Torture: an effective tool?

Former CIA Officer: Waterboarding Is Wrong, But It Worked

J.J. Green, WTOPNews.com, 20 March 2008

WASHINGTON -- It was 2 a.m. on the dot on March 28, 2002 when the Punjab Elite Force accompanied by CIA officers and FBI agents broke down the door to a two-story safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan.

A struggle ensued: Shots were fired and people were hit; knives were wielded and people were stabbed.

When the smoke cleared and the shouting stopped, a member of the Punjabi SWAT team had a severe knife wound, and more than a dozen al Qaida operatives were down -- some with severe gunshot wounds.

A man named Abu Zubayda was among the injured. Zubayda was No. 3 in the al Qaida power structure, and a close associate of Osama bin Laden.

Al Qaida documents indicate Zubayda was the organization's main logistics operative. His own statements later revealed he was the keeper of secrets of al Qaida's plans to bring the U.S. to its knees for the second time in six months - after Sept. 11, 2001.

The CIA had a vested interest in keeping him alive.

"Al Qaida had released statements indicating that there was another attack coming. It was going to be more spectacular than the attacks we saw on Sept. 11, and even said that al Qaida wouldn't rest until the green flag of Islam flew over the White House," former CIA Officer John Kiriakou says.

Zubayda supposedly knew the names, dates and details about those planned "spectacular" attacks, but he was dying.

He had been shot three times, and suffered wounds to the groin, thigh and stomach. After Pakistani doctors treated him, Zubayda was reportedly moved to a secret location -- on orders from a top intelligence official -- and was treated by an American trauma specialist dispatched from the U.S.

Six weeks later, when Zubayda had recovered enough to talk, he did -- but "he wanted to talk about poetry or his family or Islam. He didn't want to talk about anything that was truly important to us," Kiriakou says

Zubayda changed his mind after being introduced to the centuries-old technique of waterboarding.

"After [Zubayda] was waterboarded, he said God had come to him in his cell and told him to cooperate. And so he did. It was almost like flipping a switch, where one day he was not cooperative and the next day he was very cooperative," Kiriakou says.

Kiriakou did not witness the transformation in person. However, in his first interview since being threatened with legal action in December for discussing the destruction of waterboarding tapes, Kiriakou tells WTOP, "by the time waterboarding was being used, I had returned to a position at [CIA] headquarters from South Asia, but I was in a job at headquarters that afforded me access to that information."

Intelligence sources say Zubayda eventually gave up key information about Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was captured almost a year later. Authorities also say he divulged information that prevented other terror attacks inside the U.S.

There have been questions about whether Zubayda suffers from mental illness and whether his information was worth anything.

Kiriakou refutes those questions.

"The reason we went after Abu Zubayda in the first place was because he was al Qaida's logistics chief. He was one of the guys who was instrumental in getting the hijackers in the U.S.; in making sure they had appropriate training; in making sure they had money and they had places to live. This isn't someone who was mentally challenged or mentally ill in any way. This guy had to have a mind for detail. He knew exactly what he was doing."

The 9/11 Commission agreed with Kiriakou in its conclusion. "KSM [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and Abu Zubayda each played key roles in facilitating travel for al Qaida operatives. In addition al Qaida had an office of passports and host country issues under its security committee."

But waterboarding apparently has its failings, Kiriakou says.

"It's my understanding - this is not first-person information. I have heard this from others - that another prisoner who was waterboarded, ended up just saying what he though his interrogator wanted to hear and the information was not reliable," Kiriakou says.

A fierce debate is raging across the country over the waterboarding. Accounts from Kiriakou and many others detail the usefulness of waterboarding, but others say pouring water up a person's nostrils to extract information is cruel and inhumane.

The GOP's presumptive nominee for President Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said recently, "I think that waterboarding is torture and illegal, but I will not restrict the CIA to only the Army Field Manual."

Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) supported a failed effort to ban the technique.

House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, "failing to legally prohibit the use of waterboarding and other harsh torture techniques undermines our nation's moral authority, puts American military and diplomatic personnel at-risk, and undermines the quality of intelligence."

The firestorm is exactly what Kiriakou wanted.

"We really needed to have a true national debate about whether or not waterboarding was something we wanted to use as a matter of policy when interrogating al Qaida prisoners who were not cooperative and who we thought had actionable intelligence about impending terrorist attacks," Kiriakou says.

When asked about his own view, Kiriakou says, "waterboarding is probably wrong. I believe that it's torture. I believe that at this point, so many years after Sept. 11, we ought not to be doing it. But with that said, when it was used on Abu Zubayda in 2002, it actually worked."

Kiriakou, like many, is conflicted about whether to use waterboarding as an interrogation method.

"Are we willing to lose 100 people, 1,000 people in a terrorist attack and then maintain the moral high road and not waterboard? I'm not sure," Kiriakou says.

Al Qaida's low-level young fighters are "a little more than uneducated illiterate teens from the countryside and small villages in the Middle East and south and central Asia," he says.

While uncertain about waterboarding, Kiriakou says there are other methods of defending against al Qaida.

"I believe if those people had access to jobs, to educations and had something hope for, to look forward to, al Qaida wouldn't be attractive to them," Kiriakou says.

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