Word: qaeda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...special agent who came in from the cold - and waded straight into the debate over the use of harsh interrogation techniques. Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent and perhaps the most successful U.S. interrogator of al-Qaeda operatives, says the use of those techniques was unnecessary and often counterproductive. Detainees, he says, provided vital intelligence under non-violent questioning, before they were put through "walling" and waterboarding...
...techniques lies, not just in whether they constituted torture, but in whether or not they worked: did detainees like Abu Zubaydah - the first to go through the controversial coercive interrogation program - give up vital information? Defenders of the program have claimed that Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda recruiter and close associate of Osama bin Laden, did provide crucial information, including the identities of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of 9/11, and "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla. (See six ways...
...easy to forget that when the U.S. began interrogating al-Qaeda operatives in 2002, the CIA had no idea what it was doing. The last time the agency had been charged with conducting hostile interrogations was during the Vietnam era, and most of those officers were long retired. The wisdom inside the CIA has always been that the best intelligence is obtained through persuasion rather than coercion. New CIA recruits have even been counseled against using blackmail because the information it produced couldn't be relied...
...relied on to produce more than false confessions--because people will say anything to make the pain stop. This is the history that Bush officials chose to ignore. I asked a former CIA officer privy to the decision-making that led to the waterboarding of al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah whether he thought the abusive tactics worked. His answer: to a degree. From the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah, Mohammed and other al-Qaeda prisoners, the CIA learned a lot more than it knew before about the group's communications, its use of safe houses and codes, and the outlines...
...declassified Justice Department memos, former CIA director Michael Hayden asserts that it was only after the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah that authorities learned about Ramzi Binalshibh, a midlevel al-Qaeda member who helped coordinate the Sept. 11 attacks. The memos also say it was because of the waterboarding of Mohammed that U.S. intelligence learned about a "second wave" of attacks planned for after Sept. 11. Was there truly another 9/11 in the works? Maybe. Or maybe Mohammed made it up to stop the waterboarding...