The XX Factor: What women really think.

Soufan Speaks

In the debate raging over whether the Bush administration's torture practices produced valuable intelligence, the voice I'm most interested in, so far, is that of Ali Soufan. He is the FBI detective whom the CIA may have blocked from stopping 9/11, one of the few Arab speakers in the bureau, the guy who was getting Salim Hamdan to talk, according to Jonathan Mahler's book, The Challenge—and then had to relinquish Hamdan in frustration when the government decided to prosecute him. He's an intelligence officer who was close to but not part of the CIA interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

Today Soufan tells us, in a New York Times op-ed, that torturing Abu Zubaydah got us nada. Soufan writes:

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions—all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

And then he takes apart specific claims for intelligence gains, much as Tim did about the supposed busting of the Liberty Tower plot in L.A., by showing that the timelines don't work. The key information was gleaned by traditional methods before the torture began, or at least before it was approved in the DoJ memos. What now, Marc Thiessen and Dick Cheney? Ball in your court.