIA tried waterboarding. At that point, Kiriakou said, “It was like flipping a switch.”
As a matter of crass politics, Kiriakou’s assessment seems to offer a little something for everyone. For the right, Kiriakou is saying that torture produced intelligence that saved lives and thwarted possible attacks. For the left, Kiriakou is conceding that the Bush administration authorized and utilized torture (i.e., committed a felony), and he now believes the U.S. should stop using these “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
There is, however, one angle that warrants a closer look: whether torturing Zubaydah actually produced actionable intelligence. The answer is far from clear.
The torture of Abu Zubaydah has been a key White House talking point for quite a while. Last year, Bush personally discussed the interrogation in considerable detail, describing Zubaydah as “a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden,” who “had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained.”
To hear the president tell it, Zubaydah, after being subjected to an “alternative set of [interrogation] procedures,” was a font of useful information — dishing on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and at least one domestic terrorist attack in the works. Bush concluded, “Zubaydah told us that al Qaeda operatives were planning to launch an attack in the U.S., and provided physical descriptions of the operatives and information on their general location. Based on the information he provided, the operatives were detained — one while traveling to the United States.”
But there’s almost certainly more to this example. Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in March 2002. The White House has identified him as al Queda’s chief of operations. Ron Suskind reported, however, that Zubaydah turned out to be mentally ill. We were torturing a man who was, in effect, retarded.
Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries “in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3” — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, then the FBI’s top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”
Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.” And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques. […]
“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each … target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
At this point, I have no idea who’s right about this. Either Zubaydah was an unstable schizophrenic who had no useful intelligence at all, or Zubaydah was a valuable al Qaeda asset who offered key information that saved lives. I have no reason to suspect that Kiriakou is intentionally trying to deceive anyone, though I would add that Kiriakou was not personally involved in torturing Zubaydah, but was part of an interrogation team that questioned him in a hospital in Pakistan after he was captured in 2002. I mention this because, it’s possible that Kiriakou was told Zubaydah produced actionable intelligence, when the truth might be the opposite.
Either way, Kiriakou has made it clear that the Bush administration did violate the law and tortured a suspect, and that he no longer believes the United States should engage in such deplorable behavior.