Ali Soufan: What Torture Never Told Us

Former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan interprets the recently released CIA documents on Bush administration torture of al-Qaeda detainees in The New York Times.

Recently, interviews with unnamed sources led The Washington Post to report that harsh techniques turned Mr. Mohammed into an intelligence “asset.” This latest claim will come as news to Mr. Mohammed’s prosecutors, to his fellow detainees (whom he instructed, at his arraignment, not to cooperate with the United States) and indeed to Mr. Mohammed himself. He told the International Committee of the Red Cross that “I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear.”

The inspector general’s report was written precisely because many of the C.I.A. operatives complained about what they were being ordered to do. The inspector general then conducted an internal audit of the entire program. In his report, he questions the effectiveness of the harsh techniques that were authorized. And he slams the use of “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented detention and interrogation techniques.” This is probably why the enhanced interrogation program was shelved in 2005. Meanwhile, the professionals in the field are relieved that an ineffective, unreliable, unnecessary and destructive program — one that may have given Al Qaeda a second wind and damaged our country’s reputation — is finished.

I find Soufan very credible as a professional in the field who was personally involved in successfully interrogating al-Qaeda detainees by conventional means. Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission and Deputy Secretary of State in Bush's second term, does too.

I met and interviewed Soufan in the course of my work at the 9/11 Commission, while he was still doing important work at the FBI. From my commission work, my fellow staffers and I had direct knowledge about several of the specific assertions Soufan makes in this piece: about Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. My fellow staffers and I considered Soufan to be credible. Indeed, Soufan is fluent in Arabic, and he seemed to us to be one of the more impressive intelligence agents -- from any agency -- that we encountered in our work.

Soufan concludes that the CIA documents "fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism" and quips "the defenders of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are fast running out of classified documents to hide behind."

Mr. Cheney, the ball is in your court.

--Ballard Burgher