WASHINGTON — 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, 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 said 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.
He 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 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.
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