The Bush administration’s first “high value” detainee was a man named Abu Zubaida. As the recent report from the International Committee of the Red Cross revealed, Zubaida was the first person subjected to the administration’s enhanced interrogation torture program. And the Bush administration repeatedly claimed that their interrogation of Zubaida “saved lives.”
Today’s Washington Post begs to differ. If anything, the torture of this man did nothing but waste time and resources:
When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.
The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.
In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
And signficantly, it appears that Abu Zubaida wasn’t even a member of al-Qaeda. The former adminstration’s repeated claims that Zubaida was “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations” and a “trusted associate” of Osama bin Laden were all seemingly the product of an overactive paranoia:
Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 — and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.
While it seems obvious that Abu Zubaida was involved in a number of illegal activities involving Islamic extremists, he had no information or knowledge about al-Qaeda. Torturing him therefore ensured that US intelligence would be working from false premises, based on false information, spoken by a man who could do nothing but tell his torturers what he thought they wanted to hear. Such is the nature of torture.
Heckuvajob.