DID WATERBOARDING WORK?

Spencer Ackerman writes that the answer is "no."

CIA Largely in the Dark on Interrogation Tactics
Bush Tasked Agency To Build a Robust System, Despite Its Limited History

By Spencer Ackerman 01/28/2008

What isn’t in dispute is that in many interrogations that the Bush administration has called vital sources of intelligence, brutality was part of the package. Last month, John Kiriakou, who led the CIA team that in 2002 interrogated Abu Zubaydah, then the head of al-Qaeda’s military committee, told ABC News that his men waterboarded the terrorist. Two years before, ABC reported that around the same time, the CIA and its allies also waterboarded Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, another senior al-Qaeda terrorist, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11. Reportedly, the CIA has abandoned the practice, which in 2004 the agency’s inspector general warned appeared to violate the Geneva Conventions, although Kiriakou—who called it "torture"—said it was necessary to break Abu Zubaydah.

But what exactly that breaking yielded is the subject of both controversy and obfuscation. Bush has said those interrogations provided "vital information necessary to … protect the American people and our allies." But FBI agents familiar with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah have claimed that the waterboarding was worthless—and that the only valuable information from Abu Zubaydah came from documents captured from him. "He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn’t believe him," FBI agent Dan Coleman told The Washington Post. "The problem is they didn’t realize he didn’t know all that much."

Similarly, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed stated at a Guantanamo Bay hearing that he murdered the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002, though Pakistan has already convicted a terrorist named Omar Saeed Sheikh for the slaying, casting doubt on the information Mohammed gave his interrogators under torture. Perhaps most infamously, al-Libi told interrogators that al-Qaeda received training in weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein, which never happened. al-Libi recanted his claim in 2004, about a year after Colin L. Powell cited al-Libi’s false, torture-derived information to the United Nations as he made the case for invading Iraq.