Witness rebuts value of methods

WASHINGTON (AP) — A former FBI interrogator who questioned al-Qaida prisoners testified Wednesday that the Bush administration falsely boasted of success from extreme techniques such as 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 conducting 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 waterboarding 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., said former Vice President Dick Cheney has suggested there was valuable information obtained from the extreme methods.

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.”